Ties

by Domenico Starnone

  The night was perfectly silent. Naturally I wasn’t able to find myself in any of that scrawling, in any of the exclamation points (what happens to the lovely sentences that enter our minds, how do they rouse us, how do they become devoid of meaning, or unrecognizable, or embarrassing, or ridiculous?), and I ended up forgetting the books. I proceeded to replace, into boxes and folders, papers of various sizes, index cards of my reading, notebooks with novels and short stories written before I’d turned twenty, countless cuttings from newspapers of the articles I’d published, also those in which others talked about me. To that huge amount of paper I added reels of radio programs, cassettes and DVDs that showed me on television in my glory days, all the things that Vanda diligently saved, without ever showing any particular interest in what I did. And here it was, I’d dug up a great many things that attested to how I’d spent a rather long life. Was I that stuff? Was I the scrawls on the books I’d read, was I the sheets of paper crammed with titles and quotes (for example this: “Our cities are the breeding grounds of livestock; families, schools, churches are slaughterhouses for children; colleges and universities are the kitchens. As adults, in marriage and in business, we consume the finished product”; and also: “The appearance of love is the subverter of every decent social order of our lives”)? Was I a long wordy novel written at twenty about a boy who had to slave night and day to pay his father his weight in gold, thereby unshackling himself from him and from his family of origin? Was I the paragraphs on the chemists’ contract I’d published in the mid-seventies, was I the comments on the party platform, was I the reviews of books that talked about the worker on the assembly line, was I amusing clips on daily life in a big city—traffic, exasperating lines at the bank or in the post office—was I the ironic observations that had given me a little fame and, step by step, transformed me into a television writer of some success? Was I the thoughtful interviews I granted to this one or the other, was I the harsh criticism of so and so and the praise from such and such for what I’d invented for TV in the eighties and nineties? Was I my body moving in the corner of a simulated terrace, under lights that replicated broad daylight? Was I my voice thirty years ago, conversational, cordial, arrogant? I remembered how much I’d toiled since the sixties, hard labor—as they say—to realize my potential. Was this the fulfillment of it? A concrete accumulation, through the decades, of papers, handwritten, printed, a trail of scrawls, reports, pages, newspapers, floppy discs, USB fobs, hard disks, the cloud? My potential realized, Myself made real: that is to say, a chaos that could overflow, if I just typed Aldo Minori, from the living room to the Google archives?

  I imposed a rule: stop reading and skimming. I went back to the work of sorting. I put back, into cardboard boxes, Vanda’s countless notepads: figure upon figure, a punctilious financial account of our family from 1962 to today, sheets of graph paper on which she’d noted in detail the incoming and outgoing sums that maybe, were she to agree, needed at this point to be tossed. I piled up the books I wanted to unload in the middle of the room and I sloppily arranged those in decent shape on the shelves that hadn’t been dismantled. I placed the folders with newspaper clippings, the boxes of notebooks, the ones full of VHS tapes and DVDs on the table. I put the shards that I managed to gather up in a garbage bag, tearing it in various places, and so I put it into another. Last but not least I started to gather up the photographs, images of the distant past along with those more recent.

  I hadn’t looked at old photographs for a long time, I found them ugly and uninteresting. I was used to digital pictures by now, Vanda and I had tons of them on the computer: image after image of mountains, fields, butterflies, roses in bloom or just about to open, seasides, cities, monuments, paintings, sculptures, and then relatives, the exes of our children, the new boyfriends and girlfriends, our grandchildren captured in every phase of development, the children who were friends with our grandchildren. Life, in short, never so copiously documented. The present, the present perfect: better to leave the remote past alone.

  I avoided looking at myself. I didn’t like myself as an old man, and I’d never liked myself when I was younger. Instead I glanced at Sandro and Anna when they were little. They were so lovely. I saw the boyfriends and girlfriends they’d had when they were teenagers, likeable young people who’d quickly disappeared. I found friends of mine and of Vanda’s whom we’d forgotten, people we’d seen steadily, only to no longer remember their first names, or to call them cattily by last names. I paused to study a photo taken in our courtyard, who knows who took it, maybe Sandro. It dated back to the first years we’d lived in this house. Along with me and Vanda there was Nadar, who back then—I calculated—must have already been over sixty, though if one were to compare him to how he was now, he seemed young. We change so much, even in advanced age, I thought to myself, staring at him for a moment. Our neighbor, in the picture, was tall, pleasant-looking, still with some hair on his head. I was about to set it aside when I was struck by Vanda. For a fraction of a second, astonished, I thought I didn’t recognize her. How old was she then, fifty, forty-five? I lingered over other pictures of her, especially the ones in black-and-white. The feeling of looking at a stranger solidified. I’d met her in 1960, I was twenty, she was twenty-two. Little or nothing had stayed with me from those years. I couldn’t recall if I’d ever found her beautiful. Back then beauty was a vulgar notion to me. Safe to say I liked her. I thought she was graceful, I desired her to a reasonable degree. She was a clever girl, watchful. I fell in love with her for those qualities, and also because it seemed incredible that, in spite of having so many virtues, she’d fallen in love with me. Two years later we were married, and she’d become the meticulous organizer of our day-to-day life, one involving study and occasional work, no money, always scrimping and saving.

  I recognized the features of that period: flimsy clothes she sewed herself, scuffed shoes with worn-out heels, no makeup on her large eyes. What I didn’t recognize, on the other hand, was her youth. This, then, was what was alien to me: her youth. In those pictures Vanda radiated a glow which—I discovered—I had no memory of, not even a spark that allowed me to say: Yes, she used to be like this. I thought of the person who now slept in the bedroom, the person who had been my wife for fifty years. It wasn’t clear to me that she’d really been the way she appeared in those photos. Why? Had I barely looked at her from the very start? How much of her had I relegated to the corner of my eye without noticing? I fished out all her old pictures from 1960 to 1974. I stopped at that meaningful year for us: there were’t many, one didn’t take so many pictures back then. They were proof of a woman who, up until her forties, had been attractive, perhaps even beautiful. I examined a picture in reddish hues on the back of which was written, in pencil: 1973. It showed Vanda with Sandro, who was eight years old at the time, and Anna, who was four. The children seemed happy, pressed against their mother, who in turn seemed pleased, and all three looked at me, delighted, as I took the picture. Their cheerful gaze marked my presence, proving that in that moment I, too, was there. And yet only now did I realize that my wife was bursting with a joie de vivre that rendered her dazzling. I closed up the pictures quickly in a couple of metal boxes. Everything lost through carelessness. Had I really never paid attention to Vanda? And in any case, what did that question even mean, given there was no way now to verify anything? In the bedroom, only the green irises below heavy lids remained as they’d been five decades ago.

  I got up, I looked at my watch. It was ten past three, and I could hear only the call of some nocturnal bird. I closed the window, lowered the shades, reexamined the study. There was still a lot to do, but it was getting better. And I was about to go to bed, when I spotted a large fragment of a flower vase that had escaped my notice. I picked it up and underneath I found a yellow envelope, swollen and bound by an elastic. I recognized it at once even though I hadn’t thought about it for decades, even though I’d buried it God knows where precisely so that I would n
ever think of it again. It contained the letters that Vanda had written to me between 1974 and 1978.

  I felt irked, embarrassed, contrite, and I thought of hiding the envelope before my wife woke up. Or putting it among the papers to toss out and going immediately, now, to the dumpster. The letters harbored the traces of a pain so intense that, if freed, it could have crossed the study, spread through the living room, burst through the closed doors and returned to take possession of Vanda, shaking her, yanking her out of sleep, prompting her to rant and rave at the top of her lungs. But I didn’t hide the envelope, nor did I toss it into the trash. As if flattened by a weight that suddenly came back, bearing down on my shoulders, I sat back down on the floor. I pulled away the elastic and after almost forty years I read, though out of order, a few of the aging pages, ten lines here, fifteen there.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1.

  In case it’s slipped your mind, Dear Sir, let me remind you: I am your wife. These were the first words my eyes landed on that night, instantly taking me back to when I left home because I’d fallen in love with another woman. At the top of the letter was the date: April 30th, 1974. The past, very remote. A mild morning in Naples in the drab apartment we’d had back then. In love. Maybe that’s what I should have said: Vanda, I’ve fallen in love. Instead I expressed myself in a more brutal and, come to think of it now, less definitive way.

  The fitful shadows of the children weren’t there in the apartment. Sandro was at school, Anna at daycare. I said, Vanda, I have something to confess, I’ve been with another woman. She stared at me, stunned, and I myself was terrified by those words. I muttered: I could have hidden it but I wanted to tell you the truth. And I added, I’m sorry, it happened, it’s small-minded to repress desire.

  Vanda insulted me, she cried, she struck my chest with clenched fists. She apologized, she got mad again. I’d assumed, of course, that she was not going to take it well, but such a violent reaction surprised me. She was a good-natured woman, reasonable, and so I struggled to register that she would not be easily appeased. It didn’t matter to her that the institution of marriage was in crisis, that the family was in its death throes, that fidelity was a virtue of the petty bourgeoisie. She wanted our marriage to be a miraculous exception. She wanted our family to be healthy. She wanted us, always, to be faithful to one another. And as a result she despaired, she demanded that I reveal right away the woman with whom I’d betrayed her. Betrayed, yes, she screamed at me at a certain point, and humiliated her.

  In the evening, choosing my words carefully, I tried to explain that it wasn’t a matter of betrayal, that I had enormous respect for her, that real betrayal was when you betrayed your own instinct, your needs, your body, yourself. Bullshit, she shrieked, but then immediately she contained herself so as not to wake the children. We fought all night with lowered voices, and her unscreaming pain, a pain that enlarged her eyes and distorted her features, terrorized me even more than the screaming version. It terrorized me without involving me; her torment never entered my heart as if it were my own. I was in a state of intoxication that cloaked me as if it were a fire-proof suit. I withdrew, taking my time. I said I thought it was important that she understood. I said we both needed to think, that I was confused and that she needed to help me. Then I cleared out and didn’t go home for several days.

  2.

  I don’t know what I had in mind, maybe nothing in particular. I certainly didn’t hate my wife, I hadn’t built up any resentment toward her, I loved her. I’d thought it was pleasantly adventurous to get married when I was so young, before graduating, without a job. I’d felt I was cutting away my father’s hold over me and that I was finally in charge of my own life. Of course the undertaking was risky, the sources of income I could count on were precarious, and at times I was afraid. But the first years were wonderful, we’d felt like a new kind of couple, battling the existing order. Then the adventure transformed, little by little, into a routine imposed upon us by the needs of the children. What had suddenly changed, above all, was the backdrop against which I was playing the role of the husband and father. Now everything around us seemed struck by decline. A plague revealed itself in every institution, starting with the university, where I’d started to work without prospects. Being married, having a family at a young age, was no longer a sign of autonomy, but of being behind the times. I was still in my twenties and yet I felt old and—in spite of myself—part of a world, a lifestyle that, in the political and cultural environment I’d latched onto, was considered finished. And so, soon, even though I had a sound relationship with my wife and kids, I succumbed to the lure of habits that programmatically cut away all traditional bonds. Once, with the excuse that my ring finger had thickened, I had my wedding band cut off. Vanda was upset about it, she waited for me to put on another ring. I did nothing. She continued wearing her wedding band.

  It’s likely that the relationship with Lidia—she’d just enrolled in economics and business, in keeping with the fashion of the era, and I was a lecturer of Greek grammar without a future—was encouraged by that climate, fueled by it. Surely I must have thought that renouncing her to avoid wronging my wife and children was a sort of anachronism. And seeing each other in secret, according to the established pattern of clandestine relationships, also seemed contrary to the spirit of the times. Lidia wasn’t yet twenty years old but she already had a job and her own place on a pretty, fragrant street. Ringing her bell whenever I could, taking walks with her, going together to the cinema or the theater, were such urgent needs that they prompted me to spill the beans almost immediately with Vanda. But I didn’t think the desire would have taken root, that I would have wanted that girl again and again. Rather, I was more or less certain that the impetus to be with her would soon ebb, that Lidia herself would cool off in order to go back to the young guy she’d been seeing for a few months, or because she’d found someone else, someone her own age, free and childless. As a result, in revealing my affair to Vanda, I only wanted the time to enjoy it unharrassed, without subterfuge, until it had run its course. In other words, when I left the house, after that first fight, I didn’t doubt for a minute that I’d soon be back. I told myself: This pause serves also to recast my relationship with my wife, to make clear that we need to go beyond the norms of cohabitation that have kept us together so far. And this, perhaps, was the motivation for my saying to her I’ve been with another woman rather than I’m in love with another woman.

  Falling in love, in those days, had become a somewhat ridiculous notion, a vestige of the past century, indicating a dangerous tendency to conglomerate; if it began to surface, you immediately had to fight against it so as not to generate distress in one’s partner. Being with another woman, on the other hand, assumed an increased legitimacy, whether married or not. I’d been with another woman, I was with another woman, I’m with another woman were sentences that expressed liberty, not guilt. I realized, of course, that to a wife’s ears the formula might sound atrocious, especially to Vanda who, like me, was raised with the idea that first one fell in love with someone and then, with that someone, one stayed. But—I thought—she has to accept that it can happen, that it’s happened, that perhaps, when I go back to the family, it will happen again. And looking at it this way—hoping that Vanda understood, that she would adjust to present times and not create further scenes—I spent happy days, ever happier, with Lidia.

  I realized late that it wasn’t just about a sexual give and take, or a key piece in the battle against the very concept of adultery, or a joyful erotic friendship, or one of the various liberating practices that were recasting the world. I loved that girl. I loved her in the most old-fashioned way, that is to say, utterly. The idea of leaving her, going back to my wife and children, abandoning her to others, took away my will to live.

  3.

  It took me a year to admit it to myself, albeit still with some reticence. But I never had the strength to tell Vanda, which made me a
ll the more responsible for her deterioration. At first the fact that I’d been with another woman seemed terrible to her. Then, absorbing the blow as best she could, she tried to consider the matter a momentary yielding owed to my meager experience of women, and thus to my sexual curiosity. She hoped that after a few days the fever would pass, and so she took it upon herself, out loud and in writing, to cure me. She seemed in a daze. She couldn’t believe that she—she who had put me at the center of her life, who’d slept with me for years, who’d given me two children, who’d seen to my every need in an exemplary manner—had been set aside for an unknown woman who would never be able to take care of me in that same devoted way.