Ties

by Domenico Starnone

  Every time we met—often after long absences on my part—she tried to put forth, calmly and clearly, all the questions she’d pondered over. We would sit at the kitchen table and she would try to list the practical problems caused by my disappearances, the fact that the kids needed me, the reasons for her bewilderment. Her tone was generally polite, but one morning she snapped.

  —Did I do something wrong? she asked me.

  —Absolutely not.

  —Then what is it that’s not working?

  —Nothing, it’s a complicated time, that’s all.

  —You think it’s complicated beacause you fail to see me.

  —I see you.

  —No, you only see the woman who sweats over the stove, who keeps the house clean, who takes care of the kids. But I’m something else, I’m a person.

  Person, person, person, she started to scream, and then struggled to calm down again. They were long, difficult hours. In that phase she tried to show me that she hadn’t stood still for the past ten years, that she had matured, that she was a new woman. She did this while wringing her hands to contain her distress, saying: Is it possible that you, only you, weren’t aware of it? And if I, who didn’t know how to respond to her, strayed from the point, cataloging the evils of the family and the need to liberate oneself, she came down to my level, she indicated with forced politeness that the books I read were ones she was familiar with, that she, too, had been working for some time on her own liberation, that we could, should, have been doing this work together. Then, at a certain point—since she could see from my face that I couldn’t wait to leave in order to protect my state of grace from her painful existence, and from the anxiety that her spectacle of suffering provoked—the politeness gave way and the tenor of our meetings changed. Vanda would begin, scornfully, then she’d start screaming, she’d burst into tears, insulting me. Once she screamed out of the blue:

  —Am I boring you? Tell me that I bore you.

  —No.

  —Then why are you always looking at your watch? Are you in a hurry, are you afraid of missing a train?

  —I drove here.

  —Her car?

  —Yes.

  —Is she waiting for you? What are you doing tonight? Going out to a restaurant?

  She started to laugh for no reason. She went into the bedroom, singing old children’s songs at the top of her voice.

  After a while, of course, she got a grip, she always got a grip. But every time she did I felt she’d lost some part of herself that, in the past, had attracted me. It had never been like this, she was ruining herself because of me. And yet I considered that self-ruin to be the authorization to distance myself from her even further. Is it possible, I wondered, that gaining a little freedom has to be so hard? Why are we such a backward country? Why, in more evolved nations, does everything happen without histrionics?

  On one occasion I was about to leave. It was late afternoon on a very hot day. She ran to the door and locked it. She called Sandro and Anna and said: Dad feels like he’s in prison, so let’s play prison for real. The kids pretended to enjoy it, I pretended with them, but not her, she was saying softly: Ha ha, now you don’t get out anymore. Then she threw the keys at me and locked herself in the bathroom. I didn’t dare leave, I sent Sandro to call her. She reemerged, she said, I was kidding. But she wasn’t kidding at all. She was tired, she no longer slept, she was trying to figure out how to talk sense into me. Since she was getting nowhere she tried now to rouse me, now to anger me, now to beg me, now to scare me. You shouldn’t keep me here this way, I told her. She responded, indignant: Who’s keeping you, get out. But two seconds later she said quietly: Wait, sit, your madness is driving me mad.

  What exasperated her, what wore her down, was that I didn’t want to explain why I’d done what I’d done. She asked me, she wrote me, why. But I didn’t know what to tell her. I invented convoluted replies, at times I muttered: I don’t know. I was lying of course, by then I knew the reason, I knew it with growing clarity. The time with Lidia was joyful time, carefree time, I could never get enough. I felt full of energy, I was writing, publishing. People liked me. It was as if the swamp that I’d carried inside since childhood, that had lasted until a short while ago, had suddenly been reclaimed by that cheerful and elegant woman. In the beginning that April had been marvelous: sleeping with her in spring, eating with her in spring, walking with her in spring, traveling with her in spring. And looking at her—looking at her, enchanted—while she put on and took off her springtime clothes. I’d thought: I’ll go back home at the end of May. But spring slipped away and when the last day of the season came I felt I was dying. And so I said to myself, let’s wait for summer, I still want to have Lidia all summer. But summer too passed and I didn’t know how I would stand autumn without her. Then, in turn, autumn went by, winter went by, and that whole year, despite the visits with my wife and children, nothing counted except Spring Lidia, Summer Lidia, Autumn Lidia, Winter Lidia. That is to say, the coveted time was hers; I was afraid of the time with Vanda, with Sandro and Anna. I pushed it back, I whittled it to a minimum with one excuse after another. When I was with them I protected myself by lying, and the deception served to protect the extraordinary sense of well-being that had taken hold of me. In those moments I felt humiliated both by my incapacity to be true and by the unbearable truth of my wife’s desperation, by the disorientation of the children. To be as I felt, to really say why I was behaving that way, I would have had to speak of my happiness with Lidia. But what could have been more cruel? Vanda wanted something else. Vanda, so as to rise above her desperation, expected me to tell her: I realize I’ve made a mistake, let’s get back together. This was the dead end.

  4.

  We didn’t pull out of it that year, nor the following. My wife grew thin, squandering her vitality, losing even more control of herself. By now she was like a person suspended in a void, and her panic contributed considerably to depleting her remaining strength.

  In the beginning I believed that the terrible situation we’d ended up in concerned only the two of us, not Sandro and Anna. And, in fact, I’ve now seen the children in my mind’s eye: They’re blurry figures, they don’t have our clear contours as we argue and fight in the kitchen; we’re well-defined in spite of the time that’s passed. Sandro and Anna aren’t in my head, or if they are, they’re doing something else, playing or watching television. Our crisis, the anguish that devours us, is elsewhere, it doesn’t involve them. But then, at a certain point, things changed. During a fight, Vanda, burst out that I had to tell her whether I still wanted to take care of the children or if I intended to get rid of them the way I was getting rid of her. I was flabbergasted. Of course I want to take care of them, I replied. Good to know, she said quietly, and dropped the question. But as she realized that time was passing and that I was alternating long absences with brief appearances, she told me that if I didn’t want to account for what I had done to her, I had to account for what I’d done to the children. How would I put it to them?

  I hadn’t thought about it. The children, prior to that disaster, constituted a fact of existence. They’d been born and now they were there. In my free time I played with them, I took them out, I invented fairy tales for them. I praised them, I reproached them. But in general, after amusing them sufficiently, or after rebuking them with benevolent authority, I holed up to study, and my wife entertained them with great imagination, dedicating herself to housework all the while. I never saw anything wrong with the way things were going, and Vanda herself never complained, even when we were besieged by that culture of deinstitutionalization—what an ugly word—of everything. We were both raised to believe that things were naturally supposed to be a certain way. It was natural that our marriage should last until death separated us. It was natural that my wife should have no job other than housework. And even now that everything seemed to be in transition—a pre-Revolutionary pha
se, people said—it was inconceivable that mothers would stop taking care of their children. Now she was the one raising the issue, asking how I planned to deal with it. Yet again I didn’t know what to tell her. We were on the street, in Piazza Municipio. She stopped, locking eyes with me, and asked:

  —Do you want to continue being a father?

  —Yes.

  —And how? By showing up once or twice to twist the knife in the wound, then staying away for months? Having kids on demand, only when it’s convenient for you?

  —I’ll come see them every weekend.

  —Oh, you’ll come see them. You mean they’re staying with me?

  I grew confused, I stammered:

  —Well, I can take them for a while, as well.

  —As well? As well?—she screamed. I take them always, and you take them as well? You want to destroy them the way you’re destroying me? Children don’t need parents as well, but always.

  She ran off, ditching me a few yards from the city hall.

  I forced myself to come back to Naples every weekend. I left Rome, I went to the house where we’d lived for a dozen years. My plan was to avoid fighting with Vanda. I couldn’t take it anymore, and she, too, was shaken—she lit one cigarette after another with unsteady hands, she had the eyes of someone who sees no way out. To avoid her, I closed myself up in a room with the kids. I soon discovered that it was impossible. Though the spaces of the house were the same, neither I nor my children were able to be together with the same nonchalance. Everything was false now. I felt obligated to spend my time with them, happily, and they—they weren’t the same anymore. They threw me anxious looks, attuned to what their mother and I did and said. They were afraid of making a mistake, of upsetting me, thus losing me forever. They felt obligated to spend time happily with me. But in spite of willing it with all our might, in no way were we able—father and children—to behave naturally. Vanda was in the other room, and the three of us knew not to forget her. She was so much a part of us that withdrawing was a useless effort. She left us alone for a long time, this was true. She didn’t interfere. But we heard the noises of her toiling, or a nervous humming. We should have ignored her, learned to be just us three, regroup beyond the old quartet. But we weren’t able to, we felt her presence as a threat—not that she wanted to harm us. We feared, rather, the threat of her suffering—and we felt that not a movement or a word of ours was lost on her, that whenever a chair or a table creaked, she suffered. Time, therefore, tended to dilate unbearably; evening never came. After a while I didn’t know what to come up with. I distracted myself, I thought of Lidia. It was Saturday. Maybe she’d gone to the movies with friends, what did I know? I planned to say out loud: I’m going down for cigarettes, and to look for a phone, to call her before she went out, before the device rang on and on leaving me with a sense of abandonment. Vanda seemed particularly sensitive to those distractions. All of a sudden she peeped out. She read it in my face, she intuited the burden of staying with my children. I had never been there this long in normal times. Never like this, in any case: It was almost like taking an exam which my wife, their mother, had the authority to grade.

  At times she couldn’t contain herself.

  —How’s it going?

  —Fine.

  —You’re not playing?

  —We are playing.

  —What?

  —Crazy Heights.

  —Kids, let Dad win, if not he gets upset.

  —She was never satisfied. She scolded me for turning on the TV, she criticized me for playing violent games, she told me derisively that I overstimulated the kids and that they wouldn’t be able to get to sleep. The tension became intolerable, and we’d end up fighting in front of Sandro and Anna. The scenes were no longer monitored. Vanda convinced herself that the kids should know, evaluate, judge.

  —Lower your voice, please.

  —Why? Are you afraid they’ll know who you really are?

  —Not at all.

  —You want to do to them what you did to me? Do they have to believe that you love them when it’s not true?

  —I’ve always loved you, I still do.

  —Don’t lie to me. Don’t tell me lies I can’t stand anymore. Not in front of the kids. If you have to lie, then get out of here.

  Sandro and Anna had quickly learned that each of my appearances entailed the unchecked pain of their mother. So if perhaps, in the beginning, they waited for the pleasure of seeing me again and hoped that I would always stay, later they started to pretend to focus on their own games or shows on TV, wishing meanwhile that I would get out before the storm broke. The fact is, I myself tended to shorten my visits, to duck out as soon as I sensed that Vanda was about to crack. Once I brought some gifts for the children, a sweater for Sandro, a little necklace for Anna. When she realized her daughter was happy she said:

  —You bought this stuff?

  —Yes, who do you think bought it?

  —Lidia.

  —What are you talking about?

  —You’re turning red, it was her.

  —It’s not true.

  —You need help buying your children a present? Don’t you dare give them something that comes from her, ever again.

  In fact it really had been Lidia, but that wasn’t the point. Every scene that Vanda made in that phase had an ulterior motive. She wanted to demonstrate—not only to me but most of all to herself—that I couldn’t be a father without her, that I didn’t know how. That by excluding her I excluded myself, and that without a reconciliation, life—namely, the way we’d lived until the moment I’d confessed my betrayal—was no longer possible.

  This thesis soon seemed solid to me. Turning up every Saturday, every Sunday; seeing Sandro and Anna, who welcomed me, cleaned up, hair combed, as if for a stranger’s visit; sensing those first affectionate minutes charged with an excessive tension for them and for me. All this seemed not only useless but dangerous. My presence in the house was meant to give continuity to the idea of a father figure, but because it wasn’t permanent, it was necessarily flawed. Whatever I did or said seemed, to Vanda, insufficient. She demonstrated to me point by point—with the rigorous logic that she was always capable of and that had now intensified—that I didn’t give adequate replies to the mute demands of our children, that I was letting them down.

  —What do they expect? I asked her one morning, more scared than ever.

  —To understand, she shouted at me with a voice that cracked in her chest and seemed to suffocate her. To understand why you went away to live somewhere else, why you abandoned them, why you’re only with them halfheartedly a few hours before going off, without making clear when you’ll be back, or when you’ll give them what they deserve.

  I told her she was right, in part to calm her, in part because I didn’t know how to object. What kind of father was I, what kind of father could I have been, in that house where, for years, we’d had the absolute certainty that we would have lived, the four of us, forever? The architecture had absorbed our way of being together, assigning corners for every function. And though the spaces were gloomy, cold in winter, too hot in summer, never bright, they had nevertheless conformed to loving habits, often with peaks of bliss. Living in the house for a few hours a week based on the new situation was impossible for me. And so one day, at the height of the usual quarrel, I said to Vanda:

  —School’s closed, I’ll keep the kids with me for a bit.

  —With you how?

  —With me.

  —You want to take them away from me?

  —No, what are you talking about?

  —You want to take them away from me, she said, morose.

  But then she agreed. She agreed in a dramatic way, as if it were a matter of a final, definitive experiment, after which she would understand exactly what I had in mind.

  5.

  I took the kids t
o Rome one Sunday in summer, and they seemed happy. But it was a stupid thing to do. I didn’t have my own place—I couldn’t afford it—and on the other hand I didn’t feel like keeping them at Lidia’s. The reasons were, as usual, difficult to unravel. I predicted that if she hosted all three of us in her studio apartment and Vanda found out about it, she would have seen, in that choice, a sort of cancellation of her, as if to say: Get out of the way, you’re no longer needed, neither as a mother nor as a wife. She was increasingly dominated by a pressing logic that impeded every arbitration, and I feared that the abstract series of dots she connected could push her—it was already pushing her every day—she was always physically weaker, mentally more alert—to extremes that I didn’t even want to consider. But her reaction wasn’t the only thing that worried me. Being observed by the children when I was with Lidia, in her bright house, at breakfast, at lunch, at dinner, in her bed, was loathsome to me. It was saying in effect to Sandro, to Anna: Look at this girl, see how well-behaved she is, how calm, how well we get along; I live here, do you like it? And I intuited that, in doing so, I would have coerced them, for the sake of my love, into a cohabitation that—especially if they were to agree that Lidia was indeed nice—would have been an insult to their love for their mother. Not just that, there was more. I didn’t want Lidia to see me in the role of a father. Living with her and the two kids for days, occupying her tiny space, making a mess, showing her my responsibility, forcing her to share it with me, seemed unacceptable. Until a short while ago, thanks to the labors of Vanda, I didn’t realize I’d had any—none that were onerous, at any rate. I didn’t want to show Lidia, in all its concreteness, what I was: a thirty-six year old man, rigidly defined, married, the father of two children, eleven and seven years old. Inside that magical space, I didn’t even want to see myself that way. There I felt a lover, uninhibited, one who doesn’t free oneself only to be tied down again. I was casting a new mold for love affairs. I didn’t want to be a person who dragged, into the house of a young woman whose future was ahead of her, the legacy of his dreary past.