I stayed with a friend. I knew nothing about caring for children, and I quickly let the wife deal with it. Both were on my side, they supported me. They said, though they were a happy couple, stably married for five years, that one couldn’t, one shouldn’t resist impulses, that I was right to give in to my passions, and that I should stop feeling guilty. One evening, while the children slept, the husband and wife gave me a judicious scolding because I never denigrated my wife.
—Why should I? I asked.
—Because she’s going overboard, people shouldn’t act this way, my friend said.
—I’m hurting her deeply, she reacts the best she can.
—She reacts in a very unpleasant way, exclaimed the wife.
—It’s hard to suffer politely.
—Others do. Composure, in certain cases, is everything.
—Maybe the people you know don’t suffer as much as Vanda.
I defended her earnestly, but they kept saying that I was the nicer one, the more composed. And so when Sandro and Anna would go to bed, and I was sure that they were sleeping, I’d leave them under the affectionate watch of my hosts and run to Lidia. Every hour I spent with her, ever since the beginning of our relationship, surprised me. Those hours were so distant from the hardship I was used to with Vanda. Lidia was bought up to live well, it came to her naturally. She valued comfort and pleasure, she went to lengths to welcome me, cheerfully. She shared her small earnings with me if I was in a tight spot. She took our complicated situation in stride without fretting about the future. I was happy when she opened the door and the table was set for a late, sumptuous dinner; I was unhappy when I had to leave her bed before dawn. I’d come back at five-thirty in the morning to the kids, hoping they hadn’t woken up. I’d roam around the house without feeling sleepy, filled with a sense of guilt. I would often sit next to Sandro and Anna’s bed, watching them, trying to absorb them, to feel that they were indispensable to me. I’d wake them up a few hours later. I’d wait for them to have breakfast, to wash up, and then, given that my friend and his wife had their affairs to tend to, I would drag them to work with me.
Sandro and Anna never protested. They watched over me, they were well-behaved. They tried, in their way, not only to not be a burden but also to make me look good in front of my students and colleagues. Nevertheless, after a short while, I gave up, and rushed back to hand them to Vanda.
—Already?, she said, tauntingly. That’s it for your paternity?
I struggled to explain myself. In the end I muttered something about how it was hard for me to face up to the demands of our children as she’d always done. She misunderstood, believing I wanted to come back to the family. She brightened, and talked about the new equilibrium that the four of us had to find again. I shook my head. I said:
—I have to figure things out.
In a fraction of a second Vanda read in my eyes the strength I summoned from the well-being I enjoyed without her and she understood in a flash that nothing would hold me back, not even the kids. I acknowledged, for a moment, that what I was doing to her was particularly cruel. And to avoid thinking about it I ran away.
The last sign of her arrived by mail months later. It was a thin set of forms. The head clerk in the Court of Minors of Naples notified me that a measure had been put in place, according to which Sandro and Anna were entrusted to their mother. I could have hopped on a train, run to the head clerk, protested, shouted: I’m their father, I don’t give a damn about article 133 or whatever, I’m here, it’s not true that I abandoned my children, I want to stay with them. I didn’t do anything.
I went on with Lidia, I went on with my work.
6.
Seated, devastated, on the floor of my study, I examined that document for a long time. It was there in the yellow envelope along with Vanda’s letters. I asked myself if my children had ever read the original measure decreed, as they say, by the judicial authority, or some similar document that must be somewhere, too. That sheet of paper constitutes the record of my formal renunciation of them. It’s proof on paper that I abandoned them to grow up without me, that I let them fall definitively out of my life, in a tempest that would sweep them far from my eyes and from my concerns. That laconic notice proved that I’d freed myself from all that. I would get used to not feeling the weight in my head and heart and stomach anymore, because there would no longer be a daily habit, because they would soon become different from what I knew. They would lose their childish features, they would grow taller, their entire bodies would change: their faces, voices, steps, thoughts. Memory, on the other hand, would have arrested them in the final moment I’d taken them back to their mother and said: I have to figure things out.
Some time passed. I endured the separation thanks to Lidia’s presence and increasingly fulfilling commitments. I left the frustrating university job. I started writing for newspapers, I launched radio shows, I turned up timidly on television. There is a distance that cannot be measured in kilometers or even in light years; it’s the distance born from change. I distanced myself from my wife and my children by pursuing what excited me: the new woman I loved and engaging work, also new, which, in a sequence of apparently unstoppable events, led to one small personal success after another. Lidia liked me, everyone liked me. And meanwhile a thin fog concealed a past in which I felt slow and inconclusive. The house in Naples faded. Relatives faded, and friends. Vanda, Sandro and Anna remained alive, persistent, but only until distance drained energy from them, diminishing the pain. To this, almost automatically, I added an old mental habit. Ever since I was young I had trained myself to ignore my mother’s suffering when my father tormented her. I’d become so good at it that, although I was there, I could block out the screams, the insults, the sound of him slapping her, the tears, certain sentences in dialect repeated as if they were a litany: I’ll kill myself, I’ll throw myself out the window. I learned not to hear my parents. As for not seeing them, all I had to do was close my eyes. I resorted to this childish trick all my life, in thousands of situations. In those days it was extremely useful, and I relied on it heavily. I had left a void, I was creating a void. My wife, my children, emerged in a wide range of moments, and nevertheless I didn’t see them or hear them.
But I didn’t always manage so well. I was abroad when I received news that my wife had tried to kill herself. To go that far, I cried out, desolate, but even now I don’t know what I wanted to say. Maybe that far was a silent scream against Vanda. I asked what it meant to push oneself to the brink of death. Or more likely I was angry with myself: You’ve pushed her this far, shame on you. Or more generally I protested against the diffuse yearning to expect all that we desired, not caring about the risk for others, the damage we’d done. I racked my brains, distraught. Vanda was in the hospital. When and how had it happened? How would her act mark Sandro and Anna? The moments realigned, shedding new clarity on those distant figures. I realized that I was forced to choose: either leave everything, work, my life, the pattern I was creating for myself together with Lidia, and rush to cancel the void, and put everything back in order; or limit myself to calling, asking how Vanda was doing, but not seeing her, not alone, not with the children standing by her, not exposing myself to the tidal wave of emotion, not running that risk. For a long time I wavered between those two possibilities. It seemed to me that I couldn’t ask anyone for advice; the responsibility of choosing was up to me. What if my wife hadn’t survived? Would I have to admit to having killed her? How? By devastating her, leading her to decide that, instead of clinging to life, to the children, it was better to throw it all away? Would Sandro and Anna, growing up, turn me into the assassin? On the other hand, did she need to die so that I could realize that I’d committed a protracted crime, one lasting months and years?
Crime, crime, crime.
I had demolished a life: I had pushed a young person, who, like me, wanted wholeheartedly to make something of herself, to
admit that she didn’t know how to live anymore.
No, what was entering my mind? Was pursuing one’s destiny a crime? Was refusing to undermine one’s potential a crime? Was fighting against institutions and suffocating habits a crime? How absurd.
I loved Vanda, there hadn’t been a single moment in which I coldly wanted to cause her harm. I had behaved cautiously, lying precisely so that she would suffer as little as possible. But, God help me, not to the point of my own suffering, suffocating myself to keep her from suffocating. Not that far.
I didn’t go to see her. I didn’t want to know how she was. I didn’t write to her. I didn’t concern myself with how the children had taken it. I decided to behave so as to make it clear, for one and for all, how things stood: Nothing, not even her death, could prevent me from loving Lidia. To love: I began to utter the verb in that very period—before it had seemed to me the stuff of romance novels—convinced that I was giving it a meaning it had never had before.
7.
Vanda restabilized, she stopped seeking me out, she soon stopped writing to me. But in March of 1978 I was the one to send her a letter, asking if I could see Sandro and Anna alone.
It’s hard to say why I did it. On the surface everything was sailing along. I was living in Rome. I had started working regularly for TV. I was very happy with Lidia. My wife no longer put pressure on me. The kids were simply a jolt. I would turn around suddenly when I heard a young voice on the street call out dad. And yet something was off-kilter. Maybe those weren’t good times. My insecurities were creeping back, now and then I thought I didn’t have the talent I’d imagined. There were dark moments when I convinced myself that my growing success was the result of something random, that the trend would reverse, that I would be punished for arrogantly assuming responsibilities I wasn’t qualified for. But maybe Lidia also had something to do with it. I loved her even more, attributing to her a refinement, an intelligence, a sensitivity that I was increasingly less sure of deserving.
—Why are you with me? I would ask.
—Because it happened.
—That doesn’t mean anything.
—But that’s how it is.
—And if everything ends?
—Let’s try to prevent that.
I would observe her, sometimes, from afar, at a party or some public occasion. In a few years she had stopped being a young girl. She was now a woman, quite respected, and she emanated a sinuous, fiery strength that blazed with discretion. She’ll leave me soon, I would think, looking at her. Meeting her had triggered an outpouring of vitality that overwhelmed me, causing me to take the ambitious leap that rendered me a successful man. One of these days she’d realize that she’d fallen in love not with me but with the effects of her own warmth, and she would understand that, really, I was just a small, anxious man. The more she saw me for what I was, the more forcefully she’d feel attracted to others. This was what I was thinking, and recently I’d started to keep an eye on her friendships. I grew alarmed if she excessively praised this one or that. But I also feared that I was turning myself, almost without realizing it, from unbridled lover to jail-keeper. A metamorphosis—I knew well—that was totally useless. Whether I wanted it or not, Lidia would have pursued her desire, ruining me, just as I had ruined Vanda in pursuing mine. She would have betrayed me, yes, it was the right verb, even though we hadn’t signed agreements, even though our relationship was free of bonds, even though I didn’t feel obligated to not desire other women and she hadn’t promised to not desire other men. The mere idea that it might happen destroyed me. She’ll go away for work and she’ll meet someone she’ll like. She’ll be attracted to friends or acquaintances and she’ll hook up with them. She’ll go to a party, she’ll be in high spirits, she’ll let herself go. She’ll feel valued by men with authority, and in their shadow she’ll enjoy privileges that I don’t know how to provide. The new era has only spread out a flashy veil over the old one, archaic impulses fester under the rouge of modernity. But this is life these days and she’ll live it fully, my suffering won’t be able to hinder her. Which was why, sometimes, I didn’t feel like working. My capacity for invention was dimming, and it wouldn’t reignite unless I found a way to convince myself that I was wrong, that she loved me and always would. Otherwise what was the point of the trail of pain I’d left behind?
In those moments the tight mesh of the days—meetings, rivalries, permanent tensions, small defeats, small victories, trips for work, kisses and embraces in the evening, at night, in the morning: a perfect antidote for keeping memory and remorse at bay—slackened imperceptibly. Fathers who played with their children, those who gave erudite explanations on trains or buses, those who risked heart attacks in order to teach them how to ride a bike, grasping the seat and yelling, pedal, pedal, were paving the way. Vanda and the children—forgotten—reappeared, reminding me that in the past I would have done the same things. One cold morning when I was feeling particularly depressed I saw a skinny, slovenly woman on Via Nazionale dragging two wretched children behind her, a boy and girl who were fighting amongst themselves, one around ten years old, the other around five. I looked at them for a long time. The children were pushing and insulting each other, the mother was threatening them. She had a cheap unfashionable coat, and they wore beat-up shoes. I thought, that’s my family, returned from oblivion. I saw my empty place beside them; that void, I convinced myself, had turned them into this.
A few days later I wrote to Vanda. She replied after two weeks, when the three of them had receded once more to the background of my days and I was feeling decent again, having driven those nasty thoughts away. The letter got on my nerves. You write that you need to reestablish a relationship with the children. You believe, now that four years have gone by, that it’s possible to face the problem calmly. But what is there left to face? Wasn’t the nature of your need precisely defined when you skipped out, robbing us of our life? When you abandoned them because you couldn’t handle the responsibility? In any case I read them your request and they’ve decided to meet you. I remind you, in case you’ve forgotten, that Sandro is thirteen, and Anna nine. They’re crushed by uncertainty and fear. Don’t make it worse for them. I went unwillingly to meet my children.
8.
Vanda’s sarcastic reminder—Sandro is thirteen, and Anna nine—had prepared me to find them different from how I remembered them. But they weren’t simply different: They seemed strangers who looked at me as if I were a stranger.
I took them to a café, I filled the table with good things to eat and drink. I tried to converse with them, but I ended up talking about myself. They never called me Dad. I on the other hand, anxious, said their names a thousand times. Since I feared that they remembered me only for the earthquake I’d caused in their lives, for how I’d made them suffer, I tried in a muddled way to present myself as a respectable person, mild-mannered, with a job that they could brag about to their classmates. It seemed to me, from their attentive gazes, from an occasional smile, even from Anna’s cheerful laughter, that I’d convinced them. I hoped that they would want to know, for example, what they would have to do in order to follow in my footsteps as adults. But Sandro didn’t say anything, and Anna asked, nodding to her brother:
—Is it true that it was you who taught him how to tie his shoes?
I felt embarrassed. Had I taught Sandro to tie his shoes? I didn’t remember. And at that point, for no precise reason, I no longer marveled that they were strangers to me; the sense of estrangement was intrinsic to our original bond. All the time I had lived with them I’d been a distracted father who didn’t feel the need to know them in order to recognize them. Now, in order to make a good impression, wanting to absorb everything about them, I observed my children with excessive attention—that, precisely, of strangers—devouring details, yearning to know them fully in a few minutes. I replied, lying: Yes, I think so, I taught Sandro lots of things, maybe also how to tie his shoes.
And Sandro muttered: no one ties their shoes the way I do. Meanwhile Anna told me: It’s ridiculous how he ties them, I don’t believe you tie them like that, too.
I forced myself to smile, assuming the most benevolent expression I could muster. I took it for granted that I tied my shoes like anyone else: The anomaly that my two children insisted upon, each in their own way, was something that Sandro must have picked up as a child, from who knows what source. He’s convinced, I thought, worried, that he’s maintained a true bond with me because of the way he ties his shoes, and now he risks discovering that he was wrong. What was I supposed to do?
Anna looked me straight in the eyes. She had a face that was always amused, a spontaneous grin that made her look happy even when she wasn’t. She said: Show us how you do it, and I realized that she, too, while teasing her brother with that business about the laces, was searching for proof that I wasn’t some random man they needed to think of as a father, but something more. I asked: Do you want me to show you now, here, how I tie my shoes? Yes, Anna said. I unlaced a shoe, then I laced it again. I pulled the two ends of the string, I crossed them, I passed one end under the other, I pulled tight. I looked at them. They both had their eyes trained on my shoe, their mouths half-open. Somewhat nervous, I went back to crossing the ends, again I passed one under the other, I pulled once more, I made a loop. I paused, uncertain. Sandro’s eyes started to light up with satisfaction. Anna said softly: And then? I grasped the loop, I closed by pulling it between my fingers, I passed it under the end that remained, I formed another hole and pulled. There, I said to Sandro, is that how you do it? Yes, he replied. And Anna said, it’s true, only the two of you tie your shoes like that, I want to learn, too.
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