Ties

by Domenico Starnone

  Sandro and I spent the rest of the time tying and untying our laces until Anna, kneeling in front of the two of us, learned properly how to tie them as we did. Now and then she said: But it’s ridiculous to tie them this way. In the end Sandro asked me: When did you teach me? I decided to be honest: I don’t think I taught you. You learned on your own, watching me. And from that moment I started to feel guilty like never before.

  Vanda wrote to me later, using hostile words to say that the two children had found me fleeting, as usual, that I had disappointed them. No mention of the laces, Sandro and Anna almost certainly hadn’t told her about it. But I knew that that tying and untying had brought us closer together, or maybe it had brought us to a gap that, since their birth, had never been so slight. At least I hoped so, I wanted to believe that that was what happened. At the café I’d understood my children much more than in the past, and I had felt—felt in every pore of my body—the responsibility of what I’d wrested from them, the damage I had caused by robbing them of steadfast affection, and I cried for days and nights, making sure Lidia wasn’t aware of it. Which was why I couldn’t believe that they’d said to their mother: He disappointed us. But since I was sure that Vanda wasn’t lying—she never lied—I thought that it was Sandro and Anna who had lied. They’d done so with good reason. They feared that if they told their mother that it had been good to see me, it would have made her suffer, and by now every time she suffered it terrified them. They preferred to say nothing about how they’d found me kind, so that Vanda wasn’t upset by it.

  It was during that time that I remembered when my mother had cut her wrist with my father’s razor. The blood dripped onto the floor, and we children were quick to prevent her from cutting the other one as well. Something, on the shield of insensitivity that I had constructed during childhood and early adolescence in front of scenes like that, gave way. The distant torments of my mother—her malcontent, the anger, at times the hatred toward the husband she’d been dealt—assaulted me without a filter, with a force I had never perceived. The pain of Vanda also passed through that breach. And for the first time I felt in my bones how much I had demolished her. And I realized with the same unbearable intensity that, while I had been keen to avoid the blows of that suffering, our two children had been struck, perhaps bludgeoned. Nevertheless they asked about the laces. Do you tie your shoes like I do? You’re ridiculous, but can you teach me?

  9.

  I went back to see them. I turned up in their house in Naples trying to give continuity to my visits. I invited them to Rome. I took them to lunch, to dinner, to restaurants—a new experience for them—and to sleep in the apartment that I’d rented in Viale Mazzini, where I’d been living with Lidia for a short while. I realized that even if my recent successes were to have multiplied, they would never be able to justify the trail of pain that I had left behind, and I complicated my life to the point of neglecting my work. But by now that pain dwelled in gestures, in voices, indelible. Anna immediately spurned Lidia’s congeniality and routinely made it clear that she couldn’t stand her. Sandro, after a few sulky attempts to accept the situation, refused to set foot in a house where I lived with a woman other than his mother. They demanded my full attention, they wanted me to be available at every moment. Working little or not at all started to get me in trouble, and to deal with it I was forced to take away time from Lidia. My life with her, the free life we’d lived, lost ground. I had to take stock of contractual deadlines, Vanda’s shadow, Sandro and Anna’s tantrums.

  —Take care of your children, Lidia told me one day.

  —And you?

  —I can wait.

  —No, you won’t wait for me. You have your work, your friends, you’ll leave me.

  —I said I’ll wait for you.

  But she wasn’t happy. She had an increasingly autonomous life, without me. And the two kids weren’t happy, nor did Vanda seem happy. No matter how much I dedicated myself to the children, respecting minutely all the obligations that were imposed on me, she kept stepping up her demands. I decided, for example, to see Sandro and Anna only in the house in Naples, in part because it was there that they went to school and had friends, in part because I didn’t mean to further complicate Lidia’s life, in part because this was what Vanda wanted. She wavered between rancor and a warm welcome. If for some reason I vexed her, she cut me off, rudely. But if I appeared docile she hosted me politely in the house, letting me work, telling the kids not to bother me, and at a certain point she started setting a place for me at lunch and at dinner as well.

  It was soon the case that meeting Sandro and Anna at Vanda’s home became more convenient—and also more productive in terms of work—than seeing them in Rome. Once when Lidia went away for her job—she had to be away for a week—I yielded to the insistence of both kids and went to Naples. I stayed, not for a night but for all seven days. One evening Vanda and I talked for a long time about when we’d met, almost twenty years earlier. We lay back on our old double bed without touching one another, and we fell asleep talking about those distant times. When I saw Lidia again I told her about it. In that phase I was irritated by her work obligations, by the consent that must have been growing in her, the tolerance with which she accepted the complicated situation I’d thrust her into. She was always kind, and she never got upset when the kids and my wife—we had never legally separated, and as a result that novelty, divorce, wasn’t even possible—intruded with endless phone calls on our private life. Lidia didn’t put forth demands, she didn’t protest, she grew tense only if I had a problem with her ongoing commitments, and this made me suspect that she no longer cared about me, about us. I hoped that she would get angry, scream, cry. Instead she said nothing, she just turned pale. Then, without arguing, she left the house we’d rented together and went back to the study she’d lived in before. To my protests, my pleading, she simply replied: I need my space the way you need yours.

  For a while I lived alone, in sadness. I returned to Naples, to my children, to my wife, first for a week, then two, then three. But I couldn’t cope without Lidia. For several months I called her obsessively, making sure neither the kids nor Vanda were aware of it. Lidia answered right away, she talked to me affectionately, but when I told her I needed, urgently, to see her she hung up without even saying goodbye. She cut off all ties only when, ground down by the need for her and by the growing solidity of the relationship with Vanda and the kids, I proposed a sort of clandestine affair, without commitment, in which she and I were both free, based simply on the pleasure of being together once in a while. It was a terrible time. To numb the pain I dedicated all my energy to a TV show that enjoyed considerable success, and I began to earn so much money that I moved my family to the capital.

  10.

  I can’t say precisely when I started to be afraid of Vanda. Then again, I never said to myself in such an explicit way—I am afraid of Vanda—it’s the first time I’m trying to lend this feeling a grammar and syntax. But it’s hard. Even the verb I’ve used—to fear—seems inadequate to me. I’m using it out of convenience, but it’s limited, it leaves out a lot. In any case, for simplicity’s sake, this is how things are: Since 1980 until today I’ve lived with a woman who, though of minute build, quite thin, fragile by now in her very bones, knows how to sap me of my voice and my strength, knows how to render me ignoble.

  It happened, I think, little by little. She accepted me again, but not with the mellow love that had characterized the first twelve years of our marriage. She did so in a strenuous way, and with a thirst for self-celebration. She talked a lot about the work she’d done on herself, how she’d swept away all the taboos, her determination to fully become a woman. And so began a long period in which, it seemed to me, she wasn’t able to gain equilibrium. She was worn out, her eyes and her hands never stopped moving, she was smoking a lot. She didn’t want the two of us to pick up from before the crisis exploded, she refused to resemble herself. And she
imposed on me a sort of daily performance aimed to show how young she was, how beautiful, how free, so much more than the young girl for whom I’d left her.

  I was baffled. Almost certainly I tried to make her understand that her previous, placid attention toward me was enough, that there was no need to put so much effort into everything. But at every sign of my unhappiness, I realized, she stiffened. I’d thought that, proud of her victory, she would forget, and in fact she really was forgetting, but not as I’d imagined. She avoided throwing what I’d done in my face, she let the humiliations and insults fade. But the pain of those years, refusing to subside, only sought other outlets. Vanda continued to suffer, imbuing her suffering with a form of intolerance. She suffered and turned irritable, she suffered and turned hostile. She suffered and assumed an insulting tone, she suffered and grew inflexible. Every day of our new life was, for her, a crucial test which boiled down to: I’m no longer the accommodating person I used to be, and if you don’t do what I say, get out.

  I discovered that her illness depressed me. If the pain that I had inflicted on her had struggled to reach me, I was immediately attuned to the new slant of her torment and I felt the weight of it, the compunction. Slowly, filled with a sense of guilt, I put my discomfort at bay, forcing myself to pay her several compliments daily, waiting patiently for her to tire of displaying her intelligence, the radical nature of her political opinions, her recklessness in bed, her self-confidence. This yielded good results. She stopped hurling quotations in my face, she let go of the desire to be subversive, her sex drive settled down, she went back to taking sensible care of herself. And yet, she didn’t cease to brood over every small divergence on my part. If I happened to disagree with her, she grew alarmed. She couldn’t bear any unhappiness: She would turn pale, light a cigarette and drag on it in brief spurts with trembling hands. She defended her positions, pressing them to ridiculous lengths. She calmed down only if I said, in the end, that she was right. At that moment her mood abruptly changed, and she became excessively cheerful and obliging. I soon understood that if, in the past, it was she who always agreed with me, and that our closeness calmed her, now she calmed down only if that closeness was based on the fact that I agreed with her. Every time I contradicted her it must have seemed a sign of some crisis, and her very alarm exasperated her, she was the one prepared to call it quits. I learned not to interfere in her business, to stay silent about my own, to always appear cheerfully agreeable.

  This happened, more or less, in the two years following our reconciliation. It was a complicated two years. Then Vanda found a balance. Wanting a job of her own, even though I made good money, she started working in an accounting firm. Though ever more haggard, ever thinner, she multiplied her energy, never neglecting the house, me, or the children. I was mindful to watch my step. I supported her distractedly in her disputes at work, I was the mute spectator of her harassment of cleaning ladies, I respected the iron-clad law of our domestic life. I asked her to accompany me to every public event, and she willingly agreed. She observed everything and everyone, and when we came home she dismantled piece by piece the vanity of famous men, the traits of the women who had been a little too friendly with me—the sugary voices, the fake beauty, the pretentious chatter—ably ridiculing one and all to entertain me.

  The only place I tried to put in my two cents was the children’s education. It rankled me that she imposed such an ascetic life on the kids: no superfluous spending, hardly any television, little music, rare outings at night, a great deal of studying. When Sandro and Anna, now for one reason, now for another, asked me wordlessly to use my authority to their advantage, I felt burdened by their glances. And since I believed I’d returned home because I loved them, in the beginning I said to myself: Be a father, you need to intervene here, you can do no less. And in fact I intervened, especially when they’d commit some infraction and she’d require them to discuss it at length, calmly, though imprisoning them inside her relentless logic. I wasn’t able to hold back; in those instances, though carefully, cautiously mediating, I said my piece. Vanda was silent, she let me talk, the kids perked up, Anna threw me looks of gratitude. But then? Then a few seconds passed and their mother behaved as if she hadn’t heard me, or as if I’d uttered nonsense that wasn’t worth refuting, or even as if I didn’t exist. She’d go on pressing them with even more overwrought arguments, asking: Express your opinion openly, do you agree or not?

  One time, however, she flared up, she said to me coldly:

  —Am I talking or are you?

  —You.

  —Then get out, please, and let me reason with my children.

  I obeyed, disappointing the kids. Hours of hostility followed and, last but not least, at night, an all-out fight.

  —I’m no good as a mother?

  —That’s not what I’m saying.

  —You want them to grow up like Lidia?

  —What does Lidia have to do with it now?

  —Isn’t she your ideal person?

  —Stop it.

  —If you want them to grow up like Lidia then you can get out, all three of you, I can’t take it anymore.

  I restrained myself. I didn’t want her to shout, cry, fall apart again. The pain was always there, it never subsided. I started to invent distractions whenever she tormented the children with infinite questions, demanding responses as logical as they were sincere. Sandro and Anna looked at me, by now dismayed. At the start they must have asked themselves: Who is this man? What does he think? Is he going to make up his mind whether or not to come to our aid yelling: Enough, leave them in peace? Now they no longer asked themselves this. Maybe they’d also realized that that was the equilibrium. An equilibrium I could have shattered only if, to the words that Vanda always had on the tip of her tongue (either you show me every minute that you’ve accepted me unconditionally or there’s the door, get out) I were ready to reply: Rant and rave as much as you want, kill yourself and your children. I can’t stand you anymore, I’m leaving. But I was never able to do it. I’d already done it once, in vain.

  So the years skipped along, methodically, and we became a comfortable, well-respected family. I earned a nice bit of money. With her ferocious eternal penny-pinching Vanda set aside enough of it and we bought this house steps from the Tiber. Sandro graduated from college, Anna too. They struggle to find work, they always lose it. They turn to us for money, their lives are a mess. Sandro has a child with every woman he loves. He has four of them, he sacrifices everything for the children, he thinks they’re all that counts. Anna has refused to bring children into the world, believing it’s one of the many uncivilized behaviors of the human race, primitive spoils. Neither of them submit their requests, at times absurd, to me; they know it’s their mother who holds the reins to everything. They have seen me roaming through the house like a harmless spirit, practically mute. And they aren’t wrong. My life was totally fulfilled without them. In the family I became a shadow man, silent even when Vanda celebrated with great joy my birthdays, when she invited my friends, my relatives. There were no more conflicts. In every situation, public or private, I either said nothing or nodded yes, absently amused; and she spoke to me with an ironic tone that was darkly allusive, superficially fond.

  Irony, yes, sarcasm at times. And always on the brink between caresses and lashings. If by chance I utter the wrong sentence or cast a look without thinking, here are the harsh words that mark me, and something inside me runs to hide. As for my qualities, my merits, let’s just say: Vanda has often led me, the children, the cleaning women, friends, guests, to believe that I am a good man, a good companion, that I was quite promising when I was young. But she has never been openly excited about my work, my successes, and if now and then she’s tepidly appreciated them she’s done it only to emphasize that they have allowed us to live well.

  One time, maybe fifteen years ago—it was summer, we were on vacation—we were walking along the seasho
re, and she addressed me, unexpectedly, not with the usual tone but serious:

  —I don’t remember anything about us anymore.

  I summoned the courage. I asked:

  —About us when?

  —Always: from the moment we met until today, until I’ll die.

  I avoided challenging her, nor did I joke about the meaninglessness of that temporal arc. Something glittering in the water saved me, it was a hundred-lire coin. I gathered it, I gave it to her to please her. She examined it closely, then she tossed it back into the sea.

  11.

  I have thought back often to those few words. At times they mean nothing to me, at times everything. Both she and I know the art of reticence. From the crisis of many years ago we have both learned that we need to hide a great deal from each other, and tell each other even less. It’s worked. What Vanda says or does is almost always a signal for what she hides. And my continual agreement conceals the fact that for decades there’s been nothing, absolutely nothing, that we share feelings about. In 1975, during one of our cruelly honest clashes, she yelled: This is why you had your wedding band sawed off, you want to get rid of me. And since I, almost without realizing, nodded yes—my physical being was by now out of control—Vanda slipped the ring off her finger and threw it away. The tiny circle of gold bounced against a wall, skidded off the stove, fell onto the floor racing, as if alive, under a piece of furniture. Five years later, when my return seemed final to her, the wedding band reappeared on her finger. It meant: I feel tied to you again, what about you? The mute question had the new imperative tone, it demanded an immediate reply, silent or blaring. I resisted for a few days, but I saw that she was turning the ring around her finger in an increasingly anxious way. The offer of fidelity served above all to verify my intentions. I went to a jeweler and I came back home with a gold ring around my finger; I’d had engraved, inside, the date of our reconciliation. Neither of us said anything. But in spite of the ring I had a lover almost immediately—three months after I came back home—and I’ve been stubbornly unfaithful up until a few years ago.