Ties

by Domenico Starnone

  I’m not sure of the reasons why I behaved this way. Certainly the sport of seduction, sexual curiosity, and the impression (unfounded) that each flirtation reawakened lost creativity all played a role. But I prefer a motivation that’s more elusive, and also more true: I wanted to prove to myself that in spite of having reformed the old couple, in spite of having returned to the family, in spite of putting a wedding band back on my finger, I was free, that I no longer had real ties.

  I always put myself to the test, however, with great prudence. There wasn’t a willing woman to whom I didn’t say at the opportune moment, I want you, yes, but if we want to have a long friendship we have to make a clear pact; I’m a married man, I’ve already made my wife and children suffer beyond the pale, I don’t want them to suffer again; therefore all we can indulge in is a little fun, for a brief period and with utmost discretion; if this feels right to you then let’s go ahead, and if not, then no. No one ever told me to get lost. Times had changed: They increasingly obliged single women, and married ones, to relish their pleasures with confidence, as men did. Girls felt old-fashioned if they complained too much, and women with husbands and children considered adultery a venial sin or, more simply, a masculine trick to subdue them. They unleashed their desires, as a result, without expecting love of any kind, and therefore they listened to me, amused, as if my premise were an exciting little tale. Here we are, then, having a fling. In the rarest of circumstances I thought I’d lost my head, and I feared that it was about to start all over again. It happened mainly when it was my lover who said, enough. In those cases the wound left by Lidia opened up again, and for a few weeks, a few months, I felt like I would die.

  But it didn’t happen, and it was the very ghost of Lidia that saved me from further devastation. I didn’t waste my time over any other woman because I was still tied to her. I never forgot Lidia, thinking of her still upsets me. Which is why there has never been a year in which I haven’t figured out a way to meet her. I’ve assiduously followed developments in her life. She still teaches at the university, but she’s close to retiring. She writes for newspapers, she’s an admired economist, all the more so in these times of unemployment and hardship. She got married thirty years ago to a fairly well-known writer, the kind who enjoys a certain renown all his life and then, as soon as he dies, is never read again. It’s a successful marriage. She has three sons, all of them grown men by now, who all work abroad in well-paid, prominent positions. I’m happy for her, it’s wonderful that she’s had a happy life. At first she didn’t want to see me. I’d wait for her under the foyer to her building, spying her from afar, seduced by her clothes, their carefully-combined colors, her elegant gait; but over the years she’s yielded. Meeting up has become one of our habits, almost a yearly ritual which continues to thrill me. They were and remain innocent meetings. When we see each other, she talks a lot about herself. I listen to her, attentive. Her life has become progressively fuller than mine, and now that satisfactions tend to diminish for her as well, she goes on at length, tenderly, about the successes of her sons. The husband knows all about us. I think she even tells him about my complaints as a crotchety old man, and the troubles that Sandro and Anna gave me, and give me still. Vanda, meanwhile, has no idea that I have never lost contact with the woman for whom, once, long ago, I left her. I don’t want to think about what would happen were she to know about it; Lidia’s name alone has been unutterable for four decades. I’m sure she could withstand the entire list of my lovers, but not the proof that I see Lidia, that I’m in touch with her, that I love her still.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1.

  I woke up with a start. I was still in the study, but lying on one side on top of Vanda’s letters. The electric light had stayed on, but through the shutters, through rosy slits, the day now arrived. I had slept amid the fury, supplications and tears of forty years ago.

  I pulled myself up. My back hurt, so did my neck and my right hand. I tried to stand up but I couldn’t. I had to get on all fours in order to lift myself up with a groan, clutching the bookcase. I felt a stab of anguish in my chest, it came from a dream that still dazed me. What had I dreamed? I was there, in the upside-down study. Lidia was stretched out on the floor amongst all the books, appearing as she had years ago. Looking at her, I felt even older, and I didn’t feel joy but discomfort. My whole house was departing from Rome. It moved slowly, barely wavering, like a boat on a canal. For a while that motion seemed completely normal to me, then I realized something was wrong. The apartment in its entirety was heading toward Venice, and nevertheless, beyond any logic, it was leaving a part of itself behind. I couldn’t understand how there were two studies, identical in every detail, including my presence and Lidia’s, but one remained immobile, isolated, and the other backed away along with the rest of the house. Then I realized, on second glance, that the girl traveling with me toward Venice wasn’t Lidia but the one from the solenoid. The revelation took my breath away.

  I looked at my watch. It was five twenty. My right leg also hurt. With some effort I pulled up the shutter, opened the glass door, and stepped onto the balcony to rouse myself definitively with fresh air. Birds were singing, insistently, and I saw cold rectangles of sky among the buildings. I said to myself: I have to get rid of those letters before Vanda wakes up. She would have despised the fact that the thieves had brought them back into the open, that they were there, on the floor, that I’d read them—read them, not reread them—as if I’d only received them that night. She probably didn’t even remember writing them. She would have gotten angry, and with good reason. It was unbearable that words born from an imbalance, from a vanished age and culture, had resurfaced out of the blue. Those sentences were her but not her, remnants of a voice she’d shed. I quickly returned the room. I gathered up the letters and tossed them into the trash.

  At that point I wondered what to do. Make myself a coffee? Wake myself up with a shower? Make sure right away that there were no other painful documents lying around? I reexamined the room, looking hard: the floor, the furniture, the garbage bags, the dismantled shelves, the ceiling. I paused at the cube from Prague, the cube containing my secrets. It was leaning precariously, it almost looked as if it might fall, it seemed necessary to push it back. But first I strained my ears to make sure Vanda was still sleeping. Since the singing of the birds was so loud that it canceled all other sounds, I opened one door after the next, making sure the handles squeaked as little as possible, and on tiptoe I went into the bedroom. I saw my wife in the half-light: She was a small elderly woman who slept with her mouth half-open, her breath calm. It occurred to me that she was dreaming, that she was feeling something. She must have set aside the logic with which she had defended herself her whole life from me, from the children, from the world, and now she’d surrendered to herself. But I knew nothing of that inner turmoil, I would never know it. I kissed her forehead. Her breath paused for an instant, then resumed.

  I closed, with equal attention, all the doors behind me, and I returned to the study. When I’d reached the top of the metal ladder, I opened the blue cube, pressing hard on one of its sides. It was empty.

  2.

  The cube from Prague had contained, for decades, twenty-odd Polaroids taken between 1976 and 1978. It was I who’d bought the camera. Back then I took pictures of Lidia, constantly. While the ordinary cameras meant that if you weren’t able to print the rolls of film on your own, you had take them to a photographer, thereby subjecting your private life to the eyes of a stranger, with that device you shot and printed right away. Lidia came up beside me just in time to assist with the miracle, when the reproduction of her thin body was already emerging from the thick fog of a little rectangle of paper expelled by the camera. I accumulated several Polaroids in those years. When I returned to Vanda I brought back those in which, photographing Lidia, I thought I was photographing my delight in being alive. In most of the images she was nude.

  I rem
ained on top of the ladder, stunned. For some reason that I struggled to clarify to myself, I thought of Labes again, after not having thought about him all night. He’d gone to his girlfriend’s place, the young carabiniere had said, laughing. Everyone laughs about sex, even though we all know that it can sow discord, make us unhappy, generate violence, drive us to desperation and death. Who knows how many friends and acquaintances had smiled or laughed, when I’d left home. They’d been amused (Aldo’s out enjoying himself, hahaha) just like Nadar, the carabiniere and I, at the thought of Labes’s erotic wanderings. But I’d come back, Labes no, not yet. No mewing, just the birdsong. I thought of Vanda. She’d looked at me, annoyed, not laughing at the carabiniere’s remark. In her mind Labes had been sequestered, and sooner or later the thieves would be asking for a ransom. But none of the men had taken the old lady’s notion seriously, the carabiniere above all: Gypsies don’t steal cats to get money in exchange. Certainly—I said to myself at the top of the ladder—not gypsies. And I realized why I had suddenly remembered Labes. The photos and the cat had eros and disappearance in common. The thieves weren’t Roma kids and they weren’t searching for some little trinket. They ransacked homes to locate the weak points of their inhabitants, and then they got in touch, asking for money.

  I thought back to how the solenoid girl was paying attention to the cat—how her vivid gaze ran back and forth across books, knickknacks, the blue cube. She’d had her eyes on this last item straightaway, even though it was up high and in an inconspicuous spot. Nice color, she’d said. What a trained eye. I felt the anger rising to my head and I tried to calm down. At my age it’s easy to turn a suspicion into a valid hypothesis, a valid hypothesis into an absolute certainty, an absolute certainty into an obsession. I stepped down carefully, rung by rung. That hypothesis risked leading me astray. I had to verify, first of all, that nothing more obvious had happened, more immediately risky. The thieves—I drove away the girl with an act of sheer will, I went back to that generic noun—had found the cube. They had been able to open it, but maybe at most they’d laughed a bit and then tossed the pictures among the thousands of other things that had spilled down from the shelves and the loft. It was the most likely thing. In that case, however—I said to myself—I have to go back and check everything right away, here and in the other rooms. Vanda mustn’t find the Polaroids, it would be a disgrace. What would the acquiescence of all those years have amounted to, all that discretion, our ongoing repression, if now, in the end, in old age, when we are particularly fragile, when we need to help each other, we end up butchering each other instead? I made myself reexamine every corner carefully and I began to rummage through what was piled up against the bookcase, hoping the pictures had been under my nose all night without my realizing.

  But the more I rummaged, the more I grew distracted. I thought of Lidia, about our happy time together. Had I found the photos, I would have tossed them out in the trash as I’d done with the letters. And yet I couldn’t bear the thought that they would disappear forever, that I couldn’t, now and again, when I was alone at home, look at them, rejoice, console myself, grow melancholy, feel that at least for a brief segment of my life I’d been happy. The joy of those days, its soft breath without any poisonous aftertaste, already seemed to me, at times, a senile fantasy, the hallucination of a brain lacking oxygen. What would have happened next? I rummaged with an incongruous combination of frenzy and apathy. I convinced myself that the photos were neither in the study nor in the living room. Well then? In a little while Vanda would be up and about again, and with an efficiency surpassing mine she would have busied herself, tidying up. Her gaze didn’t cloud over losing itself in daydreams, she was always alert. The Polaroids could have ended up in the bedroom, in the rooms that had once been Sandro’s and Anna’s. If she were to find them, not only would she discover that Lidia had never been forgotten, had endured for decades in an intangible youth, whereas she had inevitably aged before my eyes, at my fingertips. It would also be the case that, in an attempt to placate her, I would have to destroy the photos in her presence, burning them over the stove without even a last look.

  I opened the door once more without a squeak. I went into Anna’s room. There too, what a disaster. I started to search though hundreds of postcards, newspaper clippings, pictures of actors and singers, brightly-colored drawings, pens that no longer wrote, rulers, T squares, everything. Then I heard the bedroom door opening, Vanda’s footsteps. Pale, her eyes puffy, she appeared in the doorway.

  —Did you find Labes?

  —No, I would have woken you up right away.

  —Did you sleep?

  —Only a little.

  3.

  We had breakfast, saying hardly a word to one another, as usual. I only tried, at a certain point, to send her back to bed, but she refused. When she locked herself in the bathroom I sighed in relief and started hurriedly to look through Sandro’s old room. But there wasn’t enough time, Vanda reappeared twenty minutes later with her hair still wet, her face marked by her foul mood, yet nevertheless ready to reorganize her house from top to bottom.

  —What are you looking for? she asked, perplexed.

  —Nothing, I’m setting things right.

  —It doesn’t look like it.

  I felt in the way. She had never trusted me to help, she was always convinced that she could do it better and more quickly on her own. Offended, I replied:

  —Did you see how I straightened up in the living room and the study?

  She went to see. She looked dissatisfied.

  —Are you sure you haven’t thrown out things we need?

  —I only got rid of what was ruined.

  She shook her head, unconvinced, and I feared she wanted to start rummaging through the garbage bags.

  —Trust me, I said.

  She grumbled:

  The bags are in the way, take them down to the dumpsters.

  I panicked. I didn’t want to leave her in the house alone. I hoped to keep up with her and, if the photos were somewhere, get to them before she did.

  —Maybe it’s better if you help me—I said—there are a lot of them.

  —Make multiple trips. Someone needs to stay here.

  —Why?

  —They might call.

  She continued to believe that the thieves would turn up and that they would give Labes back to us. Her conviction got to me. I went back to suspecting the solenoid girl. She would have been the one to call. Or maybe not, maybe her likely accomplice would have called, the man with the fake leather jackets. I said:

  —They’ll want to talk to me.

  —I don’t think so.

  —Usually one talks to the man.

  —That’s nonsense.

  —Are you really willing to pay for the cat?

  —You want them to kill him?

  —No.

  I heard the voices of the girl and the man in my head, the chuckers, the guffaws. For the cat—they would have said—we want this price, and for the photos another. If not? If not we show the photos to your wife. Of course, I could have responded: That girl is my wife when she was young, but they would have started no doubt to laugh, they would have replied: No problem, then, we’ll return them to your wife along with the cat. Like that, all of it predictable. I tried to take my time, I sighed:

  —There’s so much violence these days.

  —There always has been.

  —But it never entered the house.

  —You think so?

  I didn’t reply. She said, abruptly,

  —Well, are you going?

  I bent down to pick up a piece of glass I’d overlooked.

  —Maybe it’s easier to clean the whole house first, and then take down the garbage.

  —I need space, go.

  I put all the bags in the elevator, and in the end there was no room for me. I descended on foot t
o the ground floor, I pressed the elevator button, the car came down. I dragged the bags to the dumpsters. They were huge and inflated, they didn’t fit in the bin for paper, nor in the one for glass or for plastic, nowhere. I would have to start sorting though the stuff piece by piece. I let it go. I abandoned the bags on the pavement, neatly arranged, however, hoping Nadar didn’t see me through his window.

  It was already hot, I dried off the sweat. The hypothetical gaze of Nadar made me think of other gazes. Why was I convinced that the thieves would get in touch by phone? They could already be out there somewhere, watching me. The young man of color leaning against one of the few cars, the only human being on the still, empty street, couldn’t he be one of them? I went back to the door of the building, surveying the boy out of the corner of my eye. My heart was racing, my whole body felt bloated, my neck hurt. For the first time I wished that Sandro or Anna would show up suddenly, that they would give me a hand, that they would pull me, above all, out of my congealing old blood, teasing me affectionately as they usually did: You exaggerate, you see dangers and conspiracies everywhere, you don’t know how to live in the real world, you keep writing those films for TV in your head that you stopped writing ten years ago.

  I went back into the house, anxious; a glance would be enough to know if, in the meantime, Vanda had found the pictures. I quickly prepared a few conciliatory words to use if need be: I know nothing about them, who knows where they came from, give them to me and I’ll throw them out as well. I also thought about insisting on the need for order: The house, reduced to that state, seemed an incentive to stir things up even more. Vanda also seemed to think the same thing, given that she woke up so early to start working. But when I appeared in the living room it didn’t look like she’d done much. I surprised my wife, who was rummaging in a corner as if she’d lost something. The moment she heard me she stood up, setting her lips straight, smoothing her flimsy dress with her hands.