Thirty-six years later, she got to her feet, breathing softly. Now, after her daughter’s funeral, with the circle closed (not entirely, she thought with anger, with contrition), she walked slowly toward the window. She peeked into the narrow dotted openings in the heavy, half-shut wooden roller blinds. The garden with its flowers. To the left, beyond the small vegetable garden, the space in front of the kitchen where the veranda had been built.
A few weeks before giving birth she felt as heavy as an astronaut, exhausted like a sack that had been kicked repeatedly. She couldn’t sleep except for brief stretches that made her reopen her eyes more agitated than before. Her back hurt, from her nipples issued a yellowish liquid of whose normality even the inane illustrated textbooks she consulted reassured her. It was six in the evening in early spring. Clara would soon be born. Color: white. Dominant planet: the moon. She’d read that too. Ruggero was over at the house of a friend from school. She was alone in the kitchen, making a cup of chamomile tea. Vittorio was in Spain. Salvemini Construction had won a contract to widen a stretch of the highway between Cadiz and Seville. He’d be back before the weekend. Annamaria removed the chamomile teabag from the cup. She twisted the string around it and tossed it into the trash. Lately, she’d come to be ashamed of the thoughts she’d had about her little girl. All the more so because in the past few weeks Clara had been as good as gold in her belly. She kicked very little, if at all. During the last sonogram, she’d remained so still that for a moment the gynecologist had furrowed her brow in an odd manner.
She took the steaming mug in her hands. She went to set it down on the little table on the veranda. She went back into the kitchen, got the melba toast and a jar of jam. She went back out onto the veranda and practically collapsed onto the wooden chaise longue. She felt exhausted. She gnawed on a couple slices of melba toast. She stretched her legs out in front of her. Through the french doors came the wind of the summer to be. On this side of the house, the garden was turning wild. The light of sunset made the myrtle and the tall grass quiver, transforming the tangles of the bay laurel branches into a vortex of light and shadow that came toward her as her eyelids grew heavy. Annamaria reopened her eyes. It was already evening. She saw the darkness between the branches. How long have I slept? She noticed that her hand was itching. The weightless brownish body took to the air. Annamaria looked around her in fright. She started to get up, felt the weight of her big belly. Butterflies. The veranda was full of them. A whirling of furry-winged moths, large insects with brush-like antennae, coats like clouds of dust fluttered from wall to wall, stopped on the little table, or else grazed in groups in the jam, while other animals, like long winged ants, continued to come in through the french doors. Annamaria felt the nausea of the first few weeks come back. She thought that her body was, in that way, translating something that was otherwise unnamable. Before emerging from her drowsiness, and realizing that nothing at all was happening, she once again feared that this was all the little girl’s handiwork.
How horrible, she thought in amazement, continuing to observe the butterflies all around her.
Then she recovered. She got up from the chaise longue, and went into the bathroom in search of an insecticide.
From the window she watched Gioia walking in the garden with her boyfriend until they disappeared behind the porcelain-berry hedges. She sat motionless in front of the half-closed shutter. It was a terrible thing that Clara had killed herself. Terrible. At sixty-six, Annamaria had a harder, more elementary vision of things. All she could do was think about it. And yet she knew that was pointless. She could barely touch the reasons that could have pushed her first daughter to do such a thing. A wall that was impossible to climb, after all she and Clara had misunderstood each other over the years. Voices that didn’t call, doors that didn’t open. But it had been the ground underneath their feet that had grown soft. The Porto Allegro deal. This time, Vittorio might not come out on top. It wasn’t so much his age. Her husband was still a strong man. The effects were like those of a massive low-pressure system: it seemed to Annamaria more as if their slice of the world had entered into some cone of shadow inside which the old laws simply no longer applied.
As a newborn, did Clara really exert a malevolent influence?
How absurd! Only the stupid thirty-year-old she had been, the woman terrorized by the idea that her husband might leave her, could have believed it, not the woman she was now.
Had it been painful then?
It had been ravaging, humiliating, terrifying. The birth of the baby girl had forced her on bed rest for two months. A childlike state that Vittorio and Micaela had feasted on unreservedly. Because now she even knew that slut’s name, she thought to herself with undiminished hatred as she gazed down into the garden. Gioia and her boyfriend were turning their attention toward the front drive. Annamaria watched as the taxi drove off. It had to happen, she mused. The blameless fruit of stupidity and human frailty was coming once again to scuff the soles of his shoes on the doormat of her home. She knew the name, she recalled, and also the age of her hatred’s target, she knew that she worked in a boutique on Via Calefati. She had no trouble guessing that Vittorio had met her on account of the renewal of the lease (she could have pinpointed the exact day on which her husband, due to Engineer Ranieri’s being indisposed, had been obliged to take care of the matter in person), and this was because the building on the ground floor of which the boutique was located—“Satú” was the name on the sign out front, whatever that idiotic name was supposed to mean—belonged to him, to Vittorio. That is, to them, which only shook the salt of insult onto the injury.
Annamaria had been forced into the humiliating position of gathering information from her girlfriends. Phone calls from whose heights she had formerly exercised queenly benevolence suddenly became mortifying exhibitions. “Are you sure you really want to know?” Investigative, pleading phone calls. “All right, then I’ll tell you.” Annamaria understood that, with every detail extorted, the informant of the day would consider public what had until that moment reeked of gossip. In this way, she undermined herself socially at the very moment in which she extracted from the voice on the phone something that gave her at first relief and, seconds later, redoubled agony.
But once she hung up, she felt as if she were being surrounded by the warm exhalations of her enemy, and this was a good thing. To know that Micaela was younger than her (twenty-four years to her thirty as a mother of two), to know she was pretty (at her own request, Annamaria had been provided with the truth), to know she was capable and well dressed, to see not only the way in which she was manipulating Vittorio but also the fact that he glimpsed in this young woman a determination, perhaps even a value that his wife did not possess, turned her into the perfect enemy. Oh, not the kind of enemy that men have, one they might fight to the last blood, reassured by an idea of circumstance. Annamaria knew that Micaela had been promised to her long before she ever laid eyes on Vittorio, long before even Annamaria, and therefore Micaela herself, had been born.
On certain days, the hatred reached such heights of intensity that Vittorio himself became a detail. Those were the only moments in which, strangely, Annamaria had the feeling that she was entering into contact with the little girl. As if Clara lived in a dimension that Annamaria could reach only at the price of excruciating pain.
The little girl, she remembered, saddened, moved as she stepped away from the window and returned to the dim half-light of the bedroom. This is the moment, as she calculated Michele’s route from the driveway to the front door. Now I’ll turn away and he’ll ring the doorbell. Product of chance. Blameless bequest of idiocy.
The baby girl, newborn, cried. As good as she had been right up until birth, now she wouldn’t give her a moment of peace. Ten days after her return home from the hospital, Annamaria found herself in an absolutely unexpected situation. She felt tired, benumbed. Her bones ached. Because the tissues had slackened, she suffered f
rom urinary incontinence. And she was alone, abandoned in the villa’s enormous master bedroom, with only the housekeeper, and occasionally her mother, when she came to help her, for company. Vittorio would phone to tell her he’d be home late because of vaguely described business meetings. On Sundays, he’d vanish for the whole day.
If the situation had been different, Annamaria would have put her in her place. She’d have gone straight to see Micaela in her piece-of-shit store. She’d have confronted her, kicking phantoms that would, touched by the pointy tip of a Pollini shoe, usually have turned into poor, frightened girls. But she couldn’t. She was the one who was frightened now. Stuck in bed, incontinent, held hostage by a baby girl just a few weeks old. Micaela’s toned body—she worried as she looked at herself in the mirror—would have incinerated Annamaria just walking by her.
And then there was the night that she feared she was going insane.
She was watching Clara by herself. The week before she’d found a plane ticket in Vittorio’s trouser pocket. “The inauguration of the Tour Areva, the tallest skyscraper in France. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and everyone else who matters in the construction business in Europe will be in attendance,” he’d explained. Ruggero was sleeping downstairs. He’d started middle school by articulating with austere logic the system thanks to which he could escape his baby sister’s wails. Clara was crying tonight, too. Annamaria had tried to rock her. To hold her in her arms. To lay her in the cradle above which hung the bee mobile. The baby girl fell silent for two minutes. Then she’d start howling again. Annamaria picked her up from the crib, and went to sit down with her in front of the television at the foot of the bed. She turned it on. Clara was wailing. She was sobbing as if she’d been separated from someone fundamental or, better yet, as if she were awaiting some gigantic event set in the future that only she could perceive. Then Annamaria saw him. On the screen, just a glimpse, during the evening news. The coronation of Juan Carlos in the church of San Jerónimo el Real in Madrid. At the far end of the nave, the new king was shaking hands with foreign leaders. Giovanni Leone of Italy. German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Then came the pear-shaped face of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the president of France. Annamaria felt the pee run between her legs, watched it stain the sheets and drip onto the hardwood floor. Deep down she’d known it. But until then she’d been able to lock Vittorio’s lie away in a deep freeze. It wasn’t the fact of imagining him with Micaela per se, but rather the fact that they were together in Paris, whatever the evocative power that the name of this city continues to exert over certain women. Now the two of them were strolling through the Jardin du Luxembourg. Hand in hand before the Medici Fountain, riding over in a taxi to the boutiques on the Champs-Élysées. Imagining the two of them like that was worse than actually catching them between the sheets of her bed at home. Tears streamed down her face. They were in Paris and she was stuck here on account of the baby girl.
Annamaria hissed: “Shut up.” Clara did not obey. She was crying defiantly, irresponsibly. There was nothing in her that could be identified as loving kindness toward a mother who had just pissed herself in despair. At that point, Annamaria shot to her feet. The baby was surprised. Annamaria smiled. “Would you shut up, for fuck’s sake?” The little girl gave her an irritated glare and Annamaria hurled her onto the bed. Clara burst into tears. Annamaria picked her up with both hands. She lifted her in the air, straight in front of her. Then, with all the might she had in her arms, she hurled her down once more. The baby girl bounced on the mattress and landed on her back. She opened her eyes wide, as if she couldn’t catch her breath. She turned purple, then almost black. Then, thank heavens, she burst out crying. Annamaria, through her own tears, took her back into her arms, and started saying Forgive me Forgive me Forgive me, wondering why, in that grand villa where there was no lack of plenty, there wasn’t a bottle of sleeping pills so she could put an end to it all, the way they do in the movies.
And then it was even worse, she thought as she waited for the doorbell to ring, and the doorbell in fact did ring. Annamaria crossed the bedroom, walked out through the door, and headed for the stairs. It was worse, she was forced to remember.
The period of postpartum recovery came to an end. She got back in shape. The baby girl kept on crying, but Annamaria gradually regained control of the situation. Now she knew what was happening. Vittorio was getting ready to leave her for Micaela. He was on the verge of doing it. He wasn’t doing it now, but he’d do it eventually. His children were the one thing stopping him, the fake sense of guilt typical of southern Italians, which is a convenience disguised as a disadvantage. As a result, Vittorio was spending less and less time at home. Gone for two days, or a week. Fights broke out all the time. In the middle of one of these, one Saturday at lunch, in Ruggero’s presence, Vittorio unexpectedly burst into tears.
Standing at the head of table, his hair tousled and unkempt. A wealthy businessman behaving like a little boy.
“But you don’t understand,” he bawled, “I love her!”
Ruggero sat there petrified (it was the following week that his academic performance began its dizzying climb). Annamaria was disgusted. That girl had pushed Vittorio into the absurdity of a declaration that the legitimate Signora Salvemini would have rejected had it regarded her, because it would have meant that her husband had turned into an idiot. It meant that he had become a weakling, as mediocre as the rest of them.
More months passed. More still, and then: Micaela was pregnant. The final blow, the blow that had been expected. Clara was two years old. Annamaria figured it out from Vittorio’s irritability. Confirmation came from the usual rumors that came to her via her girlfriends who no longer found it amusing to fire at heights where it was by now impossible to think of her. It’s the end, Annamaria told herself coldly at the time. Vittorio was going to ask for a divorce. Annamaria would be forced into a legal battle she knew nothing about. At night, leaving Clara with a babysitter, she’d go out and spend time with new girlfriends she’d have been ashamed to be seen with just a couple of years earlier. Cheap pizzerias. Absurd Tupperware parties. Slim hopes. One chance out of a thousand. That’s what she saw in the coffee grounds that she found herself reading when Micaela’s pregnancy was in its eighth month.
And then, like a drumstick hitting the taut skin of a snare drum, it happened, she remembered as she walked downstairs, feeling rejuvenated at the thought of the miracle—that time is over, she thought, it happens only once in a lifetime, she told herself as she headed for the front door, ready to greet Michele, perhaps even to hug him, the guiltless idiot it was her lot to love like a son, she had to love him and love him she did, I love him, she thought.
That night Vittorio was at home. By now he only came to get a change of underwear. The phone rang before dinner. He answered. He stiffened. After a couple of minutes, he started talking again. Annamaria heard the tremor in his voice. She drew closer to look at him. Pale as a corpse. Vittorio ended the call. He grabbed his overcoat. He strode quickly toward the front entrance. He disappeared out the door. Annamaria felt a thrill of pleasure race through her, from head to toe. She didn’t dare to think of it, it was such a remote possibility. It was only out of superstitious dread that she refrained from praying on her knees in her bedroom when, three hours later, and then long after midnight, she still hadn’t heard a thing from him. What made her think that that’s what it could be? Against what ferocious desire would she have to battle to keep from undermining the loom of fate if this, ridiculously, was about to unfold per the plot of a bodice-ripper? In 1978, in Italy, one woman out of every ten thousand died in childbirth. Absurd! Magnificent! She needed to calm down. She smoked a cigarette. She turned on the radio in the living room. She turned it off. She tried leafing through a magazine. At a certain point—by this point it was three in the morning—she heard the sound of crying from the bedroom. She went to get Clara. She lifted her to her shoulder without even feeling the weight. She p
ut her on her shoulders, and she took her around the house, dancing. If the little girl went on crying, Annamaria didn’t notice.
At a quarter to six, she heard the key turn in the front door lock. The lights of dawn were illuminating the garden, spreading through the house in such a way that from the far end of the living room it was possible to see the other side. Annamaria lay Clara gently on the sofa. She stayed still, waiting. She saw Vittorio. Her husband was angled away from her as he entered the room, his back hunched as if protecting something. Then he turned toward her and she knew that the woman was dead. But what gave her confirmation was something that, stupidly, had never occurred to Annamaria. Wrapped in a towel, a newborn baby was in Vittorio’s arms. Then the doctor came in, too. Annamaria realized that something in the air had changed, as if the universe had chosen to emphasize the scene by changing the background noise. But the universe had nothing to do with it. It was Clara. Now she had finally stopped crying. Motionless on the sofa, she was staring at the newborn baby, wide-eyed.
So now I’m going to have to hug him, she thought, thirty-three years later, reaching her hand out to the door handle, not sparing herself the absurd consideration of how unjust it was that the half-brother should outlive his sister. She opened the door and saw him. It had been a couple of years since Michele had last come home. He looked a little beaten down, unshaven, black pants and a light-blue shirt, from which the tip of his sternum jutted. He was carrying something in his right hand, a pet carrier inside which Annamaria glimpsed the cat. Before Annamaria had time to do anything, Michele reached out his left hand. He shook her hand vigorously, as if they were work colleagues from at a conference in some exotic locale.
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