BITTERNESS AND CLOUDS
“People do you good turns and you repay them with bitterness. Why?” He was reading the final tercet of the poem by Drummond de Andrade which he was in the process of analyzing, when that sentence, spoken one afternoon many years before, came back to mind. His first good suit, jacket and trousers, in brown gaberdine with a narrow yellow stripe, perfectly horrendous as he realized later, when he had learned how to dress, but at the time he thought it was close to perfect, or at least important looking — too good for the office but indispensable for a graduation. He had looked at his reflection in the window. It was a men’s clothing shop on the Viale Libia, handling moderately priced but well-cut garments, and the minute he had put this suit on he felt at ease in it; perhaps it made him look a bit arrogant, but that didn’t hurt. It’s no good showing yourself to other people as submissive, that’s the end. Bitterness. Call it, rather, the well-spring of his being, a way to avoid being eaten alive in this world of wolves. But he didn’t answer Cecilia’s question, there was no answer to give. She wouldn’t have understood and the wolves had already eaten her up, wolves in the sense of life — you had only to look at her. At thirty years of age she was an old woman. Hair parted in the middle, some white strands already, a depressing air of resignation and her eternal fatigue. What fault was it of his if a few years before he had been in love with her and now he wasn’t? Perhaps it had been not so much love as a common purpose, their marriage had been based on a common purpose and certainly he hadn’t reduced her to her present condition. And this was the reason for his embitterment, the condition into which she had fallen, an uncared-for face and a tired body. Which was an unconscious way of displaying the sacrifices she had made on his behalf; a lament, a reproach, a mediocre remonstrance which, in reality, perversely masked her deep frustration. But how was he to blame for the defeat of a woman doomed to defeat? He had done his best to back her up. The immediate post-war years had been hard for both of them. There they were, in the uglier outlying area of the big city, with their parents dead and no one to turn to, wanting to set up house together if for no other reason than to have company. What were they to do? Jobs in the post office seemed the solution, but although these provided food and a roof over their heads, the atmosphere was squalid. A wood-burning stove and mud puddles in front of the door in the winter, humidity and mosquitoes in the summer, and all the year around the dull faces of their fellow employees, the widow who wasn’t really a widow, the assistant supervisor who talked of nothing but soccer but never bought a ticket to a match. Finally he had said: “Cecilia, let’s move on to something better, let’s sign up at the university and aim at a career.” But she was always tired. And why, after all? Wasn’t he tired, too? They had the same working hours. And the amount of housework she did — making the bed and washing a few dishes — couldn’t be called tiring. If the place had been spick-and-span he might have understood her being tired. But the three disorderly rooms, with her bedroom slippers always sticking out from under the bed, didn’t seem appropriate to a young married couple; they were the preview of an old people’s home; he had never summoned up the courage to ask even his sister to drop in.
And then Gianna was born, but that wasn’t his fault either; she had wanted a child. “This isn’t the moment,” he had told her. “Let’s wait, and time it better. A child’s a burden, one that will swallow up what little free time we have.” But she cried at night; the longing for motherhood consumed her like a fire and it must have been the only warmth within her because the rest was desert. Finally the silly woman struck a bargain. She’d take total care of the child and he could enrol at the university, he could even leave his job and devote his whole time to his studies. Since she’d had a promotion, her salary would be enough for them to live on and, if he didn’t object, she’d do some moonlighting at home over the weekend; a private postal service was offering just such employment. He said all right, if that was what she wanted. He wasn’t the one to stifle her maternal instinct, but it was agreed that he didn’t have to change diapers. He’d spend weekends at the university library, where a friendly guard would let him in on Sundays. If she wanted a child, he wanted a university degree; they both had their priorities. The agreement was clear and he respected it. She did, too, silently and with no audible complaint, only her usual resignation. Job, housework, take-home assignments from the office, care of the child. The little girl was just like her mother, things happen that way; nature is implacable. The same apathy, the same resigned look, the same defeat written on her face. As she grew, on the rare Sundays when he didn’t go to the library, he tried to awaken her interest in something, to rouse her from her precocious torpor. “Do you want to take a walk with Papa, to go to the zoo?” And the voice of a humble, common-sense little woman answered: “I must keep Mama company, thank you, Papa. She asked me to lend her a hand with the housework.” And so there they were, at it, bolstering up his “privilege” of being a middle-aged student, toiling over his books late at night in order to keep up with the young classmates who appeared on Monday morning rested and casual, with neatly creased trousers and pullovers in the latest style, quite the young gentlemen. Of course he felt it in his heart to hate those young gentlemen. And this surge of feeling, tinged with bitterness and resentment, rose, again, from the depths of his being. His hatred of them was mute and inexpressible and only increased by the fact that they shared the same political stance. In their case there were rich fathers, a long liberal tradition, membership in the postwar Partito d’Azione. Their inherited political background was a luxury and their own left-wing views even more of one. For him, instead, they marked an achievement, a painful journey slowed by family considerations, respect for a church-going mother and father with too many children to support to be able to indulge in politics. His way of being a left-winger was based on firsthand acquaintance with want, the refusal to accept it, and, finally, revenge. This had nothing to do with their abstract, geometrical ideology. He had said as much, one day, to the most stupid among them, who voiced disapproval of his choice, for director of his thesis, of an unpopular and downtrodden professor known to harbour nostalgia for the days of the dictatorship. He had looked his fellow-student in the face and said, “It’s all very easy for you to be on the left, my boy. You’ve no idea of the difficulties of real life.” And the other had only stared at him with amazement.