I had to eat, but the restaurants were too crowded; I hate being a woman alone in a restaurant on a Saturday. I decided to get something in the bar near the house. I arrived wearily, and looked in the glass case beneath the counter: swarm of flies. I got two potato croquettes, an orange, a beer. I ate without much enthusiasm, listening to a group of old men behind me chattering in a thick dialect. They were playing cards, raucously; coming in I had just glimpsed them out of the corner of my eye. I turned. At the card players’ table was Giovanni, the caretaker who had welcomed me on my arrival, and whom I hadn’t seen since.
He left his cards on the table, joined me at the counter. He made vague conversation, how was I, had I settled in, how was the apartment, chitchat. But the whole time he was smiling at me in a complicitous manner, even though there was no reason to smile like that; we had met once, for a few minutes, and I couldn’t understand what there was that we could be complicitous in. He kept his voice very low, and with every word advanced a few inches closer; twice he touched my arm with his fingertip, once he laid a hand covered with dark spots on my shoulder. When he asked if he could do anything for me he was practically whispering in my ear. I observed that his companions were staring at us silently, and I felt embarrassed. They were his age, around seventy, and, like an audience at the theatre, appeared to be watching, incredulous, an astonishing scene. When I finished eating, Giovanni nodded to the man behind the counter, in a way that meant it’s on me, and there was no way I could manage to pay. I thanked him and left in a hurry; only when I crossed the threshold and heard the loud laughter of the players did I realize that that man must have boasted of some intimacy with me, the stranger, and that he had tried to prove it by assuming for the onlookers attitudes of a lord and master.
I should have been angry, but I felt abruptly better. I thought of going back into the bar, sitting down beside Giovanni, and visibly rooting for him in the card game, like a blond bimbo in a gangster movie. What was he, in the end: a lean old man, with all his hair, only the skin spotted and deeply lined, the irises yellow and the pupils faintly veiled. I would have whispered in his ear, rubbed my breast against his arm, put my chin on his shoulder as I peered at his cards. He would have been grateful to me for the rest of his days.
Instead I went home and waited on the terrace for sleep to come, while the beam of the lighthouse struck.
9
I didn’t close my eyes all night. My back was inflamed and throbbing, and from all over town came loud music, car noises, cries of greeting and farewell, right up until dawn.
I lay on the bed but restlessly, with a growing sensation of flaking layers: Bianca and Marta, the difficulties in my work, Nina, Elena, Rosaria, my parents, Nina’s husband, the books I was reading, Gianni, my ex-husband. At dawn there was a sudden silence and I slept for several hours.
I woke at eleven, gathered up my things quickly, and got in the car. But it was Sunday, a very hot Sunday: I ran into a lot of traffic, had trouble parking, and ended up in a chaos greater than that of the day before, a stream of young people, old people, children, loaded down with gear, jamming the path through the pinewood and pressing forward to lay claim as soon as possible to a slice of sand and sea.
Gino, occupied by the continuous flow of bathers, paid little attention to me, only giving a nod of greeting. Once in my bathing suit, I lay down quickly in the shade, face up to hide the bruise on my back, and put on my dark glasses; my head ached.
The beach was packed. I looked around for Rosaria, and didn’t see her; the clan seemed to have dispersed, mingling with the crowd. Only by looking carefully could I pick out Nina and her husband walking along the shore.
She was wearing a blue two-piece suit, and again seemed to me very beautiful, moving with her usual natural elegance, even if at that moment she was speaking heatedly. He, without a T-shirt, was stockier than his sister Rosaria, pale, without even a touch of red from the sun; his movements were measured, on his hairy chest was a cross on a gold chain, and he had—a feature that seemed repellent—a large belly, divided into two bulging halves of flesh by a deep scar that ran from the top of his bathing suit to the arc of his ribs.
I marveled at the absence of Elena, it was the first time I hadn’t seen mother and daughter together. But then I realized that the child was near me, alone, sitting on the sand in the sun, her mother’s new hat on her head, playing with the doll. I noticed that her eye was still red; occasionally she licked the mucus that dripped from her nose with the tip of her tongue.
Whom did she look like? Now that I had seen her father, too, it seemed to me that I could distinguish in her the features of both parents. One looks at a child and immediately the game of resemblances begins, as one hurries to enclose that child within the known perimeter of the parents. In fact it’s just live matter, yet another random bit of flesh descended from long chains of organisms. Engineering—nature is engineering, so is culture, science is right behind, only chaos is not an engineer—and, along with it, the furious need to reproduce. I had wanted Bianca, one wants a child with an animal opacity reinforced by popular beliefs. She had arrived immediately, I was twenty-three, her father and I were right in the midst of a difficult struggle to keep jobs at the university. He made it, I didn’t. A woman’s body does a thousand different things, toils, runs, studies, fantasizes, invents, wearies, and meanwhile the breasts enlarge, the lips of the sex swell, the flesh throbs with a round life that is yours, your life, and yet pushes elsewhere, draws away from you although it inhabits your belly, joyful and weighty, felt as a greedy impulse and yet repellent, like an insect’s poison injected into a vein.
Your life wants to become another’s. Bianca was expelled, expelled herself, but—everyone around us believed it, and we, too, believed it—she couldn’t grow up alone, how sad, she needed a brother, a sister for company. So, right after her, I planned, yes, just as they say, planned, Marta to grow in my belly, too.
I was twenty-five and every other game was over for me. Their father was racing around the world, one opportunity after another. He didn’t even have time to look carefully at what had been copied from his body, at how the reproduction had turned out. He barely glanced at the two little girls, but he said, with real tenderness: they are identical to you. Gianni is a kind man, our daughters love him. He took little or no care of them, but when it was necessary he did everything he could, even now he is doing everything he can. Children generally like him. If he were here, he wouldn’t stay, like me, on the lounge chair but would go and play with Elena: he would feel it his duty to do so.
Me no. I watched the child, but, seeing her like that, alone and yet with all her ancestors compressed into her flesh, I felt something like repugnance, even though I didn’t know what repelled me. The little girl was playing with the doll. She spoke to it, but not as to a mangy-looking doll, with a half blond, half bald head. Who knows what character she imagined for her. Nani, she said, Nanuccia, Nanicchia, Nennella. It was an affectionate game. She kissed her hard on the face, so hard that the plastic almost seemed to inflate as her mouth exhaled her gassy, vibrant love, all the loving she was capable of. She kissed her on her bare breast, on her back, on her stomach, everywhere, with her mouth open as if to eat her.