I was so desolate in those years. I could no longer study, I played without joy, my body felt inanimate, without desires. When Marta began to howl in the other room it was almost a liberation. I got up, rudely cutting off Bianca’s game, but I felt innocent, it wasn’t I who was leaving my daughter, it was my second-born who was tearing me away from the first. I have to go to Marta, I’ll be right back, wait. She would begin crying.
It was in a moment of feeling generally inadequate that I decided to give Mina to Bianca; it seemed to me a fine gesture, a way of relieving her envy for her little sister. So I fished the old doll out of a cardboard box on top of the wardrobe and said to Bianca: see, her name is Mina, this was Mama’s doll when she was little, I’m giving her to you. I thought she would love her; I was sure she would devote herself to her as she had devoted herself to me in our games. Instead she put her aside, she didn’t like Mina. She preferred an ugly rag doll with stringy yellow yarn hair her father had brought as a present from somewhere or other. I was hurt.
One day Bianca happened to be playing on the balcony: it was a place she really liked. As soon as spring arrived I would leave her there; I didn’t have time to take her outside, but I wanted her to have air and sun, even if the noise of the traffic and a strong smell of exhaust rose from the street. I hadn’t been able to open a book for months; I was exhausted and angry; there was never enough money, I barely slept. I found Bianca sitting on Mina, as if she were a chair, and meanwhile playing with her doll. I told her to get up right away, she mustn’t ruin something that was dear to me from my childhood: she was really cruel and ungrateful. I called her ungrateful, and I yelled, I think I yelled that giving her the doll had been a mistake, she was my doll and I would take her back.
How many things are done and said to children behind the closed doors of houses. Bianca was already a cool character, she’s always been like that, swallowing up anxieties and feelings. She remained sitting on Mina; measuring her words, the way she still does when she declares her wishes, as if they were her last: no, it’s mine. Then I gave her a nasty shove: she was a child of three but at that moment she seemed older, stronger than me. I tore Mina away from her and finally her eyes showed fear. I discovered that she had taken off the doll’s clothes, even her little shoes and socks, and had scribbled all over her, from head to foot, with markers. It was a disfigurement that could be corrected but to me it seemed without remedy. Everything in those years seemed to me without remedy, I myself was without remedy. I hurled the doll over the railing of the balcony.
I saw her fly toward the asphalt and felt a cruel joy. She seemed to me, as she fell, an ugly creature. I stood leaning against the railing for I don’t know how long watching the cars that passed over her, mutilating her. Then I realized that Bianca, too, was watching, on her knees, with her forehead pressed against the bars of the railing. I picked her up, she let herself be held, yielding. I kissed her for a long time, I hugged her as if I wanted to take her back into my body. You hurt me, Mama, you’re hurting me. I left Elena’s doll on the sofa, lying on her back, belly up.
The storm had moved quickly to land, violently, with blinding lightning and thunder that sounded like cars exploding, full of dynamite. I ran to close the windows in the bedroom before everything got soaked, I turned on the bedside lamp. I lay on the bed, arranged the pillows against the headboard, and began to work with a will, filling pages with notes.
Reading, writing have always been my way of soothing myself.
12
A reddish light roused me from my work: it was no longer raining. I spent some time putting on makeup, dressing with care. I wanted to look like a respectable lady, perfectly proper. I went out.
The Sunday evening crowd was less dense and noisy than Saturday’s, the extraordinary weekend flood was diminishing. I walked along the sea a little, then headed toward a restaurant next to the market. I ran into Gino: he was dressed the way he always was at the beach, maybe he was just returning. He nodded respectfully in greeting, and wished to pass on, but I stopped and so he was compelled to stop as well.
I felt the need to hear the sound of my voice, to get it under control with the help of someone else’s voice. I asked him about the storm, what had happened on the beach. He said there had been a strong wind, a tempest of water and wind, many of the umbrellas had been overturned. People had run for shelter to the bath house, the bar, but the crush had been too great and most had given up, the beach emptied.
“Luckily you left early.”
“I like storms.”
“Your books and notebooks would get ruined.”
“Did your book get wet?”
“A little.”
“What are you studying?”
“Law.”
“How much longer do you have?”
“I’m behind, I’ve wasted time. Do you teach at the university?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“English literature.”
“I saw that you know a lot of languages.”
I laughed.
“I don’t know anything really well, I also wasted some time. I work twelve hours a day at the university and I’m everyone’s slave.”
We walked a little, I relaxed. I talked about this and that to put him at his ease, and meanwhile I saw myself from the outside: I dressed like a proper lady, he covered with sand, in shorts, T-shirt, flip-flops. I was amused, even rather pleased; if Bianca and Marta had seen me I would have been teased no end.
He was certainly their age: a male child, a slender nervous body to care for. The young male bodies that had attracted me as an adolescent were like that, tall, thin, very dark, like Marta’s boyfriends, not small, fair, a little stocky and plump, like Bianca’s young men, always a little older than she, with veins as blue as their eyes. But I loved them all, my daughters’ first boyfriends, I bestowed on them an exaggerated affection. I wanted to reward them, perhaps, because they had recognized the beauty, the good qualities of my daughters, and so had freed them from the anguish of being ugly, the certainty of having no power of seduction. Or I wanted to reward them because they had providentially saved me, too, from bad moods and conflicts and complaints and attempts to soothe my daughters: I’m ugly, I’m fat; but I, too, felt ugly and fat at your age; no, you weren’t ugly and fat, you were beautiful; you, too, are beautiful, you don’t even realize how people look at you; they’re not looking at us, they’re looking at you.
At whom were the looks of desire directed. When Bianca was fifteen and Marta thirteen, I was not yet forty. Their childs’ bodies softened almost together. For a while I continued to think that the gazes of men on the street were directed at me, as had happened for twenty-five years; it had become habitual to receive them, to endure them. Then I realized that they slid lewdly from me to rest on the girls; I was alarmed, and gratified. Finally I said to myself with ironic wistfulness: a stage is about to end.
Yet I began to pay more attention to myself, as if I wanted to keep the body I was accustomed to, put off its departure. When my daughters’ boyfriends came to the house, I tried to make myself more attractive to receive them. I barely saw them, when they entered, when they left, saying goodbye to me in embarrassment, and yet I was very careful about my appearance, my manners. Bianca took them into her room, Marta into hers, I was alone. I wanted my daughters to be loved, I couldn’t bear them not to be, I was terrified of their possible unhappiness; but the gusts of sensuality they exhaled were violent, voracious, and I felt that the force of attraction of their bodies was as if subtracted from mine. So I was content when they told me, laughing, that the boys had found me a young and good-looking mother. It seemed to me for a few minutes that our three organisms had reached a pleasant accord.