@ClaraSalvemini:
Everyone loves you when you’re six feet under.
4 retweets 2 favorites
@pablito82:
@ClaraSalvemini That depends how your corpse is being preserved.
@ClaraSalvemini:
@pablito82 Very well, I can assure you.
9 retweets 4 favorites
@themoralizer:
@pablito82 @ClaraSalvemini A picture as proof.
@ClaraSalvemini:
@themoralizer @pablito82 30#rt and I’ll enclose 3 pictures in a row.
But the loneliness, that’s something you can’t photograph.
She moved the iPhone away from the tip of her nose, set it down on the nightstand. She finished drinking her grapefruit juice. She set it down on the nightstand, too. She got out of bed. She went into the bathroom. She locked the door behind her. She peed. She pulled up her pajama bottoms. She looked in the mirror. She decided she looked pretty. She went back into her bedroom. She picked the iPhone back up from the nightstand. She counted the retweets. There were lots of them.
At that point, Gioia let herself fall onto the bed, overcome by a feeling that was the height of happiness and the height of sadness. She missed everyone. Her boyfriend from high school. Summer ten years ago. Certain cartoons broadcast by a local TV station. She missed her sister. She even missed the anger she used to feel when she’d see Clara and Michele talking intently, excluding the rest of the world from their conversations.
“Clara Clara . . . ” she whispered clutching her smartphone as if caressing its head, lovingly scolding it.
Then Clara would get home in the middle of the night and her husband would pretend not to notice her. Alberto would turn over in bed, close his eyes as soon as the rivulet of light extended under the door. He’d hear footsteps in the living room. Her high heels, then the muffled sound of bare feet. With an extreme imaginative effort (the faithful reconstruction of what happens when the pull tab stops sliding down the zipper), he could bring himself to hear the impalpable rustle of the dress detaching itself from her body and collapsing softly onto the hardwood floor.
She’d been with another man. It was obvious that she had. In her gestures, the memory of the encounter just recently consummated. Over the years, Alberto had learned to recognize the imprint. He’d learned to tame it, manage it. And even if it persisted the morning after, while they ate breakfast, Alberto was able to drive the invisible mark of the offense onto a territory of conjugal life where Clara became his again. Then they’d chat. They’d smile at each other. A test of strength in reverse. But no longer. It had become impossible for some time now.
If he could have seen her now, at three in the morning—her split lip, the bruises, the arms covered with scratches—all his self-control, his backbreaking strategies meant to give shape to something that would otherwise have caused too much pain, would have been upended. That was why he shut his eyes. Pretended she hadn’t come home. And for the exact same reason, at a certain point Clara burst into the bedroom.
The door slammed against the frame, he lurched in the bed, and that signaled a fire ready to devour everything.
She didn’t come in on tiptoes anymore. She didn’t slip silently under the covers, delivering the bomb that it would be his job later to defuse by himself. That piece of ordnance now exploded in the very act with which Clara threw open the door, and there was nothing that Alberto could do about it. She let the light abruptly invade the bedroom. She crossed the room half naked, heading straight for the bathroom. She slipped into the shower and turned on the spray of hot water with a resolute slap of the hand. Ferocious, satisfied. At that point he had no choice but to open those fucking eyes of his. It was no longer credible for him to be asleep. Knowing that she was at the center of his attention, that they were separated only by an insignificant partition, Clara let the water slide over her scratches and bruises.
At this point, Alberto could only take refuge in the rhetoric of a before and an after. What else remained to him, with which to defend the idea of their marriage? He could hypothesize that Clara was no longer herself, that she’d lost her mind or that the cocaine had transformed her. Otherwise how could he explain the fact that he could hear her laughing? Under the shower, Clara was sobbing. Reduced to that state, she made a joke of the situation.
In the first few years, her betrayals had been the carcasses dropped lovingly on the doormat to ensure that Alberto accepted her, and therefore kept her clutched tight to him. So then they could go to dinner. They could leave together on holiday. They could make love. Conjugal life could recover its stability and, in spite of everything, those were genuine gestures of affection that they managed to exchange, the attention paid, the attempt to protect each other, even a certain kind of complicity, these were all real.
There was no hypocrisy in the hard, scrupulous work through which Alberto prevented himself from detesting her, or even from loving her less. He welcomed her back into his arms thanks to a gesture that—measured in terms of patience, obstinacy—was more expansive than her yanking away. But this state of mind could prove in certain cases to be worse than hypocrisy. Once the shell of everyday life was shattered, when Clara happened to collapse into the epicenter of his life, it no longer worked. There was a time when women tolerated their husbands’ flings as a way of preserving domestic peace. The despotism of their men was so crude and idiotic that it never struck them in full. But with a man who put up with betrayals as Alberto did, there could be an even greater oppression: in the apparent reversal of roles, an attempt to abuse power that aspired to the absolute. The political correctness of degradation. The presentable face of violence. That is what Clara saw when she found herself defending not just daily life, but everything precious that came with it.
And so, now, naked and sobbing in the shower, so very vulgar as she laughed, wounded and overexposed, she was destroying in an irretrievable manner all attempts to hold her in check. There was no magnanimity that could re-stitch a tear of that severity.
The water stopped running. Clara ran her hands through her hair. Without even realizing it, she saw herself as a teenage girl again. A physical crossing. Michele. The happy days of their lives together. Her legs trembled. Then the sensation vanished. Once again, the porcelain tiles of the shower. She needed to let herself be fucked that way. She needed to let herself be beaten and kicked. Certainly not to wound her husband. And now that Alberto could no longer hide her beneath blankets of reasonableness, he was forced to contemplate the panorama in its entirety. At that point, he, too, thought he could see in the depths of Clara an opaque and inerasable sign. She had been happy. During a long-ago period of life, a time that Alberto would have been unable to reproduce even in a scale model, his wife had been happy to be in the world in a scandalously pure, disarming fashion. And the worst thing, Alberto mused with growing concern, was the possibility that the recipient of his wife’s innermost thoughts—the object of a chant, of a prayer—this unforeseen entity that he recognized pointblank as the real enemy, might detach from Clara like an idea taking form and odiously, unexpectedly—he thought again as he girded himself for battle—materialize one day in their home.
Motionless in his chair, struck by the late afternoon light that was pushing the rest of the house toward a past swollen with shades of warmth and neglect, he listened to him talk.
The young man was waving his arms back and forth, like an amateur conductor who can’t seem to bring the performance to the proper point of equilibrium.
Was it true that he’d gone to lodge his objections with Renato Costantini over certain articles in which they’d attacked them?
No.
Her lovers.
No.
But he’d actually met the bank director. Her friend’s father. Another guy Clara was seeing regularly.
No, Michele, no. You’re still way off track.
The young man wouldn’t give up. He masked his safecracker’s intentions under the guise of a courtesy call. On the adjoining table gleamed a vase overflowing with wood anemones. Laid out in plain view, the latest issue of a women’s magazine. The porcelain ballerina that Clara had sent away for from London enjoyed pride of place on the crescent-shaped console table. On another piece of furniture—a small desk with gilded edges—sat her purse, and the little perfume samples that she collected with all the tenacity of someone trying to elude melancholy, conscious of the fragility of that effort. Every object simmered on the low flame of a time out of order. One had the impression that Clara was bound to come back any minute from a shopping trip, smiling and loaded down with bags, as if her death had been the blow capable of thrusting reality inside itself, shoving it back into the dimension where it should have resided from the very start. An alternative past, which just needed time enough to catch up with them.
But now Michele had come along to upset this process of adjustment. He was making insinuations. He was bringing up his wife’s habits in an unpleasant way.
“Over the past several days I’ve met a series of people,” he’d said after the usual exchange of courtesies, “at a certain point I found myself pretty confused. So I thought I should come talk to you about it.”
He pretended he didn’t have things straight in his head. But he actually wanted to extort information from him. Details that, just by passing from one hand to another, would wind up rewriting the whole story.
“I’m glad you came to see me,” Alberto had replied at that point. He’d pushed his elbow into the cushion, barely twisting his wrist, as if Michele were some tremulous apparition and he were gripping a handle thanks to which the reception might improve or perhaps even vanish entirely.
Michele had called him the day before, he’d texted him more than once. Alberto had ignored his texts. So, right after lunch, he’d found the young man downstairs.
He was returning from the minimarket where he’d developed the habit of going twice a week, always at the same hour. First he’d passed by the newsstand. Mourning had kept him away from work, and soon it was going to be August. In the fall, he could not go back to work on the construction sites at all, or just do the bare minimum, he thought to himself. Everything in its place. Two packs of beer, three bottles per pack. Chicken breasts. Salad. Fresh milk. Normal actions. Very regular habits. Building a fortress inside which he could wall himself up, together with her.
Turning the corner, he’d recognized him from a distance. Michele had smiled. Alberto had half-closed his eyes, as if to crush the eggs that the apparition seemed to think it had laid inside him simply by showing itself there, in the hot flush of summer.
Alberto had said hello to him. He’d invited him to come up. Michele had offered to help him carry the groceries.
“Make yourself comfortable,” Alberto had said five minutes later, noticing with satisfaction the way that Michele’s expression had changed. A body that betrays the different density of the environment it’s entering, wrong-footed by the atmosphere of expectation more than of contrition. A place where his sister’s absence was merely temporary.
“A beer?”
“Thanks.”
Alberto had gone into the kitchen. He’d exchanged the bottles in the fridge for the ones just purchased at the supermarket. Calmly, very calmly, to ensure that his guest was left even more at the mercies of the objects that surrounded him. The matrimonial nest. His and Clara’s home. He’d come back in balancing a tray with beers and a bowl of popcorn.
He’d sat down across from him and voilà, now they were talking.
“There’d been a certain distance between my sister and me for a while now,” said the young man. “No one talks about her at home. It’s strange. Before heading back to Rome I wanted to get a better idea. Even though certain things can be explained, up to a point.”
“You didn’t come to the funeral.”
Hard, fast. First blow.
“What?”
“You didn’t come to the funeral. That’s why they don’t talk to you about her.”
Alberto lifted the bottle so that it became the board to which he could nail him with his gaze. He took a sip. He hadn’t failed to see the young man’s strategy, the way he foregrounded a truth to conceal the nuances that this very same statement would have acquired if glimpsed from another angle.
But Michele didn’t take the bait.
“I don’t think that’s the reason,” he said. “It’s that they’re actually having a hard time processing what’s happened. Like I was saying, in the past few weeks I’ve chanced to talk to some people. From what I’ve been able to gather, lately my sister was having a ton of problems.”
“You didn’t come to the wedding, either.”
This time it was Michele who took a sip: “You know,” he replied, “back then I was spending most of my time in psychiatric clinics.”
Alberto started in surprise. The way the young man crossed his legs allowed a design to emerge—as lasting as a circle drawn in the water—that belonged to her. The smile with which Clara had lately absolved herself for something that became less serious than the wound that she’d opened with her gaze. A different Clara than the girl evoked by the tidiness of the apartment. A creature who wasn’t coming back from shopping but from the grave, to lay waste that other woman.
“Of course my wife was having problems, otherwise she wouldn’t have killed herself.”
Alberto adjusted his aim, repossessing himself of the memory. Motionless in the armchair, he breathed with perfect mastery the hot air that stagnated between the walls. He continued to exert leverage on the apartment, the place that Clara had shared with him, not with her half-brother, so that the interference would vanish just as it had appeared, and that in fact was what happened. “She was having problems,” he repeated, shaking his head, wallowing in the mud of a sorrow that he had cultivated with such dedication that it had made him unapproachable to anyone else, “none of us was able to grasp how serious those problems were. None of us who were close to her, I mean,” and he looked up coldly.
“The cocaine,” said Michele.
“Certainly, the cocaine,” Alberto sensed that the young man had brought up the coke thing to brush against something else, so he said it first, taking possession of it, too, “and also the fact that for a while now she’d been seeing other people,” he kept his voice firm, “but this was the effect, not the cause. Clara was going through a complicated time. Your sister was a very sensitive girl. She couldn’t tolerate hypocrisy. She didn’t protect herself.”
“Exactly,” said Michele. “Isn’t it possible that one of the people she was seeing caused her some problems? Maybe she’d argued with someone.”
For the second time, Alberto raised his hand in the young man’s direction. He slowly clenched his fingers, as if to crush him. You aren’t the one who married her. You don’t know of what the flavor of her lips is made, you never saw her cry like that on the terrace of the Sheraton. You may be a son of the same father, and you may have spent your childhood in the house where she too grew up, but what fell to me was the incomparable part. You had to have placed the ring on her finger. You had to have waited for her, awake in the night with your heart in your throat, afraid of an accident, and then hoping for some trivial mishap because now the fear was that she was in the company of another man. You had to have found the strength to put your arms around her shoulders all the same the next day, leaving everything tacitly understood, taking up a position from which not even she would have been able to unseat you.
“That wasn’t it,” Alberto replied. “She hadn’t had any disagreements with anyone. If she’d had troubles of that sort, I’d have been aware of it. As I was saying, she was going through a hard time. She was depressed. I tried to stay close to her. We talked about it constantly. There were no secrets between us.”
“Listen, Alberto, try not to misunderstand me. The last thing I’d want to do is be unpleasant. Going to talk with the men that Clara saw. Actually doing business with them. I really don’t understand how that was a way to help my sister.”
“Then you should have gotten to know her a little better.” Alberto kept his composure. At a certain point you’ll get tired, he thought as he looked at him. You’ll get up out that chair. You’ll disappear out the front door. Disintegrated by your idiocy. Your curiosities shattered by the power of selfless love. You’d have to have had her at the altar, half drunk. You’d have to have dragged her into the hospital after she’d taken all those sleeping pills, not even a year after she’d decided to marry you. To know what one feels. Sitting, head sagging, in the waiting room outside the ER. Butting your head against the obstinate barrier of vanity, of pride. And this, of course, was only the beginning. To find out about her affair with the owner of the gym. A man whose hand you’d shaken many times. Swallow your pride. Lower your head. Keep your anger from gaining the upper hand.
There’d been the period with the bank director. Then Renato Costantini. Undersecretary Buffante. How had he been able to put up with it? There was another wrong question. He shouldn’t wonder why he hadn’t divorced her. Rather: Why hadn’t he ever even conceived of the idea that he could do such a thing? What was he looking for? Or perhaps, what had he already found that was so fundamental that it allowed him to take that sort of humiliation as a necessary evil?
And then one night—Alberto remembered, watching the young man’s reaction; Michele was moving his arm from left to right, all in slow motion—everything become clearer.
Ferocity Page 35
