“What?”
“I was late.”
Bottai breathed a sigh of relief. He had regained control. His tone changed accordingly. “Sometimes life responds like that, with plain facts. ’82 was fine where we’d left it, without wrecking two families and the lives of two little kids.”
“You wanted to marry me.” Nives had to make an effort not to say, “You should have.” “You were fixated with America. You left that by the side of the road, at the crossroads with me.”
This was a slap in the face for Loriano. He looked away from the point he’d been staring at, as if he were avoiding her eyes. “If we were to count all the stupid things we say . . .”
“Stupid things?”
“We say a lot of them, especially at that age.”
“In that regard, you were king.”
“But I really believed it. I didn’t say it to hurt you.”
“But you did.”
“I hurt myself first.”
“And me second.”
“And yet—”
“Laura third.”
Loriano had to think hard to put a face to the name. “Laura?”
“Haven’t you ever noticed?”
“Laura?”
“She has the same initial as you. Her name isn’t that far off from yours.”
Standing at the telephone table, Loriano had a waking dream: that he could be cleaved in two, so that he wouldn’t have to find out anything more about anything. In the meantime, Nives had grabbed her battle-ax. Considering their exchange, there was nothing she wanted more than to wield it in order to reduce certain facts to pulp. And shed buckets of blood. “That was how I cried ‘us’ for a whole lifetime: with my daughter’s name,” she said.
Loriano was losing his mind; a lightning storm flashed a thousand images of him, moment by moment. Him sitting at the café while Nives walks past pushing a stroller, barely saying “good morning.” Him at the school gates, on those rare days when work allowed him to pick up Amedeo. Nives there for her little girl not even glancing at him. Him with a drink (so many glasses; an infinite number of glasses) until, at a certain point in his inebriation, he was sucked back into the same old sink-hole: an image of a beautiful young woman, at night, left standing on the side of the road like one of the old whores from Collacchie. Him up at Poggio Corbello with his friend Anteo, on an urgent call to check the rabbits, mostly to exclude an outbreak of ringworm. An invitation into the kitchen for a drop of grappa, seeing a young girl intent on watching the cartoons. Nives bustling around them as if they were friends again. All this and more was reduced to three precise words, “Is she mine?”
“Whatever, she’s grown up fine. She finished high school and lives in France now. She gave us two grandchildren whose names I can hardly pronounce.”
Bottai’s throat was dry. The urge to rush to the other room and grab a bottle by the neck was overwhelming, but from one moment to the next, his confusion turned into rage. “And this is how you tell me?”
“I can’t do it in French.”
Loriano felt as though the floor was rising all of a sudden. In his mind, the version of the story he had always told himself was that two little offspring had magically appeared in order to clarify the situation and stop living as if they were split in two—a sign from the Gods that they had invoked for weeks, indicating the right path to take. To begin with, it had been strange to see Donatella and Nives both pregnant—for a while he’d even hated Nives (anger is important fuel for ending an ill-fated love affair): despite their affair, she’d been sleeping with her husband and was parading the fact around in those loose clothes that announced a happy event; the same loose clothes his wife wore, which in turn revealed the games he’d been playing—but it is a well-known fact that a man who doesn’t pay his dues in bed is the first to raise the alarm. In sum, Bottai had played the stallion for everyone’s good. Including Anteo’s. Armed with this latest development and all his past woes, he spat the words out without any preamble. “You bitch!”
Nives flinched. “Excuse me?”
“I was right. Now that Anteo is dead, you’ve come here to present me with the bill, thirty years after the fact. This little amusement will come back to haunt you: it’ll be the end of Donatella, and you’ll ruin my Amedeo, along with his wife and kids. And Laura’s fate won’t be any better. Her father fresh in the grave until she finds out he’s alive and well, with another name.” Loriano couldn’t stop himself from adding, “Anyway, who says she’s mine? It sounds like the delusion of a widow who talks to her hens.”
Nives was so still, she didn’t even blink. In the silence that followed, Bottai was on tenterhooks, ready for whatever came next, anything from the wildest of curses to more unhinged laughter. He imagined her hanging up on him and then coming to ring on his doorbell at midnight, an old flame ready to send his world to rack and ruin, even dragging old Pagliuchi downstairs from his attic apartment. He saw himself getting a hotel room, like those disastrous men who wreck their families after thirty years because they indulged too cavalierly in a fling. Except, in his case, he was hurtling headlong toward seventy, with everything that entails. Including the rapid darkening of his horizons. Including the fact that, at a certain age, solitude can terrify you . . . Instead, she resolved everything with two matter-of-fact words, uttered almost sleepily, “Anteo knew.”
This time it was Loriano who laughed jeeringly. “Tell me another one.”
Despite his protests, Nives suddenly felt calm. As serene, perhaps, as she had been for a long time. “In the early days, I dreamed about it,” she said. “You’d bought that Alfetta, which looked like it belonged to some sleazy, wannabe cop. Everyone envied you. It was nothing like the Fiat 127 you had before, which was always full of straw and clumps of earth so that, whenever I got home, I’d find a bruise in some odd place or other . . . I was in my third month when I saw you racing by in your flashy new car. It felt like having my teeth smashed. ‘Loriano has erased me.’ That’s what I thought. But then I started dreaming about it.”
“About what?”
“Us driving really fast down a road. On one side, mountains; on the other, the sea. It was in France. We wouldn’t say a word to one another, but there was always one moment when you’d turn and look at me. We were totally inebriated with the craziness of what we’d just done, with so many miles still to go before we got to America. Try and imagine how I felt when Laura came and told me a few years ago that she’d set her sights on this young, foreign man. Sometimes the signs fell like torrential rain on a sunny day. This is all to say that there is no way they’ll ever see me go and visit them in those places. I dreamed about France in a certain way, and that’s enough for me.”
Loriano was trying to hold up, despite the most colossal hangover he’d ever had. He felt duty-bound to say something, but nothing came out. Nives went on. “As soon as I opened my eyes, I felt two kicks to my stomach. One was realizing I was still in the same old bed; the other was realizing I was going to have your daughter. She had been abandoned at the turnoff to the big road, like me. Sometimes, Anteo would find me in floods of tears before it was even time for my latte at breakfast. I blamed it on the pregnancy.”
“How did he know?”
“He spent his life in the fields, but he wasn’t stupid.”
“Nobody ever thought he was.”
“Laura was nine years old when I found a piece of paper.”
“What piece of paper?”
“He’d gotten himself tested. The results were clear; even I could understand them. His sperm-count was close to zero. Maybe the little tadpoles had been killed off by the mild bout of meningitis he’d had as a kid . . .”
Loriano took this shot, too. Life’s truly a bitch, when it decides to be, he thought. He went over the thousands of moments he’d spent with his friend. Discovering that Anteo had carried such a heavy secret
made him reinterpret every single greeting they’d ever exchanged through the years, from when they shared a desk at school to when they shared a drink at the bar, and finally to when they’d had their last Stravecchio together. His breath caught in his throat. “Nives, are you done with your revelations?”
“Are you complaining? What about the poor man who brought up a girl her whole life without saying a word? Worse. When you were called in to tend to one of the animals, you’d even get a tip for your troubles. Just so you understand what kind of stuff a man worthy of the name was made of.”
Bottai, like a fox trapped in a corner, was on the attack. “You throw a daughter at me when I’m in my early seventies. Does that seem like a decent thing to do? In any case, I’ll say it again: it still needs to be proven.”
“A strand of hair’ll do it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nowadays, you can pull a hair out and in five minutes the doctors will tell you where you come from. You should know that.”
“Imagine if that information ended up in the wrong hands. I didn’t wreck two families back then, I’m not about to do it now. Anyway, congratulations. You’ve had your revenge. You’ve found a way to make me drink myself to death good and proper. Are you happy now?”
“Everyone has their own Rosa.”
“Shove it up your fucking ass, you and her.”
“What on earth are you saying?”
“You burst into my life one evening, just like that, and you start stripping the paintwork off everywhere. Your life went wrong somewhere, and now you’re ruining other people’s, at a most sensitive time, what’s more, when we’re all getting ready to pull our oars in. I can picture you, you know, in that house up on the hill, with nothing but hogs around you, mulling over things, curdling your blood over how our affair could have gone differently . . . Do you know what I think? If history goes one way and not another it means it was meant to go that way. Period. Put your mind at rest.”
“Well, there’s a letter.”
“What are you saying now?”
“You heard me perfectly well. A nice letter where I’ve written every single detail about our little romance. When it’s time, it’ll go where it needs to go.”
Loriano felt the right side of his body collapse, and he regained his balance just in time. He was like an empty sack, waiting to be beaten. “What are you talking about?”
“Have all the glasses you’ve ever drunk gone to your brain at once? I said what I said.”
“Where is it?”
“What?”
“The letter you’re blathering on about.”
“It’s where it should be.”
“What do you want to do with it?”
“Nothing. For your information, it’s in the same envelope as my will. When the time comes, it’ll be revealed to the person it is intended for.”
“Laura.”
“I owe it to her.”
“Are you crazy? Not only her mother’s death, but a slap in the face as well. Is that what you want?”
“It’s better than knowing she’ll have to live without finding out who she really is.”
“It’s pure egotism.”
“That doesn’t sound good coming from you.”
“Laura has done nothing to deserve this. But since you’ve lost your head, you want to leave her a legacy like that so that you can cleanse your conscience and have the last word. There’s nothing to cleanse, you know? Things went as they went. Telling her the truth will only send her to the madhouse. Don’t you see?”
“Ah, now you’re taking an interest in her.”
“Of course, I’m interested in her. I’m not an animal.”
“Spoke the wolf.”
“Think about it. How would you take it, in her place?”
“Badly.”
“Precisely. Exacting your revenge gives you more pleasure than leaving your daughter in peace.”
“I know where you’re going with this.”
“Where am I going?”
“You’re scared of a daughter you’ve never recognized as your own coming into the house and creating a scene.”
“Are you stupid, or what? I never recognized her, because I’ve only just found out now there’s someone I need to recognize.”
“Careful with your words.”
Bottai understood one thing only: the only way to rein the madwoman in was to try to reason with her. He was surprised to find himself having a terrible thought. He imagined himself going over to Poggio Corbello in the middle of the night, stabbing Nives to death, and burning the whole place down, including the hen. Now, more than ever, hanging up on her was out of the question. He needed to keep the widow on the line. He forced himself to stay calm, but it wasn’t easy. Inside, he was steaming over, on full throttle. “Listen, I’m sorry about everything. I’d like you to know that if I made any mistakes, I made them in good faith.”
“You can’t gut someone in good faith.”
“Well then, I’ll say this. I didn’t have the courage. Am I supposed to kill myself for that?”
“Don’t worry, the drink is doing that.”
“Are you sure you have nothing to do with it?”
“With what?”
“The fact that I’m hammering myself to death, glass by glass.”
“What?”
“I started back then.”
“Not counting whatever run-up. I was there, and I saw you with my own eyes. The legend of you and Ferrari going through a 20-liter demijohn of wine in two days was circulating long before we were together.”
“It got worse after that.”
“You bought three apartments in Silvestri with your earnings. Anteo got everything wrong. With people as spruced up as you around, he should have opened a grocery store. He could have taken me to the sea every summer. At least that.”
“You never left.”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
“Left my thoughts, I mean. I shouldn’t be saying this, since you like being the one in control, but the truth is this: it was like an endless blitz.”
“Now you’re talking in riddles.”
“Let me give you an idea of what it’s like: I open my eyes and that’s what I think about; I close my eyes and that’s what I think about. The whole day is a torment. Then someone tells you off if you drown yourself in drink to give yourself courage . . . I understand. Looking at the game board from your point of view, you were left alone by the side of the road with a suitcase. If the tables were turned, though, you wouldn’t find paradise, I can assure you.”
This sudden spurt of sentiment annoyed Nives. She held the receiver away from her ear, as if she were listening to the old vet’s words through the grate of a wood-burning stove. Loriano could feel the hesitation at the other end of the line. He ploughed on. “You weren’t the only one left at the curve in the road outside Poggio Corbello. A certain Bottai is still stuck there, on that October night. The liquor I’d downed at the fall fair served the same purpose as ever: to give me courage. I had to pull the plug on a situation that was tying me down. I felt that, as with everything, the most important thing was the first step. Once I’d taken that step, everything else would work out on its own. I’d even rehearsed it.”
“How?”
“I made the most of the fact that Donatella was working at the hairdresser’s that afternoon, doing a few perms. I went home early, giving myself a clear hour of peace and quiet. I took out the sheet of paper where I’d written down everything that I needed to up-anchor and set sail at full speed to the other side of the world towards a new life with you. My best clothes, the two or three family heirlooms I was attached to . . . I placed the big suitcase on the bed. I’d become quite good at it by then: all the shelves, drawers, and cupboards, open and shut in record time. I knew how to
pack everything into the suitcase, occupying every single inch. It gave me goosebumps to think that, if you wanted, you could erase your presence in your house in nine minutes.”
“You take that long because you’re a man. We women can do it in the blink of an eye.”
“As proof of all my good intentions, there was the cash withdrawal from the bank. That clerk, Crocetta, helped me, even though it was nearly closing time. When I told him that I wanted to take ten million lire out of my account, he said, ‘Hey, you’ll leave us in our underwear!’ Then, as a joke, he added, ‘Are you off to the moon?’ I didn’t answer. My heart was beating like a drum. He saw I was in no mood for a chat and went to the safe. A minute later, he slapped the bills on the table. ‘Shall I put them in a bag?’ he asked, and I felt as though I were buying vegetables. Imagine how upset I was when I heard my name being called as soon as I set foot outside. It was Donatella, who’d finished early at the hairdresser’s and had taken the opportunity to do a little shopping before heading home. I felt myself crumble to pieces. I told her I’d gone to the bank to sign a few papers. She swallowed the lie whole, only half listening; she’s never paid any attention to our finances. She didn’t even glance at the little white brick I had tucked under my arm. Crocetta came out to lock up and saw my wife. ‘Good day to you!’ he said. ‘Good day to you, Salvatore.’ He noticed my fierce expression. Then he looked at the life’s savings I was clutching to my chest. Who knows what went through his mind? In the end, he cleared his throat and left. I just stood there, a thousand pins pricking my face.”
It was odd for Nives, after all those years, to picture these scenes from the other side. Bottai continued, “The idea of getting drunk was a stupid weakness, but I only realized it after I’d gotten into bed, with Donatella already sounding her bugle. I lay there as still as a mummy, and the trap was set: my eyelids started to droop. There were times when I woke up from a two-second snooze with a start, my heart in my throat. Had I missed the appointment? The minutes on my alarm clock went by as slow as a snail, or as fast as a hare. Until the time came. I climbed out of bed and went through the motions I’d practiced so many times. You should have seen me; I looked like a ballet dancer. I’d packed and unpacked my suitcase so many times that I was on automatic pilot. I soon realized I’d been an idiot, though. I hadn’t taken the light through the windows into account. I could have closed the shutters or pulled the curtains. I made a failed attempt and bumped into door knobs and sharp corners. Nevertheless, my touch was that of an artist. They could have called me fairy fingers. I unzipped zippers and unbuckled buckles; I folded my clothes blindly, with Donatella there under the bedcovers. I told myself the missed period she’d told me about would come sooner or later; she’d never been late before. ‘It’s a curse of the devil, trying to lead me astray.’ That’s what I thought as I moved around the room like a ghost. Finally, I carried the giant suitcase down to the front door. I was dripping with sweat. But I had to keep going, without rolling down the ravine that was haunting me: that is, my guilty conscience at leaving a wife behind, like a gutted cow, to be the laughing-stock of the town. At the door, like you, I remembered my ring. I was planning to grab the keys of the Fiat 127 from the plate we kept on the table and leave my ring there. But it wouldn’t come off. My finger suddenly felt like the branch of an ash tree. I tugged and tugged at it. The effort made blood rush to my face. ‘I’ll cut it off!’ All this while I was fighting not to listen to the other side, speaking loud and clear. ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ the ring said. ‘If you’re so thirsty to see the world, take me with you. That or nothing.’ I yanked even harder, jerking like a madman. When Donatella turned the light on in the hallway, she found me by the front door, my hair disheveled, heaving like a bull, looking as though I was beating myself up.”
Nives Page 7
