Ties by Domenico Starnone

Author:Domenico Starnone
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Europa
Published: 2017-01-30T16:00:00+00:00

4.

We didn’t pull out of it that year, nor the following. My wife grew thin, squandering her vitality, losing even more control of herself. By now she was like a person suspended in a void, and her panic contributed considerably to depleting her remaining strength.

In the beginning I believed that the terrible situation we’d ended up in concerned only the two of us, not Sandro and Anna. And, in fact, I’ve now seen the children in my mind’s eye: They’re blurry figures, they don’t have our clear contours as we argue and fight in the kitchen; we’re well-defined in spite of the time that’s passed. Sandro and Anna aren’t in my head, or if they are, they’re doing something else, playing or watching television. Our crisis, the anguish that devours us, is elsewhere, it doesn’t involve them. But then, at a certain point, things changed. During a fight, Vanda, burst out that I had to tell her whether I still wanted to take care of the children or if I intended to get rid of them the way I was getting rid of her. I was flabbergasted. Of course I want to take care of them, I replied. Good to know, she said quietly, and dropped the question. But as she realized that time was passing and that I was alternating long absences with brief appearances, she told me that if I didn’t want to account for what I had done to her, I had to account for what I’d done to the children. How would I put it to them?

I hadn’t thought about it. The children, prior to that disaster, constituted a fact of existence. They’d been born and now they were there. In my free time I played with them, I took them out, I invented fairy tales for them. I praised them, I reproached them. But in general, after amusing them sufficiently, or after rebuking them with benevolent authority, I holed up to study, and my wife entertained them with great imagination, dedicating herself to housework all the while. I never saw anything wrong with the way things were going, and Vanda herself never complained, even when we were besieged by that culture of deinstitutionalization—what an ugly word—of everything. We were both raised to believe that things were naturally supposed to be a certain way. It was natural that our marriage should last until death separated us. It was natural that my wife should have no job other than housework. And even now that everything seemed to be in transition—a pre-Revolutionary phase, people said—it was inconceivable that mothers would stop taking care of their children. Now she was the one raising the issue, asking how I planned to deal with it. Yet again I didn’t know what to tell her. We were on the street, in Piazza Municipio. She stopped, locking eyes with me, and asked:

—Do you want to continue being a father?

—Yes.

—And how? By showing up once or twice to twist the knife in the wound,

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