Quiet Chaos by Sandro Veronesi

Author:Sandro Veronesi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2005-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

chapter twenty-one

Now things are going decidedly better, but this morning…

This morning, before dawn, when I woke up on the sofa, Carlo was gone and with him the opium and the paraphernalia used to smoke it. I got up to go to my bedroom, but I realized that I felt like shit and had to run to the bathroom to throw up. And while I was there throwing up, hugging the sides of the toilet bowl, I saw Dylan looking at me from the doorway—perplexed, I would say. It was just for a moment; Dylan disappeared immediately; but in that moment I felt more ashamed than I had ever felt in my life, and it seemed literally impossible to live with that shame. I felt so filthy in that moment, so stupid, even unworthy of the compassion of a dog. I would rather have stuck my head down the toilet bowl into my own vomit, like in that scene in Trainspotting, than leave the bathroom and maybe catch the eye of Mac, Claudia’s nanny, who always gets up before dawn and is pure of heart. To wake Claudia up, have breakfast with her, take her to school, and wait in front for her like all the other days suddenly seemed like a paradise lost. Everything was clear in that moment: I was unfit to take care of my daughter; sooner or later the truth would come out; sooner or later I would do something awful.

Then, as happens, this sensation began to get weaker, much fuzzier, I stopped throwing up, and when I stood up I realized that my legs were steady and I still had a future ahead of me. A click of the flush, and the vomit disappeared in a greenish whirlpool; despite myself, I started to think I might get away with it. I locked the door, filled the tub with warm water, got undressed, stepped into the tub, and scrubbed myself with a vengeance, using every product within reach. Then I dried myself in my soft bathrobe, shaved very carefully, put on fresh underwear and a shirt, a perfectly pressed gray suit, shiny shoes, my nicest tie, and in this way, drawing on all the best things I had available, I started to feel the courage to move forward. It was a way of fooling myself, of course, but it worked: you can judge a book by its cover. In the meantime the sun came out—a violent sun, absurd this late in October. I looked out the living room window, down to the street. People were hurrying on their way to work, and I felt worse than all of them, I did, but not to the point I could no longer mingle. I took Dylan out, watched him take a shit in the trembling, ridiculous pose dogs adopt when they shit, and while I was picking up his shit from the sidewalk I thought that when it came to inconvenient postures, as a matter of fact, he was the last one that could act morally superior to me.

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