53

 53

ON THURSDAY EVENING, Luisa had to go up to her neighbor’s to give her an injection and Giulia wanted to go with her.

“We’ll have to ask if she minds showing her bum cheeks.”

Palma, their neighbor, had no objections. She was a large woman in her seventies with a frail and avoidant husband who opened the door to them and went back to watching Double Your Money. Her hair was very short and she had a pretty face, shiny and smooth with its wrinkles ironed out by fat, violet lips, and an enormous bum glowing in the light of the table lamp.

She wanted to know how the search was going, how Anselmo was, how they were doing. But she also felt compelled to complain about her husband and before long she said, “As soon as I can I’m going to get a divorce.”

“You don’t mess around, Palmina.”

“You’ll see. You’ll see, it’ll go through.” She was referring to the law that would make divorce legal, one that parliament had been quashing for the last five years.

Giulia, meanwhile, held out the things her mother needed: a cotton-wool ball soaked in disinfectant, the metal tray with syringe and needles, a phial of Lamuran with a rubber cap for the needle. Luisa filled the syringe, replaced the needle to ensure that it was sharp, and then snapped the syringe with the nail of her index finger and squirted out a few drops of medicine. She disinfected Palmina’s skin and stuck the needle in without wasting time. She withdrew the plunger to aspirate the needle and was able to inject. Giulia was memorizing the various steps.

“Yes, but even if they approve it . . . your husband has to be crazy or in prison or that’s it.” Luisa extracted the syringe. “Done.”

“I didn’t even notice. You really have golden hands,” said Palma, and she went right back to her argument. “Leaving the marital home,” she pronounced.

“But he’s right there in the living room!”

“And who’ll take him away? I’m going to go. I’ll go to my children in Desenzano. I already have three grandchildren and I never see them because of him.”

“Will they take you in?”

“Laura’s already said yes. ‘Mamma, come whenever you want to. I’ll fix up the dining room for you.’”

“Well, go then.”

“You bet I will, and after five years I’ll ask for a divorce.”

“Of course, of course. Then you’ll see.”

“I’ll ask him. Just for the satisfaction. I don’t want to end up buried beside him, our photos one above the other with the inscription: In Greggio. I want to die as Palma Ferraro, full stop. You’ll see—without me he’ll bet even his underwear, never mind his pension. And to think that he has a good one.”

As Palma hoisted herself to her feet and adjusted her clothes, Luisa turned a wry smile on Giulia to play down the situation.

When they got back downstairs Giulia asked her mother to fill her in. She didn’t understand what sort of game Palma’s husband, Primino, played so avidly or what was wrong. Luisa explained that he had a weakness for playing cards and lost money at them, which was why his wife was angry with him. She told her, but only because everyone knew and it wasn’t a secret. She filled the bathtub. A chill from tiredness and worry had risen from her feet, her fingers were icy-cold, and her head was heavy on her neck.

The usual bath day was Sunday, and besides, it was late already: Anselmo had gone to bed with his crossword. Gemma and Corrado were sure to be asleep by now. They both got undressed as steam rose and clung to the mirror. Luisa examined some red bumps that had grown on her breast and under her armpits. “Angiomas,” she explained. “Harmless angiomas. I have polka-dot skin.”

She had only one breast. The other had been removed three years earlier because of a tumor and all that was left of it was a curved line on her flat chest; she filled her bra with a specially made silicone pad. Giulia felt odd when she thought about the breast that had nursed her having been cut off and thrown away. Luisa said she’d gone back to being half child, and every now and then Gemma brought up Saint Agatha, who carried her severed breasts on a platter.

While they were immersed in the bathtub Anselmo came to the door and grumbled, “You’re both crazy. Didn’t you see what time it is?”

“Shut the door; you’re letting the heat out,” Luisa replied.

She put bathing caps over her hair and Giulia’s to keep it dry. They used a lot of soap. Luisa washed Giulia’s toes one by one and exfoliated her heels with a pumice stone. Every so often she let out a long sigh of pleasure. “This was just what I needed. I really needed this.”

Giulia compared her mother’s one nipple, which was grainy and distinct from its pale areola, with her own flat ones and their tiny fleshy nut at the center.

“When you were a girl did you heat water over the fire in saucepans?”

“Yes, that’s what we did. And at least three people used the same water. We used to draw lots to decide who would get into the water first.”

“Will you get a divorce from Papa too?”

Luisa’s eyes widened and Giulia clasped her own shoulders. “No, I don’t really think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because I still love him.”

“Grandma says they don’t allow divorced people in church.”

“That may well be.”

“So then you can’t divorce.”

“Right. But luckily I don’t want to, right?”

“Palmina won’t go into church anymore?”

“Many years go by before a divorce becomes final. In the meantime you can go in and even take Communion.”

“After that?”

“I don’t think she’s bothered about it.”

“But at her funeral later, how will they say Mass for her?”

“I don’t know. You’ll see: they won’t deny her a church funeral. Are you worrying about that?”

Giulia thought about it while she gathered foam in her hands and stuck it to her chin, a sparkling beard. “No.”

“Good. Then turn around and I’ll wash your back.”

It made Giulia a little ticklish. Luisa got out first and held Giulia’s bathrobe open, tied it around her waist.

Later in bed she found Anselmo lying on his side with his back to her, barricaded in reproach. And sure enough, as soon as she lay down he started reeling off the waste of water, the time, school next day, lost sleep, bad habits. Luisa opened her little box of earplugs, shoved them in, and closed her eyes while he went on talking with his back to her. But from the tension of the sheets and the rocking of the mattress she could tell that her husband was still grumbling even in the silence.

When Anselmo finally fell asleep, Luisa leaned over him in the dark. Soft chest hairs stuck through his ribbed vest; she loved to caress them and Corrado would pull them out to initiate play-fighting. His long body, submerged in sleep, gave off warmth. Anselmo was three years younger than she was and this had always reassured her: during the war he was only a boy and he hadn’t had time to do anything bad.

Luisa got up and went to the kitchen, where she found some leftover roast potatoes in the fridge and began eating them, sitting there in the dark. Silvia’s disappearance, Palmina and her plans to run off, her own youth, marriage and work in the factory, illnesses, hospital stays and recovery, childbirth: that chorus of seemingly dissonant events corresponded to a secret harmony she was trying hard to name, as when you can hear a song in your head but you can’t sing it out loud. Some kind of glue was holding the pieces of her life together, an assumption, the same one that kept her from throwing plates at Anselmo when he badgered her. She tried to formulate it clearly to herself while chewing on cold potatoes and watching the jagged black mountains turn gray and white as the moon scythed through clouds, illuminating the snowfall on their peaks.

What’s keeping you upright? she wondered. It was her sense of duty. She’d been taught—by whom? everyone and everything: example, religion, people she loved—that you had to do things right, do the right thing, keep on going. How are things? Oh, we’re trundling along was the automatic reply, and yet it was perfectly sincere. Trundling along was a moral precept because life is a cart to pull, a work to bring to completion. When you’re tired, you persevere. When you’re suffering, you endure. When you want to leave, you stay. Industry as an antidote to unhappiness. Not that Luisa hadn’t been happy; she’d often been so. Her joys naturally came from persevering, enduring, and staying. After the death of her first love, she had married. After the death of her first baby, Giulia and Corrado had been born. She’d had a life of second chances. Of resurrections, as Sister Annangela had once told her.

She recalled Silvia’s face when she came to visit Luisa in the hospital after she first gave birth, that inexpressive face that had allowed her to rest under its gaze. Silvia had sat down in the visitor’s chair, which she’d placed at a three-quarter-degree angle facing the window, and she stayed there for a long time, ankles attached to legs of steel. Silent, as if at a wake—for all practical purposes, it was one. Silvia was the only person who hadn’t tried to console her, nor did she try to guess, by watching her, whether she would ever get over the loss of her child.