The Days of Abandonment Read Online Free PDF

with a crowd of dead words.

7.
    D uring the day, on the other hand, I was frantic, and became more and more careless. I imposed on myself tasks to accomplish, I rushed from one end of the city to the other on errands that were not at all urgent but which I tackled with the energy of emergency. I wanted my movements to seem purposeful, and instead I scarcely had control over my body; behind that activity I lived like a sleepwalker.
    Turin seemed to me a great fortress with iron walls, walls of a frozen gray that the spring sun could not warm. On clear days a cold light spread through the streets that made me sweat with unease. If I walked, I knocked into things or people, and often sat down right on the spot to quiet myself. In the car I had nothing but trouble: I forgot I was driving. The street was replaced by the most vivid memories of the past or by bitter fantasies, and often I dented fenders, or braked at the last moment, but angrily, as if reality were inappropriate and had intervened to destroy a conjured world that was the only one that at that moment counted for me.
    In those situations I got out of the car in a fury, I quarreled with whoever was driving the car that I had hit, I screamed insults, if it was a man I said I wondered what could have been going through his mind, foul things certainly, a young lover.
    I was really frightened only once, when, distractedly, I had let Ilaria sit next to me. I was driving on Corso Massimo D’Azeglio, and had reached Galileo Ferraris. It was drizzling in spite of the sun, and I don’t know what I was thinking, maybe I had turned toward the child to make sure she was wearing her seat belt, maybe not. I know I saw the red signal only at the last second, and the shadow of a lanky man who was crossing the street. The man was looking straight ahead, I thought it was Carrano, our neighbor. Maybe it was, but without the instrument over his shoulders, or lowered head, or gray hair. I stepped on the brake, the car stopped with a long, whining screech a few inches away from him. Ilaria’s forehead banged the windshield, a web of luminous cracks spread across the glass, immediately her skin turned purple.
    Shouts, cries, I heard the rattle of the tram on my right, its gray-yellow mass approached across the sidewalk, beyond the railing, passed me by. I remained mute, at the wheel, while Ilaria pounded me furiously with her fists and screamed:
    “You hurt me, you stupid, you really hurt me!”
    Someone was saying something incomprehensible to me, maybe my neighbor, if it was indeed he. I came to myself, answered something offensive. Then I hugged Ilaria, made sure there was no blood, yelled at the insistent horns, repulsed the annoyingly solicitous passersby, a nebula of shadows and sounds. I abandoned the car, took Ilaria in my arms, went in search of some water. I crossed the tram tracks, walked in a daze toward a gray urinal that bore an old stamp saying “Casa del Fascio.” Then I changed my mind, what was I doing, I went back. I sat on the bench at the tram stop with Ilaria screaming in my arms, repelling with sharp gestures the shadows and voices that crowded around me. Once I calmed the child, I decided to go to the hospital. I remember that I had only one clear, insistent thought: someone will tell Mario that his daughter is injured and then he will appear.
    But Ilaria turned out to be in excellent shape. She merely carried for a long time and with a certain pride a violet bump in the middle of her forehead, nothing for anyone to worry about, least of all her father, if anyone had even told him about it. The only nagging memory of that day remained my own thought, a proof of desperate malice, my instinctive desire to use the child to bring Mario home and say to him: Do you see what can happen if you’re not here? Isn’t it clear where you’re pushing me, day after day?
    I was ashamed of myself. Yet I couldn’t do anything about it, I couldn’t think of anything except