chapter nine

And this morning, Marta.

Marta is my sister-in-law, but I have a very hard time calling her sister-in-law. She’s always been gorgeous, and one morning thirteen years ago, when she was nineteen, rather than go to school she went downtown to do some window-shopping with a friend. All of a sudden something happened, or rather, two things happened, and her good looks went public: at the Krizia boutique on Via della Spiga, a drug addict committed armed robbery, ran out of the store, and fired a gunshot into the air; at that very moment, a Japanese tourist (who was later discovered to be a spy sent to Italy to copy designs) was taking a picture of the window. All hell breaks loose: shouts, the addict gets away, the terrified salesgirls leave, the police arrive, Marta and her friend slip away and don’t want to be seen. The next day the newspapers print the photo taken by the Japanese guy, thanks to which the drug addict is identified and arrested, and this is what it shows: Marta, in the foreground, to the right, a dead ringer for Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass, in perfect focus even if she was turning around quickly, with a lock of hair flying up from the movement, and in her eyes there’s an expression of irrepressible joy (a joy that she was obviously not feeling, since it was a case of surprise, rather, or maybe shock, because of the gunshot that had just gone off), and the robber in the background, with his weapon in one hand and the bag with the loot in the other, recognizable but completely insignificant in comparison to her. The girlfriend is gone: she was cut out by the photo editor. A fantastic shot, filled with beauty and movement. Seen by millions of people, including me; it was the first time I saw Marta. Like all of those people, when I saw the photo I didn’t think of the robbery, or the chance taking of the photo at that moment, or the rotten luck of that poor devil who’d end up paying for much more than the wrongs he had committed: I only thought of how beautiful that girl was. I had just moved to Milan, I had a contract as a writer for a show on Canale 5. I fixated on convincing the other writers to track her down so she could work on our show. It took us a couple of days, but we did. She came for an audition and got the job. I took her to dinner the next evening, and on that same night, to my great surprise, I ended up in bed with her. After me, three other guys who worked on the same program went to bed with her, including the host, who was famous, and all this before the program even began. In September Marta had her debut on the show, but she was already well known: the photo of the robbery had been purchased by a company that made hair-care products, and it appeared in newspapers all over Italy, on posters along the highways, on the buses. The show was a hit, and Marta became a TV star.

It was then that I met Lara, her older sister: every now and then she would accompany Marta to the tapings, and she wasn’t as pretty, as young, or nearly as dangerous as Marta. We fell in love, as they say, and started going out. The next year, in a bit of a surprise, Lara got pregnant: we decided to keep the baby and moved in together. During the same period, in an even bigger surprise, Marta got pregnant, too, by a choreographer, but when she also decided to keep the baby, the choreographer dumped her. She lost her job, had the baby, struggled to make ends meet, started working for television again, but by then the winds had shifted, and it wasn’t easy. Then, when the baby was four, the winds shifted again, and Marta was hired to host an important program on fashion. The show was a hit, but she got pregnant, by the producer this time, and the whole story started all over again: she wanted to keep the baby, the producer dumped her, she couldn’t host the second season of the show because she had to give birth, and she hit bottom. A really ugly period followed. Marta lost all interest in work, in her looks, in the future, and even in her children, and devoted herself to relentless self-destruction; but when she seemed on the verge of completing it, her parents suddenly died, first one, then the other, in the space of six months, and she stopped. She was twenty-seven and she was still gorgeous, but she had two little children and nothing was going her way. She decided to forget about television, bought a house with her inheritance money, got herself out of trouble, and started hanging out with Lara and me more regularly. She devoted a lot of time to her children and started taking acting classes. She had an affair with a married architect; it lasted a year and a half, but when he left his family to be with her, she dumped him. From that moment on she got into the esoteric, macrobiotics, ayurvedic medicine, and yoga. She started working in the theater, small stuff, with a lot of enthusiasm and not much satisfaction. Then this summer she came and stayed with us at the seaside and was content because in December she’s doing Beckett’s Happy Days, as the lead and with a good company. She had even started acting like a sister-in-law: she helped Lara with the wedding preparations, took care of the children on evenings that Lara and I went out to eat, made the picnic table outside a riot of flowered tablecloths, and even cooked—Mexican food, no less, and once even sushi. Then she went back to Milan, we stayed at the seaside for another week, and at the end of that week Lara died. So at the age of thirty-two Marta is still very beautiful, still looks like Natalie Wood, and is practically alone in the world. I really can’t call her sister-in-law.

This morning, three hours ago, she called to say that we had to talk. I told her to come by whenever she wanted, and she said she’d come right away. She arrived fifteen minutes later, in her battered old Renault Twingo, and she passed close to me, indicating that she was looking for a parking spot. I stayed in the car, since it was raining, and my eyes followed her through the windshield. I saw her stopping about sixty feet ahead, where there was a guy talking on his cell phone by the open window of a Smart car. Through gestures, she asked him whether he was leaving and he nodded yes but kept talking on the phone while Marta waited in the middle of the street. A short line started to form behind her while the guy kept talking on the phone as if it were nothing. An elderly man at the wheel of a Peugeot, right behind her, lost his patience and started honking his horn; other cars farther back did the same, and Marta had to stick her head out the window to explain, still using gestures, that she was waiting to take the Smart car’s place. The guy finished his phone call, closed his umbrella, jumped in his car very calmly, spent a little time rummaging through God knows what, and finally took off, leaving the spot free. Marta shifted into gear but immediately took the wrong angle, cutting too close, and wasn’t able to center it. She went into reverse, but when she tried again she made exactly the same mistake and got stuck again. The old man started honking his horn again, and so immediately did the other people behind him. Marta shifted into reverse to try again, but in the meantime she’d gone even farther off track, and at that point the maneuver she needed to enter the spot had gotten too complicated. The old man in the Peugeot literally glued himself to the horn, getting all the others going as well—and the line had gotten long: an infernal racket. I got out of my car to help her, waved my hand to tell her to wait for me, but she went forward, driven savagely by the horns of the line of cars, trying again to park in the free space at the usual wrong angle, and ended up getting trapped with her side stuck in the bumper of the car parked next to her, a brand-new Citroën C3. It sounded like every horn in Milan was honking at her, and I saw her turn around, overwhelmed by the noise, with the side of her Twingo stuck in the other car, unable to move either forward or backward; I was at a distance, but in her eyes I could still distinguish a flash of true desperation, during a long moment when she must have tried one last time to tackle the situation, after which her head turned around and her arms started whirling about her. The old man was starting to climb out of his Peugeot, and I scared him back in. When I got to the Twingo, Marta was emptying her purse onto the seat: cosmetics, keys, change purse, diary, mints, Kleenex, receipts, scraps of paper, scattered all over the seat, while the blaring horns echoed like the trumpets of Armageddon. I dove in, by which time Marta had also emptied her pockets: more keys, more scraps of paper, candies, change. “Marta,” I said, “move over,” but she was beside herself: a look of defeat, a blissed-out smile on her lips, she was starting to get undressed: off with her jacket, off with her sweater, her boots. She was doing it with an urgency but also a strange, tempered serenity, as if she were freeing herself from all this stuff before plunging into the sea, knowing she would be swallowed by a whale that would keep her safe forever in its belly. In the meantime the old man had gotten out of the Peugeot and was shouting at her rear window. I slipped into the driver’s seat, crushing the half-naked Marta against the door on the passenger’s side so I could reach the pedals with my feet, grabbed ahold of the steering wheel, and shifted into first. For two infinitely long seconds, the noise from the metal on the side of the car against the bumper of the C3 covered the noise of the horns and sounded truly catastrophic—the sound of an irreparable event—but then it all came to an end: the Twingo was no longer in the middle of the street, the line disappeared, and silence returned. I relaxed, moved over to the side, trying not to ruin Marta’s things scattered all over the seat; as soon as I’d stopped crushing her against the door, she smiled at me, finished unbuttoning her blouse, and sat there in her brassiere. Only then did I realize her stereo was playing the same song by Radiohead that Piquet had noticed—the one that says, “We are accidents waiting to happen.”

A half hour later, we were sitting at a table at the café in front of the school. Marta was crying, but she had calmed down because I kept repeating to her that everything was taken care of—and it was true, everything was taken care of. Sobbing, she told me she needed to get out, in the open, and we did. It had stopped raining. We passed by the school, crossed the path of the Down syndrome boy and his mother, I played the usual game with the car alarm, and I told her about the secret between me and the child. She stopped crying, she smiled. We sat down on a park bench and, smiling, Marta told me what she had to say.

—I’m pregnant,—she told me.

—Jesus Christ! Who’s the father?

—The set designer. A boy younger than me.

—How much younger?

—Six years.

—Does he know?

—No. We’ve stopped seeing each other.

—What do you mean, you’ve stopped seeing each other? What about the play?

—We see each other at rehearsals sometimes. But we’re not together anymore.

—How many months along are you?

—Four.

She started crying again, maybe because she guessed what I was thinking: if it’s four months, that means that in August, at the seaside, she already knew but she kept it hidden from us—most of all she kept it hidden from Lara. And now Lara is gone.

It was very hard to tell her anything. I’m not her father, I’m not her brother, I’m not even the father of one of her children, but suddenly I’m all Marta has in the world, and in fact I am the one she has come to: it was up to me to tell her something. Except that it was hard, and I didn’t tell her anything. I hugged her, that’s what I did. I hugged her close, and she kept crying in my arms, sniffing that she was unlucky, that now she was going to lose the part in the play and would end up with her ass on the ground, like always, like always…

I couldn’t say how long our hug lasted—for a while, anyway—and the situation was embarrassing me, among other reasons, because almost all the eyes that could see us—the custodians, the teachers, the newspaper man—belonged to people who had only recently adjusted to considering me the widowed father of one of the schoolgirls and none of them knew that Marta was my sister-in-law. But no one probably saw us: it was completely deserted out there at that hour. Someone who definitely did see us was the girl who always takes her golden retriever to the park—she’s very pretty, too—who doesn’t know a thing about me and, although we see each other every day, we never say hello: but to her face, on the contrary, to the brazen look she gave me in the midst of that hug, I actually felt proud that I could be mistaken for the lover of someone like Marta—because it meant that I could have been hers, too. It was a wicked thought, I have to admit, of a narcissism, an egotism, and a superficiality that amazed me, given the situation; but I had it, and hiding it wouldn’t do anything to make me a better person. Nor was it a particularly noble moment for Marta, who had just lost her sister but was suffering for completely different reasons, and I truly hope that Lara is not spending all her time “looking down upon us from heaven,” as so many people told Claudia, to console her, or at least that Lara was momentarily distracted: Marta and I were the persons closest to her, and rather than hugging and crying over the immense void left by her death, here we were reacting to something completely different. Marta was thinking of the evaporation of her part in Happy Days and I of what a beautiful, unknown woman thought of seeing me in Marta’s arms. Reprehensible. Yet while we were hugging I did not feel any of the moral abasement I feel now in remembering it, of being either truly ashamed or genuinely proud to be seen in her arms, by the same token as she—I sensed it clearly—was truly desperate over the new mess in which she’d gotten herself; and quite simply, Lara had nothing to do with any of this. For the duration of our embrace it was as if our bodies, glued to each other so tenderly, conspiratorially, and sensually, deflected each other’s sense of guilt over excising Lara from our thoughts, and even completely short-circuited it. I’m saying this now, some three hours later, to explain what happened next, when the embrace was over. Because although I had said nothing, had asked no questions, and had been careful not to remark that there is such a thing as the Pill in the world, goddamn it, and condoms, especially if you go to bed with teenagers whom you break up with one month later, and especially if you already have two children by two different men and you’ve decided to set your life in order; as I was saying, although I kept my mouth shut, Marta stopped crying, pulled away from me all of a sudden, and gave me a spiteful look. Why? And why did she say to me the things she then started saying? Thinking back, I’m convinced that it had something to do with the sense of guilt that her body glued to mine was able to stifle, which couldn’t be contained when we were apart.

What Marta said to me from that point on was…

—Have you already started?—she said, and began to cry again.

—To do what?

—To stop smiling?

—Who?

—You, people, everybody.

There was spite in her eyes. Spite.

—Like the last time, the same,—she insisted.—What is it you don’t like? Why is it that when children turn four you stop smiling at them?

I kept my mouth shut. It was absurd to defend myself from such an accusation, which I couldn’t understand; but to her it didn’t matter. She started in on me as if I did.

—You don’t realize it, do you?—she continued.—Yet you do it, everyone does, as if you were obeying some fucking law. Well, could you tell me, please, where it’s written that when a child turns four people should stop smiling at it? So why not stop smiling at it earlier? Why bother smiling at it when it’s in a baby carriage, for Christ’s sake? You bust your ass, keep your eye on your child day in and day out, make sacrifices, care for it, and it’s not as if you’re asking for something in return, you do it and that’s all there is to it. Then you go out, take it to the doctor, to nursery school, go there to pick it up, drag it along with you to the supermarket, and everyone that you meet, everyone, even those fucking tourists, when they run into you with your child, they smile at you. They smile at the child, because of the child, but they also smile at you, smile at what the two of you are together. It’s nice, you know, and it’s also right, yes, it’s right to smile at a mother taking a walk with her child. Everyone does the right thing, in other words, and you get used to it, am I making sense? Those smiles are energy being made available to you, and you get used to having it available, you start to think that, no matter how messed up your life is, there are still big smiles for you out there, there’s energy, and this calms you down. People smile at you, at least there’s that. But then, all of a sudden, from one day to the next, it stops: it happened with Giovanni, when he turned four, and I felt horrible. I went into the shops, walked down the streets, came to visit you, and no one smiled at me anymore. What is it, I wanted to ask, is he too big? At the age of four? What, you don’t like him anymore? What’s wrong? Why the fuck aren’t you smiling anymore? Then Giacomo was born, and you started smiling again, everyone did. There was not a single time I left the house with Giacomo that you all didn’t smile at me whenever you ran into me. You, too, don’t fool yourself, don’t go making that face, I noticed it, you all behaved the same way. In the baby carriage, in the baby sling, and then when he started walking and I pranced along next to him holding him by the hand: it was a flash, a goddamn instant, but when our eyes would cross, you all smiled again, all of you, and I went back to feeling the energy of those smiles, and to helping myself to them. But now that Giacomo has turned four, too, you’ve stopped again, and I can’t stand it. I’d understand if you stopped when he turned eight or nine, it would still be hard to accept, but I’d understand; but at the age of four it’s too soon. It’s too soon…

While she was saying this, Marta was looking at me with spite, I repeat, as if she considered me personally responsible for all of this stuff about the smiles, the leader of all those who had stopped smiling. I continued to keep my mouth shut because I thought that half an hour earlier she had suffered a kind of nervous breakdown and her ranting was probably the tail end of it; everyone has the right to be aggressive, I told myself, and she was taking it out on me because I was all she had. But in her aggressiveness I sensed something a little too personal, something that her explanations failed to explain. After all, I had just gotten her out of a small hell, calmed her down, and not uttered a word about her umpteenth demonstration of spite: why didn’t she notice? The answer to this question might be irrelevant or have nothing whatsoever to do with me, except for the fact that in our embrace I had felt for the first time a profound bond between her and me, something accidental but also radical that united our fates in a tight knot, like suddenly discovering that you’re hanging from the same hook. So tight that, after a pause, another short tear jag, and a quick movement of Kleenex from purse to nose, Marta switched to a direct attack, much more lucid and brash: not that she apologized, not that she asked for my understanding of the difficult moment she was going through: she attacked me head-on.

—I don’t want to end up like Lara,—she said.—I want to be loved.

This had absolutely nothing to do with anything she had said so far, but it had the air of being the real reason she had come to see me. To tell me that. Once again I kept my mouth shut, and once again it was useless, because Marta kept on as if I had objected to something.

—Apart from Claudia we were all she had, Pietro, and we didn’t love her. It’s awful. Maybe Claudia, too, who as fate would have it resembles us more than she does her, maybe Claudia didn’t love her, either. I don’t want to end up like that.

At this point, since keeping my mouth shut hadn’t worked, I answered her.

—Marta, what are you talking about?—I said, and I realize that as replies go it was no bombshell. But it’s the best I could come up with. Marta smiled at me, the spite in her eyes disappeared, and it gave way to a conspiratorial, familiar expression: she had done it, she had managed to get a rise out of me.

—You said it yourself, that Claudia is calm,—she said,—that she never cries, that at night she sleeps as if nothing had happened, and that she doesn’t even seem to be sad. Well, Claudia doesn’t seem sad, you don’t seem sad, maybe this is because you aren’t sad? Lara dies, and the two of you aren’t sad: nice story. I’m sad, I am, I even get panic attacks, but for completely different reasons: I’m not suffering because of her death, either. I didn’t love her, either.

Once again—and even more awkwardly than before, because I was literally dragged into the discussion—I reacted, and I shouldn’t have.

—What in the world are you talking about, Marta? We loved Lara.

Now she looked very pleased with herself, and she smiled.

—Bullshit, Pietro. I know what the poor woman was going through. I was the one that took her to yoga classes, to the Chinese wise man, to the witch doctor. She knew perfectly well that you didn’t love her, she knew about your escapades, as she used to call them, but she didn’t even tell you, because you would always throw it back in her face with all the bullshit about your harmony, about the spirit of your family, and she would end up believing it. She couldn’t face reality, you see, but she knew everything, she really did, and it made her sick.

—Lara wasn’t sick. You’re the one that was sick. She’s the one that accompanied you to the witch doctors.

—What do you know!—Her temper flared.—Lara was very sick! And she was right to be sick, because her husband was cheating on her all over town and no one loved her, not even her daughter.

—Knock it off, Marta. Stop exaggerating.

—Unless…—She smiled.—Unless…—And for a moment she wore the same mythical expression immortalized in the photo in front of Krizia’s thirteen years ago.—Unless you didn’t realize, either. Look me in the eyes, Pietro; answer me. Did you really not know that Lara was sick?

—Lara wasn’t sick. You were sick, you have always been sick, and you continue to be sick, apparently. Not her.

She looked me straight in the eyes, incredulous, and suddenly she burst out laughing.

—Fantastic! Unbelievable! You’re sincere! You didn’t know your wife was sick! She was so sick that her heart was literally breaking and you didn’t even—

—That’s enough, knock it off. Lara was fine, and I loved her. And I didn’t have any affairs.

—You didn’t?—She raised her voice.—So how do you explain Gabriella Parigi? Lara took me with her, you know, when she followed you once, and I saw you with my own eyes going into that house on Corso Lodi when you were supposed to be in London! What were you going there for, a business meeting?

—What’s that got to do with anything, Marta, it was ten years ago.

—So, if it was ten years ago it doesn’t matter? May I remind you that your daughter was three months old at the time, three months old, and Lara was suffering from postpartum depression. Or you didn’t know about that, either?

—Marta, please…

—And that other woman, the TV presenter? That was, like, five years ago? Yes, it was five years ago, because I was pregnant with Giacomo; is five years also too long ago? Does that not matter, either? The night of the Oscars in Los Angeles, do you remember? Do you remember the girl you shared the Imperial Bedroom with at the Beverly Hills Hotel? Oh, you want to know how I know certain things? Well, it just so happens that—

—Listen, I don’t know why you’re digging up all these things, and I especially don’t see how it’s any of your business, but the only thing I can tell you is that I loved Lara, and she knew it, that’s all. I may have cheated on her those two times, and if you really must know I cheated on her a couple of other times, that’s right, four times altogether, and all at the beginning, in the early years, when, if you don’t mind, I had a right to do some stupid things myself; but I loved her, I respected her, and she was not at all sick.

Here she got really mad, and it served me right, I realize now, since I should have kept my big mouth shut.

—Hey, don’t go feeding me your bullshit!—she screamed.—Don’t try it with me, do you understand? I won’t put up with it, I’m not her! I’m even worse than you, don’t you realize it? The truth is I’m just like you! You always did whatever the fuck you wanted and didn’t give a shit how Lara felt, that’s how much you respected her! You even went to bed with me!

—Give me a break! I hadn’t even met her then!

—So what!

—What do you mean, so what? Have you gone crazy, Marta? Maybe you shouldn’t be here. Maybe you should go to a—

And finally, halfway through that useless sentence, after all the other useless sentences that I had unfortunately already said, a lightbulb went on and I did the right thing: I got up and walked away. I left her there and I went back to my car, because I was getting angry, indeed I was already angry, I was beside myself, and beside myself the situation grew more confused and grotesque, while inside myself it remained calm. I left her there, sitting on the park bench, and she, out of pride, who knows, or because she didn’t know what to do, stayed on the bench for a long while—for one hour, at least. Recess came, Claudia stuck her little head out the window, and we waved to each other; Miss Paolina came out of the entrance, and we waved at each other, too; I made a couple of business calls, had a cigarette, ate a sandwich, and slowly but surely tried to calm myself down, because at that moment calming myself down was an absolute priority. And I succeeded; I was calm again when Marta stood up from the bench and walked toward me. I hoped that she would ignore me, that she would walk straight to the half-crushed Twingo that I had parked while she was tearing her clothes off—after which I had put my business card under the windshield wipers of the C3 that she had dented, giving my phone number to pay out of my pocket for the damages that she had caused—but instead she came to my window and leaned over to speak with me, just as Piquet had done yesterday. And just like yesterday, a light drizzle began to fall, and it was odd to see such a perfect repeat but with such completely reversed aesthetic parameters: the day before, one of the ugliest men I know; the day after, one of the prettiest girls I know; both in the same absurd position in the rain to tell me one last thing through the window after having poured out an anguish they had concealed for who knows how long.

—Do you know the last thing we did together, Lara and I?

—No.

—We went to a fortune-teller, in Gavorrano, the day you took the children to the Water Park. Didn’t Lara tell you?

—No.

—And do you know what the fortune-teller told us? She read our cards, and she told us a few things. First she did mine, and she told me that I’d be successful, very successful, in my work and in my love life, and that many, many men would fall madly in love with me, but that unfortunately I’d die young. Then she did Lara’s, but after turning them over she didn’t want to speak. But Lara insisted, and so the fortune-teller told her not only that she, too, would die young, but that she wouldn’t be successful at anything, that she would end up alone, without a man, just as she had always been. Then Lara started laughing and told the fortune-teller that she was wrong because she did have a man. The woman looked at the cards again and, unmoved, repeated that she didn’t. Lara insisted, amused, and she said your name, she said that she had been with you for eleven years, she told her that you had a daughter and that you were going to get married in early September, and so the cards had to be wrong. The fortune-teller heard her out, looked at me, looked at the cards again, looked at Lara again, and with the sweet tone of voice people use when they give you bad news, she told her, “I’m sorry, my dear, but you do not have that man…”

And she left; her hair wet, her face wet, her clothes wet, Marta went back to the Twingo with her lovely gait. She started it up and easily pulled out of the parking spot that she had been unable to enter two hours earlier. I didn’t care how she felt or what she might do: she also seemed to have calmed down, and, I don’t know why, but I have the impression she went to her children’s school and stayed there in her car, like me, waiting for them to come out.