Rosina Mastriani checked the want ads every morning. Obsessive hunting was the hundredth cut.
Even before Vialdi, her days hadn’t really been her own. She tenaciously monitored the hours of other people. Her children’s, the hours of the man she’d married whom she now feared. She always felt she was under examination, she obeyed all requests with military precision, anytime she fell short she was filled with fear. The meticulousness she aspired to was impossible to attain, she chipped off pieces of her rigid will, far from any emotional sweetness.
She’d gradually been emptied of consciousness and surprise. She’d gotten her first taste of the future a few days after the birth of her first child. Her compulsive sobbing had first started while she was changing its diapers, on the changing table in the bathroom. The baby cried to attract attention and she had cried along with it, but without the same expectation.
She’d locked the door behind her, so that she couldn’t be seen, and she’d gone over to the window.
A number of buildings cluttered up the horizon. A patch of ground, however, had still survived all the construction work. Rosina identified some apples scattered on the hay in the little clearing; they were ready to be placed in wooden crates and taken to market. In the future she told herself that those apples had saved her and her baby’s lives.
The windows of the other buildings were holes, cells, niches. The clotheslines were links. For some reason, there was no movement in the other houses, no distraction of people; there were no voices. The asphalt in the enclosed space between buildings rose toward her and bid her take a step out, told her it wasn’t that hard to do, just one or two little steps, maybe with the baby in her arms. The laziness of her body suggested that it was impossible to make any effort, even to lift her baby, even to take a single step toward the courtyard. Her spine no longer had any structural integrity, her vertebrae were made of butter and the child’s screams were a noise that didn’t concern her.
She needed orderliness, or at least chronology. She asked her own will for help, but it was nowhere to be found.
She muddled up her years, months, and days, until she couldn’t remember whether it was evening, afternoon, or morning. She couldn’t connect events and she put spring after summer. Even her despair belonged to some body that wasn’t her own. The razor was right there. To feel her arms, she decided to wound them.
She would have gone on to her wrists, if she hadn’t noticed a man bent over, packing the apples into a crate. The sheer indecency of her imagination recognized on her fingers the smooth peel of apples. As if those were her hands down in the tiny field. She smelled the bitter scent of annurca apples and the heedless response of life itself took over.
She shook herself, the days promptly went back into place; she finished dressing her baby boy who had lain there all the while diaperless on the changing table. She concealed the cut, she dried her eyes, and she opened the bathroom door.
She glimpsed the eyes of the man she’d married, closed her own, and braced for the blow.
“Don’t ever lock yourself in.”
At the time of the second baby’s birth, her husband was already spending practically no time at home. He devoted himself to gambling, betting, other women. Rosina knew that she ought to leave but she didn’t know where to turn or how she could feed her children. The words of her middle school teacher often returned to her memory: “The first freedom is the freedom from want.”
Maybe the teacher was having a hard time making ends meet too. Rosina clung to her school days, which she remembered as a wonderful time.
She left the Rione Sanità every morning and went off to the Art Institute at Oltremare. She liked everything about it: in her dense language of an adolescent girl, she left behind the history of burial and the fascination of the stones where she’d been born and gave herself up trustingly to the progress that art promised. Nothing was going to stop her; she was going to be able to change. She’d shaved her red hair into a boy’s crew cut and felt she had the power to achieve anything. She learned with glee, and she was good.
When they told her that there was no money to attend university she went off to look for work in Rome. She found a furnished room in an apartment building nicely lodged at a distance from the city center. To get to the capital she traveled in the opposing direction every morning, from the glass boxes of progress she migrated on a daily basis back to the fascination of stones, a fascination which, however, roundly ignored her: her day was spent in a cellar that someone had decided to glorify with the name of kitchen, cooking meals for tourists. The place not only taught her the disgusting array of substances that it was possible to pass off for food, it also made her yearn again for her stones back home and the grimaces and sneers of life and death, the entrance to the Quarries, the Fontanelle cemetery, the catacombs and the basilicas, the early Christian art, but also the little corner store where she could settle her bill at the end of each month, the doctor who was willing to take an espresso at the bar in payment for an after-hours office visit, or her own language, the tongue that had nursed her, protected her, defended her.
She returned home. She disguised herself as a girl who’d never gone away. She took on a slovenly appearance, to a far greater degree than before she’d ever left for Rome, and adjusted the content to match the appearance. She wanted to be like all the other girls. She wanted to fit in, to disappear. She stopped shaving her hair and chose a nice cropped pageboy like a leper from the edge of town: she’d lost all and any ambitions to be considered a member of the tribe of artists. She took a job as a clerk in a shirt shop, and was paid in cash.
She was almost immediately recognized by the boy who would become a man, the man that she married.
She pretended to be a woman and an obedient wife, and then became one.
No question, an untamed and fiery part of her was still alive, but when it emerged into the open, despite all Rosina’s training to rein it in, it was greeted with kicks and punches from her husband.