A woman awoke in her new house. Her name was Adriana. It was snowing outside, and her birthday, she was forty-three years old. The house was in the country. The village was visible from the house, on a hilltop, two kilometres away. Fifteen kilometres to the city. Adriana had moved in ten days earlier. She pulled on a light, tobacco-brown robe. Slid her long narrow feet into a pair of slippers that were also tobacco-brown and trimmed with dirty white fur. She headed to the kitchen and made a cup of instant coffee to dunk biscuits in. There were apple peels on the table and she swept them into a newspaper to keep for the rabbits they didn’t have yet but would soon because the milkman had promised to bring them. Then she went into the living room and pulled open the shutters. She saw herself in the mirror hanging over the sofa. She was tall, she wore her wavy copper hair cropped short, she had a small head and a long strong neck, her green eyes were wide-set and sad. She sat down at the desk to write a letter to her only son.
Dear Michele, she wrote, I’m writing primarily to tell you that your father is sick. Go and visit him. He says he hasn’t seen you for days. I was there yesterday. It was the first Thursday of the month, and I was waiting for him at Café Canova’s when I got a call from his butler telling me he was ill. So I went on up. He was in bed. Seemed quite worn out. There were bags under his eyes and his skin looked awful. He has painful indigestion and isn’t eating anything. Naturally, he’s still smoking.
When you go to see him, don’t take your usual twenty-five pairs of dirty socks. The butler, I can’t remember if his name is Enrico or Federico, isn’t up to the extra burden of managing your dirty laundry right now. He’s exhausted and overwhelmed. He doesn’t sleep at night because your father keeps calling for him. And it’s the first time he’s ever been a butler. He was a mechanic before. Plus, he’s an idiot.
If you have a lot of dirty laundry, you can bring it here. I have a woman helping me, Cloti. She started five days ago. She’s not very nice. She’s always scowling and things with her are already shaky, so if you were to show up with a suitcase full of laundry to wash and iron, that would be just fine. I should remind you however that there are good launderettes near your studio and you’re old enough to take care of yourself. You’ll be twenty-two soon. Speaking of which, it’s my birthday. The twins gave me new slippers. But I’m fond of my old slippers. I also wanted to tell you that it would be a great improvement if you washed your socks and handkerchiefs at night instead of balling them up and leaving them to fester for weeks under your bed, but I’ve always told you that and the message has never got across.
I waited there for the doctor. He’s Dr Povo. Maybe Covo. I didn’t quite catch his name. He lives in the building. I was unable to understand exactly what he thinks your father has. He says there’s an ulcer, which we already know about. He says your father should go to a clinic but your father won’t hear of it. I wonder if you think I should move into your father’s house to help him. I think the same thing periodically but I won’t do it. Sick people frighten me. I’m scared of other people’s diseases, though I’m not scared of my own. But I’ve never really been seriously ill. I went to Holland when my father had diverticulitis. I knew perfectly well it wasn’t diverticulitis. It was cancer. So I wasn’t there when he died, which I regret. But after a certain point in life a person has to dunk her regrets in the morning coffee, just like biscuits.
Moreover if I were to show up there with all my bags tomorrow, I don’t know what your father would think. He’s grown shy around me in the last few years. And I’m getting shy around him. There’s nothing worse than shyness between two people who’ve hated each other. Ther
