Don't Move (19 page)

I’m in the bathtub with the faucets running. My member, abandoned to its own devices, bobs in the moving water. Later, bent over the bidet with my hands on my head, I weep. Soon a maid will come in and throw our sheets onto the floor. On one of them, there’s a little spot of wetness that trickled out of Italia’s intimate parts. I have kissed that spot.

When we leave the room, I raise my arm to turn out the light, but then I hesitate. Italia turns and looks for the last time at that pool of darkness before it disappears behind us. We’re both having the same thought:
What a shame! What a
missed opportunity!

31

They must be almost there. Your hematoma’s been aspirated and removed from your head; the tube filled up with red blood. They’re irrigating you with saline solution.

Manlio got here a little while ago, and now he’s sitting across from me. He embraced me, tried unsuccessfully to cry, and glued himself to his cell phone. Your mother’s flight will be a little late, and he insisted on knowing the exact minute when the landing would take place. A discussion began, and he raised his voice. Getting pissed off at an airline information agent—that is, at nothing at all—is his way of showing his solidarity with me. The cell phone is still hot in his hand; he can’t put it down. He wants to call someone else, but he doesn’t know who. He’s afraid of being alone with me in the midst of this silence. You know how he is: He’s accustomed to lighting up life the way he lights up his cigars. He fidgets around, exhaling loudly. His mouth has fallen down, and so have his eyes; he’s in a cage. Closed up in a cage with me, his best friend, on the worst day of my life. I watch him unconcernedly, thinking about the question I saw on a mural:
How can you see the bottom if you
keep splashing around on the surface?

“Excuse me, I have to telephone Bambi.”

He goes to the window, hunching his shoulders to isolate himself, and mutters. He doesn’t want me to hear him. I consider his ass. He made fifty-seven last month, and he is unequivocally fat.

He clears his throat and changes his tone. He’s talking to his extremely blond, extremely beautiful, extremely obnoxious twin girls: the “Pukies,” as you call them, Angela. Manlio’s dark, stocky, immediately likable; they don’t resemble him at all. They look like their mother, Bambi, that northeasterner with the fashion model’s slender figure and the peasant’s hard heart. She made him leave the city and move to that big estate they live on with the horses, the deer, and the olive groves, where she has herself photographed for magazines dedicated to country living. She poses in front of the stables, dressed as a cowgirl from the Maremma, together with her daughters, wearing checked skirts and embroidered blouses. They cold-press the olive oil, put it into fancy bottles, and ship it to America; they’re making pots of money. Bambi’s a stickler for organic agricultural products. Manlio, on the other hand, gorges himself on fried foods in noisy restaurants in the city. Then, in the evening, he zooms down the autostrada at 120 miles per hour, rushing to get home to the decorative ears of corn and the bunches of dried lavender. He detests nature, particularly its silence. Of course, he’s got the swimming pool, with a vanishing-edge spillway and a spectacular rock arrangement designed by his architect; but he’s pissed off about the pool, too, because it’s got that robot cleaner swishing around the bottom. It’s implacable, like his young wife. He misses Martine, the jack-in-the-box. He attends a growing number of conventions, and every time he can, whenever he has to fly somewhere, he makes a stop in Geneva and goes to visit her in her antique shop with the little statues that all look alike. She’s alone, decrepit, and happy. He makes out checks and tries to buy everything she has. “I like helping you,” he says. She smiles and tears up the checks under his nose: “Thanks, but no thanks, Manlió.” That accent on the last vowel in his name drives him wild with joy. And who knows? Maybe—when he’s in the airplane, way up in the intercontinental sky with the sleeping mask over his eyes—maybe it drives him to tears.

He puts his cell phone back in his pocket and touches his balls. His lips are dark, and the cigar between them has gone out. He adores you. He’s always considered you the ideal daughter.

“I’m going to the airport to pick up Elsa. See you later.”

32

I didn’t knock. I pulled the key off the chewing gum and went in. I found her lying on the bed next to the dog. Heartbreaker barely raised his head; she didn’t even do that. She had her legs curled up and an absent look on her face, and she said, “Oh, it’s you. . . .”

There was nothing left in her kitchen, so I went out and bought a few groceries. I washed out the dog’s bowl and dumped a can of dog food into it. Some time before, I’d bought her an electric heater, but every time I went there, it was off, as it was now. I opened the windows so at least a little sun could come in. The air in her house was stale and unhealthy, like the air in a sickroom. I kept going back there without wanting to. With my head bending low, I kept going back there, because I didn’t know where to go.

She changed the furniture around. She put the table next to the chimney, and the sofa where the table had been. She even rearranged her knickknacks, the various little objects she had, organizing them according to some new order, which quickly slipped her mind; she spent a great deal of time looking for things without finding them. Her dog clung to her side in bewilderment, as if he, too, couldn’t find his place anymore. She was subject to sudden bursts of activity. More than once, I found her on a ladder, washing the windows or dusting the light fixture. She did housecleaning, but she left things lying around: a dripping sponge on the table, the broom leaning against a chair. And she did the same thing with herself. Her eye makeup would be perfect, she’d have her hair neatly pulled back, but she was absentminded: she’d come out of the bathroom with part of her skirt tucked inside her panty hose. I’d go to her and pull her skirt straight, as if she were a little girl. And when I did that, I felt her flesh, inhaled the fragrance of her skin. Those were the hardest moments, the times when I would have liked to get a can of gasoline and set fire to everything—to her broom, to her bed, to her dog. A cone of black smoke and then nothing at all.

I hoped she’d stage some sort of revolt. I looked at her hands. She’d stopped biting her fingernails, and I hoped she was letting them grow so that she could scratch my face. The thought of leaving behind such a kind, forlorn creature filled me with fear.

There was, on the other hand, Elsa, she of the growing belly. The telephone would ring at unusual hours. Elsa would answer, but the caller didn’t say anything. I knew it was her. I’d be hoping she’d speak, make some sound—I didn’t care what. An insult, a howl. Your mother would hang up and lie back with her hand on her stomach, calm and serene. Then the telephone would ring again.

“I’ll get it.” But even when I answered, she said nothing. I was the one who spoke: “Is that you? Do you need something?”

I’d sit down beside Elsa again and put my hand on hers, absorbed in her slow waiting. I could have gone on like that forever. Maybe I’m going insane, I’d think. Maybe this precision without calculation, this constant grace, is madness.

Then one evening, I went to her house. She stank of alcohol, and she didn’t even brush her teeth to cover it up. Although her hair was disheveled and she was wrapped in a bathrobe, she finally seemed like herself again. Her eyes had circles around them, but they’d lost their opaque patina. She asked me to make love to her. She asked me this out of the blue, out of the depths of those black-ringed eyes.

I said, “You feel like . . .” and made a little gesture with my closed fist. A vulgar gesture.

I’d been to some ceremony, and I was in a tuxedo. I started feeling uncomfortable, so I loosened the clip on my bow tie. Too many tastes were mingling in my mouth, and I was thirsty. She was standing against the wall, under the monkey poster. “Just like old times,” she said, opening her robe. She didn’t have any underpants on, but she was wearing a T-shirt that I recognized at once. I recognized the paste flower dangling down from it, torn askew by my lust on that summer afternoon, so distant now. The thing was there before my eyes, dismally glittering. She leaned on the wall and raised an arm. “Help . . . help . . .” she muttered, imitating herself. And she laughed like a depraved and desperate little girl. Then she said, in her normal voice, “Kill me. Please, kill me.”

I looked down at her sparse tuft of pubic hair, grabbed both sides of her robe, and covered her up. “You’ll catch cold.”

I went into the kitchen for some water and drank it straight from the tap. The water was like melted ice. When I returned to the living room, I found her in the fireplace with her hands on her head, as though trying to hold herself still. The alcohol was starting to work on her. “Turn out the light,” she said. “My head is spinning.”

“What did you drink?”

“Muriatic acid.”

She laughed again, but she didn’t vomit. All the while she spoke, she kept holding her head. “You remember that market vendor I told you about, the one with the dress? He was my father. I did it with him. I screwed my father.”

“Did you report him to the police?”

“For what? He wasn’t a monster. He was a poor devil who couldn’t tell a rock from an olive.” She shook her head, suppressing a belch that puffed out her cheeks. Her drunkenness had passed like a storm, washing everything clean. Italia was limpid. “It’s better this way, my love. I would never have been a good mother.”

I wanted to pull her out of that chimney, out of that black grotto. She was far away, in a place I had nothing to do with. She was telling me this secret of her life only now, now that we were breaking up. She knew she’d never find anyone else to tell it to. She drank to bolster her courage, because she wanted to help me go away. I went to her and stroked her forehead, but there was a cunning cleft between her flesh and mine. One part of me was already safe, far from her corrupted love.
Was it really you that I loved? Or was it that I expected fate
to bring me love, as I still do? I’ll go strolling through the world
again, and it won’t make any difference if nostalgia makes my
heart tremble like a tooth in a dead gum. Everyone has a forgottenpast dancing along behind him. Now I look at you, and I see
what it is you’re teaching me. You’re teaching me that sin entails
retribution. Maybe that’s not true for everyone, but it’s true for us.
Because we’ve scraped ourselves away, together with that child.

I don’t smoke; therefore, there wasn’t even a cigarette butt with the imprint of my lips. There was no visible witness to my passage in that house. The invisible witness was in Italia’s body. She cut my toenails once, but she didn’t throw the clippings away; she slid them into a little velour bag, the kind used for jewelry. Those clipped toenails were all I left her of myself.

33

I know the smell of your head, Angela, and all the other smells you brought into the house from outside, year after year. For a while, you smelled like sweaty hands and felt-tip pens and the plastic parts of your dolls. Then you smelled like the narrow halls of your school, like the grass in the park, like smog. These days, on Saturday evenings, you smell like the clubs you go to, like the music you’ve listened to. You smell like the boy who’s found a place in your heart. I’ve sniffed your contentment, and I’ve caught a whiff of the clouds passing over you. Because joy has a fragrance all its own, and so does sadness. Italia taught me to be silent and aware; she taught me to smell. To stop and close my eyes and breathe in an aroma. One alone, jumbled together with millions of others—you wait, and it comes; it composes itself for you—a little vaporous wisp, a swarm of gnats. All these years, I’ve searched for her fragrance. If you knew how many times I’ve followed a distant scent! I’ve turned into little side streets; I’ve climbed up stairs. All that remains of her is in smells. And see, even now, if I sniff my hands in this aseptic room, if I squash my nose against my palms, I know I’ll find her smell. Because she’s in my blood. Her eyes are floating in my veins, two luminescent holes, like a crocodile’s eyes in the night.

The first weeks were the least difficult. To be sure, I was visibly wounded; I kept losing weight and feeling physically exhausted. But, more than anything else, I was catching my breath. I started looking after myself—taking supplements, eating more sensibly. As for the injury to my psyche, I figured that would heal itself with the passage of time. And one day, I let a new exuberance take hold of me. It was exactly like the feeling you have when you’re moving house; you carry in the boxes of books, you position the furniture, you fill the drawers, and you throw away what you no longer need: out-of-date medicines, half-empty bottles of liqueur with their corks cemented in place, the old broom. I joined a gym and went there in the evenings, after I left the hospital. I closed myself inside that airless space, in the midst of other men wedged into bodybuilding machines, and I sweated hard. Convinced that strenuous exercise would help me flush out my mind as well, I spewed sweat all over the stationary bike. I shifted gears higher and higher; I was climbing a steep, fictitious grade, and I had to work harder. I lowered my head and closed my eyes, thrusting with every muscle. When I got home, I emptied the wet clothes in my gym bag onto the floor next to the washing machine, and I felt stronger, better prepared to enter the realm of the counterfeit fairy tale. My wife’s belly was growing, and outside the window, the tremulous lights of the outdoor Christmas crèches shone through the branches of the trees. One evening, the wave swept over me with great force: the black wave of melancholy, of disaster. Life fell in on me. You can’t reach safety by pedaling in the void. My sickness hadn’t abandoned me; it had remained where it was, like that wheel-less bicycle.

I called her up that evening. We had guests in the living room—the usual suspects—playing some party game, sophisticated in structure but vulgar in execution. I bowed out, went quickly to my room, and hurriedly dialed her number, but then I had to stop; I’d forgotten the last two digits. Anxiety overcame me. I breathed slowly, holding the receiver on my chest, until the entire number appeared, brightly shining before my mind’s eye.

“Hello?”

I didn’t speak right away.

“Hello?”

This time, her voice was smaller, a few tones deeper in pitch. Just a few seconds had passed while she was waiting for a reply, but the suspicion that it was me must have crossed her mind already.

“What are you doing?”

I hadn’t called her in almost a month. She said, “I’m going out.”

“With whom?”

I had no right to ask her that. I shook my head in self-reproach. My face was contorted, but I tried to make my voice sound as if I were laughing. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

She answered in the same tone as before: “We’re going to have a few drinks.”

We’re going?
You and who else? You’ve found a way to console yourself already, my little tramp!
And now I wasn’t laughing at all; my voice was raspy, strangled, and I obstructed it further with fake-cheerful condescension. “Well, then, have a good evening. . . .”

“Thanks.”

And now there it was, there it was and how, that sadness that I’d hoped to hear, that note of longing, of effort.

“Italia?”

“Yes?”

And now that “Yes” was different, Angela. I wanted to tell her that I’d already had two EKGs since we broke up—I’d gone up to Cardiology and asked my colleague there to paste the electrodes to my chest. By way of justification, I told him, “I work out a lot.” And I wanted to tell her that I loved her and that I was afraid of dying far from her.

I said, “Take care of yourself.”

“You, too.”

Maybe she was rebuilding a minuscule existence for herself; maybe she’d gone back to that bar where we met and started over from there. And another man had come up to her and asked her a question. She was used to giving herself in exchange for not much: for a look, say, where she could see an image of herself, any image at all. Yes, she probably wound up in the arms of some random man who let her plunge to her ruin in peace. An idiot who didn’t know her, who had no idea how precious she was, who was ignorant of her suffering. She let him screw her so she could have the illusion that she still existed, and she turned away and buried her face in the pillow and wept when he couldn’t see her. I saw her.

It was during that period that we determined your sex. Your legs were curled up under you. Manlio gave you a little pat, turned off the ultrasound scanner, and turned to Elsa. “It’s a girl.”

Your mother turned to me. “It’s a girl. . . .”

As we drove back, Elsa was silent, her mouth fixed in a smile. I knew she wanted a girl. While we sped down the street, she was daydreaming about the life that awaited you, Angela, about the torrent of small, momentous events that accompanies a development, a destiny. She was wearing a cape the color of milk. Next to that majestic swan, I felt like an ugly duck in a dried-up pond. I fixed my attention on the traffic, on the present, and looked for a cushion where I might lay my thoughts. Italia was there, coming and going with the windshield wipers. I remembered her words. She never talked very much, and the few things she said issued from her mouth as though they had made a long voyage in her mind, in her soul. She said, “It’s a boy for sure.”

She said it without solemnity, because it was what she felt, and it was true. Now I knew it was true, now that I seemed to be able to perceive a shadow destiny, where the things that never happened were lined up in a row. This thought struck me without wounding me. It would have been easier to make a getaway, to withdraw a bit more every day, until you and your mother were completely alone. Daughters belong with their mothers. They watch them while they’re putting on their makeup; they try on their shoes. And I could have faded away unobtrusively and become a background figure in the house, as stealthy as an Indian waiter.