Don't Move (25 page)

I fell asleep sitting up, with my chin on my chest. And I dragged her along with me, blue as she was. I saw her, wet to the crotch, wading through the still, slimy waters of a docking basin, trudging toward a small vessel, perhaps a postal boat, laden with cargo. I heard the splashing sounds her movements made as she tried to get to that boat, which wasn’t going to ride at anchor very much longer. She had some of her things with her. She was carrying a voile dress with a pattern of red flowers and pulling a floating table behind her through the shallow water; the dress was on a hanger, blowing in the wind. There was a chair on top of the table, an empty chair. She wasn’t tired and she wasn’t sad; rather, she seemed fervent, zestful, and in the gathering dusk, her hair looked like frogs.

Sometime after nightfall, a person came into the room and was amazed to find it in darkness. “Where’s the light?” he asked, and the hand accompanying his voice groped for the switch. I saw that hand, because you can sense things better when you’re used to the dark. The man, it turned out, was a priest. He was short but not thin, and the ample skirts of his priestly robe trailed on the floor. His face was both gaunt and collapsing, free of color, and given to a single expression, a kind of smile that was supposed to suggest the exalted level of beatitude he had attained but looked more like a sardonic and deeply insipid smirk. He approached Italia’s bed and solemnly masticated an unintelligible prayer. There was nothing sacred about this priest’s halfhearted blathering, and I thought I detected something sordid about him. He was, in any case, as insignificant as a lazy guard loitering in his sentry box, staring without interest at the crowd of people coming and going, as though he were looking at dust blown along by the sirocco. He gave the dead woman his blessing in a sequence of rapid movements, made a plaintive but barely audible sound, and went away, leaving the light on in the room.

Came the dawn. I leaned out of my chair to the bed, rested my head on an elbow, and looked at Italia from below. Her face was beginning to turn darker, as if the night had forgotten some shadows and left them on her face. In fact, the darkening was caused by her coagulating blood, the first sign of imminent decay. Instinctively, I looked at my arms to see whether there were such dark blotches on my skin, too. But my flesh looked unblemished in the dawning light.

A little while later the undertaker knocked on the door of the room, then opened it himself. He was wearing his sunglasses high on his head, exposing his eyes. The light in the room was icy, and his white shirt gleamed between the black lapels of his jacket. He wasn’t alone; a boy was helping him. The coffin lay where they’d placed it, on the floor outside the room. “Hello,” the undertaker said.

“Hello,” I replied.

He gave a satisfied nod, pleased with this response, because it meant that I was now capable of speech. I looked into his uncovered eyes, and I saw that he was conscious of the obscenity of his profession. He said, “You’ll have to leave the room.”

I went out and the coffin went in, together with the boy, also in jacket and tie, and a nurse who had come to assist them, a thin woman with shifty eyes.

Someone suggested a bar farther along the road, close enough to walk to. It was next to an exhibition of swimming pools—huge dusty sky blue basins.

The old man behind the bar was intent on putting a deck of playing cards in order. “What time is it?” I asked him.

“Six something.”

I drank a cup of espresso. Although I wasn’t hungry, I did my best to force down a prepackaged brioche that tasted like the plastic wrapping it came in. After two bites, I tossed the rest into a tall bronzed bucket that might have been an umbrella stand.

“See you later,” said the old barman, speaking to my back as I headed for the door.

As I stepped out, a bus passed on the highway, plowing the road silently, like a ship on the sea. The old fellow and I would not, in fact, see each other later; his coffee was an abomination. And I wouldn’t be seeing this landscape again, either, this flat expanse of clay reaching to the horizon. This was where I’d thought I was going to live; this was where the adventure I’d believed in was supposed to begin. Now there was no wind, and the inert air was spread over the earth like cellophane as far as the eye could see, constraining the movements of every living thing. Italia’s death reigned over that space all the way to the horizon, to the spot where the sun had risen.
Good-bye, my love. Good-bye.

Pillowed on satin, she lay in her coffin. They’d tucked her blouse into her skirt and brushed her hair. The luxury of her surroundings revealed, by contrast, her humble origins. She looked like a country bride, or like the effigy of a local saint, fit for carrying in processions. I think they’d probably put something on her face, some cream or wax, because her cheeks sparkled a little. It was that very sparkle that made her piteous.

“She’s missing a shoe,” the undertaker said.

I went back out to the parking lot and found the shoe— wine-colored, with very high, very thin heels—where it had fallen off her foot the previous night. I put it back on her and looked at those twin soles, scuffed and darkened by who knew what roads. Those shoes made more of an impression on me than anything else. I thought about her gait, about the effort she put into walking, into living, about that little tenacity of hers, which had failed to do her any good whatsoever. The last part of her I touched was an ankle. After that, they closed her up.

We left the hospital. Since I didn’t have the strength to drive— or the will, for that matter—I knew I’d have to make the trip sitting beside the silent man with the gold belt buckle. I locked my car and walked to the hearse. Before getting in, the undertaker took off his jacket and hung it up behind his seat, using a hook set into the upholstery on the other side of the glass that separated us from Italia’s coffin. The jacket grazed the polished wood. The confident thought that this contact would be maintained throughout the trip appealed to me. I felt comfortable in the deep seats of that car, a machine as impeccable as its driver. A fragrance of sandalwood emanated from the upholstery and the dark brier of the dashboard.

We traveled down old roads, patched in many places and encroached upon everywhere by low-growing wild blackthorn and the suffering trunks of olive trees. Here and there, a palm tree had opened an unexpected crack in the asphalt. The vegetation in these parts followed no method; it simply rose up from the ground, as sporadic and confused as the buildings we passed along the way. Everything that stood out in that landscape appeared arbitrary, ready to be pulled down and hauled off. I don’t know, maybe all this reflected the spirit of the people who lived there, and maybe it was in that very arbitrariness that they saw order. I supposed one would eventually stop being surprised at chaos, grow accustomed to it, perhaps even discover in it a secret fascination. I looked out the window. I had no sunglasses between me and the unsparing midday light, which laid bare everything it touched, exploring things in their smallest details. I reflected that we were, after all, on the way to a cemetery, and that this passage through purgatory was not at all disagreeable.

The undertaker drove without speaking. His hair was shiny with pomade, his shirt collar was immaculate, and he showed no trace of perspiration. In such jumbled, disordered surroundings, his correctness appeared positively alien. He was driving quite fast, keeping his neck straight and maintaining his composure despite the repeated shocks. Our trip seemed to me like a journey out of life. The terrain, my traveling companion, my state of mind—everything was bound up together in the same consternation. And then there was that coffin behind me, sliding placidly over the felt carpet of the hearse as we sped around curves or bounced over the worst parts of the road. I imagined Italia’s body rolling about in her excessively luxurious, excessively large casket. I’m not looking for pity; I’m not looking for anything, Angela, believe me. I don’t even know why I’m going over all this again. It’s like when a man drinks too much: He can’t help pissing, and he pisses into a hole that carries away everything, or onto a wall that doesn’t know him.

We drove past some houses built of stone, others covered with navy blue tiles, and several working-class apartment buildings, rows of little balconies with thin railings. Modest lives were being carried on behind those burnished windowpanes. Everyone turned toward the funeral car and watched it as it passed; some touched their crotches to ward off bad luck, while others made the sign of the cross. The young boys playing soccer on whatever dusty spaces they could find turned and looked, and so did the women at their windows. Men planted in front of bars raised their eyes from the pages of their newspapers. It struck me that a lot of people seemed to be idling, but then I remembered that it was Saturday.

We passed a church with outside steps so steeply graded they seemed about to plunge into the street. A group of people wearing festival costumes stood on these steps. An emaciated woman with a little girl in her arms and a red cloth cap on her head followed our passage, rotating her upper body. When I met her eyes, they were alert and prickly with malevolent curiosity. The little girl’s flounced dress was partly draped over the woman’s arm, revealing the child’s underpants. I stared at those little purple legs, dandled against that coarse body. In the state I was in, everything that passed before my eyes seemed to be a sign of something. And maybe this
was
a sign, the dim trace of an illicit destiny, whose only means of revealing itself, as far as I could tell, was to radiate promiscuously from every single thing I looked upon. It was as if the whole trip had been unreal—had been a dream, or an allegory. The little girl’s face was buried where I couldn’t see it, and her legs dangled down like inanimate objects. . . . Maybe I frightened her, and that’s why her mother was staring angry daggers at me.

In order to keep from plunging into my emblematic discomfort more deeply than I had to, I stopped looking all around and concentrated on a muddy little stream whose scanty waters poked along, bearing clusters of rubbish accompanied by clouds of gnats.

The silent man beside me was a consummate professional. When we passed through populated areas, he slowed down considerably, as if he wanted to provide the living with an opportunity to salute the coffin or say a prayer. The expression on his face changed; it became stronger, more purposeful. He was playing himself, in his melancholy role of Driver on the Last Ride, and he knew he was giving a memorable performance. But I detected an ironic streak in this facade. As far as he was concerned, I realized, it was always carnival time, and he was like a bad boy wearing a skull mask, brandishing a sickle, and scaring passersby. I assumed—I thought I could tell—that the black sunglasses obscuring his face served many functions. Now we were in a town, and he was driving slowly but inexorably through crowds of people. They flattened themselves against walls and ducked around corners as we passed them, cutting off the words in their mouths, capturing their eyes, making them bow their heads. We left them behind us like terrorized sheep.

Then, to my surprise, we reached the sea. I was sitting on my side of the car, resting my forehead against the window, and suddenly the sea struck me, entered my eyes and my nose. I glimpsed a motionless blue strip. A train passed, so close that I thought I was about to be run over, and I instinctively jerked my head away from the window. I hadn’t realized it, but here the highway ran side by side with the railway tracks, and there wasn’t much space in between; some of the platforms were practically in the road. Then the train passed on, and the sea returned. Great cubes of cement were piled into breakwaters here and there along the coast. It was too thin—the waves had devoured it—and all that remained was a stretch of grainy sand, not very wide, wedged between the sea and the railroad. On the other side of the car was an unbroken line of squalid buildings, multifarious in size and shape, with similar buildings crowded behind them and a forest of television antennas as far as the eye could see.

I should have called your mother, but I’d forgotten about both her and you. I’d stored the two of you away, and you were lodged in a part of my mind so remote that it hardly seemed like mine anymore. I thought about Elsa as though she were the wife of a friend. As for you, I didn’t think of myself as a father; I thought of myself as an orphan. My eye, reflected in the glass, stared back at me like the eye of some puzzled reptile.

We glided past a billboard that displayed a giant bathroom sink, complete with an imposing faucet. This road was much wider than any of those that had preceded it. Glad to be on a smooth surface at last, the undertaker changed gears and put his big engine to work. Other cars sped along the road as well. There was no median, and I pictured one of the oncoming vehicles traveling too fast and spinning out of control. It was a possibility, I thought, because people were so curious. As I saw all during the journey, everyone wanted to get close enough to the hearse to verify that it was already occupied. A driver could get distracted while trying to check our cargo and wind up crashing into us. Only fitting, I thought, for we were clearly part of death’s victory parade, and it would have been sublime to die like that, sitting beside an undertaker in a hearse. For a while, I convinced myself that I was nearing the end that fate had reserved for me. As for my traveling companion, he appeared to know nothing about any of this. Far from all premonitions, safe inside his big solid body, he drove on. His hands on the steering wheel were steady; dark lenses covered his eyes.

We stopped for gas. He looked at the glass building beyond the gasoline pumps and asked, “Would you like to get something to eat?”

She stayed in the car. It occurred to me that she’d stayed in the car the last time we stopped at a highway restaurant, too. She’d been asleep, or pretending to be asleep, in the passenger’s seat. Later, when I turned from looking at the big blue brushes in the empty car wash and met her eyes, awake and watching me through the windshield, I remember thinking that we wouldn’t make it, and that I was about to lose her again. In the parking lot of a highway restaurant, I’d realized she was going to die.