Don't Move (5 page)

3

The beach house, built in the 1950s, was low and square and rather plain. Outside the kitchen window stood a tall palm tree, and next to the tree was a pergola, where a jasmine vine clambered, diffusing its overpowering perfume. The rest of the yard was bare, enclosed by a fence of little iron spears corroded by salt. The gate, which opened directly onto the beach, screeched on its hinges at every gust of wind, emitting a sound identical to the cries of the frightened seagulls. The house faced a strip of comparatively unfrequented shoreline. The bathing establishments were located farther down the coast, beyond the mouth of the river, beyond the fishing boats riding at anchor, their trawls hanging idly in the air like famished mouths.

Your mother was the one who picked out that place, that summerhouse. She said it made her think of a tent in the desert, especially at sunset, when the glare coming off the sea seemed to move the walls. There was also a cat that influenced her decision. He was drowsy and docile, and he let Elsa pick him up, then stayed with her all the while the girl from the real estate agency was opening the shutters and getting rid of the musty odor that accumulates in houses when they’re closed up all winter long. She showed us the house on a weekday near the end of March. Your mother was wearing a coat of Casentino wool, as violently orange as the sun we’d enjoy there later that summer. On the way back, we stopped to eat at a restaurant that was too big for just the two of us. Its windows overlooked the rocky seashore, but sea salt had made them opaque. It was cold, and we both got drunk, though we didn’t drink very much: one carafe of wine, followed by one
amaro
apiece. Elsa and I left the restaurant embracing each other, staggering a little, and carrying a souvenir plate. We hid in a nearby pine grove and made love. Afterward, I laid my head on her belly. We stayed like that, on the lookout for the future that we expected. Then your mother got up and walked around, gathering a few shriveled pine nuts. I stayed where I was so I could watch her. I think that was the happiest day of our life together, but naturally we didn’t realize it.

Almost ten years had gone by since that day in March, and I drove past the pine grove without turning around. The road under my wheels was getting covered with sand. I parked the car on the side of the house, under the thatch. I had to duck so I wouldn’t run into the clothesline, where Elsa’s beach towel and swimsuit were hanging. It was a plum-colored one-piece suit made from some elastic waffle-weave material; she’d roll the top down to her waist when she was sunbathing. The swimsuit was hanging there, inside out. As I passed, my shoulder grazed the white lining of the crotch, the piece of Lycra that snuggled up between my wife’s legs.

I walked around the house and went in through the living room, which featured a big sky blue angled sofa. The sand on the soles of my shoes made a grating sound. I took them off—I didn’t want Elsa to hear me. I walked barefoot over the stone floor, which was always cool. I spread my toes and stretched my heels to get more of my feet on that cool surface as I stepped into the kitchen. The faucet hadn’t been turned off all the way and was dripping onto a dirty plate. There was a knife lying on the table, and next to it a piece of bread abandoned among crumbs. I picked up the bread and started to eat it.

Your mother was upstairs, taking a nap. The bedroom door was half-open, and I gazed at her as she slept there in the dark: her naked legs; her silk undershirt with the thin shoulder straps; the sheet, crumpled up at the foot of the bed, where she had kicked it off of her; her face, covered by the thick mass of her hair. I thought, Maybe she was already asleep when I called, and that’s why she didn’t hear the telephone. And that thought soothed me, the thought that she was sleeping while I . . . as if in a dream. I was chewing my bread; my wife was asleep. Her breath was as calm as the sea outside the window.

I threw my underwear into the laundry basket and got into the shower. Then I went back downstairs in my bathrobe, leaving wet footprints on the stairs. I found my sunglasses and went outside to sit in the pergola. Through my dark lenses the blue of the sea looked more vibrant and intense than it really was. I was in my house, surrounded by the fragrance of familiar things; fear was somewhere else, far away. I had run away from a fire—I could still feel the flames on my face. I looked around and tried to bring things slowly into focus. I had to reaccustom myself to the man I believed myself to be, the one who’d got lost inside a glass of vodka, melted away like those filthy little ice cubes, and given in to a sordid impulse. I put a hand in front of my mouth to smell my breath. No, I didn’t stink of alcohol.

“Hello, sweetheart.” Elsa put her hand on my shoulder. I turned around and kissed her immediately. My kiss was badly aimed and partially missed her lips. She was wearing her gauze shirt; a hint of her nipples, darkened by the sun, showed through the fabric. Her eyes were still full of sleep. I pulled her close again for a better kiss.

“You’re late.”

“I had to do a really difficult operation.”

I’d lied instinctively, and now there I was, stuck in my lie. I took her hand and we walked on the sand along the seashore.

“You want to go out to eat?”

“If you want to . . .”

“No, it’s up to you.”

“Let’s stay home.”

We sat down at the water’s edge. The sun was beginning to show a little mercy. Elsa straightened her legs, thrust out her toes, and watched her toenails disappear and reappear in the wet sand. We were used to being together like this; neither of us objected to sitting side by side in silence. But after being apart for several days, we were spoiled by solitude, and we had to reactivate our intimacy. I picked up your mother’s hand and stroked it. She was thirty-seven years old; perhaps she, too, missed that girl in the orange wool overcoat, the one who swayed tipsily out of the restaurant and sat on the breakwater, doubled over with laughter, while the wind blew the spray around. Maybe she was searching for her younger self there, at the tip of her toes, where the white foam ebbed and flowed over her feet. But no, I was the one who had gone missing. It was me, with my long, unpredictable working hours, my niggardly giving, my hasty taking. In any case, we certainly didn’t start digging about in search of our reciprocal shortcomings, in the sand or anywhere else. We no longer had the courage for that. Courage, Angela, belongs to new love; old love is always a little cowardly. No, I wasn’t her boyfriend anymore; I was the man who waited for her in the car while she went into a shop. Elsa slipped her hand into mine. Her hand was soft, like the muzzle of a horse that recognizes its fodder.

“Shall we go for a swim?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I’ll put on my bathing suit.”

I watched her go back to the house; I watched her strong, solid, willful legs as she walked up the beach. I thought about those other, scrawny legs, flaccid on the inner side, where I’d squeezed them so hard. And once again, I relished the taste of her sweat, of her fear. “Help,” she’d murmured at one point. “Help.”

Now Elsa was going through the gate to the yard, smiling the way we smile at things that belong to us. I turned to look at the sun, which was going down into the sea in a shimmer of pink light, and I thought that I was a stupid man. This was one of the splendid evenings of my life. In such a moment of serenity, I thought, I should fold up my embarrassment and put it aside.

She returned, wearing her plum-colored bathing suit and carrying a towel under her arm. She was still incredibly beautiful, thinner than when I’d first met her, maybe a little harder, but more open. Her well-kept figure corresponded perfectly to her soul.

“Shall we go in?”

The lining inside her swimsuit, the white gusset before which I had trembled as though before a judge, had disappeared between her thighs. With a sudden movement, I sprang to my feet. She was standing still at the water’s edge. I gazed at the curve of her back. I was the love of her life, the old man who’d wait for her, double-parked, outside the shops. Maybe she desired someone else; maybe she’d already had him. When you’ve reached a mature, rational age, fidelity isn’t so valuable. But infidelity is, because it requires precautions, frugality, discretion, and various other attributes of senility. We two together were starting to resemble an old overcoat when it’s lost its original shape, together with any uncomfortable stiffness, and this very collapse, the natural wear and tear of its fabric, makes it unique and inimitable.

I opened my bathrobe and let it fall on the sand. Elsa’s head snapped around in surprise. “You’re naked!”

She laughed as she waded into the sea, following my white ass, which was really too broad to be a man’s ass. Did she still like it? Surely she preferred me with my clothes on, camouflaged under pieces of cloth. My belly stuck out; my arms had no muscles. I wanted her to look at me without indulgence; I wanted to let her measure objectively the imperfections of the man with whom she proposed to spend the rest of her life. I dived into the sea and swam underwater until I felt my chest swelling and hardening. I turned over on my back and floated while wavelets lapped at my mouth. Before I saw your mother, I could feel her arms displacing the water, and then suddenly she emerged at my side. Her wet hair made her face look bare. No, even if I had told her the story of my erotic adventure, she wouldn’t have believed me. I thought about some of the sexy scenes we’d watched at the movies, risqué images that came rushing down upon us from the screen in the darkness of the theater. Your mother would sit as though thunderstruck, holding her breath, while I felt irritated and shifted about in my seat.
She can’t be stupid enough to believe
people screw like that in real life, can she?
But when we left the movie house, she’d look as dreamy as the face on a playing card.

She spat a little seawater in my face, then kicked out and started swimming ahead of me. I listened to the sound of her body moving through the water, farther and farther away. I lay still, floating with my eyes half-closed and my legs a little apart, letting the current rock me along. Maybe some little fish below me was observing the keel of my body. I turned over and dived, keeping my eyes open in the blue underwater glimmer. I went all the way to the bottom, where the water was cold, and I lingered there for a while on the slowly shifting sands. I opened my mouth, shouting into the deafness of the water: “I raped a woman!”

And then, with my arms spread wide, accompanied by my air bubbles, I swam back up like a big white fish toward the light that suffused the surface of the sea.

4

When I was a medical student, Angela, I was afraid of blood. During anatomy classes, I used to duck behind the other students’ backs. I’d listen to the sounds of intense surgical activity and the voice of the professor as he explained the details of the operation. In the room where the cadavers were dissected, blood wasn’t gray, as it was in our textbooks; it had its real color and its real smell. Sure, I could have altered my plans and schemes: I could have opted for a career as an untalented doctor of internal medicine, like my father. He wasn’t any good at diagnosis, and I would never have been any good at it, either. I had no intuition. And I wasn’t interested in treating sicknesses hidden behind a wall of flesh. I wanted to open, to see, to touch, to cut away. I knew that I’d do good work only if I could get to the bottom of things, only there and nowhere else. I fought tenaciously against what seemed to be my destiny; I struggled against my natural reaction with all my strength, because it was killing my dreams and forcing me to go in the wrong direction.

And then, one morning in the students’ bathroom, I deliberately cut myself. I used a razor blade and slowly made an incision in the adductor muscle of my left thumb. I felt the wound grow wet and the blood seep out. I had to endure it, had to open my eyes and endure the sight of it. And at last, I succeeded. I watched my blood drip into the sink and felt slightly faint, nothing more. That same day, I stood close to the operating table in class and finally looked. My heart remained calm. It also remained calm the first time I pressed a scalpel into living flesh. Before newly incised flesh begins to bleed, time passes in a special way. The blood doesn’t flow immediately; for a fraction of a second, the wound remains white. I’ve performed thousands of operations, and it’s only then, at the moment of the incision, that I feel a slight dizziness, because the revulsion I used to struggle against is still alive in me. I raise my hands and leave the cauterization of the wound to my assistant. Except for those first moments, though, I’ve always remained clear-headed and calm, even in the most desperate situations. I’ve always done everything I was capable of doing, and when I’ve had no other recourse, I’ve let people die. I’ve taken off my mask, I’ve washed my face and hands and forearms, and, without asking myself useless questions, I’ve looked in the mirror to see how my efforts have marked my features. My child, I don’t know where people go when they die, but I know where they stay.

Alfredo must have already started by now. The cutaneous layer is detached, the bleeding stanched. They’re probably cutting into the fascia of the temporal muscle. Then they’ll saw away a section of your skull. It’s a difficult operation; if they apply too much pressure, they run the risk of nicking the dura mater. Afterward, if they have to, they’ll sew the bone section into your abdomen to keep it sterile—but later, at the end of the procedure. Now there’s no time for frills; they have to go straight to the blood. And here’s hoping that the hematoma hasn’t compressed the brain too much. I’d like to be an ordinary father in this situation, one of those trusting men who put their faith in anyone wearing a doctor’s coat and bow before it as before a sacred garment. But I can’t pretend I don’t know how little the goodwill of even the best surgeon can accomplish against the workings of fate. A man’s hands are rooted firmly in the earth, Angela. God, if he exists, is behind our backs.

You know, sweetheart, it’s my sense of decency that stops me from entering the operating room. Because if you don’t make it, I don’t want to remember you like that; I don’t want to watch while your heart stops beating in such undignified circumstances. I want to remember you like a father—I don’t want a memory of your naked, pulsing brain, I want to remember your hair. The hair I stroked at night, bending over you as you frowned in your sleep. The sight of your little face filled me with fantasies about your future. One was about your wedding day: I imagined your white arm on my dark sleeve; I pictured that long walk, at the end of which I’d turn you over to another man. I’m ridiculous, I know. But the truth about men is often ridiculous.

Out here there’s a lot of silence. There’s silence in these empty chairs in front of me; there’s silence on the floor. Out here, I could pray; I could ask God to enter into Alfredo’s hands and save your life. I’ve prayed only once before, a long time ago, when I realized I had lost and I didn’t want to give up. I raised my stained hands to heaven, and I summoned God to help me, because I knew that if the creature under my scalpel died, everything else would die with her: the trees, the dogs, the rivers, even the angels. Everything in creation.