Don't Move (7 page)

7

Your mother was in the garden with Raffaella, who rented a cottage not far from us every summer. They were laughing. I bent down and grazed Elsa’s cheek with a kiss. She was sitting in a lounge chair, and she reached up and tousled my hair with a limp hand. I straightened up at once. I was afraid she’d smell something strange. Raffaella got to her feet.

“I’m leaving. I promised Gabry I’d take her some of the mousse I made.”

Raffaella passed a good part of the day in the water, wearing a terry-cloth cap on her head. She’d float a few yards offshore, waiting for someone on the beach to decide to go for a swim. You’d make a few strokes, and there she was in front of you, like a buoy. She loved to gossip while she soaked, and since she traveled all the time, she had plenty of stories to tell. Now Elsa was turning purple next to her, but Raffaella never suffered from the cold; her bathing suit was permanently wet, even after the sun went down.

I gazed, for no particular reason, at Raffaella’s sturdy thighs. She laughed, overcoming my look with her usual irony. “What do you expect?” she said, pointing at Elsa. “All skinny women have a fat bosom buddy.” She picked up her pareu. “You look pale, Timo. You should get some sun.”

She died three years ago, you know. I operated on her twice. The first operation was on one of her breasts. The second time, I cut her abdomen open and sewed it back up again in the course of half an hour. I went through with it because she was a friend, but I had known all along there was no hope. She’d never come in for a single checkup after the first operation—she went to Uzbekistan instead. She gave her sarcoma the opportunity to metastasize undisturbed. Raffaella was a tolerant woman. Live and Let Live was her motto, and it applied to everybody and everything.

At the time I was talking about, of course, she didn’t have cancer. She was wearing a pair of clogs, and they made an unbearable clatter on the brick pavement as she walked away. I stayed tense until her annoying shuffle reached the silence of the sand.

Elsa’s feet and calves extended past the end of the chair she was stretched out on. I sat down next to them and started to stroke her from her toes to her knees. Her skin was smooth and fragrant with sun lotion. Every time I arrived at the beach house to meet her, every time I thought about arriving there, it made me happy. And now there I was, huddled at the foot of her lounge chair, not happy at all. I had recently become aware that something was out of balance. There were some slight oversights: nothing cool to drink in the refrigerator, my bathing suit left to fade in a sunny corner after the last time I’d gone swimming, my favorite shirt not yet ironed. And, most of all, there was Elsa herself, her impassive face. I didn’t feel waited for; I didn’t feel loved. I knew I wasn’t being fair. Elsa loved me, but with the reasonableness that I’d reduced her to; in the beginning, she’d been far more passionate than I was. She’d adapted herself, for love’s sake, to my caution, my reserve, but since my father’s death, I’d been regressing. I felt doubts; I felt internal struggles and rebellions. Feelings I’d avoided during my adolescence were emerging intact. Now she was my entire family, and I expected her to notice me. But your mother never did love weak people, Angela, and unfortunately, I knew that. That was the reason I’d chosen her.

I stroked her legs, but there was no answering tremor. All I got was the sweetish scent of her sun lotion. I loved her, but I was no longer able to attract her attention. I loved her, and I had turned off into that suburb, into the bones of that other woman. She didn’t disappoint me; her flesh held no memories; I was screwing nobody. When I made those euphoric, pathetic detours, I became the reckless boy I’d always wanted to be but never was. I’d go down and play in the courtyard in spite of my mother, in spite of her pale hands resting on the piano keys. I’d tear frogs apart. I’d spit into the plates. And afterward, I was alone, just like before. But the fragrance of crime stayed with me, and now it was rising up from the darkness and keeping me company while a clump of reeds next to the garden began to move. Their rustling harmonized with the soft sound of the wind.

“Do you remember that man at my father’s funeral?”

Elsa was propped up on her elbows. She turned her head toward me a little. “Which one?”

“The one who read.”

“Yes, vaguely. . . .”

“Did you think he was genuine?”

“Well, some poor devils bluff their way into strangers’ funerals because they have nothing better to do.”

“Right, but I don’t think he was one of those. He knew Dad’s nickname, and besides, he was crying.”

“Everyone’s got plenty of reasons to cry. Funerals just provide a good excuse.”

“So why were you crying?”

“For your father.”

“You hardly knew him.”

“I was crying for you.”

“But I wasn’t sad.”

“Exactly.”

She slid her legs out from under my hands and decided to laugh. “It’s late. I’m going to take a shower.”

Right, go take a shower! I’ll stay here a little while longer.
I’m going to watch the sun lower itself into the sea from the purpleedge of a sky so beautiful, it makes a man believe in God—
and also in a world where his dead are waiting for him to tell him
that nothing will be lost. And all the while I’m thinking about my
father, there’s a burning sensation in the tip of my cock. I’ll tend
to it by myself (it seems only right) under this cardinal red sky.
And then maybe I’ll get one of the beers out of the refrigerator—
or get pissed off if I find them under the kitchen table, still warm.

There was a whole raft of people at Gabry and Lodolo’s place, completely surrounded by a circle of torches whose flames stretched out in the wind. Suntanned faces came toward me; white teeth flashed in the dark. I was wearing my white linen suit but no tie. The hair on the back of my head was still wet, giving me a little chill, a shiver that slipped down under my shirt. As usual, I hadn’t shaved all weekend. With a glass in my hand, docile as an apostle, I said hello to people here and there. Over by the drinks table, talking to Manlio and his wife, Elsa was moving her hands, tossing her hair, smiling. Her full lips kept parting to reveal her slightly prominent upper teeth, as though she knew the powerful attraction of that small flaw. Her satin dress, the same crimson red as her lipstick, caressed the tremors of her full breasts as she laughed. At parties, we always went our separate ways; that’s the way we liked it. Every now and then, we’d brush past each other to make some whispered comment, but most of the time we waited until we got home, until after she kicked off her high heels and slipped into her espadrilles. Our friends made us laugh; the more tragic they were, the more they made us laugh. We spoke very badly of them, but with great affection, thus absolving ourselves. Elsa had a talent for getting to the kernel of every relationship. She’d toss away the peel and dig into the most succulent part of the fruit. She had performed an autopsy on every marriage in our acquaintance. Thanks to her, I knew that all our friends were unhappy.

At the moment, however, they seemed quite content. They were eating, drinking, looking at one another’s spouses. Evidently, their unhappiness was nimble enough to evaporate after a few glasses of
prosecco
and drift away, past the edge of the roof garden, down to the sea below, over Lodolo’s motor-boat with its gleaming white fenders, and out into the black water. No, I didn’t feel that I was surrounded by souls in pain.

Manlio was talking to Elsa, and only now and then did he shoot a quick glance at his Swiss wife. Martine moved her head in little jerks, following the movements of her eyes, which protruded too much and opened too wide. She was tiny, thin, and wrinkled: a tortoise, wearing a necklace of brilliant stones. She drank. She wasn’t drinking now, because Manlio was there, keeping an eye on her. But she drank when she was alone and Manlio was performing his operations. Uterine prolapses, deliveries, D and C’s, egg implants and extractions—all carried out, preferably, in private clinics. Manlio was very fond of Martine; he’d been taking her around with him for twenty years, like a jack-in-the-box. It really seemed as though he’d bought her in a toy store. All his friends said, practically in chorus, “What does he see in her?” I, for my part, saw nothing special in him. Martine kept an excellent house, she could cook
gigot d’agneau
and
pasta all’amatriciana
with equal skill, and she had no opinions. You’d pig out to your heart’s content and then forget to thank her; you don’t thank a jack-in-the-box. Naturally, Manlio cheated on her. “Naturally” was what Elsa said. “Such a brilliant, red-blooded man, stuck with that anorexic alcoholic.” I looked over at Martine past the crowd of faces between us, and I thought, Yes, if she were my wife, I’d gladly cheat on her with Elsa. Naturally. Elsa was so desirable, with her beautiful thick hair, her firm flesh, that slightly imprecise smile, those nipples sticking out there like an invitation. She was acting a little too giddy with Manlio this evening. He was her gynecologist. He gave her her Pap tests; he’d put in her IUD. Had she forgotten that? He certainly hadn’t. His cigar was clamped between his teeth, and his eyes burned like two embers. The jack-in-the-box bobbed up between them, inhaling the smoke from her menthol cigarette.

I went to get another glass of wine, and in passing, I brushed against Elsa’s red satin. Manlio raised his glass to me in what was supposed to be a gesture of mutual understanding.

Do what you must, Manlio. And get stuffed while you’re at
it. You wear tailor-made shirts with monogrammed pockets, but
there’s that protruding belly underneath. You sure have managed
to grow yourself a spare tire since we were at the university together.And what do you want? Do you want to screw my wife,
fatso?

Manlio was my best friend. Was and is, as you know. My heart has saddled me with a lifelong affection for him, though I couldn’t tell you the reason why.

Now, Raffaella was in full party mode, moving her broad hips inside her heavily embroidered Turkish caftan. Standing next to her was Lodolo, the host; with his narcotized stare and his rumpled shirt, he looked like some poor houseguest. Livia was far gone; her hair covering her face, her arms in the air, she was shaking her ethnic jewelry, totally focused on Adele, who was wearing a tight lobster-colored sheath dress and swaying by herself, twitching her head and shoulders back and forth like a high school student at her first dance. Their husbands, standing a little off to the side and embroiled in one of their formidable political discussions, ignored them. Livia’s Giuliano, tall and prematurely gray, was bending over Adele’s Rodolfo, a brilliant civil-law expert who performed with a troupe of amateur actors in his spare time. During another summer that was still to come, he would divorce poor Adele, cutting her off with lawyerly ruthlessness, putting an end to all her privileges practically overnight, without pity and without shame. But life is gradual; it unwinds itself over a length of months and years, and it leaves us time for everything. That evening, Adele was far from her future, and she shook her head and displayed the triangular-shaped ornaments that adorned her earlobes.

“Come on, Doctor!” she shouted at me.

My eyes found a way through the wall of heads in front of me and met, just for a second, the eyes of your mother. She, too, must have been at least one glass past her limit, because she was blinking myopically. She put her hand to her mouth, too late to cover a little yawn. I don’t like to dance. At a party, I generally try to stay well away from the music, which I always find aggressive and loud. But if I’ve got to dance, I plant myself inside my own square yard of floor space, and I never leave it. I closed my eyes and started bobbing and weaving, my arms hanging limp at my sides. The music got inside of me and stayed there, deep and hollow, like the sound of the sea inside one of those big shiny conch shells. I had recently seen one, but where? Oh, right, it was next to the jade elephant on top of the little chest, the one with the chipped lacquer, at that woman’s house. Several times, when I opened my eyes briefly and peered through the sweat, I had found myself staring at that vulgar conch shell, at its curled opening, pink and smooth as a woman’s sex. Now I was bobbing and weaving more stubbornly, bending forward, far forward, and then straightening up and throwing my head back. Overhead, the sky, brimming with stars, was full of forgotten light, like the darkness left behind at the end of a fireworks display. My drink had slipped out of my hand, and I could feel pieces of glass under my shoes. I lost my balance and nearly fell into Raffaella’s arms. “Watch out, Timo,” she said. “I might say yes.” She laughed, all the way up to her ears. Livia laughed, too, and so did Manlio, who was hopping around behind me in an attempt at solidarity. The expression on his face was wild. I put my arms around Raffaella’s thick waist and pulled her into a tottering pas de deux. Her feet got tangled up in her caftan, which was too long, and her fat belly gurgled against mine as I catapulted her here and there among the crowd.
Let’s dance, Raffaella. Let’s
dance. In a few years, your belly will be under my hands, an isolated piece of flesh surrounded by cloths, and your head will be on
the pillow with the blue health-unit logo. You’ll say, “What a
shame. I was finally losing weight,” and burst into tears. But for
now, laugh, dance, let yourself go!
And I’m dancing, too, Angela, in the samba of my memories. Completely clueless, like everybody else. Like your mother. She’d taken off her shoes, and she held them in her hand as she danced, arching her feet and frantically squashing her toes against the floor as though she were trampling grapes. The music was under her bare soles. “Watch out,” I said. “I broke a glass.”