“So that meant he didn’t have just one woman, aside from me, he had at least two or three, or who knows how many more. But I was incapable of doing anything about it, I just went on loving him and suffering over him. I was seized with a wave of panic, instead of snickering at his misfortune behind his back, when I thought about what would happen with his father, on account of the car. I was so worried that I was tempted to call his parents’ house and ask for his father and say that none of it was Stefano’s fault, just take the blame for the car myself, tell him that it was me who had ruined it with the black paint . . . and I did, I called Stefano’s parents that very same night, but there was no one home. They were all out on the street looking at the charred car, with the fire department and the police. In fact, Stefano had somehow managed to drive the paint-covered car all the way to his home, and then he had set it on fire with a tank of gasoline he’d found in the garage. The police theorized that it was a threat or a warning or an act of retaliation against his father, who for a while went everywhere with a police escort.
“I’ve never been in love with any other man. Not even with my first husband, or with the second, that’s for sure. And not even with my children, though I do love them deeply . . . The feelings I had for Stefano outweigh any thing and any person, I mean to say, the feelings I might have for any person. Because they include the wicked things, the crazy ones. The things you dream when you have a fever. With him, I could easily have committed a murder, if he’d asked me to, if I’d had even the vaguest notion that it might please him, and bring him back to me . . .
“I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so stupid as I was when I loved him. For a certain period, I even stopped washing. I lost twenty pounds. I cut my hair almost down to the scalp, thinking that I’d appeal to him again, like that, again, again . . .
“I didn’t give a damn about how he had left me all alone to face the most difficult moment, how cold and arrogant he had been. He was just so beautiful, so beautiful and wicked . . . Stefano Jervi, your classmate.
“My husband, on the other hand, is a good man . . . he is close to me, he understands me. I don’t need to think about him. I can go days on end without thinking about him, because in any case he’s there. You, too, were kind and thoughtful that time he hit me in front of your school—at least, from what you tell me, because I don’t remember a thing about you, that day. Were you really there? But that smack he gave me, that stayed with me.
“I couldn’t see anyone but him, I didn’t understand . . .
“Then when I found out that he was dead, I had already been married and divorced, and I had a young daughter . . . I can’t say that I was still obsessed with him, that wouldn’t be true, I hadn’t thought about him for a while, it had been ten years, I’d started another life, and after that, yet another life, my little girl, my job . . . but when I heard about it, I was seized with a violent pang of pain, as if someone had driven a sword through my body . . .”
IT WAS ONLY AT THAT MOMENT that I realized Rosi was crying, but not from the raucous sound of her voice, as she went on telling her story at the same monotonous pace, in the same remote tone of voice, but rather from the fact that the hair behind which she was hiding her face was wet again, like when she first came in out of the snowstorm. I didn’t interrupt her, nor did I try to dry her tears, I just started stroking her, from her shoulders down to the small of her back, dotted with stretch marks above and below her skinny butt cheeks. I noticed two small dark bruises right above her jutting sharp pelvic bones, which practically broke the surface, and there I concentrated my caresses for the longest time.
“. . . IT WAS AN INTOLERABLE, senseless grief. Stefano had vanished from my life, ten years it had been by that point, what did it matter to me that he was dead, and that he had died in that way, after all? What better occasion could there be to think that it served him right, it really served him right, such an absurd death! And just think: He was someone who had never given a damn about politics anyway . . . The most selfish egotist of all time . . . dying as a revolutionary combatant—come on, now! I couldn’t accept that, it was unthinkable, it made me want to laugh. All the same, that sword twisted ever deeper into me, into the pit of my stomach, taking my breath away, I was breathing as if my ribs had been bent inward . . . and all of a sudden I decided, with great clarity of mind, that I, too, wanted to die, like him, in just as senseless a manner, by blowing myself sky high . . . the apartment . . . my little girl, the high chair, the juice boxes, the sofas, the clothing and the shoes in the clothes closets . . . just blow it all up.
“I fastened all the windows, I went into the kitchen to turn on the gas on the stove, I took my daughter in my arms and, with a lighter in reach, I sat down at the kitchen table, waiting for the right moment . . . the point of saturation. But the pain wasn’t diminishing, in fact, it became intolerable, piercing, I thought I’d die of it, not from the gas. In the meantime, my little girl started yawning and rolling her eyes. I don’t know what was wrong with me, why I was doing it. I’m a calm woman, I’m self-reliant, I know how to make decisions. I know how to say yes and no. I told you yes, I told some other guy no, and I know the reason. At work they actually consider me a snake, a cold-blooded reptile, heartless, maybe you’ve heard people say it around town, and all just because I’m a thinker, because I know how to think. You don’t know me, and I don’t know you, all things considered. But if we’re here, it means that we know each other and we know what we’re doing, we know that it’s wrong, but we’re doing it anyway. That day, though, I was beside myself, something else was making decisions for me . . .
“When I looked at my little girl again, she had shut her eyes. She was asleep. Maybe because of the gas, which I could barely smell. It looked to me as if she was luminous . . . her flesh looked phosphorescent. I got out the lighter, ready to flick it. Outside the window, the stars were shining in the clear night sky. Steady, motionless. I looked down at my daughter once more, and she had changed again: a little corpse, motionless, swaddled in winding cloths, a statuette, you know, like those Madonnas, those tiny little Madonnas that glow in the dark . . . and suddenly everything was clear to me again, simple, the way it was supposed to be, I set the lighter down on the table, I stood up, I threw the window open, I twisted the knobs on the stove to ‘off,’ and with my daughter in my arms I went to throw open all the windows in my apartment, and five minutes later the gas had all flown out into the night sky, and my daughter was breathing normally. I went to lay her down in her little bed, it was all over now, the piercing pain in my belly had vanished, replaced by a bubble of nothingness, and the thought of Stefano as someone with whom love had been made, long long ago, sure, a good-looking young man, a special boy, my first sweetheart . . . but nothing more . . .
“I got off easy, and since then I’ve lived my own life.
“So that now, I laugh at certain memories with him. I laugh, and that’s all.
“I remember when he’d talk about your school and about the priests. He hated them. He hated all of you, his classmates, truth be told, or at least that’s what he told me. He wanted to run away from your school and from the priests. And from his family. But from the school, most of all. I don’t remember him ever saying anything about you, but in general he considered you all a herd of idiots. Except for one, a genius, he said that there was a genius in your class, an absolute genius . . . Do you know who he was talking about? Was that you? No? But there’s nothing you can do about it, Stefano was a wicked guy. Evil. One time he told me about how he injected poison into a plant . . . that you had a queer teacher who was in love with that plant, and he killed it, as a joke, by injecting it with poison . . . Was that true?”
“Yes. It really happened. But it wasn’t him who did it . . .” I said, to defend his memory. I don’t know why I said it. I had been reminded somehow of his large, dark-rimmed eyes . . . his gleaming white teeth. I stopped caressing Rosetta’s back and she whipped around to look at me.
�
��Ah, then . . . the usual liar!” and she laughed. “Let me tell you about something, which was just my last piece of lunacy. But a simple one, risk-free. So risk-free that it wasn’t even worth the trouble of trying it. Did you know Stefano’s sister, Romina? Do you remember her? If you met her, you surely liked her. She was the prettiest girl in Rome, in my opinion, or at least, the prettiest in her quadrant . . .”
“Her quadrant?”
At this point, in much the same way certain guidebooks do, splitting cities up into zones to make it easier to find monuments or restaurants, Rosetta Mauri ventured into a rather curious theory she had about Rome and the young women who were beautiful and famous, famous for being beautiful, the beautiful young Roman women of thirty years ago, the beauties of the schools, that is, of the high schools, the dance clubs, of the families of good-looking people, the most sought-after and desirable young women, about whom Rosetta knew everything, unlike me. According to her, there were actually different physical types, almost as if they were distinct species or breeds, depending on the quadrant they belonged to. The hair, the eyes, the mouth, etc. A persuasive theory, corroborated by numerous examples, which I’m not going to list here at any length because it would involve mentioning too many people, by their first and last names. I saw something of the sort on TV once, on a program (cruel, intelligent, and in fact, that program was taken off the air almost immediately) in which they went back, many years later, to dig up various beauty queens from school years, or a certain vacation spot, or a volleyball team.
In my city, in any case, and for fifteen years or so starting from the period when this story unfolds, Romina Jervi had illuminated with her beauty the entire northern quadrant, with a light so dazzling that, according to Rosi, she had dimmed the glow of all the others, “and I was among the girls that she made disappear, and I wasn’t exactly chopped liver, now, was I?”
I shook my head. Rosi was a perfect personification of the type of offhand appreciation that I must have read about in a book translated from the English: “I wouldn’t kick her out of bed,” a sentiment I was confirming to the letter at that very moment.
“Maybe it was to take revenge on Stefano, or else because I still loved him and I wanted something of his, something that belonged to him or resembled him. That resembled him closely. I’d had a lot to drink . . .”
You lovely thing, what are you talking about? I wondered to myself. Rosetta was one of those people who enjoy telling stories by tossing out broken, mysterious phrases to arouse their listener’s curiosity, so that the listener in question is therefore obliged to ask questions and act eager to know more, so that he practically has to beg the person who started the story in the first place to go on. It’s an old trick, I knew how it worked, so I didn’t ask a thing. After a lengthy silence, as if astonished that I wasn’t demanding further clarifications, she continued: “Well, there she was, in the same club . . .” In the meantime, she’d cupped her breasts in both hands, as if she no longer wanted me to see them. It was hellishly hot in that studio.
“You understand who I’m talking about, right? Romina Jervi, Stefano’s sister . . .”
Instead of nodding, I shut my eyes. That’s the best way to listen.
“I’d always wondered if she liked men. If she really liked them, I mean. Appearances or habits aside, it’s hard to tell, and even harder with Romina. What does it really tell you that someone has a boyfriend or a husband? So I decided to put her to the test. And then I thought to myself that kissing her would be like kissing her brother. She had the same mouth, in fact, her mouth really was Stefano’s mouth. As if they switched: one day he had it, the next day she did. After all, what’s the difference? A pretty mouth is a pretty mouth. Can two people have a single mouth? Yes: if they’re brother and sister. For that matter, your classmate’s mouth was the part I liked best about him. Okay, go ahead and think that I’m crazy . . . that’s what you think, isn’t it? And you also think that I’m not a very good girl, that I basically threw myself at you . . . I know that, but I don’t care . . .”
I took her hands off her breasts, and each one fell to the side. With one finger, I traced the stretch lines that radiated toward the armpit.
“You like them anyway?”
I nodded.
“Well, anyway, Romina, yes, Romina, the beautiful Romina . . . was rather stupid. For that matter, so was Stefano. Courageous, impetuous, and dazzlingly handsome . . . but stupid. Back then, Romina was dating a guy who was filthy rich and had taken her to a deserted little island, between Corsica and Sardinia, for two months, with nothing and no one, except for his jeep and his villa, and he’d leave her there, he’d fly away in his helicopter . . . maybe for a week, for business, and then he’d come back . . . he’d leave and come back, you get it? Even though she was already pretty dark, she’d lie out in the sun all day until she turned practically as dark as an African; for that matter, what else was she supposed to do on that fucking deserted island? Swim naked and lie in the sun. When I saw her in the club, she had just finished spending the summer like that. The asshole was drinking champagne with some noisy friends of his, and Romina was all decked out in jewelry, glowing in the shadows, and she was drinking too, but just taking small sips, as if she didn’t like it. Without even bothering to say hello, I just sank into the tiny space between her and the arm of the sofa she was sitting on. I took her glass out of her hand and drained it to the last drop. “That’s the way you do it,” I told her, and she was so surprised that she gave me a beautiful smile, filled with astonishment. Ah, that mouth, those teeth . . . I just had to kiss her, and right away. I pulled her head close to mine and I kissed her. Romina opened her eyes wide, dark-rimmed like Stefano’s, but she didn’t take her lips off mine. I don’t know what got into me, or really, I know exactly what it was. The interesting thing is the way that Romina responded to my kiss. Totally. With passion. As if she were kissing her man, who was sitting on the sofa next to ours, and as if I were kissing the man who had once been mine, namely Stefano. Then the asshole noticed what we were doing. “Hey, hey! What’s going on here?” he cried, and abandoning his noisy friends, he came over and squatted down in front of us, with the glass of champagne still in his hand, and the same grin on his face he had had before. He didn’t seem scandalized or jealous, quite the contrary. “Did I miss something?” he asked, looking at me in a provocative fashion. Romina gave him a slap in the face, which he pretended to take as a joke, even if it made him lose his balance from that filthy squatting position he had assumed and his champagne glass spilled onto the floor. In the meantime, Romina turned back to start kissing me again . . .
“What are you doing? Aren’t you interested in what I’m telling you?”
“Certainly I’m interested, you can’t imagine how much,” I told her, “but right now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to fuck you again.”
“No . . . no, I don’t mind.”
I slid into her. She gasped. She held her breath. And with her voice in a falsetto she asked if it had excited me to hear about Romina, about the two of them together. Had she done it intentionally?
“Do you . . . do you want me to tell you more . . .?”
“No. Shut up now.” That wasn’t why.
But she went on talking. And I went on fucking her.
AND IN THE MEANTIME, the snow kept coming down heavier and thicker, exactly as the TV weather reports and the daily newspapers had said it would, there was a blizzard over Milan, all of Lombardy, the railroad tracks were freezing over, the trolley cars came screeching to a halt, their regular runs at an end. When day dawned, the city was a crystal forest. I went to the appointment with my publisher on foot, sliding along the sidewalks, the only means of conveyance, all vehicles and buses were out of service.
I FUCKED ROSI FOR VARIOUS REASONS. The first and the most important one remains the absence of reasons: those are things that you just do, for the sake of it, and that’s that. Then there’s the fact that she was even more beautiful, even if
90 percent of her beauty had to be backdated to an age that had to be imagined, dreamed of, like when you’re masturbating: it’s a morbid aspect whose importance I couldn’t measure, a strange blend of excitement and contempt, perversion and heartbreak. Then there was her prompt willingness, reciprocal to my own. And then there was the fact that something which, whatever way you choose to look at it, would still have only made sense to have happened ten or twenty, or even thirty years earlier, but which instead didn’t happen, if fate decides that the possibility of it happening finally does present itself thirty years later, well then, this time it absolutely has to happen, you have to make it happen: in such a way that the loop of time closes in on itself, leaving no doors wide open or even cracked just slightly ajar. That door needs to be sealed shut, in other words. Rosetta Mauri and I had gone to bed together the number of times strictly necessary to open, consummate, and close the case. Last of all, there was perhaps a lesser, but still decisive, motive clamped in my twisted mind, namely, that she had been my classmate’s woman, that’s right, Stefano Jervi’s girlfriend, and he had taken her virginity. I entered Rosi thirty years after my screen-idol-handsome classmate did: in the same pussy where he had first come, getting her pregnant, I too had come, even though there was no longer any danger of my doing the same. She had made that clear to me an instant before my orgasm, when I had asked her in a choked voice if I needed to pull out: she was lying on one side with a twist of her torso that, if she hadn’t been so bony, I would have described as Michelangelesque, so that she could look me in the eyes while I loomed above her, penetrating her from behind, perhaps the finest position in which to make love with a woman because you have a view of both her face and her breasts and you’re in contact with her ass, and you can touch and kiss everything because her body, so to speak, turns into a single unbroken surface, and in response to my frantic query, she, who had already come violently and was quite tired, matted with sweat, indifferent, had replied merely with an ironic, complicit smile, baring her teeth, as if to say, “Go ahead and come inside me, kid, don’t worry . . .” whereupon, understanding that contemptuous smile as the signal of an experienced, knowledgeable woman, perhaps even happy to be out of the perverse circuit of childbearing, I thrust my sex deep into hers until I had filled her sex with semen. Just like a kid.
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