That night Sophie talked, curled up on the sofa, while the stereo played a Bowie album she liked as much as I did—Hunky Dory, one of the Thin White Duke’s masterpieces. She was eager to tell me her story, to try to fit together pieces of the puzzle. A fashion model in Palermo: clearly out of place.
“Meeting Elena was fun, and it allowed me to get away from him. I found him relentless, his insecurity, his jealousy, his insistence on being the center of attention every single night. I was just doing my best to work hard, find a little scrap of security. And I was succeeding, but I had to get away from him. An English model I confided in heard that I loved dance, and she mentioned this school of Béjart’s. I decided to take a little time off, do a three-month course, and in May I ran away from Paris. That was where I met Elena, and after that it was easy to come down to Sicily. I knew that there was a city here called Cefalù, where they have one of the most fashionable Club Meds on earth, and we French think of Club Med as a little piece of heaven.”
I let her talk; I asked no questions. She was different from her usual self. She was loose, she was stroking my hand with the intimacy of a girlfriend, then she lit one of my Camels, and every now and then she’d kiss me, pressing her lips against mine, as if she were getting away with something. Furtive, light. Then she’d laugh.
I’d never seen Sophie that way. I sort of liked it, though in some corner of my mind, something imperceptible, an object out of place in the background, caught my eye. Too many words, certain unfamiliar gestures, her relaxed, jovial tone of voice, nothing in common with the girl steeped in seduction, wrapped in mystery. I imagined French disappointments in a metro station, abandonments, the emptiness of a missing father, and the fullness of a mother absent by necessity. Working in a Paris that to me was legendary but to her was the red zone of suffering. Then her work, the certainty that she was desired, frank and open sex, and finally running headlong to escape from an obsessed man. Coming to Sicily was like catching a ride, out hitchhiking on the highway of life.
I wasn’t jealous, I just wanted to understand better. There were vipers in the warm nest of that Sicilian summer and I knew it. In the meantime, I looked at her and desired her. Sophie stripped bare every impulse I had simply by being close to me. I had a constant desire to enter her. The apartment had become our bed. We made love everywhere, without a second thought, without protection. We took affection for sex, and we took sex for life. That’s how it worked, with Sophie and me. We lived. Our life was an attraction out of the animal kingdom, pure subtraction from the intellect. We were different, we were the same. I felt all the tenderness available to me, and in my hands she seemed to be defenseless; I could crush her if I squeezed. Not that night. And I asked myself the question that you should never ask yourself: Why not?
Two days later, Fabrizio found out the reason. We were in the kitchen in the late afternoon. He was in a robe; I was in a T-shirt and jeans. Fabrizio was opening a yogurt.
“Sophie’s shooting up.”
“What are you telling me, Fabri?”
“I found syringes in the trash can in the bathroom.”
“What do you think she’s shooting?”
“If you ask me, heroin.”
“That’s not possible, she’s not the type.”
Two friends of mine had overdosed and died, four years before. I knew a lot about smack: burglaries, thefts, broken windows and stolen car radios, the rapid slide down the ladder of existence, turning tricks for a baggie, lying about everything, with the blank look of idiotic automatons. Sophie was different; two nights ago she’d been so happy, with that urge to talk.
“If she were strung out on heroin, she’d be down, remote, and lackluster. I don’t believe you, plus I know her body, I’ve kissed her arms a thousand times. I’d have seen something. You’re talking nonsense.”
“In the syringes there was blood mixed with some kind of liquid. She threw them in the trash, relying on our naivete, or perhaps on your being a complete asshole.”
Heroin had devastated the sixties protest movement; it had been the far shore for far too many disappointments, the venue in which to elaborate the defeats of life in a self-destructive fashion: we hadn’t revolutionized the world, we hadn’t changed a thing, but on the other hand, we’d become excellent customers for the Mafia’s pushers. A splendid success. But Sophie was a fashion model, she was twenty-one years old, she came from a planet where the word “politics” hadn’t been invented yet. What did she have to do with heroin? Fabrizio had found two syringes. He showed them to me: you could see the traces of blood. I said nothing, but I could just hear the dull thump of a fallen body, in free fall for twenty stories, from the top of my soul to the bottom. Sophie falling, crashing to the cement, as beautiful as she was, the central panel in Leonardo da Vinci’s codex of proportions, luminous as a fire that burns every word, every conversation; a perfect girl who was becoming a perfect stew of herself. I didn’t know how I could go on loving her: I hated heroin, considered it the closest thing there was to a sawed-off shotgun, the sordid weapon that the Mafia used to eliminate its potential enemies. And Sophie was a shotgun shell, cocked and loaded, a pistol aimed straight at me.
I asked myself a number of fairly standard questions: Why hadn’t I noticed? Why, if she was strung out, did she still feel like having sex? Who was selling her the smack? How was she paying for it?
I only barely managed to find an answer to the first question: because I’m an asshole. Fabrizio was right: the reason I hadn’t noticed was because I was in love. The rest was a mystery that I was determined to solve.
The afternoon that my eyes were opened, that Fabrizio showed me the syringe, Sophie was working: she was shooting the last photographs for the catalog for that fashion boutique on Via Libertà.
The doorbell rang. I went to see who it was.
It was Sophie.
She gave me a kiss on the lips. She smelled faintly of smoke and her mouth was a place where I would gladly have been buried.
“Ciao. I’m exhausted.”
She had an underlying fair-skinned pallor, heightened by foundation, eye shadow, and mascara, all enhancing her whiteness. They wanted her to look like an extraterrestrial compared with the Sicilian model of beauty in those years, exemplified by a B-cup chest, long raven-black hair, and the kind of pelvis women have in real life but rarely in the world of fashion. The exact opposite of her.
“I had to change fifteen times.”
“What’s he like?”
“The photographer?”
“Right.”
“Okay. Not outstanding. He doesn’t know much about lighting.”
“What about the client?”
“He’s rich. Kind of fat.”
“What’s his name?”
“Salvatore Cincotta. He has a chain of boutiques called Atelier Donna, with outlets all over Sicily: in Marsala, Trapani, Agrigento …”
I waved my hand, signaling that I wasn’t interested in details: I was afraid I might seem to be suddenly worried or, even worse, jealous. Afraid to reveal to her, with a remark or silence, what Fabrizio claimed he had discovered.
Sophie avoided any other questions by starting to get undressed. She embraced me as cautiously as a distant relative, and asked me if I’d run some hot water for a bath. She’d been dreaming of soaking for hours, washing away the makeup, forgetting the day.
I heard the water splashing in the tub, and I knew that she was getting ready to take her bath, that she was naked in my bedroom. I opened a beer. I decided to put off any discussion of heroin till later. I was seized by the terror of ruining everything. That night. In my bed.
Half an hour later, Sophie was stretched out on the sofa, smoking a cigarette, her wet hair pulled back, her breasts barely covered by the bathtowel. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young was spinning on the turntable.
One morning I woke up and I knew you were really gone.
I could feel clearly that Sophie was going, or perhaps was already gone, and it m
ade me angry to know it could have been Salvatore who had plunged her into the throes of heroin, or perhaps someone else she’d met even before I first met her at Vergine Maria. Palermo was a nest of vipers; Palermo was the world capital of heroin trafficking. I’d seen heroin crystalize into existence in a little villa that broke every building code, located on the waterfront in Acqua dei Corsari, half an hour after the Carabinieri raided the place and uncovered the Mafia’s largest operating refinery. I was one of the first people to set foot in the place after the raid; I’d been tipped off by a friend who was a Carabinieri captain. The Cosa Nostra chemists and guards had managed to get away, leaving everything in disarray: the heroin-refining process and their lunch, a fruit salad made of Brazilian oranges, seasoned with oil and vinegar. I noticed a fork stuck into an orange peel in the salad bowl, and I had to think of the misery that man must have felt: after lavishing so much care on preparing this delicacy, he’d had to leave it uneaten, all because of those cornuti degli sbirri—those cuckold cops. I sat looking at the beakers and retorts, waiting for the refining process to be finished; I saw crystals form, break, and fall, turning into 100 percent pure heroin: undiluted heroin, capable of killing a junkie with the first push of the plunger into the syringe. As the crystals formed and fell, they made a crackling sound. A sound I’ll never forget.
At that exact moment, Sophie, or at least the love I felt for her, started to crack and shatter just like those crystals.
And that’s when I started to turn into an executioner.
I hated to think that Fabrizio might be right, that Sophie lived a double life, one in her relations with me and one with the world itself. Was she ashamed of her addiction? Did she not trust me? Or was I her only island of love and purity? Whatever the case, she had refused to tell me the truth, and unless I misremember, truth was the only accepted religion for our generation.
Why wasn’t she telling me?
I repeated the forbidden question in my mind: Why not?
I wished everything could go back to the way it was that first night, the enchantment of a boy and a girl bathing their souls in the dark sea of the stars overhead, in the hopes of finding something absolute.
Her.
Me.
Her hand, the hand of a Russian pianist, was pressed against my chest, our tongues were touching, I got an erection at the mere sight of her, the simple contact of her flesh with mine. Her lake-blue eyes—sea-blue, ocean-blue—were leveled at me; around us was the rest of the world: an insignificant landscape.
Now there she was, leafing through magazines on the sofa. Smoking a cigarette, waiting for the city heat to finish drying her off. My trust, however, was gone.
That morning I had read in the newspaper that the main conduit for infection with the new disease known as AIDS was homosexual sex. In second place, heroin addiction. A doctor was explaining that if you were an addict, the only way to reduce the level of risk was to buy and use new syringes every time you shot up, never to lend syringes to anyone else, and never to accept used syringes from anyone. If you were a homosexual, the doctor recommended using prophylactics. A very respectable word, suitable for a mass-audience newspaper. My friends and I had used condoms at the start of our sexual lives, when there weren’t many girls choosing to use IUDs or the pill. I used to buy a brand of condoms called Nulla—literally, “nothing.” Using them was intolerable, but we had no alternatives: none of us wanted to become fathers or mothers at age eighteen.
I was pretty sure I still had half a box of condoms left over from an affair with a young bookseller that had lasted a couple of weeks. I pulled one out and hid it under my pillow: I had confidently taken a second step down the staircase that leads from worthy to worthless.
I went back to where Sophie was, and she gave me a warm look. She’d recovered. She asked me if I wanted to go out.
“No, I want to stay home, just the two of us,” I said, without a smile, without concealing my new state of mind.
I didn’t want anything else, just to take her right then and there. I was filled with a dull, aching anger.
She raised no objections, complying placidly. I told her that I’d make her some pasta with botargo—pasta con la bottarga; I used parsley, garlic, and fresh red chili peppers. And, of course, the tuna roe that I bought at the Vucciria market from a shady character who claimed he made it with his own hands.
“It’s all okay,” I added, for no clear reason.
It was a little past eight o’clock on a late-August Wednesday night, and with all the precision of an astronomer, I could pinpoint the beginning of the final clash between two stars on the verge of destroying each other to the moment I said that phrase: “It’s all okay.” Two stars: Sophie with her heroin, me with my cowardly lies.
“Okay, let’s try your spaghettì avec la botargue,” she smiled, unsuspecting.
She came toward me, wrapped her arms around me with a renewed strength. I grabbed her ass with both hands, possibly a little too vigorously. She didn’t care; she gave me a slow, deep kiss.
I urgently desired her blonde pudendum. I felt a yearning to paint over my need for light, to deaden the itch to know more.
I lifted her off the ground, her arms still wrapped around me, half naked. I carried her into my bedroom. She took off my shirt, while I kicked away jeans and underwear in a single motion. She looked at me, restoring in me the desire that she could sense in my unfamiliar new acts of brutality. Her eyes opened wide, softening the features of her face in a smile that was no less erotic. She was intense, warm, and silent. She had opened her pale, elegant legs, the flesh taut over the long muscles, her pubic mound shaved almost smooth, adolescent, a pubic mound that could have persuaded Courbet to give up painting: the origin of the world was blonde, not dark-haired. To understand that, it would have been sufficient to look at Sophie at that moment, the way I did, ecstatic and furious at the same time. The open conflict raging inside me was still there, unresolved. I made myself wait. And I kept myself from penetrating her. I left her standing in a vulgar state of standby, stretched out naked on my bed, me eight inches away from her, our eyes locked.
Sophie must have assumed I was being playful. There was no real foreplay between us: we had the physical urgency of twenty-year-olds; we could make love at the movies, behind a breakwater, in a dressing room at an UPIM department store. Sex on the fly, bound together by reciprocal need.
With my right hand I found the condom underneath the pillow; I slipped it on without ever breaking eye contact. My reaching and stretching hadn’t alarmed her, she continued to trust in that young man who hadn’t figured anything out, who loved her, period, perhaps the first such encounter in her life where the arithmetic of self-interest hadn’t played a role. I slipped on the condom, and I slipped into her. And she screamed.
A powerful scream, something out of Hitchcock, the scream of someone who’d been stabbed. She jerked away from me and I suddenly found myself ejected, with that nothing between my legs dangling in thin air. Then a simple phrase, repeated in a crescendo: “Je ne suis pas une putain! Je ne suis pas une putain! Pourquoi? Pourquoi?” Over and over again: “I’m not a whore! Why?”
I mumbled a string of excuses, I talked about the risk of having babies, I begged her to forgive me. She went into the bathroom and locked the door behind her. I leaned against the door and listened to her sobbing softly on the other side.
“Sophie, please, open the door.”
The only answer was the splash of the tub filling with water.
Deep within her, a parallel tragedy had just been consummated. Heroin, whore. The two tracks down which her life was running: the demands of drug-dealing pimps the world over, the hungry yearning to seize the opportunity of a beautiful, penniless woman who was also a heroin addict. An ideal victim. With my hypocritical act, the product of male selfishness, I had reminded her just how much of a victim she was. In all her indubitable perfection.
I went back to my bedroom, stretched out, and waited for her
to find it within herself to forgive me for my sheer vulgarity. I couldn’t think of anything but my own selfishness. A foolish question dictated by the blindness of love made its way into my mind: What if Fabrizio had been wrong?
I pulled her suitcase out from under the bed. I opened it and rummaged through, finding clothing, pairs of panties, a book by Verlaine, various skin creams, a couple of letters from her grandmother postmarked Deauville, three new insulin syringes. I zipped it shut and pushed the bag back under the bedframe. Sophie had locked herself in the bathroom. I waited for her to come out and then, after an hour or so, fell asleep.
In my dreams, I saw her, abandoned, under the Pont Neuf. My arms reached out to her, standing on the deck of a Parisian bateau mouche, a tourist glimpsing the life of an enchanting and desperate young woman, in the vain hope of catching her in passing, rescuing her from her fate. In my dream, Sophie’s eyes were glazed over, filmy, and she looked at me with the detachment of the terminally ill.
At four in the morning, Fabrizio walked into my room, waking me up.
“Get up and come with me. Sophie. In the bathroom.”
“What is it, Fabri?”
“Just come with me.”
I imagined the most obvious thing to imagine. I followed him with a piece of tumultuous heart, the only shred left to me: the rest was a dog’s breakfast. The bathroom door was ajar, and Sophie was immersed in a tub full of water.
The water was transparent, no streaks of blood, no sign of razor blades. I touched Sophie and woke her up; she was ice cold. She reacted by saying something to me that I couldn’t understand. On the floor by the tub was the hypodermic she’d used to shoot up. Luckily, before getting in the water, she’d left the door ajar. Her nudity made her look small, cadaverous, completely defenseless.
I gave her my bathrobe and helped her to my bed.
She fell asleep on her side, her back to me, far away. I decided that I wouldn’t go to work the next day. I left a message with the newspaper switchboard in the middle of the night, saying that I had a fever. It was partly true.
The Four Corners of Palermo Page 8