“From what?” Manuela is alarmed. “Didn’t you tell me Lapo was busy?” “Who ever heard from him again?” Vanessa grumbles, shrugging her shoulders. “He disappeared—he doesn’t answer his phone, I sent him two texts yesterday, but he hasn’t texted me back; he didn’t even wish me a happy new year.” “So you didn’t go to the party with him?” Manuela asks. She has the feeling she’s missed something. “No, I went with Simone, Biagio, Melissa, you don’t know them. It was a madhouse. We lost track of each other at some point.” “I’m totally confused,” Manuela says. “Me, too,” Vanessa says. “What’s the fifteen hours about?” Manuela insists. But Mattia’s Audi emerges from the garage and pulls into the middle of the road, and they have to hurry to get in so he won’t block traffic—Manuela in front, Vanessa and Alessia in the back, the girl clinging to her mother, not wanting to let go for even a second. “Don’t be afraid, make yourself comfortable,” Mattia says, looking at her in the rearview mirror. “I’m sorry there’s no booster seat, but you can sit on my coat, besides, you’re a big girl now.” “It’s okay,” Vanessa says, buckling the seat belt, and thinking instantly that if a man knows child safety laws, it means he has a kid himself. And if Mattia has a child, he’s not the man for Manuela. Manuela can’t get herself mixed up in a situation like hers.
She’d been going out with Youssef for five months when it emerged that he had a wife and three children in Morocco. He said it was what his parents wanted, that it was a loveless marriage, he’d get a divorce if she wanted him to, but Vanessa didn’t want to take on that responsibility. In the crinkled photo he’d shown her (he kept it in his wallet, behind his residence permit), his wife, a monumental woman with eyes ringed with kohl, had a kind, good-natured face. His three children—all boys, all between the ages of nine and thirteen, curly haired and relaxed—had sly smiles and looked incredibly like their father. Youssef was ready to repudiate Yasmina and move his children to Italy. But Vanessa, stunned by the disappointment and nearly prostrate with hatred for her rival, discovered she felt a certain solidarity with that fat, maternal woman who was, in a certain sense, a widow, who had raised their children by herself, albeit with the money her husband sent every month. Why should she take her husband away from her? He lived here ten months of the year already. They never spoke of it again.
Youssef had two families and divided himself between two countries, two languages, two women, two lives. He wasn’t happy here or there, nor were they. Vanessa wanted to leave him, and every now and then she did, for a while. But she also wanted to have a child with him, which is why she had stopped taking the pill this summer. Youssef is a trustworthy, serious, and generous man. He loves Alessia and she’s fond of him, too. He’s as good as his word; when he says something, he does it. And she is sorry, really incredibly sorry, for what happened last night. Youssef didn’t deserve it. Neither did she.
Manuela looks intently at the road; it’s already been swallowed up by the imminent darkness, which is occasionally pierced by headlights. Every now and then she turns to Mattia and smiles, and everything—her new way of doing things, her mysterious need to touch him at every opportunity, the joy that lights up her eyes when she looks at him—makes it clear to Vanessa that her sister really is falling for the guest at the Bellavista.
At the roundabout, Mattia doesn’t know which way to go, so he circles it twice. Then Vanessa shakes off her torpor and remembers to direct him toward the Aurelia, toward Rome. The night before, when she’d looked at her watch, it was three a.m. A dark place, far from the streetlights and the music, probably the parking lot because all around her all she could see were cars. Her cheek was pressed against the hood of a car, the cold metal freezing against her face, her deafened ears burning, her mind confused, a bitter taste in her mouth, her insides in turmoil. Someone was fucking her, and that realization had left her dumbfounded, because she couldn’t remember leaving the Gas Works and it seemed to her that just a second before she’d been in ecstasy on the dance floor. It was like there was a black hole inside her head. “Hey!” she had yelled. “Hey, what the fuck are you doing?” But she couldn’t turn around, all she could see was a hairy arm with a mermaid tattoo.
* * *
The first stop is the emergency room at a hospital on the outskirts of Rome. Vanessa gets out, saying she won’t be long. Manuela, increasingly bewildered, opens the car door and runs after her—limping without her crutches. The Paris sisters disappear, both of them tottering down the ramp lined with dormant ambulances, their doors closed. There’s not a soul in sight; it’s like the hospital’s abandoned. A stretcher, straps dangling and bars broken, stands forgotten at the entrance. “Who stole your front teeth?” Mattia asks Alessia, who sits petrified in the backseat, clasping her Hello Kitty doll. “No one, they fell out,” Alessia whispers, scared. “What?” Mattia feigns surprise. “And the cat didn’t come back to bring you a present?” “What cat?” Alessia asks, curious now because she had a cat for real, Aunt Manuela brought it home when she was on leave, a scabby stray she found scratching in the trash cans along the beach. A yellow tabby with round, phosphorescent eyes like golden marbles. Aunt Manuela named her Moon, like Sailor Moon’s talking cat, even though she later discovered that she was a he. Manuela couldn’t take him with her to the barracks up north, so she had trusted Alessia with him, much to her mother’s and grandmother’s dismay. But one morning not too long ago, while Alessia was at school, Moon had jumped off the balcony and disappeared.
“Do you know why he didn’t come back?” Mattia explains as if revealing a secret. “Because he put on his magic boots, changed shape, and now he’s on a mission for the Marquis of Carabas. I am the cat. Open your hand.” Alessia perches on the edge of the seat and tentatively stretches her hand toward the big strong man who says he’s a cat. Mattia gives her five crisp bills. “One for each tooth,” he says. “You have to keep them, though, that way they’ll grow back quicker.” “Okay,” Alessia promises. She always talks with her hand over her mouth to hide the gap in her teeth and her gums, red like slices of meat from the butcher, but the strange man with big blue eyes and sunglasses saw anyway. Still, she doesn’t believe he is Moon, the tabby cat that jumped off the balcony, no.
“Do you know Tom Tom?” Mattia asks, turning on the GPS. “They stole ours,” Alessia says. “They smashed the window with a rock.” “No one ever steals anything from the Marquis of Carabas,” Mattia assures her, pointing to the little gray box to the left of the steering wheel. “Just tell it where you want to go, and Tom Tom will take you there. Come sit here.” Alessia, docile, climbs over the handbrake and catapults herself next to Aunt Manuela’s mysterious friend. A strange man with a good smile that doesn’t frighten her. “I want to go find the cat,” Alessia says, “I want my teeth back right now.” “Okay, let’s give it a try,” Mattia says, and has her enter the letters G-A-T-T-O—Italian for cat—on the display. It takes Alessia a long time, too long. When Mattia asks her what grade she’s in, she murmurs that she’s in second, but she’s behind. Her teacher says she’s slow, attention deficit disorder. It saddens Mattia how easily they can undermine a child’s self-esteem. The conformist cruelty of adults. A woman’s voice, metallic yet sensual, suggests they turn left. There’s clearly a Via Gatto—perhaps after Alfonso Gatto, a poet in school anthologies, whom Mattia had always liked because of his feline name. “Come drive,” he says, letting her sit between his knees and placing her hands on the wheel. Alessia smells of Play-Doh and Johnson’s baby shampoo, a scent that stabs him in an undefined spot in his chest, near his heart.
He has to take two deep breaths to regain control of himself, emptying his lungs like a pregnant mother in Lamaze class. Then he places his hands, which are so much bigger, on top of hers, and removes the brake. The car moves through the deserted hospital parking lot, up and down the ramps, around the flower beds, while the woman’s voice delivers increasingly abstruse, imperious, and pointless directions on how to arrive at the ineffable Cat. When Van
essa and Manuela reappear, they find the Audi making slow circles around the fountain, Alessia mounted between Mattia’s arms and legs, both of them laughing as if they’ve known each other for ages and have always been great friends. The Paris sisters aren’t laughing at all. “We have to go somewhere else, we couldn’t find it here,” Manuela says vaguely as Vanessa hides in the backseat. Mattia notes that her hands are still shaking but that her pupils are less dilated. Whatever chemical substance she took, the effect is wearing off. Manuela has Alessia punch the name of their destination into the Tom Tom, then nestles her in her mother’s arms. They pull onto the highway and drive without talking, guided by the invisible woman’s metallic voice. Alessia leans forward on the seat, and every now and then Mattia turns and winks at her. He’s good with children, so, Vanessa deduces, he’s an active and engaged father.
Manuela doesn’t notice, though. She’s still troubled. Vanessa asked the triage nurses for the morning-after pill. And they rudely invited her to look elsewhere, because the doctors here are all conscientious objectors and they never order it. “But weren’t you on the pill, Vanessa?” Manuela asked, as she left the emergency room as red-faced and ashamed as a thief, hoping that those women, intent on watching TV in the tiny glass booth, hadn’t recognized her from the evening news. “I’m trying to have a child with Youssef,” Vanessa had replied, lengthening her stride. “But he’s married to someone else! You’re crazy, do you want to start all over again?” “What do you know about these things!” Vanessa had hissed cruelly. “You and your gun and your platoon and your gold stripes. But I’m different, I feel more feminine when I’m pregnant, breastfeeding makes me happier than anything, better than any orgasm, I want to have at least five children, I’ve already waited too long.” “Excuse me, but why are you worried?” Manuela followed after her, hobbling on her lame leg. “You’re not even ovulating, you had your period last week. You told me so yourself. In the valley of the tombs, when I left you with Lapo.” “Well, I was bullshitting you.” “But why?” Manuela had exclaimed. “Because you’re like a cop about that kind of thing, I didn’t want you to think less of me,” Vanessa had said without turning around.
The GPS obediently directs them to another hospital, perched on a hill just off the highway. An ugly white barrack of a building, twelve stories tall. Hundreds of illuminated windows punctuate the night. Vanessa wants to go alone this time and Manuela doesn’t insist. It’s all so horrible. Mattia gets out to stretch his legs. They stroll with Alessia along the tree-lined avenue that leads to the building for the terminally ill. They take her hands, Mattia her right and Manuela her left. Mattia tells her a story that sounds like a manga version of “Puss in Boots,” with an energy and conviction Manuela would never have thought him capable of. She’s sorry to have involved him in this mess, and at the same time she feels that on this miserable evening, spent navigating between exit ramps and hospitals, she has discovered a different and better man. A man to whom she feels bound by something more than just sexual attraction, by something that resembles tenderness, the kind of affection that’s born from familiarity. And to think that only a week ago, she didn’t even know he existed.
Vanessa reappears quickly. Too quickly. “Nada,” she whispers, “conscientious objectors here, too. What time is it?” “Twenty to eight,” Mattia says. “Don’t hate me, but they suggested I try at Terzo Miglio,” Vanessa says to him. “Why should I hate you?” Mattia says with surprise as he deactivates the alarm. The headlights blink. “It’s kind of a weird way to spend the first day of the year, but we’re having fun, right?” Alessia nods. “Do you know he’s the Cat of the Marquis of Carabas?” she confides to her mother in a whisper. “But no one knows, he travels incognito because he has to deliver a message.” “What message?” Vanessa asks distractedly. She can’t help but think that while they travel in comfort in Mattia’s Audi, or rather Avis of Fiumicino’s Audi, the sperm of the strangers she met at the old Gas Works are traveling in comfort in her vagina, from whence the lavender douche may not have evicted them. She doesn’t even remember who or how many they were. Two for sure, because after the one with the mermaid there was another, in a green bomber jacket, who was practically dancing even inside of her, crooning fuoco nel fuoco—fire in the fire—and was so high he didn’t even realize he’d come. And there could have been a third, maybe, because she remembers a different rhythm, as painful as flesh tearing, and she can hear her own voice saying ouch, go slow, you’re hurting me, but her voice doesn’t sound worried in the least, in fact it’s cheerful, exhilarated almost. Then she danced some more, and took something—or maybe that was earlier—the fact is, she must have fainted, or fallen asleep, anyway time passed because the next thing she remembered, it was already morning. She was vomiting in a Porta-Potty, the light drilling into her brain. There was no one around now, on the floor only clumps of toilet paper, empty cans, and bottles. A strange, muffled yet deafening silence; her ears were buzzing as if a crazed bumblebee were whirling around inside. A security guard asked her if something was wrong and she said no, and he said, well, you’re either peeing blood or you need a tampon, and she looked between her legs and burst out laughing because in that instant the situation seemed comical to her, and she kept on laughing hysterically as she wandered about the huge, empty parking lot searching for her car, and she laughed as she drove, unable to stop the convulsive tremors that shook her like an electric current sizzling in her veins. She nearly crashed getting onto the highway, and in fact she did manage to swipe the guardrail with the side of her Yaris, leaving a headlight on the asphalt. So then she parked in the turnout of a gas station and slept until she felt sober enough to get on the road again. She didn’t want Manuela to suspect any of this. She would have hated her. And her little sister’s opinion mattered to her, more than anything. I just wanted to have fun. I was too trusting. I’m not wary enough of people.
They stopped giving it out at the Terzo Miglio when the new medical director arrived. They try all the hospitals in the area, and when Vanessa gets back in the car after the sixth one, she curls up in a corner, leans her head against the window, and starts to cry—not for herself or for the pill they won’t give her or for the terrifying prospect of being pregnant after such a night, but for Youssef. Because she ruined everything, and now it seems that she has lost the only certainty and the only fixed point in her life: him. She sniffles softly, but Alessia is dozing serenely and doesn’t notice.
* * *
Rome is just starting to rouse itself from its holiday torpor; there are just a few cars on the street and the occasional bus, empty of passengers. On the asphalt a mire of broken glass, champagne corks, unexploded firecracker, rocket, and paper bomb cartridges. Mattia doesn’t know the city well and is having trouble getting his bearings: he diligently obeys the GPS, slowing at times to look at a cupola, an obelisk, an equestrian statue. They cross the city from north to south, and then back again. They sweep past aqueducts, palaces, churches, fountains, restaurants, bars, arches, metro stations, temples, long straight streets lined with hundreds, thousands of shops, shutters lowered. He would like to live in Rome. No one notices you here. Everyone is anonymous, everyone is free.
They cross a bridge in reinforced concrete and then, in the opposite direction, a monumental Fascist-looking bridge in marble, on which a graffiti writer has sprayed a sentimental slogan in black. As he waits for the light to turn green, Mattia has time to make it out: HE WHO SOWS SEEDS IN THE WIND WILL MAKE THE SKY BLOSSOM. He reads it aloud, as if reciting it to Manuela. But she says it’s not true. To make a seed bloom, you have to water it, care for it, you have to bend your back and hoe the soil, things don’t take root without effort. Vanessa knows her sister is wrong. It’s an idealistic vision of nature, and of human existence. A fertilized egg doesn’t need anyone’s effort to take root. It simply blooms. She wouldn’t dream of saying so, though. She just prays it doesn’t happen.
The hospital she remembered being behind Piazza del Popol
o—they sewed up her knee in the ER after she fell during a school trip when she was a girl—no longer exists. It’s been shut down. When she asks for the pill in the other hospital in the historic center, behind Saint Peter’s, they look at her as if she were a murderer. Each time, Vanessa comes back more and more quickly; after a while it only takes a few minutes. And each time she gets back in the car, she slams the door with less force. “Don’t get the wrong impression,” Manuela says between hospitals, “she’s not promiscuous, she’s just too impulsive.” “I think very highly of your sister,” Mattia replies. “She’s full of joy.”
They even ask at the all-night pharmacy behind the train station, but the pharmacist doesn’t understand what Vanessa is talking about—or he pretends not to. Mattia pulls over to the right, in front of some potbellied planters, awaiting instructions. It’s nine in the evening. Dark porticoes ring the piazza. Cars circle a fountain: jets of water rise high and then fall, titillating the nipples of naked bronze nymphs. It seems to Mattia an unusually erotic monument in a Catholic city like Rome, and he would like to know the name of the artist who dared conceive of and then place it right there, in plain sight, on a hill dominating the entire historic center. His car headlights illuminate the bare, concave brick façade of a building swallowed by the gloom. Embedded between imposing ruins, it seems ancient. Roman, surely. Baths, maybe. Without saying a word, Manuela opens the car door and gets out.
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