All Things in Their Place

by Giulia Dell'uomo

  Beep beep – my phone buzzes and distracts me.

  It’s a message. Roberto. Listen, there’s something I want to say to you, even if I shouldn’t. For the first time in my life I have seen a patient through the eyes of a man and not those of a doctor.

  Now I understand.... I understand his behaviour, at once helping but at the same time rejecting and repulsing. A way of distancing himself while remaining attached. I understand the reason behind his giving me his number. Not to get me, but to be found. I understand why every time he was in my room with me I felt like a woman even when I was wearing pyjamas. Even with my Frankenstein scar on my neck with each cut and stitch. I felt like a woman even though I was barely 20 years old. And I felt like a woman because the illness makes you feel like that a bit automatically. It takes your youth from you and catapults you into adulthood. Just like that. All of a sudden. It plays with stealing your innocence and all your future dreams. It plays at making you touch the stuff of our existence and the crude acknowledgment of the contrary. Up to a few weeks ago I was a girl like any other. Now I feel different, as though my learning curve is a bit steeper than a regular 20 year-old. But I want to scale those heights with Roberto. Because I believe in destiny. And if everything was magically drawn in the dawn before time, it can only be his hand that helps me navigate the steps.

  Tonight I am going to see a film with my girlfriends, a comedy starring Carlo Verdone to match my mood. I love his films, the way he makes movies, his ability as an actor and director. Denim jacket, black pants, killer heels. And an accessory that I wear everywhere since my operation, a scarf. They suggested it to me on the ward, to stop sun getting to the wound until it heals. I am running late, damn. I don’t even have time to tidy my room. On my bed there are four jackets, seven pairs of pants. On the floor my Fendi scarves are strewn, the grey ones for use on odd occasion. Then there are the boots, slippers, ballet flats, and lace-up ankle boots. In other words there is nowhere to step. ‘Bye mum I’m going out’. ‘Where are you going?’ and before giving her the chance to hear my answer I am already out the door, behind the wheel of my Smart car.

  ‘Sara finally!’ Bea comes to meet me, my friend with the most beautiful eyes in the world. They are the most intense sky blue colour. ‘We’re waiting for you. Francy and Eleonora are here too’. ‘Hi guys, sorry I’m late!’ ‘Which film did we decide on?’ asks Eleonora. ‘The Verdone one right?’ While I’m at the box office getting the tickets my phone rings and his name appears. Roberto. ‘Hello’ I answer with my heart in my mouth, without my shield each word echoes. ‘Are you busy?’ ‘No not at all. I’m going to see a film with the girls’. ‘Sara I need to tell you something. It’s about what binds us.’ ‘Sorry, what binds us? A couple of messages is hardly binding’. I’m feigning aloofness. I’m trying to see what he’s thinking. ‘In the name of the chaos that your strong presence is wreaking in my head’. I respond with silence. ‘Why aren’t you talking?’ ‘You called me’. ‘If you answer my texts you are thinking about me too right?’ Silence again from me. The tone isn’t the best. When someone says ‘I need to tell you something’ it’s not that they have to because there is someone with a gun to their head. It’s because after having told you, they feel better. A kind of personal unburdening. ‘Are you there?’ ‘Yes, talk to me’ I’m starting to get annoyed. And all of a sudden, in the same way he gave me his mobile number he says ‘I’m with someone’.

  Thump. Straight to the heart.

  ‘Since when?’ Even though it feels as though my heart is about to burst through my chest I try and be cold and determined. And then with the violence of a train crashing into a wall he answers ‘Ten long years’. An unending stream of questions swirls in my head but I am unable to say anything. Because, in reality, what is there to say?

  ‘No, no, no. No way. He should never have given you his number if he had a girlfriend. What does he want from you?’ Exactly. I’m not the only one asking myself these questions. Francy is angry. She fears I will suffer for nothing. ‘I agree with Francy’ adds Eleonora. ‘Me too’ says Bea. ‘But in the end at least he told you straight away. That was the right thing to do. He could have hidden it from you. Maybe he’s serious about you’. Many theories follow, that’s how it is with friends. He’s playing a tough guy. He’s just playing. He’s not playing and you’re the woman of his dreams. It could go on for hours, listing infinite scenarios for this singular situation. And yet I am certain that the only thing that will help is time. Boring? This too happens in everyone’s life. Everybody has heard at least once ‘time heals all wounds’. Sometimes it is a common place where you get easily trapped. Other times, instead, truth is simple but painful to accept. And when does this time arrive? When does it pass? How much of this time do I need to live? In the end, the greatest desire in the world is to have more time. Time to achieve more dreams, to resolve the most difficult situations calmly. To avoid regrets. More time would be useful for everyone. For me, now, it would help me understand. And maybe to grow. The only certainty I have is that I can stop all of this, whatever it is. A doctor and his patient. Nothing more. There was never anything more. I breathe a sigh of relief. I have made a decision and feel lighter.

  Thump thump thump. My heart is beating hard. I feel like it’s about to burst out of my chest, while I’m sitting on the bench in Piazza del Popolo. One of the most beautiful squares of the capital. If you look at it from the viewpoint at the Pincio, it is like looking at lots of tiny ants. Or else you could dive right in. You can feel the heat of the people, the different languages, the magic of the colours, the enchantment of the tourists, the glint of the fountain in the sunlight. You live and breathe the beating heart of Rome. But in that moment all I could hear was my heart. Thump thump thump thump. I have no idea what I’m doing here. Text message. Francy. Friend, be good. You know you are taking a big risk being there and I don’t even like him, but I know you like the back of my hand and I know you have never looked at anyone else the way you looked at him in the hospital. I smile, maybe because it is true. Maybe I tried to hide it from myself and from him. From the rest of the world. What can I do? You only live once and no one knows where this journey ends. I believe in destiny. All the ingredients are there for a sensible folly. I see him come out of the crowd and again feel that sensation of being the only people in the world. The first date between a man and woman is magical. There is the fear of not being liked, the anxiety around what to say, how to speak. There is the want to love and to discover one another. It is the extraordinary ordinariness that brings two people to love each other slowly. But the first date between a man and woman who are doctor and patient is something more. It is the meeting of two worlds that should never meet. It is the creation of the forbidden. Of leaning over the precipice at the risk of falling. It’s a pinch of madness. A test of courage.

  ‘Hi’. ‘Hi’ I answer a bit embarrassed and a trembling voice. ‘Have you been waiting long? Sorry I was late, a last minute emergency’. ‘Don’t worry’. He is warm and speaks easily. I succeed only in speaking in monosyllables. Not one word extra comes out. And yet over the phone I was more confident. I am cognisant of the fact that at his house someone is waiting for him. I’m angry. ‘Shall we get a beer?’ ‘Uhm, I don’t want to disappoint you but I don’t drink’. ‘Look I won’t hassle you, I’m human too. I’m not just a doctor. I have as much fun as other 30 year-olds.’ While he talks, I observe him. He seems so different to when we met. Black leather jacket, jeans. Very rock and roll. He has a slight wrinkle between his eyes, where his nose begins. Maybe that is the part of his face that he uses most when observing patients. Maybe when he concentrates during an operation he frowns and it wrinkles his forehead a bit. We walk towards the Via del Corso and while I am absorbed in my thoughts I come out with ‘You won’t ever leave her will you?’ I regret saying it right away. In the end, who am I to make demands? And his response is just as direct. ‘It’s ten years of my life’. But I don’t understand. What does time have
to do with it? Maybe you win a prize if your relationship lasts the longest? Anyway if that’s the case what was he doing here with me?

  ‘Do you love her?’ A straight ‘yes’ arrives like a hurricane in my ears and takes with it any possibility. I have already heard too much. I got my answers. For me, life is black and white. No grey. No shaded areas.

  ‘I’m going home’. ‘I’ll take you’ He doesn’t permit response. We cross this city I love, yet I am unable to enjoy its beauty. I’m annoyed and feel astonished. How did I think it could all be this easy? I run off. He catches up to me and grabs me. ‘Stop it, I’m not athletic enough’. ‘Well then stop smoking’. I don’t ask any more questions, I don’t want any more answers. We get to my front door. ‘Later’ I say brusquely, I would like to say ‘Goodbye’. I look for my keys in my bag which is always full of too much stuff. He takes my face between his hands, by force, and kisses me on the lips. Roughly he presses his mouth on mine. Here it is, the kiss. The moment a woman waits for, dreams of, fantasizes about. I pull away instantly, it wasn’t going as I had planned. He imposes his presence with his lips. Mouth against mouth. ‘Bye’ he says. ‘Goodbye’.

  ‘Ele, I’m wrecked, it didn’t go the way I thought. The worst first date of my life. He kissed me at the front door, but he told me he loves her. The first thing I do is vent to my friend over the phone. ‘Sara forget about him and if he calls again don’t answer’. ‘But how? How am I going to cope each time I see him at the hospital?’ ‘You’ll act the way you did before you ever met him. You are strong on your own, you don’t need him’. Ok, my friend is right. I turn off my phone. I won’t hear from him again. But my heart knocks at my head as if to say ‘It’s futile trying too hard, I’ll win in the end.’ Stupid heart. I’ll turn it off together with the phone.

  I lasted a whole day with my phone off. My heart remained on. Text. Sara, I know that I shouldn’t. But I keep thinking of you. I don’t answer. Another text. Where have you gone? And another I need to talk to you. I don’t answer. I’m at your house. I go to the window. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ ‘I wanted to see you, you disappeared.’ ‘For obvious reasons I would have thought’. ‘There are no obvious reasons for disappearing. I know you think about me’. ‘I didn’t know you were a mind reader as well as a doctor.’ ‘Silly. Come on, come down. We can’t keep talking between the road and the window!’ Says who? You can, and how. Words go to the sky and fall back down to earth. Then they disintegrate when they hit the earth, that way they don’t hurt as much.

  ‘Give me five minutes and I’ll come down’ ‘Oh come on, you don’t need to make yourself up. I have already seen you naked, in your pjs with drainage tubes’. Ok I feel completely stupid. He has this amazing ability to make me feel moronic which I hate. I look at him and blush and he knows I’m embarrassed. He makes a cocky face and laughs. He lights a cigarette and while he puffs the smoke away repeats ‘are you coming?’ I slam the window shut and hurry down to him. He hugs me as soon as I am within reach. ‘Get off me you stink of smoke’. ‘You’re in a good mood today’. ‘Oh well, you’re always in a bad mood’. He forces a kiss on my cheek. ‘You want to tell me what you’re doing here?’ ‘I missed you’. ‘Ok, you’ve seen me so now I can go’. ‘Where are you going...’ He grabs me by the arm, his tone softening. ‘You can’t escape from me...’ He takes my face in his hands, moves closer and kisses me. Not just any kiss, not like the other one. This time the kiss is not one way. This time I give in. I don’t want to fight. This time he has won. And it doesn’t matter if I will have a new scar tomorrow in my heart. Today I’m alive. Tomorrow I’ll worry about tomorrow.

  There is a something a bit masochistic in addictions. You’re addicted to something that in the end is bad for you. Cigarettes? Alcohol? No, you don’t need to go that far. You can stop with love. You can be addicted to someone you love. But if you are addicted then maybe it isn’t true love. You breathe based on how your man or your woman breathes and this feeling seems to gift splashes of life. But as time passes you realise that instead you have lost life behind something that is bad for you. And it’s too late to stop. It’s like this with Roberto. Love that becomes a drug. Impossible, chaotic, difficult, unbearable. And when we are together I get re-energised. I get an energy in my body to take on the world, the determination to win the battle with him. We speak on the phone, we go for a walk, go for pizza. We look at the sky and we dream, stretched out on a bench. All simple things, the most normal of the normal, for a couple. But he and I are not a couple and that which might appear to be mundane to the rest of the world to me is a breath of life. Mouthfuls of oxygen and pure air. Unexpected moments to take, moments that may be one-offs. Unprogrammed moments, unrepeatable moments. Each time could be the last. So I rely on all of this. And it doesn’t matter how much it hurts every time he leaves and is with his ‘official’ other. It doesn’t matter because without it I would be worse. And it’s him with his presence today that anaesthetises me from the pain of tomorrow.

  ‘Stop it Sara. This way you only hurt yourself. You have to think of yourself, of your health, of your life’ Francy is angry.

  I always talk to her about Roberto, I’m monotonous. And she is worried. She’s not wrong. ‘I can’t do without it. The other day I told him that he’s a drug’. ‘And what did he say?’ ‘He said that he wouldn’t be able to find a better phrase himself. He said he feels the same way’. ‘Well then...I understand that ten years is a long time. But this way three of you suffer. You, him and her, even if she knows nothing. Or has she figured out?’ “Francy I don’t know. He says that things between them are bad. I only know that sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy. I would never have imagined finding myself in a similar situation and I can’t get out. I feel guilty, dirty. But to say goodbye to him would hurt even more. I can’t even think about facing the radiotherapy knowing he is not in my life. I can’t think about not speaking to him about my day. It’s very simple in the end. We aren’t living anything too big.’ She interrupts me. ‘Exactly! You make me angry. I don’t understand what you could miss about him! It’s not like he gave you the moon’. ‘For me that simplicity is better than the moon. It’s a simple mess. Or a chaotic simplicity. But that I can’t live without, in both cases’.

  Life goes by like a full river. When I stop to think, when I stop on the riverbank and look at it I realise how extraordinary my existence is. I have never wanted for anything, and yet now I am happier than ever. My head fries my thoughts, it grinds them, it minces them. I think it’s a paradox. Because in the end in my body there are bad cells. In the end I am living suspended on thin line because I’m sick. In the end I live in the world of the healthy, but I’m not part of it. Maybe this is the reason that I’m able to see the beauty in the smallest things. Maybe this is why when Roberto smiles at me I feel whole. I don’t need anything else. My days sail by, I meet him at the hospital without being seen. Fugitives in our own little world. We run from ward to ward, hand in hand. Service stairs, fire exits. For us there is no official entrance. We escape from people and from reality. But when we stop, between those blue walls, even with the smell of disinfectant, the world can pass us by and we don’t notice. When I want to see him I know where to find him. All I need to do is throw myself into the hospital. I just need to call him on the telephone and say ‘I’m on the fourth floor, on the last seat.’ ‘I’ll meet you there’ without advising him I turn up in his reality. He finds me punctually with my head in my hands, sitting waiting for him. ‘I have finished my last operation. If you want we can go for a pizza’. And so we go for dinner together and laugh a lot. Last night he told me about his nice elderly patients, of the first time he held a scalpel. All that kept him company was a pinch of fear. Then he felt unstoppable. ‘You would have been a great doctor’ he tells me. ‘Why? I’m scared of a drop of blood!’ ‘Because you would have been passionate in your work, you would have looked a patient in the eye instilling calmness. And you aren’t obliged to have contac
t with the blood!’ He takes me home and for the first time I let him come inside, showing him even this part of my world. We find ourselves in the same bed. Mine. He tells me for the first time about his family, he opens to me for the first time a small part of his world. He tells me he loves to read, just like me. ‘Which is your favourite book?’ He doesn’t speak. He thinks of an answer, looking me right in the eyes. ‘I don’t know, I have to list in my head my favourite titles, then pick one and do a list. As soon as I know I’ll tell you. And yours?’ ‘Mine hasn’t been written yet. Maybe one day I’ll write it myself’. He smiles and touches my hair. He kisses me tenderly. Goosebumps, shivers. My head fits on his shoulder perfectly, as if his clavicle was designed as my cushion. Simply, with happiness, I take the iPod and put the headphones in my ears. I turn up the volume, to the music and to my life. While you sleep I protect you and brush you with my fingers. I breathe you and hold you back, to have you for always, past this moment in time. Max Gazzè wrote this poem, more than a song. And these words seem made for us. Another kiss, that tastes of love and the forbidden. Visceral. To pierce the soul. He hugs me, while I huddle up to get closer to him. We fall asleep like this, to the right notes for this moment. The night flies and for me this is happiness. We wake after a few hours. The day brings with it the tiredness of a night too short. A tender kiss, I rub my eyes. ‘I have to run, I need to go to the hospital’. He is whispering in my ear, just so I don’t wake completely. And then another kiss and one more again.