by Fabio Volo
I learned it is best not to ask women any questions in those moments. Either you get it or you don’t.
Then we washed each other.
“I was wondering, at your place, all those bottles on the shower floor, don’t they bother you?”
“No, they don’t bother me.”
I swallowed hard.
“What do you mean they don’t bother you?”
“They don’t bother me. Of course, if I knew how to use the drill I would hang a rack, but since I don’t know how…”
“Well, that’s better,” I thought.
Michela closed her eyes and rested her head on the edge of the tub. She was relaxed. Perhaps even a bit cooked by the hot water. I looked closely at her for the hundredth time. Sometimes I thought of her and compared her to the girl from the tram. It’s strange, but in my head, I felt as if Michela was a different person. That stranger managed to make me feel free over the past few days, and she even made me think, for the first time, that I would have liked to have a child with a woman like that. Although it was just a passing thought.
“Have you ever really thought about having children?” I asked her.
“Of course I think about it. I would like to experience what it means to be a mother.”
“Would you have one with me?”
Without even opening her eyes she answered, “I don’t know. I think so.”
Silence.
“We’ve known each other for such a short time,” I told her.
“You’re right. But it wouldn’t be that strange.”
“I’ve never even told you ‘I love you’…”
The fact that we were in the tub, completely relaxed, created long silences between one sentence and the next. Our answers were not pronounced immediately. Our conversation seemed like a slow game of ping-pong.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“How do you mean? If you have a child with someone the least you can do is love them.”
“Not for me.” Pause. “To me it’s not important to have a child with you because you love me, or, better, that isn’t enough. It’s not important what you feel for me, or what you are with me, but rather what you are in your life.”
“Meaning…? I don’t understand. Don’t they say that children are the fruit of love?”
“Maybe, but that’s not the way I think about it. If we were to have a child together, it wouldn’t be because we love each other.”
“Then why would we do it?”
“When I was twenty I would have had a child with my boyfriend because I loved him, because I believed in the fairytale. But things are different now. I feel ready to have a baby and thus I look for a man with whom I can share this experience. But it’s not necessary for us to be in love. Actually, the way I see it, sometimes it’s even better not to be in love. Lovers are unreliable people.”
Her reasoning seemed absurd to me. I’ve never heard a woman speak like that.
“I would like the father of my child to have qualities that go beyond what he feels for me. It would be selfish of me to choose someone as the father of my child just because I’m his priority. For instance, Paolo loved me more than anyone had loved me before, but I never thought of having a baby with him. I would have never wanted him as the father of my children. You see, a woman can be in love with a man, have a story with him, knowing that it will work as long as it is something limited to the two of them. It’s one thing to be a couple and another to have children. It’s more important that you are a courageous man than a man in love. If you’re also in love, it’s all the better. I like you for who you are. Do you know what has made me want to know you even more? It was something you did when we went to the café, when we spoke for the first time; something you did that I was crazy about.”
“What did I do?”
She opened her eyes and the conversation took on a more normal rhythm. “You opened the door of the café for a lady and you told her to bundle up because it was cold out. The way you did it told me it was a natural gesture. You were the only one on the tram who gave their seat to elderly people, and when you did you wouldn’t look around, as many do, to check to see if the others had seen your gestures. You’re full of these acts of kindness toward others. You love people. I like your intelligence, your loyalty, your honesty. Plus, your female side is exposed. You are feminine.”
“What do you mean that my feminine side is exposed?”
“Yes, you’re a very feminine man and I like that about you, I really like your fragility, the fact that you don’t hide it.”
“And you would like to have a child with a feminine and fragile man? You’re crazy.”
“Many think that being a man has nothing to do with fragility, but it’s the opposite.”
“Well, I don’t see what’s virile about being fragile and feminine.”
“That’s because when you say feminine and fragile you think effeminate and weak. Fragile is not weak. Feminine is not effeminate. They are two different things.”
“And what is so feminine about me exactly?”
“Those aspects of life that interest you, your sensibility, your attention to certain things, the fact that you never try to act macho, that you never try to be something different than what you are. Do you remember when we took a shower together and we saw each other naked for the first time?”
“Yes.”
“For a woman it’s not easy to be naked in front of a man. It is not easy for me, at least. At that moment I realized that it was hard for you, too, but you started to list your flaws, making fun of yourself. That’s something a woman would do. Your irony showed me your fear and helped you overcome it. It’s the stuff you’re not aware of doing that made me realize how much I like you. I like you as a person, and I would like my children to have a father like you. That’s all. You and I may not like each other as lovers in a few years, but you would still remain the father of my children. Thus the love between us doesn’t matter at all. What matters is how we are as individuals, not as a couple. What matters is the quality of our dialogue, the way we understand each other, the way we feel around each other. You shouldn’t think about what you feel for me, instead you should decide whether you like the way I think, the way I live, how I behave, and most importantly what I believe in. The things you tell me are less important to our relationship than things you don’t tell me because you think that I wouldn’t understand, or that I would get mad, or get offended, or get hurt. Then, if in addition to all things, we are still in love, so much the better, but when it comes to children one must think beyond the couple’s relationship.”
Although her speech was a bit strange and I probably didn’t understand all of it, I liked it, especially the list of things she liked about me.
She was a fascinating chaos. I had never met a woman like that. We never told each other “I love you” or “I’m in love with you.” Neither of us could give a name to what was happening between us. It was different from all the other stories I had experienced. If she had asked me what I liked about her, this is what I would have told her. However, Michela never asked me anything. She closed her eyes and we remained in the tub a bit longer, immersed in our thoughts.
After our bath we went to a crazy place for which Michela had made a reservation three days earlier, because it was so hard to get in.
Strangely enough, Alfred was still outside the hotel. Usually I would only see him there during the day. We gave him a dollar and he said, “No joke… Tonight for you just the truth. You have made a supernova. Believe me.”
We smiled and left.
From the outside, the Corner, on Kenmare Street, looks like a normal place, but that isn’t the real restaurant. The real one is hidden. At the entrance there is a girl with a list of reservations. If you’re on the list, she’ll open a small door that leads down a set of stairs, where another girl asks for your name again. If it’s also on her list, then you can get in, but before arriving at your table you have to walk th
rough the kitchen, through stoves, pans, and cooks. It seems like a mysterious place. In the end, the restaurant is in a brick cellar, full of candles and strange paintings. It’s called La Esquina, which is Spanish for the corner.
They prepare excellent Mexican food. Their margaritas are also good.
I was starving. I always get hungry after I take a bath, if I make love during the bath I turn into a werewolf. After we ordered, my dish got there first. As soon as I saw it, I started salivating just like a real wolf, but I still waited politely for her dish to arrive. At a certain point I asked her, “What did you order, a hundred-piece puzzle?”
When we left we had to go through the kitchen again, and we complimented the cooks. We found that the stairs had become much more demanding. After a few beers and margaritas they had become much steeper. Once we reached the top Michela said, “I wonder if they’ll give us a stuffed animal as prize for all this work.”
We were stuffed. We sat down for a moment on a bench across the street from the restaurant.
That evening we didn’t sleep together. We were both confused. Over those past few days we were overwhelmed by a sea of thoughts and unforeseen circumstances. We needed to be alone to process the emotions and to put some order in our lives. What we were experiencing wasn’t the same thing that happens when you’re in love; it was something new. Not necessarily better, but certainly different. It was as if we had discovered that even without being in love, or without loving in the classical sense, there was a territory of gestures, discoveries, and emotions that could be experienced, shared, and exchanged. We weren’t building a relationship, we were simply experiencing it.
I had never experienced a story like that. I had never known/loved a person feeling those emotions. The need to give, receive, express. Although we knew that, after all, it was a fundamental need, we still wanted to play like that. The joy of giving love filled me like it never had before.
…What you give away will be yours forever…
Our story was about to end. Michela was going to be my girlfriend, actually my wife, for two more days. Together, we had everything that used to scare me and now I was sad I was going to lose it. She was going to be my ex. I was about to send her a message to tell her how beautiful she was, but as I was writing I received one from her.
“Thanks for the shower rack… You’re beautiful.”
She had taken the words right out of my fingers.
23
Game Over
I was still asleep the next morning around eight. I was having a crazy dream: I was having dinner at my father’s girlfriend’s house, and Elena was there, too. Nobody spoke. They opened the freezer, took out a bowl, and put a little bit of frozen minestrone into a pot. Everyone moved slowly, as if they were handling a precious crystal. They heated it up and served me some, saying that it was the minestrone Pier Paolo Pasolini had prepared just before his death. “When we heard that he had been killed, we froze it. This is the last thing he did before dying, he prepared it with his own hands.” When I tried the first spoonful I remember I liked it a lot and I felt like crying.
“It’s so good… I feel like crying.”
“That’s normal because it is…” Driiiiiiinn!
The phone on my nightstand woke me up suddenly.
“Hello.”
“It’s me, Silvia.”
“What time is it?”
“It’s two in the afternoon here, so it should be eight where you are, I think.”
“Eight… Are you crazy…?”
“Listen, I have something to tell you.”
“What?”
I was speaking but I couldn’t wake up, you could say I was just slurring words that were barely understandable.
“They brought your grandma to the hospital today.”
Now I was completely awake.
“What happened, is it serious?”
“I don’t know. Your mother called me and told me to let you know, because she couldn’t reach you on your cell phone. Didn’t you give her your new number?”
“I forgot.”
“Call her… We’ll talk later.”
I sat up in bed. I rubbed my face and called my mother.
“What happened?”
“Grandma’s not well. They took her to the hospital. The doctors say she could get better like she did before, or maybe not. You know, at her age, she could go at any moment.”
I didn’t know what to say. It was a difficult subject and plus, I didn’t like talking to my mother.
“You don’t have to come back, do what you want. I just wanted you to know.”
There she was, everything about my mother in that sentence, “You don’t have to come back, do what you want.”
“Okay… I’ll talk to you later,” and I hung up. Hell of a wake-up call. My grandma in the hospital and my mother who wanted to me to go back, but told me what she had just told me.
It was eight in the morning. My return flight to Italy was scheduled for the next evening. At that moment I didn’t know what to do. “Should I leave early? Should I wait until tomorrow?”
One or two more days might not have changed things.
“You know, at her age, she could go at any moment.”
What a fucking thing to say! But it was true. If it had been a week, I would have left early, but it was just one day…
I got up. I was nervous. I turned on my cell phone. The first thing I needed to do was check if there was room on the next flight out. There were two seats available: the airline told me I could have changed tickets for a fifty-dollar fee. At nine I called Michela and explained the situation. She suggested I change my flight and leave immediately. I still didn’t know what to do. There was only one day left before the end of our game. In the end, I called the airline and they changed my flight. In the meanwhile, Michela had come to the hotel.
In a matter of a few seconds, an emotional bomb had gone off inside me. I couldn’t tell if I was more upset about the fact my grandma was about to die, or the fact that Michela and I were about to break up. And what was worse, we were a day ahead of schedule. I wasn’t ready, I probably wouldn’t have been ready the next day either, but I didn’t have time to give it any serious thought. We went downstairs and ordered two coffees. Then we went out for a walk and sat down on a bench facing the Hudson. We could see the river right in front of us.
During the time we spent together we had talked a lot. But there, sitting on that bench, when perhaps we needed to talk the most, we didn’t say anything. We looked at each other in silence. We had reached the point, the awakening from the dream, the end of the fairytale. The moment of the lost slipper. In reality, we had spoken very little because there was very little to say. We both knew that we had to abide by the rules of the game. We knew that if we had stayed in touch we would have probably seen each other a few more times, for a few months, and everything would have faded away, got worse, become trivial. At least, this is what we were thinking at that moment.
I only remember that Michela told me, “This is the first time I’ve lived this kind of experience, Giacomo. The opportunity to express everything that I always wanted to say, from the bottom of my heart, without any fear of being misunderstood, without having to justify or ever explain a feeling, an action, a gesture, a word. Here, to this place of ours, we arrived together. I wouldn’t know how to find it alone. I don’t see a road that leads back and I don’t know which way to go from here. If I listen to my heart, I can only say that I’ve never been this way with anyone before. Especially in such a short period of time… If I listen to my head… Well, you already know what I think.”
As she spoke, in my mind I could see her on the tram, where it all began. To me, she had always been a window opening onto all the beautiful things in life.
In my head I relive that moment on that bench like an instant of emptiness. My mind had jumbled everything up. I only remember a few words out of context, as if they were flashes, shots, heavy rocks thrown into the sea.
Words spoken. Words heard.
“Let’s break up now… It has been beautiful… It wouldn’t work… You live on the other side of the ocean… We are better off that way… You will always be… Even though it hurts, it’s the right thing… We must be happy… Let’s say goodbye now… Let’s not call each other… Let’s not talk to each other…”
We hugged. And hugged, and hugged, and hugged. We cried. I cried for everything.
It hurt. I couldn’t walk away. It hurt. It hurt, it hurt.
Often the right thing to do is not what feels right.
I moved my head only to kiss her. I would kiss her wet face with my wet face.
“Are you going to walk me back to the hotel?”
“Let’s go.”
We walked in silence holding hands. For the first time in my life I felt someone else’s pain inside me. I was hurting for the both of us. Her pain gave me pain. I wanted to take away all that suffering and free her. I would have exploded into a thousand pieces for her, the same as I would have done for my mother when I was a child.
At that moment I realized I was truly in love. Perhaps we weren’t just two people who fell for each other, but rather we were in love with what had brought us together. Like two jazz musicians: what brings them together is not their love for one another, but the love they have for the music, for what they create together. As we were walking, I remembered the famous quote that says, “Two people who are really in love don’t look at each other, but together they look in same the direction.”
When we were almost at the hotel, Michela suddenly told me, “I can’t do this. Sorry. I can’t do this, I have to go.” And she hailed a cab.
“Wait, Michela, don’t leave like this… Wait, please, just for a moment.”
“I can’t, sorry… Let me go. I don’t feel well.”