Don't Move

by Margaret Mazzantini

  She climbed up one more flight, then walked rapidly through the dirt covering the floor and stopped in front of a metal door. Thrusting a finger into the hole where the lock should have been, she pulled the heavy obstacle toward her. Light struck me in the face so violently that I had to raise an arm to protect myself; the sun seemed very close. “This way,” she said, and I saw her body drop out of sight. She’s nuts. I’m following a woman with a diseased mind. She picked me up in that bar just so I could watch her commit suicide. I found myself standing at the top of an exterior stairway. It was a fire escape, a plunging iron spiral. She was descending the steps fearlessly; from where I stood, I could see the dark roots of her blond hair. Now she looked unbelievably agile in her high heels, like a small boy, like a cat. I ventured into the coils of that spiral staircase, holding tightly to the rusty tubes and bolts of the handrail. My jacket caught on something; I pulled at it and heard the fabric rip. I was startled by a sudden roar, and there before my eyes, very close, was a gigantic viaduct. On the other side of the guardrail, cars were whizzing by. I couldn’t figure out where we were, so I stopped and looked around. The woman was below me, standing on an embankment some distance away. With her peroxided blond hair, her painted face, and her multicolored bag, she looked like a clown left behind by the circus.

  “Here we are!” she shouted.

  And, in fact, there was a structure behind her, an old pink wall that didn’t seem to belong to any visible house. She turned toward that wall, and now I saw that it was part of a freestanding dwelling, a sort of minuscule villa crumbling away right under the piers of the viaduct. We walked through a small thicket of dusty shrubs, then climbed two steps to a porch. The door was made of green staves, the same color as her skirt. She stretched an arm toward the rows of bricks above the door and detached a key stuck up there with a piece of chewing gum. She opened the door, took the gum out of her mouth, stuck it to the key, and pressed the whole wad back into place over the door. While she was stretched out like that, I looked at her exposed armpit—not shaved, but not bushy, either. Just a tuft of long, fine hairs, plastered together by sweat.

  A diagonal beam of sunlight cut through the air inside the room. That was the first thing that struck me, together with a mixture of odors that reminded me of a house in the country: the smell of soot, overlaid by the sour tang of bleach and rat poison. The room was square, with a coffee-colored stone floor. On the far wall was a fireplace like a big sorry black mouth. The interior of the room was dignified and orderly, though somewhat indistinct because the light came from a single window. The shutters were set ajar, and one of the columns of the viaduct showed through the opening. Three Swedish-style chairs were pushed under a table covered by a patterned oilcloth. Next to this was an open door, through which I could glimpse a kitchen cupboard with an imitation-cork veneer. She said, “I’ll put the milk in the refrigerator,” and stepped into the kitchen.

  She had claimed to have a telephone. I looked for it in vain on a low table with an ashtray in the shape of a seashell, on a lacquered chest of drawers littered with knickknacks, on an old couch rejuvenated by a cloth covering with a floral design. I noticed a poster hanging on the wall. It was a studio photograph, artificially lit and decorated with little plastic umbrellas, and it captured for posterity a monkey wearing a baby’s cap and holding a baby’s bottle.

  She came back quickly. “The telephone’s over there, in the bedroom,” she said, gesturing at a curtain made of plastic strips right behind my back.

  “Thanks,” I murmured, looking at this bit of barroom decor and once again fearing an ambush. She smiled, revealing a row of small defective teeth.

  On the other side of the curtain was a narrow room almost entirely occupied by a double bed with no headboard and a tobacco-colored bedspread. A crucifix, slightly askew, hung against the wallpaper. The telephone was on the floor, sitting next to its baseboard jack. I picked up the receiver, sat on the bed, and dialed Elsa’s number. In my mind, I followed the ringing of the phone as it penetrated the beach house. It ran over the coconut-fiber rug in the living room, climbed up the bright stairs to the second floor, entered the large bathroom with the mirror fragments set into the indigo blue plaster, brushed over the linen sheets of the still-unmade bed, over the desk piled high with books, drifted through the gauze curtains into the garden and over to the pergola, which was overgrown with white jasmine blossoms, then to the hammock, and then to my old pith helmet with the rusty eyelets; but there was no response. Maybe Elsa was swimming, or maybe she’d already come out of the water. I thought about her body, stretched out on the beach, and about the water licking at her legs. The telephone was ringing away, unheard. I ran my hand over the chenille bedspread, and at the same time I spotted a pair of worn fuchsia slippers tucked under a cheap-looking dresser. Leaning on the mirror was the photograph of a young man, obviously taken long ago. I felt uncomfortable in that room, sitting on a stranger’s bed, in the sleeping quarters of the deranged clown who was waiting for me a few feet away. One of the dresser drawers was partly open, revealing a swatch of red satin. Almost without noticing it, I slipped a hand into the crack and touched the slippery fabric. The clown’s face poked through the plastic strips.

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  I sat down on the sofa in front of the monkey poster. Something in my throat was bothering me; it felt dry and grainy. I gazed around me, and that modest setting seemed to augment my physical discomfort. On a bookshelf, a porcelain doll holding a sheer parasol pressed her frightened face against the first in a row of identical volumes, one of those general encyclopedias you can buy in installments. The dreariness was all of a piece, well cared for, honorable. I looked at the woman, who was coming toward me with a tray in her hands. Considered against the background of her house, she seemed less lively; she took on a shabby decency that was perfectly in keeping with her surroundings. They depressed me. For one thing, there was that collection of knickknacks next to my arm. I hate furniture cluttered with trinkets, Angela, as you well know. I like an unencumbered surface, with maybe a lamp in one corner and a book or two, nothing more. My shoulder twitched with a sudden impulse to fling out my arm and knock all that trash to the floor. She served me the coffee. “How much sugar?”

  I attached my lips to the cup and took a sip. The coffee was good, but my mouth was deadened by fatigue and ill humor, and so the liquid left a coating of bitterness on my tongue. The woman came and sat at some little distance from me on the sofa. The light was behind her, but her frayed bangs failed to hide her high forehead. It was too high, too prominent for the rest of her face, which gathered around the furrow between her nose and her heavily painted mouth in a single fixed grimace. I looked at the hand she was holding the espresso cup with. The flesh around her short fingernails, which she no doubt chewed, was red and swollen. I thought about the smell of stale saliva on those fingertips and shuddered. As I did so, she bent forward. I saw a dog’s muzzle appear from under the sofa. A sleepy middle-sized dog with a dark, wavy coat and long amber ears. He licked her hand, including those nibbled nails, as happy as though he’d received a reward.

  “Heartbreaker,” she whispered, rubbing her big forehead against the dog’s. He noticed me, but he seemed to look at me without interest, and I saw that his eyes were strangely clouded. She gathered up the tray and the dirty cups. “He’s blind,” she said in a lowered voice, as though she didn’t want the beast to hear her.

  “Would you give me a glass of water?”

  “Do you feel all right?”

  “No, I’m hot.”

  She turned around. As she walked to the kitchen, I observed her buttocks. They were as thin as a man’s. My gaze slid over her entire retreating body: her narrow, curved back, the empty space between her legs where her thighs should have met. This was not a desirable body. Indeed, it looked downright inhospitable. Swaying on her high heels, she came back to where I was sitting and handed me a glass of water, then stood there and waited fo
r me to give her back the glass. “Do you feel better?”

  Yes, I did; the water had cleaned my mouth.

  She didn’t accompany me to the door. “Well then, thank you,” I said.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  The heat was still there, hanging heavy in the air, imperceptibly shifting things. The asphalt felt soft under my feet. I took up a position next to the closed shutter and started waiting for the shop to reopen. I was sweating again, and I was thirsty again. I went back to the bar. I asked for a glass of water, but when the young bartender with the pimply face stepped aside, I got a good view of the row of bottles behind his head, changed my mind, and ordered a vodka. I had him pour it into a tall glass and requested some ice, which he doled out from the bottom of an aluminum container. Maybe as it melts, I thought, it’ll give off the same smell as the rest of the place, rancid mayonnaise and sour floor cloths. I walked over to the far side of the barroom and sat down next to the jukebox. I took a long, noisy swallow; the alcohol penetrated me like a sharp pain, like a hot flash that turns at once into an intense, protracted chill. I looked at my watch—I still had more than an hour to wait.

  I wasn’t used to intervals, Angela. I was barely forty, and already I’d been a chief surgeon for five years, the youngest in the hospital. My private practice was growing, and with some reluctance, but more and more often, I performed operations in private clinics. I caught myself appreciating those places, where the patients had to pay and where everything was clean, well organized, and silent. I was barely forty, and maybe I had already fallen out of love with my profession. When I was a young man, I was impetuous, always in motion. After my internship, my first years in practice were febrile, vigorous, like the time I punched a nurse because he hadn’t waited for the steam autoclave, which sterilizes the instruments, to complete its cycle correctly. Then, almost without my noticing, a veil of peacefulness, accompanied by a mild feeling of disenchantment, came over me. When I talked about it with your mother, she said that I was simply slipping into the habit of adult life, making a necessary and by and large agreeable transition. I was barely forty, and I’d given up taking offense some time ago. It wasn’t that I would have sold my soul to the devil; it was just that I hadn’t offered it to the gods. I’d kept it in my pocket, and there it was now, in the pocket of my lightweight summer suit, inside that ugly bar.

  The vodka gave me a spark of life. A tall young man, filthy with dust and mortar, glared at the fan and its motionless blades. As he headed for the Foosball table, followed by his stocky friend, he blurted out, “It’s hot! Turn on the fan!” With a brusque yank, he pulled the cylindrical handle on the table, and the balls started to roll in the wooden belly. The stocky boy threw in the first ball, dramatically letting it fall to the playing field from high above his head, apparently some kind of ritual, and then the game began. The two of them said little to each other. Their hands gripped the handles tightly as they flipped their wrists, striking hard, precise blows that made the metal rods vibrate. The bartender slouched out from behind the bar, drying his hands on his towel, and turned on the fan. As he was walking back, I handed him my glass and said, “Bring me another one, please.” The fan blades began moving, sluggishly stirring up the hot air in the bar. A napkin fluttered to the floor, and I bent over to retrieve it. I noticed a few revolting piles of sawdust and, a bit farther away, the legs of the two Foosball players. By the time I straightened up, my head was heavy with blood, and the sudden movement made my brain reel. The bartender brought the glass of vodka to my table. I drank the whole thing in one gulp. My eyes floated toward the jukebox. It was an old model, speckled blue in color, with a little window. When a song was playing, you could look into the jukebox and see the metal tonearm gliding across the record. I thought, I’d like to hear a song. Any song at all. That woman’s face came back into my mind. Wearing too much makeup, looking dazed and coarse, she was swaying in the light that came from the lower part of the music machine. A ball leaped off the Foosball table and rolled across the floor. On my way out, I left the young bartender a handsome tip. He laid aside the sponge he was using to wipe off the bar and gathered the money into his dripping hands.

  I walked back to the mechanic’s shop. In front of me, a group of half-naked children were laboriously hauling a cart containing a large plastic garbage bag filled with water and leaking from many holes. The mechanic had finally hoisted his rolling shutter, but only partway, and I had to duck to enter the shop. Inside, under the oiled breasts of a calendar girl, I found a powerfully built man of about my own age, wearing overalls too tight for him and black with grease. He and I climbed into an old Citroën Dyane with blazing hot seats and drove to where I’d left my car. It needed a new oil pump and a cylinder sleeve. We went back to the shop to pick up the required parts. The mechanic discharged me in front of the shop, tossed what he needed into his trunk, and drove away.

  I loafed about aimlessly for a while. My shirt was drenched with sweat and my eyeglasses were fogged, but I didn’t care about the heat anymore. This calm indifference was due to the alcohol, but it also happened to correspond to one of my most secret desires. I’d been driving myself hard during all those years of success; I was always where I should be, always traceable. Now, purely by chance, I was flying under the radar, and I assented to my temporary freedom, which I saw as an unexpected reward. Now I would offer no further resistance; I’d let myself explore my new situation, like a tourist. I went back to the unfinished apartment building. The children, having poured the water from their trash bag onto a mound of pozzolana, were molding the stuff into a sort of hut that looked like a big black egg. I stood there stupefied and watched them under the hammering sun.

  My mother never wanted me to go out into the courtyard and play with the other children. After her marriage, she’d had to adjust to living in a poor neighborhood. It wasn’t a sad part of the city at all; it was crowded and lively, and it wasn’t even very far from the center. But your grandmother refused to look out the windows. In her view, our neighborhood wasn’t sad—sadness was something she knew how to bear. No, it was much worse than that; it was one step above absolute penury. She lived a sequestered life in that apartment, as though it were a cloud where she had reconstructed her life, where she had settled in with her piano and her son. During certain languid afternoon hours, I would have liked to join all that teeming life I saw going on downstairs, but I couldn’t bring myself to humiliate her. I pretended that the downstairs world didn’t exist for me, either. She would hustle me onto the bus that took us to her family home, to her mother, and in that setting, amid all those trees and those elegant houses, I could finally open my eyes. When my mother was there, she was radiant; she was another person altogether. We’d lie down together on the bed in her old room and laugh and laugh. She was filled with new energy; she shone with new beauty. Then she’d put her overcoat back on and assume her normal look. We’d catch the bus back home long after dark, when everything was pitch-black outside. She’d run from the bus stop to our front door, terrified by the abyss that surrounded her.

  My mother’s face passed before my eyes—or rather, her faces, one after another, all the way to the end of the sequence, when her face was closed in death and I asked the sexton to leave me alone with her for a moment so that I could look at it one last time. I chased away that image by angrily shaking my head.

  Now I’ll go back to get my car. I’ll pay the mechanic, turn on the engine, and drive home to Elsa. Her hair will still be wet, along with her gauzy primrose-colored shirt. We’ll go to that restaurantand sit at that table in the back and look at the lights of the gulf shining through the darkness. I’ll let her drive so I can lay my head on her shoulder. . . .

  She didn’t look surprised. In fact, I got the feeling she’d been expecting me. She blushed when she stepped back to let me in. I entered awkwardly, inadvertently stumbling into the bookshelf on the wall. The porcelain doll fell to the floor. I bent down to pick it up. “Don’t worry abo
ut it,” she said, swaying toward me. She was wearing a different T-shirt. This one was white, ornamented with a gaudy paste flower. She murmured, “How’s your car?”

  Her voice was uncertain, and so was her mouth, with all the lipstick gone. I looked past her shoulder at her tidy, wretched house, and it seemed even drearier than it had a little while ago. But this didn’t bother me. In fact, I took a mysterious pleasure in the sensation that everything around me was incontestably dismal. “They’re fixing it,” I said.

  Her hands were behind her back, and I could hear her rubbing them together. She lowered her eyes, then raised them again. It seemed to me that her whole body was quivering imperceptibly, but maybe I was only drunk.

  “You want to use the telephone?”

  “Yes.”

  Once again, I went into the bedroom; once again, I stroked the tobacco-colored chenille bedspread. I looked at the telephone. I looked at it as though it were made of plastic, a toy that wouldn’t put me in touch with anybody or anything. I didn’t even touch it. I closed the dresser drawer. I straightened out Jesus on the wall. Then I stood up and walked toward the door. I just wanted to get out of there. The vodka had left me with a dull headache and no manners. Maybe I won’t go to the beach house; maybe I’ll go back to the city and get in bed, I don’t want to do anything or see anyone.