Don't Move

by Margaret Mazzantini

  I heard a little moan, a rustling sound on the other side of the door. I thought about her body, her hands, and once again I surprised myself by not remembering her as clearly as I wanted to. “Italia,” I whispered. “Italia . . .”

  And it was like putting a cloak over her, limiting her to a single place, inside the four walls of her name, hers and no one else’s. “Italia,” I whispered again, and now I was stroking the wooden door.

  I heard a whimper, a scratching paw, and I realized it was the dog. He started barking, the blind beast, as wretched as his mistress. It was a smothered bark, the bark of an old dog that soon grew tired. I smiled. She’ll be back. If she’s left the dog here, it means she’ll be back, and I’ll wait for her. I’ll have my way insideher body for the last time.

  Headlights bathed the wall of the house as a car passed on the viaduct. Among the bricks above my head, something glinted in the darkness, and then I remembered the key. I reached up and found the key attached to one of the loosened bricks with a used piece of chewing gum. I closed my hand, and it was just as if I were taking hold of her. I knew I shouldn’t do it, but already I was feeling the door, clutching the key in my other hand and searching for the keyhole.

  It was pitch-black inside, and there was the usual smell, only staler. I was in her house, and she wasn’t there; the transgression excited me. And now I had the pleasing thought that the key hadn’t been stuck up above the door by chance. She had left it there for me. I felt my way along the wall and found the light switch inside a chipped ceramic apple. An energy-saving lightbulb came on in the middle of the room. The blind dog stood blank-eyed before me, one ear straight up, the other flopping down. Truly a miserable watchdog. I flipped the switch off. No, no light; I’d wait for her in the dark. The darkness would hide me from myself. I took a few halting steps and collapsed on the sofa. Silence permeated the house. Along with the few small sounds made by my intruder’s body, there was only the breathing of the dog, which had taken up its position under the sofa. I began to grow accustomed to the darkness; now I could distinguish the shapes of the furniture, the groups of bric-a-brac on the various flat surfaces, and the outline of the fireplace against the wall. In the dark, the house had a sacredness and a desolation all its own, and the fireplace seemed like a dismantled altar.

  She was there. In her absence, she was all the more there. The last time, we had never looked each other in the eye; I’d pushed her facedown onto the sofa. Now I fell to my knees in front of it, looking for the spot where she’d braced herself as she bucked under me. Still kneeling on the floor, I rubbed my face in the darkness. Italia had been like this, pinned in this corner. I searched with my nose, with my mouth—I was trying to feel what she must have felt when I took her. I wanted to be her, so that I could feel the reaction that I provoked in her flesh. I didn’t even try to resist. I ran full speed toward the precipice almost without realizing it. Pleasure, deep and warm, spread through my belly, entered my shoulders, my throat. Just like a woman’s pleasure.

  But I soon became a man again, Angela, and all the sweetness was gone, replaced by the smell of my breath after the last spasms died away on that sofa. I felt uneasy, unexpectedly sad, and in the violated darkness, everything seemed worse. My legs were stiff, and I was soiled like a teenager. The dog lying next to my knees hadn’t missed any of my passionate tremors. I pulled myself to my feet, running into things as I looked for the bathroom. I found a door and an electric wire running along the wall, then followed the wire until my hand came to a switch. My face appeared in the mirror in front of me; the sudden, malevolent light dazzled my eyes. I was in a kind of niche, covered with old tiles. I turned on the faucet. While I bent forward to bathe my face over the sink, I saw a drinking glass hanging inside an iron ring, and in the glass was a toothbrush long past its prime. Together with the disgust I felt at the sight of those squashed, frayed bristles, I was assailed by a feeling of disgust for myself. There was a small bathtub— a hip bath, really—and a rubber mat was draped across the edge of it. The bottom half of the plastic shower curtain was spotted with mildew and slung over the curtain rod. The bar of soap had been neatly stored in its container. On the shelf under the mirror, there was only some hand cream and an opaque glass jar of the foundation makeup Italia used on her face. A wicker basket was on the floor. I lifted the lid and saw a little pile of dirty clothes. I fixed my gaze on a pair of crumpled panties, and I heard a coarse voice inside me begging me to stuff them into my pocket immediately and bear them away. I looked into the mirror again and asked my lupine eyes what kind of man I had turned into.

  I turned off the light and went back into the other room. As I passed the sofa in the darkness, I leaned over to adjust the flowered cloth. In doing so, I stepped on the dog’s paw, and he let out a yelp. I went out the door, locked it, and tried to push the key back into its hiding place, but the gum had lost its elasticity. I tried to soften it by rubbing it between my fingers—I couldn’t bring myself to do the job with saliva. I heard a sound, a distant clicking. Heels on metal steps. I tossed the gum into my mouth and chewed it hard. I dropped the key and bent down to look for it. When the heels reached the bare ground, the clicking stopped. I found the key, jammed it with my thumb against one of the chinks in the bricks, and pressed as hard as I could until the gum stuck. I crouched down, creeping away through the grass, and hid behind the house, near the carcass of the burned automobile. She appeared almost at once. Two black legs, unhurried, accustomed to the darkness. And between the legs, the usual purse. She seemed tired; her spine was curved even more than I remembered. She stretched out an arm, reaching for the ledge above the door, but the key fell into her hair. I flattened myself against the wall while she rummaged in her hair. Peering with only one eye, I saw her fingers brush the key, then seize it, and as she did so, her face changed. I could barely see her, but I sensed that a precise emotion was rising in her. She detached the key from the gum and stood still for a while, holding the gum in her fingers; she’d noticed that it was wet. She looked around in the darkness, turned her eyes in my direction, and stared. Now she’s going to discover me; now she’s going to come over here and spit in my face. She took a few steps, then stopped. She was barely visible in the pale moonlight. I squatted down behind the skeleton of the burned car. She looked into the dark where I was skulking, and maybe she could see me. Her eyes were fixed on emptiness, but it was as if she knew I was there; the thought of me was reflected on her face. She went no farther. She turned around, slipped the key into the lock, and closed the door behind her.

  10

  The next evening, I had dinner with Manlio at one of those trattorias in the city center where the outside tables rock back and forth on the uneven sidewalk and you have to stoop down and slide a shim under what seems like the proper leg, and then when you sit up straight again, you discover that now another leg’s too short and the table’s still wobbly. Just like life. Manlio was joking—he was making his chest expand under his jacket—but he wasn’t happy. He’d had some problems in the delivery room. He was muttering a few set phrases for effect, he was feeling sorry for himself, and, naturally, he was lying. Against his will, he was insincere; he’d never been one for self-scrutiny, and he had no intention of starting now. He fell in with other people’s moods and impulses and ended up making them his own. And so, that evening, with the zeal of a true friend, he was trying to climb down into the deep burrow where I was apathetically wandering. His effort had been going on for some time. I was silent and distracted; I’d attacked the antipasti violently at first, wielding my fork like a weapon, but then I’d left them unfinished and hadn’t ordered anything more. Manlio was trying to follow me, borrowing my mood, but meanwhile he was nibbling at everything in sight: grilled peppers, fried ricotta, broccoli rabe.

  I asked him, “Do you go with whores?”

  He didn’t expect such a question, not from me. He smiled, poured himself a drink, made a clucking sound with his tongue.

  “Do you
or don’t you?”

  “How about you?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Come on.” He didn’t know where this was leading; maybe he was thinking about Elsa. It didn’t seem possible to him that a man with such a wife would pay for sex. However, the shift in the conversational tone didn’t displease him; he could handle it, and it went with the wine. “Me, too, from time to time,” he said, and now he seemed like a little boy.

  “Do you always go with the same one, or do you change?”

  “It depends.”

  “Where do you take them?”

  “We stay in the car.”

  “Why do you go with them?”

  “So we can pray together. What a dumb-ass question.” He laughed, and his eyes disappeared.

  It’s not a dumb-ass question, Manlio, but you realize that too late, while you’re looking at a passing tourist with her arm around a giant in Bermuda shorts. Now you have a bitter look on your face.

  Later, I told him it wasn’t true, I didn’t go with whores. He was annoyed, but he kept on laughing. His cheeks grew flushed; he said that I was being an asshole—“an asshole, as usual” is what he said. In the meantime, however, our boredom had vanished. The evening had taken a turn; we’d entered more intimate territory, where there was a flicker of something that resembled the truth, and as Manlio walked to his car, he looked like a sincere man, a desperate man. We said good-bye quickly—a pair of claps on the shoulders—took a few steps in the dark, and already we were far apart, each on his own sidewalk, free of any residue left by the other. Ours was a sanitary friendship.

  I could tell you, Angela, that the shadows of the streetlights seemed to fall on my windshield like dead birds, and that in their falling, I saw everything I didn’t have raining down on me; I could tell you that the torrent of shadows came down faster and faster as I sped along, and that I felt a growing desire to fill that absence with something, anything. I could tell you many things that might sound true now but maybe aren’t true at all. I don’t know the truth; I don’t remember. I only know that I was driving in her direction without any distinct thought. Italia wasn’t anything. She was like the black wick in an oil lamp. The flame burned beyond her, in that greasy light that enveloped the things I needed, all the things I didn’t have.

  I turned onto the long, tree-lined road and drove past the indistinct commercial figures standing by the roadside. The beams of my headlights struck bodies floating in the night like jellyfish, painted them for an instant with dazzling light, and then returned them to the darkness. Near one of the last trees, I slowed down and stopped. The girl who came over to my car had legs covered with black net and a perfect face for her line of work: sour and infantile, agitated and gloomy—the face of a whore. She croaked something, perhaps an insult, as I pulled away and watched her disappear in the rearview mirror.

  She was home. That night, she was home. The door opened slowly. The dog came around the side of the house and approached me, sniffing hard and wagging his tail between my legs. He seemed to recognize me. And now Italia was there in front of me, standing with one extremely white hand on the door. I pushed her inside with my body. Maybe she’d already been sleeping, because her breath was stronger than usual. I liked it. I grabbed her by the hair, forcing her to bend her neck, to stoop down. I rubbed her face against my stomach. Right there, where the thought of her caused me pain. Heal me, heal me. . . . I bent down and ran my mouth all over her face. I stuck my tongue into her nostrils, into the corners of her eyes.

  Later, she sat on the sofa, pulling down the tail of her undershirt with one hand to cover her sex. She was waiting for me like that when I came out of the bathroom. I had washed myself in there, sitting on the edge of the tub, next to the moldy shower curtain hanging down from its rod. I walked over to her, seized a handful of her hair, and shook her head as I tried to slip the money into her hand. She went limp; I had to squeeze her hand to make her close it. She accepted what I gave her as one accepts pain. I had to leave; I couldn’t recapture myself in her presence. It would have been unseemly, like looking back on one’s own excrement.

  You want to be alone, too. I’m getting to know you. You do what I want; then you disappear like a mosquito at sunrise. You place yourself among the flowers on your sofa and hope that I won’t notice you. You know that you’re not worth anything except in the throes of passion; you know that while I’m tying my tie and getting ready to leave, I’m already disgusted by everything. You don’t have the courage to move as long as I’m there; you don’t have the courage to show your ass while you walk to the bathroom. Maybe you’re afraid of getting killed; you’re afraid I’ll toss you onto the baked clay of that dried-up riverbed, like that black car that fell from the viaduct. You don’t know that my anger dies when I die inside you, and that afterward I’m an unlioned lion. What do you do when I go away? What do I leave you with? This cold fireplace, this room I’ve razed, I who offended you in the heart of the night without even loving you. The dog will come close to you, you’ll need that fur, you’ll stroke him while your eyes are fixed somewhere else. He’s blind, after all. Scenes, obsessions from your past, will rise up before your mind’s eye. Eventually, though, your confidence in the present, in what’s there, will come back to you. You’ll get up and put a few things in order—an overturnedchair, for example. And you won’t need to pull your undershirtdown; when you bend over, you’ll feel the air on your naked buttocks and pay no attention. Without my eyes moving over it, your body’s worth what it’s worth: as much as a chair, as much as hard work. But when you get up, you’ll feel a filament of my semen running down one of your legs, and then—I don’t know, but I’d like to know. I’d like to know if you feel disgust, or . . . No. Hurry up and wash, little slut. Stand behind your mildewed shower curtain, grab a sponge, and cleanse yourself of this fool’s secretions, cleanse yourself of his ghosts.

  There were several medlars on the table. I took one and ate it; its flesh was soft and sweet. I took another.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  Her voice was weak; it proceeded from silence. Italia, too, must have been having some bizarre thoughts. Before, when I’d stopped squeezing her hand, she had spread her fingers and the money had fallen to the floor. Now she held that empty hand out to me. “Give them to me,” she said, and I gave her the medlar pits.

  “Shall I fix you some spaghetti?”

  “How do you mean?” I murmured, astounded by this proposal.

  “With tomato sauce, or however you want.”

  She’d misunderstood my question. Her face, as she scrutinized me, seemed new, different, suddenly vivacious; her eyes vibrated in their sockets like heads just emerged from a shell. I had no intention of staying there, but there was that little shimmer of hope in her expression, a hope quite remote from my own. Because I, too, was hoping for something, Angela. Something that was neither in that room nor anywhere else, something that might have been decomposing with my father’s bones. Something of which I knew nothing. Searching for it was a truly futile exercise. “Do you make a good sauce?” I asked.

  She laughed, flushed with delight, and for an instant I thought that maybe my hope was as modest and easy to fulfill as hers. She went to the bedroom, hunching over as she walked, trying to cover herself with her undershirt, which was too short for the job. She came back quickly, wearing a pair of pants that looked like overalls and her multicolored sandals with the straps undone. “I’m going outside for a minute,” she said. I watched from the window as she reappeared behind the house, where, I now noticed for the first time, she had a little garden. With her heels sinking into the earth and a flashlight in her hand, she rummaged around in a row of plants supported by canes. She came back inside, carrying a bundle in the bottom of her shirt, and went into the kitchen. I could see her through the door, sometimes all of her, sometimes just an arm or a shock of hair. She reached into a wall cupboard and took out a saucepan and a plate. She washed the tomatoes carefully, one at a tim
e, and then she began mincing the herbs with a large kitchen knife. She worked quickly and skillfully, guiding the knife with her index finger. I discovered, to my amazement, that Italia was a neat, efficient cook, completely in command of her movements and her kitchen. I sat and waited, composed and a bit stiff, like a deferential guest.

  “It’s almost ready.”

  She left the kitchen, went into the bathroom, and closed the door. I heard her turn on the water in the shower. I fluffed up the sofa pillows around me. A fine aroma of fresh tomato sauce was permeating the room and intensifying my hunger. I gazed at the wall, at the monkey clutching his baby bottle. He looked exactly like Manlio. I smiled at him the way one smiles at a stupid friend. In the bathroom, the water pelted down violently for a while, then stopped. I heard a few small sounds, and soon she was out. Her yellow hair looked like wood when it was wet. She was wearing a beige bathrobe. As she tightened the belt around her waist, she sighed contentedly. “I’ll put the pasta on,” she said.