The second evening, we leave my room in the middle of the night, drop off the key at the desk, and slip out of the lobby. Italia’s wearing a pair of white shoes I saw in a shop window and bought for her. They’re too big for her feet, so she’s padded them with a bit of toilet paper. The little town, built on a steep hillside, is a warren of narrow streets with rough stone houses. Italia’s new shoes are too wide; her heels come out of them with every step. We hike up past the town hall, all the way to the fortress, where we stand on the lookout platform and gaze out over the plain, a sea of darkness studded with points of light. We go down a few steps and find ourselves in an open area paved with cobblestones. In the center of this space, there are a few pieces of children’s playground equipment. A swing, jostled by the breeze sweeping this high ground, grates and squeaks. In the darkness, only the illuminated bell tower with its Romanesque spires stands out among the black roofs. We sit on a stone bench and look at the wooden horse a few feet away—it’s got a giant spring where its legs should be—and a tinge of melancholy seeps into our secret tryst. This playground without any children makes us sad. The swing squeaks incessantly, spoiling the mood. Italia gets up, walks over to the swing, and sits down on its iron seat. She gives herself a push, then another. Her legs thrust up into the air; her back comes and goes. She allows her shoes, white as a bride’s, to fall from her feet.
The next day, I find her in the corridor. She’s struck up a friendship with the hotel chambermaids; as they move from one room to another, she follows their cart, helping them out by stooping to the pile of clean sheets and handing them as many as they need. She doesn’t see me right away, and so I have time to watch her. She’s talking fast, in her southern accent, more herself among those young women in their smocks. She has sneaked away from her prison and joined up with some of her own kind. Clowning around, she puts a shower cap on her dry hair and imitates a demanding hotel guest whose water ran out while she was taking a shower. The plump girl by her side laughs heartily. I didn’t know Italia was such a joker. I call her; she turns toward me, and so do the maids. Italia snatches the cap from her head and comes toward me. Her face is blushing red, and she’s trembling like a little girl. She whispers, “You’re back already?”
The last night we’re there, she has dinner in the hotel restaurant. It was my idea; I pleaded with her to come downstairs. I felt like seeing her in the midst of all those people who don’t know about us and would think us strangers to each other. Arriving late, she hurries over to a table in the back, near a glass door that opens onto another large room. The people I’m dining with are exhaling wine fumes and professional malice. Manlio arrived only that morning, and already he’s fed up. He’s firing potshots at an American researcher, a guru in the field of alternative pharmacology, whose distaste for Manlio extends to his cigarette smoke. My friend’s gold lighter lies on the table next to his napkin. I wonder what Italia’s ordered; I’d like to serve her a glass of wine. They haven’t brought her anything yet—maybe they’ve forgotten her—and I look around the room, searching for the waiter. She doesn’t seem very calm. She’s come into the restaurant as a favor to me, and now, with her elbows on the table and one hand picking at her chin, she can’t wait to leave. Even at this distance, I can sense her embarrassment. The waiter arrives, leaning toward her and taking the lid off whatever he’s carrying. Maybe it’s soup, because Italia eats it with her spoon. I turn to Manlio; he’s staring at her. Before long, she notices, stops eating, and starts playing with a corner of her napkin. She raises her eyes and lets them wander, without any attempt at caution, as far as I can see, into Manlio’s line of sight. Once again, she has that brazen expression on her face. Manlio pokes me with an elbow and hisses, “She’s looking at me.” His smile is so wide, it distends his lower jaw. “She’s alone. Let’s invite her for a drink, shall we?”
And before I can stop him—assuming, of course, that I even want to—he’s on his feet. He keeps that chimpanzee smile on his face all the way to her table. Our other dinner companions, by now a little tipsy, burst out laughing. I watch Italia shake her head, rise to her feet, take a few steps backward, collide with the dessert cart, and leave the restaurant. Manlio returns to his seat beside me and reaches for his gold cigarette lighter. “From a distance, she just looked trashy,” he says. “But up close, she’s ugly.”
She’s on the bed, paging through the hotel brochure. “Who was that clod?” she asks without looking up.
I say, “He’s a cloddish gynecological surgeon.”
I’ve eaten well, I’ve drunk well, and I feel like making love. But Italia takes too long in the bathroom, and when she comes out, she doesn’t get in bed. She puts a chair close to the window and looks down at the hotel courtyard. The light rising from below turns her face yellow; she’s waiting for the fountain to die away.
Italia has fixed some sandwiches for our return trip. She went out and bought bread, cheese, and salami, then came back and broke up the bread on the bed. When I woke up, she was picking crumbs off the spread. On the way to the elevator, she said good-bye to the maids. They exchanged addresses and embraced one another like sisters. In the car, during the drive back, we don’t talk much. Somewhere along the way, Italia says, “You’re ashamed of me, right?” She says it without looking at me, huddled against the door on her side and staring at the road. Her patchwork purse is filled with the little jars of honey and preserves she got with breakfast at the hotel; she saved them every morning. I smile, stretch out my hand, and adjust the rearview mirror. My head is a muddle of confused thoughts, mingling with one another, despite their lack of any definite connection. Elsa called my room this morning. When the phone rang, our bags were already packed. I thought it was the hotel desk, and I answered carelessly. Italia said something, something about her identification card—she’d forgotten to get it back from the desk—and your mother heard her voice. “Who’s there with you?” she asked.
I said it was the maid—that the door was open and I was about to leave. Toward the end, I raised my voice. She asked me, “Why are you getting angry?”
“Because I’m in a hurry.”
Then I apologized. She talked for a little while longer, but her voice was slightly different. And as I drive, I’m thinking that I no longer know exactly what I’m doing. I drop Italia off in front of the unfinished apartment building, the one with the squatters. Before she gets out, I catch up her hand and kiss it. I’m in a hurry to get away from her; maybe she realizes that. I’m nice and polite—I get her bag out of the trunk for her— but when she disappears into the entrance, sucked inside that bad smell, I breathe a sigh of relief. I don’t stay a minute longer. This morning, the whole place strikes me as appalling.
I go directly to the hospital and plunge single-mindedly into my work. The scrub nurse is a bit uncertain—she must be new—and passes me the instruments without any force. I get angry. She drops the forceps. With a kick, I send those forceps spinning to the other side of the operating room.
15
The summer’s almost over. In the beach house, your mother’s starting to gather her things together. I’m sitting in the garden, looking at the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, and the North Star. She comes out and joins me. She’s got a sweater over her shoulders and a glass in her hand. “Do you want something to drink?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
The autumn will come, the sea will turn gray, the sand will be dirty, the wind will blow it around, and the house will already be shut up. Elsa can feel that little twinge of melancholy in her shoulders.
In bed, she snuggles close to me; she wants to make love. She asks, “Do you want to go to sleep?”
I lie quietly, keeping to my side of the bed, facing away from her. I ask her, “Do you mind if I do?”
She minds. She stops kissing me, but she deliberately keeps breathing on me. The heavy sound of her brea
th penetrates my drowsiness. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m really tired. . . .”
I turn toward her. Her face is like iron in the dark. Her body rustles the sheets and moves away from mine. Now she turns her back on me. I wait. I don’t want her to be sad. I reach out to her, but she shakes off my hand with a slight movement of her shoulder. “Let’s go to sleep,” she says.
The next morning, I get up late and find Elsa in the kitchen, wearing her raw silk dressing gown. “Hi,” I say. “Hi,” she says. I put water and ground coffee in the little espresso maker, set it on the stove, and sit down to wait. My wife is tall; her shoulders form a perfect trapezoid, wide across the top, with two oblique lines running down to her narrow waist. She’s putting some long-stemmed flowers in a vase.
“Where did you get them?” I ask.
“Raffaella gave them to me.”
She’s still angry. I can tell from her hands, which are making short, sharp movements, whose sole purpose is to ignore me. I think, How long has it been since I gave her flowers? And perhaps she’s having the very same thought. She’s tucked her hair behind her ears. She’s standing in front of the window, silhouetted against a vivid light barely softened by the cotton curtain. I look at her profile. Her pale lips are two pads of grouchy flesh. Those lips reflect many thoughts about me, not all of them favorable. I get to my feet, fill my little cup, and sip my coffee. I say, “Do you want some?”
“No.”
I pour another cup and drink that one, too. Elsa cuts herself, drops the scissors onto the table, and raises the wounded finger to her mouth. I go to her. “It’s nothing,” she says. But I take her hand and hold it under running water. Her blood turns the water pink before it disappears down the black hole in the middle of the sink. I dry her finger on my T-shirt, then go to the medicine cabinet for the disinfectant and the bandages. Your mother doesn’t object; she likes it when I take care of her as her doctor. Then I kiss the back of her neck. I find that it’s right next to me, her neck, and so I kiss it, there at the line where her nape disappears under the mass of her hair. And we embrace in the kitchen, leaning against the flower-strewn table.
When I get out of the shower, she’s in a sheltered corner of the living room, typing. She has to work fast, she says, because her deadline’s approaching and she’s behind schedule. She’s no longer interested in swimming and sunbathing; her deep tan will start to fade now and continue to fade all winter long. She hasn’t got dressed—she’s still in her dressing gown. The silk cloth spreads out on the floor at her feet, revealing her legs. I’ve put Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony on the turntable, and the notes invade the sunny living room like a crystal shower. I sit there barefoot, reading. Your mother’s eyes scan the keyboard. Every now and then, she stops typing, rips the sheet of paper out of the machine, crumples it up, and drops it into the wicker wastebasket beside her. She’s naturally haughty; there’s a prideful intentionality in everything about her, including the lines of her body. She doesn’t belong to me; she’s never belonged to me. Now I’m sure of it. We’re not meant to belong to each other; we’re meant to live together, to share the same bidet.
She looks up, abandons her typewriter, and comes toward me. She sits down on the sofa, facing me, with one leg folded under her buttocks and one bare foot brushing the floor. She starts talking, and her words are a planned maneuver, an encirclement. She starts with generic chitchat about her work, about one of her colleagues at the newspaper who’s behaved badly, but then she asks me point-blank, “What did you do at the convention?” And next she wants to know who was there and who wasn’t, and I feel the circle closing around me when she says, “So how was the room?”
“Anonymous.”
I smile. I’m not the one who’s having trouble; she is. I’m letting her stew in her thoughts, but I couldn’t be calmer. If she has something to ask me, let her ask away. Be strong, dear wife; don’t stop. If you really need total clarity this time, you’re goingto have to reach it by yourself, without any help from me. Try as I may, I don’t feel guilty. Tchaikovsky plays on, but this morning I don’t find anything all that dramatic in his music. Elsa is pitilessly torturing a hank of her hair, which looks white because of the sun behind it. She’s struggling, trapped between her curiosity and her fear of suffering. If she asks me to, I’m ready to blow the lid off of everything, right now; but truth has sweaty armpits and is therefore unsuitable for my regal wife. She looks at me in a familiar way, a way I recognize, and yet there’s something different. For the first time, I feel capable of figuring out what lies imprisoned inside those opaque eyes: There’s a deficiency, a stop sign, a wall. Her eyes are the eyes of a stupid woman. This is an explosive discovery: Behind so much apparent intelligence, there’s a part of her that is resolutely blind. It’s almost an absence of conscience; it gives her an escape hatch, a refuge from pain. Those are the eyes she puts on when she’s having trouble, the ones she uses to pretend she understands me, when, in fact, she’s leaving me on my own.
Now she gets up and heads for the kitchen, her straight back and her magnificent hair bouncing with every step. When she’s almost at the door, I take aim at the middle of her body and hurl my knife: “You want to know if I’m screwing somebody else?”
She turns around. “Did you say something?”
Tchaikovsky’s fortissimi have covered my words. She hasn’t heard me. Or maybe she has, and that’s why she staggers a little.
That night, we make love. And it’s your mother who ravishes me; I’ve never seen her so audacious. “Easy,” I murmur through giggles. “Take it easy.” But she’s stronger than I am, and she has a project. She’s discharging onto me a mighty load of pent-up energy; tonight, I’m her ground wire. Inspired, no doubt, by some movie or something she’s read, she’s putting on an erotic farce. The effect she’s decided to go for tonight is burning passion. And I’m caught in the midst of it, a spavined nag flung into a race at full gallop. Now she slips under me and pants against my stomach. I’m not used to seeing her so submissive. It makes me feel guilty, as though I’m the cause of her choosing to abase herself. I want to go away, to escape from the bed, but instead, I stay where I am. By now, I’m excited, too, for I’ve looked at your mother’s head and I’ve thought . . . a thought that excites me. I fall upon her body; I mistreat her. I push her to the foot of the bed and take her like a goat, and while I’m doing it, I’m wondering what I’m doing.
Afterward, she lies under me like a broken egg. Then she turns over in her shattered shell and looks at me with new intention. She seems happy and cruel, like a witch who’s cast a successful spell. For the first time since we met, I think about leaving her.
16
My lover’s little body lay curled up on the edge of the bed. I was looking at the point where her thin back broadened into her buttocks. I’d licked her all over; my tongue had traveled from her hairline to her feet, slipping into every cleft, into the spaces between her toes. She liked it, but it made her shiver, and my passage left goose bumps on her skin. I realized that was how I wanted to love her: stroke by stroke, in stillness, in silence. It was no longer the way it had been; our embraces weren’t so blind and furious as they used to be. I’d taken up the habit of holding her down on the bed and just kissing her. I wanted my ministrations to be a means by which she might perceive herself. I’d plow her skin with my tongue; toward the end, it would begin to ache, and I’d run out of saliva. When having sex, she was immodest, almost shameless; but she felt embarrassed by the tough calluses on the soles of her feet, and she felt embarrassed by love. I took her only at the end, when I was already tired. I slipped inside of her like a dog—a dog that has run for days, through brambles and briers and rocks, finally finds its way home, and creeps exhausted into its bed.
She whispered, “Leave me.” Her voice was thin and cold, like a strip of metal.
“What are you saying?” I drew close to her and stroked her lonely back.
“I can’t, I just can’t anymore. . . .
” she said. She shook her head. “It’s better to do it now, don’t you see? Now.” She was holding her face in her hands. “If you love me at all, leave me.”
I held her close; her elbows dug into my skin. “I’ll never leave you.”
And I was so sure of what I was saying that my body hardened, every fiber in me hardened, as if I’d grown a mighty carapace. And we stayed like that, our chins on each other’s shoulders, each of us staring into a separate void.
What does love mean, Angela? Do you know? For me, love meant holding Italia’s breathing in my arms and realizing that every other sound had fallen silent. I’m a physician; I can always recognize the pulsations of my heart, even when I don’t want to. I swear to you, Angela, the heart that was beating inside of me was Italia’s.
She has a recurring dream. She dreams that her train leaves without her. She gets to the station early. She’s wearing a nice dress. She buys a magazine and steps out onto the sheltered platform, perfectly calm. The train’s there, waiting for her; an elegant train, she says, red and gray and gleaming. She’s about to board it, but then she starts wasting time, digging around in her purse, looking for her ticket. After she finds it, she loses more time trying to read the destination. The train leaves the platform, and she’s still there; but now her purse is gone, and so are her shoes. Then the station behind her is empty and she’s naked, “like in a painting,” she says.
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