Don't Move

by Margaret Mazzantini

  She told me that dream had tormented her for a long time, from when she was a young girl, and then it had vanished; but it came back after she met me.

  I believe we punish ourselves with our dreams, Angela. They don’t seem much like rewards.

  “Give me your hand,” she said. “The left one.”

  She spread it out, passing her palm over mine as though she wanted to clean it, to disencumber it of other things: dusty things, of no concern to us. “You’ve got a long life line, with a break in the middle.”

  I don’t believe in such nonsense, so I shrugged my shoulders. “What does it mean?” I asked.

  “It means you’ll survive.”

  But now I wonder if that break was you, Angela. If Italia encountered you in my hand.

  “Now make a fist, tight, and we’ll see about your children. ” She scrutinized the creases around my little finger. “There’s one—no, two. Bravo!” she said. She started to laugh.

  “How about you?” I said. “Show me your hand. What’s your life line like?”

  She stood up, but she didn’t stop laughing. “Don’t worry. It’s really, really long—weeds are hard to kill. My mother used to call me ‘Crabgrass.’ ”

  After we said good-bye, she ran after me and threw her arms around me. “Don’t ever take me seriously when I tell you to leave me,” she said. “Keep me, please, keep me. Come when you want, once a month, once a year, but keep me.”

  “Of course I’ll keep you. I love you, Crabgrass.”

  She burst into tears, an eruption of tears, tears that burned me like lava. “Why?” I asked.

  She stepped away from me. Her face was red; her eyes were red. She stared into mine, and then she started punching me on the arm. “I’ve been screwing since I was twelve, and no one ever told me ‘I love you.’ If you’re fooling me, I’ll kill you.”

  “With these little fists?”

  “Yes!”

  17

  And you, Angela, have you ever made love? I remember the day you became a woman, three years ago. You were in school, in English class; the teacher took you to the principal’s office. You called your mother at the newspaper, and she picked you up and drove you home. When she joked with you in the car, you smiled weakly, like a sick person. You were confused and a little angry. You’d been waiting for that moment, but now growing up didn’t seem so great. You were always a tough, independent child, accustomed to handling things on your own. Now you were twelve, sprouting up like a mushroom, but you still had a child’s body—your girlfriends were way ahead of you—and your thoughts and your games were those of a child. But in spite of all that, something had moved inside of you. Your first egg had matured and fallen away, and the end of your childhood was sealed with your blood.

  Your mother met me at the door and told me what had happened. There was a light in her face. She wasn’t the same person who’d left the house that morning; now she had the face of a midwife. You women are so changeable, so ready to grab hold of life, to capture all the butterflies. We males are like earthworms, lined up at the foot of your walls. I smiled, dawdling as I took off my overcoat. You were lying on your bed. With those big black eyes of yours and that long face, you looked like a skinny cat.

  I walked over to you, leaned down, and said your name: “Angela . . .”

  You barely smiled, crinkling your pale skin a little. “Hi, Daddy.”

  I had no idea what I wanted to tell you, and nothing came out. At that moment, you and your mother were alone together, and I was an awkward guest, the kind that knocks over glasses. You were lying with your hands on your stomach; your legs were bent, unmoving. You were my little asparagus, my favorite perfume. How many times had I pushed you on a swing? How many times had you swung away and then back into my hands? And yet I didn’t try to hold that moment, I let it go—maybe I didn’t even feel like pushing you; maybe I wanted to read the paper. I brushed your forehead with my fingers. “Good girl,” I said. “Good girl.”

  Later, in my study, bent under the Art Nouveau fixture that sheds a warm light on my desk and my bald head, I’m still thinking about you, Angela. I’ve beaten a retreat to my lair, leaving the rest of the house to you two women, along with the white cloths, the pads, the virgin blood. Your mother has brewed some tea and carried it into your room on the tray she bought in London, the one with the cats. You’ll sit on the rug with your legs crossed like two young girls and dunk biscotti into your tea. Today’s a special day. We’ll stay home, where it’s nice and warm. And we won’t have dinner. Later, I’ll go to the kitchen and eat a little cheese, by myself. I think about the day that’s coming, when you’ll make love for the first time. A man will approach you with his hands, with his patter. He’ll approach my long, lean girl, whose pants are always too short for her, and he won’t want to trade picture cards or claim his turn on the swing; he’ll want to stick his dick in you. I squash my eyes with my hands, violently, because the image that rises up before my sight is too strong. I’m your father; for me, your sex is that sandwich of hairless flesh that gets filled up with sand on the beach. But I’m a man, too, and once I was a livid, barbarous man who raped a woman, a girl grown old before her time. I did it because I loved her right away and I didn’t want to love her; I did it to kill her and I wanted to save her. While I knead my eyes to drive away that image of myself, I see a person, a male with a lustful back, approaching you. And now I snatch him by the scruff of the neck and I tell him, Be careful. That’s Angela, the joy of my life. Then I let him go. And I let these offensive thoughts go, too; I have no right to think about you making love. It will be the way you want it to be. It will be sweet. It will be with a better man than I am.

  18

  My birthday. It’s not an anniversary that I particularly welcome, as you know; despite the passage of time, I still feel the same bitterness I felt when I was a little boy. The schools weren’t open yet, my friends had absconded to parts unknown, and so I never had a real party. When I was growing up, I started ignoring the date myself. Later, I begged your mother not to waste time organizing surprise parties, which I’ve never found at all surprising. She took me at my word, and without ever confessing it, I felt a certain amount of resentment toward her for having agreed so readily to disregard me.

  It wasn’t one of my best days. The sun remained smothered behind a great mass of chalky, amorphous clouds. Your grandparents, my in-laws, who had just come back from a cruise in the Red Sea, were visiting us. In the afternoon, we went and sat under the beach umbrellas. Grandma Nora’s suntan was spotted with abrasions inflicted upon her by her beautician in an effort to erase her age spots. The visor of a master mariner’s cap shaded Grandpa Duilio’s forehead. This was his standard summer outfit: short pants, long socks snug around his still-robust calves, rope-soled shoes. He sat in a low beach chair and drummed on his knees with his fingers, beating time to his mighty silence. I didn’t feel comfortable with my father-in-law. You know him as he is today—vague, gentle, and always very affectionate with you. But sixteen years ago, he still retained the arrogant manner and the disinclination to pardon that had carried him so high in his profession. He was one of the most powerful architects in the city; when he dies, he’ll definitely get a street named after him. Back then, he was just starting to be an old man, and he had a lot of trouble staying in the discreet corner indicated by his age. He behaved horribly toward his wife, who was too flighty to notice. Elsa felt an authentic veneration for her father; in the first years of our marriage, I used to get offended by the inordinate amount of attention she lavished on him. When he was present, I didn’t exist. Then, with the passage of time, things improved. He grew unequivocally old, and, unfortunately, I began to age, too. Now that he spends his days in front of the television set with the little Philippine woman who assists him, we’re good friends, as you know. If I don’t drop by at least twice a week and take his blood pressure, he gets his feelings hurt.

  Elsa was lying on her side with her face in her arms,
talking to her mother. I would say theirs was a moderately close relationship; Elsa couldn’t completely forgive poor Nora for being so frivolous. Like her father, Elsa has never been indulgent— that’s her real weakness. “My mother is so good-hearted,” she’d say, “and such a nitwit.” After Nora died, she miraculously stopped being a nitwit. Driven by a furtive impulse from her unconscious, Elsa began to mold her mother into a different woman, vulnerable but strong-willed, and a shining example to herself. This process is now complete; a few days ago, I heard her tell you, “Your grandmother didn’t have a lot of education, but she was the most intelligent woman I’ve ever known.” I looked at her, and she returned my look quite calmly. Your mother knows how to forget; she knows how to move things around so that they’re available to her in the proper form and at the exact moment when she wants to make use of them. On the one hand, this is unconscionable; on the other, it’s as if she gives everyone and everything around her the power to be continually born again. I must have been reborn under her hands many times without noticing it.

  So there I was, buried in the silence of the familiar life. In this setting, I was a free man; I didn’t need to hide. The people here knew me; my wife, my father-in-law, everybody knew me. And yet it seemed to me that this was the parallel life, not the other one. That one, the one with Italia—with its whispers, its segregation—that was the real life. Secret, enclosed, frightened, but real.

  A woman was swimming in the sea, her head disappearing and reappearing in the foam. She emerged from the waist up and wrung out her hair, twisting it in her hands, then shook her head. As she waded ashore through the increasingly shallow water, her figure was gradually revealed. She was wearing a turquoise two-piece bathing suit. She didn’t have a suntan. Her white belly protruded slightly, the way children’s stomachs do when they’ve just eaten. She headed in my direction, swinging her bony hips. I thought I could hear the rush of her breath and the sound the seawater made when it dripped from her moving body and fell onto the sand. I thought I wanted to raise an arm and stop her, but none of my limbs budged. Everything was at a standstill; everything was frozen. She alone was in motion, in slow motion. Fixed in my block of stone, I waited for the end. She passed us, and I couldn’t even find the courage to turn my head and follow her with my eyes. The shock had stiffened my neck. But the mirage of her—that wan shape, kicking up sand as it approached—stayed locked in my irises.

  Then the sound track came back up around me: first, the whistling of the wind, which had started to blow again; next, my mother-in-law’s chattering, which gradually grew more and more audible; and finally, my father-in-law’s labored breathing. It was like what happens when you’re out in a boat and you approach the shore and you begin to hear the murmur of the beach, closer and closer. At last, I turned my head, but behind me I saw only the sandy wall formed by the dunes. Italia had vanished.

  I passed the remains of the day in a trance. Everything seemed excessive; voices were too piercing, gestures too aggressive. Who were these dull people? Who parked them in my house? And to think, there was a time when I believed marrying into this family of respectable imbeciles meant a big step up on the social ladder! At dinner, I could barely lift my fork to my lips; the distance between the plate and my mouth had increased enormously. I left the table and went to the bathroom. My mother-in-law’s Yorkshire terrier lunged at me with bared teeth out of a dark corner in the hall. I replied to the attentions of this little parlor mutt with a solid kick. He ran limping to his mistress, who was already rushing to his side. “I’m sorry, Nora,” I said. “I accidentally stepped on him.”

  I went upstairs and lay down on a rug. I felt like one of those limp worms that hang on dried-up shrubs in the summer—one of those stupefied, tremulous worms that fall to the earth without a sound.

  Elsa’s parents left after dinner, and I was right behind them. Elsa had asked me to follow them back to the outskirts of the city, where the first streetlights were. My father-in-law was driving slowly along dark country roads that he didn’t know very well. I looked through the window at those two mute, immobile heads. What were they thinking about? Death? Not much of a trick on a Sunday evening. Or maybe they were thinking about life—that is, about buying something or eating something. In the end, life becomes unadulterated greediness. You take, and you just don’t feel like giving anything in return. So there they were, en route to the same silence that Elsa and I were headed for. In a few years, the solitude my headlights were shining on would be ours as well. I had two puppets in front of me, cruising into the night. But I still had time to stop, to change direction and consign myself to life again. To a different life, one in which I probably wouldn’t live long enough to reach the same state as those ancient figures in front of me.

  I yanked the wheel to the right and stopped on the edge of the asphalt. My in-laws’ car disappeared around a pitch-black curve in the road. That evening, I felt I would die young, and I knew that Italia was a gift I wouldn’t turn down.

  19

  I said, “How did you find the house?”

  “I walked along the beach.”

  “But why?”

  “I wanted to give you a birthday present. I wanted you to see me in my bathing suit.”

  She was in her bathrobe, half-asleep and holding her dog.

  “I’ll let you go back to bed.”

  “No, let’s go out.”

  In the street, she took my arm and walked along slowly. We went into the usual bar. “What will you have?” I asked her.

  She didn’t answer. She was leaning on the counter with all her weight. I saw her hand sliding over the metal surface toward the paper napkins. With a jerk, she ripped them from their container and rushed back out the door, bent forward and limping. When I caught up with her, she was leaning on the wall with her head down.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She was squeezing her hands between her thighs, and her hands were squeezing the wad of napkins. “I don’t feel good,” she whispered. “Take me home.”

  There wasn’t very much light, but I could see that the white napkins had turned dark between her fingers. “You’re losing blood,” I said.

  “Please, take me home.”

  But she fainted on the way. I picked her up, carried her to my car, and put her in the passenger’s seat. I’d decided to run the risk of taking her to the hospital. As I drove, I tried to figure out whether one of my friends was on duty that night. She came to; her face was ashen, and she gazed sad-eyed at the city lights. “Where are we going?”

  “To a hospital.”

  “No, I want to go home. I feel better.”

  She slid off the seat and squatted on the floor under the dashboard. “What are you doing?”

  “This way, I won’t soil the seat.”

  I took one hand off the wheel, leaned toward her, and grabbed a handful of her T-shirt. “Get up out of there!”

  But she managed to hold her ground. “I’m fine down here,” she said. “I’m watching you.”

  The emergency room was practically empty. The only patient was an old man, sitting in a corner with a blanket draped across his shoulders. I knew one of the nurses on duty, a portly young man with whom I occasionally talked about soccer. I’d found a terry-cloth beach towel on the backseat of the car and given it to Italia, who wrapped it around her hips. The nurse made her lie down on a stretcher in the first-aid area. She lay there with her neck twisted around, looking at me. The physician on duty, a young woman, arrived almost at once. I didn’t remember ever having seen her before. She said, “Come, we’ll go upstairs and do an ultrasound.”

  The three of us got into the elevator. The doctor’s face looked as though she’d been asleep—her hair was pressed flat on one side—but she smiled at me obsequiously, plainly well aware of who I was. Italia had walked into the elevator on her own two legs, and her color was somewhat improved.

  While the physician was examining her, I went over to my wing of the hospital. I wanted to
check on a patient I’d operated on the previous day. I stood beside his bed; he was asleep, breathing normally. The nurse who’d followed me into the room asked, “Can we remove his drain tube tomorrow, Doctor?”

  When I returned, Italia was coming out of the ultrasound room. “Everything’s all right,” the physician said. “The placenta has partially detached, but the embryo is in good shape.”

  For a fraction of a second, I stared at the physician’s face: square jaws, shiny nose, eyes too close together. I took a step backward and instinctively looked over her shoulder, as if I was afraid someone had overheard her. “Fine,” I think I said. “Fine.”

  The woman had no doubt detected my agitation. Now she was giving me a look of strange complicity. “Nevertheless, Doctor, I think the lady should stay in the hospital. The best thing for her would be complete rest, at least for a while.”

  The lady in question, dazed, confused, and visibly agitated, was hovering a few steps away. She wasn’t a lady; she was an unmarried woman, and also my lover. For just an instant, we exchanged surreptitious looks. I moved slightly, shifting my weight to my other leg and effectively removing her from my line of sight. I mustn’t have any sort of contact with her, at least for now. I was there in my hospital, face-to-face with a woman who knew me by my professional reputation and now, in addition, had surely guessed a few things about my private life. I thought, I must get Italia out of here; she has to disappear first, and then I can think about what to do next. We were walking toward the elevator; the doctor’s buttocks undulated under her smock. What guarantee did I have that this woman was discreet? There was something careless about the way she walked. Maybe by tomorrow, the news would be making the rounds in the hospital. Sly glances would be aimed my way like arrows, piercing my back. There would be gossip I’d be helpless to stop. Italia was behind me, and now I was furious with her. She hadn’t told me a thing; she’d kept me in the dark. She’d hidden this news from me, this news of all news, and left me to find it out from a stranger, right here in my hospital. She’d enjoyed the look of astonishment on my face. I almost felt like hitting her, like giving her a good smack, five fingers printed red across her lying mug.