I stop the car in the open area in front of the clinic. Italia looks at the polished glass of the sliding doors; I take her hand and kiss it. “Don’t be worried,” I say. “It’s nothing; it’ll be over before you know it.”
“I’m going,” she says, gets out of the car, and walks to the entrance. I start to back and fill so I can get out of there, and I see her in the rearview mirror. She’s walking even more unsteadily than usual, maybe because of the gravel. However, I know she won’t fall; she’s used to those excessively high heels, to that purse with the excessively long strap knocking against the insides of her legs. And yet, she does fall. She takes one more step and goes down like a sack. She hauls in her purse, but she doesn’t get up; she stays huddled up on the ground. And she doesn’t turn around, because she’s sure I’m already gone. Don’t move, I say, without knowing what I’m saying. Maybe she knows I’m there. Don’t move. Because now it seems to me that what she was missing has returned to her. It’s covering her back like ragged wings.
I open the car door and sprint across the gravel. “What’s the matter?”
“Breakfast. Maybe I ought to have breakfast.”
I help her to her feet, and as I embrace her, I look up over her head. On the second floor, standing at a big dark window, a man in a white coat is watching us.
So what? What if this is the beginning of the end, if this is the way we enter the darkness? Those eyes of hers are on me; those sticky hands are holding me back. No one has ever loved me like this, no one. I won’t carry you in there; I won’t let any curette scrape you clean. I want you, and now I’m strong. I’ll find a way; I won’t ever offend you again.
“Think of yourself,” she whispers. “I mean it. Think of yourself.”
I’ve already decided. I love you. And if you want my head, give me a hatchet, and I’ll give you the head of a man who loves you.
“Let’s get out of here,” I say.
And I was saying that to our child, Angela. Without a sound, a little red leaf fell on my windshield and slid under the wiper. It was a finely veined leaf, perhaps the first of the season, a gift to us.
I got back behind the wheel and started driving again, farther and farther away from the clinic. We headed north and stopped in one of the first little towns beyond the city limits, where the landscape changes and gets wilder. It was still an urban setting, but we could smell the woods, and we could feel the breath coming down from the flat-topped mountains that loomed up on the horizon like sleeping buffalo.
We went to a film in one of those movie houses in the provinces that open only on Saturday and Sunday. It was the first showing, and the place was nearly empty. We sat on wooden chairs in the middle of the theater, which didn’t seem to be heated. Italia laid her head on my shoulder.
“Are you tired?” I asked.
“A little.”
“Go to sleep.”
She stayed like that, dozing on my shoulder in the darkness. The light from the screen barely illuminated her cheek. The film was a comedy, a little trivial, perhaps, but very enjoyable. In fact, I was enjoying everything. Perhaps for the first time, we were a couple. A couple on a holiday trip, taking in a movie, stopping in a bar for a sandwich, and then heading out again. Yes, I would have liked to take a trip with Italia, to sleep in hotels, make love, and be on our way. Perhaps never to return. We could have gone abroad. I had some friends in Mogadishu. One of them was a cardiologist who worked in a psychiatric hospital. He had a little house on the ocean, and there, in the evenings, he smoked marijuana with his lady companion, a woman with legs as thin as arms. Yes, a new life. A poor hospital, and little dark-skinned children with no shoes on their feet and eyes as shiny as beetles. To go where I’d be needed, perform operations in tents, care for the poor and the wretched.
“Would you like to take a trip somewhere?”
“Yes.”
“And where would you like to go?”
“Wherever you want.”
22
Your mother’s leaving on a trip. Her job will take her away for a few days, which means a nice stretch of free time for me. She puts the last items in her suitcase, the same spotted suede bag she took on our honeymoon. Her arm brushes me as she searches for a foulard scarf in the closet with the multiple doors that cover an entire wall. She’s wearing a soft nutmeg brown pantsuit with a shawl collar and a very simple necklace made of big amber beads strung on a thin strip of black satin. I take out a shirt. All my shirts are white, and to keep from making mistakes, I keep an appropriate tie wrapped around each of the hangers that hold my suits. Occasionally, Elsa urges me to be daring and wear something different, perhaps a hat. She’s got a friend, a writer from Berlin, who affects ostentatious headgear: berets, Panamas, cocked hats, felt hats. On him, they look good; he’s eccentric, bisexual, extremely intelligent. I’m sure she’d be happier with the writer from Berlin. Maybe they have assignations in literary cafés. He places his sombrero or busby on the chair and reads her some things he’s written; she gets excited. Yes, she’s reached the right moment; she’s ripe enough, and bourgeois enough, for a bisexual lover.
Having so elegant a woman at my side has always filled me with pride; today, however, her elegance depresses me. The umpteenth disguise. This morning, she’s the comfortingly feminine journalist, traveling on assignment. Even her gestures annoy me; she’s abrupt, perhaps a bit rude. She’s already slipped into the role that she’s going to play out in the world, among her riffraff colleagues. I pull my pants on, the ones with the belt already passed through the loops to make things easier. I’m going to tell her now. Yes, this is probably a good time to tell her. This way, she can go on her trip and think over what I said. By the time she gets home, she’ll have given it a lot of thought. So now I’ll tell her: I love anotherwoman, and that woman is going to have a baby; you and I, therefore, must part. I don’t intend to tell any face-saving lies, to say I want to live alone or some such palliative nonsense. I don’t want to live alone; I want to live with Italia, and if I hadn’t met her, I probably would never have found a single good reason for leaving Elsa. I have nothing to reproach her for—or perhaps too much. I don’t love her anymore, and maybe I’ve never loved her; I’ve merely been seduced by her. I’ve submitted to her tyranny, sometimes enraptured, sometimes intimidated, and at the last quietly exhausted. Now, if I watch her closely—and I can, for she’ll never notice—if I watch her closely now, while she’s making an inventory of the cosmetics in her beauty case, and I see her fixed stare, her dull eyes, her slack jaw . . . What’s this woman doing here? What does she have to do with me? Why doesn’t she live with our neighbor across the way? I see him pass a window in his drawers now and then, a paunchy but muscular fellow. Why doesn’t she cross the street, enter his building, get on his bed, and rummage around in her beauty case there? Yes, it would be better if she were over there now, with that narcolepticlook on her face. Maybe I’ll take the little redhead who lives with the paunchy, muscular fellow. Maybe she’s nice. Maybe we’ll talk a little. Maybe she’d like to hear the thoughts of a man who spends his days disemboweling people. I look at my wife, and there’s not a single thing I like about her, nothing that interests me. She’s got very beautiful hair, it’s true, but there’s too much of it for my taste. Her breasts are perfect, full but not excessively large, and yet I have no desire to touch them. She’s putting on her earrings; the taxi’s on the way. I’ll let her keep everything; I’ll haggle about nothing. I won’t even try to divide up the books. I’ll throw some things in a suitcase and leave. Good-bye.
“Good-bye, I’m leaving.”
“Where are you going?”
“I told you: Lyons.”
“Send me a postcard.”
“A postcard?”
“Yes, I’d like that. Good-bye.”
Elsa smiles, picks up her spotted suede bag, and leaves the room. I wonder about the writer from Berlin. Is his dick limp, like a skullcap, or stiff, like a kepi?
23
I was kissing Italia’s navel. She had a wrinkled navel that sucked me in deeper and deeper, like a whirlpool. That little knot of flesh had been her link to life. Now I felt I could penetrate it, could open that soft passage with my lips and slip inside, one part at a time, first my head, then my shoulders, then the rest of me. Yes, I wanted to be inside her belly, all curled up and gray as a rabbit. I closed my eyes, wet with my own saliva, and I was an unborn infant, afloat in the warm sea. Help me, my love. I want to be born. I want to be born again. I’ll take better care of myself, and I’ll love you without mistreating you.
I opened my eyes and looked at the few things around me—the lacquered chest of drawers, the bedside carpet with its faded stripes, and, outside the window, the gray pier of the viaduct. And across the room, leaning against the mirror, the photograph of the unknown man. “Who’s that?”
“My father.”
“Is he still alive?”
“I haven’t seen him for many years.”
“Why not?”
“He never was a family man.”
“How about your mother?”
“She’s dead.”
“And you don’t have sisters and brothers?”
“They’re all older than me, and they all live in Australia.”
“I’d like to see your village.”
“There’s nothing there. There used to be a pretty church, but the earthquake knocked it down.”
“That’s not important. I want to see where you grew up, the streets where you lived.”
“Why?”
“So I can picture where you were before I knew you.”
“I was in here,” she said, touching my belly. Her hand was burning hot.
That afternoon, I took her to see the place where I grew up, Angela. It used to be a respectable working-class neighborhood, mostly laborers and low-level office workers, and when I was a kid, it seemed far from the city center. But now the city has expanded so much that my old neighborhood’s practically downtown; there are cinemas, restaurants, a theater, and an infinite number of offices. We went into the park that seemed so immense to me when I was little. It turned out to have quite modest dimensions and was, moreover, badly maintained and smothered on all sides by large buildings. It looked like a remnant of green wool lost amid rolls of cheap synthetic fabrics. I looked for the exact spot where my mother used to sit and wait for me while I played in the park. She always brought a blanket to sit on, and she’d spread it out under a certain tree. I thought I recognized the tree, so Italia and I sat down under it. She was staring straight ahead when a man passed, walking a dog. She asked me, “What were you like when you were a kid?”
“Nothing special. I was always a little irritated.”
“Why?”
“I was fat, I was afraid, and I sweated a lot. . . . Maybe I was irritated because I was sweating, and I was sweating because I was fat and afraid of getting hurt.”
“And then?”
“Then I grew up, I became thin, and I stopped sweating. But I’m still always a little irritated—it’s my character.”
“You don’t seem like that to me.”
“Well, I am. And I’m also a great liar.”
We stopped and looked at the steps of my old school. Thirty years had passed, but it was still there; it hadn’t changed. I recognized the strip of playground, surrounded by the same iron fence with the same black bars. Even the color of the terra-cotta facade was unchanged: the very same, pale yellow. The day was ending, and the light was starting to fade. We’d been outdoors for a long time. We could still see each other, though; there was enough light for that. The colors of our clothes seemed more somber, and our clasped hands were hard to distinguish in the gathering gloom. I wanted to speak, and yet I remained silent, holed up in my memories. We were sitting at the top of the marble steps with our backs against the iron bars of the fence. It was from this very vantage point that my school companions and I had observed the progress of many a morning, but I’d never sat there and watched night fall. And while the darkness was erasing everything, I had the sense that life is sweet, however fleeting. The school was still there. That’s the important thing, Angela. You can still lean against the gate; you can still visit it by chance, on a random weekday, and relive a part of your childhood. That was when I knew that I hadn’t changed, that I was still the same. Maybe one never changes, I thought; maybe one just adapts.
“Did you do well in school?”
“Yes, unfortunately.”
“Why unfortunately?”
Unfortunately because I raped you, unfortunately because I didn’t weep when my father died, unfortunately because I’ve never loved anyone. Unfortunately, Italia, Timoteo is afraid to live.
As we walked along, my mind was in a strange limbo, where memories overlapped one another and mingled with the present. I held Italia close and we wandered the streets, stumbling a little, like two lovers in a strange city. That night, this part of town, which I knew when I was a boy, seemed unfamiliar to me.
People passed us, brushed against us. They didn’t know how much in love we were. By accident, we found ourselves in front of the building where I used to live. We’d just come to the bottom of a narrow, descending street. There was a bakery on the corner, and a delicious smell of pizza filled the air. I was thinking that we could go in and eat a slice or two, and then I realized I was outside my old house.
“I lived there until I was sixteen. We had an apartment on the third floor, facing the courtyard, so you can’t see the windows from here. But wait a minute. . . .”
We climbed over a low brick wall, and we were in the courtyard. “There it is. That window was mine.”
“Let’s go up there,” Italia said.
“No . . .”
“The porter’s in his booth—let’s ask him. They’ll let you in. You think they won’t let you in?”
She dragged me upstairs, all the way to the apartment. A young woman opened the door. I didn’t look at her; I looked past her shoulder as she invited us in. Even the walls were gone. Now there was a single large room with dark parquet floors. Looking over at the far side of the room, I saw a large metal bookcase, a white sofa, and a television set on the floor. The young woman was pretty and, like her home, modern. She and Italia looked at each other like dogs of two different breeds. I didn’t recognize a thing, and I smiled at our hostess, who said, “Would you like something to drink? Some tea, perhaps?”
I shook my head. Italia shook hers as well, although with less conviction. If she could have, she probably would have stayed for a while, looking at that sophisticated young lady with her straight black hair, the color of petroleum. The handles on the windows, I thought, are they still the ones . . .
“You’re right. I kept the fixtures.” She’d lived here for less than a year, she said. “The couple who lived here before me split up. I got the apartment at a good price.”
I went over to one of the windows and touched the handle. Behind my back, in the big room, there was nothing I remembered, nothing at all. So now I knew that my memories dwelled in a place that didn’t exist, a place that had been swept from the face of the earth, and those four rooms, that bathroom, and that kitchen lived only in me. All the things that had once seemed irremovable were gone. The toilet was dust; the plates were dust; the beds were dust. There was not a trace of my family’s passage; our smell had disappeared forever. I thought, What am I doing here? I held on to the window handle, the only thing left, a little brass leg. I used to pull up a chair so I could reach it. I peered through the window now, and the view, the whole perspective, had changed as well. New buildings crowded out the horizon. The courtyard looked the same, except it was full of parked cars. “Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t mention it.”
Soon we were in the street again, and again there was the aroma of the bakery. Italia said, “How did that make you feel?”
I said, “You want a pizza?”
We ate it on the way home. Since
I was driving, I took big bites. Italia stroked my ear, part of my face, my head. She knew I was suffering, and she didn’t like it. She herself didn’t turn away from pain, but rather went to meet it. Her hand comforted me.
Later, in bed, I was kissing her belly again, when she said, “I’ll give it up, you know. If you want me to, I’ll give it up, but tell me now, tell me while we’re making love.”
Loving wasn’t easy for me, Angela, believe me. It wasn’t easy; I had to learn. I had to learn how to caress a woman, how to move my hands the right way. Plaster hands; in lovemaking, I’ve always had plaster hands.
The cars are passing over the viaduct and shaking the walls of the house. The sound comes in through the window and reverberates in the room. The windowpanes vibrate. They can’t last; the sun is destroying the adhesive tape that holds them together.
“I was in fifth grade. There was a dress in one of the market stalls, a voile dress with red roses on it. It was Saturday. I roamed all over the market, but I kept coming back to that stall to look at the dress. It was lunchtime, and the market was emptying out. The merchants were putting their stuff away. A man folding T-shirts says to me, ‘Do you want to try it on?’ I tell him I have no money. ‘Trying on is free,’ he says. He helps me climb into his truck. I try on the dress inside a kind of tent. The man comes inside the tent and starts touching me. ‘Do you like the dress?’ he asks. I can’t move, so I stay still when he touches me. Afterward, he’s all sweaty. ‘Don’t say anything about this to anyone,’ he says, and he gives me the dress. When I walk, my legs are like rubber. I’ve got my old clothes in my hand, and I’m wearing the new dress with the flowers on it. After I get home, I take it off and put it under the bed. But that night, I wake up and pee on the dress, because I figure the only thing it’s going to bring me is bad luck, and the next day, I burn it. Nobody knows about any of this, but in my mind everyone knows everything. It seems to me that anybody can take me inside a truck and do dirty things to me.”
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