“Where are you going?”
“I’m getting off.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
They’ve already closed the cabin doors, and the airplane is moving. The flight assistant stops me. “Excuse me, sir. Where are you going?”
“I’m sick; I have to get off.”
“I’ll get you a doctor.”
“I am a doctor. I’m sick. Let me get off.”
I must look pretty impressive, because the young woman starts to back up. She’s in her uniform, of course, and her blond hair is pulled back. She has an innocuous little nose. I follow her into the cockpit. Two men in short-sleeved white shirts turn around and look at me. I say, “I’m a doctor. I’m having a heart attack. Please open the cabin door.”
The mobile staircase moves back into place. The door opens. Air, finally, air; I run down the steps. Manlio follows me. The attendant calls to him, “Sir, are you getting off, too?”
The wind’s about to blow Manlio’s jacket off. He raises an arm and shouts, “He’s my colleague!”
So here we are again, back on the asphalt. An airport worker picks us up in his tiny automobile and drives us to the exit. I don’t speak. My arms are crossed; my lips are pressed together. My heart has returned to its proper place. Manlio puts on his sunglasses, even though there’s no sun. We get out of the airport car. Manlio says, “May I ask what came over you?”
I force myself to smile. “I saved your life.”
“You mean the plane’s going to crash?”
“Not now it won’t. You can’t get off of a plane that’s going to crash.”
“Were you scared shitless?”
“Yes.”
“Me, too.”
We laugh and go to the bar and drink some real coffee, and we miss the conference. “With all those jerkoffs,” says Manlio. He likes to deviate from the program. And it’s while we’re standing there that I tell him everything. I keep my head down, bent over my empty espresso cup, pushing the sugary black dregs around with my spoon, and my cheeks sag as I give him the whole story. There at the airport bar, among people eating their sandwiches with one eye on their luggage, I spill all the beans, confessing my feelings and my desires like an old, love-struck adolescent. And it doesn’t matter that Manlio is the last person I should tell about this. I need to tell someone about it, and here he is at my side, looking at me with his boar’s eyes. We’re friends—the wrong friends, as we both know—but we share this intimate moment, leaning together on the metal counter long after we’ve drunk our coffee.
“But who is this woman?”
“You’ve seen her.”
“I’ve seen her?”
“It was during that oncologists’ convention. One evening, she was sitting at a table near us. . . .”
He shakes his head. “I don’t remember her.”
People pass by. Even though there’s no smoking, Manlio lights a cigarette. I look straight ahead and make my declaration to him, to myself, and to the flood of unknown people rushing around us: “I’m in love.”
Manlio crushes out his cigarette with the toe of his moccasin. “Shall we take the next plane?”
27
I park the car, grab my bag off the passenger seat, and walk toward the hospital. Suddenly, Italia comes out of nowhere. And suddenly she’s very close to me, she puts a hand on my arm, feeling for the flesh under the material of my jacket. Not only does she surprise me; she frightens me, too. She’s not wearing any makeup, and she looks wan and thin. She hasn’t even bothered to cover her forehead with her hair. Her brow is broad and oppressive; it weighs down her eyes. I look around, consciously protecting myself from her, from the burden she’s bearing this morning. I say, “Come.”
I cross the street without touching her. She walks behind me, head down, wrapped in her shabby little cotton jacket. A car slows down for her, but she pays no attention; her stare is fixed on my hurrying feet. I walk away from the hospital like a thief with a bundle of indecent swag. We turn into a narrow street where there’s a little café I know.
She follows me up the spiral staircase to the second floor, an empty room that stinks of old smoke. She sits next to me, very close. She looks at me, looks away, then looks at me again. “I waited for you,” she says.
“I’m sorry.”
“I waited so long. Why didn’t you call me?”
I don’t answer. I wouldn’t know what to say. She puts her hand to her face, and now her face is red, her eyes are gray with tears. There’s an aquarium against the wall. From this distance, the fish look like confetti.
“You’ve changed your mind, right?”
I don’t want to talk, not this morning, not at this hour. “It’s not what you think,” I say.
“It’s not? What is it, then? Tell me what it is.”
There’s defiance in her eyes, in those tears that won’t fall. Her lips are inside her mouth, and she’s insistently picking at the wrists of her jacket. Those nervous hands of hers irritate me, and so does that face, which leaves me no room for escape. I should tell her about Elsa, but I’m not in the mood for emotional upheaval today. It’s tiring enough just being here with her, stuck at this little table. There isn’t much light, the place stinks of smoke, and then there are those little fish back there, forgotten like confetti after the carnival is over. All at once, she bursts into high-volume tears. She throws her arms around my neck; her nose and her lips are wet. “Don’t leave me. . . .”
I stroke her cheek, but my hands are hard as claws. She breathes on me, kisses me. Her breath smells odd, a mixture of sawdust and upset stomach. I hold her close, but her breath makes me nauseous. She says, “Tell me you love me.”
“Stop it.”
But she’s lost all her self-control. “No,” she cries. “No, I won’t stop. . . .”
She shakes and sobs in her chair. Footsteps come up the stairs. A boy disappears into the bathroom, a schoolboy with his knapsack on his back. With an effort, Italia pulls away from me and sits up. She’s calmer now, and I take her hand. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
She looks at me. Now her forehead looks as though it’s made of plaster. I say. “My wife . . . isn’t well.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
Tell her, Timoteo. Tell her now. Tell her to her face, to her dirty mouth, stagnant with her misery. Tell her you’re expecting a legitimate child, the heir to your sterile, cautious life. Tell her she has to have an abortion, because now’s the right time, now when she’s scaring you and you’re thinking, What kind of mother would so desperate a woman make?
“I don’t know,” I say, leaning back into my cowardice.
“You’re a doctor, and you don’t know what’s wrong with your wife?”
The boy leaves the bathroom. We look at him as he comes out, and he looks at us. He’s got black eyes and a wispy beard. He walks past the aquarium and disappears down the spiral staircase. Italia says, “I’m going to the bathroom.”
She wobbles a little, backs up a few steps, and runs headfirst into the wall, so hard that the sound echoes around the room. I get up and go to her. I say, “What on earth are you doing?”
She laughs and shakes my hand from her shoulders. That laugh scares me more than any amount of weeping. She says, “Every now and then, I need a blow to the head.”
We go outside and walk slowly down the street. I ask, “Does your head hurt?”
She’s distracted, looking at the people coming toward her. I ask, “Shall I get you a cab?”
But instead, we walk to a bus stop, and she climbs into the first bus that comes along.
I turn around and walk back to the hospital, thinking exclusively about myself. Today, not loving her was the easiest thing in the world. And during the operation, while I’ve got somebody’s liver in my hands, she stays with me like an unpleasant memory. I see her knocking at the door of my apartment, pretending to be a sales representative or something, one of those shadowy figures that sl
ip past the porter and roam around condominiums. As she rings the bell, she’s shaking and gloomy-eyed, but her eyes light up when she sees Elsa and asks for permission to enter. Elsa’s half-asleep, wearing her ecru nightshirt, her body naked and warm under the silk. Italia’s little; her armpits are stained with perspiration, because she’s been sweating. She sweated on the bus; she sweated all night long, tossing and turning. She looks at the apartment, the books, the photographs, and Elsa’s firm breasts, still dark from the sun. She thinks about her own breasts, stuck to her rib cage like hollowed-out onions, and she thinks about the heart beating in her womb. She’s wearing that ridiculous skirt with the elastic waistband that slides down onto her hips. Elsa smiles at her. She feels solidarity with all members of her sex, even the lowliest; as an emancipated woman, she thinks it’s her duty to show some indulgence. Not Italia; she’s got a child in her belly under that flea-market skirt, and she’s not indulgent. Elsa turns to her and says, “Tell me what you want.” She speaks familiarly, as she usually does to working-class girls. Italia doesn’t feel well; she’s dizzy, and she’s gone a long time without eating or sleeping. “Nothing,” she says, retreating toward the door. Then her eyes fall on the white envelope with the ultrasound results, lying on the table in the hall. . . .
Between operations, I call Elsa. “How are you feeling?”
“Terrific.”
“You’re not going out?”
“In a little while. I’m transcribing an interview.”
“Don’t open the door to anyone.”
“Why? Who’s coming over?”
“I don’t know. Ask who it is, make sure you know them.”
There’s a pause, then her laughter erupts out of the receiver. I imagine her cheeks, the little dimples in her flesh when she laughs. She says, “Paternity is having a strange effect on you. You’re turning into my grandmother.”
I laugh, too, because I feel ridiculous. My house is in order, and my wife is strong, tall and strong.
In the evening, I look out of the bedroom window. I part the curtains and examine the street below, the branches of the trees, the traffic light signaling a few blocks away. The street’s empty except for one passing car, an anonymous vehicle taking someone home. I’m looking for her. I don’t know if I’m looking for her because I need her, or because I’m afraid she’s got the place staked out and is spying on us from down there. I look out at the roofs, the antennas, and the cupolas in the direction where she lives, out past the highway lined with nocturnal shapes lit up by automobile headlights, out near that bar I know all too well; I wonder if it’s still open at this hour. There’s such a mass between us, all these walls, all these existences curled up in sleep. So much separates us, and good thing it does, too; I need to catch my breath. Don’t be distressed,Italia. That’s life for you: wonderful, intimate moments, followed by blasts of cold wind. And though you may be suffering out there, out beyond the last concrete outpost, at this distance your torment is unknown to me, and alien. What does it matter if one of my obscene spurts got you pregnant? Tonight, you’re alone with your baggage on a railroad platform, and the train is leavingthe station; you’ve missed it.
“Aren’t you coming to bed?”
I lie down next to your mother. She’s reading. Her hair, still wet from the shower, surrounds her face in damp clumps. I’m turned away, well on my side of the bed, but I feel her hand pulling on my pajama shirt. “I wonder what it’ll be like,” she says.
I roll over, not too far, just giving her my profile.
“The baby, I mean. I can’t seem to imagine it.”
“He’ll be like you, utterly beautiful.”
“And maybe it’ll be a girl,” she says, lowering her book. “Ugly, like you.” She moves close to me; her wet hair brushes against my skin. “Last night, I dreamed that it didn’t have any feet, it was born and it didn’t have any feet. . . .”
“Keep calm. Its feet will show up in the next ultrasound.”
She moves back to her side and starts reading again. She asks, “Will the light bother you?”
“Not at all. It’ll keep me company.”
I lie there in the yellowish half-light with the sheet over my eyes. I don’t really sleep, but I doze off, reassured by the light and the sound of Elsa’s breathing, which suggests that life will go on this way—easy, uncomplicated, shampoo-scented. I dream and drowse, my thoughts moving along benignly, until I see a maimed child coming toward me. Now the light’s off and I’m asleep, but not soundly enough. I hear your mother cry out, “Damn you, give me back his feet! Give them back to me!” And then, drowned in the blue waters of the night, I have a terrible vision: I get up, go to my bag on the hall table, take out the scalpel, and cut my member off. I open the window and toss the thing down onto the pavement for the cats, or for Italia, if she’s around. There you go, Crabgrass. There’s your child’s father. And now I’m pressing my thighs together as tightly as I can. What a horror it is, Angela, when life starts taking bites out of you at night, too. It bites you when you’re awake; it bites you in your dreams.
28
The recurring drone in the receiver I was holding to my ear echoed the telephone in that hovel, ringing away. Far from me, far from my hand, far from my ear. She wasn’t there at ten. She wasn’t there at noon. She wasn’t there at six in the evening. Where was she? Cleaning up some office, probably, having her way with a washroom. I could picture her walking along the city streets, grazing the walls, wearing the wasted look I’d seen on her the last time, in that café, when I’d found her general unpleasantness intolerable, humiliating for both of us. Whenever a romance is bound for dissolution, humiliation’s a part of the tale. Sometimes lovers emerge from their confining silhouette and see an objective image of the beloved, a bright, focused image no longer camouflaged by their own desires. Afterward, they pretend that nothing has changed, but by then—at least to some extent—they’ve already passed from love to ferocity. For we become ferocious with those who have disillusioned us, Angela.
And so, while we were in that café, I looked at her as though she were just another anonymous pedestrian, one of those useless bodies that crowd the streets, the buses, and the world. Bodies like the ones I split open and root around in every day, without joy and without compassion. I passed my surgeon’s eyes over her, from her forehead down to the hand supporting her head; I examined her, peering at her ugly little flaws: the fuzz on her chin, the crooked finger, the two deep rings around her neck. She had crawled back into her wretched shell, and I could look at her like that, without interest or sympathy, cataloging the details of her unsuitability. I caught another whiff of her dismal breath. It was like breath from a decaying body, like the breath of patients when they wake up from anesthesia.
The telephone wasn’t disconnected. It was a working line, an operator with a metallic voice had assured me of that; but she didn’t answer. Maybe she was home after all, curled up into a ball, lying on her bed, letting the sound of the telephone hover above her body before entering it and jolting her with its monotonous alternation of rest and alarm, making her shiver. It was the only way I had of telling her that I hadn’t abandoned her. So I continued to call her into the evening, telling myself a lie about how this mournful sound was a way of communicating with her.
I left the hospital exhausted and drove home, running through quite a few not-yet-green traffic signals along the way. Occasional shafts of light revealed that my eyes were dilated and my expression grim. . . . I would never be free of her; wherever I might go, I’d be haunted by the thought of her. Italia dominated me. She foiled all my intentions. Her voice hammered at my temples, so present that I turned and looked for her. Had she been sitting there in the passenger seat, with her frayed little jacket, her white, blue-veined hands, and her faded eyes, maybe then it would have been easier to forget her.
Nora puts her arms around me, and I feel her pasty lipstick sliding along my cheek. She and Duilio have stayed for dinner, which is already on
the table.
“Congratulations, Dad!”
“Thanks.”
“It’s great news.”
“Let me go wash my hands.”
From the other end of the table, Nora tosses a package wrapped in white tissue paper. Elsa, distracted, fails to catch the package, which lands in the tuna sauce. She picks it up and cleans it off with her napkin. “Mama,” she says. “I told you not to.”
“Just a little thought, something for good luck. Remember, the first baby dress has to be new, and it has to be made of silk.”
Elsa unwraps it and passes it to me. “Here, isn’t it wonderful? We’ve got a new baby dress.” She laughs, but I know she’s annoyed. She doesn’t want baby presents; it’s still too early for that. The baby dress is a handkerchief with a pair of holes I can stick four fingers into. The water pitcher on the table is empty, and I stand up to fill it. When I turn on the faucet, the sound cancels out the voices of the others. They’re having a family conversation; I watch the movements of their faces and their hands. As far as I’m concerned, they’re already behind a glass panel, the three of them, the usual smudged glass panel I put up around the world when I want none of it and it wants none of me.
Elsa’s talking to her father, touching his arm. I see her in isolation, as if she were emerging from a cloud of steam; I see her very well. She has returned to the center of the world. Gone is the fragility she displayed that evening not so many days earlier; gone is her sudden, touching uncertainty. She’s herself again, steady and tireless, only more mysterious. She casts her eyes upon me, and they, too, are the same as always: attuned to surface stimuli, but intimately distracted. She doesn’t need me anymore.
I return with the pitcher and pour everyone some water. Then I say, “Excuse me,” and leave the room. I don’t even bother to close the bedroom door, so eager am I to dial her number.
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