Don't Move

by Margaret Mazzantini

  One evening, Manlio called me up and we went out for a pizza like two old classmates getting together again. After we sit down, he asks me, “How did things turn out with that girl?”

  “She’s all right.”

  “And how about you?”

  At a table some distance away, a blond woman with her back to me is smoking a cigarette. All I can see is the whitish cloud of smoke around her hair, and the face of the man sitting across from her. From his expression, I try to guess what she looks like. “I don’t know,” I say. “I’m waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I’m waiting for that woman to turn around. There’s a chance she looks like her.

  Sometimes I go and pick her up at the market. I arrive when the vendors are taking down the stalls, and she’s standing in the midst of a flood of damaged flowers. She greets me with a movement of her head. She stacks the boxes and carries the pots of unsold plants to a small pickup truck that is covered with green oilcloth, parked behind the stall. I wait for her to finish her work, posted there in my elegant clothes like a stalk among the dewy petals. Italia takes off her rubber boots and slips into her normal shoes. After she’s in the car, we treat each other kindly but joylessly, like two friends whipped with the same stick. Or maybe like parents who’ve lost a child. In any case, we’re a pair of survivors. We’re both walking next to an open wound, and we have to be careful about choosing our words.

  “How are you?”

  “Fine. And you?”

  “Are you tired?”

  “No, not at all.”

  She’s never tired, but she rubs her cold, chapped hands. She’s grown; in the car, her forehead seems broader, but her shoulders are more hunched. She never sits back completely in her seat. Her necklines are always too low. She’s trying to put up some kind of a fight. She looks through the car windows at the world, which has done nothing to protect us.

  We’re like two convalescents, waiting for the time to pass, and meanwhile the traffic is rolling along and the days are growing shorter. The bright lights from the shop windows reflect in Italia’s eyes, apparently without bothering her, for she pays no attention to them. I haven’t touched her again. When a woman’s recently had an abortion, you don’t have sex with her; you leave her alone. Besides, I’m terrified even at the thought of her nakedness, terrified of finding my arms around her again, of clasping that pain she carries inside her, inert under her wet clothes. It’s too cold for her at the market—her nose is red and peeling. She pulls a thoroughly soaked handkerchief out of her pocket and blows that nose. Not long ago, I brought her some vitamins, but I’m not certain she takes them. It’s unhealthy for us to let time pass this way. We’re not friends now, nor will we ever be. We were lovers even before we knew each other. We exchanged flesh in a wild fury. And now such an odd courtesy has sprung up between us. I look at her and wonder what she and I are doing here, becalmed in these still waters. It can’t end like this, without a cry, without anything at all. If a demon is required, let him fall upon us, let him burn us. As long as we don’t have to stay in this limbo.

  Maybe a change of scene would do the trick, I think. Her house gives me the creeps. That tobacco-colored coverlet, the naked chimney, her blind dog, and that monkey on the wall, holding the baby’s bottle like a tasteless joke. One afternoon, therefore, I ask her if she’d like to go to a hotel. “So we won’t spend all our time sitting in traffic,” I say.

  And so here we are, in a room completely new to us, a lovely room in the center of the city, with heavy damask curtains and damask walls. She doesn’t even look around; she throws her purse on the bed and goes straight to the window, raising a hand to push the curtain aside. I ask if she wants something to eat or drink, and she says no. I go into the bathroom to wash my hands, and when I return, she’s still there at the window, holding back the curtain and looking out. When she hears my footsteps coming toward her, she says, “It’s really high. What floor is this?”

  “The ninth.”

  She has her hair pinned up. I draw close to her and kiss the nape of her neck with my lips open and my eyes closed. How much time has passed since I’ve kissed her like this? Already, I’m wondering how I could have given her up for so long. Once again, her warm body is next to mine, and that virgin room will help us to forget.

  Now she’ll feel the wetness of my lips on her neck. She’ll balk at first, but then she’ll be mine again, just as she’s always been. She can’t give me up; she told me so herself. When she lowers her arm, the curtain shuts out the daylight and the view of the city. I start to undress her right there, leaning against that stiff, heavy fabric. I take off her jacket, which she’s kept on until now; it’s an ugly faded jacket made of some kind of fluffy wool. It weighs nothing and appears to be held together by mucilage. My fingers brush her breasts, those small, droopy breasts that please me so much. She lets me have my way. “Darling,” she says, “my darling,” and holds me close. I take her by the hand and lead her to the bed. I want her to relax and be comfortable. I take off her shoes. She’s wearing cheap nylon panty hose. I rub her legs and her feet, which are like a mannequin’s. She slips off her skirt herself, folds it carefully, and drapes it over the foot of the brass bed. Then she does the same with her shirt. Her movements are slow; she’s trying to take her time, to postpone the moment of intimacy.

  I get undressed in a hurry and throw my clothes on the floor, taking advantage of her averted eyes, because now I feel ashamed. She undoes her side of the bed, lies down, and pulls up the covers. I get in next to her. The bed’s still cold. She’s lying there stiffly, hands at her sides. I throw a leg over her, but it slides off, because she’s left her panty hose on. I say, “We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

  “I know.”

  What a considerate lover I’ve become all of a sudden! How ridiculous I must seem! She didn’t feel the slightest desire to take off her clothes. She would have gladly stayed where she was, looking down through the parted curtains at the world below, wondering if there was a place for her somewhere. When I enter her, she gives a little start, then nothing; she lets me move back and forth in absolute silence. I keep my face buried in her hair. I don’t dare look at her; I’m afraid of meeting her impassive eyes. I let out a loud groan, hoping she’ll take pity on me and respond. But nothing happens. We don’t take off—we don’t even leave the ground. I’ve got blood in my eyes and her hair in my mouth. Despite my efforts, I don’t exactly get carried away, either. I see and hear everything: the soft hum of the minibar; the bathroom fan, which I’ve left on with the bathroom light; the sound of my flesh sliding in and out of hers. This last is the sound that’s truly terrible. Italia’s not here; her flesh is empty, and now I’m a weight inside her, the deadweight of dead love. This embrace is our funeral. I feel my sweaty bulk pressing down on her skeleton. She doesn’t want me anymore; she doesn’t want anything anymore. Her body is a passage that’s closing itself off. At this moment, I understand that I’ve lost everything, Angela, because everything I want is here in my arms, lifeless. I push my chest off of hers, looking for her face. Her eyes move around under her tears like two fish in a very narrow sea. She’s crying; it’s the only thing she’s felt like doing since we entered this hotel room. My shrunken member withdraws, swift as a rat crossing a street at night.

  I lie next to her in silence until her weeping becomes gentler, less anguished. There’s a fixture on the ceiling, an oval of whitewashed glass, a blind eye looking down on us with total indifference. I say, “You can’t not think about it, can you?”

  A gust of wind blows the window open, and icy air assaults our naked bodies. We stay as we are, unmoving, letting the cold wound us. Then Italia gets up, closes the window, and goes to the bathroom.

  I watch her nude figure cross the room, one hand covering her breasts. I stretch out my arm on the sheet where she’s been lying. The lukewarm outline of her body is still there, and I think that it’s
all over, that it has come to an end like this, in a hotel. My thoughts slide into the folds of the sheet. I think about a friend of mine who used to go to a prostitute—always the same one—when he was a young man. By his request, when they made love, she pretended to be dying. I think about all the men I’ve known, men who made love, like all men, and now are dead. I think about my father. He went with all sorts of women, always using extreme discretion, not that it was necessary; after he separated from my mother, he lived alone. Still, he liked to keep certain matters as abstract as possible. He’d choose strange, solitary figures, middle-aged women with few attractions. They all seemed like dullards, but perhaps each of them had her secret ways. One worked as a cashier in a second-class movie theater. She had dyed hair, aquiline features, and large breasts tightly bound inside a rigid brassiere. I saw her only once, when my father took me to a bar that connected with the theater lobby through a glass door. As I observed the woman through the glass, I noticed that my father was watching her, too, but furtively, with a look in his eyes I didn’t recognize. They were a child’s eyes, overhung by his bushy old satyr’s brows. He seemed happy with his location, his son on one side of him and his lover on the other. Maybe she’d told him she wanted to meet me. I pretended I didn’t know what was going on. Later, I learned this woman’s name was Maria Teresa, she was married to an invalid, and she had no children. She and my father often went to eat in a little restaurant in the back of a delicatessen; her favorite dish was beef tongue in green sauce. I never found out anything more about her. But now the sheet my hand’s resting on becomes a movie screen, and I watch that woman undress. She slips off her little watch and places it on the marble top of an old bedside table. My father’s by her side, taking off his pants and hanging them on the wooden clothes rack. The perfume on the back of her neck is bitter. In a little pensione in a side street near the delicatessen, where she has just eaten beef tongue in green sauce, my father and the aging cashier with the stricken face make love.

  Whatever happened to those two? Like us, they left behind a rumpled, lukewarm bed in a pensione with narrow staircases, where a closing door sends a rush of wind through the crack under the other doors on the same floor. My father smokes while the cashier’s in the bathroom, splashing water into her armpits, puckering her lips, and applying her lipstick. Then she turns off the light, just as she does in her own home. Later, after they’ve gone, a maid comes in, carrying a bucketful of cleaning products in one hand and clean sheets rolled up under her other arm. She opens the windows and throws the dirty sheets onto the floor. Then comes another woman, with her own particular smell and her own particular undergarments, and she undresses by the side of another man. She, too, makes love; she, too, submits to the probing of her insides.

  I wonder if my father’s cock was bigger than mine. I never saw it, but deep in my heart, I think it must have been. Meanwhile, he’s still in the coffin, where I left him a few months ago, dark-faced, cotton wool in his nostrils, a flower in his hand. Who put that flower there? The cashier, maybe. No, she wasn’t at the funeral; that was an old affair, years and years ago. They probably broke up, but she continued to eat beef tongue in green sauce with somebody else. Maybe she’s dead, too. Italia’s in the bathroom, and I’m stroking the sheet where she lay. It’s still a little warm. The movie’s over; the screen is blank and wrinkled again. I know I’m going to cry soon, for all the dead lovers, for myself and for her, in there looking at herself in the mirror, like my father’s cashier. When she gives me my turn in the bathroom, I’ll cry. Because she and I are like all those who have been here before. We’ll keep on going, and we’ll die far apart. No one will ever know anything about how close we were, how deeply each of us entered into the other, nor anything of our life together up to now, when I’m lying here with my arm flung out across the sheet where she was lying a little while ago. It’s not warm anymore. We’re needy flesh, Angela, self-duplicating flesh projected onto an empty screen. Or perhaps our energy nourishes another world, a perfect world that lives very near ours, where there’s no need to be afraid or to suffer. Maybe we’re like those black sailors who shoveled coal in the bellies of steamships so that a pair of lovers could have a romantic dance up on the bridge, above the twinkling carpet of the sea. Someone will gather up our dreams, someone less imperfect than we are. We’re doing the dirty work.

  I’m in the bathtub with the faucets running. My member, abandoned to its own devices, bobs in the moving water. Later, bent over the bidet with my hands on my head, I weep. Soon a maid will come in and throw our sheets onto the floor. On one of them, there’s a little spot of wetness that trickled out of Italia’s intimate parts. I have kissed that spot.

  When we leave the room, I raise my arm to turn out the light, but then I hesitate. Italia turns and looks for the last time at that pool of darkness before it disappears behind us. We’re both having the same thought: What a shame! What a missed opportunity!

  31

  They must be almost there. Your hematoma’s been aspirated and removed from your head; the tube filled up with red blood. They’re irrigating you with saline solution.

  Manlio got here a little while ago, and now he’s sitting across from me. He embraced me, tried unsuccessfully to cry, and glued himself to his cell phone. Your mother’s flight will be a little late, and he insisted on knowing the exact minute when the landing would take place. A discussion began, and he raised his voice. Getting pissed off at an airline information agent—that is, at nothing at all—is his way of showing his solidarity with me. The cell phone is still hot in his hand; he can’t put it down. He wants to call someone else, but he doesn’t know who. He’s afraid of being alone with me in the midst of this silence. You know how he is: He’s accustomed to lighting up life the way he lights up his cigars. He fidgets around, exhaling loudly. His mouth has fallen down, and so have his eyes; he’s in a cage. Closed up in a cage with me, his best friend, on the worst day of my life. I watch him unconcernedly, thinking about the question I saw on a mural: How can you see the bottom if you keep splashing around on the surface?

  “Excuse me, I have to telephone Bambi.”

  He goes to the window, hunching his shoulders to isolate himself, and mutters. He doesn’t want me to hear him. I consider his ass. He made fifty-seven last month, and he is unequivocally fat.

  He clears his throat and changes his tone. He’s talking to his extremely blond, extremely beautiful, extremely obnoxious twin girls: the “Pukies,” as you call them, Angela. Manlio’s dark, stocky, immediately likable; they don’t resemble him at all. They look like their mother, Bambi, that northeasterner with the fashion model’s slender figure and the peasant’s hard heart. She made him leave the city and move to that big estate they live on with the horses, the deer, and the olive groves, where she has herself photographed for magazines dedicated to country living. She poses in front of the stables, dressed as a cowgirl from the Maremma, together with her daughters, wearing checked skirts and embroidered blouses. They cold-press the olive oil, put it into fancy bottles, and ship it to America; they’re making pots of money. Bambi’s a stickler for organic agricultural products. Manlio, on the other hand, gorges himself on fried foods in noisy restaurants in the city. Then, in the evening, he zooms down the autostrada at 120 miles per hour, rushing to get home to the decorative ears of corn and the bunches of dried lavender. He detests nature, particularly its silence. Of course, he’s got the swimming pool, with a vanishing-edge spillway and a spectacular rock arrangement designed by his architect; but he’s pissed off about the pool, too, because it’s got that robot cleaner swishing around the bottom. It’s implacable, like his young wife. He misses Martine, the jack-in-the-box. He attends a growing number of conventions, and every time he can, whenever he has to fly somewhere, he makes a stop in Geneva and goes to visit her in her antique shop with the little statues that all look alike. She’s alone, decrepit, and happy. He makes out checks and tries to buy everything she has. “I like helping you,”
he says. She smiles and tears up the checks under his nose: “Thanks, but no thanks, Manlió.” That accent on the last vowel in his name drives him wild with joy. And who knows? Maybe—when he’s in the airplane, way up in the intercontinental sky with the sleeping mask over his eyes—maybe it drives him to tears.

  He puts his cell phone back in his pocket and touches his balls. His lips are dark, and the cigar between them has gone out. He adores you. He’s always considered you the ideal daughter.

  “I’m going to the airport to pick up Elsa. See you later.”

  32

  I didn’t knock. I pulled the key off the chewing gum and went in. I found her lying on the bed next to the dog. Heartbreaker barely raised his head; she didn’t even do that. She had her legs curled up and an absent look on her face, and she said, “Oh, it’s you. . . .”

  There was nothing left in her kitchen, so I went out and bought a few groceries. I washed out the dog’s bowl and dumped a can of dog food into it. Some time before, I’d bought her an electric heater, but every time I went there, it was off, as it was now. I opened the windows so at least a little sun could come in. The air in her house was stale and unhealthy, like the air in a sickroom. I kept going back there without wanting to. With my head bending low, I kept going back there, because I didn’t know where to go.

  She changed the furniture around. She put the table next to the chimney, and the sofa where the table had been. She even rearranged her knickknacks, the various little objects she had, organizing them according to some new order, which quickly slipped her mind; she spent a great deal of time looking for things without finding them. Her dog clung to her side in bewilderment, as if he, too, couldn’t find his place anymore. She was subject to sudden bursts of activity. More than once, I found her on a ladder, washing the windows or dusting the light fixture. She did housecleaning, but she left things lying around: a dripping sponge on the table, the broom leaning against a chair. And she did the same thing with herself. Her eye makeup would be perfect, she’d have her hair neatly pulled back, but she was absentminded: she’d come out of the bathroom with part of her skirt tucked inside her panty hose. I’d go to her and pull her skirt straight, as if she were a little girl. And when I did that, I felt her flesh, inhaled the fragrance of her skin. Those were the hardest moments, the times when I would have liked to get a can of gasoline and set fire to everything—to her broom, to her bed, to her dog. A cone of black smoke and then nothing at all.