I’m a bit less evasive about my childhood and my strange relationship with my family. I tell her about my mother’s death, and for the first time I manage to talk about it openly, without filters imposed by circumstances, like a child free to draw on a blank sheet. I’m encouraged by the totally natural empathy in her eyes when I describe my claustrophobic years at boarding school and the more carefree ones at university in England, or when I tell her how impossible it is for me to go back to my roots.
“I certainly would never have guessed you’re Piedmontese,” she says at a certain point. “You don’t have a trace of an accent.”
“To be honest, I’ve never felt Roman either.”
“But there must be somewhere in the world where you feel at home.”
“Nowhere in particular,” I confess. “Though last year I went to Tuscany, a really beautiful spot in Tuscany, where the countryside has something magical about it, and I suddenly decided to buy a house in the area. I’m currently renovating it. It used to be a monastery, and it’s really lovely. That’s somewhere I think I might actually feel at home.”
As I talk to Isabelle, not far from our table I spot my old friend the Deputy, having dinner with his wife. Our eyes meet and I feel myself turn pale. The last time we saw each other, we were cocooned in the pleasant atmosphere of an evening he thought was private, an evening full of slaps on the back, confidences, friendly smiles, which the director then used for his own ends, and now his eyes are burning with fear and resentment and he looks as if he’d like to beat me to a pulp.
When I pay the bill and we get up from the table to leave the restaurant, the Deputy approaches me. Addressing a forced smile to Isabelle, he takes me to one side. “You should be ashamed of what you stand for,” he says in a voice that’s barely audible but as taut as a violin string, discreetly sinking his nails into my arm. “You think you have me by the balls. I may have some weaknesses, but I’d never be capable of stooping to your level.”
Then he turns away and walks back to his table.
Isabelle is looking at me. “He’s a politician, isn’t he? I’ve seen him on television.”
I nod, taking her by the hand and leaving the restaurant with her. I can’t hide the sense of unease his words have left me with. In the car, she strokes my forehead, and gives me what’s intended to be a reassuring smile.
The unease grows even more once we’ve entered my apartment. Isabelle looks around, but without the amazed reaction the women who’ve set foot in here before her have accustomed me to. No ecstatic smile, no open-mouthed gaping at all the hi-tech gadgetry. The only thing that seems to delight her is the view from the window of the living room, though she does glance briefly at the Bonalumi in the dining room, though not so much as to make it seem like one of the more interesting paintings.
I’m sure she recognizes the uniqueness of the apartment in itself, but I fear that the cold, minimalist style of decoration makes her uncomfortable.
And the fact that there are no books is hardly a point in my favour either. My designer hadn’t seen the need for a bookcase, and what space there is contains just a handful of rather bulky photographic books, and a few others about interior design and the world’s top hotels. When Isabelle starts leafing through one of them, with a slightly wary look in her eyes, I go to her and kiss her on the mouth. And suddenly there are no more deputies or architects or not-very-complimentary thoughts about my life. There is only her body, which I carry in my arms to the bedroom and undress with a hitherto concealed urgency, as if it was a secret, a priceless pearl. There are her hands, modestly covering her maternal breasts, and mine, which have only one purpose: to give her pleasure. She is the centre of my interest, the receptacle of everything good. This bed has seen perfect, gorgeous women, but with her, for the first time, I’m surprised by a sense of inadequacy, which I overcome only by giving myself completely, with a dedication I’ve never known before, until I disappear. I no longer exist. I let myself be annihilated by her slow dance above me, while time dissolves. I am her breath, her moods, her pleasure. As I’m about to come, I withdraw, even though she moans to have me back inside her. And I do it so that I can have my excitement at my disposal for as long as I need. We are like two orphans in an air raid, defenceless and at the same time indestructible. Held tight in her arms, wretched as I am in comparison with Your disarming power, I’m not afraid of You any more. All this might come to an end, there might be nothing but oblivion awaiting me beyond this bed, but I’m inside her, I’m part of her, and not even oblivion scares me any more.
We spend two days like this, never leaving the bed except to go to the bathroom or to have something to eat, like two wild animals, from whatever we find in the refrigerator. Two days which in my time have expanded to an indefinable length. I feel like one of Ulysses’ companions, forgetting my identity, drugged with pleasure, at the banquet of the sorceress Circe. We watch a film, we make love, we talk, and we start all over again.
At a certain point, breaking into the idyll of this suspended time without coordinates or directions, a thought crosses my mind. One of those thoughts that seem absurd, nonsensical, until they insinuate themselves into your rational perception of things with such force as to demolish it: what if even this image of the two of us, lying abandoned on this bed, was a hallucination? What if Isabelle wasn’t real, or—worse still—what if she wasn’t even possible?
“It may seem illogical to you,” I say to her without warning, “but I have the feeling you may last for ever and at the same time never have happened.”
Isabelle smiles in that reassuring way of hers, and snuggles closer to me, placing her head on my chest. “I’m a mess, really,” she confesses, drawing little circles on my skin with her forefinger and thumb together. “With a little child, in a foreign country. Sometimes I think my life has been a long series of mistakes, but I assure you that I really am here. There’s only one thing I hope: not to make any more mistakes. I have happened, oh yes, I can swear that I have happened, and I hope to happen for a lot longer.”
“I like the way you say things.”
“I like the way you say things. For ever and never, I think those were the final words of a love letter in Mauvais sang by Leos Carax, a film that’s been almost completely forgotten. Love can be so overwhelming, it stays inside you for ever, even if you’ve never experienced it.”
I stroke her hair and look at her, thinking of all the men she has loved before she met me, maybe that long series of mistakes she spoke about a moment ago, and I feel a pang in the pit of my stomach, a sensation I’ve never felt before. I assume it’s jealousy, the kind of jealousy that may even become intolerable. “Have you ever known that?” I ask her. “A love for ever and never?”
Isabelle pulls a face that puts everything back in perspective, even my jealousy. “I don’t like leaving things unresolved,” she says. “And I feel relatively at peace with my own conscience. If there were accounts to settle, I’ve settled them. Nobody has stayed inside me like that.”
I think about things unresolved in my own life, festering wounds. They have nothing to do with love, at least not with love as she means it. They look like my father and sound like all the words I’ve never been able to say to him.
“What about you? Have you ever known a love that was for ever and never?”
She wouldn’t believe me—she might even think me ridiculous—if I told her I’ve never been in love. So I just smile at her, a shy smile, to which she responds with an amused pout, like a little girl. “I’m always the one to reveal myself, but never mind.” She gets out of bed to fetch a glass of water, wrapping herself in the sheet as she does so: now I’m the one revealed.
“I don’t think so,” I say, pulling on the sheet to undress her.
Naked now, Isabelle tries modestly to cover herself with her hands. “I feel embarrassed,” she says, coming back to the bed to take possession of the sheet again.
She’s turned red. Suddenly overwhelmed by tendernes
s, I take her face in the palm of my hand. I’m surprised by such girlish modesty in a woman like her.
She confesses that it’s the first time since she had Giulia that she’s slept with a man. For her, this beautiful interlude in my bed has the fresh taste of rebirth and the bitter taste of guilt. For more than a year her body has been a cradle, transforming itself to welcome a new life. She tells me that in the first few days after Giulia was born, she would look in the mirror and wonder if sex would ever again be part of her life. The last time before that had been the bored, mechanical act of a Sunday afternoon, a clear symptom of the fact that, after almost ten years of living together, she and Giulia’s father had reached the end of the line, and yet it led, mysteriously, to conception. Even from the final stages of a love affair, something much bigger can come, overcoming everything, even death.
Again that pang in the pit of my stomach. I imagine that sharing in the conception of a new life is a gesture of absolute, unforgettable love, even for two people who are barely on speaking terms. A gesture which is like a bond, something set in concrete.
I stroke her stomach, that soft, maternal stomach, which she keeps hiding from my gaze, and touch her belly button with one finger. She smiles, I keep pressing with my finger, as if the belly button was a hole in a balloon and I was afraid that she might deflate at any moment and fly away. Then I tell her that she’s mine, mine and nobody else’s.
“People aren’t like apartments or cars,” she answers, with a distant smile. “You can’t own people.”
“But I feel that I’m yours,” I tell her, trying to keep my tone light, however serious the words. “You could do anything you like with me.”
“I’d never put a label on you, like those people who tattoo their bodies with names and dates… That’s always disgusted me.”
“Well, then I disgust you too,” I continue, still lightly. “Tomorrow I’m going to have your name tattooed on my chest in capital letters. Or rather no, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to have my whole body covered with your initials. I’m yours! I want to shout it to the whole world!”
She bursts out laughing. “Stop it! I’m sure you’d even be scared of one of my magic markers,” she says, reaching out her hand to her bag, which is under the bedside table. She takes out one of the markers I saw in her bathroom, her face like a naughty child’s. “Want to bet?”
“You really are obsessed!” I say, with a laugh. “Don’t tell me you were intending to scribble all over my apartment.”
She approaches me, brandishing the marker threateningly. “Didn’t you just tell me you wanted to have my name tattooed all over your body?”
“And didn’t you just tell me you were against possession and would never put a label on me?”
We start fighting, like two little children. We tickle each other, we laugh, we laugh until we can’t breathe, ending up looking each other in the eyes, motionless, and at the same time wanting to go beyond those eyes. I’d like to penetrate the most inaccessible cavities of her mind.
Isabelle is the first to look away. “Come on, let me write something on your body! You said I could do anything I wanted with you, and now you’re scared of a few measly words!”
I surrender. She makes me turn on my stomach and sits astride me. “Do you want me to scribble on your back?” I feel the cold tip of the marker on my neck.
“But if you do it there I’ll never be able to read what you write!”
“That’s the best part of it!” she replies, moving her marker without my being able to see anything.
“That’s enough now,” I say, leaping up suddenly, and again I rugby-tackle her, simulating the noises of a maddened animal. I hold her tight, while she struggles, still laughing. We end up making love once again. It’s better every time. We settle into it, and it’s so simple, the way we move, the way we give each other pleasure. Finally, sated and satisfied, we lie in each other’s arms, two twins in their mother’s womb, and stay like that, suspended, for all the time we need.
In the middle of this tranquil oblivion, all at once she breaks the silence: “I have to call Giulia’s father, I’m an awful mother.”
“You’re wonderful,” I reassure her. And I really do think that as she talks on the telephone to her little girl, whispering tender promises to her.
“I have to pick her up tomorrow morning at eight,” she says after hanging up. “Do you realize how much time we’ve spent here? It’s Sunday.”
The first reference to time since we sank onto this bed. If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t even know what time it is, which month we’re in, and I don’t even care.
“I’m hungry, and we’ve emptied the fridge.”
“Do you want to go out?”
“No…” she moans, stretching. “I’d be fine with a pizza.”
“There’s a place just near here, I can go down and get something. Will you wait for me here?”
I grab a tracksuit from the wardrobe. I feel completely devoid of strength, I’d never go out if it wasn’t a matter of life and death.
She laughs and sticks her head under the pillow. “Let’s enjoy this last night,” she says, her voice muffled. I leave the room, thinking I don’t like the word last.
As I go down in the lift, then walk along the street, then go into the restaurant and order the pizzas, then sit at a table waiting for them, all I keep doing is smelling my hands, lingering over her perfume to convince myself she exists. She’s waiting for me in my apartment, I tell myself.
When I get back, noisily closing the door behind me, the first thing that surprises me is the unnatural silence of the apartment, then the distinct thought that I’ll go into the bedroom and realize she isn’t there, that she’s melted like a vision.
What I can’t imagine is that, beyond that door, something even worse is waiting for me.
The shelf under the bedside table has been raised. I suddenly realize that I never got rid of that bag of cocaine. Isabelle has it in her hands now. She’s standing there, completely naked, but she looks distracted, as if her mind is suddenly miles away.
“I can explain—”
Her eyes stop me dead. She drops the cocaine on the ground. I do the same with the pizzas.
“You’re an addict,” she says, looking at me in dismay.
“It isn’t mine.”
“You’re an addict,” she repeats. “No, you’re more than that… Nobody keeps a quantity like that in their home if they’re not…”
“Are you joking? Don’t even think it.”
“What is it, then?”
“I told you, it isn’t mine.”
She looks me straight in the eyes. She’s weighing up my lie, and she’s doing it with a surgical coldness.
Then she looks away and starts searching for her clothes. “I have a little child,” she says as she puts her skirt on. “As long as she’s with me she’ll never know that stuff like this even exists.”
I stand there without saying a word, crushed by the weight of my own weakness, gathered there in that plastic bag.
I know that something irreparable has just happened. Isabelle is walking out of my life and I don’t open my mouth, I don’t lift a finger to stop her. When she finishes dressing, she picks up her handbag and walks past me without even looking me in the face. At the noise of the door closing, I feel anxiety growing inside me.
I know, You’ve started racing again.
I clench my fists in order not to scream, I restrain myself from destroying everything within reach. What I do attack is that plastic bag, that insignificant relic of a distant life. I never had the courage to show myself to Isabelle for what I am: another relic, like everything around me.
The powder flies up when I hit the bag. I blow it, angrily. The world can’t go any faster than this. The only thing worse than this is death.
But then I’m forced to change my mind. I turn to the window and see the sun, looking as if it’s wrapped in ash-grey steam, emerging from between the b
uildings at breakneck speed. I collapse on the bed, devoid of strength. I think of the length of my existence, the way my heart thumps when she takes my face in her hands, our breathing, so deep that it seems to fill the entire space, then I think of the age of the sun and stars, and suddenly I see them shrink in a flash, just a fluttering of wings in the immensity of the universe, and almost involuntarily I find myself bowing my head before Your omnipotence.
16
I DON’T GET OUT OF BED for two days. She hasn’t been in touch, and when I call her she doesn’t answer the phone. The only person still looking for me is Elena, my secretary, and she’s paid to do it. On the screen of my mobile I even find a call from my father, from a few days ago. He’s left me a message saying that he’s tried to contact me several times and that we have to speak, if he could he’d even come and see me himself, but he’s been saying that more or less since he brought me into the world. Then again that silence, I can sense the pride in it, even over the phone. “End of messages,” the electronic voice informs me. I can still remember when my voicemail was overflowing with requests, appointments, greetings. You just have to remove yourself from the flow to realize you’re not indispensable, quite the contrary. I have to find my way again, think up a plan to raise myself out of this abyss.
I get up. I don’t even look at myself in the mirror. I put on a pair of trousers, a jacket, and go out. I have to find her again, and discover what the hell I can do to slow down my life.
I go back to the Campo de’ Fiori. The market seems more chaotic than when I saw it with her. I rush through it to her front door. I press the button by the entryphone. I don’t know how long I stand there waiting for an answer, a woman’s voice saying “Come up”. But there’s nothing.
Elena keeps calling me on my mobile, the way my time is racing makes her seem even more persistent. I have to switch the phone off before the ringing perforates my brain.
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