I linger a while in the arms of Rome, pressed against the city, enveloped in this text. What did I recover here? What did I give up when I fell in love with you that Rome restored? What part of me clings to you, what part has been impaled in me, like a tumour needing to be excised?
I will return home like a soldier, a medal on my breast and gravely wounded, or like those Roman legionnaires ordered to commit atrocities for the good of the empire, and who returned forever changed. I am both the slaves and the patricians, the populace and the senators, the criminals and the lawyers and judges.
Rome is a city in your image, angel and demon. I found you in Rome, and I gave you up in the catacombs of St. Peter’s. I loved that beauty as much as I loved you, and I found peace even if I haven’t finished mourning you.
You might resent it but I have no regrets, neither for leaving you nor for refusing your invitation to meet you in Prague, and fire up the machine of hurt, the instrument of torture that quarters me between the reality of what you are and the illusion I nourished. I came here to get out of my skin. I left your empire and lifted myself up in my little Roman studio with its Japanese design, full of hidden storage spaces, interior design in the image of my mind. One by one I emptied all the drawers, and now as I leave I am sad as I face the deck with its light. I greet the forest of antennas. I say goodbye to the bee and her nest. The last time I had such difficulty leaving Italy was after I’d met you here.
One winter morning, before stalking out of Coloniale Avenue after one of your fits of anger, I yelled at you, “You missed everything about me and everything about this country!”
Now it’s too late, your trip was a failure, and the marriage of our lives as well. The ring you slipped onto my finger became a halter. It was the only way you could experience love, this strange dance of desire and violence, when lovers take one another by force in a final, desperate effort to tear down their defences.
Take the clothes out of the closet. Pack the new Italian linen bag decorated with silk ribbons. Close the overstuffed suitcase the way you helped me do it two years ago, when I left Ostia. Count the taxi money. Make sure I have my passport. Carry out the luggage. Shut the apartment door. Unlock the one to the deck and close it behind me. Walk down one floor. Call the elevator. Go down to the street. Wait in front of the building in the blazing mid-morning sun. Throw myself into the taxi. Watch the city go by from the window. Let my tears flow.
I am writing to the very last minute, hanging onto this happiness, my Roman life.
At the Fiumicino airport, a very handsome man, very tall, with light blue eyes, is standing behind me between the velvet ropes of the lineup in front of the check-in counter. The plane is late, they have to find another one, at least seven hours delay. I talk with him, moved by his beauty. He is seductive in a gentle way, and I fall into the game. I laugh, I smile, I brush his arm with my hand as I talk to him.
He tells me he’s an ophthalmologist on his way to a colloquium in Montreal. He knows nothing about the city. I ask him how old he is, fifty-eight, he looks ten years younger. He’s Danish and has lived in Sienna for more than twenty years. His wife is Italian and they have four children. We lose track of one other in the Fiumicino terminals and meet up again when it’s time to board the plane. At the Terminal 3 bookstore, I bought the life of Caravaggio, and he the latest Lindqvist novel. In shaky English, he asks me who I am, what I do for a living. At one point in the conversation, he recommends a book, but I retain neither the title nor the author.
As we’re heading toward the plane, the handsome Dane asks me to hold his passport and boarding card. We talk until we’re separated, and once more, I lose sight of him, in the plane. For six hours, I wonder what it would be like to make love on the seats under the synthetic blue blankets, away from the prying eyes of the flight attendants.
I remember that story I told you the night before one of your departures, about that young Brazilian man I had talked with on a train between Cologne and Brussels, who became my lover after saving me from a lousy hotel and taking me back to his place. He told me how, one time, he noticed a magnificent Swedish woman in line ahead of him at the airport check-in counter. She dropped off her baggage, took her boarding pass, and walked away as he waited to move up. When the agent asked him if he had a preference as to where he would sit, he laughed and, turning his head toward the departing beauty, answered, “With her!”
When he went looking for his seat in the plane, he realized the agent had granted him his wish. The young woman was there, her beautiful face against the window, a blanket covering her long legs, and soon he slipped his hand under it and caressed her the whole trip.
In Montreal, as I rush toward the exit, I spot the Queen Elizabeth Hotel shuttle waiting for the handsome Dane and his colleagues who are part of the same colloquium.
It is midnight, I don’t wave to him, I duck into a taxi.
Watch the city through the window open on the humid Montreal summer night. Pay the taxi fare. Open the door. Drop my suitcases in the foyer. Move into the room. Recognize what was there a month ago. Feel that somehow the space is too big and hostile, as if it wasn’t quite my place anymore. Watch as memories of your presence rise up. Go from room to room like a sleepwalker. Unpack my suitcases in the middle of the night. Feel that another chapter is beginning, life anew. Accept that your absence is for good.
I didn’t sleep that night. My body didn’t understand what happened to time; it dreamed it was still back there. I lay in bed and the hours went by, slow as a burial, our life from before playing out behind my eyelids.
A week later I got a message from the handsome Dane who found me on the Web after he returned to Italy. He liked Montreal. He said it was a city where people seemed happy, a place where life was good. I answered; would he remind me of the title of the novel he recommended at the airport? It was Borderliners, the story of a teenage boy with a borderline personality, who ended up being sent to a restrictive private school in Denmark. Behind the walls of the school, the monitors brutalized the children, claiming they needed strict discipline. When the book came out, Peter Hoeg, the author, entertained a certain amount of doubt about the identity of his hero and whether the story was autobiographical.
I consider this man, the Dane who came into my life out of nowhere, a reality check.
You used to say that the universe sent us messages and we should be attentive to them. I think of Constantine who, while I was in Rome, was vacationing in Copenhagen. He praised the land of Andersen as the ideal spot for writing. When he returned, he told me it was a city I would appreciate, and I remembered how you hated it because you were made to spend your summers there when you were a child, a place you hated as much as the city where I live, and in your fits of anger you mixed up the two, two rotten apples in the barrel of countries.
Since my return, sadness has lodged in my right side. It has taken my lung, kidney, and liver. It is my companion at night, in the dark. It has taken your side of the bed; it is like the flashes from headlights illuminating my suffering, a form of vigilance that keeps me from falling back into your arms. Pain invests my side as soon as I lie down, my ribs are pulled apart from inside, as if something were trying to escape the cage my body has become, no doubt the remains of what has not yet been exorcized. Pain awakens me between two nightmares, I am the hostage of an endless stream of tears that cannot express my suffering.
Last night I had two dreams. The second was the continuation of the first in that way dreams have of following one another.
In the first, I was sitting with you in the centre of a circle made up of your friends. You were all talking about the end of the world. I began to laugh as I listened to you. I took it lightheartedly, I said I didn’t believe in any such thing, one day the end of humanity would come, but not in the way you described. You looked at me, you were outraged, shocked, anger and contempt on your face, you ordered me to leave. I stood up and
moved out of the circle. You stayed. Then I found myself in a crosshatch of corridors and moving stairways, something like a shopping centre. I knew that Julia was waiting for me and that I would find refuge with her.
In the second dream, I was somewhere waiting for you to finish packing your bags and leave my house. You were leaving me, giving up our relationship. A tall, thin woman of about fifty arrived, her hair was very white and bobbed to her chin. She told me she had seen you (she had come to my house to deliver something), and that you were very nice and very sweet with her, she told me you were in a lot of pain. I looked at her, incredulous. In the dream, the woman brought me a vanilla ice cream cone. I left the room where we were, and when I returned, she was still there, but in complete disorder. Her head was thrown back, and tears ran down her face. She was sitting, and when I sat near her, suddenly she pressed me against her body and held me fiercely in her arms. In my left hand I had the ice cream, it was melting and running down my fingers. The woman was a messenger, the scene was an annunciation, she hadn’t come to tell me I was pregnant, she came to announce the end of our life together.
Afterward, in the dream, I went home. Your things weren’t there, you were gone. You had left a series of letters on the kitchen counter. Your handwriting on red cardboard like the one you gave me on the evening of Valentine’s Day, on which you copied a passage from Kafka’s journal. Letters like the one you left me on the dining room table, one night after a senseless fight. At the top, each letter was paginated, and on the last of them, next to your name, in bold capitals, was the word quaking, as if that were your state of mind when you wrote to me.
I woke up, my body tense. Once again, I had crossed the pit of sadness dug by the dust of hope, the hope I still had in the dream when I read through your letters and groped for a reason why love might survive, the proof of a misunderstanding, not everything was a disaster, what I believed I had found in you really did exist, and I must return to retrieve it.
I awoke with the feeling of having seen your words written, and I finally understood that by breaking up I agreed to the end of our story, though you had left long before the day of your departure. That’s what the dream wanted me to see. You never really wanted to live here, you never really lived with me, in your madness you found a thousand ways to leave me day and night. When you went back to the Czech Republic, with the excuse that you needed to recharge your batteries after giving so much to an America that didn’t deserve it, you played Russian roulette and my love was the wager. You wanted to take that risk, you agreed to double or nothing, and you lost. Two years ago I bet everything on you, on us, believing for a while that I had won, love at first sight, passion, pleasure without end, the love of my life, the perfect couple, faithful, together, forever. I pictured us as Yelena Bonner and Andrei Sakharov, the couple nothing could separate, not even the worst totalitarian system. Maybe, deep down, you wanted to lose the bet because losing, for you, meant winning, and feeding the fury now that I can’t defend our covenant anymore, that made you fight harder to stay in a country you despised. You became poisonous, a parasite. You surrounded me to punish me for my resistance. You occupied, you pillaged, you expropriated, you implemented your final solution because what moves you is a love that ravages the earth.
Prague is flooded and Russia is burning as I write these words. The weeks of scorching heat and drought have set off fires, and Moscow has disappeared behind a curtain of carbon monoxide. The wheat harvest is ruined. People are dying. The East is destroying itself along with our love. The lightning strike of madness set my heart on fire, life has become hell, and you are incensed, you accuse me of treason, vengeance, you yell that I am carrying out trench warfare, you scream that I have stripped you of everything, you are a child sent to his room, beating against the closed door. But what is love for you, if not the exercise of power to convince yourself that you exist?
You loved the dwelling I made for you in me. You loved looking into the mirror I became for you, the surface into which you gazed, wanting to see only yourself. In my face, you found your own reflection. You mistook us for each other, and dissolved us into one. When you talked to me about me, you were making a speech about yourself. You swallowed me to forget what was breaking down inside you, a shattering that terrified you. The fear dissipated only when I was near, thanks to the fleeting illusion that your hold on me gave you, the fiction of being in one piece. You loved the patience with which I greeted your anger. You loved my forgiveness and the excuses I made. You loved the way you reigned over my collapse, and the song of my words that rocked you through the evenings, calming your anxiety and making you see reason. You loved the stories I told you, you were the hero of every one, raised up out of my love and admiration. You loved how I filled the emptiness inside you by praising your talent, the way I imprinted the identity of a strong, gifted man onto you, one who deserved to be loved. You loved everything you could project onto me, the baggage you were tired of carrying, the black box you handed me filled with your childhood memories, the past, present, future, everything that made you suffer, everything your mother handed down to you. Maybe one day you’ll understand that sometimes people have to run away because being near you is dangerous. The people who stay are the ones you can’t break down, they observe you from a distance or wear the same armour you do, they move on a parallel track to yours so your paths never cross, they risk nothing, certainly not the storms of your rage.
All your life you have seduced and reigned until an army of resistance rose to oppose you, and you hit a wall, and that wall was me. I am Desert Storm and my words rain down on you like fire, a curtain of explosives that pulverizes the illusion of what we had together, this splendid love story that was really a dream.
I think of those American mothers receiving the body of their son killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, a life lost in a senseless war, only the spirit of the departed remains since his body was never seen a last time. The mothers stand stiffly on the tarmac, their faces grey, their hands open, lifeless figures receiving a little package, the country’s flag that covered the casket, and has now been folded. A flag instead of a body destroyed by a bullet, torn apart by a landmine, victim of an explosion.
But I am not the mother, and my flag is the one of hearts that have been tricked, deceived, betrayed, broken, the country of broken hearts.
I am writing so all these words won’t be lost, so something will remain of these faded dreams, sentences spoken to the wind, endless discussions repeated and vanishing into the air because nothing ever touched you, the arrows always missed. You were an invisible, impalpable target. Every shot was blind, in the dark. You were a labyrinth with no way out, an impregnable fortress, an Alcatraz from which there was no escape. You were the muddy trench where the soldier lies down to die.
In the end, I lived alone. The man I thought I’d found was a rainbow. For months I cried tears of wonder over such beauty, then bitter tears when it disappeared. I wondered if I had fallen into an ambush, caught in a trap by a spy whose mission was to wear me down so I would surrender, so my system would collapse, after having given everything I had.
Dreaming out loud of the trips we would take together, the children we would have. Giving you a present to make you laugh: a made-in-Quebec T-shirt with “Poutine” printed on it. Suggesting a film we should see. Watching you sleep, lying in front of the living room window. Breathing in the smell of your skin. Spending the afternoon in bed, drinking bubbly and watching movies. Kissing you passionately when you least expected it. Giving you the cold shoulder because I was mad over your unkindness one particular day. Making up because I’d promised myself to stop clinging to my resentment. All those things I’ll never do with you again.
If, at the beginning of the summer, after you received my first letter, or after the second, third, or tenth letter, you had humbly lowered your head and admitted that, yes, this was no kind of life, with your screaming and yelling, your hatred for just about e
verything, the way you believed that the life of a dog was worth the life of a child, the way you tried to knock everyone down because your anger was so great nothing could contain it, if you had said yes, that everything I pointed out was the stain you could not turn away from anymore, that you had to stop this descent and you were going to find a way to do it and return when the work was done, when there was something else inside you besides endless fog, black terror, because you loved me too much to go on threatening me, you loved me enough to believe me, your love was greater than your pride and you were ready to lower the walls of your fortress and accept that danger… if you had said that, or said nothing for months, then returned and explained that you had understood, and for the first time in your life you finally accepted to investigate your own black hole, that you had discovered the way out and if I still wanted it, you were there, but otherwise you’d wait as long as it took, because this visitation of grace that made you feel you were dying had helped you learn to live … if you had done that, I wouldn’t have felt the need to send in my armies to protect my territory against your assault. I would have thrown down my weapons and gone off to Rome, but with my spirit still moving in your direction, I would have gone there to wait for you, and kept on loving you.
The Last Bullet Is for You Page 9