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Training in Love

Page 7

by Manuela Pigna


  I think for a minute about it. “He’s competent. Really. I’m really confident, this time, that my plan to lose weight will have a positive outcome.”

  Linda nods, but I see that she’s skeptical. I start to drink my cappuccino again. Unfortunately I can’t finish the tart if I have to be faithful to the desires of my stomach.

  “Oh come on!” She burst out suddenly, pulling up her head and looking me in the eye with her cheeks a little red. “Don’t you like him even a little?”

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “I mean, Nic describes him as who knows what… and Nic’s girlfriend that night too… He seems like this big whatever! And you don’t say anything!”

  I burst out laughing. “Oh Lindy…” I chuckle, shaking my head. “Andrea is this big whatever. It’s one of the few times in which someone’s reputation is completely deserved.”

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  “So do you like him?” She asks leaning a little forward over the table.

  I start laughing again. “Of course I like him. The reverse would be unlikely. Everyone likes Andrea,” I conclude calmly. “I’d advise anyone who didn’t like him to get their eyes checked. Everyone has their own tastes, sure, but Andrea has an objective beauty.”

  Linda leans back on her chair with a half frown.

  “Lindy… I’m sorry to mention it to you, but you don’t seem satisfied even now…” I say smiling.

  She puffs, “No, it’s that…”

  “Hmm?”

  She stares at me. “You say it so… calmly. Too calmly.” She studies me. “You had a much more conspiratorial air when you told me about Gianca.” She stops for an instant before continuing, as if the idea suddenly came to her, “Or is Gianca more good looking?”

  I laugh again. “No! Not at all! Andrea is really hard to beat!”

  She’s even more perplexed and her faces make me want to die laughing.

  “Quit laughing!” As I was saying… “You say these things, but it seems like you don’t really like him.”

  “Oh, no, I like him!” I correct her, still laughing. “I like him the way I like Brad Pitt.”

  Linda frowns. “What do you mean?”

  I get a hold of myself, but the smile remains on my lips. “I mean that it’s a totally abstract and theoretical liking.”

  Finally her face relaxes, I think she understands what I mean. “Yes, but you don’t meet up with Brad Pitt three times a week… alone,” she says, lifting her eyebrows allusively.

  Nothing – I can’t help it – I laugh again. “Oh, Linda…,” I answer shaking my head. “Believe me, it would be the same if I met up with Brad Pitt three times a week! Nothing would happen anyway between me and Brad, ever. Never anything in a million years of seeing each other three times a week. And you know why? Simply because we belong to different levels,” I end, as though explaining something very easy to someone who should have already been versed on the subject. “In fact, if you’ve noticed, Brad is with Angelina Jolie, another inhabitant of his same level.”

  “You’re saying that this Andrea belongs to the level of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie?” She asks keeping her eyebrows raised, but this time to express skepticism. Profound skepticism.

  “Exactly!” I answer laughing.

  Linda narrows her eyes. “You’ve invented this thing about levels and you’re the only one who believes it, I’m sorry to inform you. Anyway, I’d really like to see this guy in person.”

  I laugh. “Marco would kill me if you ended up leaving him for Andrea, but… if you want, you can come Thursday morning to the cafè. He and Nic have started having breakfast there on Thursdays. Or at least it’s been like that up until last Thursday…”

  “Really?” She asks, surprised.

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t know anything about it.”

  I laugh. “But why, do you know all about your brother-in-law’s movements?”

  Linda crosses her arms on her chest. I can tell from her look that she has doubts, that something doesn’t add up – like in an equation – and until it does, she won’t let it go. “No, but I would have thought it normal to tell me if he sees my best friend every week…”

  “Oh God, Lindy!” I exclaim finally, lightly exasperated at her Machiavellian attitude. “Let’s not embroider the facts. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  She replies with a noncommittal “Hmm”.

  I sigh and shake my head.

  “And in any case,” she says after a bit, “For the record, no-one is more handsome than Marco. Not even Brad Pitt.”

  I smile. Ah, l’amour!

  7.

  A week later I’m waiting for Andrea at the bike track. Today, which is Saturday and I’m not working, we’ve decided to move our appointment to the morning, because Saturday afternoon the path is overflowing with people and I’m embarrassed a little because of the indecent appearance I have after a couple of minutes of running. It’s not very early though, because I categorically refused to wake up before nine on a weekend day. If it were up to Andrea we would have met up at seven. He even unconsciously suggested it.

  “Hi.”

  I jump and jerk around towards the voice at my back. “Where did you come from?” I ask him, vaguely indignant.

  “I came earlier and took advantage of the time to do a little of my own workout,” he answers breathlessly, and I notice the state he’s in – a post-jogging state. If you can call Andrea’s extremist running workout “jogging” – red cheeks, messed hair, a veil of sweat which covers his forehead and drips from his temples, his chest which rises and falls in the slightly adherent T-shirt. It’s the first time I’ve seen him without a baggy tracksuit and, good heavens, it was better not knowing.

  Andrea is practically Linda, Andrea is practically Linda, Andrea is practically Linda.

  My gaze involuntarily slides to his pectorals and I think that today with my mantra I’ll have to go over my usual dozen times. If he doesn’t cover up I’ll probably have to repeat it the entire time.

  Andrea follows my gaze and maybe thinks the same thing, because he picks up the sweatshirt that was thrown at the foot of the tree near the beginning of the bike path and puts it on. I redden slightly and turn away. And Linda tries to tell me that the different levels don’t exist. Here’s what I was talking about! Here are the levels! When you belong to Andrea’s level, you’re even more hot after doing sports. The people at my level are not fit to be seen.

  “Let’s do some stretching,” I hear his voice behind me.

  “We usually do it after…” I protest weakly.

  The stretching session is that painful moment when, every blessed time, Andrea tries to put his hands on me – in a purely innocent way, of course – and I… lose it. Completely. It’s just that I can’t resist the impulse to pull away from him. I simply can’t stand for someone like him to touch all this… fat. So he tries to do something that he’d do with anyone else, even with my grandmother for instance, and I – as a total nutcase, I realize, and this is probably the worst thing! – flee, attempting to hide the fact that I’m fleeing. I badmouth him and create other lovely scenes that I’d like to avoid remembering at the moment.

  “Today we’ll do it before.” I’m not sure, but there seems to be a slight note of challenge in his tone.

  Without saying anything, I slowly come closer and stop a good fifty centimeters away. Andrea puts himself in a position which I copy. He does another and then another. At the fourth I draw a breath of relief. Maybe he’s finally got it! After about ten minutes we begin my workout. He has completely recovered his breathing – now it seems as though he didn’t do anything and just arrived from home after a night of repose.

  “Just out of curiosity, how much did you do before I got here?” I ask after a bit.

  “I went around the lake.”

  I stop. I know that it is specifically prohibited in Andrea’s Ten Commandments for Running, but it comes out spontaneously. “What?”
I ask in a shrill voice.

  He turns to me, notes that I’ve stopped and comes back. He pulls on my sleeve.

  “You did what?” I repeat in a voice I don’t even recognize as my own as I follow him, dazed.

  He glances at me from his height of one hundred-eighty-eight centimeters. “You heard me. I went around the lake.”

  This shocks me to such a point that I can’t speak for several minutes. It’s about thirty kilometers of track and I, frankly, don’t think I’ve done thirty kilometers on foot all of last year.

  “You know how I do this kind of thing?” He breaks the silence after almost ten minutes.

  “You’re Superman in disguise?” I answer with a smile. “I bet if I looked at your ID card I’d see ‘Andrea Clark Colucci’ written there.”

  He doesn’t laugh, or smile, he looks straight ahead and speaks as though I hadn’t opened my mouth. “Motivation. It’s motivation that gets you to do incredible things.” He thinks for a bit and adds, “Motivation together with a precise limit line in terms of time.”

  I don’t say anything, he doesn’t seem to be in the mood for pleasant conversation today.

  “My motivation is the Iron Man race I’ve signed up for, and the deadline is August of this year,” he continues, and at this point I feel the obligation to participate. “That’s great! Where will it be held?”

  He glances at me. “In the United States.”

  I just say, “Nice,” a little because he’s too serious today, a little because we’re already halfway through the workout and I’m beginning to heat up and have breathing difficulties.

  “At this point the question is – what is your motivation?”

  I knew it. I knew that we’d get to something like this and just now, when I can’t manage to speak anymore or think lucidly. I know he won’t give up until I say something to him, so I answer almost immediately, “Buy myself some clothes.”

  He steals a glance and raises his eyebrows. “Really? This is your big motivation? To buy yourself clothes?” His tone is decidedly scornful.

  “Yes,” I reply tersely, a little because of his disdainful tone, and a little because I will never tell him about my real motivations.

  He is quiet and then says softly, even if the volume doesn’t mitigate the bitterness in his voice, “Right, good for you. Go tell it to someone else.”

  I turn to look at him a little stunned. I don’t understand what his problem is, if I’ve done something to him or if he has personal problems and is taking it out on me, but I decide to not let him do it, so I don’t answer.

  “What is your real motivation?” He repeats when he sees I’m not going to answer his comment, and I don’t answer his direct question either. I wouldn’t be able to anyway, even if I wanted to, because I need my air to remain alive at the moment.

  He runs a hand through his hair, agitated, and huffs. Differently from myself, he has no respiratory problems. “You always do that. If someone asks you a question that you don’t want to answer – for obscure reasons only you know – you don’t even try to say something. You just shut up. And a person finds himself there, in front of a wall of silence.”

  I turn to look at him, completely dumbfounded as I gasp for air.

  He looks at me in turn and repeats slowly, “What is your motivation?”

  I jerk towards the road in front of me without answering.

  “At the least, it has to do with some guy. You’re all like that, all the same.”

  I freeze again, in a completely different humor than the one before. I stare at him a moment, waiting for him to notice that I’m no longer beside him. He doesn’t take long and comes back, like before, but when he’s about to raise his hand, I beat him to it. “I’m going back, today we’re stopping here,” I say turning around and going in the direction we came from.

  Andrea wants to argue with me, but I won’t allow him to.

  I feel my arm grabbed roughly. “Oh no you don’t! We aren’t finishing anything! We’ll finish when I say so!”

  “What the he-” But I can’t finish the sentence because he’s pushing me in front of him.

  I take two running steps after his push and then I stop again, trying to turn back, but he takes me by an arm and turns me around again, pushing me, again and again. “Andrea stop it! I can’t breathe anymore!”

  He continues to push me and his hands on my shoulders keep me going forward for a few more meters, mostly because I’m trying to get away from them, but as soon as I manage to free myself, I feel them again. As a result of this little game I’m running even harder than before at too fast a pace and, in fact, I stop shortly afterwards, breathless. He pushes me again and I lurch away from his hands, again in the opposite direction. He tries to grab me and I take another step backwards yelling, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  He doesn’t answer. He stares at me and puts out his hand which I manage to elude once again.

  “What is your problem today?” I yell in his face again.

  He pulls a half smile. “Annoying, isn’t it? When people don’t answer you?”

  I glower at him. He takes my right arm, trying to pull me, while I push in the opposite direction. “Let me go!” I yell, totally confused by his behavior. “I’m dying, I can’t do it anymore!” I tell him in a lower tone of voice, to get him to reason. “I can’t breathe!”

  He lets me go and says, “Let’s continue.”

  I shake my head even before speaking. “No… I’m dying…”

  “You can’t die because of a bullshit little run like this one.”

  It’s at this point, faster than a thought, that my arm comes up by itself to slap him, but unfortunately he’s faster still and blocks my hand five centimeters from his face, grabbing my wrist. Instinctively I try to hit him with the other hand and he blocks that too. For two seconds we stay like that, with my hands almost on his face and my wrists in his hands. Suddenly he twists both my arms, bringing them behind my back without letting go of my wrists. This position brings me closer to him, closer in the sense of glued to him from chest to knees. I feel a panic attack coming on. That is, I’ve never had a panic attack, but I think that’s what I’m having now. I’m almost dizzy with anxiety.

  I fight to detach myself with all my strength, which compared to his is nil evidently, because he looks at me with his brows furrowed as though he were trying to resolve a puzzle, and as he holds on to me his breathing doesn’t even alter.

  After a few minutes of mortifying struggling, I finally understand that I will never win against him and give up, relaxing immediately. I concede, lowering my head and gaze to his chest. Reddening because of the new and embarrassing feeling of my big, flaccid body leaning against his – but surrendering anyway to the inevitable. At that point he detaches himself abruptly, as though he were burned, in a completely contradictory way.

  We stay like that – scowling at each other for a few seconds, both breathing hard. Even though his breath seems to have come out of no-where, since up until two seconds ago it seems to me he was breathing just fine.

  I decide to take control, so while I rub my wrists, I break the silence, “Have you lost your mind?”

  He runs a hand through his hair and shakes his head without answering.

  “Why are you angry with me?”

  “I’m not angry with you.”

  “Nooo…” I say with exaggerated innocence. “Are you angry for some reason of your own and were looking for someone to take it out on?”

  He shakes his head again and walks towards the start of the bike track. “Let’s go back.”

  “Thank God…” I whisper.

  When we get to where we started, the feared moment of stretching begins.

  Andrea begins the first position and I, a little way off, copy him. We are silent and I’m fairly confident that today it will go well, like before. I almost don’t see him coming, when he quickly grabs me like a predator with his prey. He was as still as a statue two seconds before moving
.

  “Andrea!” I yell with exasperation while I try to wiggle away, but it’s not easy since I’m lying face up. “You do it and I’ll copy you! What’s your problem with ‘you do it and I’ll copy’?”

  “My problem is that I didn’t decide it, that I don’t want to do it like that and I don’t see why I, who have studied for years, have to obey someone who has spent three-quarters of her life lying on a couch!” He replies.

  I seem to be dealing with Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde… what’s happened to the polite boy I first met?

  I look at him, astonished. “What-the-hell-is-your-problem-today?”

  He doesn’t answer, he just looks at me while he maneuvers my legs as though they were made of putty and while I continue to wiggle.

  After a while I puff, “My God you’re unbearable today!”

  He comes near to my face and says, “You are all the time!”

  I inhale sharply, struck, despite myself.

  Hurt, despite myself.

  I should have known not to let myself go, ever, with anyone. Not even for two seconds. Not even in my thoughts. I should know enough not to believe in anyone. I should have known that the pain was always there waiting.

  My eyes fill with tears, despite myself.

  He’s on top of me and I turn my head to the side so he won’t see, but it’s too late.

  “Olly,” he says, suddenly tender, trying to turn my face towards his, but I bat his hand away and this time he lets himself be hit. He even moves and lets me go, finally. I jump up and run towards my car. He runs after me. “Olly!”

  I shake my head, without turning. I hear him sigh loudly behind me and exclaim, “God, you’ll drive me crazy!”

  I get in my car and leave, without looking back, without even saying goodbye.

  ***

  Thursday morning. Today Nic arrived directly with Linda, who, as promised, has come in to check the question of levels personally.

  Tuesday, after that absurd workout on Saturday, there was a moment of initial embarrassment. As soon as I arrived, Andrea smiled at me and said, “I didn’t think you’d even show up today. I thought you wouldn’t come anymore.”

 

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