“No,” I answer in a low voice, because I find it useless to tell a lie at this point.
She is silent for a second, maybe she’s too surprised. “And where? If I may ask?”
“At Andrea’s.”
She doesn’t speak. Then she lets go with her breath that I didn’t realize she was holding and puts a hand on her eyes, sitting down again on the couch, letting herself flop down. “Olly…” She whispers. She almost seems unhappy.
I don’t say anything. I already sense that I won’t like it – whatever she’s thinking of saying to me, I won’t like it.
When she realizes that I don’t intend to ask her anything, she lifts her gaze, a sad gaze, almost compassionate. “Olly, men like Andrea…” She shakes her head, taking a breath while she pauses, as though what she had to say was too hard.
I straighten my shoulders, perhaps involuntarily. I stiffen. “Go ahead, Mom. Don’t stop at the best part.”
She stares at me, still with the same sad look, the same look full of compassion. “Do as you want, but… don’t count on him too much.”
“Oh.”
“Sit down for a second,” she says, patting the couch beside her.
“No thanks, I’m fine standing.”
She sighs. “Don’t look at me as though I was the wicked witch… I’m only saying it for your good, so you’ll be prepared… I’m just afraid that he’ll really hurt you. No mother wants to see her daughter suffer.”
“Oh really?” I ask sarcastically. “It’s really interesting that you’re saying these things, because Andrea, since I’ve met him, hasn’t been anything but good to me. In all ways. The one who has hurt me more than anyone, contrarily, the one who has made me suffer innumerable times, has been you.”
She looks at me as though I had slapped her. “What are you saying?” She asks in a little, thin voice.
Something in me snaps, definitively. I take a step towards her without dropping my purse, which I clutch as though it were a life jacket in the middle of a stormy sea. “Do you think that all your comments, all your contempt in the last few years didn’t do anything to me? That they didn’t hurt me? All the times that you put me down, only because I wasn’t physically how you wanted me to be? And now that I’ve lost a few kilos? A few crappy kilos? You’re all sweet and play the mother who worries about my wellbeing? Who worries if I get hurt? Just think about how much you have hurt me, with your words, with your looks, for years, before accusing someone else!”
“But Olivia…” She answers, shocked, “I only did it for your own good, to encourage you…”
“To encourage me?” I ask, incredulous. “Encourage me? What? That was your encouragement?” I laugh bitterly.
“Of course.” Her tone is calm, reasonable. “This is a superficial world, one based on image, on appearance… I can honestly state that no-one knows this better than I. People judge you on the basis of your appearance. And it’s cruel and they don’t care at all how many good qualities you have inside. They don’t care at all…” She repeats, shaking her head unhappily.
She has a voice and look that leave me speechless.
“My love…” She whispers, and I have to swing around so she doesn’t see the tears which have suddenly welled up in my eyes.
I hear a movement behind me and then a hand that touches me. “Olly… what did you think? That I didn’t love you? That I didn’t see how wonderful you are?”
A sob escapes from my mouth and I drop the purse to stop myself before another one can come out.
“Honey, I just wanted to protect you.”
“You were horrible at it…” I say between the sobs I can’t seem to stop anymore. “You were horrible…”
She slowly turns me around and embraces me. “Forgive me.”
We stay like that until I calm down and pull away, noticing that she was crying too. “I thought that… you didn’t love me because of… my appearance.”
She shakes her head and hugs me again. “Impossible. I only wanted you to lose weight for your own good, for health… and social… reasons.” She sighs. “I didn’t know what to do and it seemed to me… at times I thought that is was impossible to get to you. It didn’t matter what I said, you remained impassive and nothing changed. I didn’t know how to reach you and maybe, over time, I overdid it without realizing.”
I think for a second, reflecting about all these years before the evening of revelation. “No, you managed to get to me, it’s just that… you didn’t manage to reach me. Because maybe I didn’t want to be reached,” I conclude frowning.
She strokes my hair, my cheeks, drying the last streaks of tears. “It doesn’t matter. That’s all past. Now you’re splendid and I can’t hide that I’m happy, but not because…”
I laugh softly, in a low voice, “Yes Mom, I understand.”
She sits down suddenly. “Sit down for a second.”
I waver because Andrea’s waiting for me.
“Just five minutes…” It almost seems like a plea.
I sit and she takes me and brings me close to her with my face on her shoulder. Five minutes won’t make any difference…
For a bit, no-one speaks, we stay like that, on the couch, looking straight ahead. After a few minutes, while she caresses my hair, my mother says in a low voice. “Your father was a trauma for me. I know it seems exaggerated to say that, but he was.”
I hold my breath because she has never spoken spontaneously about him and even when she was provoked to say something, she never told me anything.
“Oh,” she sighs before continuing, “you don’t know the promises that we made to each other, that he made to me… I believed him.” She concludes with a sad tone, without raising her voice at all.
I’d like her to continue speaking, but I don’t want to press her… Fortunately, she begins again after a while. “He told me there was no-one else like me, that I was the love of his life, that we would be together forever. Sometimes I imagined our life as old people, when we would be retired, with lots of grandchildren from you and your brothers and sisters.”
“Brothers and sisters?” I murmur.
“Yes. That was the original plan… When you were five and I began to ask him to give you a little brother or sister, he constructed one excuse after another, ‘next year’, ‘it’s not the moment’, ‘too many expenses’… I didn’t know then that he had already started an affair with Lea.”
I jump up and look her in the face. “What?”
She nods forlornly. “Yes, sweetheart. I never wanted to tell you…” Her look is so sad… but a part of me understands that, in this moment, she’s more sad for me, learning the truth only now, than for what happened.
“How is that possible?” I ask in a faint voice.
She shrugs, with that resigned look still on her face. “His affair wasn’t a fling, sweetheart. You don’t marry a fling…” She shakes her head, lost amid memories and thoughts. “He was very romantic with me, he really made me believe I was special, made me believe he loved me as I was. Me. Do you understand?” When she asks me if I understand, she raises her eyes to mine and I nod immediately because it’s how Andrea made me feel this afternoon. Exactly.
“And then I saw Lea,” she continues with a touch of bitterness in her voice, looking away. “Oh Olly, when I saw her…” She sighs, shaking her head, looking down towards her legs folded on the couch. “Young, beautiful, thin… When I saw Lea, something snapped in my brain. Something irreversible. I realized that everything I had heard from his lips, everything that I believed blindly for years was a load of bullshit. Excuse my bluntness.” Her eyes search for mine again and I just nod, with a lump in my throat. I never knew these things. Never.
“A while back you asked me how come I’m so cynical. I’ve thought about it a lot since you asked me, you know? And I believe that I’m partly the cause of this experience. Yes, I don’t want to say that the blame was entirely your father’s, I have my part of the responsibility too, but my life was chan
ged from that day. I convinced myself that the only thing that counted, for men, but also in general, was appearance. And I… consequently… didn’t want you to be so far out of society’s standards because… because I didn’t want you to suffer.”
“Oh Mom…” I whisper without being able to say anything else.
“I just didn’t want you to have to suffer like… like I suffered…” She bursts out crying again and I stretch out to embrace her, swallowing several times. “If you had been perfect, thin and beautiful, no-one… no-one would hurt you… What an idiot! You can’t escape from suffering!” She concludes with a sob, stronger than the others and then begins to really weep. I squeeze her, murmuring “sshh” from time to time, as though she were a little girl. The truth is that I’m shocked. Completely. And I feel pity and tenderness towards her. That’s right, I feel tenderness towards my mother. This is a day to mark on the calendar.
We stay like that, embracing and rocking, until she calms down. “And now this Andrea…” She sighs. I can’t see her face, because I have her head between my chin and my shoulder, but her tone is almost heart wrenching. “What does he want from my baby? If he doesn’t treat you well, if he makes you suffer…”
“Mom,” I interrupt her, “I’m scared too, believe me, but it’s a risk I want to take.” I swallow.
I feel her nod on my neck and sniff and I smile.
“What time is it?” I ask after a while, letting her go.
She quickly glances at her watch. “Twelve-thirty.”
God… only an hour? This has been, absolutely, the most intense hour of my life!
We look at each other for a few seconds. Finally I smile. “I’d better go. He’ll be asking what happened to me.”
She smiles too, nodding, and I hug her on impulse, again. “We should have done this a long time ago.”
“You’re right,” she answers, stroking my back.
When I go out of the house, I feel twenty kilos lighter. Getting into my car I check my phone expecting to see a message or a call from Andrea, but the screen is empty.
***
When I get to Andrea’s house, I stop behind a car parked in front of his house. I turn off the the engine and look at the vehicle in front of me. It wasn’t there before and it’s not Andrea’s. A feeling of unease takes hold of my stomach and my heart suddenly beats faster.
The front door is ajar. I hear indistinct voices arguing and I enter silently.
The scene I encounter stops me in my tracks, one step into the house. Andrea is standing bare-chested in the kitchen, with his hair wet, while Tiziana is on the other side of the island in a skimpy red dress, a pair of enormously high heels and her hair, loose, smooth and long, caressing her back invitingly.
As quiet as I was, both turn towards me immediately.
“I can’t believe it!” Tiziana exclaims with her red mouth, which matches her dress, open in an expression of astonishment. She turns to Andrea. “You’re dumping me for this one here?” She laughs, but it isn’t an amused laugh. “This is really rich…”
Andrea crosses his arms on his chest without speaking.
Tiziana laughs again, an empty laugh to make you shudder. “Your charity case? Seriously Andrea?” She turns to me, still immobile at the door, and looks me over from top to bottom with two malevolent eyes. “Will you put tonight in your thesis too?” She asks him, but she’s looking at me with a nasty smile on her lips.
I am unable to resist lifting my eyebrows and turning to Andrea with a stunned look.
Tiziana laughs. “You didn’t tell her?” I hear her voice, but I’m not looking at her, I’m looking at him avoiding my eyes.
“If you’ve finished now, Tiziana,” says Andrea calmly, but with a frowning look, “you know where the door is. As I told you before, I’m busy this evening.”
Tiziana laughs. “Yes, I can see that. Well, have a good evening with your guinea pig then. When you get tired of studying, Andrea, you know where to find me.”
I move without meeting her eyes when she comes towards me. I wait until she’s gone out completely before speaking. I come towards him only when I hear the click of the front door latch. “What… what did she mean?”
He’s still not looking at me. His head is bent over his chest and his arms straight out, resting on the counter of the island.
I stay stopped on the other side, waiting for an answer that doesn’t arrive. “Andrea?” I raise my voice. “What did she mean? What thesis?”
He scratches his head. I see his chest rise and fall more quickly.
“What have I got to do with your thesis?” I ask with exasperation, and my tone must have shaken him, because he finally looks up. I don’t like what I’m reading in his eyes of ice, I don’t like it at all.
He shrugs his shoulders. “Nothing, I… only gathered some data…”
I cross my arms. “Let me see it.”
He takes a breath. “Olly… It’s nothing, I just…”
“If it’s nothing, there won’t be any problem showing it to me.”
He puffs. “Let’s not talk about my thesis now! You got here really late. I want to be with you tonight… like before… let’s talk about my thesis tomorrow.”
He’s trying to get out of it.
“No, we’ll speak about it now. Let me see it or I’m leaving right now.”
He huffs again, passes a hand through his hair and goes to get it. He climbs the stairs two by two. I can see he’s going to his room, but I don’t follow him. I sit on one of the stools attached to the island and wait for him.
He sets it in front of me without saying anything and remains standing by my side.
I begin to read it and almost immediately I cover my mouth. Andrea has built his thesis on our work. There are all my weight measurements up until the end of July. There are all my physical information, a table of my workouts from the beginning until the end of July. A little at a time I run through the pages more quickly, dogged by a feeling that I don’t immediately recognize. I read randomly, jumping here and there. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Nowhere is it written that it’s you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“If nothing’s wrong with it, why didn’t you tell me?”
He doesn’t answer. I swallow, continuing to leaf through it because, with a new thought, I realized that it’s a bound copy… “You studied me like… an insect… in a laboratory!”
“No!” He answers, trying to take it from my hands. “It’s not like that at all! It’s just my work, and I thought… that it was interesting…”
I hold onto it tightly, looking at him with disdain, “I-have-not-finished!”
He concedes and lets me have it, because if he had really wanted to pull it away from me he obviously could have.
Silence falls while I read and leaf through, forward and backward, randomly, filled with anxiety and a sense of betrayal and disappointment. And disgust towards myself, because I believed it. For a few hours, I believed it.
“You put…” I murmur breathlessly when I arrive at a particularly painful point. “You put the evening at the lake… between the lines but… you put it in!” At this point I close it and set it on the counter. I don’t think I want to continue.
I get off the stool without looking at him. I slowly go towards the door.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m leaving you,” I answer without turning. “That way you’ll have time to write something about this evening too.”
He stops me taking my left wrist before I get to the door handle. “Don’t be stupid, you know very well that this evening has nothing to do-”
He doesn’t finish the sentence because I, for the absolute first time faster than him, silence him with a slap in the face. A slap that makes his face turn and his cheek red. He looks at me without saying anything, without reacting. When I take my wrist from his hand with a jerk and leave, he lets me go.<
br />
24.
When I exit Andrea’s house I realize from the clock in the car that reading that wonderful thesis has taken a lot of time. It’s almost two.
I drive normally, without speeding or breaking suddenly or running any red lights. Externally I’m very calm.
I’m going to the main highway. I’m going to do something that I’ve only done once before, when I got my license at age eighteen, but this energy field is too heavy, too much… It resembles despair.
When I get to the highway rest stop, the only place that sells food at this time of night, I look around, hoping I don’t meet anyone I know. When I enter I notice with pleasure that there isn’t anyone, only two girls behind the counter. One small and thin with black makeup around her eyes which must have lost its initial luster after hours of work, and another tall and heavy who goes back and forth, cleaning the coffee machine. I hope she’ll be at the cash register when I have to pay.
I do my circuit cool and collected – externally - trying to seem indifferent, like a robot. And I know I can do it because I’ve already done it lots of times before. In reality, however, inside I’m filled with a series of tumultuous feelings and thoughts, that unfortunately I am very familiar with. I know what I’m about to do. I know everything - consequences and motivations – and yet I want to do it anyway. Nothing will prevent me from doing it, and if I’m not able to manage it here, now, I will find another way to get there. I’m also nervous because I’m thinking about how the waitresses in this rest stop will judge me. What will they think of me? What will they think of someone who shows up in the middle of the night and buys a ton of junk food, too much for one person, and most of all, things that one could easily buy in the morning when any supermarket opens? They’ll know. They’ll put two and two together and they’ll understand and they’ll judge me as a loser, weak, without backbone. What I am. But this won’t stop me, it won’t stop me… The demon has taken over… I’m not here anymore… There’s only him, only him…
Training in Love Page 27