Don't Move (9 page)

10

The next evening, I had dinner with Manlio at one of those trattorias in the city center where the outside tables rock back and forth on the uneven sidewalk and you have to stoop down and slide a shim under what seems like the proper leg, and then when you sit up straight again, you discover that now another leg’s too short and the table’s still wobbly. Just like life. Manlio was joking—he was making his chest expand under his jacket—but he wasn’t happy. He’d had some problems in the delivery room. He was muttering a few set phrases for effect, he was feeling sorry for himself, and, naturally, he was lying. Against his will, he was insincere; he’d never been one for self-scrutiny, and he had no intention of starting now. He fell in with other people’s moods and impulses and ended up making them his own. And so, that evening, with the zeal of a true friend, he was trying to climb down into the deep burrow where I was apathetically wandering. His effort had been going on for some time. I was silent and distracted; I’d attacked the antipasti violently at first, wielding my fork like a weapon, but then I’d left them unfinished and hadn’t ordered anything more. Manlio was trying to follow me, borrowing my mood, but meanwhile he was nibbling at everything in sight: grilled peppers, fried ricotta, broccoli rabe.

I asked him, “Do you go with whores?”

He didn’t expect such a question, not from me. He smiled, poured himself a drink, made a clucking sound with his tongue.

“Do you or don’t you?”

“How about you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Come on.” He didn’t know where this was leading; maybe he was thinking about Elsa. It didn’t seem possible to him that a man with such a wife would pay for sex. However, the shift in the conversational tone didn’t displease him; he could handle it, and it went with the wine. “Me, too, from time to time,” he said, and now he seemed like a little boy.

“Do you always go with the same one, or do you change?”

“It depends.”

“Where do you take them?”

“We stay in the car.”

“Why do you go with them?”

“So we can pray together. What a dumb-ass question.” He laughed, and his eyes disappeared.

It’s not a dumb-ass question, Manlio, but you realize that
too late, while you’re looking at a passing tourist with her arm
around a giant in Bermuda shorts. Now you have a bitter look on
your face.

Later, I told him it wasn’t true, I didn’t go with whores. He was annoyed, but he kept on laughing. His cheeks grew flushed; he said that I was being an asshole—“an asshole, as usual” is what he said. In the meantime, however, our boredom had vanished. The evening had taken a turn; we’d entered more intimate territory, where there was a flicker of something that resembled the truth, and as Manlio walked to his car, he looked like a sincere man, a desperate man. We said good-bye quickly—a pair of claps on the shoulders—took a few steps in the dark, and already we were far apart, each on his own sidewalk, free of any residue left by the other. Ours was a sanitary friendship.

I could tell you, Angela, that the shadows of the streetlights seemed to fall on my windshield like dead birds, and that in their falling, I saw everything I didn’t have raining down on me; I could tell you that the torrent of shadows came down faster and faster as I sped along, and that I felt a growing desire to fill that absence with something, anything. I could tell you many things that might sound true now but maybe aren’t true at all. I don’t know the truth; I don’t remember. I only know that I was driving in her direction without any distinct thought. Italia wasn’t anything. She was like the black wick in an oil lamp. The flame burned beyond her, in that greasy light that enveloped the things I needed, all the things I didn’t have.

I turned onto the long, tree-lined road and drove past the indistinct commercial figures standing by the roadside. The beams of my headlights struck bodies floating in the night like jellyfish, painted them for an instant with dazzling light, and then returned them to the darkness. Near one of the last trees, I slowed down and stopped. The girl who came over to my car had legs covered with black net and a perfect face for her line of work: sour and infantile, agitated and gloomy—the face of a whore. She croaked something, perhaps an insult, as I pulled away and watched her disappear in the rearview mirror.

She was home. That night, she was home. The door opened slowly. The dog came around the side of the house and approached me, sniffing hard and wagging his tail between my legs. He seemed to recognize me. And now Italia was there in front of me, standing with one extremely white hand on the door. I pushed her inside with my body. Maybe she’d already been sleeping, because her breath was stronger than usual. I liked it. I grabbed her by the hair, forcing her to bend her neck, to stoop down. I rubbed her face against my stomach. Right there, where the thought of her caused me pain.
Heal
me, heal me. . . .
I bent down and ran my mouth all over her face. I stuck my tongue into her nostrils, into the corners of her eyes.

Later, she sat on the sofa, pulling down the tail of her undershirt with one hand to cover her sex. She was waiting for me like that when I came out of the bathroom. I had washed myself in there, sitting on the edge of the tub, next to the moldy shower curtain hanging down from its rod. I walked over to her, seized a handful of her hair, and shook her head as I tried to slip the money into her hand. She went limp; I had to squeeze her hand to make her close it. She accepted what I gave her as one accepts pain. I had to leave; I couldn’t recapture myself in her presence. It would have been unseemly, like looking back on one’s own excrement.

You want to be alone, too. I’m getting to know you. You do
what I want; then you disappear like a mosquito at sunrise. You
place yourself among the flowers on your sofa and hope that I
won’t notice you. You know that you’re not worth anything except
in the throes of passion; you know that while I’m tying my tie and
getting ready to leave, I’m already disgusted by everything. You
don’t have the courage to move as long as I’m there; you don’t have
the courage to show your ass while you walk to the bathroom.
Maybe you’re afraid of getting killed; you’re afraid I’ll toss you
onto the baked clay of that dried-up riverbed, like that black car
that fell from the viaduct. You don’t know that my anger dies
when I die inside you, and that afterward I’m an unlioned lion.
What do you do when I go away? What do I leave you with? This
cold fireplace, this room I’ve razed, I who offended you in the
heart of the night without even loving you. The dog will come
close to you, you’ll need that fur, you’ll stroke him while your eyes
are fixed somewhere else. He’s blind, after all. Scenes, obsessions
from your past, will rise up before your mind’s eye. Eventually,
though, your confidence in the present, in what’s there, will come
back to you. You’ll get up and put a few things in order—an overturnedchair, for example. And you won’t need to pull your undershirtdown; when you bend over, you’ll feel the air on your
naked buttocks and pay no attention. Without my eyes moving
over it, your body’s worth what it’s worth: as much as a chair, as
much as hard work. But when you get up, you’ll feel a filament of
my semen running down one of your legs, and then—I don’t
know, but I’d like to know. I’d like to know if you feel disgust,
or . . . No. Hurry up and wash, little slut. Stand behind your
mildewed shower curtain, grab a sponge, and cleanse yourself of
this fool’s secretions, cleanse yourself of his ghosts.

There were several medlars on the table. I took one and ate it; its flesh was soft and sweet. I took another.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

Her voice was weak; it proceeded from silence. Italia, too, must have been having some bizarre thoughts. Before, when I’d stopped squeezing her hand, she had spread her fingers and the money had fallen to the floor. Now she held that empty hand out to me. “Give them to me,” she said, and I gave her the medlar pits.

“Shall I fix you some spaghetti?”

“How do you mean?” I murmured, astounded by this proposal.

“With tomato sauce, or however you want.”

She’d misunderstood my question. Her face, as she scrutinized me, seemed new, different, suddenly vivacious; her eyes vibrated in their sockets like heads just emerged from a shell. I had no intention of staying there, but there was that little shimmer of hope in her expression, a hope quite remote from my own. Because I, too, was hoping for something, Angela. Something that was neither in that room nor anywhere else, something that might have been decomposing with my father’s bones. Something of which I knew nothing. Searching for it was a truly futile exercise. “Do you make a good sauce?” I asked.

She laughed, flushed with delight, and for an instant I thought that maybe my hope was as modest and easy to fulfill as hers. She went to the bedroom, hunching over as she walked, trying to cover herself with her undershirt, which was too short for the job. She came back quickly, wearing a pair of pants that looked like overalls and her multicolored sandals with the straps undone. “I’m going outside for a minute,” she said. I watched from the window as she reappeared behind the house, where, I now noticed for the first time, she had a little garden. With her heels sinking into the earth and a flashlight in her hand, she rummaged around in a row of plants supported by canes. She came back inside, carrying a bundle in the bottom of her shirt, and went into the kitchen. I could see her through the door, sometimes all of her, sometimes just an arm or a shock of hair. She reached into a wall cupboard and took out a saucepan and a plate. She washed the tomatoes carefully, one at a time, and then she began mincing the herbs with a large kitchen knife. She worked quickly and skillfully, guiding the knife with her index finger. I discovered, to my amazement, that Italia was a neat, efficient cook, completely in command of her movements and her kitchen. I sat and waited, composed and a bit stiff, like a deferential guest.

“It’s almost ready.”

She left the kitchen, went into the bathroom, and closed the door. I heard her turn on the water in the shower. I fluffed up the sofa pillows around me. A fine aroma of fresh tomato sauce was permeating the room and intensifying my hunger. I gazed at the wall, at the monkey clutching his baby bottle. He looked exactly like Manlio. I smiled at him the way one smiles at a stupid friend. In the bathroom, the water pelted down violently for a while, then stopped. I heard a few small sounds, and soon she was out. Her yellow hair looked like wood when it was wet. She was wearing a beige bathrobe. As she tightened the belt around her waist, she sighed contentedly. “I’ll put the pasta on,” she said.

She went back to the kitchen. When she passed me, she left the scent of talcum powder in the air, a doll’s scent, as sweet as vanilla. “Would you like a beer?”

She brought me the beer, disappeared, then reappeared with what she needed to set the table. I got up to give her a hand.

“Please,” she said. “Don’t get up.”

Her voice was as solicitous as her gestures. I kept watching her as she got the table ready. Surprisingly lively for that time of night, she moved swiftly back and forth between the living room and the kitchen. It seemed to me that I was seeing her for the first time, as if I’d never possessed the body under her bathrobe. She knew how to set a table; after laying out the napkins and silverware impeccably, she placed a candle in the center. Then she came and stood before me. She furrowed her brow, turned up her nose, and moved her upper teeth forward like a little rodent. “Al dente?” she squeaked.

“Al dente,” I replied. By way of imitating her, I tried to turn up my nose, too, but I discovered it was much less mobile than hers. She laughed; we laughed. She wasn’t just cheerful; she was something more. She was happy.

“Here we are,” she said, coming out of the kitchen with a serving dish in her hand. She put the dish down. In the center, in the midst of the pasta, was a handful of basil leaves, arranged to look like a flower. She served me, then sat down across from me with her elbows on the table.

“You’re not going to eat anything?” I asked.

“Later.”

I thrust my fork into my plate. I was hungry. I hadn’t been so hungry in a very long time.

“Do you like it?”

“Yes.”

Her spaghetti was really good, Angela. The best spaghetti I ever had in my life. Italia scrutinized me vigilantly as I ate. She followed every nuance of my appetite, encouraging me with her eyes, with little adjustments of her shoulders and arms. It seemed that she was eating, too, that she was savoring every mouthful along with me. “Would you like some more?”

“Yes.”