While the Shark is Sleeping (9 page)

So there was this kind of life out there, too, and I had never known.

My boyfriend calls me by the names of different animals, depending on the situation. I’m his little bunny if I’m afraid, his lioness if I show strength. His bitch in heat when we undress impatiently and bite each other as we make love. Or his kitten, his field mouse, his little purple swamphen. But above all, no offence, I remind him of cows, melancholy and good, who let you squeeze their tits without protest when they need to be milked, to be useful to mankind. And, no offence once again, and only now during the winter, I remind of him of lambs, meek, useful and because I, too, have a woollen coat.

I confessed everything to him, including my S&M sex story. And he hugged me and told me that I had accepted that sort of thing because I used to be a delightful dung-beetle, but now I’m another animal.

I’m happy in this zoo. My vet manages to care for my wounds and pains, which are now almost completely healed. And he always has the right food for my hunger for love, for example: ‘No rush, baby koala,’ when I can’t get going. Or: ‘My whimpering chickadee,’ when I’m laughing and crying at the same time. The first time we made love and we were kissing I kept saying to him, ‘I can’t decide, my love. I can’t decide whether or not to do it.’

And he said, ‘In the meantime, I’ll start undressing you. You’re glorious. I’ve never seen such a beautiful animal.’

We don’t like my cunt to be called ‘cunt’ or his cock to be called ‘cock’, so we call them, respectively, ‘The Island of Lakes’, because I’m always wet with desire, and ‘The Island of Trees’, for a similar reason.

He doesn’t believe in God but he wanted me to say the rosary before his exams, which he took after immersing himself in a period of deep study.

Afterwards he phoned me and said, ‘I’ve re-emerged, you can put the rosary away, darling.’

I know he’s wrong to say that, because what else could this beautiful love be but a gift from Mamma up above, or from Nonno, or from my father’s God?

Nonna says that this boy’s strange and I shouldn’t trust him. That he’s fallen in love in too much of a rush. Besides, we’re too young. And yes it’s true that she and Nonno were young, but then the war had come along and made sure they waited and thought things through.

On Christmas Eve Nonna’s baking
papassine
,
candelaus
and
amaretti
all night long so that I can take them to my boyfriend’s family who have invited me for lunch.

I stop at the door. ‘And what are you going to eat? Why are you giving me all the sweets?’

‘Go on, it’s late,’ Zia says, pushing me out the door. ‘Unhappiness deserves a kick up the arse!’

All three of them look out the window and I can feel them caressing me with their gaze – I’m now slim and my hair’s long and well looked after, pulled back with a hairband – until the wall alongside the road is too tall for them to be able to see me.

With my boyfriend’s family you get everything in stereo. Five puppies in great form come to the door: ‘Say Merry Christmas to your sister.’

‘My nonna sends you these sweets that she made, and I brought this for your sisters –
The Diary of Anne Frank
. I read it over and over when I was their age.’

‘That’s great, sweetheart, but Levi’s
If This Is a Man
would have been perfect too. Something to keep them cheerful, at their age.’

‘It’s not sad, it’s full of hope.’

‘Of course, darling, don’t worry. No one here will notice anyway. They’ll throw themselves on the sweets. I’ll introduce you to the other animals: my big brother, my sister-in-law, my little nieces and nephews. My little brother, my big sister, my little sisters. And the kids: Chopper, the most generous dog in the world. Shake paws with this beautiful young lady. Isotta’s not here because she’s depressed. The cats too, they’ll come later. And you’re already friends with Biagio.’

Biagio looks at me sweetly and wags his tail, and when I sit down on a small armchair that someone has pushed towards me, he puts his snout in my lap with his ears in quiet repose. He likes me. Maybe he can sense that I’m afraid of these new things, of life. Maybe he’s anxious too.

‘Zio! We want the story about the tyrannosaurus before we eat.’

‘Leave him in peace!’ we hear, in stereo.

‘Let’s take refuge inside his jumper, the tyrannosauruses are attacking!’ The little ones stretch out his jumper and get themselves to safety. ‘You’ll never get us!’

‘Leave him in peace!’ – reprimand in stereo.

And since everyone does what they like in this paradise, I get up from my little armchair and take refuge under my boyfriend’s jumper as well, sheltered from anxiety, from fear and from tyrannosauruses. The dogs and cats think the same thing as I do and bark and miaow to make space for themselves.

‘You’re not allowed to wear my shoes.’

‘You’ve got lots more stuff than I do.’

‘That’s because I look after it well and I don’t put a top on without having a shower first and I don’t wear my nice shoes when it’s raining.’

‘Selfish, stingy, nasty viper!’

‘Darling, come out from under my jumper, here are my little sisters in action. My girlfriend has brought you
The Diary of Anne Frank
.’

‘I’m going to the movies later on,’ says the younger brother.

‘What are you going to see?’ – question in stereo.

‘The latest Hannibal film.’

‘We don’t like it’ – verdict in stereo.

‘You don’t have to watch it.’

‘That’s true. You can go then. We’re not giving you the money, but you can go.’

That was the first of many times I was invited over by my vet’s family. Nonna would send sweets she’d made, I would take along a cheerful little book for the younger sisters and everyone would laugh at my dramatic temperament. Zia would send the elder brother, who was passionate about history, a book with some new interpretation of unresolved and widely debated issues. Then the elder brother would immediately call Zia to thank her and he’d linger on the phone even if we were all already sitting down to eat. Their parents said that he’d been an only child for ten years until my boyfriend was born, and he used to read and read and as a boy he’d always wanted toy soldiers as presents, so that he could fight wars with them, but then he grew into a pacifist who was interested in conflicts only so as to hate them more. And it was strange that in such a big family there were two only children, because another ten years separated my vet from the youngest brother, so he too, as a boy, used to read and read and had always wanted animal books as presents. Not like his little brother, who had spent all his childhood fighting with his sisters, who fought among themselves but ganged up against him.

Isotta fell in love with a dog of the same breed, a new next-door neighbour that left bones for her at the front door. She got over her depression, much to the sorrow of Chopper, who had never been able to mate with her because they were different breeds. Biagio, on the other hand, seemed only to have eyes for me.

During those lunches and dinners, he never let me out of his sight. He’d come to the gate, his tail wagging, and lead me through the garden, stopping to wait if I was too far behind. He’d be on the alert while everyone said hello, and would quietly put his head in my lap only when I sat down on what everyone now referred to as my armchair.

When it was time to go, the elder brother would say: ‘Thanks, Ma, thanks, Pa. I didn’t even touch the ravioli, but everyone here tells me they were excellent. The dessert too – I didn’t get to see it, but I hear it was divine.’

‘That’s because you were on the phone talking about the Isonzo Front and then about the culpability of Marie Antoinette of France and whether they were right to guillotine her,’ his wife would gently defend herself, as she muffled up the children before going outside. ‘It’s because you were discussing El Alamein.’

Nonna says that ours is an excessive love. That it’s not realistic: always on the phone, a constant back and forth from Sassari. I never think about school, even though this is my last year. Only love, love, love. Nonna also says she reckons you can’t trust someone who confuses animals with human beings. I shouldn’t have told her about how my boyfriend cuddles his dogs and cats when he comes home: ‘Give me your little paws because Daddy loves you. What does Daddy always say? That we’ll never be parted. Never.’

I decide to let my vet read my stories. He likes them a lot. Only he doesn’t understand why they always have to end badly. I often tell him that there’s going to be a death and then he gets angry.

‘Shit, darling, you’ve already killed off one, two is overdoing it. Two deaths are ridiculous in any story that’s not a tragedy.’

I agree. Sure, two deaths are too much. But – my boyfriend doesn’t know this – I could easily die in this story and I wouldn’t feel ridiculous. I only have to think about the fact that one day he might no longer want me so much, that he might feel bored and see me only out of a sense of duty so as not to hurt his sixth puppy, and then I pray to God to kill me now, before my character has to reach the end of this story.

Suddenly I get terribly afraid that my time at the zoo of the Island of Lakes and Trees is just a holiday. And I start counting the times he calls me darling and I pay close attention to make sure nothing’s remotely different from usual at the zoo. Food’s never enough for me any more and once again I’m always hungry. Worried, I circle the Island, which seems less and less like an earthly paradise and more and more like Hell.

I tell myself that for some people, love is lasting: for Nonna and Nonno, for example, for his older brother and sister-in-law, for his parents. How can they keep calm, and consider themselves worthy of such a miracle?

My heart is uncertain, discouraged, and every day I’m amazed to be the person loved. How much easier it was to be the sexual tool of someone who loved another woman, who isn’t part of your story, how much simpler to live within the walls and look elsewhere in postcards.

Now that I’m out, now that there’s the sun, the sea, abundant food to be enjoyed . . . Maybe if Jesus Christ suddenly appeared in the road and said to me, ‘Greetings!’ I’d be able to relax. He did it for the puppies, but not for me. He leaves me alone. He leaves me to ruin everything.

I convince myself that my stay here is coming to an end and I know well that having endured the whip, the Japanese stick and the shit won’t be any use to me, because no one has ever got used to being expelled from Eden. So every time we have to part company, I become a pain in the neck like Mamma when she was little and I ask him for more and more caresses and good nights that will reassure me and he says, ‘Good night, puppy’ a hundred times and he caresses me in the doorway but he doesn’t know, poor thing, that it’s not enough for me. Because it’s not what I really want. None of this soothes my soul. Not even the sex games I push him into with stories from my past, when I ask him to hurt me to punish my insatiable hunger for love. What I want is what he says to his dogs and cats. ‘Give me your little paws. We’ll never be parted. Never.’

And so I linger and I ask for more and more food, and I give him more and more food, until he gets indigestion, until he’s exhausted and slaps me on the back like he’d do with his brothers.

‘Relax, relax . . .’ And it seems to me that he can’t wait for me to leave and inside I feel only desperation.

One of these days I’ll leave the Island and when the vet returns he’ll no longer find the sixth puppy, or the cow, or the rabbit, or the bitch in heat, and he’ll forever think of us with regret and he’ll keep looking for us and he’ll wonder why, why, what did he do wrong, how did he fail to make us happy. And we’ll look for him too, and this zoo will be the only place we’ll want to go back to. All because we’re too hungry and no food can possibly be enough for us.

I’m sitting in my little armchair. Biagio is watching over me with his ears at rest. Through there is the vet with a friend of his who fell in the stream during the trip we took to Monte Arcosu. Now her clothes are all wet and he’s giving her some men’s things to change into. I suppose they’re keeping the bedroom door shut so the heat won’t escape. It couldn’t be any other way. The vet didn’t want us to always be on our own in that isolated world of the zoo and invited his friends to come for a walk with us. However, as bad luck would have it, the only one to turn up was this girl and of course it wasn’t possible to say to her, ‘Well we won’t go after all.’ So we went and I convinced myself that there was nothing to be afraid of, that my vet can’t go around with a blindfold over his eyes to stop him seeing other women. And everything was going fine, the sky was that still-wintry blue and the water of the river was a mirror so perfect that the woods were doubled. As we went up the mountain through the undergrowth of brambles, the river became more and more of a stream and when it became impossible to push our way through we had to cross the stream and the vet went ahead and made little bridges out of stones for us girls. I’m chubby and didn’t fall, whereas the other girl – who’s a ballerina and light and delicate as a feather – did. She fell in the icy February water and had to undress completely because she didn’t have a single thing on that wasn’t drenched. She lay down naked on a flat rock and looked like a princess from a storybook. The vet hung all her clothes from the trees to drip and they laughed and laughed together. And then my idea about the storybook must have occurred to him too, because he knelt down at her feet bowing like a prince. And I tried to take something off too, like my windcheater and then my thick jumper and for a while I was in my bra as well with my big tits and it wasn’t all out of altruism, it was also to catch my boyfriend’s attention and distract him from the ballerina. But in that enchanted frame the two of them were alone and my tits were meat from the butcher’s that has no effect on anyone and can just be sliced up, and the same with my arse. When the ballerina had warmed up, ages later, and her clothes had stopped dripping, we followed the path back, and the evening gave the stream and the woods a beautiful golden shimmer. But instead of seeing in this beauty the proof that God exists, I realised that he doesn’t. Because if God is God and was clever enough to create this mountain and these woods and this stream and this sky, he can’t be so stupid as to let her fall in the water instead of me, or neither of us. And now they’re shut up in there so as not to let the heat escape and no one from this big family is home today and in that coincidence, too, God’s not proving himself to be all that clever.