I met her yesterday when I went into the pet shop where she works. She’s young, she isn’t beautiful — I don’t think any of the others are really beautiful — but I do think she’s his type, I’m convinced she could be. My first impulse was to hit her and kick her without losing my temper, coldly, deliberately. Strike her on that tight-fitting top, beneath which jutted two enormous breasts.
A man called her by name from the other side of the shop and that name was Viola.
I gritted my teeth as though I wanted to break them.
She looked at me sweetly and said, “Are you looking for something? Can I help?”
If you really want to do something, help me to take away those horrible images that are rooting themselves in my imagination. Please put your panties back on and get off that sofa; arrange your hair and twist it into a braid, reapply your lipstick and do up the zippers of your boots. Put on your scarf and your coat. And before you walk through that door, don’t say good-bye, just whisper, “This is the last time we’ll see each other. It was nice — you’re marvelous,” as you look at him lying there, powerful and naked, wondering why you’re leaving.
And when you go through that fucking door don’t cry, love. Don’t cry — that would hurt me too much. The idea that those big green eyes of yours might never again see the light of the sun, because I would have blinded them with the light of my fire.
Viola looks at me, while with startled eyes I watch the whole scene of my film play itself out.
“You’re Melissa, aren’t you?” she asks.
I nod and reply clumsily, “Yes, why?”
“I’ve seen you on TV a few times. I like you.” She goes on smiling. What the hell are you smiling at?
“And I’ve read your book,” she goes on. “I really liked it, although I’d have written it differently myself…”
Go fuck yourself, bitch. Go on, just show me what you would have done. Take a piece of paper and a pen and write a book, if you’re capable of it. But all you’re capable of is straddling the dick of the man who belongs to me, who will never give himself to you as he gave himself to me.
“I don’t need anything, thanks. I’ve got to go now,” I say as I make for the exit.
She watches me going without a word, and I know perfectly, I CAN SEE THEM, I see that her eyes have become a boundless green marsh that will soon, very soon, swallow me up.
Twenty-seven
Only a few weeks had passed since that night in Cosenza. Thomas and I were on a train taking us to the place where we would celebrate New Year’s Eve on our own.
“Do you have any idea where we could go?” I had asked him.
“A quiet place,” he had answered, “far away from everyone.”
So we had rented a little house surrounded by trees, lost among the Umbrian hills. It was red as a cherry, small and red.
There, we said, our dreams would meet at night, regardless of where we ourselves might be.
“When we’re far away from each other, our dreams will be there, and they’ll meet — we’ll see them twining in the air and they’ll dance in a close embrace to a symphony that hasn’t yet been composed,” he had said.
Inside, the house had yellow walls and terra-cotta floors, and if we walked around barefoot we could feel a vague, faint warmth spreading around the whole of our bodies.
Once inside, it was almost impossible to leave. I think a thin, poisonous cloud hung in the air above the bed and kept us from getting up. Three days passed as though the hours, the minutes, the seconds, the day, and the night belonged to other galaxies, other worlds. In that suspended red world, above the great green breast of those hills, the only thing that quivered with life was love, a gigantic, lost, stunned love. I sipped slow and long, and I gulped it down, a love that allowed us to stroke each other and sometimes to kiss, but never to plunge into the deepest, blindest darkness of passion.
His body was soft and motherly; I stretched myself out on top of him and was no longer afraid.
“If we were ever to part,” I said, “who would I tell my funny stories to? When something funny happens I can’t wait to tell you about it.”
Who will I tell my funny stories to now? And do such funny things really happen?
I don’t know, I don’t really think so.
Perhaps what I flushed into the sewers wasn’t something human, but the fruit of an extreme feeling whose name I’ve forgotten.
Twenty-eight
At four o’clock this morning I was woken by a voice that led me to the study. It was the woman in brown with the slashed wrists.
I looked at her, frightened, and she grinned crookedly.
Often, during my nightmares, I have felt an oppressive weight that keeps me from screaming, from calling for help, from running. The same thing often occurs to me in reality as well, and it happens when I can’t keep track of myself and my ghosts.
“Pick it up,” she said to me, nodding to the pen on the desk.
I didn’t move.
“I said pick it up!” Her narrow lips didn’t move, but I understood.
“What do I have to do?” I asked her, half frightened, half curious.
“You know what you’ve got to do. Don’t be an idiot and pick up that bloody pen — hurry up.”
I picked it up and held it as though holding the metal probe of a scientific instrument. I clutched it very tightly.
I went over to him. He was asleep, the sheets wrapped messily around him without covering him up. His lips were half open, his feminine eyelashes very, very long. He looked like a beautiful little girl.
His chest was bare, so I brought the tip of the pen to the skin, with the intention of tearing it. And then eating it and not digesting it.
I brought it a little closer and my eyes filled with tears. I pressed the pen against his chest, but I didn’t plunge it in. I let a drop of blood color his white, white skin.
I remembered a line from a song: “Maybe it’s not quite legal, but you look great covered in bruises.”
I woke him up to make love. To heal his wound.
And mine.
And the deeper he plunged, the more he healed me; the more he healed me, the more ashamed I grew, the more I longed for death, the more he said he was waiting for it.
When he made love to me, pressing me close, drowning his love and desperation inside my madness and desperation, I heard a Sicilian voice call,
Then I disappeared.
Then he disappeared.
Twenty-nine
I remember that in our sitting room was a grotto and in the grotto was a statue of the Madonna.
I remember that she was bleeding and that the child she held in her arms was bleeding, too.
