Thirty-nine
I feel the tapeworm wriggling, nestling amid my fears and becoming their high queen.
I’m still very frightened of the dark, of monsters under the bed, and of the blood that might come out of the plug hole. I see eyes in the walls, I feel hands beating against the floor, wolves howling from somewhere over in the hills.
At night the red house assumes a dark color, it turns scarlet, and I feel as though I’m in a huge pool of blood, floating in it along with my ghosts.
The pain I feel confesses things it has never confessed before.
Pain is the source of my life, the source of my imagination. To love I must first feel pain; to feel pain I must die.
So many things have changed, Mum. It really is true that life is a concentration of many lives which, all added up together, can never give you a satisfactory result.
I’m just nineteen, and yet I’ve lived so many lives, too many. I’ve lived more lives than all the characters in my stories.
I’ve abandoned you, I’ve abandoned a love that still pulses vividly. I’ve abandoned myself.
Mum, everything I’ve lived through I want to live again. I want to make the same mistakes.
I’m locked away in my room all day and the stench of cigarettes fills the air.
My dead hair scattered on the carpet, my white, tapering fingers, my yellow irises.
I think of the dragonfly, Viola, and imagine myself reincarnated in her, if I am ever reborn. I reflect that while she may not have been part of my reality, mine and Thomas’s, in reality she was there. She’s always been there, and she’s dug a deep, deep hole inside my soul, like a wizard with a sour apple.
I sleep, I look at myself in the mirror, and I laugh. I laugh at myself, I laugh at my ghosts, I tell them to fuck off, and they start running madly all around the house. They start chanting, they tell me I’m going to die. Today Obelinda came back to see me, and she said, “Don’t imagine you’re going to get away with it.”
“I don’t imagine anything of the sort,” I told her, my eyes elsewhere.
In less than a second she slipped to the foot of my bed, widened her eyes, and asked me, “Do you know what’ll happen to you afterward, do you really know?”
“Will I keep you company in the other dimension?”
“No, worse than that,” she replied, her pupils now covering the whole of her face. Cheeks, mouth, nose — none of it existed anymore, just the eyes.
“Worse my dear,” she went on. “Don’t you know what happens to those who die of love?”
I didn’t move.
She touched one of my legs and I let out a shriek of pain. She burned my skin.
“What happens?” I asked with tears in my eyes.
“You’ll be forced to kill the one who brought you to your death. It will be your task, it will be your purpose.”
I shook my head — I didn’t want to do that.
“Yes, my darling, you will. And you’ll do it because it’s the only way of uniting yourself with him once more. You’re his demon now, and demons can only take their own favorites with them,” she said.
“You mean, you couldn’t?”
“If I did, I would go on being a damned soul, while he would be a free one. If you do it, drag him with you, because he must obey only you.”
“I don’t want him. I’ll disappear forever and watch him love: that will be the damnation I deserve,” I replied. She came over to me and breathed in my face. Her breath froze my muscles.
“You stupid, spoiled little girl. You’ve asked for it. The other ghosts and I will hurt you so badly you’ll beg us to die a terrible death. We’ll finish you off.”
When I was little I drew a closed semicircle on a sheet of paper. I drew a little ball on each end of the semicircle and then wrote
Forty
Cold floor. Doors barred and shutters lowered. Lights out. My naked body lying here. Wind on the hills. Rain. Sun. Then rain again. One week. Two weeks. Three weeks. Three days. No remorse, no kindness, no emotion. The absence of the ghosts. The sense of having attained perfection and omnipotence. Omnipotence. Omnipotence.
Then the darkness comes and grips me by the arm.
Forty-one
What did you do today? When someone phoned you at six in the morning and told you they’d found your daughter lying on the floor, close to death, what did you think? Did you scream, did you curse, did you feel overwhelmed with resignation? Did you think you had a mad daughter? Or did you think you had a daughter who was passionately in love? Or perhaps both?
When you took the first flight for Rome and then traveled more than a hundred kilometers to find me, and when you reached the red house on the hill and didn’t find anyone, just my hair scattered on the carpet, what did you call your pain?
What was the consistency of your love when you looked at me through the glass in the door, while my wrists, slashed and now healed, were outstretched and hanging, held up by two strips of white fabric?
What fear did you feel when you saw my eyes? When you noticed that one of them was going blind, full of clotted blood?
Would you have allowed yourself to be stroked by my hands with their shattered nails?
And that part of me I gave you, where did it end up?
If it’s still inside you, free it, let it fly. Perhaps one day it will come back to me and we will have a great orgy of love.
Acknowledgments
For many reasons, all different and unpronounceable, I thank the following: my dog, Burrito, who arrived late but not too late. Simone Caltabellota, who, on the other hand, arrived early. Nikki Sudden, Nic Kelman, and Rocco Fortunato. Martina Donati and Melisso, plus Nilo, the unborn child (who will have been born by now!). Julieta and Bengt, Ignacio and Mario Brega.
I’d also like to thank the coprotagonist of this story even if, in my view, I’ve already devoted too much time to him (both in life and in the book).
Last, I thank all the people who hate me, because it’s thanks to them that I love myself all the more.
