If I’d been with you, I would have sat still with my cheek pressed against your bottom and would soon have gone to sleep. But now you’re alone and the cats have followed Ornella between the sheets.
You’ve lit a cigarette and sat yourself down in front of the television again. Your eyes, which are made of water, are drowning in an ocean of tears.
When you wake up, you realize that it wasn’t my voice calling you but the infuriating crackle of the umpteenth unextinguished cigarette making the umpteenth hole in the same old sofa.
You go to bed knowing that I wasn’t calling you and you weren’t able to get pissed off and say, “What the hell do you care if I sleep here on the sofa?”
You slink off to bed, tears drying on your cheeks.
I’m in another world, falling in love.
I think about me, about you, about him, about me and him, especially. Your eyes are made of water, mine of fire, his of earth. Out of the three, I’m the one who can endure your dominion, the one who loves it.
Sixteen
I advanced, slowly at first, and then, once I had managed to touch his thigh with my knees, my movements became even more enveloping. I circled him lightly with an arm. His body stiffened and his breath seemed to falter for a few moments. He stayed motionless, blocking off all contact with the world. With my outstretched little finger I gently touched his erection. It was powerful, yet incredibly light. I had never touched a real erection before. That was why my hand moved higher and higher until it reached his heart. When he lightly brushed my fingers, I realized that nothing would be as before.
“Do you want to sleep with me tonight?” I asked him.
We were at Cosenza in Calabria, and the university where I was staying had put two rooms at my disposal, one for me and the other for my companion.
“It’s horrible sleeping on your own…,” I went on, plunging farther and farther into my embarrassment.
“OK,” he replied, his cheeks growing fiery.
The smell of his neck was intoxicating, he was young, he was a child. He was everything I wanted.
“The scent of your breath…,” he whispered suddenly in the night, “I love the scent of your breath.”
I clutched his T-shirt with my fingers and closed my eyes.
He imprisoned my breath in a glass jar, and he sniffs it every time he makes love with me.
Seventeen
The train’s progress accompanies our movements, our sighs creating a light and liquid countermelody with sudden surges of emotion, our lips brushing, a race to kiss each other’s bodies, tongues darting disturbingly, imperiously, the night’s darkness, broken here and there by street lamps scattered along country roads, reconciling troubled fantasies and provocative imaginings, my thighs gripping his body, pressing him tightly, as I cried out to him, “You’ll never want to go! Why are you getting away? Why won’t you come back? Why won’t you suck my breath?”
My palms against his warm, maternal body, my neck thrown back, my eyes holding back their tears, perhaps tears of blood.
The echo has started whispering in my head again, too faint to be properly understood, but loud enough for me to perceive a breath of wind, the north wind. All of a sudden I came, giving off so much energy that he too felt an electric shock in his belly. Blood, blood everywhere. Blood in my head, blood in my eyes. Empty, my veins.
Then I trace a line with the fountain pen my father gave me, the one I use to write with; I want to work out whether I’ve still got any blood inside me. Empty, completely empty.
I just remember him going back to his cabin and shouting. I remember his dirty fingers and his forlorn and distant eyes.
Distance, one day, will take him to the very rim of the segment of our life; he will go far from me and end up in
A poisonous tapeworm nests in our bellies; the slides of our life are printed on its body. Each time the tapeworm moves, a slide settles underneath our navel, and the light projected outside enchants us. We stand and stare at it; then we burst into tears.
At first I couldn’t work out what it was that stirred in my belly. I thought it was a child that didn’t want to grow and didn’t want to be born, a child that wanted to stay immersed and suspended in my amniotic fluid. But then I saw images in my head, and those images were born of pain.
That pain was born of the movements of my entrails, my guts, my flesh.
A pain with its own roots in my past, which I can’t cough away: I have to live it and I have to watch it.
The tapeworm helps me do that, the tapeworm loves me.
Eighteen
The sea was rough and I was four years old and wearing a red swimsuit. The beach was scorched by the early afternoon sun; the pebbles gleamed and stood out against the intense blue of the sky. Around my waist I had a plastic rubber ring with a pattern of red apples. I held it up with both hands, stamping my feet because I wanted to swim at all costs, even though the waves seemed determined to swallow everything up.
“I want to swim!” I shrieked, tears pricking my eyes.
My father, lying on his mat, pretended not to hear me.
“I want to swim!” I repeated until he was forced to look up at me impatiently.
“Well, you can’t,” he said. “The sea’s too rough.”
“That’s what I like about it,” I replied. “I like playing with the waves.”
Lying on your stomach and sunning your back, you muttered, “Go on, let her do it, go on, as long as you’re there nothing will happen.”
Inside I was smiling with satisfaction, but my face was still furious.
I ran toward the water’s edge, still holding up my rubber ring. Dad caught up with me, I put one foot into the water and it was terribly cold, but I didn’t care.
“It’s cold,” he said, “let’s get out.”
I said nothing but just kept walking until the water came halfway up my belly.
I headed toward the open sea, my toes no longer touching the bottom, and now the waves were dragging me and my rubber ring. Behind me, my father was growing impatient with my saying, “Dad, let’s go.”
I swam and played with the waves that buoyed me, high and majestic. Perhaps I was smiling. They were like big arms that lifted me up and then dropped me back down again, and for a moment I felt a mixture of fear and delight. Fear of drowning, and delight at being lifted toward the sky, just for a moment, just for a second. I felt myself being rocked.
I turned around and saw him, so impatient now that his face was almost contorted with pain.
I felt so much sorrow at that moment. I saw his wet trunks and I thought it was bad that he was feeling cold. I saw the pained expression on his face and felt so much tenderness; I chastised myself for being selfish, for thinking about my games.
“Dad, let’s go back to the shore.”
He practically ran out of the water, while I floundered impetuously, battling against the waves that seemed
