“Oh, come on…”
“I’m serious. I didn’t want to hurt him.”
“You should have thought of that before. Why in hell did you go to bed with his wife?”
“His ex-wife,” Mauro corrected me.
“Ex-wife,” I repeated after him, incredulous. “Correct. So that was OK with your conscience.”
Mauro was silent for a few seconds.
“It never occurred to me.”
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“Trevor. I was always trying to understand his side of the argument, but he’s the one who gave up on Kate. He didn’t make the slightest effort to hold on to his marriage. He was too busy acting the part of the doomed artist…”
“Shut the fuck up,” I said angrily. “He has more talent than the two of us put together. It’s just that Trevor hasn’t broken through yet. Just a question of luck.” My words caused Mauro to fall silent. He looked at me with his wide, nutmeg-coloured eyes, took my hand firmly into his to calm me down.
“Fine, you know better. Trevor is a genius and I’m a piece of shit. But for now let’s make peace and have some coffee.”
We sat down at the airport bar and ordered a couple of coffees and a plate of snacks. I was starving and ate almost all of them, but it wasn’t enough. With hungry eyes I began staring at the warm pastries behind the counter. Mauro couldn’t help smiling at me.
“You haven’t changed at least,” he said. “You still have the appetite of a wolf.”
“You’re wrong. I have changed,” I replied.
“Is that why you’ve returned to Bologna?”
“I was missing spaghetti and tomato sauce.”
“Be serious.”
“I am. You try eating fish and chips seven days a week and tell me if I’m wrong. It’s better here. Even the airport coffee is delicious.” All the while sipping a tar-coloured espresso and pretending to be ecstatic.
“You can tell me,” Mauro insisted. “Did you come back for Trevor? I know he rang you…”
“We just exchanged gossip. Nothing more.”
Mauro’s gaze was fixed on me. I knew he was studying me.
“In England, things were not as I expected,” I confessed to him. “I managed to publish a couple of short stories in a anthology, then nothing more.” As I was talking, I spilt some coffee on my sleeve. Impassive, I wiped the stain dry with a tissue.
“I’ve been offered a job as an editor in Turin. Correcting and improving manuscripts. It’s well paid and I’ve said yes,” I said resolutely.
But Mauro did not approve of my decision.
“It sounds dubious to me. You went to England to write a book and now you’re content to read other people’s books. It’s a pity. After everything you’ve achieved…”
“Actually, I haven’t done that much,” I replied.
“Does that apply to Trevor too?”
Mauro was beginning to get on my nerves. This was becoming more of an interrogation than a conversation.
“Why bring Trevor into it? He’s a closed chapter,” I said.
“I don’t believe you. You go all pale every time I mention his name.”
Sunk. Mauro has caught me out and now my appetite has gone. I can barely breathe in and that’s a damn effort.
“Did he tell you that he’s returning to Canada?”
Go fuck yourself, Mauro. Just shut up.
I’ve tried everything not to have to think about of him and have no intention of doing so now. All I want to look at is the fluorescent light hanging from the ceiling and burning my eyes. I want to stop the tears from running on my face. I want a cigarette but no one here is smoking and I’m losing my mind.
Trevor. Every time Mauro says his name, an invisible hand takes a grip of my shoulder and drags me down a well of memories.
“I want to get out of this bloody place.”
I’m losing my balance. I’m screaming out in pain.
Trevor’s name steals my lucidity and my concentration.
I’m hurting like a dog. And, like a dog, I still feed on the scraps of that night.
“What are you thinking of?” Trevor asks, lighting a cigarette.
“I’m thinking of the book I wish to write,” I tell him.
“Is it that important?”
“It is.”
“More important than me?”
His question hung in the air and stayed there. Like a hook which I could hang myself on if only my hands could reach it. But I didn’t. I knew that hook could not support my weight and I would fall heavily to the ground.
Trevor was asking me how important he was to me. He asked with his eyes lowered and this angered me. I hated it when he did that. I hated Trevor and I hated his eyes when they negligently shifted downwards and avoided me. It made me feel like taking a hold of his face and yelling at him to stop. But on this occasion I controlled myself, but it was to be the last time. It’s his fault, it’s all his fault.
I know that expression, that face. It’s my face superimposed over Trevor’s face. The face of someone with a definite goal and enough ambition to achieve it. But ambition on its own is not enough. Trevor’s eyes betray his insecurity. It will not help him to keep his eyes lowered and hidden behind his eyelids. I know those eyes, because I know Trevor and the doubts that assail him. He is like me. I know that for him too every day starts the same way. I imagine him looking at himself in the mirror and wondering, looking for something inside, a reason to forge ahead with the day or not. I see him, as he blames himself for being so stubborn, reaching wildly for something he should have taken hold of firmly when he was twenty years old, and that now appears like a mirage in the distance.
Because I see Trevor every time he surrenders.
I see him and I see my own face, like a reflection in the mirror. Everything he feels, I feel too.
I recognize myself in his weakness, in the daily temptation to give up, to fuck once and for all with art and this journey that exhausts me. Like him I am scared, and just want to be normal again, and at peace with myself. To return to the days when everything was so much more spontaneous, and there were no goal posts to reach, and to manage to say “I love you” and to be able to live with that.
Yes, Trevor. I must confess I want to say I love you.
Such a simple thing, isn’t it?
To say I love you, and that I love you so much that I will not be able to write another word for the rest of my life, because this love is so strong and so intense that it drains all my energy.
Yes, Trevor. This love makes me weak. And it makes you weak. Maybe you didn’t know, but that’s the way things are.
If I now say I love you, I won’t save your life. All I will provide you with is a pretext to accept it, to become content with what you have, even though that’s still not enough to be happy. For folks like us, happiness is inappropriate. For folks like us, happiness is a state of unthinkable boredom. Surely we are not ready to set our pride aside and give up the fight. We lack the courage to accept our fate and to love each other for what we truly are.
We’re two losers, Trevor. Two beautiful losers who were lucky enough to meet each other and recognize ourselves, as if our reflections were seeking one another. But you are you and I am me, and we will know how to benefit from the occasion.
It’s better to pretend not to notice, to cover our faces with masks, to start wearing another
