We spend two days like this, never leaving the bed except to go to the bathroom or to have something to eat, like two wild animals, from whatever we find in the refrigerator. Two days which in my time have expanded to an indefinable length. I feel like one of Ulysses’ companions, forgetting my identity, drugged with pleasure, at the banquet of the sorceress Circe. We watch a film, we make love, we talk, and we start all over again.
At a certain point, breaking into the idyll of this suspended time without coordinates or directions, a thought crosses my mind. One of those thoughts that seem absurd, nonsensical, until they insinuate themselves into your rational perception of things with such force as to demolish it: what if even this image of the two of us, lying abandoned on this bed, was a hallucination? What if Isabelle wasn’t real, or — worse still — what if she wasn’t even possible?
“It may seem illogical to you,” I say to her without warning, “but I have the feeling you may last for ever and at the same time never have happened.”
Isabelle smiles in that reassuring way of hers, and snuggles closer to me, placing her head on my chest. “I’m a mess, really,” she confesses, drawing little circles on my skin with her forefinger and thumb together. “With a little child, in a foreign country. Sometimes I think my life has been a long series of mistakes, but I assure you that I really am here. There’s only one thing I hope: not to make any more mistakes. I have happened, oh yes, I can swear that I have happened, and I hope to happen for a lot longer.”
“I like the way you say things.”
“I like the way you say things. For ever and never, I think those were the final words of a love letter in Mauvais sang by Leos Carax, a film that’s been almost completely forgotten. Love can be so overwhelming, it stays inside you for ever, even if you’ve never experienced it.”
I stroke her hair and look at her, thinking of all the men she has loved before she met me, maybe that long series of mistakes she spoke about a moment ago, and I feel a pang in the pit of my stomach, a sensation I’ve never felt before. I assume it’s jealousy, the kind of jealousy that may even become intolerable. “Have you ever known that?” I ask her. “A love for ever and never?”
Isabelle pulls a face that puts everything back in perspective, even my jealousy. “I don’t like leaving things unresolved,” she says. “And I feel relatively at peace with my own conscience. If there were accounts to settle, I’ve settled them. Nobody has stayed inside me like that.”
I think about things unresolved in my own life, festering wounds. They have nothing to do with love, at least not with love as she means it. They look like my father and sound like all the words I’ve never been able to say to him.
“What about you? Have you ever known a love that was for ever and never?”
She wouldn’t believe me — she might even think me ridiculous — if I told her I’ve never been in love. So I just smile at her, a shy smile, to which she responds with an amused pout, like a little girl. “I’m always the one to reveal myself, but never mind.” She gets out of bed to fetch a glass of water, wrapping herself in the sheet as she does so: now I’m the one revealed.
“I don’t think so,” I say, pulling on the sheet to undress her.
Naked now, Isabelle tries modestly to cover herself with her hands. “I feel embarrassed,” she says, coming back to the bed to take possession of the sheet again.
She’s turned red. Suddenly overwhelmed by tenderness, I take her face in the palm of my hand. I’m surprised by such girlish modesty in a woman like her.
She confesses that it’s the first time since she had Giulia that she’s slept with a man. For her, this beautiful interlude in my bed has the fresh taste of rebirth and the bitter taste of guilt. For more than a year her body has been a cradle, transforming itself to welcome a new life. She tells me that in the first few days after Giulia was born, she would look in the mirror and wonder if sex would ever again be part of her life. The last time before that had been the bored, mechanical act of a Sunday afternoon, a clear symptom of the fact that, after almost ten years of living together, she and Giulia’s father had reached the end of the line, and yet it led, mysteriously, to conception. Even from the final stages of a love affair, something much bigger can come, overcoming everything, even death.
Again that pang in the pit of my stomach. I imagine that sharing in the conception of a new life is a gesture of absolute, unforgettable love, even for two people who are barely on speaking terms. A gesture which is like a bond, something set in concrete.
I stroke her stomach, that soft, maternal stomach, which she keeps hiding from my gaze, and touch her belly button with one finger. She smiles, I keep pressing with my finger, as if the belly button was a hole in a balloon and I was afraid that she might deflate at any moment and fly away. Then I tell her that she’s mine, mine and nobody else’s.
“People aren’t like apartments or cars,” she answers, with a distant smile. “You can’t own people.”
“But I feel that I’m yours,” I tell her, trying to keep my tone light, however serious the words. “You could do anything you like with me.”
“I’d never put a label on you, like those people who tattoo their bodies with names and dates… That’s always disgusted me.”
“Well, then I disgust you too,” I continue, still lightly. “Tomorrow I’m going to have your name tattooed on my chest in capital letters. Or rather no, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to have my whole body covered with your initials. I’m yours! I want to shout it to the whole world!”
She bursts out laughing. “Stop it! I’m sure you’d even be scared of one of my magic markers,” she says, reaching out her hand to her bag, which is under the bedside table. She takes out one of the markers I saw in her bathroom, her face like a naughty child’s. “Want to bet?”
“You really are obsessed!” I say, with a laugh. “Don’t tell me you were intending to scribble all over my apartment.”
She approaches me, brandishing the marker threateningly. “Didn’t you just tell me you wanted to have my name tattooed all over your body?”
“And didn’t you just tell me you were against possession and would never put a label on me?”
We start fighting, like two little children. We tickle each other, we laugh, we laugh until we can’t breathe, ending up looking each other in the eyes, motionless, and at the same time wanting to go beyond those eyes. I’d like to penetrate the most inaccessible cavities of her mind.
Isabelle is the first to look away. “Come on, let me write something on your body! You said I could do anything I wanted with you, and now you’re scared of a few measly words!”