The end of this bad story came when I had stopped thinking about it. About the past, I mean. It happened sometimes that I remembered my nights at the Forbidden City, the girls who danced on the stage and the things that were said about them. But it happened less and less frequently, and anyway it was something so distant that it felt alien. It was as if neither Yin nor I had ever been the person of that time.
I began to think of us as a real, if somewhat peculiar, couple. I even considered asking Yin if she would like to have a child. This, because she seemed more and more affectionate. Not that she did anything apart from being silent and lying on the bed. I don’t know, it was something in her habits, in the way she made love. She seemed — how to put it? — really in love.
I felt serene. Until one day I found her sitting cross-legged on the bed waiting for me to come home from work. On the night table, beside the old pin with the bills, there was a bottle of red wine with two glasses. She poured the wine and offered me a glass.
Nothing like that had ever happened. Her proposing a toast, that is. So I asked her if there was something I didn’t know that we had to celebrate.
She shook her head smiling. And then: “You know everything. Me like you.” She touched my glass with hers and drank.
“I love you,” I said. I don’t know if it was true. I was happy that she had made the gesture, and was happy that she was there for me every day, on my bed, waiting for my return. If this can be called love, then I loved her.
I drank the wine, and was about to kiss her, but she moved her face. She grabbed me by the hair and pushed me down, on her breast. I began to kiss her there, then on the neck and behind the ear. I tried again to bring my lips to hers, and again she moved. Suddenly, in a flash, I understood. And in understanding I lost consciousness, with an acid taste in my mouth that wasn’t wine.
I came to as in the dream, paralyzed. And what else can I say? It’s not true that before you die you see your life go by in an instant. This didn’t happen to me, at least. In that final moment, I thought only of how blind and stupid a human being can be. I’m referring to all the things I hadn’t realized in those months. For example, the way I began to win again after telling Yichang that I was in no position to pay my debts.
Then I also wondered if anything would have been different if I hadn’t told her and Yichang my dream. And I almost reached the conclusion that certain things would have happened anyway. I say almost because when Yin took the pin with the bills and stuck it in the pillow, I understood that she was about to do something different from what I thought. She didn’t intend to emasculate me. I saw her sit on my stomach. Then she raised the pillow over her head and stared for a moment at a precise point between my eyes. Everything lasted less than a second, and maybe that’s why I didn’t see any film go by. I thought only that it’s really astonishing how a person can be capable of not thinking things through.
Last Summer Together
by Cristiana Danila Formetta
Translated by Ann Goldstein
Ostia
I’m not dressed properly. I realize it from the way the other passengers are staring at me.
They’re right. The train headed to Ostia-Lido is gritty, dust-coated, and none of them would dare set foot in it wearing a white linen suit. Here in Rome, dirt has a fascination with soft colors, insisting on the palest tints, and enjoys removing from them every trace of whiteness. My suit will soon be covered by a thin patina of grime, but that doesn’t matter now. I no longer distinguish colors or the faces of the people around me. I no longer hear their voices, I have no desire to listen to their words, what they say, what they think.
English, that man in shorts and flip-flops said when he saw me arrive. And the fat woman next to him nodded her head yes.
English. Of course, that explains everything. My clothes, my composure, even the indifference I show toward the curious gazes of the other travelers. For them, my detachment is not the result of a natural disgust for a rude, vulgar segment of humanity. No, if I’m like this it’s because I’m English. If I act like this, it’s because I was born in a place where to sit silently reading a book is not yet considered a crime. Criminal, if anything, is the insistence with which a girl keeps asking me question after question, in an absurd mixture of English and Italian. She thinks I’m a tourist, she thinks I’m here just to dive into the dirty waters of Rome. And she won’t stop talking to me about the Colosseum, about the marvels of the city, about places that in her view I really cannot do without seeing. Stupid girl. If she only knew how much beauty I’ve seen, and how much pain I’ve felt in the face of its enchantment. But she’s incapable of understanding. She’s young, but already she has the obtuse gaze of an old woman. And, just like an old woman, every so often she loses the thread of the conversation, wanders, and no longer knows what she’s saying.
“You know Pasolini was murdered at Ostia?” she asks. Then, without waiting for an answer, she adds, “Of course, he was asking for it...” Then, as if unconsciously, I got up and left the compartment, overwhelmed by the brutality of that statement, but far more disturbed by the rapidity with which the recollection of a long-ago crime had brought back to mind other crimes, other horrors.
There’s nothing odd about it. The history of Rome was written in blood. Every street, every building of this city conceals within its walls the sighs of executioners and their victims. And if everyone on this train stopped talking, even just for an instant, those moans would be heard here too, on this dirty train. But for now the noise is louder. It covers up the voices. It suffocates the cries. Just as you did, my dear Charlotte. Only you had the power to banish evil thoughts. You did it for almost thirty years. Thirty winters and thirty summers together, the last right here in Rome, visiting museums, walking on the beaches at Ostia, like a happy young married couple. That summer, you smiled, Charlotte. The way the child smiled who came and sat beside me. You, too, looked at me and smiled like that, while Alzheimer’s was already eating away your brain. A simple, pure smile, and yet so distant, letting me understand that I was losing you. And you were losing the power to keep those voices at bay. Soon, my love, your smile would no longer rein in desire, the call of the young bodies that crowded the beaches of Ostia that summer. Male bodies. Bodies of tall, tanned youths. Memories of a past that you, my sweet wife, had been able to erase, giving me the illusion that nothing had ever happened. Yet it took so little to make my confidence crumble. A look, a few words were enough. It was enough that he told me his name.
Mario. Yes, his name was Mario, I haven’t forgotten it. And Mario is the name I’ve given my shameful act. Mario is the name I’ve assigned to my lies.
I just bought him a drink, Charlotte. There’s nothing wrong with having a soft drink together, a Coke. And yet in the depths of my heart I already knew that the years of peace you had given me were about to end.
You had changed me, Charlotte. You had transformed me into an adult who lived in a world of adults, a world where there was no room for young men with crew cuts and tanned skin.