But it is in bed that we spend most of our time together. Partly we stay in these hotel rooms because ours is an illicit, clandestine love, which can’t be lived in front of others. The main reason, though, is that we like it. However nice it is to eat together, walk together, go somewhere together, nothing seems better to us than staying in bed together. I’ve never felt anything like that. I’ve had other women who excited me, but I’ve never spent eight, ten, fifteen hours in bed with one of them — at a certain point, desire always ran out. With Giulia it’s different: It never ends. Even if I’m tired after we’ve made love for a long time, an electric current impels me to caress her butt, lick the inside of her thighs, kiss her mouth, trace the line of her teeth with a finger, bite her ear, and on and on, without stopping. I can never have enough of her. It’s like a universal truth that was suddenly revealed to me: For the first time it seems obvious, as it never had before, that things should always be this way between a man and woman who are in love. That or nothing. No half-measures. The idea that a couple can lie together, I don’t mean for ten minutes but for an hour or two, and that each prefers to read a book, watch television, sleep — that is, do something else — now seems inconceivable, sad, wrong. If two people are in love, if they want each other, love should be the way the two of us live it: uncontainable. Morbid. A disease. Now I believe that the moment this passes and excitement turns into routine, love starts to end. Rather, it’s already over.
Eventually, however, a worm began digging a hole in my obsession with Giulia, very tiny at first, then larger and larger: the thought of her husband. I’m a free man, without ties; I could be with her, if we wanted, all the time. And I would like it to be all the time. But Giulia isn’t free; she’s a married woman. For months, after that first meeting at Villa Borghese when I said that I saw in her a neglected and unhappy wife, we never returned to my mistake. Besides, it seemed to me that the facts expressed our wish to be together. Mistake or not, I thought I had understood everything: Giulia and her husband were the typical couple who married very young, but after twenty years things had cooled. As an explanation it suited me. I had no doubts, residual questions, uncertainties. But the worm, quietly, slowly, continued to dig. The hole got bigger. And I fell into it. I had to admit to myself that the classic roles of the triangle were reversed: I, the lover, was jealous of the husband. Of course, every so often Giulia mentioned his egotism, the fact that he never listened to her or that he dumped on her shoulders as wife and working mother all the responsibilities for the house and the children. But she said it as a simple fact, without much complaint, without expecting to change him or the situation. Of him she never spoke with malice, never.
Now Giulia had someone to listen to her: me. As in our first conversation flying over the Atlantic, it was always she who did more of the talking, telling me an infinity of stories great and small, about the articles she commissioned or wrote for the paper, about the minor incidents of life in the office, petty feuds, jealousies, injustices, the confidences of friends, the problems or successes she had with her children, the things she bought for the house, the vegetables she got at the market, the delicious meals she cooked. There — that’s where my uneasiness made itself felt for the first time, I remember clearly, at the table. One of those evenings when Giulia couldn’t stay with me, but had to hurry home at dinnertime — breathless, in her constant struggle with time — as if she were coming from the newspaper. Suddenly, as I was eating dinner alone in a squalid pizzeria, I saw her at the stove, preparing food for her family, and then at the table, laughing with her children, telling her husband something, receiving compliments from them all for the wonderful meal she had made. I felt a pang of jealousy. From that day, I began to desire Giulia not only in bed. I began to want to share with her the little rituals of daily life: dinner with friends, an outing with the children, a vacation, shopping at the supermarket. I thought how, in all those situations, it was the husband who got to be close to her, who enjoyed her presence continuously: not me. And I wondered how she really was with that man. I wondered if, and when, and how, they made love: odd, I had never thought about this before. Giulia talked so much, she told me so many things, but about him, and what she really felt, she said little. Was it reserve, a need to protect the privacy of her marital relations? Or perhaps only timidity, a difficulty in opening up? I then realized that she had rarely said to me, “I love you,” “I adore you,” phrases typical of lovers. It seemed to me that I could see love in the way she looked at me, but she measured her words, as if she distrusted them. She was much freer with text messages. She wrote: What are you doing to me? I’m yours more and more, I miss you, I want you, I think of you, dream of you, you’re inside me, part of my life. And yet when, having received the message, I called her, I had the sensation that it was a different person who had sent it, that she was retreating, that she no longer wanted to talk about it. And the worm, planted inside me, kept on working. I would have liked to ask her: You, what do you really feel? What is the difference between me and your husband? Would you leave him if I asked you to? How would you react if I asked you, for example, to marry me? Would you run away with me to New York? Or, if I moved to Rome, would we live together? But I couldn’t: It was stronger than me: I couldn’t. These were the sort of questions that, the other way around, women had always asked me, in the various relationships I’d had. Relationships without love. Relationships in which I listened to those plaintive questions — What about you, what do you feel? Do you love me? Do you care for me, think of me? — with an increasing sensation of nausea. With the wish to silence their mouths, flee, never see them again.
The Italians take long summer vacations: usually an entire month. During the second vacation after we met, which Giulia spent at the beach with her whole family, we talked very little on the phone. It was complicated, her husband or children were always around. When finally we saw each other again, during a hot September in Rome, Giulia was more stupendous than ever: tanned, polished by the sun, slightly rounder, from days of repose and, I imagined — in vexation — from the food she had lovingly prepared over the four weeks. We made love furiously. Then I pounded her with questions. All the questions that the worm had burrowed into my body. Giulia didn’t expect it. She was stunned, almost frightened. Then she answered. She said that her husband wasn’t perfect, that their relations in twenty years of marriage had obviously changed, but that he was a good father whom the children adored, a good man, intelligent; certainly he neglected her somewhat, but not out of meanness or insensitivity — he just was like that. Once she had thought of leaving him, of divorcing, she admitted, without specifying if it had been after we met or before, but she had abandoned the idea: It wouldn’t be easy, it would have been too painful for too many people, the children would never forgive her. Then, speaking of the two of us, she asked me point-blank if I would really be willing to leave my law office in New York. She knew that I loved my work. Before I could answer, she said that she loved hers as well. She said she needed me, that she was happy when she had me near her and heard me on the phone, that she didn’t want to lose me — but life was a magical accord made up of many things: love, work, children, the city where she was born and raised, family ties. And she didn’t want to lose any of them. Then she went silent, exhausted by all these explanations that she evidently wasn’t used to.