Even sleep was no longer a refuge.
She lived in the hills behind the Olympic Stadium.
He painfully managed to find his way there, maneuvering the car with difficulty with an unfolded map on his knees and dodging cars that sped past him. She had pointed out the area to him when they had driven nearby on the way to secret places where they could fuck, but he had a hell of a time today finding his way past the Olympic Stadium. Once in the hills, it was no better and he arrived at the top by mistake, enjoying a view of both central Rome and all the neighboring hills he remembered from his history and Latin lessons all those years past. Oh, there was the Vatican. And there was the road that led out of town to the lake and Calcata, past the neglected area whose name he couldn’t recall where, she had told him, prostitutes and low-life came out at night, then further down the road the RAI buildings. She had confessed to an unholy fascination with the whores there when she had been a teenager and how she had always imagined what they were doing and how she would act if she were one.
He studied the map carefully and found her street. He drove off downwards in its direction.
Via Luigi Credaro was a cul-de-sac and a small supermarket occupied the ground floor of the apartment building where she still lived with her parents. He managed to park a hundred meters away on the opposite side of the road.
Though he had never been here, he seemed to remember her saying that the apartment occupied the top two floors of the building. Did her bedroom overlook the street, or was it on another side of the building facing the hills or a different part of the city?
So, this was where she had mostly grown up, apart from those years in the country when she had commuted to school in the city by train. It felt strange being here. He kept his eye on the door to the building; the supermarket was open and customers trickled in and out.
He opened the glove compartment and took out the gun and placed it between his thighs on the car seat. He’d never fired a gun in his life, let alone owned one. But he had read enough books and articles and knew the basics — the safety, the caliber, the damage it could invariably cause.
I’m crazy, totally crazy, he thought. He’d been in love before, of course, but never had he been so obsessed with a woman, a girl, or missed her so much. Without her, he had sadly realized, he was nothing.
However much he knew that things could never have worked out between them after the initial year-long honeymoon of covert meetings and fiery fucks in forbidden places, he still couldn’t give up on her totally, admit defeat, let her, and him, get on with their respective lives. She was younger. She still had a life — adventures, as she’d put it — ahead of her. He didn’t. Not without her.
It was a few weeks before when he had been doing some Internet research for a story that he had stumbled across a pornographic website replete with photos submitted by nonprofessionals; openly voyeuristic images of nudity, both simple and extreme, and of couples having intercourse. He had distractedly spent a quarter of an hour surfing through the images and noting the monotonous repetition of positions and angles, when he had come across a series of eight shots in which the woman’s face was out of the frame but her opulent white ass stood front and center, her wet, pink gash circled by unruly black curls, fully exposed along with the puckered, darker areola of her back door. The young woman was on her knees, her rear right in the camera’s face. From image to image the ass came nearer and nearer to the fore, and in the final three photographs a resplendently thick and hard penis took aim at the woman’s cunt and was then seen entering it and finally deeply embedded up to the ball sack.
He had of course seen a thousand photographs of this kind before, but this time the shape, the color, the details of the woman’s ass recalled hers in indelible resemblance. He’d been violently sick, rushing to the bathroom and spewing out all the contents of his stomach over the carpet long before reaching the safety of the ceramic bowl. It had been like a knife to his heart. Naturally, he knew that he could not expect her to keep on being faithful to him in the whole year since their break-up, and since when do women in their twenties have to act as nuns? But somehow the images on his laptop had brought it all home, the idea of another man fucking her, owning her, playing with her, and, worse, getting her to allow him to broadcast photographs of their terrible intimacy across the web.
A few hours later, he had hesitantly peered at the photographs again and realized it wasn’t her, couldn’t be her. A few meshes of the woman’s hair were in the frame of one of the images and the color was not hers; also, there was a distinctive mole absent in a familiar area of her lunar landscape, he discovered, to his relief. But the scar was still there. Inside him. Who was she with now? Who did she love now, she who had once loved him?
The door to the building opened and a woman walked out, plump, dark-haired, almost a vision of what Desi might look like twenty years later. Her mother?
The heat of the day hammered against the parked car, but he couldn’t switch the air-conditioning on or the battery would go flat.
Was she now alone in her room in the large two-floor apartment?
Or maybe she was now in a small hotel room by Lake Bracciano, being ploughed by another man. It had been, after all, she who had discovered that hideaway.
Enough. Enough.
I am sick. I am sick.
Sick enough to climb the stairs to the apartment, ring the bell, confront her when she opened the door, and brandish the gun? If you can’t be mine, you can’t be anyone else’s...? The pitiful stuff of tabloid journalism. Come on!
He could sit here all day and not see her, he realized. And even if she did emerge, what would he do then? Follow her? Stalk her? He’d lose her in traffic most likely.
In her anger, when he would refuse to let her go and beg for a last meeting, a final embrace, a penultimate conversation, she would always fire back that he had no respect for her and could not accept what she felt. She had these crazy ideas about respect, but he did understand what she meant.
In a letter, one of so many, too many, he had written that loving her was also knowing when to let her go, but it was a precept he had proven incapable of adhering to.
What the fuck was he doing in Rome? What the hell was he doing with a gun?
There’s no way he could kill her.
Damn.
He drove off, found the highway that led out of town, past the desolate and empty marketplace where the whores were said to congregate at night like in a Fellini film, sped past the RAI buildings and into the countryside.
The sky was blue.
Maybe he could find peace after all.
There was a junction with a road that led to Lake Bracciano and Trevignano. He sighed and drove past it, his mind assaulted by more memories of nearby hotel rooms where they had made love and had once been unbearably happy. Watching her emerge from the shower, her wet, unfurled hair hanging all the way down her back. Putting that cheap necklace around her throat.
The next turn-off was for the medieval town of Calcata. He was just over forty kilometers from the city, in the Parco Treja Tuscia. Here, behind the high, fortified ramparts in a small stone house, where the February cold had chilled their bones to the marrow and forced them to spend almost two whole days in bed — talking nonstop between the tender fucking, learning about each other, getting accustomed to the taste of each other, growing bolder with mind and body and plunging headfirst into transgression — he had moved inside her for the first time and fallen in love with her. Forever.