When I woke it was 4:00 a.m. and I felt much better. My head was no longer spinning. It was pitch-black, but I sensed that someone was lying next to me. It had been ages since someone else slept in my bed, and it’s not a feeling you can re-create any other way, not even with a mannequin. It’s a beautiful feeling.
So I didn’t want to wake her. But I desperately needed to piss, so I got up cautiously and went out of the room and into the bathroom. I looked at myself in the mirror for ten minutes, thinking back on my arrival at the hospital and the point when I went into the exam room on a gurney: they X-rayed me and clipped the films up on a light box. The doctor was a woman so young that she seemed like a child, but her colleagues and the nurses obeyed her, and clearly they respected her; she came across like a little general, pointing to the X-ray of my cranium as if it were a battle map; and while talking to another doctor she named the tiny bones of my face, one by one, with childish glee, entertaining herself in the midst of the sad, boring night. I had no fractures, and my life wasn’t in danger. A solicitous nurse dressed the wound on my cheekbone, and the girl-doctor discharged me with her sleepy eyes half shut: the entertainment was done.
I undressed and put on the T-shirt and boxer shorts that I sleep in.
The room was no longer so dark — there was a faint glow now, or maybe I’d just gotten used to the gloom, so I could see the outline of Elisabetta Renal’s body stretched out on the right side of my bed, the deserted side.
Until the moment I touched the bed, I’d merely intended to lie down again in my spot and fall back asleep, and if she were to wake up, I’d ask her why she had stayed to sleep, whether she had drunk too much vodka to drive or whether she was afraid I might still need her, or a doctor, or a hospital.
But as soon as I touched the bed my intentions changed. I sat down on her side and stared at her. Maybe she wasn’t sleeping, I thought. Her eyelids trembled with the effort of staying shut. I slowly moved closer and kissed her lids. She didn’t move. So I began kissing her whole face. Her nose and her cheeks, her lips and her chin. She had a hand on her belly, and I went down to kiss the hand. I brushed against the fabric of her blouse, tracing the line of her bra. I saw a naked foot, and, gripped by some kind of euphoria, I began kissing that too. The euphoria had a caption to it, like the display photos in a plant catalog: “There’s a woman in my bed, I can kiss her.” I rested my lips on her toes, then touched them softly, one by one, with my lips, breathing against her skin.
When in the dimness I saw that her eyes were open and watching me with a serious and astonished and curious look, when I understood that she was waiting for something, I glided up her calves, lifted her skirt, roamed around between her thighs, and reached her white underpants, where I stopped to await her reaction. She began moving her hips up and down, pressing her sex against my mouth.
I slipped her undies off. I kissed her and licked her, and she grabbed my hair and pulled it. I squeezed her buttocks between my hands, crushed my whole face against her, and penetrated her with my tongue; my wound reopened, and I felt blood bathing my face and her thigh, but I didn’t stop kissing her until she arched her back like a branch loaded with flowers and then fell back onto the bed and pushed me aside. A moment later she was bowing down over my belly, and I was staring incredulously at the ceiling. I came in thirty seconds.
I asked, “Where are you going?”
“That’s enough.”
“Why ‘enough’?”
She got up and went into the bathroom. I lay down on my side, covering my belly with a corner of the sheet. Why “enough”? I wondered.
Coming out of the bathroom, she left the light on, and now we could see each other’s faces. She came back with a damp towel, cotton, and alcohol, cleaned the blood off me, disinfected the wound, and put another Band-Aid on my cheekbone. She lay down again on the other side. It really was all over.
“Why ‘enough’?”
“Enough. You’ve been in an accident.”
She looked at me like a concerned nurse, and I was irritated but too weak to protest.
What accident was she talking about? She seemed to be distancing herself already: “You’ve been in an accident” was a way of saying “This was just an accident.”
At some point I must have fallen asleep.
At 5:15 I heard the sound of the Ka’s engine and its tires on the gravel, and I awoke with a start.
At 6:00 I took a sleeping pill.
This is what I told her about the night we spent together, what I told her the next evening, when she came to see me and we ate together in the kitchen for the first time. Elisabetta sat at my place, because she found the sofa too uncomfortable for eating. She listened in silence. She was embarrassed, but smiling. Then she told me that she had to think about it, that she wasn’t sure it was a good idea for either of us. “Speak for yourself,” I said. But I thought it was the end.
In those final days of May, the Renal construction site became a garden. There’s always a point when a project you’ve designed and so often pictured in your imagination comes to life and takes the last few steps on its own; when your imaginative effort is suddenly interrupted, and a stranger — the garden — decides everything for you, decides everything for itself; it takes shape and suddenly has its own unique face, not exactly like the face in the frame hung on your mental wall, but it’s still a friendly and familiar face; it turns out your only task was to recognize that face in the crowd and tease it out and set it in the foreground: the garden itself is like the real person, while the design project is just like a memory. But sometimes it remains nothing but an impression and never springs to life. Sometimes you get all the way to the end of a job, and you’re still the one and only person responsible for what you’ve made, and the garden is just an inert heap of crude or sophisticated plants and dirt and materials that you’ve intentionally or unintentionally given some kind of shape to, which arouses some kind of emotion in the clients (or maybe no emotion at all). Then your attitude changes, and exhaustion makes you self-indulgent, and you no longer have the strength to solve problems, except when your errors leap out at you — like a flower bed built wrong — and force you to find a remedy. You finish the job on inertia alone. Or sometimes both things are true.
But it just so happened that the night of the accident (of the accidents) was the milestone marking off “before” from “after.” Before I understood what the Renal garden meant to me, and after. (I had long worried about its precarious, impalpable, accidental nature, but now I saw it as a passageway, a subterranean tunnel that would take me elsewhere, and so I was more willing than usual to let myself be carried along on the inertia of the final stages.) Before sleeping in my bed with Elisabetta, and after.
Almost every night she came to my place. She was always the one who called me, from her cell phone, to say she was coming. She came at 7:30, stayed for dinner, and left at 10:00. Or I wouldn’t hear from her till 11:00, when she would call from who-knows-where to ask whether she could come by for a drink — but she never stayed past 1:00 a.m. She’d leave the car half in and half out of the gate, which I always left open; I don’t know if she did it on purpose, whether she was trying to tell me that she hadn’t yet come all the way into my life, or whether she simply wanted to keep any other car from going in or out of the courtyard. I would wait for her in the doorway, and she always came in with her eyes on the ground, not looking at me until I had shut the door behind her. Roiling in her wake was a magnetic trail of anxiety like the train of an evening gown, and I always checked outside to see whether some of it had been left behind before I closed the door; I would glance around my deserted courtyard with a feeling of alienation. She would rub her hands together, tuck her hair behind her ears, cross and uncross her arms, pinch at her cheeks and her neck; it took her at least half an hour to calm down, and then she would slowly begin to smile. I didn’t want to ask her where she’d just been, who she’d been with, or where she went after leaving my house; I didn’t want to ask her to stay the night: maybe I was simply afraid she’d say no. I asked her how she spent her day, what she did.