We were at Cosenza in Calabria, and the university where I was staying had put two rooms at my disposal, one for me and the other for my companion.
“It’s horrible sleeping on your own…,” I went on, plunging farther and farther into my embarrassment.
“OK,” he replied, his cheeks growing fiery.
The smell of his neck was intoxicating, he was young, he was a child. He was everything I wanted.
“The scent of your breath…,” he whispered suddenly in the night, “I love the scent of your breath.”
I clutched his T-shirt with my fingers and closed my eyes.
He imprisoned my breath in a glass jar, and he sniffs it every time he makes love with me.
Seventeen
The train’s progress accompanies our movements, our sighs creating a light and liquid countermelody with sudden surges of emotion, our lips brushing, a race to kiss each other’s bodies, tongues darting disturbingly, imperiously, the night’s darkness, broken here and there by street lamps scattered along country roads, reconciling troubled fantasies and provocative imaginings, my thighs gripping his body, pressing him tightly, as I cried out to him, “You’ll never want to go! Why are you getting away? Why won’t you come back? Why won’t you suck my breath?”
My palms against his warm, maternal body, my neck thrown back, my eyes holding back their tears, perhaps tears of blood.
The echo has started whispering in my head again, too faint to be properly understood, but loud enough for me to perceive a breath of wind, the north wind. All of a sudden I came, giving off so much energy that he too felt an electric shock in his belly. Blood, blood everywhere. Blood in my head, blood in my eyes. Empty, my veins.
Then I trace a line with the fountain pen my father gave me, the one I use to write with; I want to work out whether I’ve still got any blood inside me. Empty, completely empty.
I just remember him going back to his cabin and shouting. I remember his dirty fingers and his forlorn and distant eyes.
Distance, one day, will take him to the very rim of the segment of our life; he will go far from me and end up in her arms. When he is with her, mists will rise up and thicken, and keep him from remembering. While he is with her, I will die slowly, allowing myself to be dragged along with those mists. That way at least I’ll see him from close-up.
A poisonous tapeworm nests in our bellies; the slides of our life are printed on its body. Each time the tapeworm moves, a slide settles underneath our navel, and the light projected outside enchants us. We stand and stare at it; then we burst into tears.
At first I couldn’t work out what it was that stirred in my belly. I thought it was a child that didn’t want to grow and didn’t want to be born, a child that wanted to stay immersed and suspended in my amniotic fluid. But then I saw images in my head, and those images were born of pain.
That pain was born of the movements of my entrails, my guts, my flesh.
A pain with its own roots in my past, which I can’t cough away: I have to live it and I have to watch it.
The tapeworm helps me do that, the tapeworm loves me.
Eighteen
The sea was rough and I was four years old and wearing a red swimsuit. The beach was scorched by the early afternoon sun; the pebbles gleamed and stood out against the intense blue of the sky. Around my waist I had a plastic rubber ring with a pattern of red apples. I held it up with both hands, stamping my feet because I wanted to swim at all costs, even though the waves seemed determined to swallow everything up.
“I want to swim!” I shrieked, tears pricking my eyes.
My father, lying on his mat, pretended not to hear me.
“I want to swim!” I repeated until he was forced to look up at me impatiently.
“Well, you can’t,” he said. “The sea’s too rough.”
“That’s what I like about it,” I replied. “I like playing with the waves.”
Lying on your stomach and sunning your back, you muttered, “Go on, let her do it, go on, as long as you’re there nothing will happen.”
Inside I was smiling with satisfaction, but my face was still furious.
I ran toward the water’s edge, still holding up my rubber ring. Dad caught up with me, I put one foot into the water and it was terribly cold, but I didn’t care.
“It’s cold,” he said, “let’s get out.”
I said nothing but just kept walking until the water came halfway up my belly.
I headed toward the open sea, my toes no longer touching the bottom, and now the waves were dragging me and my rubber ring. Behind me, my father was growing impatient with my saying, “Dad, let’s go.”
I swam and played with the waves that buoyed me, high and majestic. Perhaps I was smiling. They were like big arms that lifted me up and then dropped me back down again, and for a moment I felt a mixture of fear and delight. Fear of drowning, and delight at being lifted toward the sky, just for a moment, just for a second. I felt myself being rocked.
I turned around and saw him, so impatient now that his face was almost contorted with pain.
I felt so much sorrow at that moment. I saw his wet trunks and I thought it was bad that he was feeling cold. I saw the pained expression on his face and felt so much tenderness; I chastised myself for being selfish, for thinking about my games.
“Dad, let’s go back to the shore.”
He practically ran out of the water, while I floundered impetuously, battling against the waves that seemed more and more intent on carrying me out to sea.
With my eyes narrowed slightly, I tried to get closer to him but I couldn’t. I still said nothing, because I didn’t want to see that expression on his face — I had to do it on my own.
By the time I reached the shore, he was already lying on his mat reading the paper.
Nineteen
Last night I had a beautiful, disturbing dream. I was in it, with Thomas and a little girl. A beautiful little girl with red hair, a round face, and a pair of red, fleshy lips. I was almost frightened at the sight of her; her beauty was disconcerting. She was our daughter.
But in the dream I was at once myself and Thomas and the girl. I could see with everyone’s eyes. I felt part of everyone.
We were dressed in nineteenth-century clothes. Not the sumptuous nineteenth century of the courts but the nineteenth century of the ordinary villagers.
The little girl takes us to the sea. She makes us immerse ourselves in the waves, but we don’t swim.
We stay suspended underwater for a long time. Around us there are octopus, jellyfish, lobsters…the little girl is lying suspended above the void, her arms along her hips and her long, long red hair still growing and flowing beneath the water. Her hair is beautiful and silky, and it grows and grows. Then, at some point, her hair turns white and bristly and starts to shrink back until it finally disappears. Now her head is bald. She’s a newborn baby, but she is still surprisingly beautiful.
I kiss her, I press her to my breast, and she shuts her eyes and lays her face on my neck.
An icy sensation woke me up. I touched my neck and it was extremely cold. That lasted only a few seconds, because I shut my eyes again and went on with my dream. The little girl has died in my arms and I have floated to the surface, passing through a cave. Thomas stays down there, looking at her and kissing her. But I have left only in a physical sense, because I’m still seeing through Thomas’s eyes. He picks up the little girl, rises to the surface, and when he reaches the cave, he lifts her into the air and cries, “She’s alive! She’s alive!”
You, dressed all in black, run and shout with joy. I go on looking at her beautiful face, and realize that she isn’t alive at all. She’s dead. But I pretend she’s alive. We all pretend she’s breathing.