Don't Move (14 page)

20

Your mother has returned to our apartment in town, and my solitary bivouac has vanished without a trace. The table I used to rest my feet on while I read has returned to its place in the center of the carpet, surrounded by sofas and far from my reading chair. And now the inlaid wooden surface of that same little table bears a festive load— glasses with long pink stems, a dish of crudités, a bowl of prunes wrapped in bacon—because Elsa has invited some friends to dinner. I’ve come home late from the hospital, where I performed an operation that went on forever. Several members of the operating room staff were absent because of the strikes, which started up again in September, and I was slowed down by many errors. When I tossed my keys into the ebony bowl in the foyer, I heard the voices coming from the living room. I slipped into the small bathroom in the hall and splashed water on my face before I made my entrance. Hello, hello, hello. Shoulder pats, kisses. Clouds of perfume, shocks of hair, fumes of cigarettes and wine.

I’m leaning on some bookshelves, and Manlio’s in front of me. He’s speaking on a range of subjects: boats; Martine, who’s in the detox center again; an abdominal suture that came out smooth as a baby’s behind and then got infected and hypergranulated and now has to be done over. Manlio has a cigar in his hand, and that hand’s too close to my face.

He says, “And how are you doing?”

“Manlio, that cigar . . .”

“Oh, right. Sorry.” He moves his arm a little to one side.

“I have to talk to you.”

He looks at me and expels a large puff of malodorous smoke. “You look like a zombie. What have you done?”

“We’re serving the pasta.”

I don’t take part in any of the conversation at the table. I eat, stare at my plate, wield my fork, drink a glass of wine, then reach for the tureen and take a second helping. I’m boorishly hungry. The table is a clamor of sounds and voices. I spy on the tablecloth a fallen
rigatone,
which I pick up with my fingers. Your mother looks at me. She’s wearing a green watered-silk top with transparent openwork stripes, and a small emerald adorns each of her ears. Her hair is pulled back, except for one loose lock falling across her forehead; she’s very beautiful. I think about that barefoot girl in the shop window, and Italia remarking that green’s in fashion this year. I get up from the table.

“You don’t want dessert?”

“Excuse me, I have to make a phone call.”

I go to the bedroom and dial the number, which rings away. I lie down on the bed. Elsa comes into the room and asks, “Who are you talking to?”

“No one. The line’s busy.”

She goes into our bathroom and pees. I can see her reflection in the armoire mirror, her skirt hiked up over her behind. She says “A patient?”

“Right.”

She pulls the chain, turns out the light, and leaves the bathroom. “A ‘noteworthy’ cancer?” she asks, smiling. It’s not easy to live with a man who has such a sad profession. Sometimes she uses my jargon, but only to make fun of it.

I smile in response.

“At least take your shoes off the bed,” she says as she leaves the room.

“Hello?”

“Where were you?”

“Here.”

“I called and called.”

“Maybe I couldn’t hear you.” She’s breathing hard, surrounded by a great roaring.

“What is that?”

“The vacuum cleaner. Wait—I’ll turn it off.”

She goes away, the roaring stops, and she comes back.

“What are you doing, cleaning house at this hour?”

“It’s therapy.”

“I wanted to send you a kiss.”

Manlio’s outside with me—I’ve dragged him onto the terrace. I tell him, “I operated on this patient’s breast two years ago. Now she’s pregnant, but it’s too risky. She needs to terminate the pregnancy.”

“She’s in the first trimester?”

“Yes.”

“So why doesn’t she go to the hospital?”

Down in the street, one of the municipal garbage trucks is lifting a rubbish container. Manlio turns up his collar and starts whistling softly. Maybe he understands.

The party ends on the sofas; eventually, their occupants depart, and all that’s left are the deep imprints left by their bodies, the crushed sofa pillows, the glasses everywhere, and the overflowing ashtrays. Elsa already has her shoes off. “Good party,” she says.

“Yes.”

I rise and pick up an ashtray.

“Don’t touch anything. Gianna will see to it tomorrow.”

“I just want to toss the cigarette butts so they don’t stink up the room.”

She goes into the bedroom, removes her makeup, and puts on her nightshirt. I stay in the living room for a while, looking at television in the midst of that cemetery of dirty glasses. Eventually, I join her; I lie on the edge of the bed, make a few adjustments, and settle down, stretched out on one side. Your mother throws a leg across me, and then her warm mouth grazes my ear. I freeze; I can’t do it, not tonight, I really can’t. She searches for my mouth and finds it, but I don’t open my lips. With a sigh, she falls back on the sheet, facedown. “You know,” she says, “maybe we could try making love in a different way.”

I turn toward her. She’s staring at the ceiling, a strange look on her face. She goes on: “We could try looking into each other’s eyes.” There’s an undertone of spite in her voice that hums proudly around every word.

“Are you drunk?” I ask.

“A little.”

It seems to me that her eyes are shining and her chin is trembling. I say, “We look at each other; you know we do. You’re so beautiful, why wouldn’t I want to look at you?”

I lie on my back and adjust the pillow, but I’m not sleepy. I think, Let the night of conjugal attrition begin; let us dance the retaliation waltz. But what I get is a kick in the stomach, followed at once by another and another after that. Then your mother is slapping me in the face with both hands. I try to ward her off, but her attack has caught me completely unprepared.

“You! You! Who do you think you are? Who the hell do you think you are?”

Her face is contorted; her voice is hoarse. I’ve never seen her like this. I let her hit me. I pity myself and her, too, as she gropes for sufficiently insulting words. “You’re . . . you’re . . . you’re a shit! A selfish shit!”

I manage to capture one of her hands and then the other. I embrace her. She weeps. I stroke her head while she pants between sobs.
You’re right, Elsa, I’m a selfish shit. I’m ruining
everyone’s life, all the people who are close to me, but believe me,
I have no idea what I want. I’m simply marking time. I desire a
woman, but it may be that I’m ashamed of her, I’m ashamed of
desiring her. I’m afraid of losing you, but it may be that I’m doingmy best to make you leave me. Yes, I’d like to see you pack a
bag and disappear into the heart of the night. I’d run to Italia,
and maybe then I’d discover that I miss you. But no, you’re not
going anywhere. You’re staying here, clinging to me, to our bed.
You won’t go away in the night, you won’t do it, you won’t take
the chance, because it could be that I wouldn’t miss you, and
you’re a prudent woman.

21

The windshield wipers are turned off. There’s a film of dirt on the windshield, a blurry curtain that separates us from the world. The car smells like a car, with its floor mats and its leather seats. (These seem stiffer than usual this morning; they creak every time we move.) There’s also a trace of fragrance emanating from the old tree-shaped, sun-faded air freshener, a little of my own smell, my aftershave lotion, and the smell of my raincoat, which hung on a coatrack all summer long but is with me once again, rolled up on the backseat like an old cat. And above all, there’s Italia’s smell: her ears, her hair, the clothes she’s wearing. Today, she’s got on a flowered skirt with a broad black elastic waistband and a stiff cotton cardigan. There’s a cross on her chest, a silver-plated cross hanging from the tiny links of a thin, thin chain. While she stares through the windshield at the hazy world, which seems so far away, she puts the cross in her mouth. Her hair bristles with enameled metal hairpins, many of which are cracked and chipped. She’s a little clodhopper who buys her clothes in market stalls, or in those doorless shops with the benumbed, gum-chewing salesgirls. It’s the first Saturday in October, and I’m taking her to have an abortion.

She’s come into town on the bus. When she saw me waiting at the stop, she smiled. I don’t know if she’s suffering. We haven’t talked about that. Maybe she’s already had several abortions; I’ve never asked her. She seems calm. We didn’t kiss when she got into the car. We don’t take such risks in the center of town. She’s a prudent traveler, a creature in transit, far from its familiar pen. This morning, she seems austere and stiff, like the cardigan she’s wearing. She sucks her silver cross, and I have the sense that she’s missing something, something she’s forgotten back in her little lair. She’s so reserved that I feel somewhat lonely. Perhaps it would be easier for me if she were weepy and depressed, as I expected her to be. Instead, she seems strong this morning, and her eyes are lively and combative. Maybe she’s less delicate than I thought, or maybe she’s just trying to keep up her courage. I ask her, “Do you want some breakfast?”

“No.”

The private clinic where Manlio works is a villa built in the beginning of the century, situated on a piece of woodland and surrounded by trees. We turn into the drive, which climbs amid the dark trunks, and reach an open area where other cars are parked. Italia takes in the building with its pale red terra-cotta facade. She says, “It looks like a hotel.”

I’ve explained everything to her; she knows what she has to do. She’ll go to the reception counter, where they’re expecting her, and state her name. They’ll admit her to the clinic and show her to her reserved room. Naturally, I can’t stay with her—it’s already a mistake to have accompanied her this far. I’ll call her in the afternoon. As we were driving up and she was distracted by the view, I stared at her belly. For a moment, I thought I could see something under her clothes, some swelling. I don’t know what I was looking for—something I wouldn’t see again?—and then one of my wheels slammed into a huge pothole. I quickly veered and accelerated, but I’ve remembered that jolt to this day. Time doesn’t always move in a straight line; sometimes it operates differently, and a whole life can appear in a flash. In that fraction of a second, when I was trying to steer my car out of that depression in the road, I believe I saw the torment awaiting me, and I saw you, too, Angela; I saw your hematoma on the light scanner. I made a leap into the circular room of time, the leap one makes when the unreal appears and becomes permissible. The room has a multitude of doors, all there in the circle, to be entered in no particular order.

I stop the car in the open area in front of the clinic. Italia looks at the polished glass of the sliding doors; I take her hand and kiss it. “Don’t be worried,” I say. “It’s nothing; it’ll be over before you know it.”

“I’m going,” she says, gets out of the car, and walks to the entrance. I start to back and fill so I can get out of there, and I see her in the rearview mirror. She’s walking even more unsteadily than usual, maybe because of the gravel. However, I know she won’t fall; she’s used to those excessively high heels, to that purse with the excessively long strap knocking against the insides of her legs. And yet, she
does
fall. She takes one more step and goes down like a sack. She hauls in her purse, but she doesn’t get up; she stays huddled up on the ground. And she doesn’t turn around, because she’s sure I’m already gone.
Don’t move,
I say, without knowing what I’m saying. Maybe she knows I’m there.
Don’t move.
Because now it seems to me that what she was missing has returned to her. It’s covering her back like ragged wings.

I open the car door and sprint across the gravel. “What’s the matter?”

“Breakfast. Maybe I ought to have breakfast.”

I help her to her feet, and as I embrace her, I look up over her head. On the second floor, standing at a big dark window, a man in a white coat is watching us.

So what? What if this is the beginning of the end, if this is
the way we enter the darkness? Those eyes of hers are on me; those
sticky hands are holding me back. No one has ever loved me like
this, no one. I won’t carry you in there; I won’t let any curette
scrape you clean. I want you, and now I’m strong. I’ll find a way;
I won’t ever offend you again.

“Think of yourself,” she whispers. “I mean it. Think of yourself.”

I’ve already decided. I love you. And if you want my head,
give me a hatchet, and I’ll give you the head of a man who loves
you.

“Let’s get out of here,” I say.

And I was saying that to our child, Angela. Without a sound, a little red leaf fell on my windshield and slid under the wiper. It was a finely veined leaf, perhaps the first of the season, a gift to us.

I got back behind the wheel and started driving again, farther and farther away from the clinic. We headed north and stopped in one of the first little towns beyond the city limits, where the landscape changes and gets wilder. It was still an urban setting, but we could smell the woods, and we could feel the breath coming down from the flat-topped mountains that loomed up on the horizon like sleeping buffalo.

We went to a film in one of those movie houses in the provinces that open only on Saturday and Sunday. It was the first showing, and the place was nearly empty. We sat on wooden chairs in the middle of the theater, which didn’t seem to be heated. Italia laid her head on my shoulder.

“Are you tired?” I asked.

“A little.”

“Go to sleep.”

She stayed like that, dozing on my shoulder in the darkness. The light from the screen barely illuminated her cheek. The film was a comedy, a little trivial, perhaps, but very enjoyable. In fact, I was enjoying everything. Perhaps for the first time, we were a couple. A couple on a holiday trip, taking in a movie, stopping in a bar for a sandwich, and then heading out again. Yes, I would have liked to take a trip with Italia, to sleep in hotels, make love, and be on our way. Perhaps never to return. We could have gone abroad. I had some friends in Mogadishu. One of them was a cardiologist who worked in a psychiatric hospital. He had a little house on the ocean, and there, in the evenings, he smoked marijuana with his lady companion, a woman with legs as thin as arms. Yes, a new life. A poor hospital, and little dark-skinned children with no shoes on their feet and eyes as shiny as beetles. To go where I’d be needed, perform operations in tents, care for the poor and the wretched.

“Would you like to take a trip somewhere?”

“Yes.”

“And where would you like to go?”

“Wherever you want.”