Don't Move (16 page)

24

Elsa’s back from her trip. Her purse is on the table in the foyer, next to her sunglasses. There’s a scent of curry and some music I don’t recognize. It sounds like rain on windows and wind in trees. Your mother, it seems, has bought a new record. The table in the living room is laid for dinner. The usual piles of books and newspapers are gone from the slate and cherry surface, replaced by a bottle of wine, a blue candle, and the glasses with the long stems.

Your mother looks through the door of the kitchen. “Hi, darling,” she says.

“Hi.”

She smiles at me. She’s put on makeup, she’s brushed her hair, and she’s wearing a short-sleeved ivory-colored sweater and black pants. A cook’s apron is tied around her waist.

I pour the wine into the glasses and go into the kitchen. She’s in front of the stove, stirring a pot with a wooden spoon.

“How was your trip?”

“Boring. Cheers.” Our glasses touch.

“How come?”

“Everyone’s become so mediocre.” She arches an eyebrow and sips her wine. Then she stops stirring and takes a step toward me. “Kiss,” she says.

I bend to her lips; she holds me close. It’s as if her body is searching for a new place in my arms. Maybe it’s the exact opposite of what I think; maybe her trip was a real disappointment to her. I ask, “Have they fired you?”

“No, why? Do I seem like an unemployed person?”

I start cutting the bread. She’s behind me, sumptuous as always, filling the place with herself. But she seems more withdrawn; there’s an unusual reserve about her as she stands there, curved over her cooking pot, giving her lamb stew close attention. I must talk to her; I must tell her that I’m leaving. I’m not going to be the man of the house anymore.

We sit at the table. The food, too, seems more complicated and refined than usual.

“It’s too spicy, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s delicious.”

My mouth’s on fire, and I take a sip of wine. I want to eat in a hurry, lead her to the sofa, and tell her how things stand, but I haven’t expected to find her so defenseless. Now she seems positively mortified, just because she’s put too much spice in this ridiculous foreign concoction. She’s displaying a side of herself she generally keeps well hidden. Maybe she realizes she’s lost me. Too bad, she should have thought about it sooner. Now it’s too late; all these unexpected attentions embarrass and annoy me. French wine and a blue candle aren’t enough to turn back the clock. Or is there a surprise in store for me, something nestled under that ivory-colored cashmere sweater? Maybe it’s she who wants to leave me. She’s holding a glass against her cheek. The wine sways a little in the light, coloring her nose and part of one eye.

I pick up my napkin. There’s a postcard underneath it. It shows an image of old Lyons, a woman and a man in regional costume sitting in front of a blue door. “You didn’t mail it to me,” I say.

“I didn’t have time.”

I turn over the postcard and read it. Two words, nothing more. Two words written with a ballpoint pen.

I say under my breath, “What is this?”

Elsa’s eyes are the color of wine, and the wine sways in her glass, throwing its red reflections on her smile. “It’s the truth.”

I don’t say anything. I sigh, I sigh deeply, and I sit still, because if I get up, I’ll fall, I’ll stumble and fall backward, pushed over by that smile.

“Are you happy?”

“Of course.”

But I don’t know where I am or what I’m thinking. Her eyes remind me of a road at night, vanishing in the distance among trees, among branches. She says, “I’ll go and get the crème caramel.”

Two words written with a ballpoint pen on the back of a blue postcard:
I’m pregnant.
Now she’s rummaging around in the refrigerator, and here I am, sitting in the wind in front of this steady candle. It’s come up suddenly, the wind, and the dust it blows around blinds my eyes. I close them and let the storm buffet me. I can’t think about anything; it’s too soon. I swallow the crème caramel in tiny bites, then stick my finger in the plate, scoop up some brown sugar, and put it in my mouth. I say, “When did you find out?”

“My period was a little late, and I forgot my earplugs. So when I got to Lyons, I went to a drugstore to buy some more and picked up a pregnancy test, as well. Then I forgot about that, too, until this morning. I gave myself the test in the hotel room before I left. When the little ball came out, I sat and stared at it for I don’t know how long. The taxi was downstairs, waiting for me, and I couldn’t leave the room. I wanted to tell you right away. I tried calling you at the hospital, but you were already in the operating room. I’ve been walking with one hand on my stomach. I was afraid someone would run into me.”

Her eyes are shining. A tear runs down her cheek, next to the glass, and the candlelight dances on her excited face. This is the first news of you, Angela, the first whisper, and I hear it joylessly, with a burning throat.

“Put your arms around me.”

I embrace her, bury my face in her hair, and try to find peace.
What am I going to do with her? The wind’s carrying off
everything I thought I wanted. I’m a miserable wretch, ricochetingthrough life.

I drink some whiskey. The wind abates, allowing me to reach the sofa and sit down. Elsa curls up on the other end, puts a pillow under her back, and takes off her shoes. A moment ago, the record ended, but she started it over, and the watery music is back. She’s chosen it because she’s pregnant. She twirls her hair in her fingers and says something every now and then, but mostly I listen to the long pauses between her words. She doesn’t take her eyes off me. I look horrible—I haven’t even washed my hair—but she’s gaping at me like I’m some kind of miracle. I have impregnated her, I have demonstrated an ability to change the course of all her projects, and to her that must seem like a miracle. She’s weighing our future, considering the mother and father we’ll be. Behind those dreamy eyes, bowing down from the heaven of her fullness, she’s adjusting my position in the earthly life that she’s decided will be mine. And you’re already in the midst of us, Angela. If you’d been able to read my mind when I heard the news of your existence, would you have chosen me as your father? I don’t think so. I don’t think I deserved you. You were already there, a little bug in your mother’s belly, and I didn’t deign to give you a single kind thought. Don’t think I’ve forgotten that. You entered our house the same evening I planned to leave her, and you swallowed up my destiny. I didn’t even have a thought for you, my innocent little bug. Nothing for you, stuck in a powder keg with adults who weren’t certain about anything. They didn’t know who they were or what they wanted, and they didn’t know where they were going.

25

Ada comes out of the operating room, with two nurses running behind her. They open the instrument cabinet; I can hear the rattle of its glass door. I stand up like a robot. “What’s going on?”

Ada, very pale, is coming toward me. “We have to give her adrenaline. There’s a problem with her pulmonary ventilation, and her blood pressure’s going down.”

“How low is it?”

“It’s at forty.”

“She’s hemorrhaging.”

Ada’s face is a mute plea. I look through the round window into the operating room. I know what these moments of extremity are like, when silence falls, when people become shadows, moving together in waves. They work frantically, then step back from the operating table. They look at the monitors, waiting for a sign, waiting for a graph to start moving again. Trapped in that no-man’s-land, where life has stopped and death is still on the way, they stand aside, as if they can feel the chill of its passage. It’s the moment when hands become impotent, when helpless looks are exchanged, when you know you can’t pull it off, when that shroud of green cloths evokes the raw truth: Under it, there’s a person passing away from here, passing away. I hear the alarmed beeping of the monitors. Your blood pressure’s still going down. Alfredo shouts, “Quick! She’s in arrest!” His surgical mask has slipped down to his chin.

I rush over to you, to your heart. My hands, a father’s hands, pounce on your thorax like talons; I press down hard once, and then again and again.
Listen to the fury in my hands,
Angela. Tell me they’re still worth something. Help me, my brave
little girl, and excuse me if I leave a bruise on your breast.
There’s silence all around us. It’s as though we’re inside an aquarium: fish without gills, mute and gasping. There’s nothing but the sound of my hands thumping your chest and my groaning hope. Where are you? You’re floating somewhere above me. You’re looking down on me from a height, from beyond this group of masked shadows, and maybe you feel sorry for me. No, I won’t let you go. Don’t even think about it. With every blow I’m getting you back, piece by piece. Your feet sticking out of the bed, your back curved over your schoolbooks, you eating a sandwich, you singing, your teacup, your hand on the handle. I won’t let you go. I promised your mother. She’s on her way back. Before she boarded the plane, she called me again, sobbing into the telephone: “Please, Timo, save her. . . .” She doesn’t know that love is contraindicated for surgeons. She doesn’t know anything about my profession. It frightens her to think that I caress her with the same hands I use to carve people up. But I’m like a sanguinary watchmaker: I’ve got precise hands, and I’ve seen amazing things happen under them. I’ve felt stirrings that didn’t originate in the flesh. I’ve watched lives struggling to hold on with unexpected tenacity, as if they were receiving some assistance that came neither from me nor from my battery of machines, lives that asked and kept asking and finally received, right before my incredulous eyes. Now you’re face-to-face with that mystery, which, they say, is Light.
Please, Angela, ask God to leave you
here on the benighted earth, in the little shadows where your
mother and I live.

I hear Ada’s voice: “It’s coming back. . . . It’s back.”

What’s come back is your heartbeat, showing up at last on that miserable fucking monitor.

And now the intracardiac needle is sticking straight up in your chest, and Ada’s pressing down the plunger. My hands are trembling; they can’t make themselves stop. I’m drenched with sweat. I breathe deeply, gulping in air, while the others around me start breathing again, too.

“Inject dopamine.”

“She’s stabilizing.”

Welcome back, sweetheart, you’re in the world again.

Alfredo looks at me, tries to smile, and says softly, “She was joking. She played a little joke on us.”

“It was her spleen; that’s what was bleeding. . . .”

I didn’t look at the hole in your head. I saw a pale flap of something that must have been your skin, but I didn’t look inside. Alfredo quickly goes back to work. I don’t stay. I’m sweaty and trembling; I sense a great darkness; I’m about to faint.

26

I looked into the patients’ rooms as I went down the corridor, searching for an empty bed. Yes, I would have liked to slip into one of those white slots and get comfortable and wait for someone to come and take care of me. I would have liked to have a thermometer in my armpit, a baked apple, a pair of pajamas to detach me from the world.

I wanted to tell Italia the truth, but instead I held her tight and closed my eyes. She already had a face like a pregnant cat, and frequent spells of nausea distorted her features; I couldn’t frighten her. We made love, and only afterward did I realize that I loved her then as if I had already lost her. I didn’t want to pull away from her; I stayed inside of her until I got small, until we both got cold. Those days, her house was always chilly. She’d put an old plaid blanket over the chenille bedspread, but that wasn’t enough to keep us warm. The dog curled himself up at the foot of the bed, close to our feet. Crushed under the weight of my body, she asked, “Why do you love me?”

“Because you’re you.”

She took one of my hands and laid it on her belly. I was lost in a maze of tragic thoughts, and my hand was deadweight. Italia was too focused on me not to notice. She said, “What’s wrong?”

“I’ve got a slight fever.”

She put effervescent aspirins in water and brought me the fizzing glass.

And maybe a presentiment crossed her mind, but she dismissed the thought at once. Pregnancy endowed her with a timid trustfulness. For the first time, she turned her eyes away from the present and dared to gaze beyond it. I was the reason why she contemplated a benevolent future, a happy horizon she was ashamed of desiring.

Your mother’s in the hospital. She got here about eleven o’clock, and we’re having a bite in the snack bar. Manlio and some of my other medical colleagues are standing around her. They know she’s pregnant, and they shower her with compliments, which she accepts with a series of smiles that dimple her cheeks and fill her face with light. She’s my wife, here for her first ultrasound. Tall and elegant in her anthracite-gray suit, she walks up the stairs by my side. Manlio follows us, joking, en-vying me. In those sad, monochrome surroundings, among patients walking around in their pajamas, Elsa is so beautiful that she could be an actress on a charity visit. Pallid and exhausted—so like the place where I spend most of my existence—I hide behind her, like a boy clinging to his mother.

She lifts her undershirt, lowers her skirt, and bares her stomach. Manlio spreads the gel on her. “Is it cold?”

“A little.”

She laughs. Maybe she’s more nervous than she feels like admitting as ultrasound waves scan her abdomen. I stand aside and wait. Manlio moves the probe below her navel, looking for the region of the uterus where the embryo is attached. I don’t know what it is I’m thinking, Angela—I don’t remember now—but maybe I’m hoping that nothing’s there. Your mother’s face is stiff as she stretches to study the monitor, fearful that her dream won’t make itself visible. And then you appear, Angela, a tiny sea horse with a white spot that comes and goes. It’s your heart.

That’s how I saw you for the first time. When the monitor was turned off, she relaxed her neck muscles and laid her head back, breathing hard. I kept staring at that black screen, but you were gone. I thought about Italia. She, too, had a tiny sea horse in her belly. But it wouldn’t be appearing on any monitor screen; it was destined to remain in the dark.

That evening, I walked over to the place where they had the rice balls I liked, the
arancini.
As I ate, I looked at the television set mounted on the wall. I couldn’t hear the audio, which was drowned out by the people in the bar, solitary people who ate their dinners standing up, with their feet in sawdust and greasy paper napkins in their hands. I went back out onto the street, feeling scatterbrained and powerless as I collided with the dark. The shops were empty, and the city was settling down for a rest. I went into a telephone booth, but the receiver had been torn off its cable, which was hanging down dead. I said to myself, I’ll call from the next telephone booth. But I didn’t stop again; I went straight home.

Elsa and Raffaella are chatting on the sofa. I hear their voices while I’m putting up my bag. Raffaella gets up and drowns me in her flesh; I respond with my usual reticence. She’s barefoot, and out of the corner of my eye, I see her shoes on the rug. “I’m so happy,” she says. “At last I can be somebody’s aunt!” Carried away, vibrating with joy, she wraps me in another ardent embrace. Her shoes lie there, worn and stretched by her feet.

I say, “Good night.”

“You’re going to bed already?”

“I have to get up very early tomorrow morning.”

Elsa leans over the back of the sofa, presenting a lukewarm cheek, to which I give a brief peck. Raffaella looks at me with her round, infantile eyes. “Do you mind if we sit and talk a little while longer?”

Talk all you want, Raffaella. Breathe on your heart until it
comes alive. We’re all out for a ride together, passengers in a wagon
without wheels.

The next day, I’m on an airplane, about to leave for a conference. This will be a quick trip: there and back in the same day. Manlio’s by my side, taking up more than his share of the armrest between us. I can smell his aftershave lotion. I’m in the window seat, looking at the white wing against the gray background of the runway. We’re still on the ground. Down here, it’s not much of a day—the air is thick and dirty—but maybe we’ll get above the clouds and into the sunlight. The flight attendant is moving down the aisle, pushing a cart with newspapers and magazines. Manlio looks at her behind. After we take off, I’ll have a coffee, a cup of what Manlio calls “septic coffee.”
I have to get off. This plane is going to crash. I have to
get off. I don’t want to croak next to Manlio with a cup of septic
coffee in my hand.
I feel bad. I’m perspiring, my heart is hurting my chest, and I can’t feel my arms.
No, I’m going to die of
a heart attack, standing on my feet inside that little lavatory, that
box of quivering metal, where some plastic wrappers from the refreshertowels are afloat in the washbasin.
I rise from my seat.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m getting off.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

They’ve already closed the cabin doors, and the airplane is moving. The flight assistant stops me. “Excuse me, sir. Where are you going?”

“I’m sick; I have to get off.”

“I’ll get you a doctor.”

“I am a doctor. I’m sick. Let me get off.”

I must look pretty impressive, because the young woman starts to back up. She’s in her uniform, of course, and her blond hair is pulled back. She has an innocuous little nose. I follow her into the cockpit. Two men in short-sleeved white shirts turn around and look at me. I say, “I’m a doctor. I’m having a heart attack. Please open the cabin door.”

The mobile staircase moves back into place. The door opens. Air, finally, air; I run down the steps. Manlio follows me. The attendant calls to him, “Sir, are you getting off, too?”

The wind’s about to blow Manlio’s jacket off. He raises an arm and shouts, “He’s my colleague!”

So here we are again, back on the asphalt. An airport worker picks us up in his tiny automobile and drives us to the exit. I don’t speak. My arms are crossed; my lips are pressed together. My heart has returned to its proper place. Manlio puts on his sunglasses, even though there’s no sun. We get out of the airport car. Manlio says, “May I ask what came over you?”

I force myself to smile. “I saved your life.”

“You mean the plane’s going to crash?”

“Not now it won’t. You can’t get off of a plane that’s going to crash.”

“Were you scared shitless?”

“Yes.”

“Me, too.”

We laugh and go to the bar and drink some real coffee, and we miss the conference. “With all those jerkoffs,” says Manlio. He likes to deviate from the program. And it’s while we’re standing there that I tell him everything. I keep my head down, bent over my empty espresso cup, pushing the sugary black dregs around with my spoon, and my cheeks sag as I give him the whole story. There at the airport bar, among people eating their sandwiches with one eye on their luggage, I spill all the beans, confessing my feelings and my desires like an old, love-struck adolescent. And it doesn’t matter that Manlio is the last person I should tell about this. I need to tell someone about it, and here he is at my side, looking at me with his boar’s eyes. We’re friends—the wrong friends, as we both know—but we share this intimate moment, leaning together on the metal counter long after we’ve drunk our coffee.

“But who is this woman?”

“You’ve seen her.”

“I’ve seen her?”

“It was during that oncologists’ convention. One evening, she was sitting at a table near us. . . .”

He shakes his head. “I don’t remember her.”

People pass by. Even though there’s no smoking, Manlio lights a cigarette. I look straight ahead and make my declaration to him, to myself, and to the flood of unknown people rushing around us: “I’m in love.”

Manlio crushes out his cigarette with the toe of his moccasin. “Shall we take the next plane?”