Troubling Love (11 page)

I began to feel my heart pounding. I could hardly bear his dialect or the hostility he gave off. In addition I could no longer see the expression on his face, which kept me from gauging to what extent he was displaying an elementary model of virility, and to what extent, on the other hand, the model might materialize into real intentions of violence. I saw only the dark silhouette that was unknotting the tie.

“They are my things,” I objected, pronouncing the words carefully. “My mother gave them to me for my birthday.”

“They are things that my father took from the shop. So you have to give them back to me,” he answered, with a slight childish dip in his voice.

I felt sure he wasn’t lying. I imagined Caserta choosing those garments for me: colors, size, styles. I felt a shiver of disgust.

“I’ll just take the dress and leave you all the rest,” I said. So I reached my hand out toward the bed to grab the dress and slip into the bathroom, but the gesture sliced the air too quickly and hit the wall behind it, with the Madonna of Pompeii and the dry olive branch. I had to move more slowly. I brought my arm under control so that the whole room wouldn’t become animated, with every object shifting, gripped by anxiety. I hated it when frenzy took charge. 

Polledro noticed my hesitation and grabbed hold of my wrist. I didn’t react, in order to keep him from trying to crush any hint of resistance by pulling me toward him. I knew I could keep at bay the impression of looming violence only if the speed of our movements seemed chosen by me.

He kissed me without embracing me, but keeping a strong grip on my wrist. First he pressed his lips against mine and then tried to open them with his tongue. He did it in such a way that I was reassured: yes, he was merely behaving as he thought a man should behave in those circumstances, but without real aggression, and perhaps without conviction. He had probably lowered the blind in order to take advantage of the darkness and surreptitiously change his appearance, relax the muscles of his face.

I half opened my lips. Forty years earlier I had imagined with fascinated horror that the little Antonio had the same tongue as Caserta, but I had never had proof of it. Antonio as a child had not been interested in kissing: he preferred to explore the entrance to my vagina with his dirty fingers and at the same time pull my hand toward his short pants. Then in time I had discovered that Caserta’s tongue was a fantasy. None of the kisses I had had in my life seemed like the ones I had imagined him giving Amalia. And Antonio as an adult was confirming that he was not the equal of those fantasies. He didn’t kiss me with much conviction. As soon as he realized that I had agreed to open my mouth, he pushed his tongue too impetuously between my teeth, and immediately, continuing to hold onto my wrist, pulled my hand over his pants. I felt that I shouldn’t have opened my lips.

“Why in the dark?” I asked him in a low voice, with my mouth against his. I wanted to hear him speak, to be definitively sure that he wouldn’t try to hurt me. But he didn’t answer. His breath was short, he kissed my cheek, he licked my neck. Meanwhile he didn’t stop pressing my hand, palm spread, against the fabric of his pants. He was insistent, so that I would understand that I shouldn’t be inert. I held his sex. Only then did he let go of my wrist and embrace me. He murmured something I didn’t understand and leaned over to find my nipples, pushing my chest back, tasting with his mouth the satin fabric and wetting the robe with saliva.

I knew then that nothing new would happen. It was the start of a well-known rite that I had experienced often as a young woman, hoping that if I changed men frequently my body would eventually come up with the appropriate response. Instead it was always the same, identical to what I was now expressing. Polledro had opened the robe to suck my breasts and I began to feel a slight pleasure, not localized, as if warm water were running over my numbed body. Meanwhile, with one hand, careful not to disturb my hand that was holding his member under the fabric, he was caressing my sex too ardently, excited by the discovery that I wasn’t wearing underpants. Still I felt nothing but that diffuse pleasure, enjoyable and yet not urgent.

For a long time I had been sure that I would never cross that threshold. I had only to wait for him to ejaculate. On the other hand, as always, I felt no impulse to help him, in fact I barely moved. I knew intuitively that he expected me to undo his pants, take out his penis, not confine myself to holding it. I felt that he was agitating his pelvis in an attempt to transmit hesitant instructions. I was unable to respond. I was afraid that my already slow breathing would stop completely. And I was paralyzed by a growing embarrassment, because of the copious liquids spilling out of me.

Even when as a girl I had tried to masturbate this had happened. The pleasure spread warmly, without any crescendo, and immediately my skin began to get wet. However much I caressed myself, the only result was that the liquids of my body overflowed: my mouth, instead of getting dry, filled with a cold saliva; sweat ran down my forehead, my nose, my cheeks; my armpits became puddles; not an inch of skin remained dry; my sex got so wet that the fingers slipped over it without purchase, and I could no longer tell if I was really touching myself or only imagined that I was. The tension of my body wouldn’t increase: I was left worn out and unsatisfied.

Of all this Polledro for the moment seemed unaware. He pushed me toward the bed, and, in order to keep us from falling together with the velocity caused by his weight, I sat down cautiously and then submissively stretched out. I saw his shadow hesitating, for a few seconds indecisive. Then he took off his shoes, his trousers, his underpants. He got on the bed and sat astride me, on his knees, resting lightly on my stomach, without putting his weight on me.

“So?” he murmured.

“Come on,” I said, but didn’t move. He groaned, his chest erect: he was hoping that finally his sex, large and thick in the shadowy light, would mingle its desires with those he attributed to mine. Since nothing happened, after a deep breath he reached out one hand and began rubbing me between the legs again. He must have thought that like that he would finally induce me to react: out of passion, out of maternal pity, the modality of the reaction didn’t seem important to him; he was only looking for the stimulus that would excite me. But my compliance without participation began to disorient him. I thought, as always in those circumstances, that I should pretend a yearning and uncontrolled passion or push him away. But I didn’t dare to do either one or the other: I was afraid I would throw up, because the result would be earthquake-like waves. I had only to wait. Besides, I could no longer feel his fingers: maybe he had withdrawn in disgust, maybe he was still touching me but I had lost every sensibility.

Disappointed, Polledro took my hands and brought them around his sex. At that point I realized that he would never enter me unless he was sure I wanted him to. I also noticed that his erection was beginning to recede, like a defective neon light. He realized it, too, and shifted forward so that his stomach came close to my mouth. I felt for him a vague sympathy, as if he really were the child Antonio I had known; and I wanted to tell him that but my voice wouldn’t come out: he was rubbing slowly against my lips and I was afraid that any slight, even imperceptible movement of my mouth would be so uncontrollable that it would lacerate his sex.

“Why did you come to the shop?” he asked, annoyed, sliding back along my body, which was dripping with sweat. “I didn’t come looking for you.”

“I didn’t even know who you were,” I said.

“And all that nonsense? The dress, the underpants . . . what did you want?”

“I didn’t come to see you,” I said, but without aggression. “I just wanted to see your father. I wanted to know what had happened to my mother before she drowned.”

I realized that he wasn’t convinced and was trying to caress me again. I shook my head to let him understand: enough. He squatted over me for an instant. He pulled back abruptly with a gesture of repulsion as he felt me soaking wet.

“You’re not well,” he said uncertainly.

“I’m fine. But even if I were sick, it would be too late to cure me.”

Polledro turned over beside me in resignation. I saw in the half light that he was drying his fingers, his face, his legs with the sheet; then he turned on the lamp on the night table.

“You look like a ghost,” he said, gazing at me, without irony, and, with an edge of the shirt that he was still wearing, began to dry my face.

“It’s not your fault,” I reassured him and asked him to turn out the light again. I didn’t want to be seen and didn’t want to see him. Thus, lost and desolate, he too closely resembled Caserta as I had imagined him or had actually seen him forty years earlier. The impression was so intense that I even thought of telling him right then, in the dark, what I saw crowding around his face, which was so different from the puffy and thuggish face he had showed me all morning. Speaking, I wished to eliminate both me and him, in that bed, different from the children of long ago. We had in common only the violence we had witnessed.

When my father found out that Amalia and Caserta were seeing each other secretly in the cellar—I thought of telling him slowly, gently—he wasted no time. First of all he chased Amalia along the corridor, down the stairs, through the street. I smelled on him the odor of oil paints, when he went by, and it seemed to me that he himself was brightly painted.

My mother fled under the railway bridge, slipped in a puddle, was caught, and punched, slapped, kicked in the side. Once he had punished her sufficiently, he brought her home bleeding. As soon as she tried to speak, he struck her again. I looked at her for a long time, bruised and dirty, and she looked at me for a long time, while my father explained the situation to Uncle Filippo. Amalia had a look of wonder: she stared at me and didn’t understand. Then, irritated, I went off to spy on the other two.

My father and Uncle Filippo had gone into the courtyard together and I could see them from the window: they were tin soldiers making serious decisions. Or officers to cut out and paste in an album, one beside the other so that they could speak privately. My father wore boots and had put on a bush jacket. Uncle Filippo was wearing an olive-green uniform, or maybe white, or black. Not only that: he had a gun.

Or he stayed in his regular clothes, even though in the shadowy light of room 208 a voice was still saying: “He’ll kill him, he took the gun.” Maybe it was those sounds which made me see my father in his boots, Uncle Filippo in uniform, with both arms hanging beside his chest and the gun in his right hand. Together they chased the young Caserta, in his camelhair coat, up the stairs to his house. Behind them, at a distance, so that she wouldn’t be beaten again, or because she was worn out and couldn’t run, there was Amalia in her blue suit and the hat with the feathers, who was saying in a low voice, more and more bewildered: “Don’t kill him, he hasn’t done anything.”

Caserta lived on the top floor but first they caught him on the third. The three men had stopped there, as if for a secret meeting. In fact they had produced in unison a tumult of insults in dialect, a long list of words ending in consonants, as if the final vowel had been thrown into an abyss and the rest of the word were whining mutely in displeasure.

When the list ended, Caserta had been pushed down the stairs and had rolled to the first floor. At the bottom of the stairs he got up and ran up again: who could say whether to boldly confront the avengers or try to reach his house and his family on the fifth floor. The fact is that he got past them and—with one hand running lightly over the banister and then, when his body curved, grasping it, the legs continuously taking the steps three by three—whirled up the stairway to the door of his house, spurred by kicks that missed him and spit that sometimes struck him like a meteor.

My father got to him first and threw him to the floor. He pulled his head up by the hair and smashed it against the banister. The thuds were protracted into an interminable echo. Finally he left him unconscious, in the blood on the floor, on the advice of his brother-in-law, who may have had a gun but was wiser. Filippo took my father by one arm and dragged him away calmly: he did it because otherwise my father would have left Caserta dead on the floor. Caserta’s wife, too, was pulling my father away: she was holding on to his other arm. Of Amalia there remained only her voice, which said: “Don’t kill him, he hasn’t done anything.” Antonio, who had been my playmate, was crying but with his head down, suspended in the stairwell as if he were flying.

I heard Polledro breathing beside me in silence and felt compassion for the child he had been. “I’m going,” I said.

I got up and put on the blue dress quickly to avoid his gaze on my shadow. I felt that the dress fit me perfectly. Then I looked in the plastic bag for a pair of white briefs and put them on, sliding them under the dress. I turned on the light. Polledro had an absent expression. I saw him and no longer could think that he had been Antonio, who resembled Caserta. His heavy body was lying on the bed, naked from the waist down. It was that of a stranger, without obvious connection to my past life or to the present, apart from the wet imprint I had left on his side. But at the same time I was grateful for the small dose of humiliation and pain he had inflicted on me. I went around the bed, sat on the edge beside him, and masturbated him. He let me do it, with his eyes closed. He ejaculated without a moan, as if he were feeling no pleasure.

The sea had become a violet paste. The noise of the storm and the noise of the city made a furious commotion. I crossed the street, avoiding cars and puddles. More or less unharmed, I stopped to look at the façades of the great hotels lined up beside the fierce flow of vehicles. Every opening in those structures was spitefully shut against the din of the traffic and the sea.

I took the bus to Piazza Plebiscito. After a pilgrimage through damaged phone booths and bars with broken equipment, I finally found a telephone and dialed Uncle Filippo’s number. There was no answer. I set off on Via Toledo as the shops were pulling up their shutters, the swarm of pedestrians already dense. People stood in little groups at the entrances to the alleys, steep and black under strips of dark sky. Near Piazza Dante I bought some chocolate, just to breathe the sweet air of the shop. In fact I had no wish for anything: I was so distracted that I forgot to put the chocolate in my mouth and it melted in my fingers. I paid little attention to the insistent looks of men.