Don't Move (13 page)

17

And you, Angela, have you ever made love? I remember the day you became a woman, three years ago. You were in school, in English class; the teacher took you to the principal’s office. You called your mother at the newspaper, and she picked you up and drove you home. When she joked with you in the car, you smiled weakly, like a sick person. You were confused and a little angry. You’d been waiting for that moment, but now growing up didn’t seem so great. You were always a tough, independent child, accustomed to handling things on your own. Now you were twelve, sprouting up like a mushroom, but you still had a child’s body—your girlfriends were way ahead of you—and your thoughts and your games were those of a child. But in spite of all that, something had moved inside of you. Your first egg had matured and fallen away, and the end of your childhood was sealed with your blood.

Your mother met me at the door and told me what had happened. There was a light in her face. She wasn’t the same person who’d left the house that morning; now she had the face of a midwife. You women are so changeable, so ready to grab hold of life, to capture all the butterflies. We males are like earthworms, lined up at the foot of your walls. I smiled, dawdling as I took off my overcoat. You were lying on your bed. With those big black eyes of yours and that long face, you looked like a skinny cat.

I walked over to you, leaned down, and said your name: “Angela . . .”

You barely smiled, crinkling your pale skin a little. “Hi, Daddy.”

I had no idea what I wanted to tell you, and nothing came out. At that moment, you and your mother were alone together, and I was an awkward guest, the kind that knocks over glasses. You were lying with your hands on your stomach; your legs were bent, unmoving. You were my little asparagus, my favorite perfume. How many times had I pushed you on a swing? How many times had you swung away and then back into my hands? And yet I didn’t try to hold that moment, I let it go—maybe I didn’t even feel like pushing you; maybe I wanted to read the paper. I brushed your forehead with my fingers. “Good girl,” I said. “Good girl.”

Later, in my study, bent under the Art Nouveau fixture that sheds a warm light on my desk and my bald head, I’m still thinking about you, Angela. I’ve beaten a retreat to my lair, leaving the rest of the house to you two women, along with the white cloths, the pads, the virgin blood. Your mother has brewed some tea and carried it into your room on the tray she bought in London, the one with the cats. You’ll sit on the rug with your legs crossed like two young girls and dunk
biscotti
into your tea. Today’s a special day. We’ll stay home, where it’s nice and warm. And we won’t have dinner. Later, I’ll go to the kitchen and eat a little cheese, by myself. I think about the day that’s coming, when you’ll make love for the first time. A man will approach you with his hands, with his patter. He’ll approach my long, lean girl, whose pants are always too short for her, and he won’t want to trade picture cards or claim his turn on the swing; he’ll want to stick his dick in you. I squash my eyes with my hands, violently, because the image that rises up before my sight is too strong. I’m your father; for me, your sex is that sandwich of hairless flesh that gets filled up with sand on the beach. But I’m a man, too, and once I was a livid, barbarous man who raped a woman, a girl grown old before her time. I did it because I loved her right away and I didn’t want to love her; I did it to kill her and I wanted to save her. While I knead my eyes to drive away that image of myself, I see a person, a male with a lustful back, approaching you. And now I snatch him by the scruff of the neck and I tell him,
Be careful. That’s Angela, the joy of my life.
Then I let him go. And I let these offensive thoughts go, too; I have no right to think about you making love. It will be the way you want it to be. It will be sweet. It will be with a better man than I am.

18

My birthday. It’s not an anniversary that I particularly welcome, as you know; despite the passage of time, I still feel the same bitterness I felt when I was a little boy. The schools weren’t open yet, my friends had absconded to parts unknown, and so I never had a real party. When I was growing up, I started ignoring the date myself. Later, I begged your mother not to waste time organizing surprise parties, which I’ve never found at all surprising. She took me at my word, and without ever confessing it, I felt a certain amount of resentment toward her for having agreed so readily to disregard me.

It wasn’t one of my best days. The sun remained smothered behind a great mass of chalky, amorphous clouds. Your grandparents, my in-laws, who had just come back from a cruise in the Red Sea, were visiting us. In the afternoon, we went and sat under the beach umbrellas. Grandma Nora’s suntan was spotted with abrasions inflicted upon her by her beautician in an effort to erase her age spots. The visor of a master mariner’s cap shaded Grandpa Duilio’s forehead. This was his standard summer outfit: short pants, long socks snug around his still-robust calves, rope-soled shoes. He sat in a low beach chair and drummed on his knees with his fingers, beating time to his mighty silence. I didn’t feel comfortable with my father-in-law. You know him as he is today—vague, gentle, and always very affectionate with you. But sixteen years ago, he still retained the arrogant manner and the disinclination to pardon that had carried him so high in his profession. He was one of the most powerful architects in the city; when he dies, he’ll definitely get a street named after him. Back then, he was just starting to be an old man, and he had a lot of trouble staying in the discreet corner indicated by his age. He behaved horribly toward his wife, who was too flighty to notice. Elsa felt an authentic veneration for her father; in the first years of our marriage, I used to get offended by the inordinate amount of attention she lavished on him. When he was present, I didn’t exist. Then, with the passage of time, things improved. He grew unequivocally old, and, unfortunately, I began to age, too. Now that he spends his days in front of the television set with the little Philippine woman who assists him, we’re good friends, as you know. If I don’t drop by at least twice a week and take his blood pressure, he gets his feelings hurt.

Elsa was lying on her side with her face in her arms, talking to her mother. I would say theirs was a moderately close relationship; Elsa couldn’t completely forgive poor Nora for being so frivolous. Like her father, Elsa has never been indulgent— that’s her real weakness. “My mother is so good-hearted,” she’d say, “and such a nitwit.” After Nora died, she miraculously stopped being a nitwit. Driven by a furtive impulse from her unconscious, Elsa began to mold her mother into a different woman, vulnerable but strong-willed, and a shining example to herself. This process is now complete; a few days ago, I heard her tell you, “Your grandmother didn’t have a lot of education, but she was the most intelligent woman I’ve ever known.” I looked at her, and she returned my look quite calmly. Your mother knows how to forget; she knows how to move things around so that they’re available to her in the proper form and at the exact moment when she wants to make use of them. On the one hand, this is unconscionable; on the other, it’s as if she gives everyone and everything around her the power to be continually born again. I must have been reborn under her hands many times without noticing it.

So there I was, buried in the silence of the familiar life. In this setting, I was a free man; I didn’t need to hide. The people here knew me; my wife, my father-in-law, everybody knew me. And yet it seemed to me that
this
was the parallel life, not the other one. That one, the one with Italia—with its whispers, its segregation—that was the real life. Secret, enclosed, frightened, but real.

A woman was swimming in the sea, her head disappearing and reappearing in the foam. She emerged from the waist up and wrung out her hair, twisting it in her hands, then shook her head. As she waded ashore through the increasingly shallow water, her figure was gradually revealed. She was wearing a turquoise two-piece bathing suit. She didn’t have a suntan. Her white belly protruded slightly, the way children’s stomachs do when they’ve just eaten. She headed in my direction, swinging her bony hips. I thought I could hear the rush of her breath and the sound the seawater made when it dripped from her moving body and fell onto the sand. I thought I wanted to raise an arm and stop her, but none of my limbs budged. Everything was at a standstill; everything was frozen. She alone was in motion, in slow motion. Fixed in my block of stone, I waited for the end. She passed us, and I couldn’t even find the courage to turn my head and follow her with my eyes. The shock had stiffened my neck. But the mirage of her—that wan shape, kicking up sand as it approached—stayed locked in my irises.

Then the sound track came back up around me: first, the whistling of the wind, which had started to blow again; next, my mother-in-law’s chattering, which gradually grew more and more audible; and finally, my father-in-law’s labored breathing. It was like what happens when you’re out in a boat and you approach the shore and you begin to hear the murmur of the beach, closer and closer. At last, I turned my head, but behind me I saw only the sandy wall formed by the dunes. Italia had vanished.

I passed the remains of the day in a trance. Everything seemed excessive; voices were too piercing, gestures too aggressive. Who were these dull people? Who parked them in my house? And to think, there was a time when I believed marrying into this family of respectable imbeciles meant a big step up on the social ladder! At dinner, I could barely lift my fork to my lips; the distance between the plate and my mouth had increased enormously. I left the table and went to the bathroom. My mother-in-law’s Yorkshire terrier lunged at me with bared teeth out of a dark corner in the hall. I replied to the attentions of this little parlor mutt with a solid kick. He ran limping to his mistress, who was already rushing to his side. “I’m sorry, Nora,” I said. “I accidentally stepped on him.”

I went upstairs and lay down on a rug. I felt like one of those limp worms that hang on dried-up shrubs in the summer—one of those stupefied, tremulous worms that fall to the earth without a sound.

Elsa’s parents left after dinner, and I was right behind them. Elsa had asked me to follow them back to the outskirts of the city, where the first streetlights were. My father-in-law was driving slowly along dark country roads that he didn’t know very well. I looked through the window at those two mute, immobile heads. What were they thinking about? Death? Not much of a trick on a Sunday evening. Or maybe they were thinking about life—that is, about buying something or eating something. In the end, life becomes unadulterated greediness. You take, and you just don’t feel like giving anything in return. So there they were, en route to the same silence that Elsa and I were headed for. In a few years, the solitude my headlights were shining on would be ours as well. I had two puppets in front of me, cruising into the night. But I still had time to stop, to change direction and consign myself to life again. To a different life, one in which I probably wouldn’t live long enough to reach the same state as those ancient figures in front of me.

I yanked the wheel to the right and stopped on the edge of the asphalt. My in-laws’ car disappeared around a pitch-black curve in the road. That evening, I felt I would die young, and I knew that Italia was a gift I wouldn’t turn down.

19

I said, “How did you find the house?”

“I walked along the beach.”

“But why?”

“I wanted to give you a birthday present. I wanted you to see me in my bathing suit.”

She was in her bathrobe, half-asleep and holding her dog.

“I’ll let you go back to bed.”

“No, let’s go out.”

In the street, she took my arm and walked along slowly. We went into the usual bar. “What will you have?” I asked her.

She didn’t answer. She was leaning on the counter with all her weight. I saw her hand sliding over the metal surface toward the paper napkins. With a jerk, she ripped them from their container and rushed back out the door, bent forward and limping. When I caught up with her, she was leaning on the wall with her head down.

“What’s wrong?”

She was squeezing her hands between her thighs, and her hands were squeezing the wad of napkins. “I don’t feel good,” she whispered. “Take me home.”

There wasn’t very much light, but I could see that the white napkins had turned dark between her fingers. “You’re losing blood,” I said.

“Please, take me home.”

But she fainted on the way. I picked her up, carried her to my car, and put her in the passenger’s seat. I’d decided to run the risk of taking her to the hospital. As I drove, I tried to figure out whether one of my friends was on duty that night. She came to; her face was ashen, and she gazed sad-eyed at the city lights. “Where are we going?”

“To a hospital.”

“No, I want to go home. I feel better.”

She slid off the seat and squatted on the floor under the dashboard. “What are you doing?”

“This way, I won’t soil the seat.”

I took one hand off the wheel, leaned toward her, and grabbed a handful of her T-shirt. “Get up out of there!”

But she managed to hold her ground. “I’m fine down here,” she said. “I’m watching you.”

The emergency room was practically empty. The only patient was an old man, sitting in a corner with a blanket draped across his shoulders. I knew one of the nurses on duty, a portly young man with whom I occasionally talked about soccer. I’d found a terry-cloth beach towel on the backseat of the car and given it to Italia, who wrapped it around her hips. The nurse made her lie down on a stretcher in the first-aid area. She lay there with her neck twisted around, looking at me. The physician on duty, a young woman, arrived almost at once. I didn’t remember ever having seen her before. She said, “Come, we’ll go upstairs and do an ultrasound.”

The three of us got into the elevator. The doctor’s face looked as though she’d been asleep—her hair was pressed flat on one side—but she smiled at me obsequiously, plainly well aware of who I was. Italia had walked into the elevator on her own two legs, and her color was somewhat improved.

While the physician was examining her, I went over to my wing of the hospital. I wanted to check on a patient I’d operated on the previous day. I stood beside his bed; he was asleep, breathing normally. The nurse who’d followed me into the room asked, “Can we remove his drain tube tomorrow, Doctor?”

When I returned, Italia was coming out of the ultrasound room. “Everything’s all right,” the physician said. “The placenta has partially detached, but the embryo is in good shape.”

For a fraction of a second, I stared at the physician’s face: square jaws, shiny nose, eyes too close together. I took a step backward and instinctively looked over her shoulder, as if I was afraid someone had overheard her. “Fine,” I think I said. “Fine.”

The woman had no doubt detected my agitation. Now she was giving me a look of strange complicity. “Nevertheless, Doctor, I think the lady should stay in the hospital. The best thing for her would be complete rest, at least for a while.”

The lady in question, dazed, confused, and visibly agitated, was hovering a few steps away. She wasn’t a lady; she was an unmarried woman, and also my lover. For just an instant, we exchanged surreptitious looks. I moved slightly, shifting my weight to my other leg and effectively removing her from my line of sight. I mustn’t have any sort of contact with her, at least for now. I was there in my hospital, face-to-face with a woman who knew me by my professional reputation and now, in addition, had surely guessed a few things about my private life. I thought, I must get Italia out of here; she has to disappear first, and then I can think about what to do next. We were walking toward the elevator; the doctor’s buttocks undulated under her smock. What guarantee did I have that this woman was discreet? There was something careless about the way she walked. Maybe by tomorrow, the news would be making the rounds in the hospital. Sly glances would be aimed my way like arrows, piercing my back. There would be gossip I’d be helpless to stop. Italia was behind me, and now I was furious with her. She hadn’t told me a thing; she’d kept me in the dark. She’d hidden this news from me, this news of all news, and left me to find it out from a stranger, right here in my hospital. She’d enjoyed the look of astonishment on my face. I almost felt like hitting her, like giving her a good smack, five fingers printed red across her lying mug.

We went downstairs to Admissions. I turned to Italia, and with a look that must have seemed terrible to her, I said, “Well, ma’am, what do you want to do?”

She stammered, “I want to go home.”

I turned to the nurse. “The lady will sign a discharge form,” I said. “Give me one.”

I took a pen from the inside pocket of my jacket and filled out the form myself, then shoved it under Italia’s gnawed hands and held out my pen. When I looked at her face, I saw that she’d become quite pale again. I lost all certainty about what I was doing and held on to the pen. I was a doctor; I couldn’t put her at risk. Suppose she should have a hemorrhage—what would I do then? I couldn’t let her go like that. I’d get my chance to abuse her later on, but now it was important for her to stay in the hospital, where she’d be safe. I tore up the form. “Let’s admit her.”

She made an effort to resist, but it wasn’t very forceful: “No—I want to leave here—I’m fine.”

The other physician was still with us, and she took a step toward Italia. “Ma’am, the doctor’s right. It would be better for you to stay here tonight.”

We dispatched the admissions process in a hurry and went back upstairs to Gynecology. The elevator doors opened onto the nocturnal silence of the corridor and the usual smells of medicine and soup. I love the hospital at night, Angela. For me, there’s something furtive about it, like a woman without makeup, like the whiff of an armpit in the dark. Italia, however, seemed terrified, practically clinging to the wall as she walked. She still had the beach towel with the starfish wrapped around her butt, like a survivor from a shipwreck. We were left alone for a few seconds, so I asked her, “Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant?”

“I didn’t know.”

She pulled the towel tighter around her waist. Her voice trembled as she said, “I don’t want to stay here; I’m all dirty.”

“I’ll have one of the staff give you something.”

A nurse came up to us. “This way, miss. I’ll take you to your room.”

“Go on,” I whispered. “Go on.”

And I watched her move away down the half-lit corridor, never once turning around.

Back home, I took off my shoes without undoing the laces and flung them across the room, then lay down on the bed with my clothes on. I sank into a black hole and woke up at dawn, perplexed and still tired. I turned on the shower. Italia was expecting a baby. The water ran along my skin and down my body in channels, and Italia was expecting a baby. What were we going to do now? Naked in the bathroom of the home I shared with my wife, I lathered up the clump of hair in my crotch. I had to slow down and reflect, but instead I was speeding ahead. My thoughts kept overlapping one another, like backdrops in the wings of a theater.

I got to the hospital very early. I was anxious, because I had a feeling she wouldn’t be there. And in fact, she wasn’t; she’d signed a discharge form and left.

“When?” I asked the nurse.

“A few minutes ago.”

I got back in my car and started driving along the avenue that borders the hospital grounds. I found her at the bus stop. She was wearing a nurse’s smock, and I almost didn’t recognize her. She was leaning against the wall, and my beach towel showed through the top of the plastic bag dangling from her fingers.

I pulled up to the curb not far from her, but she didn’t see me. The streets were just beginning to revive. I recalled the time I’d waited for her in my car, spying on her. It was hot; she had makeup on; she swung her hips. I’d liked her high heels, liked her vulgarity. And how much time had passed since then? At the moment, her face bore no trace of makeup, she was dressed in an oversized nurse’s smock—she was still losing weight, as she’d done all summer—and, only now, I realized something had changed. Her color was gone; maybe it was my fault that she was so pale. An unpainted clown. And yet, to me she seemed even more beautiful, even more desirable. I could see nothing else: just her, lined up in my sights with her back against a wall. An insane thought assailed me.
What if someone
is indeed taking aim at her? What if a bullet strikes her in the
chest and I watch her slide to the ground, leaving only a streak of
blood on the wall behind her?
I wanted to shout to her to move away from there, because someone was squeezing the trigger, someone lurking somewhere I couldn’t see, maybe on the roof of the hospital. Her face was like that; it was the face of one about to be struck by a blow she hasn’t got the strength to avoid. Nevertheless, nothing happened, and she moved away from the wall. The bus arrived, shielding her, and before I had time to stop her, she climbed in. I started to tail the bus, keeping my bumper close to its black exhaust pipe, which belched out clouds of reeking smoke. At the next stop, I left my car double-parked and jumped on the bus, looking for Italia. I wanted to make her get off with me, but I found her too late; the driver had already closed the doors. She was collapsed in a seat, with her head against the window. They’re going to tow my car, I thought. Too bad. I said, “Hi, Crabgrass.”

She jumped, turned her head, caught her breath. “Hi.”

“Where are you going?”

“To the train station.”

“You’re taking a trip?”

“No. I want to look at the schedules.”

We remained silent for a while, staring at the streets, which were beginning to fill up with the first traffic of the day. Italia watched a mother and two children cross at a stoplight. I put a hand on her belly, a big steady hand. Her stomach growled. I said, “How do you feel?”

“Fine,” she said, removing my hand. She was ashamed to be making that rumbling noise.

“How far along are you?”

“Not far. Not even two months.”

“When did it happen?”

“I don’t know.”

Her eyes were huge and serene. “You don’t have to worry about anything,” she said. “You don’t have to say anything. I’ve already made up my mind.”

I shook my head, but I kept quiet. Maybe she was expecting me to say something. She looked out the window again as the bus jounced along. “I’ve got only one favor to ask: Let’s not talk about it anymore. It’s too horrible.”

We got off the bus and walked down the street side by side, not touching each other. Italia was dressed like a nurse, and we were a sorry couple. Inside a shop window, a girl took down the SALE sign and started to arrange the fall display, walking barefoot on a carpet of plastic leaves and chestnuts. Italia stopped and watched the shop girl slip a dress on a mannequin with ruffled hair. “Green’s in fashion this year,” Italia observed.

We walked toward a taxi rank, where three cabs were waiting. The traffic light was about to change, and we had to run across the street. I opened the door of the first cab for Italia and helped her in, then leaned in myself and put the fare in her hand. “Thanks,” she whispered.

“Don’t worry,” I said in a low voice, not wanting the driver to hear me. “I’ll arrange everything. You just take it easy.”

She tensed her lips in what was supposed to be a smile, but the result was only an exhausted grimace. She wanted to be alone, and maybe she didn’t trust me anymore. I reached into the cab and passed a hand over her face; I wanted to mollify her wounded, wide-eyed expression. Then I closed the door and the taxi pulled away.

Left to my own devices, I took a few steps. And where was I going? I needed to gather my thoughts; I needed to get my car out of the middle of the street. I was late for the operating room, but that couldn’t be helped. Right up to the last moment, she’d hoped I’d say something different. I’d seen hope leaning in the depths of her eyes, like a broom forgotten in a corner, and I’d pretended not to notice. I didn’t even have the courage to be pitiless, to browbeat her into making her decision. I let her choose for herself, I let her shoulder all the blame, and in exchange I gave her cab fare.