Don't Move (17 page)

27

I park the car, grab my bag off the passenger seat, and walk toward the hospital. Suddenly, Italia comes out of nowhere. And suddenly she’s very close to me, she puts a hand on my arm, feeling for the flesh under the material of my jacket. Not only does she surprise me; she frightens me, too. She’s not wearing any makeup, and she looks wan and thin. She hasn’t even bothered to cover her forehead with her hair. Her brow is broad and oppressive; it weighs down her eyes. I look around, consciously protecting myself from her, from the burden she’s bearing this morning. I say, “Come.”

I cross the street without touching her. She walks behind me, head down, wrapped in her shabby little cotton jacket. A car slows down for her, but she pays no attention; her stare is fixed on my hurrying feet. I walk away from the hospital like a thief with a bundle of indecent swag. We turn into a narrow street where there’s a little café I know.

She follows me up the spiral staircase to the second floor, an empty room that stinks of old smoke. She sits next to me, very close. She looks at me, looks away, then looks at me again. “I waited for you,” she says.

“I’m sorry.”

“I waited so long. Why didn’t you call me?”

I don’t answer. I wouldn’t know what to say. She puts her hand to her face, and now her face is red, her eyes are gray with tears. There’s an aquarium against the wall. From this distance, the fish look like confetti.

“You’ve changed your mind, right?”

I don’t want to talk, not this morning, not at this hour. “It’s not what you think,” I say.

“It’s not? What is it, then? Tell me what it is.”

There’s defiance in her eyes, in those tears that won’t fall. Her lips are inside her mouth, and she’s insistently picking at the wrists of her jacket. Those nervous hands of hers irritate me, and so does that face, which leaves me no room for escape. I should tell her about Elsa, but I’m not in the mood for emotional upheaval today. It’s tiring enough just being here with her, stuck at this little table. There isn’t much light, the place stinks of smoke, and then there are those little fish back there, forgotten like confetti after the carnival is over. All at once, she bursts into high-volume tears. She throws her arms around my neck; her nose and her lips are wet. “Don’t leave me. . . .”

I stroke her cheek, but my hands are hard as claws. She breathes on me, kisses me. Her breath smells odd, a mixture of sawdust and upset stomach. I hold her close, but her breath makes me nauseous. She says, “Tell me you love me.”

“Stop it.”

But she’s lost all her self-control. “No,” she cries. “No, I won’t stop. . . .”

She shakes and sobs in her chair. Footsteps come up the stairs. A boy disappears into the bathroom, a schoolboy with his knapsack on his back. With an effort, Italia pulls away from me and sits up. She’s calmer now, and I take her hand. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

She looks at me. Now her forehead looks as though it’s made of plaster. I say. “My wife . . . isn’t well.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

Tell her, Timoteo. Tell her now. Tell her to her face, to her
dirty mouth, stagnant with her misery. Tell her you’re expecting a
legitimate child, the heir to your sterile, cautious life. Tell her she
has to have an abortion, because now’s the right time, now when
she’s scaring you and you’re thinking, What kind of mother would
so desperate a woman make?

“I don’t know,” I say, leaning back into my cowardice.

“You’re a doctor, and you don’t know what’s wrong with your wife?”

The boy leaves the bathroom. We look at him as he comes out, and he looks at us. He’s got black eyes and a wispy beard. He walks past the aquarium and disappears down the spiral staircase. Italia says, “I’m going to the bathroom.”

She wobbles a little, backs up a few steps, and runs headfirst into the wall, so hard that the sound echoes around the room. I get up and go to her. I say, “What on earth are you doing?”

She laughs and shakes my hand from her shoulders. That laugh scares me more than any amount of weeping. She says, “Every now and then, I need a blow to the head.”

We go outside and walk slowly down the street. I ask, “Does your head hurt?”

She’s distracted, looking at the people coming toward her. I ask, “Shall I get you a cab?”

But instead, we walk to a bus stop, and she climbs into the first bus that comes along.

I turn around and walk back to the hospital, thinking exclusively about myself. Today, not loving her was the easiest thing in the world. And during the operation, while I’ve got somebody’s liver in my hands, she stays with me like an unpleasant memory. I see her knocking at the door of my apartment, pretending to be a sales representative or something, one of those shadowy figures that slip past the porter and roam around condominiums. As she rings the bell, she’s shaking and gloomy-eyed, but her eyes light up when she sees Elsa and asks for permission to enter. Elsa’s half-asleep, wearing her ecru nightshirt, her body naked and warm under the silk. Italia’s little; her armpits are stained with perspiration, because she’s been sweating. She sweated on the bus; she sweated all night long, tossing and turning. She looks at the apartment, the books, the photographs, and Elsa’s firm breasts, still dark from the sun. She thinks about her own breasts, stuck to her rib cage like hollowed-out onions, and she thinks about the heart beating in her womb. She’s wearing that ridiculous skirt with the elastic waistband that slides down onto her hips. Elsa smiles at her. She feels solidarity with all members of her sex, even the lowliest; as an emancipated woman, she thinks it’s her duty to show some indulgence. Not Italia; she’s got a child in her belly under that flea-market skirt, and she’s not indulgent. Elsa turns to her and says, “Tell me what you want.” She speaks familiarly, as she usually does to working-class girls. Italia doesn’t feel well; she’s dizzy, and she’s gone a long time without eating or sleeping. “Nothing,” she says, retreating toward the door. Then her eyes fall on the white envelope with the ultrasound results, lying on the table in the hall. . . .

Between operations, I call Elsa. “How are you feeling?”

“Terrific.”

“You’re not going out?”

“In a little while. I’m transcribing an interview.”

“Don’t open the door to anyone.”

“Why? Who’s coming over?”

“I don’t know. Ask who it is, make sure you know them.”

There’s a pause, then her laughter erupts out of the receiver. I imagine her cheeks, the little dimples in her flesh when she laughs. She says, “Paternity is having a strange effect on you. You’re turning into my grandmother.”

I laugh, too, because I feel ridiculous. My house is in order, and my wife is strong, tall and strong.

In the evening, I look out of the bedroom window. I part the curtains and examine the street below, the branches of the trees, the traffic light signaling a few blocks away. The street’s empty except for one passing car, an anonymous vehicle taking someone home. I’m looking for her. I don’t know if I’m looking for her because I need her, or because I’m afraid she’s got the place staked out and is spying on us from down there. I look out at the roofs, the antennas, and the cupolas in the direction where she lives, out past the highway lined with nocturnal shapes lit up by automobile headlights, out near that bar I know all too well; I wonder if it’s still open at this hour. There’s such a mass between us, all these walls, all these existences curled up in sleep. So much separates us, and good thing it does, too; I need to catch my breath.
Don’t be distressed,Italia. That’s life for you: wonderful, intimate moments,
followed by blasts of cold wind. And though you may be suffering
out there, out beyond the last concrete outpost, at this distance
your torment is unknown to me, and alien. What does it matter
if one of my obscene spurts got you pregnant? Tonight, you’re alone
with your baggage on a railroad platform, and the train is leavingthe station; you’ve missed it.

“Aren’t you coming to bed?”

I lie down next to your mother. She’s reading. Her hair, still wet from the shower, surrounds her face in damp clumps. I’m turned away, well on my side of the bed, but I feel her hand pulling on my pajama shirt. “I wonder what it’ll be like,” she says.

I roll over, not too far, just giving her my profile.

“The baby, I mean. I can’t seem to imagine it.”

“He’ll be like you, utterly beautiful.”

“And maybe it’ll be a girl,” she says, lowering her book. “Ugly, like you.” She moves close to me; her wet hair brushes against my skin. “Last night, I dreamed that it didn’t have any feet, it was born and it didn’t have any feet. . . .”

“Keep calm. Its feet will show up in the next ultrasound.”

She moves back to her side and starts reading again. She asks, “Will the light bother you?”

“Not at all. It’ll keep me company.”

I lie there in the yellowish half-light with the sheet over my eyes. I don’t really sleep, but I doze off, reassured by the light and the sound of Elsa’s breathing, which suggests that life will go on this way—easy, uncomplicated, shampoo-scented. I dream and drowse, my thoughts moving along benignly, until I see a maimed child coming toward me. Now the light’s off and I’m asleep, but not soundly enough. I hear your mother cry out, “Damn you, give me back his feet! Give them back to me!” And then, drowned in the blue waters of the night, I have a terrible vision: I get up, go to my bag on the hall table, take out the scalpel, and cut my member off. I open the window and toss the thing down onto the pavement for the cats, or for Italia, if she’s around.
There you go, Crabgrass. There’s
your child’s father.
And now I’m pressing my thighs together as tightly as I can. What a horror it is, Angela, when life starts taking bites out of you at night, too. It bites you when you’re awake; it bites you in your dreams.

28

The recurring drone in the receiver I was holding to my ear echoed the telephone in that hovel, ringing away. Far from me, far from my hand, far from my ear. She wasn’t there at ten. She wasn’t there at noon. She wasn’t there at six in the evening. Where was she? Cleaning up some office, probably, having her way with a washroom. I could picture her walking along the city streets, grazing the walls, wearing the wasted look I’d seen on her the last time, in that café, when I’d found her general unpleasantness intolerable, humiliating for both of us. Whenever a romance is bound for dissolution, humiliation’s a part of the tale. Sometimes lovers emerge from their confining silhouette and see an objective image of the beloved, a bright, focused image no longer camouflaged by their own desires. Afterward, they pretend that nothing has changed, but by then—at least to some extent—they’ve already passed from love to ferocity. For we become ferocious with those who have disillusioned us, Angela.

And so, while we were in that café, I looked at her as though she were just another anonymous pedestrian, one of those useless bodies that crowd the streets, the buses, and the world. Bodies like the ones I split open and root around in every day, without joy and without compassion. I passed my surgeon’s eyes over her, from her forehead down to the hand supporting her head; I examined her, peering at her ugly little flaws: the fuzz on her chin, the crooked finger, the two deep rings around her neck. She had crawled back into her wretched shell, and I could look at her like that, without interest or sympathy, cataloging the details of her unsuitability. I caught another whiff of her dismal breath. It was like breath from a decaying body, like the breath of patients when they wake up from anesthesia.

The telephone wasn’t disconnected. It was a working line, an operator with a metallic voice had assured me of that; but she didn’t answer. Maybe she was home after all, curled up into a ball, lying on her bed, letting the sound of the telephone hover above her body before entering it and jolting her with its monotonous alternation of rest and alarm, making her shiver. It was the only way I had of telling her that I hadn’t abandoned her. So I continued to call her into the evening, telling myself a lie about how this mournful sound was a way of communicating with her.

I left the hospital exhausted and drove home, running through quite a few not-yet-green traffic signals along the way. Occasional shafts of light revealed that my eyes were dilated and my expression grim. . . . I would never be free of her; wherever I might go, I’d be haunted by the thought of her. Italia dominated me. She foiled all my intentions. Her voice hammered at my temples, so present that I turned and looked for her. Had she been sitting there in the passenger seat, with her frayed little jacket, her white, blue-veined hands, and her faded eyes, maybe then it would have been easier to forget her.

Nora puts her arms around me, and I feel her pasty lipstick sliding along my cheek. She and Duilio have stayed for dinner, which is already on the table.

“Congratulations, Dad!”

“Thanks.”

“It’s great news.”

“Let me go wash my hands.”

From the other end of the table, Nora tosses a package wrapped in white tissue paper. Elsa, distracted, fails to catch the package, which lands in the tuna sauce. She picks it up and cleans it off with her napkin. “Mama,” she says. “I told you not to.”

“Just a little thought, something for good luck. Remember, the first baby dress has to be new, and it has to be made of silk.”

Elsa unwraps it and passes it to me. “Here, isn’t it wonderful? We’ve got a new baby dress.” She laughs, but I know she’s annoyed. She doesn’t want baby presents; it’s still too early for that. The baby dress is a handkerchief with a pair of holes I can stick four fingers into. The water pitcher on the table is empty, and I stand up to fill it. When I turn on the faucet, the sound cancels out the voices of the others. They’re having a family conversation; I watch the movements of their faces and their hands. As far as I’m concerned, they’re already behind a glass panel, the three of them, the usual smudged glass panel I put up around the world when I want none of it and it wants none of me.

Elsa’s talking to her father, touching his arm. I see her in isolation, as if she were emerging from a cloud of steam; I see her very well. She has returned to the center of the world. Gone is the fragility she displayed that evening not so many days earlier; gone is her sudden, touching uncertainty. She’s herself again, steady and tireless, only more mysterious. She casts her eyes upon me, and they, too, are the same as always: attuned to surface stimuli, but intimately distracted. She doesn’t need me anymore.

I return with the pitcher and pour everyone some water. Then I say, “Excuse me,” and leave the room. I don’t even bother to close the bedroom door, so eager am I to dial her number.

She wasn’t there; even at night, she wasn’t there. I put down the receiver, put down the solitude that I felt everywhere—in my heavy hand, in my ear, in the silence of my study. I was sitting in the dark, and Nora’s shape appeared in the mirror on the door. She looked like a crow. The light from the hall barely illuminated her as she looked at me in the darkness of the room. It didn’t last long, but in that brief space of time, I had the feeling that she’d grasped something. It wasn’t so much the fact that I was sitting in the dark alone with the telephone in my hand that gave her the intuition about my double life. No, it was my body, so different from what she’d seen at the table. My shoulders were slumped, collapsed; my eyes were shiny and wet. I was too far from my usual self. And so an unexpected intimacy, precipitated by coincidence (she’d been on her way to get her cigarettes, which she’d left in her purse on the hall table), was established between my mother-in-law and me. It’s remarkable, Angela, that sometimes the least likely people are the ones who manage to see through us. She took a step toward me in the dark and said, “Timo?”

“Yes?”

“I’ve got a mole on my back that’s a lot bigger than it used to be. Would you mind looking at it?”

It’s three o’clock in the morning. Once again, your mother is asleep. Her body is a mountain at sunset, a dark, impenetrable shape. Maybe leaving her is less difficult than I think; it’s just a question of getting dressed and going away. All of them—Elsa, her family, our friends—will form a united front against me, like a wall. And eventually, everyone will be resigned to the wall. In my place she wouldn’t hesitate, she wouldn’t be afraid; she’d leave me out on the rear balcony, just as I did a little while ago with the garbage bag.

A rain as fine as face powder was falling. Damp but not drenched, I wrapped myself more tightly in my overcoat as I walked. I had no destination—I just wanted to keep the night from turning on me. I wasn’t tired. My legs felt light. I’d eaten very little, and that little had already been digested. The streets were deserted and silent. It took a little while for me to notice that the silence wasn’t total; the asphalt was emitting its own peculiar groan. At night, the city is like an empty world, abandoned by people, yet imbued with their presence. Someone is being loved, someone else is being left, a dog is barking on somebody’s terrace, a priest is getting to his feet. An ambulance takes a sick person to my hospital, far from his warm bed. A whore with legs as black as the darkness makes her way home; a man who isn’t waiting for her sleeps like a mountain, secure and appalling. Exactly like Elsa. When you can’t sleep and you know sleep won’t come, all sleeping people are the same. They all look alike.

As I walked, every form I saw seemed to be Italia: the trees, which were giving off an odd phosphorescence; the metallic shapes of the parked cars; the streetlamps, bending down into their own light; and even the terraces and the cornices of tall buildings. It was as if her body were everywhere, dominating the city.

I put my arms around a tree. That’s right; I suddenly found myself pressing my body against a large wet trunk. And as I hugged it, I realized that I’d wanted to do that many times before. This was news to me.
Maybe she’s killed herself and that’s
why she’s not answering the phone. Her gray hand is hanging
down from her gray arm, which is dangling over the edge of her
rusty bathtub. With her last gasp, she ripped down the plastic
shower curtain. She died thinking about me, trying one last time
to embrace me in her thoughts or drive my image from her mind.
It’s the middle of the night—the water must be cold by now.
When she filled the tub, she made the water scalding hot so that
the blood would flow more easily from her slashed wrists. Did she
use her little penknife, or perhaps a razor blade I left there? The
instrument one chooses for suicide is important; it’s already a kind
of testament.

A cry comes out of the darkness. I’ve tripped and fallen onto a mound of rags, under which a man was sleeping on the ground. He sticks his head out of his filthy nest and cries, “I don’t have anything!”

He clamors, he bawls, he thinks I want to rob him. Of what? His toxic bedclothes? His teeth, perhaps? But no, I see he doesn’t have any when he opens his mouth to utter his hoarse lamentations. I say, “Excuse me, I fell.”

What have I touched? What emanations have entered my lungs? The man’s stench is loathsome; he smells like a disemboweled dog on the shoulder of the road.
Italia stank, too,
when her tragedy came round again, when she understood that I
was leaving her, that I wasn’t going to keep her or her baby, and
that, once again, I was going to offer her money.
I want to run away, but instead I hold on to the man with all my strength. I lay my head against his filthy neck, my nose in his congealed hair, stiff as fur, and I breathe. I breathe in his odor of unburied dog.

Angela, I was looking for the contagion that would push me irretrievably to the other side, to that swamp between the city and the sea, where the only person I ever truly loved made her home. The plague-bearer, my new nocturnal companion, did not recoil from me. Rather, he put an arm around me and turned his face (deeply creased, with dirt in the creases) toward me, searching for me in the cavern where I was hiding. He found me and stroked my head, as merciful as a priest absolving a murderer. Did I deserve so much compassion, daughter of mine? In that dark corner of the world, a miserable wretch welcomed me, guided me. On the wet street where he lay dreaming, now I was dreaming, too, embracing the stinking accoutrements of a life of total destitution, far from my home, far from my parquet floors and my whiskey. For me, this was love: love orphaned and shriveled, love in extremity, when fate takes pity on us and gives us a pacifier.

“You want a drink?”

From under some cardboard, he pulled a bottle of wine and offered it to me. I drank without thinking about the mouth that had touched the chipped rim of that bottle before mine; I drank because I was thinking about my father. My father, who died on the street, who fell against the rolling shutter of a closed shop and then slid to the ground with one hand around his throat, where life was leaving his body.

Before I went away, I gave the man some money, all I had on me, in fact. I thrust my fingers into the recesses of my wallet and pulled out everything that was there. He accepted the money like any ordinary bum, hiding it in his rags, obviously terrified at the possibility that I might change my mind. Then he watched me with incredulous eyes as I made my way to the intersection, where I disappeared from his view.

The darkness was beginning to fade, washed by the rain that had not ceased to fall, gently but relentlessly. I drove through the hesitant light; every now and then the headlights of an oncoming car struck me in the eyes. Two Philippine nuns, standing under two little umbrellas, were waiting at a bus stop. A bar was opening. A soaking bundle of newspapers lay beside a newsstand that was still locked up. I was weary when I stopped the car, done in by my dense, sleepless night. Now I could go to sleep in her arms, and only later would we gather our future together. I had already fought my battle over the course of that long night. There was nothing to say; all that remained for me to do was to embrace her in silence. When I got out of the car, my cheeks were flushed from the heated air inside. The streets were dry in the growing gray light, and now I could distinguish every object; maybe it hadn’t rained there. The absence of that rain, which had hounded me all night long, seemed a sign that the struggle was indeed over. Italia had waited for me, safe and dry.

I was halfway up the second flight of stairs when I heard the thud of the elevator arriving below me, followed by the clicking of a woman’s high-heeled shoes, the echo fading as she crossed the lobby. I ran down the stairs and saw her back as she left the building.

“Italia!”

I caught up with her just as she was turning around. I didn’t look at her; I simply embraced her. She went limp, allowing herself to be squeezed, not even raising an arm; she remained exactly as she was. Holding her head against my shoulder, I saw her hand dangling loosely at her side.
Now she’s
going to raise her hands and put them on me. She’s going to respondto my embrace. Then she’ll collapse, and I’ll hold her up.
But in fact, she didn’t move. She remained motionless until my breath stabilized and I could feel the beating of her heart, calm and deep. She was warm; she was alive. Nothing else mattered. A few caresses would have sufficed to restore her to me. I knew her; she’d let herself be loved without useless displays of pride. I let her go and backed away to get a look at her. I asked, “Where are you going?”