He shrugs again and this time his expression has changed. “OK, we’ve bumped into each other in the bar a couple of times, we’ve had a sandwich together…nothing more.”
“I bet! Nothing more? What else would you have wanted? A sandwich and that’s that? In fact I don’t really see why you’d have wanted to share it with her,” I say, looking into his eyes, aware that mine are exploding from their sockets.
I stare at him and imagine him looking at her, I work my way inside him and hear his thoughts, telling him over and over to leave me. At this moment he’s thinking that I’m making his life difficult, but as far as I’m concerned that’s the last thing I want. Right now I just want to analyze, understand, and take possession of all the security I lack. I know, I know, at any moment he’s going to slam the door and he’ll never come back, he’ll leave me bleeding and faded on this floor, I’ll gradually disappear and stop annoying him. But right now he’s got to take my hands and reassure me.
As for him, he’s not the kind to withdraw from a discussion. He’s the kind of person who likes to reason, to make me reason, but he can’t do it. He can’t say, “OK, you’re being a pain in the ass, so I’m out of here”—that’s not his way. He stays here with me and looks at me and sometimes smiles at me without resentment. I hate his goodness, his tolerance. He makes me feel so unworthy, so wretched and pitiful, with my tendency to hide, to seek refuge, to sink my face into the pillow, to escape my problems. I’m not capable of being so self-possessed, so empathetic.
Then he takes my hands and whispers, “I love only you.”
I don’t believe him. Not for a moment.
Don’t ask me why, don’t tell me — forget it. I just don’t believe him.
Then he talks to me about freedom. He says he lacks it. He says I’m tearing off his wings. How naive of me — I thought I was his freedom, that I was his wings, and that with me he’d be able to go wherever he wanted; he would have stayed perched on my back and guided me among the clouds, among the storms; together we would have looked down on buildings from on high and laughed at the stupid, impotent men struggling on the streets, dragging themselves along like sacks of potatoes.
He tells me he has the right to meet whomever he feels like and that isn’t why his love will shrink. He just says, “You’ve got to trust me.”
As for me, I have the right to die, to destroy myself, to feel my belly crumbling, to go mad and meet my ghosts, to become their puppet.
I have the right to yield to instinct. I have the right to cry and feel good as I do so. I also have the right to think that if he feels suffocated, clearly I’m no longer the delicate, flowing wave that softened and dissolved him. It means that I’m the storm now and he’s alone and he can’t find shelter anywhere.
Except with Viola and her normalcy.
Thirty-one
Why do you beat your red-tipped wings like that, lovely dragonfly? Settled on that white wall with your black body you look like a word on a badly written page. Why do your wings swell each time you breathe? It’s as though you were brooding hatred, rancor, rage. You’ve settled just a few centimeters from his photograph…ah no, dragonfly, we don’t do that. I come over to you and take his photograph and put it to my chest and you look at me, disillusioned and in tears, as I dart glances back at you, likewise full of hatred, rancor, and rage. Are you going mad now? Your flight is uneven now and imprecise; I see you’re running out of breath. If I show you his photograph from a distance, what will you do, thank me?
I won’t kill you, don’t worry. I’d rather see you die slowly.
I know I shouldn’t have slid that horrible message under the door, dragonfly, but what do you expect me to do? It’s written in my blood that I must destroy everything that wants to destroy me.
Don’t say anything, because you don’t know anything. You don’t know what it is to be abandoned, you know nothing of the battle of love. Don’t you understand that each time you immerse your big green eyes in his you’re stripping me of part of my life, the air that I breathe? If you take away my breath, he won’t be able to love it anymore, he won’t be able to smell it.
My mother, the same mother I’m talking to now, told me that dragonflies must be killed and forgotten. But I want to see you suffer a little; I want to play with your life and keep you hanging on this thin little thread, like a sadistic Fate.
I’ll tell you about that time we went to the river. It was an amazing day, the rocks were sparkling and the plants showed no sign of death or decomposition, and everything was big, wonderful, strong.
I’ve always been used to swimming in the sea, battling with the waves, feeling that exciting fear filling me up when the blue was so dark and so deep that I couldn’t see anything. I’ve always confronted infinite spaces, with vague horizons. I liked it, but I didn’t love it. In my heart I wanted to swim in something visible, clear, with precise contours that I could see, that I could cling to.
So when Thomas suggested going to the river, I gave a leap of joy and kissed him and whispered in his ear, “Don’t chicken out — today I want to know that we’ll make love in the river,” and he said, “We’ll see,” as though it were a challenge.
Our lovemaking really was lovely and joyous and playful, with the water splashing off our warm bodies in a thousand glittering droplets. And I felt like a mermaid with her Triton; we were king and queen of the water, of that lonely place, that beauty.
Or I could tell you about that time when I was in a hotel, in some remote place in South America. I felt ill and I was shivering with cold, although my body was fine and my heartbeat was regular. Without a word he drew me to him and talked to me gently, and then my tears slowly melted on my skin and made way for my smile. And then he told me that I could, that night, forget who I was, what I was for the people out there. He whispered that I was the woman he loved and nothing more, that everything else was only a silly joke.
I could tell you that I love everything about him and I wouldn’t be lying.
Can you explain to me why the hell you have two little red dots on the ends of your two wings? Did you think you would pass unnoticed, did you want to show yourself off, did you want to look seductive?
When the keys rattle behind the door she understands that the time has come to go. This, I think, is just a warning.
Thirty-two
In the corridor of our house was a giant stain, right beside my room. I thought it was the profile of Alfred Hitchcock, and every time I walked past it at night I started running with my eyes shut and then slipped under your covers, still shaking with fear. Or rather, first I watched you sleeping. I stood by your side of the bed and watched you for minutes at a time, moving my head as kittens do when drunk on their own curiosity. Tears came to my eyes because you filled me with tenderness, lying there like a little girl, with your serene and heedless eyelids. Then Hitchcock came back and imposed his shadow over my eyes and I fell back into darkness and desperation, in the certainty of being alone. Then I sought your warmth.
One night, as I was running with my eyes shut, I didn’t notice that the door to your bedroom was closed. I ran like an untamed horse, unaware of anything, aware only of the night and its shadows. So I crashed into the door handle and bumped my eye with greater violence than anything I had ever experienced, but I pretended everything was all right so as not to worry you. I slipped as always into your bed and went painfully to sleep. The next morning the blood was dry and dark on my cheeks. As you washed my face, concerned about what had happened to me, I looked at myself intensely in the mirror, and what I saw there was a divine, saintly figure. A bleeding child, a child that quenched itself with its own mucous membranes.