I woke first and we set off early in the morning. I couldn’t bear you waking me up, I didn’t want to get in your way. So I got up and washed and by the time you woke up you found me clean and neatly dressed. It was quite normal for you to find me already up and ready — you never paid me any special compliments. Perhaps if I had a child I would praise him, every now and again, just to make sure he didn’t feel unwanted…to avoid making him feel incompetent — that’s it. While Dad never even noticed what I was wearing, you studied me for minutes at a time.
“Why did you put on that skirt? It doesn’t suit you, it needs washing.” “What are you doing with those shoes? Going dancing? Put on a pair of sneakers…wear the ones from last year, the dirty ones. We’re going to the seaside, to Grandma’s. We’re going to spend Easter there.”
And yet, on those trips, I felt fine. I left the window closed because I hated the wind filtering through the window of the moving car…it felt like a sword sent flying through the air, or a cowboy’s lasso. I liked the sound of the radio and I liked the sound of your voice when you spoke to Dad. From Mia Martini to Mina, from Riccardo Cocciante to Loredana Berté: those were the sound tracks to my thoughts. Those songs you used to sing at the top of your voice, the songs I learned by heart, whispering them shyly because I was ashamed of my hoarse, masculine voice. Loves shattered, lost, abandoned: those were the themes of my childhood. I often fell asleep. It was amazing, sleeping in the car, enclosed in an artificial belly kept alive by an engine. I almost felt as though I were returning to your womb. How did it feel to have me inside you? Did I feel like an intruder, or like part of you? Did I weigh that much? You’ve always been so small, so tiny…didn’t having another life inside you hinder your movements? And did you ever talk to me? What did you say?
Only yesterday I asked Thomas to suck my breasts as though he were sucking milk. Lately I’ve been feeling maternal all the time. Anything that makes me feel like a woman is a blessing.
Seriously: you know what I thought during those long, long journeys? I thought, One day I’d like to publish a diary, I’d like to write about my life. I really need to think about keeping one…even if I know I would quickly get tired of writing.
One day I asked Dad to give me a nice diary with a big lock. For a week, every day when he came home, I said, “Dad, have you got the diary?” I always asked him when we were having our dinner, always in a low voice, and I asked him when the table was already plunged into silence — I didn’t want to interrupt you. Every time I asked him if he had brought the diary I felt guilty. When he said no, I wasn’t angry: it was the most obvious answer to such an indiscreet question. If he had brought one home, he would have given it to me straightaway — what was the point in my asking?
Weeks later you took me with you in the car, you let me out, and we went into the store. The skeletal lady behind the counter, the one with the boiled-fish eyes and the fine, fine hair, was the mother of one of my classmates in primary schooclass="underline" I liked her, she was like a fairy dressed up as a witch. All my schoolmates were afraid of her, while I actually thought she was beautiful. You pointed toward a shelf with notebooks, pencils, pens, and other kinds of writing equipment: a diary had been thrown in the middle. The cover was smooth and white, a dirty white, with a picture of a blond girl in a leather jacket sitting on a motorbike. The diary was very thin — there couldn’t have been more than twenty pages in it. And the lock looked extremely fragile, golden and covered with little brown stains. It was the only one they had. It was a leftover from the eighties. Although it was horrible I was extremely happy and absolutely loved it. The fairy disguised as a witch charged you fifteen hundred lire for it.
But my usual capriciousness soon led me to abandon the project. I wrote only five pages before I got tired.
I’ll write when I can’t help saying something, I promised myself. I hated to write anything meaningless.
So, when I thought the moment had come to bury my soul and keep only my material alive, pure and lewd, some perverse angel whispered in my ear, “Write. These emotions will never return. If you write, a scrap of soul will be left in your breast.”
I never had anything to lose, and in pretending to keep a diary I ended up writing a novel.
Eight
This evening, as he laughed, I noticed that one of his teeth overlapped with another, as though shyly hiding. I found this defect incredibly fascinating and wondered why I had never noticed it before. I know his moles and his skin, and I know the different smells that arise one by one from the exploration of his body. I know that he has an extra rib, the one he didn’t give to the woman. He has freckles on his back and big, deep knuckles on his hands. The gleam of the stars is a flat, monotonous glare in comparison with the flash of his eyes. He has a soft mouth, the kind only women tend to have. He has a maternal belly and breasts, soft as the limbs of a newborn child.
He has a mole under his eye, in the same place as mine.
As I looked in delight at that twisted tooth, he stared at me and asked, almost irritably, “What’s up?”
I knew something was wrong.
I knew I was about to be abandoned.
The first thing we shared was a book of poems by Mao Tsetung, bought in an antiquarian bookshop. We read it at night, in his room, our warm, naked bodies covered by the duvet. Red Christmas lights hung from the walls of the room, and we thought we were in a transparent cube suspended in midair, from which we could be seen by anyone.
Nine
They put us outside beneath a damp, watery sky. All we had to shelter us were a few umbrellas — gas heaters our sole source of warmth. A very bright light was angled toward our table, and the smoke from the roasting meat clung insolently to our hair.
I wanted to go, I wondered what the hell I was doing there.
“Meeting important people”—that’s what my condition requires me to do. But my mind and body mutiny.
As far as I’m concerned, the people sitting around this table, assailed by the damp and the smell of roasting meat, aren’t important. I couldn’t give a crap about that actor; that editor can go fuck himself, thank you very much; that photographer can squash herself into one of her own pictures and live inside it forever.
This is what all we humans do: we stay trapped inside our creations, our worlds…and no one can save us from our worlds, no one can drag us out of them.
While they all raise their glasses to my success and a thousand more to come, I repeat just one thing in my head: Go fuck yourselves, the lot of you, you horrible ass-licking cunts. I’d just like to see the look on your faces if I showed you my pussy.
I grip Thomas’s hand as I whisper to him, “Take me away from here, now.”
Ten
I’m eating salted crackers. Over there, some delirious jazz pours from the stereo and outside it’s raining. My hips are so wide you can rest your elbows on them.
My voice is hoarse. Massimiliano was here this morning, that Neapolitan friend I told you about a few times: sometimes he comes to see me and when he smiles I can’t tell if he’s sad or what.
“I’m frightened,” I whispered to him.
He looked at me compassionately, embarrassed, and said, “Of what?”
“I’m frightened that he might betray me…,” I replied.
“What makes you think that?”