Now sleep fogs her thoughts even though, once in bed, she can’t get to sleep: what is she doing in a cheap hotel in this unfamiliar country? Is it really so important for her to find Emanuele? Thirteen years since he disappeared. Why go on struggling to find someone when she no longer knows anything about him? She could meet him in the street and not recognise him, have him before her eyes and not know it. And this man who seems so attached to her? Could that be just a trap for … for what? You’re getting much too suspicious, Amara, she tells herself, half asleep, searching in her memory for the face of the man with the gazelles on his chest. His body will always now be tied to that image even though she has not since seen him wearing the jumper with gazelles running across it.
When she wakes next morning, she spends a few minutes trying to remember where she is. Her mind has emerged fresh from a vivid dream in which she has seen Emanuele up in their usual leafy tree in the garden of Villa Lorenzi, picking cherries. The bitter scent of wild fruit brushed delicately against her nostrils. She remembers spending a long time watching him climb the trunk with his grazed knees and then, agile as a monkey, move from one branch to another. Watching him she felt again the sensation she had known as a little girl. Not so much passion as a blessedly secure sense of unity. He was part of her and she was part of him. They did not need to speak to understand one another. They knew they would go on belonging to one another. They were in no hurry to make love. It was as if they were afraid of becoming adults too quickly with no chance to go back. Though they did kiss, lips locked together, rolling in each other’s arms in a field. Or sitting up in the cherry tree, with leaves whisking their cheeks and threading their hair.
When Emanuele disappeared Amara had been stopped in her tracks. She had lost an arm, perhaps more, and she did not know if she could survive. She no more wanted to play, to adventure into unknown worlds, to climb trees, to laugh, or to eat. It was seven years before she had been able to take any interest in another man. This was Luca Spiga, who worked in an architects’ studio and was twenty years her senior. She liked the calm, adult, discreet and perhaps rather timid way he caressed her; as she warmed to his caresses, she seemed to rediscover a body she had thought dead for ever. Luca did not press her with sexual demands. At first he just watched her, then very gently began to stroke first her hair, then her face and neck and shoulders, and his gentleness had seemed a sign of her reawakening. When he asked her to marry him she at once said yes. But she knew now that they had never shared any deep feeling, only the coming together of two chilled bodies that needed to be warmed. And once warm, they accepted the boredom of living together. By good luck they conceived no children, even though they had assumed that they would. She was sure that Luca Spiga never loved her, but he did introduce her to the cinema. He bought them a subscription to the Charlie Chaplin film club where each evening the great classics were shown: the Marx brothers’ comedies, Buster Keaton, Battleship Potemkin, Casablanca, Obsession, Rome Open City, Bicycle Thieves. They were two good companions in adventure, not much more. When he was away, she didn’t miss him. Rather, she was often happy to forget him. Then, to punish herself, she would spend two hours waiting near a public telephone for the chance to spend three minutes talking to him. Never more than three minutes; it would have cost too much. She had to watch her money and always think twice before spending any.
When her husband told her he had fallen in love with a woman younger than herself she had been hurt, but had said nothing. By now she had got to know Luca, and she knew he only required the preliminaries of love. The rest did not interest him. He liked to stroke, smell and kiss his beloved, and whisper sweet nothings into her ear. He was so convincing that women were not just deceived but trapped and fascinated. In time, thinking over his constant absences and escapes, Amara realised that the closer their relationship became, the more he needed to run away and find new bodies to caress. He was too much in love with love to dedicate himself fully to any one woman. To him, lasting commitment was unbearable imprisonment. She never understood why he had ever asked her to marry him. Perhaps for once he had believed the caresses would last. Or perhaps he had seen marriage as a way of not falling in love, so that as soon as he had felt there was a danger he might fall in love he had hurried to propose to her, just as Swann, that sophisticated creation of Proust, proposes to Odette in the firm belief that marriage will kill desire. Who knows? He was a man who knew how to listen and be tender, and he drove women mad.
The fact that she had seen through him in no way diminished the intensity of her delusion. She may never have believed in his love, but she had certainly believed in his caresses. And when his caresses were absent she dreamed of his hands. Large hands with broad, flat fingers, the balls of his thumbs sensitive, always warm, his palms dry and smooth. He knew how to caress without wanting to possess, without wanting to press on to the relief of a quick orgasm. He would start with her face: ploughing her forehead with his fingers like a tired field, smoothing and dividing her hair, letting it slip like water through his hands. Then her mouth and neck, where his thumbs would slowly search out her veins and press them lightly as if to feel the slow flow of her blood. Then her shoulders which he released from their many burdens with delicate little taps. He would fill his hands with her breasts and sometimes suck them as if to reach milk closed inside. Then he would warm her sides and belly, pressing them gently with the heat of his closed fists. He would skim lightly over her sex because the moment had not yet come for that secret nucleus of naked flesh. Then he would pass down her back pressing as he counted each individual vertebra, in sheer wonder at the architecture of bone on which the physical equilibrium of the body depends. Then her legs and feet, first separating her toes before bringing them together again in a warm, affectionate gesture; running his knuckles over the arches of her soles, knocking against her mercurial restlessness in tribute to the grace of her walking.
His caresses were an end in themselves, possessed of an angelic sensuality. She had loved them for that. But in order to caress, Luca needed to feel a dedication that could not last. It was not his ambition to transform this ceremony of delights into a permanent habit. And practising the daily routine carelessly was not even conceivable. A perfectionist cannot be expected to turn into a slipshod repeater of predictable gestures when it comes to the adorable art of caressing.
In fact his caresses were over after barely a year of marriage. And with the end of his caresses, something changed in his character. Tenderness gave way to resentment, a subtle brutality that insinuated itself into his words and gestures. Had this been the meaning of his caresses? To use the intelligence of his hands to restrain a cruelty hidden in some part of his soul? Maybe. But he had been generous and she was grateful to him for that.