I knew then that nothing new would happen. It was the start of a well-known rite that I had experienced often as a young woman, hoping that if I changed men frequently my body would eventually come up with the appropriate response. Instead it was always the same, identical to what I was now expressing. Polledro had opened the robe to suck my breasts and I began to feel a slight pleasure, not localized, as if warm water were running over my numbed body. Meanwhile, with one hand, careful not to disturb my hand that was holding his member under the fabric, he was caressing my sex too ardently, excited by the discovery that I wasn’t wearing underpants. Still I felt nothing but that diffuse pleasure, enjoyable and yet not urgent.
For a long time I had been sure that I would never cross that threshold. I had only to wait for him to ejaculate. On the other hand, as always, I felt no impulse to help him, in fact I barely moved. I knew intuitively that he expected me to undo his pants, take out his penis, not confine myself to holding it. I felt that he was agitating his pelvis in an attempt to transmit hesitant instructions. I was unable to respond. I was afraid that my already slow breathing would stop completely. And I was paralyzed by a growing embarrassment, because of the copious liquids spilling out of me.
Even when as a girl I had tried to masturbate this had happened. The pleasure spread warmly, without any crescendo, and immediately my skin began to get wet. However much I caressed myself, the only result was that the liquids of my body overflowed: my mouth, instead of getting dry, filled with a cold saliva; sweat ran down my forehead, my nose, my cheeks; my armpits became puddles; not an inch of skin remained dry; my sex got so wet that the fingers slipped over it without purchase, and I could no longer tell if I was really touching myself or only imagined that I was. The tension of my body wouldn’t increase: I was left worn out and unsatisfied.
Of all this Polledro for the moment seemed unaware. He pushed me toward the bed, and, in order to keep us from falling together with the velocity caused by his weight, I sat down cautiously and then submissively stretched out. I saw his shadow hesitating, for a few seconds indecisive. Then he took off his shoes, his trousers, his underpants. He got on the bed and sat astride me, on his knees, resting lightly on my stomach, without putting his weight on me.
“So?” he murmured.
“Come on,” I said, but didn’t move. He groaned, his chest erect: he was hoping that finally his sex, large and thick in the shadowy light, would mingle its desires with those he attributed to mine. Since nothing happened, after a deep breath he reached out one hand and began rubbing me between the legs again. He must have thought that like that he would finally induce me to react: out of passion, out of maternal pity, the modality of the reaction didn’t seem important to him; he was only looking for the stimulus that would excite me. But my compliance without participation began to disorient him. I thought, as always in those circumstances, that I should pretend a yearning and uncontrolled passion or push him away. But I didn’t dare to do either one or the other: I was afraid I would throw up, because the result would be earthquake-like waves. I had only to wait. Besides, I could no longer feel his fingers: maybe he had withdrawn in disgust, maybe he was still touching me but I had lost every sensibility.
Disappointed, Polledro took my hands and brought them around his sex. At that point I realized that he would never enter me unless he was sure I wanted him to. I also noticed that his erection was beginning to recede, like a defective neon light. He realized it, too, and shifted forward so that his stomach came close to my mouth. I felt for him a vague sympathy, as if he really were the child Antonio I had known; and I wanted to tell him that but my voice wouldn’t come out: he was rubbing slowly against my lips and I was afraid that any slight, even imperceptible movement of my mouth would be so uncontrollable that it would lacerate his sex.
“Why did you come to the shop?” he asked, annoyed, sliding back along my body, which was dripping with sweat. “I didn’t come looking for you.”
“I didn’t even know who you were,” I said.
“And all that nonsense? The dress, the underpants. . what did you want?”
“I didn’t come to see you,” I said, but without aggression. “I just wanted to see your father. I wanted to know what had happened to my mother before she drowned.”
I realized that he wasn’t convinced and was trying to caress me again. I shook my head to let him understand: enough. He squatted over me for an instant. He pulled back abruptly with a gesture of repulsion as he felt me soaking wet.
“You’re not well,” he said uncertainly.
“I’m fine. But even if I were sick, it would be too late to cure me.”
Polledro turned over beside me in resignation. I saw in the half light that he was drying his fingers, his face, his legs with the sheet; then he turned on the lamp on the night table.
“You look like a ghost,” he said, gazing at me, without irony, and, with an edge of the shirt that he was still wearing, began to dry my face.
“It’s not your fault,” I reassured him and asked him to turn out the light again. I didn’t want to be seen and didn’t want to see him. Thus, lost and desolate, he too closely resembled Caserta as I had imagined him or had actually seen him forty years earlier. The impression was so intense that I even thought of telling him right then, in the dark, what I saw crowding around his face, which was so different from the puffy and thuggish face he had showed me all morning. Speaking, I wished to eliminate both me and him, in that bed, different from the children of long ago. We had in common only the violence we had witnessed.
When my father found out that Amalia and Caserta were seeing each other secretly in the cellar — I thought of telling him slowly, gently — he wasted no time. First of all he chased Amalia along the corridor, down the stairs, through the street. I smelled on him the odor of oil paints, when he went by, and it seemed to me that he himself was brightly painted.
My mother fled under the railway bridge, slipped in a puddle, was caught, and punched, slapped, kicked in the side. Once he had punished her sufficiently, he brought her home bleeding. As soon as she tried to speak, he struck her again. I looked at her for a long time, bruised and dirty, and she looked at me for a long time, while my father explained the situation to Uncle Filippo. Amalia had a look of wonder: she stared at me and didn’t understand. Then, irritated, I went off to spy on the other two.
My father and Uncle Filippo had gone into the courtyard together and I could see them from the window: they were tin soldiers making serious decisions. Or officers to cut out and paste in an album, one beside the other so that they could speak privately. My father wore boots and had put on a bush jacket. Uncle Filippo was wearing an olive-green uniform, or maybe white, or black. Not only that: he had a gun.
Or he stayed in his regular clothes, even though in the shadowy light of room 208 a voice was still saying: “He’ll kill him, he took the gun.” Maybe it was those sounds which made me see my father in his boots, Uncle Filippo in uniform, with both arms hanging beside his chest and the gun in his right hand. Together they chased the young Caserta, in his camelhair coat, up the stairs to his house. Behind them, at a distance, so that she wouldn’t be beaten again, or because she was worn out and couldn’t run, there was Amalia in her blue suit and the hat with the feathers, who was saying in a low voice, more and more bewildered: “Don’t kill him, he hasn’t done anything.”
Caserta lived on the top floor but first they caught him on the third. The three men had stopped there, as if for a secret meeting. In fact they had produced in unison a tumult of insults in dialect, a long list of words ending in consonants, as if the final vowel had been thrown into an abyss and the rest of the word were whining mutely in displeasure.