Three. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen

Two

Were you OK yesterday? When you got home and lit yourself a cigarette from the gas ring in the kitchen, when our cat rubbed against your neck, breath quivering, when you shut your eyes and folded your legs like a fetus, what did you think about? Were you OK?

My torments began when I said good‑ bye to you at the airport, when I came over and said, “So, did you get all that? You check in, go up those escalators and then through the metal detector, ” and I pointed to it with a finger, “after which you go toward the gate marked on your boarding card, and you’re there. Call me when you get home. ”

That’s what I said to you, and then I moved away, came back, and repeated it all word for word. I even repeated my gesture, pointing to the metal detector.

Finally I kissed you softly, our bodies apart, and whispered in your ear: “Thank you. ”

You, in a voice less harsh than mine, replied, “Thank you, darling, thank you. ”

That same evening I made love with Thomas. “Let’s do it as though it’s the last time, ” I said to him, looking him straight in the eyes.

He hesitated for a moment, then asked, “What do you mean? ”

“Don’t be stupid…nothing apocalyptic. Just an excess of love. ”

“Why? ” he asked, dumbfounded.

I shrugged. “Because I’ve had enough of giving myself away piecemeal. I need to stretch to infinity. ”

“But you always do that, ” he said.

I shrugged again and snorted.

No, I’ve never stretched to infinity. I don’t know infinity. What I know is boundaries, paralysis, impairment. But not infinity.

“Let’s do it this way. Imagine one of us dies tomorrow; imagine that one of us has to go traveling for years and years and then we had to see each other again after a long time…or maybe never see each other again. How would you love me, how far would you go? ”

He was extremely handsome, I was extremely beautiful. We were warmed by the light from the lamp on the chest of drawers, which bathed our faces with specks of color.

When we made love he didn’t exist, but he did exist and so did you. I existed, just an apparition. You and he loved me, tore me apart and kissed me. I saw your nose, his mouth, your ears, and his eyes. I felt two hearts beating rather than one, and when my body surged I shouted, “I love you so, so much, ” and I was saying it to you as well.

You and he, guardians of my soul and my body. Presumptuously appearing on the terrace of my life, you watch and protect it as I have not asked you to, as I do not expect you to.

His sweat smelled like your neck, and his neck smelled of you. Then it was over. My eyelids lowered like the curtain after a show, and my soft, gratified breath merged with the smells of the room. And you stayed.

You’ve never made an attempt on my life or my liberty. You’re so frail, and I’m too heavy. Now and again I’ll have to silence all my theories of life to give more room to that extreme but gentle feeling I have for you.

Maybe you deserve that.

“A one‑ way ticket for Rome, ” I said.

The man at the travel agency looked at me and smiled. “Where are you off to this time? ”

I looked at him for a moment, tracing every feature of his face inside my head.

“Home, ” I replied.

He lowered his head as a sign of reverence and, looking up at me furtively, said, “Straightaway. ”

As he clicked away at the keys of his computer, I studied the brochures behind me. From the Congo to Laos, I could have gone anywhere. From Paris to Hokkaido. From Valparaiso to Athens. Endless possibilities spread out behind me, with many promises and few demands. I could have begun my escape right then, since I was there. But I was scared of the lack of responsibility; it’s always frightened me.

“So you’ve decided on Rome? ” the man asked.

I turned around and nodded with a smile.

“Do you want me to make you an electronic ticket? ”

“No, please don’t. I’d like to be able to hold it in my hand. ”

It was like suddenly turning in to the road I’ve seen so many times on the horizon from my street, the one I’ve been traveling down for such a short time, but I feel as though I’ve lived a hundred years already, half of those years spent well, the other half so‑ so, to put it optimistically.

It’s always struck me as impossible to reach the point where the two roads cross, so that I’ve indolently traveled the whole journey without wondering where it would take me and what I would do when I got there.

All of a sudden I’ve found myself at the entrance to that unknown street, which a gilded sign identifies as “Likely Street. You can go straight ahead or turn left. ”

So I looked back and saw my footsteps leading to the place where the parallel lines of the street joined in a perfect perspective: the tarmac was half destroyed, ruined by hail, rain, the wind, cratered and worn to the thinnest of crusts. I saw trails of blood where people had fallen; here and there I saw corpses lying naked and gaping. No trace of you. Just hints of a mammalian smell that spread along the lifeless, deserted street. I took another look at the gilded sign: it looked like the entrance to paradise. But someone once told me that there is no better paradise than your own personal hell (or perhaps my conscience told me that, to give me an alibi? ). In any case, I decided to tempt fate, and rather than continue along that gray street, which I reached by passing through a black hole shouting, “Light! Light! ” at the top of my voice, I sniffed the air and turned left, holding both hands crossed over my heart.

I took the airline ticket and held it delicately with two fingers: my ticket of entry.

As I left the agency, a thin line of cold made my skin ripple. I wrapped myself up in my overcoat (the red velvet one, the one Omella thinks looks like a dressing gown) and climbed the street called the Acchianata di San Giuliano. I decided to pass by Piazza dei Crociferi, where the excess and luxury of the baroque vie with the degradation, death, and decomposition of the graffiti‑ scrawled houses, with flowers inexorably sprouting and withering from their stones. That’s where I had my first kiss, where I came to blows with some half‑ wit; farther over is the staircase where, one evening, I sipped a beer with a boy I didn’t know, who didn’t even ask for anything in return.

But no memory reawakened sensations that had been covered over by time.

So I went down, down as far as Piazza dell’Elefante, and all I saw were the gray coats of the council workers.

I walked on toward the fishmonger’s, and even there the only thing that came to mind was that time many years ago when you, Grandmother, and I came here to buy fish, and I was struck by the sight of that starfish on the back of the swordfish, still alive. A few, a very few memories, most of which are pointless and faded now.

If someone asked me which city I hated the most, I would say Catania, and I would give the same reply if they asked me which city I loved the most.

You’ve always told me that being far from your own land is the most painful thing imaginable. You’ve always told me that if and when I went away, homesickness would grab me by the throat and drag me down into a pit of sorrow and despair.

I told you that as far as I was concerned, one place was pretty much the same as another, and actually Catania was the place I feared most, because Catania swallows people up.

Darkness, ash, lava cooled and congealed. In spite of the sun forever peeping among the baroque reliefs and the white lace curtains of the old houses in the center, the whole city seems plunged in a big, endless, abysmal gloom. Catania is dark. It’s as though it were sliding into a vast, gaping mouth, being pulled by an exhausted train. Catania’s even like that when it seems that life can’t be contained by its small squares and its stone‑ scratched streets, at night when young people, bag snatchers, whores, drug addicts, families, and tourists all arrange to meet in the same place, at the same time, leading to exotic, chaotic orgies. Catania is beautiful because it has no hierarchies, because it has no time, because it is unaware of its fascination. It’s beautiful like a naked woman, white‑ skinned and with black, black hair, opening her eyes wide when a brute clamps his hand over her mouth, hissing, “Don’t breathe, you whore. ”

That’s what Catania is like, a whore who doesn’t speak, because someone is suffocating her.

I am a deeply Catanian creature. I have both life and death within me. I’m not afraid of either, but sometimes my life tends toward death.

Often I hear people who have been away from home for too long being told that the only thing drawing them back to their own beds is the need to take possession of their own roots, to eviscerate the earth and reappropriate their roots. Roots? What the fuck kind of roots are they talking about? We aren’t trees; we’re human beings – human beings who have sprung from a seed and remain seeds for all eternity. If anything, the only place we have ever put down roots is in the womb.

And, if one day I want to return back to my origins, if I want to eat my roots, I’ll just have to rip open your belly, climb in with my whole body, and bind myself to you with a cord that is nothing but a fiction now.

But it wouldn’t do me any good. I want to go on being a seed. I want to be my origin and my end, and I don’t want to rot in the ground, any ground; I want the wind to carry me forever. I don’t want ordered spaces.

It isn’t really spring yet, even if technically it is. The sky is still so wintry…and the faces of the people are wintry, too. The Colosseum stands dramatically at the heart of the city, its fat ass in the middle of the road, exposed to everyone. I try as hard as possible not to look at it when I go shopping. I don’t like the Colosseum. It looks like a middle‑ aged man trying to convince everyone of his virility, even though he lost it ages ago. I can’t bear it. It wears me out. I walk down the noisy street, bags in hand and eyes lowered; I walk so fast that by the time I get to the front door my calves are hard and tense and my fingertips are sawn in half by the plastic bags, fat and swollen like a pack of sausages.

I suckled on the Catanian nipple for too short a time; perhaps I was weaned too soon, but it was what I asked for.

What did I do with all those years, in that dark, cramped chasm? How could I have failed to notice that Catania was taking over my soul, when I hadn’t even granted it permission? Why didn’t you tell me?

Did you conspire with the city to make me stay there forever, clinging to your breasts? You constantly told me that I would be homesick for my city and my family, that if I went elsewhere I’d find loneliness and conflict, and that there’s nothing finer than waking up in the morning and feeling the sea breeze stinging your nostrils. I don’t care: I hate the sea and I’m really fond of loneliness and conflicts.

Shame, though, that you got it wrong.

Sorry, I’m being harsh. I’ve always had a deviant vision of other people’s thoughts; perhaps you didn’t think all those things. But perhaps you hoped them, just a bit.

Three

I didn’t love him, I felt no tenderness for him, I wasn’t particularly fond of him. I exploited his adulthood, his experience, the security he was able to give me.

He exploited the childish part of me that I guard so jealously, because it’s small, insignificant, soft, and yet precious. We exploited our bodies with the excuse that we were freeing our souls. He said I had given my freedom to him, that with me he felt like a falcon. But what had he given me?

I gave myself to him because he was the only one at that moment in time who could lick my wounds. Lick them, open them up, and make them burn. And then lick them again.

I told myself that his body was exactly the same size as the deep abyss that had formed inside my own. I thought his body, stretched out on top of mine, might suddenly heal the bloody wound that opened up a little more each day, each day another centimeter.

Then I let him love me, and he let me love him.

At the precise moment when I came, I already felt sated and full, and wanted to be alone with myself. He turned his back on me and I curled up in a fetal position on the bed, closed in on myself. I masturbated.

Then he left me alone and stayed motionless on the unmade bed, completely naked, one arm over his head and his eyes fixed on the ceiling, lost in thought. His body still pulsed with erotic discharges, his virility a powerful presence.

In those moments of silent stillness, when the darkness of the hotel room was lit at intervals by the headlights of passing cars, I wondered what he would be left with if the natural perfume in which he was drenched were assimilated, swallowed, fixed within me. He would become an arid oak tree, about to die of dehydration, and his roots would be firmly planted in the earth, but the sap would no longer course through that rough and imposing trunk.

Four

There’s a sofa, and the soft blue light from the television screen. The sofa is covered with a pale fabric patterned with big brown flowers, and I’m wearing a tartan blanket. I’m four years old or maybe younger. I’ve spent the whole day with my father, and we’ve been watching the elections of the new president of the Republic. I haven’t the faintest idea who he is, but Oscar Luigi Scalfaro is a nice name – it sounds pretty. It reminds me of my heroine, Lady Oscar. You’re in bed with a headache, Dad soon joins you, and I’m left alone on the sofa, listening to the music of the cartoon, whispering, “Lady Oscar, Lady Oscar, the blue of your eyes holds the rainbow…your sword…in battle…don’t ever change, don’t ever change…Lady Oscar…” My eyelids close heavily.

I fall into a deep sleep, not at all disturbed by the flashes from the television.

Someone is lying beside me, zapping the TV with the remote control.

An itch in my legs wakes me all of a sudden, my eyes are half closed, and in a voice still thick with sleep I ask, “What are you doing? ”

Another voice replies, “Don’t worry, I’m just checking to see if you’ve become a lady. ”

I go back to sleep, immersed in a field of brown flowers that Lady Oscar is elegantly felling with a clean sweep of her sword.

Blood drips from the stem of a flower.

Five

I awake with a start, drenched in sweat, the sheet wrapped around my legs. I’m almost tangled, trapped as mosquitoes are trapped in tears.

Thomas is lying beside me; he’s gone to sleep with his glasses on and with II Manifesto in his hand. I slip off his glasses, turn out the light and tell him I love him, lay my head on his chest and feel his heart squeaking, like a malfunctioning mechanism. Not regular, human beats, just a squeak, an attempt to stay alive. My first thought is this: until a few months ago, his heart would have exploded at contact with my face. Now it squeaks. What do you need, I wonder, the grease of love?

Back in Catania: I was dressed the way Claudio liked, and I didn’t mind going along with his aesthetic tastes and his desires: I was the one he desired. The fact that I liked him was neither here nor there, because pleasing him was the most important thing. We were sitting outside, at the table of a restaurant just behind Piazza Teatro Massimo.

Summer was just over, and autumn was softening the faint tan that colored my skin. The streets were calming down after the chaos that had become a constant lurking presence in the cobbled streets. The table stood at a slight angle in the uneven street. Reggae music filtered from the restaurant, and I couldn’t help smiling when his face assumed an expression of amazement: I was well aware that this kind of music was as remote from him as it could be. He would have preferred somewhere discreet, a setting to which he could have applied adjectives like “delicious, ” “exquisite, ” or “charming. ” He would have called this place “noisy, ” “vulgar, ” and “young. ” But all he did was look at me and recoil from this place as best he could.

“It’s extraordinary how you manage to make me say things I’ve never said even to myself, ” he said.

I just smiled. I wasn’t listening to him.

“When I talk to you about my ruined dreams, about the new life you’ve given me, for the first time I feel as though I’m not being judged. As though someone thinks highly of me. Do you understand what I’m getting at? ”

I nodded, looking utterly bored.

He stopped talking for a few minutes and then, gazing at me intensely, asked, “What do you think of me? ”

The last thing a man should ever do is ask me what I think of him.

I don’t think anything – what’s to think? If I love you I love you, if you disgust me you disgust me. Is that so hard to figure out? And you want to know what I think? I think you shouldn’t give a fuck what people think of you. I think you’re selfish and cowardly, and blind, too. I think you were so greedy for me that you didn’t even feel, while you were fucking me, that my body was as motionless and unresponsive as the expensive white wine in this big glass.

He looked at me with big eyes, like a whipped dog. He waited.

I took a sip of wine and replied, “I think you’re a good person. ”

“You know, I’ve never felt free. Not even with my wife, ” he said, not paying the slightest attention to the words I had just uttered.

I didn’t feel like talking. He felt like talking. I let him go on.

“I always have this vise around my heart, my brain, and my tongue, making me passive and powerless. Do you have any idea what that means? Do you? ” His voice had grown reproachful; it was as though he were telling me off.

I shrugged and said gently, “No, I don’t know. I’ve always loved my freedom. ”

His lips trembled and he went on, more violently than before. ‘You’re a little girl, and there are some things you can’t understand. You don’t know what it feels like to be deprived of yourself, to see your own dreams carried away by rational, conscious, adult people! I was like you: I didn’t want to grow up, I felt free. But someone ripped me off. And they’ll rip you off, too, ” he said, clenching his teeth.

“That’s one point of view, ” I replied.

“You don’t know a thing, you haven’t a clue how I feel. ”

No, and I don’t want to know.

“I do know, Claudio. But please, don’t keep going on at me about this. ” “What do you want to hear? That life is beautiful, that people love you, that it’s all one long funfair? ”

I smiled broadly and exclaimed, “Why not? ”

He started to cry, his voice growing muffled. Tears spilled from his eyes and trickled down the rough skin of his face.

I looked at him compassionately and whispered, “Everything will be fine. We should go home – you’ve got to calm down. ”

He nodded and moved away from the table without saying good‑ bye.

Left on my own, I went into the café and smiled as the music bounced off the walls.

A hundred times good night.

Six

His eyes were unsteady; they looked as though they were drenched with tears, they looked stunned, fragile, malleable. And yet they raped, they crushed, they pleaded, they reproached.

The parked car in a country lane at the feet of Etna, the rain that had finally stopped crashing against the windshield, the smell of rotten earth, my panties and stockings scattered around inside the car, my hair heavy with damp, his penetrating breath, and the smell of his aftershave. The tissues on top of the glove compartment, the purple, yellow, and red colors of the flowers, the trucks passing behind our heads, the bee convulsively striking the window. Sweat, saliva, and humors, the stench of damp fabric, the clink of his belt, the sun timidly reappearing, passion, haste, anxiety, jealousy, impotence, inconsistency, illusion, lies, indifference to the point of grief.

Everything was there, everything but love.

Seven

My skin turned transparent. All of a sudden all my pores opened up until my body became a single great pore. My body like glass. My face, too. My veins, my arteries, my capillaries. I can see everything. The red and purple highways crisscross to form a beautiful cobalt blue. My ovaries are two little chickpeas suspended in midair. One is bigger and lower than the other, because of my period, which is due any minute. Inside, a red and lumpy pulp chums around like juice in a juicer. My kidneys are two beans, just as I imagined them when our teacher tried to explain their shape to us in primary school. I’m starting to think of my body as a vegetable garden. My lungs are coated with black moss, here and there, and the white splashes are rare now, rare but very beautiful.

My heart. My heart pulses, veiled by a nylon stocking, like the ones bandits wear. A little condom with life inside it. A bandit on the run from death but also from love and the extremity of pain. Because too much death has lain in wait for him, too much pain has buried him, too much love is strangling him.

My brain. My brain. My brain. Nothing but dreams. Many photographs and no sound.

When I was in the car with you and Dad, lots of things came into my head. I loved the car journeys we took; I liked driving all around the coast of Sicily, admiring the landscape that passed alongside us while infinite quantities of thought‑ molecules wrought havoc in my little brain. It was surprising how the coastline changed over a distance of only a few kilometers: from sand to cliffs, from cliffs to rock pools, to sand again and then, unexpectedly, to hills. A big, green hill ending in a sheer drop to the sea.

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 school: 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? ”

“Nothing.. it’s just a feeling. ”

He looked at me and nodded, and I immediately understood what he was thinking.

I screwed up my eyes as tightly as I could and screamed, “Do you think I’m crazy?! ”

He said I was getting reality muddled up, that the world I thought I lived in wasn't the real world.

“Open your eyes, Melissa. You’re creating a reality that has nothing to do with the reality around you. ”

I took him by one arm and hurled him out, with such violence that a scrap of his checked shirt stayed in my hand, tom out by my furious fingers.

Then I shut the door behind him and felt dizzy for a moment. Exhausted, I went to the bathroom and noticed that in my haste I had left a blood‑ filled Maxi Pad in the basin. It doesn’t matter; blood doesn’t bother anyone. I went out onto the balcony; the washing machine had finished its cycle. I stood and looked inside the dram for a while – I don’t know why. My head is so full of thoughts it seems empty. I’m sated with happiness, happiness is exhausting me, demoralizing me. I ask myself every day, every moment, if this happiness will end and when. I’m too apocalyptic, I know. And maybe masochistic. Yes, I’m well aware of that. The messages sent by the world are exasperating: nothing lasts forever, everything comes to an end, everything withers, everything dies. And if it didn’t happen to me, well, what about that? If I stayed this age forever, if I remained intellectually ignorant, if I stayed in love forever, what about that?

I know, I can’t accept change. I’m too much of a traditionalist, too attached to my memories and, paradoxically, attached to fantasies about the future. That’s why my present is so restless, even if it’s happy: I mix the past, the future, and the present as though an exquisite sweet might emerge from the dough. A sweet that does you good because it hurts. A sweet that’s good because it’s full of clashing ingredients.

There is nothing positive in this wealth of feelings. It’s an orgy, Mum. An orgy of feelings…in which it’s impossible to work out who’s winning, in which you can’t predict whether the ultimate winner will be death or life, pain or love. It’s an infinite chaos, bound by many little interlocking rings that have slipped into my throat, dragging me to places that are never the same, to more and more exasperating states of mind.

I’m disturbed to the depths of my marrow. I don’t know how to hold back my instincts; I allow myself to be corrupted by my obsessions, by my most violent passions. Do you think it’s just because I’m Sicilian? Or is it because I’m fucking terrified of losing the most beautiful part of me? Of losing Thomas?

Eleven

I shook him awake; I was breathless.

“There are ghosts, I can hear them, ” I whispered so they couldn’t hear me.

“A dream, ” he said, “a bad dream, calm down. ”

No, I couldn’t. I really did hear that hand striking the wall opposite the bed. It beat out a rhythm, creating a sweet melody. Through half‑ open eyes I had seen a tall, black female figure.

Go to sleep, go to sleep, don’t be afraid. Go to sleep, go to sleep, don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid.

This morning the memory of the night has already passed, but a strange attraction leads me to long once more for the black darkness. I hear a weird echo, I sip the careless milk of my thoughts, my legs are naked and crossed, I look impatiently at my cigarettes, because seven hours without smoking is far too long.

The stench of the dirty dishes in the sink grows from day to day. This morning I decide to clean the house; I swear I’m going to do it. I’m serene, even if that echo sounds like a Tibetan chant that won’t leave me alone.

He says, “Come and see. ”

With my lips open in a smile, I go look across the narrow corridor, and I think this morning I really do feel like making love. I think that when I go into the room I’ll throw him on the bed and fuck him without even looking at him. He’s just had a shower and he’s damp. I can already feel the skin of his feminine back brushing against my fingertips.

“Come and see, ” he repeats.

I don’t go in. I stop in the doorway, with one leg against the wall and a smile that hints broadly at what I have in mind.

He doesn’t notice but points at the wall.

A black hand. Or, rather, not a hand – three fingers. Three black fingers imprinted on the wall, as though someone had set fire to his own skin and then pressed it against the plaster.

I just say, “I told you so, ” and feel something clenching inside me, and someone tells me that I have to hide because no one knows how to listen to that echo.

Twelve

I realized I was in love with him one late summer evening. An electric evening, in a Rome that was colder than usual, turned in on itself as though to apologize for making too much noise, for being too beautiful, too schizophrenic, too old. The Rome of emperors and usurers, of politicians and tax collectors, lost girls and girls in miniskirts and stilettos, the Rome of vineyards and dairies, churches and brothels.

Sipping my Vin Santo, I studied the images running across the screen. The TV enfolded and contained me, and for the first time the eyes and words of the scarecrow presenters were directed at me, like rough‑ edged swords waiting to be used. What was I like? I wasn’t. I wasn’t me. I was a caricature of myself, I was the most exasperating version of myself, I said all the things I would never have wanted to say, because what I want to say is too crazy and too confused for anyone to understand. I was only pretending to cope.

Martina and Thomas were lying on a big leather sofa; Simone and I had our eyes glued to the TV.

“Tommy, would you give my back a rub? I’m aching like a beast…, ” said Martina.

He brought his cigarette to his mouth and held it tightly between his lips, letting it dangle. He kept his eyes half closed to shield himself from the smoke that brought tears to his eyes; his long eyes, with their almost girlish lashes, looked even longer, two crescent moons.

Martina turned her back to him, and he started rubbing her vertebrae with two fingers, strong and extremely delicate. I thought about how good it must be to have two big hands like those on your body, and the smoke from his cigarette filling my nostrils. At that moment I desired him, and not just physically.

At some point I even thought of asking him, “Thomas, would you rub my back, too? ” and I swear I nearly did.

But I don’t know how it happened…

That very evening, on an enormous Empire‑ style bed, Claudio lay on top of me and I halfheartedly opened my legs. By now I was wearing nothing but a black silk bra.

The smell of old wood gave me a comforting sense of warmth. The darkness engulfed everything. I was wearing the necklace with the pearl that you gave me, the only spark of light in the room. My thoughts were like long, long shooting stars whose tips I couldn’t find. Claudio’s attitude toward me was a mixture of jealousy and envy, and if I didn’t dedicate enough time to him he was hurt and made me feel guilty. He cried on the phone, begging me not to leave him, mortifying my happiness. “I can’t wait for this dust cloud to settle, ” he said. “I want to have you all to myself. And don’t kid yourself, they’ll forget about you soon enough. ”

No, Claudio, I’m not kidding myself. I hope deeply that they do forget me, that no one remembers me…and you, Claudio, you’ve got to forget me, too.

Claudio entered me and started moving back and forth. I felt my swollen belly, and felt his penis as something strange now, something unfamiliar. I turned my head to one side as I felt his abdomen rubbing against my pubic bone.

With my nipples erect I wanted to torture him.

After five or six thrusts he usually started sweating, water pouring from his forehead. When he was on top of me, the drips ran along his face and reached my lips, and I licked them wearily away with my tongue: they were very salty and bitter, with a vague taste of sperm.

That night he didn’t get as far as perspiration, because at the third thrust I stopped him and said, “I’m in love with someone else. I can’t do this. ”

He broke away from me without a word, and I turned to face the other side of the bed. In front of me there was a huge mirror framed in an old wardrobe, and I stared at myself for a few moments that felt like an eternity. I studied myself and saw once again that same lost, passive expression that has accompanied me throughout my life.

“You aren’t in love with someone else, you’re in love with your success, and you think I’m a hopeless fool who’s barely capable of satisfying your whims, ” he whispered a few minutes later.

“Please stop, ” I said quietly, tired of hearing him say that success had altered me. The only thing that had changed was his vision of me; I felt that he was hostile and saw me now as something that belonged not to him but to everyone. I was starting to despise him – not hate him, but despise him.

“It’s the writer you met at that party, isn’t it? ”

“If that’s what you want to think, go ahead and think it, ” I replied indifferently. “I’m stupid as always…I always tell you everything. But things are going to change from now on, you’ll see, ” I said, facing away from him and speaking very quietly.

I heard him crying but shut my eyes. I couldn’t have cared less about his victimhood.

He just cried for a while and soon worked out that it wasn’t going to move me. His tears flowed whenever he needed someone to give him a little understanding. I wished him black with bruises from my fists, white from my withheld caresses. With my nipples erect, I wanted to torture him.

The sheets rustled faintly, and before I realized what was happening I heard a croaking sound. I looked at the mirror on the wall in front of me and saw in its reflection that the sheet behind me was slightly raised, and that his hand was gripping his penis. Lying in bed next to me he was masturbating, partly in order to come, but also partly, perhaps, to take his revenge on me.

I felt him touching himself and shut my eyes; I tried to sleep and feel nothing more.

With my nipples erect, I wanted to torture him.

He got up and went to the bathroom, from which I heard his final, long moan of pleasure.

The next morning we had breakfast in silence. I never saw him again.

In a sense I felt like an orphan, though one with two fathers: a natural one, for whom I have never felt anything, not rancor, rage, or love; and one whom I had taken it upon myself to love and on whom I had imposed the task of loving me.

With my nipples soft, freedom arrived.

Thirteen

I’m naked at the computer; he’s in the kitchen washing the dishes and whistling. I like noise when I’m writing – I like a racket. He puts on a CD and I, still writing, find myself moving my hips and making my revolving chair move back and forth. The curtains aren’t closed yet and the windows are high, typical of a seventeenth‑ century palazzo. Everybody can see us, and we’re happy for anyone to watch us making love. Perhaps that’s typical of people in love: showing everyone you love each other. I wander along the corridor, brushing the walls with my fingers. I enter the sitting room and stroke the bonsai tree, standing on tiptoes. He has his back to me, and I wrap my arms around his chest and start rubbing my pelvis against him. I turn him resolutely around, look at him coyly, aware that I’ve made a movement he likes. I turn around, rub my ass against him, and he delicately strokes my back; I sit down on the edge of the cold, wet sink, the contact makes my whole skin shiver, and my body swells upward.

He takes me there and then, grandiosely stretches his body out on top of mine, and whispers words I like into my ear, warming my earlobe with his breath.

Then I hear a coughing fit and open my eyes: I see a woman leaning over the table, coughing convulsively; she looks up and smiles wickedly at me. She’s blond, wearing a flower‑ patterned dress, and she’s thin and coarse. I look at her for a moment longer, then I look at him, close my eyes, open them again, look back at the woman and see that she’s disappeared. I can still hear her coughing. I draw him toward me and devour him.

His tongue bleeds, dripping red on my neck.

Fourteen

Lovely, absolutely lovely – that film was fantastic. A touch of genius in that shot.

And what do you think of the new director in competition at the Berlin festival? And Cannes? And Venice?

Well…I…

And what do you think about Edgar Allan Poe, about Cé line, about the fin de siè cle poets? Don’t you think their words blend perfectly with their ideas?

Yes, of course…but…

And did you see the Paul Klee exhibition? And the Tintoretto? Did you see Tarantino’s latest, and Buñ uel’s first?

No…

Your brains are in a state of collapse. You all know how to know. I don’t.

I’m a Homo sapiens who hasn’t evolved yet. I’m still in the initial phase and I intend to stay here.

They’re all motionless pillars of ash. Compacted ash, impossible to break. I’d so love to walk on their soot. Their stillness frightens me yet, at the same time, fascinates me.

Someone once said that we’re surrounded by dead people. Dead people walk in the street, eat, drink, make love and read lots of books and see lots of films and know lots of important people. But dead people, unlike living people, can’t have palpitations; they can’t have emotions. They use only their intellects, their minds, and they tend to show off their own culture.

I’m scared of dead people.

I’m scared of the thought that one day I will die, too.

At the beach at Roccalumera there was an enormous NO SWIMMING sign, and yet it was the most crowded beach in the whole of eastern Sicily. There was no sand, there were no rocks. Just pebbles. Pebbles that got stuck between your toes, that dug into your tender skin.

“Here, put on your rubber shoes so it won’t hurt, ” you said.

I always hated those horrible rubber shoes. They made me feel ugly, like one of those old German tourists with little white hats and those inevitable rubber ballet shoes.

I preferred to hurt myself, and when I did a lot of walking I even ended up liking the sensation, that gentle torture that I inflicted on my childish skin.

I didn’t like going down to the beach in the morning; the ideal time for me was early afternoon, straight after lunch.

“You can’t go swimming, not right after lunch, ” you, Grandma, and my aunts all chorused, while the men inside snored, back from their night’s fishing.

“No, I swear, I’m not going to go swimming. I’m going to lie down in the sun, ” I said seriously.

“You’ll get sunstroke! ”

“I’ll wet my head every now and then, ” I replied wisely.

I set off with all the paraphernalia, accompanied by Francesco and Angela, who had previously dispatched me to persuade you to let us go.

We crossed the street, the three of us hand in hand, and once we reached the shore, we threw the inflatable mattress into the water and lay down on it. We played at betting who would get their belly wet first. The water was extremely cold and it felt as though all the food we had just consumed was freezing in our stomachs. After initial unpleasant experiences, we had grown used to jellyfish. Around here they’re small but lethal. We brought olive oil, Nivea Creme, and butter, mixed them all up together, and greased the places where we got stung. In contact with these substances, our skin fried like bacon and eggs. Then we put a hot stone on top, gritted our teeth, and beat our feet on the ground.

Francesco, small as he was, managed to impale the jellyfish with his dagger. On the water’s edge there were dozens of decomposing jellyfish, melting in the sun and giving off steam.

While he was cruelly killing jellyfish on the beach, Angela and I ran in under the shower, sure that no one could see us. We let the water run over us and sang the theme song from a television music program: “Brancamen‑ ta! Ta‑ ra‑ ta‑ ta…, ” we crooned, writhing like snakes in a bowl.

You and my aunts arrived at about five o’clock. From a distance, washed out by the sultry air, you looked like characters from a Sergio Leone film. The heat, the silence all around, you armed with your fighting gear: sunglasses, cushions for your backs, hair bands, eye masks, sarongs, transistor radios, Tupperware containers full of biscuits, fruit, and panini made with oil, tomato, and salt – my favorites, the ones that burned my chapped lips.

We looked at one another from a distance and felt like thoughtless beasts, instinctively assessing an opponent’s weak points. After a few minutes you started running and shouting at us, “You scoundrels, you’ve been swimming, haven’t you! ”

“Eight wasted years! You’re eight years old and you’ve wasted them all! ”

“I’ll have your soul, you wicked child! ”

“Mum, how are you going to take my soul? ”

It seemed a lovely image, you making a hole in my stomach and pulling out my soul with your hands, as though it were a rope.

We felt an exponential joy: the joy of our aquatic play and the joy of transgressing your stupid rules. Why…if you didn’t want us to go swimming after eating, why on earth did you bring food to the beach?

At seven o’clock, when the sun started shrinking and the sea turned gray, down came Grandma, the Boss.

The Boss was no taller than us children, she had short fair hair, big green eyes, her skin was smooth as silk, and her breasts were worn out from having six children in as many years, her belly swollen and hard. And her thighs…the most beautiful thighs I have ever seen. Slender and sleek, without a hint of cellulite, toned and soft.

The Boss came down to the beach even more heavily armed than you, with jars of water, trays full of food, boxes of ice creams, and big bunches of bananas. The Boss filled us with awe, and we were forced to eat the bananas beneath her gaze.

“Eat it up for your Nonna, it’ll do you good. ”

At the eighth banana, if one of us said, “That’s enough, Grandma, I’m full, ” she cast you a glance so grim that you wet yourself, and it was a good thing our swimsuits were wet already.

Our stomachs became endless storehouses of food – we could have kept going for months. It was her way of expressing her affection.

Then, down came Dad and my uncles with their own gear: cameras and movie cameras. They said they wanted to photograph us children, but in fact their lenses were always trained on the bottoms of the women in the sea. You got furious, but still you took the sun, mumbling, “What’s so lovely about that bum, what do they see in it? It’s flabby, sagging…”

Every weekend the band came and set up in the central courtyard surrounded by the villagers’ houses. I watched it all, sitting on the concrete step, letting my legs dangle because I couldn’t touch the ground with my feet. There was Signor Sibilla, who, when his wife went away, flirted with his neighbor, a fat, vulgar woman who gave off a strong, rancid smell. Then there was the Witch, who came down covered in sequins, her eyes surrounded by gleaming, green eye shadow, her black, black hair down to her shoulders, always wearing tight, fluorescent clothes. She sat down next to the band’s keyboard player and tried to follow the music so she could play the songs on her pianola the next day. She was our band for the rest of the week.

Grandma’s thighs, on these occasions, were sublime, especially as she danced. “Put your hands in the air, shake them all about…Do it when Simon says, and you will never be out. ”

They were sublime both to me and to Signor Loy, the Sardinian who looked like a tarantula. Every weekend the band had to leave earlier than planned because Granddad started punching Signor Loy, who, undaunted, went on slobbering over Grandma.

Queen of the summer, she was more radiant than the rest. She gleamed, and her brilliance was more powerful than the sun’s reflection. More glittering than the Witch’s sequins.

Fifteen

Sometimes I think about you. No, that’s not true, not sometimes: I think about you all the time. And every time I do a tear slips out, from only one eye. If Thomas asks me why I’m crying, I reply that it’s nothing, that I’ve focused my eye on a point on the horizon and that’s why my iris is stinging. I’m thinking about you and your unbroken solitude.

The pizza has just turned up and you’ve been searching through the money box to find coins because the boy has no change. When he (and his pimples) have disappeared, you laugh and say, in Sicilian dialect, “Che scemu carusu ”–“What a stupid boy. ”

You sit down on the sofa with your legs crossed and switch on your TV, trying to find a film that might move you. A costume drama, preferably, with a tight, romantic plot. Francesco and Morino are sniffing at the tomato on your pizza; you hold out a little bit of sauce on one finger. You’ve already opened the windows, the terrace with the little garden is a few feet away, and you catch the freshness of the newly watered lawn. It’s lovely to see Ornella lying on her belly on the carpet, head on a cushion, face pointing straight at the TV. But her eyelids are closed – she’s just gone to sleep.

I love hearing her tell you to fuck off when you call her to go to bed, to get between the sheets. She rises to her feet, looks at you with her direct, imperious eyes, and says, “You’re a fucking idiot, why the hell did you wake me up? ”

You don’t reply, because if you did the two of you would come to blows.

If I’d been with you, I would have sat still with my cheek pressed against your bottom and would soon have gone to sleep. But now you’re alone and the cats have followed Ornella between the sheets.

You’ve lit a cigarette and sat yourself down in front of the television again. Your eyes, which are made of water, are drowning in an ocean of tears.

When you wake up, you realize that it wasn’t my voice calling you but the infuriating crackle of the umpteenth unextinguished cigarette making the umpteenth hole in the same old sofa.

You go to bed knowing that I wasn’t calling you and you weren’t able to get pissed off and say, “What the hell do you care if I sleep here on the sofa? ”

You slink off to bed, tears drying on your cheeks.

I’m in another world, falling in love.

I think about me, about you, about him, about me and him, especially. Your eyes are made of water, mine of fire, his of earth. Out of the three, I’m the one who can endure your dominion, the one who loves it.

Sixteen

I advanced, slowly at first, and then, once I had managed to touch his thigh with my knees, my movements became even more enveloping. I circled him lightly with an arm. His body stiffened and his breath seemed to falter for a few moments. He stayed motionless, blocking off all contact with the world. With my outstretched little finger I gently touched his erection. It was powerful, yet incredibly light. I had never touched a real erection before. That was why my hand moved higher and higher until it reached his heart. When he lightly brushed my fingers, I realized that nothing would be as before.

“Do you want to sleep with me tonight? ” I asked him.

We were at Cosenza in Calabria, and the university where I was staying had put two rooms at my disposal, one for me and the other for my companion.

“It’s horrible sleeping on your own…, ” I went on, plunging farther and farther into my embarrassment.

“OK, ” he replied, his cheeks growing fiery.

The smell of his neck was intoxicating, he was young, he was a child. He was everything I wanted.

“The scent of your breath…, ” he whispered suddenly in the night, “I love the scent of your breath. ”

I clutched his T‑ shirt with my fingers and closed my eyes.

He imprisoned my breath in a glass jar, and he sniffs it every time he makes love with me.

Seventeen

The train’s progress accompanies our movements, our sighs creating a light and liquid countermelody with sudden surges of emotion, our lips brushing, a race to kiss each other’s bodies, tongues darting disturbingly, imperiously, the night’s darkness, broken here and there by street lamps scattered along country roads, reconciling troubled fantasies and provocative imaginings, my thighs gripping his body, pressing him tightly, as I cried out to him, “You’ll never want to go! Why are you getting away? Why won’t you come back? Why won’t you suck my breath? ”

My palms against his warm, maternal body, my neck thrown back, my eyes holding back their tears, perhaps tears of blood.

The echo has started whispering in my head again, too faint to be properly understood, but loud enough for me to perceive a breath of wind, the north wind. All of a sudden I came, giving off so much energy that he too felt an electric shock in his belly. Blood, blood everywhere. Blood in my head, blood in my eyes. Empty, my veins.

Then I trace a line with the fountain pen my father gave me, the one I use to write with; I want to work out whether I’ve still got any blood inside me. Empty, completely empty.

I just remember him going back to his cabin and shouting. I remember his dirty fingers and his forlorn and distant eyes.

Distance, one day, will take him to the very rim of the segment of our life; he will go far from me and end up in her arms. When he is with her, mists will rise up and thicken, and keep him from remembering. While he is with her, I will die slowly, allowing myself to be dragged along with those mists. That way at least I’ll see him from close‑ up.

A poisonous tapeworm nests in our bellies; the slides of our life are printed on its body. Each time the tapeworm moves, a slide settles underneath our navel, and the light projected outside enchants us. We stand and stare at it; then we burst into tears.

At first I couldn’t work out what it was that stirred in my belly. I thought it was a child that didn’t want to grow and didn’t want to be born, a child that wanted to stay immersed and suspended in my amniotic fluid. But then I saw images in my head, and those images were born of pain.

That pain was born of the movements of my entrails, my guts, my flesh.

A pain with its own roots in my past, which I can’t cough away: I have to live it and I have to watch it.

The tapeworm helps me do that, the tapeworm loves me.