Thirty‑two. Thirty‑three

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.

Thirty‑ three

“Have you any idea how idiotic you’ve been? ” he says to me, without losing his temper but with his eyes moving from one side of my face to the other.

“What was I supposed to do? She’s testing us, ” I reply.

“But testing us with whom, with what? ” he says, angry now.

“With you, ” I snarl candidly.

“You know you’re an utter maniac? ” he shrieks, his voice almost as high‑ pitched as a woman’s.

I defend what’s mine.

“That poor thing came to me in tears, saying that you left a threatening message under the door of the shop! You’re completely out of your mind! ” he continues.

“Aha! …so…she went to see you…, ” I exclaim furiously. “She came to see me, too, did you know that? ”

“When? ” he asks, startled.

“First, you tell me if you’ve fucked her. Or more simply: tell me if you’re in love with her or what…, ” I say, pointing a finger at his chest.

“Fucking hell! Nothing like that, but how on earth can I get you to believe me? ” He’s desperate and he puts his arms around me. “Why do you go on hurting yourself? Why do you think she means anything to me? ”

I pull away from him and look him straight in the eyes.

“Because I can feel it, ” I whisper.

After an incalculable period of time suspended between silence and complete impotence, he asks, “When did she come? ”

“She left just before you got here. She flew out of the window, ” I say, pointing to it.

“What the f–, ” he exclaims.

“Dickhead. I didn’t kill her. She came in a different form, and I recognized her. She wanted to pull a fast one on me, the whore, but she didn’t succeed, ” I say proudly.

He shakes his head and goes into the other room. Without a word.

Fear holds me by the hand now and my trembling never ceases. I’m trembling now as I write, I tremble when I’m eating, I tremble as I let the water flow over my body, I tremble as I look at him, as I stare at the sky, I tremble as flocks of birds make shapes and patterns in the Roman sky. I spend hours staring at them from the window, as they perform pirouettes and veer to the right and then to the left, making circles, whirlwinds, they look like hairy moles, then they plunge down, down, to the branches of the trees.

I tremble. I tremble as everything vibrates in the world, in the air. I tremble because I know that there’s still life out there and I can’t live it.

I need to look at the life I have inside me, that dark life, disconnected from all the others; I need to live inside myself, because outside no one can let me live. I thought he was capable of letting me live and wouldn’t let me die one day at a time. But that’s what he’s doing, and I’d rather he killed me all of a sudden, once and for all, with a well‑ aimed blow.