A Little Lumpen Novelita

XII

Sometimes, while I was looking for the safe and going from room to room, moving things and putting them back again, I would hear — or rather sense — the presence of Maciste, in his black bathrobe or naked, moving through the darkness of the house following the sound of my footsteps, the almost imperceptible noises I made, until suddenly he would grab me from behind, wrapping me in a bear hug, no matter how careful I tried to be, no matter how stealthy my movements.

And then, when I was in his arms and he was bearing me off through the darkness, or when I was under him or next to him, in the bed or in the gym, every inch of my body slathered with lotion, I would give thanks that I hadn’t found the safe, at least not yet.

And sometimes I imagined sleeping there every night, with Maciste, and I imagined hiring a woman to do the cleaning (because in my dreams I didn’t intend to be his slave), and convincing him to go out every once in a while, maybe not to the movies but for a walk, like two normal people or two people who pretend to be normal and by pretending actually are normal or become normal, and I saw myself calling a taxi once a week, on Fridays maybe, to come and pick us up and take us to a nice restaurant where we would have a leisurely dinner, with conversation about all kinds of things, or to take us downtown, where I would buy clothes for him at one of those stores for big men, and then clothes for me, and I even imagined myself going to the movies with Maciste, and describing what was on the screen, the way companions of the blind are supposed to.

But the reality is that I hardly ever slept at his house, and also that after dreaming for a while about our life together I would start to wonder where the hell that safe could be.

Late at night, when I got home and my brother and his friends were half-awake, we argued about it. The Bolognan was getting impatient, he said we’d didn’t have all the time in the world, and sometimes he talked about breaking in, armed with a knife or whatever, but when he said this he trembled, he and the Libyan and my brother, the very idea made them tremble, and it wasn’t hard for me to steer them back to the original plan.

Other times we talked about Maciste’s story, about the movies he’d made that had been such hits. For weeks my brother even looked around the neighborhood video stores and then downtown for the movie called Maciste vs. the Tartars, which according to the Bolognan was the best, but he never found it.

I was glad he couldn’t find it because I didn’t like the idea of seeing Maciste as a young man, when he still had his sight and his hair and a perfect body. I didn’t want to see that because I knew what was to come, twenty years later. But once I dreamed about the movie. First, two armies clashed on a dry plain. Then Maciste fought twenty warriors inside a palace and defeated them all. At some point a woman appeared in a tunic of gauzy silk and kissed Maciste. The two of them stood on the edge of a cliff. An abyss yawned at their feet and wisps of smoke rose on the horizon. Then I saw Maciste sleeping in a room with marble walls and a marble floor. And in the dream I thought: this is a movie, he’s not really sleeping, he’s just pretending to sleep, and in fact he’s awake, and only then did I realize that Maciste, making the movie, was in the present, and I, watching the movie or dreaming that I was watching it, was in the future, Maciste’s future, or, in other words, nothingness. Then I woke up.

Anyway, I preferred to see him the way he really was when I went to visit him at his house, twice a week.

At the salon things weren’t good. Though in some ways they were better than they had been. I was usually exhausted when I got there and sometimes I stumbled through the day like a sleepwalker. Once the boss, who was an understanding woman, pulled me into the bathroom and pushed up my sleeves, looking for needle tracks on my arms.

“I’m not doing drugs,” I said.

“What’s wrong with you, Bianca? You’re looking worse and worse.”

“I’m sleeping badly,” I said.

It was true. Sometimes I’d go for weeks getting three or four hours of sleep a night.

Once I was tempted to ask Maciste how he lost his sight. The Bolognan and the Libyan had warned me never to raise the subject. According to them, the last person to show any curiosity about Maciste’s blindness had ended up with a couple of broken ribs. It wasn’t their warning that gave me pause. I knew Maciste would never lift a hand against me. But there was something that stopped me, something else.

Sometimes I thought it was a good thing that he had gone blind, because that way he would never see me, never see my face, never see the look on my face when I was with him, which wasn’t the look of a prostitute or a thief or a spy, but an expectant look, the look of someone hoping for anything and everything, from a kind word to a life-changing declaration.

There weren’t many kind words, because Maciste didn’t talk much, but there were kind gestures. And there were no life-changing declarations, or at least none I recognized at the time, though since then I’ve come to remember each of Maciste’s words as a key or a dark bridge that surely could have led me elsewhere, as if he were a fortune-telling machine designed exclusively for me, which I know isn’t true, though sometimes I like to think so, not often, because I don’t lie to myself the way I used to, but every once in a while.