A Little Lumpen Novelita

XIV

Still, I kept looking for the safe.

I wandered around the house, peering into corners and behind paintings, as my brother and his friends had instructed me, and the safe never turned up.

Only grime, dust, spiders’ nests, patches of crumbling wall, patches of old wallpaper protected from the passage of time, lighter, closer to their original color, though upon close examination I was left with the thought that these rectangles were actually more damaged, as if their pallor or their newness was a rare and degenerative disease.

During my forays in search of the safe, the whole house seemed alive. Alive in decay, alive in neglect. But alive.

Let me explain: my own apartment was just an apartment to me. Smaller every day, if anything, with the echoes of thousands of hours of television, sometimes the echo of my father’s and mother’s voices, but just an apartment. It was dead.

Not Maciste’s house. Maciste’s house was a promise and a disease, and I spun from promise to disease, feeling on my skin when my body — or the speed impressed on my body — passed from one state to another, the iridescent promise, the disease, an oblique falling or gliding, wandering, touching everything with my fingertips, until I heard Maciste’s voice calling me, asking where I was.

Sometimes I didn’t answer. I covered my mouth with one hand and breathed through my nose, shallowly, since I knew that, even more silent than me, he would come looking for me, gliding along the dark hallways of the house until he found me by my breathing or the heat of my body, I never knew which, and then everything would start over again.

He grew more generous, and the money that he gave me after each visit gradually increased. Sometimes I followed him, since I imagined he got it directly from the safe, but actually he took it from a drawer in the kitchen, and the amount there was always more or less the same, one hundred and fifty euros, enough to pay me and the woman or teenager (I never saw her, since she came during the day and I came at night) who bought provisions for him at a nearby store and sometimes left him plastic containers of food.

I’m ashamed of this now, but one night I told him that I was in love with him and asked him what his feelings were for me.

He didn’t answer. He made me cry out in his gym, but he didn’t answer me. Before I left at five that morning, feeling hurt, I told him that things would probably end soon. I told him this in the foyer, with one hand on the doorknob. When I opened the door and let in the light from a streetlamp on Via Germanico, I realized that I was alone.

For days I could only think of him with hatred. To make him angry, during our next meeting, I asked how he had been left blind.

“It was an accident.”

“What kind of accident?” I asked.

“A car accident. I was with some friends. Two of them didn’t live to tell the story.”

“And who was driving?”

Then Maciste focused his blind eyes on my eyes, as if he were really seeing me, and he said that he didn’t feel like discussing the subject any further.

I watched him get up with some difficulty and head without hesitation for the open door. I was alone for a long time, lying on the wooden bench, my body smeared with liniment, waiting for him and thinking my own thoughts, about the future that was opening up like a mirror of the present or a mirror of the past, but opening up regardless, until I got bored and fell asleep.

Back then I dreamed a lot and almost all my dreams were quickly forgotten. My life itself was like a dream. Sometimes I stared out a window in Maciste’s house and thought about dreams and life, which meant thinking about my own dreams, so quickly forgotten, and my own life, which was like a dream, and I got nowhere, nothing cleared inside my head, but just by doing this, by thinking about dreams and life, a vague weight was lifted from my heart or what I thought of as my heart, the heart of a criminal, of a person without scruples or with scruples so warped that it was hard for me to recognize them as my own.

Then a sigh of relief would escape my throat. I would gasp and smile as if I had just risen from deep waters, out of air, oxygen tanks empty. And immediately I would feel an urge to leave the window and go running in search of a mirror to look at my own face, a face that I knew was smiling and that I also knew I wouldn’t like, a fierce and happy face, but my face in the end, my own face, the best among many other distorted faces, a face that emerged from the death of my parents, from my neighborhood where it was always day, and from Maciste’s house where I was gambling with my fate, but where my fate for the first time was entirely my own.

None of these certainties — none of these sensations — lasted very long. Thank God, because if they had I would have died or lost my mind.

I was flying high, I was hallucinating, but sometimes my feet were planted firmly on the ground. And then I thought about the safe and the money or the jewels that Maciste had hidden away and the life that awaited us, my brother and me (and also in some way his no-good friends), when we at last got our hands on the treasure, a treasure that was useless to Maciste, since as we saw it all his needs were taken care of and anyway he wasn’t young anymore, whereas we had our whole lives ahead of us and we were as poor as rats.

And at moments like these, instead of imagining money, for some reason I imagined gold coins. A safe like Maciste’s intestines, black and fathomless, with the gold coins that he had amassed making gladiator movies shining in their depths. It was an exhausting vision. And a pointless one.

One night, as we were making love, Maciste asked me what color his semen was. I was thinking about the gold coins, and for some reason the question seemed pertinent. I told him to pull out. Then I took off the condom and masturbated him for a few seconds. I ended up with a handful of semen.

“It’s golden,” I said. “Like molten gold.”

Maciste laughed.

“I don’t think you can see in the dark,” he said.

“I can,” I said.

“I think my semen is getting blacker by the day,” he said.

For a while I pondered what he meant by that.

“Don’t worry so much,” I told him.

Then I went to shower and when I got back Maciste wasn’t in his room. Without turning on the lights, I went looking for him in the gym. He wasn’t there either. So I went to the porch room and spent a while there looking out at the garden and the shadow of the neighboring walls.

Maciste’s semen wasn’t really golden.

I can’t remember the exact moment when I realized that I would never see the money, that I would never spend Maciste’s treasure on pretty, frivolous things. All I know is that soon after I realized it I closed my eyes and went looking around the rest of the house for Maciste. I found him in the bookless library, sitting under the icon of St. Pietrino of the Seychelles and I climbed astride my lover or my master, it was the same to me, and let him make love to me without saying or feeling a thing.

Before dawn, on my way home in a taxi, I thought I was going to die.