Numero Zero

10 Sunday, May 3

Braggadocio was crazy. Perhaps he’d made the whole thing up, though it had a good ring to it. But the best part was still to come and I’d just have to wait.

From one madness to another: I hadn’t forgotten Maia’s alleged autism. I had told myself I wanted to study her mind more closely, but I now knew I wanted something else. That evening I walked her home once again and didn’t stop at the main entrance but crossed the courtyard with her. Under a small shelter was a red Fiat 500 in rather poor condition. “It’s my Jaguar,” said Maia. “It’s nearly twenty years old but still runs, it has to be checked over once a year, and there’s a local mechanic who has spare parts. I’d need a lot of money to do it up properly, but then it becomes a vintage car and sells at collectors’ prices. I use it just to get to Lake Orta. I haven’t told you — I’m an heiress. My grandmother left me a small house up in the hills, little more than a hut, I wouldn’t get much if I sold it. I’ve furnished it a little at a time, there’s a fireplace, an old black-and-white TV, and from the window you can see the lake and the island of San Giulio. It’s my buen retiro, I’m there almost every weekend. In fact, do you want to come on Sunday? We’ll set off early, I’ll prepare a light lunch at midday — I’m not a bad cook — and we’ll be back in Milan by suppertime.”

On Sunday morning, after we’d been in the car for a while, Maia, who was driving, said, “You see? It’s falling to pieces now, but years ago it used to be beautiful red brick.”

“What?”

“The road repairman’s house, the one we just passed on the left.”

“If it was on the left, then only you could have seen it. All I can see from here is what’s on the right. This sarcophagus would hardly fit a newborn baby, and to see anything on your left I’d have to lean over you and stick my head out the window. Don’t you realize? There’s no way I could see that house.”

“If you say so,” she said, as if I had acted oddly.

At that point I had to explain to her what her problem was.

“Really,” she replied with a laugh. “It’s just that, well, I now see you as my lord protector and assume you’re always thinking what I’m thinking.”

I was taken by surprise. I certainly didn’t want her to think that I was thinking what she was thinking. That was too intimate.

At the same time I was overcome by a sort of tenderness. I could feel Maia’s vulnerability, she took refuge in an inner world of her own, not wanting to see what was going on in the world of other people, the world that had perhaps hurt her. And yet I was the one in whom she placed her trust, and, unable or unwilling to enter my world, she imagined I could enter hers.

I felt embarrassed when we walked into the house. Pretty, though spartan. It was early May and still cool. She lit a fire, and as soon as it got going, she stood up and looked at me brightly, her face reddened by the first flames: “I’m... happy,” she said, and that happiness of hers won me over.

“I’m... happy too,” I said. I took her by the shoulders and kissed her, and felt her take hold of me, thin as a mite. But Braggadocio was wrong: she had breasts, and I could feel them, small but firm. The Song of Songs: like two young fawns.

“I’m happy,” she repeated.

I tried to resist: “But I’m old enough to be your father.”

“What beautiful incest,” she said.

She sat on the bed, and with a flick of a heel and toe, she tossed her shoes across the room. Braggadocio was perhaps right, she was mad, but that gesture forced me to submit.

We skipped lunch. We stayed there in her nest until evening; it didn’t occur to us to return to Milan. I was trapped. I felt as if I were twenty or perhaps a mere thirty like her.

“Maia,” I said to her the next morning on the way back, “we have to go on working with Simei until I’ve scraped a little money together, then I’ll take you away from that den of vermin. But hold out a little longer. Then, who knows, maybe we’ll go off to the South Seas.”

“I don’t believe it, but it’s nice to imagine: Tusitala. For now, if you stay close, I’ll even put up with Simei and do the horoscopes.”