The Scent of Your Breath

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.