The Scent of Your Breath

Seven

My skin turned transparent. All of a sudden all my pores opened up until my body became a single great pore. My body like glass. My face, too. My veins, my arteries, my capillaries. I can see everything. The red and purple highways crisscross to form a beautiful cobalt blue. My ovaries are two little chickpeas suspended in midair. One is bigger and lower than the other, because of my period, which is due any minute. Inside, a red and lumpy pulp chums around like juice in a juicer. My kidneys are two beans, just as I imagined them when our teacher tried to explain their shape to us in primary school. I’m starting to think of my body as a vegetable garden. My lungs are coated with black moss, here and there, and the white splashes are rare now, rare but very beautiful.

My heart. My heart pulses, veiled by a nylon stocking, like the ones bandits wear. A little condom with life inside it. A bandit on the run from death but also from love and the extremity of pain. Because too much death has lain in wait for him, too much pain has buried him, too much love is strangling him.

My brain. My brain. My brain. Nothing but dreams. Many photographs and no sound.

When I was in the car with you and Dad, lots of things came into my head. I loved the car journeys we took; I liked driving all around the coast of Sicily, admiring the landscape that passed alongside us while infinite quantities of thought-molecules wrought havoc in my little brain. It was surprising how the coastline changed over a distance of only a few kilometers: from sand to cliffs, from cliffs to rock pools, to sand again and then, unexpectedly, to hills. A big, green hill ending in a sheer drop to the sea.

I woke first and we set off early in the morning. I couldn’t bear you waking me up, I didn’t want to get in your way. So I got up and washed and by the time you woke up you found me clean and neatly dressed. It was quite normal for you to find me already up and ready — you never paid me any special compliments. Perhaps if I had a child I would praise him, every now and again, just to make sure he didn’t feel unwanted…to avoid making him feel incompetent — that’s it. While Dad never even noticed what I was wearing, you studied me for minutes at a time.

“Why did you put on that skirt? It doesn’t suit you, it needs washing.” “What are you doing with those shoes? Going dancing? Put on a pair of sneakers…wear the ones from last year, the dirty ones. We’re going to the seaside, to Grandma’s. We’re going to spend Easter there.”

And yet, on those trips, I felt fine. I left the window closed because I hated the wind filtering through the window of the moving car…it felt like a sword sent flying through the air, or a cowboy’s lasso. I liked the sound of the radio and I liked the sound of your voice when you spoke to Dad. From Mia Martini to Mina, from Riccardo Cocciante to Loredana Berté: those were the sound tracks to my thoughts. Those songs you used to sing at the top of your voice, the songs I learned by heart, whispering them shyly because I was ashamed of my hoarse, masculine voice. Loves shattered, lost, abandoned: those were the themes of my childhood. I often fell asleep. It was amazing, sleeping in the car, enclosed in an artificial belly kept alive by an engine. I almost felt as though I were returning to your womb. How did it feel to have me inside you? Did I feel like an intruder, or like part of you? Did I weigh that much? You’ve always been so small, so tiny…didn’t having another life inside you hinder your movements? And did you ever talk to me? What did you say?

Only yesterday I asked Thomas to suck my breasts as though he were sucking milk. Lately I’ve been feeling maternal all the time. Anything that makes me feel like a woman is a blessing.

Seriously: you know what I thought during those long, long journeys? I thought, One day I’d like to publish a diary, I’d like to write about my life. I really need to think about keeping one…even if I know I would quickly get tired of writing.

One day I asked Dad to give me a nice diary with a big lock. For a week, every day when he came home, I said, “Dad, have you got the diary?” I always asked him when we were having our dinner, always in a low voice, and I asked him when the table was already plunged into silence — I didn’t want to interrupt you. Every time I asked him if he had brought the diary I felt guilty. When he said no, I wasn’t angry: it was the most obvious answer to such an indiscreet question. If he had brought one home, he would have given it to me straightaway — what was the point in my asking?

Weeks later you took me with you in the car, you let me out, and we went into the store. The skeletal lady behind the counter, the one with the boiled-fish eyes and the fine, fine hair, was the mother of one of my classmates in primary school: I liked her, she was like a fairy dressed up as a witch. All my schoolmates were afraid of her, while I actually thought she was beautiful. You pointed toward a shelf with notebooks, pencils, pens, and other kinds of writing equipment: a diary had been thrown in the middle. The cover was smooth and white, a dirty white, with a picture of a blond girl in a leather jacket sitting on a motorbike. The diary was very thin — there couldn’t have been more than twenty pages in it. And the lock looked extremely fragile, golden and covered with little brown stains. It was the only one they had. It was a leftover from the eighties. Although it was horrible I was extremely happy and absolutely loved it. The fairy disguised as a witch charged you fifteen hundred lire for it.

But my usual capriciousness soon led me to abandon the project. I wrote only five pages before I got tired.

I’ll write when I can’t help saying something, I promised myself. I hated to write anything meaningless.

So, when I thought the moment had come to bury my soul and keep only my material alive, pure and lewd, some perverse angel whispered in my ear, “Write. These emotions will never return. If you write, a scrap of soul will be left in your breast.”

I never had anything to lose, and in pretending to keep a diary I ended up writing a novel.