Adam's Rib by Antonio Manzini Page A

the apartment, that much is certain. “What if I gave up the apartment and just stayed in a hotel? Wouldn’t that be better?”
    â€œYou’ve never liked hotels,” she says to me. “You can’t stand them, and you never could.”
    She’s right. I don’t know why, but I’m always afraid someone is going to walk in with a vacuum cleaner when I’m naked or in my underwear. There’s no real privacy in hotels. They know everything about you. What time you wake up, how you like your coffee, and even who you call on the phone.
    I’m freezing. I take off my jacket, my sweater, and my flannel shirt, and I start trembling from the cold. This fucking chill has gotten deep inside me, and there’s no way to get it out of my bones. You can’t still have snow in March. “You can’t still have snow in March,” I say to Marina when she appears in the door. She replies: “That’s the way it is in Aosta. And if you ask me, you might still have snow in May if you’re not careful.”
    She’s holding her notebook in one hand. She’s always on the hunt for new words. She looks for them in the dictionary, or else maybe she reads them in books, writes them down, and learns them by heart. Once I looked in her notebook. It’s half-empty. If you ask me, she tears the pages out, like a calendar. “You want to know the word for today?” she asks.
    â€œSure, go ahead and tell me.”
    She runs toward the bed, barefoot. That’s what Marina always does. She walks around barefoot at home, gets cold, and then dives under the blankets. She says it’s more fun that way.
    â€œAll right then, the word for today is: hemiplegia . Paralysis of one side of the body.”
    â€œParalysis?”
    â€œYes. Physical. Or paralysis of the soul.”
    â€œAm I hemiplegic?”
    But she doesn’t answer me. She puts her little notebook on the side table, pulls the blanket up to her chin, and says “Brrrr,” with laughing eyes. This is my moment, now it’s my turn. I know that she’ll get angry, but I also know that she’s only pretending. I slip under the covers.
    And sure enough, she gets angry.
    â€œYou stink of cigarettes!” and she tries to shove me away. But I just grab her tighter.
    â€œCome on! At least take a shower first!”
    Nothing doing, what are you thinking? I stay right there. And I wrap my arms around her. After all, it’s always the same story. When we get in bed at night, she’s always cold and I’m always warm. Then during the night she steals all my heat and leaves me like this, frozen and alone on my half of the bed. In the morning, she’s warm and I’m cold. And if I try to embrace her so I can warm up, she mutters and grumbles and turns her back on me. She always makes me laugh. Marina is possessive about her warmth.
    She always has been.
    I’m not possessive about mine. I’d give her every last bit of it.
    I’d give her every last bit of it, if I could only wrap my arms around her again. Even just one last time. Just one last time, and after that, nothing.

SATURDAY
    D ’Intino was flat on his back in bed 14 in room 3 in the trauma ward at the Umberto Parini Hospital. His nose was wrapped in bandages and he had a gash on the right part of his forehead that the tincture of iodine made even more horrifying. He had both eyes closed and was breathing slowly. The physician on duty had accompanied the deputy police chief to the victim’s bedside.
    â€œNasal fracture and a couple of shot ribs,” he’d told him.
    Rocco looked at the patient. He was amazed to discover that he felt something that came dangerously close to pity for the poor man. Until just yesterday, he’d have happily shipped him off to some police station in the middle of the Maiella mountains, but now the sight of him, so helpless, in that hospital bed almost stirred a sense of