Don't Move by Margaret Mazzantini, John Cullen Page B

I’d left them unfinished and hadn’t ordered anything more. Manlio was trying to follow me, borrowing my mood, but meanwhile he was nibbling at everything in sight: grilled peppers, fried ricotta, broccoli rabe.
    I asked him, “Do you go with whores?”
    He didn’t expect such a question, not from me. He smiled, poured himself a drink, made a clucking sound with his tongue.
    “Do you or don’t you?”
    “How about you?”
    “Yes, I do.”
    “Come on.” He didn’t know where this was leading; maybe he was thinking about Elsa. It didn’t seem possible to him that a man with such a wife would pay for sex. However, the shift in the conversational tone didn’t displease him; he could handle it, and it went with the wine. “Me, too, from time to time,” he said, and now he seemed like a little boy.
    “Do you always go with the same one, or do you change?”
    “It depends.”
    “Where do you take them?”
    “We stay in the car.”
    “Why do you go with them?”
    “So we can pray together. What a dumb-ass question.” He laughed, and his eyes disappeared.
    It’s not a dumb-ass question, Manlio, but you realize that
too late, while you’re looking at a passing tourist with her arm
around a giant in Bermuda shorts. Now you have a bitter look on
your face.
    Later, I told him it wasn’t true, I didn’t go with whores. He was annoyed, but he kept on laughing. His cheeks grew flushed; he said that I was being an asshole—“an asshole, as usual” is what he said. In the meantime, however, our boredom had vanished. The evening had taken a turn; we’d entered more intimate territory, where there was a flicker of something that resembled the truth, and as Manlio walked to his car, he looked like a sincere man, a desperate man. We said good-bye quickly—a pair of claps on the shoulders—took a few steps in the dark, and already we were far apart, each on his own sidewalk, free of any residue left by the other. Ours was a sanitary friendship.
    I could tell you, Angela, that the shadows of the streetlights seemed to fall on my windshield like dead birds, and that in their falling, I saw everything I didn’t have raining down on me; I could tell you that the torrent of shadows came down faster and faster as I sped along, and that I felt a growing desire to fill that absence with something, anything. I could tell you many things that might sound true now but maybe aren’t true at all. I don’t know the truth; I don’t remember. I only know that I was driving in her direction without any distinct thought. Italia wasn’t anything. She was like the black wick in an oil lamp. The flame burned beyond her, in that greasy light that enveloped the things I needed, all the things I didn’t have.
    I turned onto the long, tree-lined road and drove past the indistinct commercial figures standing by the roadside. The beams of my headlights struck bodies floating in the night like jellyfish, painted them for an instant with dazzling light, and then returned them to the darkness. Near one of the last trees, I slowed down and stopped. The girl who came over to my car had legs covered with black net and a perfect face for her line of work: sour and infantile, agitated and gloomy—the face of a whore. She croaked something, perhaps an insult, as I pulled away and watched her disappear in the rearview mirror.
    She was home. That night, she was home. The door opened slowly. The dog came around the side of the house and approached me, sniffing hard and wagging his tail between my legs. He seemed to recognize me. And now Italia was there in front of me, standing with one extremely white hand on the door. I pushed her inside with my body. Maybe she’d already been sleeping, because her breath was stronger than usual. I liked it. I grabbed her by the hair, forcing her to bend her neck, to stoop down. I rubbed her face against my stomach. Right there, where the thought of her caused me pain.
Heal
me, heal me. . . .
I bent down and ran