the walls. Food goes from the cooking area to the table through a little door that gives a wondrous quality to everything you eat. And the bedroom is like a monk’s cell in a monastery by the sea, with the bed under a little window with a grating through which the light seems to come from far away, along with the sound of bells and the salt sea air.
Plus at Mauro’s house you really enjoy music. Not that there’s any lack of music at our house but – no offence to my brother, who’s brilliant – it’s one thing to hear the same exercises or the same passage for hours and hours until they’re perfect, and another to lie back in an armchair and listen to whatever you like most. Zia’s afraid all this will end. She’s afraid of not feeling Mauro’s body weigh intimately and marvellously upon her own. And this time she doesn’t know which war plan to take inspiration from, because no strategy would be able to hold out against an enemy offensive taking the form of a sudden departure, another sea, another love. When she told him ‘I love you’ Mauro got angry and even gave her a smack on the bum, instinctively, and begged her not to use big words, because the two of them screw, laugh and talk infinitely well. That’s all. And I know what bombs are preparing to fall on Zia’s head. And on Nonna’s, too, who seems reborn now that her daughter’s with Mauro, and says, ‘Finally, a normal man.’
But I haven’t forgotten that for Mauro, screwing, laughing and talking represent a greatly diminished idea of love.
A refuge. That’s the only possible solution: to fit out a refuge so that it’s possible to endure all this.
Because it’s become clear by now that none of the surviving Sevilla Mendozas can afford to nick off quietly just like that, the way Mamma and Papà did.
We have to stay. We’ve made one another an unspoken promise that we’ll stick around.
26
Inside the shark
Unfortunately the refuge proved necessary. Very much so. You couldn’t hear anything from in there, because there was a great silence after Mauro De Cortes stopped inviting Zia over and I learnt that my vet had now taken in that other puppy. This time Zia didn’t lie down on the floor and she didn’t run around the house hitting her head against the walls. She washed, ate and went to her university classes. She didn’t make reference to any battles, nor did she compare us to the victors or the defeated. After the atomic war, we were simply wiped from the face of the earth.
The refuge, a kind of shark’s belly, contained all the things the sea had brought after millennia of history; the only thing was, the life of a survivor brought no satisfaction. And above all, we couldn’t understand what had caused the atomic bomb to explode.
Nonna would come to see us and keep asking, ‘But what did you do to him?’
‘Nothing.’
So Nonna would try to understand it, speaking aloud in long soliloquies. She said maybe Zia had behaved like a madwoman. Or maybe Mauro De Cortes didn’t want to go out with a woman who’d been with so many men and Zia had then confirmed this perception by giving herself to him too quickly, without ever making him work for her. Or maybe she hadn’t been sufficiently clear and he hadn’t understood that she truly loved him and instead he had thought that since she played around, so could anyone. Or maybe she had been all too clear and had ended up giving him her whole life story and he’d got bored because there was nothing more for him to discover. Well, she must have done something. Because Mauro De Cortes is a good, delightful, normal person and he doesn’t do things for no reason.
I thought that in the end it wasn’t Mauro’s fault if for him, having sex, laughing and talking weren’t love. And didn’t he have the right and the duty to look for it elsewhere? He surely wasn’t causing all this hurt on purpose and he certainly hadn’t been the one to press the button on the atomic bomb. And nor
Plus at Mauro’s house you really enjoy music. Not that there’s any lack of music at our house but – no offence to my brother, who’s brilliant – it’s one thing to hear the same exercises or the same passage for hours and hours until they’re perfect, and another to lie back in an armchair and listen to whatever you like most. Zia’s afraid all this will end. She’s afraid of not feeling Mauro’s body weigh intimately and marvellously upon her own. And this time she doesn’t know which war plan to take inspiration from, because no strategy would be able to hold out against an enemy offensive taking the form of a sudden departure, another sea, another love. When she told him ‘I love you’ Mauro got angry and even gave her a smack on the bum, instinctively, and begged her not to use big words, because the two of them screw, laugh and talk infinitely well. That’s all. And I know what bombs are preparing to fall on Zia’s head. And on Nonna’s, too, who seems reborn now that her daughter’s with Mauro, and says, ‘Finally, a normal man.’
But I haven’t forgotten that for Mauro, screwing, laughing and talking represent a greatly diminished idea of love.
A refuge. That’s the only possible solution: to fit out a refuge so that it’s possible to endure all this.
Because it’s become clear by now that none of the surviving Sevilla Mendozas can afford to nick off quietly just like that, the way Mamma and Papà did.
We have to stay. We’ve made one another an unspoken promise that we’ll stick around.
26
Inside the shark
Unfortunately the refuge proved necessary. Very much so. You couldn’t hear anything from in there, because there was a great silence after Mauro De Cortes stopped inviting Zia over and I learnt that my vet had now taken in that other puppy. This time Zia didn’t lie down on the floor and she didn’t run around the house hitting her head against the walls. She washed, ate and went to her university classes. She didn’t make reference to any battles, nor did she compare us to the victors or the defeated. After the atomic war, we were simply wiped from the face of the earth.
The refuge, a kind of shark’s belly, contained all the things the sea had brought after millennia of history; the only thing was, the life of a survivor brought no satisfaction. And above all, we couldn’t understand what had caused the atomic bomb to explode.
Nonna would come to see us and keep asking, ‘But what did you do to him?’
‘Nothing.’
So Nonna would try to understand it, speaking aloud in long soliloquies. She said maybe Zia had behaved like a madwoman. Or maybe Mauro De Cortes didn’t want to go out with a woman who’d been with so many men and Zia had then confirmed this perception by giving herself to him too quickly, without ever making him work for her. Or maybe she hadn’t been sufficiently clear and he hadn’t understood that she truly loved him and instead he had thought that since she played around, so could anyone. Or maybe she had been all too clear and had ended up giving him her whole life story and he’d got bored because there was nothing more for him to discover. Well, she must have done something. Because Mauro De Cortes is a good, delightful, normal person and he doesn’t do things for no reason.
I thought that in the end it wasn’t Mauro’s fault if for him, having sex, laughing and talking weren’t love. And didn’t he have the right and the duty to look for it elsewhere? He surely wasn’t causing all this hurt on purpose and he certainly hadn’t been the one to press the button on the atomic bomb. And nor
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