Toward the end of July things finally came to a head. It seemed clear that after Chiara there had been a succession of cotte, crushes, mini-crushes, one-night crushes, flings, who knows. To me all of it boiled down to one thing only: his cock had been everywhere in B. Every girl had touched it, that cock of his. It had been in who knows how many vaginas, how many mouths. The image amused me. It never bothered me to think of him between a girl’s legs as she lay facing him, his broad, tanned, glistening shoulders moving up and down as I’d imagined him that afternoon when I too had wrapped my legs around his pillow.
Just looking at his shoulders when he happened to be going over his manuscript in his heaven made me wonder where they’d been last night. How effortless and free the movement of his shoulder blades each time he shifted, how thoughtlessly they caught the sun. Did they taste of the sea to the woman who had lain under him last night and bitten into him? Or of his suntan lotion? Or of the smell that had risen from his sheets when I went into them?
How I wished I had shoulders like his. Maybe I wouldn’t long for them if I had them?
Muvi star.
Did I want to be like him? Did I want to be him? Or did I just want to have him? Or are “being” and “having” thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone’s body to touch and being that someone we’re longing to touch are one and the same, just opposite banks on a river that passes from us to them, back to us and over to them again in this perpetual circuit where the chambers of the heart, like the trapdoors of desire, and the wormholes of time, and the false-bottomed drawer we call identity share a beguiling logic according to which the shortest distance between real life and the life unlived, between who we are and what we want, is a twisted staircase designed with the impish cruelty of M. C. Escher. When had they separated us, you and me, Oliver? And why did I know it, and why didn’t you? Is it your body that I want when I think of lying next to it every night or do I want to slip into it and own it as if it were my own, as I did when I put on your bathing suit and took it off again, all the while craving, as I craved nothing more in my life that afternoon, to feel you slip inside me as if my entire body were your bathing suit, your home? You in me, me in you…
Then came the day. We were in the garden, I told him of the novella I had just finished reading.
“About the knight who doesn’t know whether to speak or die. You told me already.”
Obviously I had mentioned it and forgotten.
“Yes.”
“Well, does he or doesn’t he?”
“Better to speak, she said. But she’s on her guard. She senses a trap somewhere.”
“So does he speak?”
“No, he fudges.”
“Figures.”
It was just after breakfast. Neither of us felt like working that day.
“Listen, I need to pick up something in town.”
Something was always the latest pages from the translator.
“I’ll go, if you want me to.”
He sat silently a moment.
“No, let’s go together.”
“Now?” What I might have meant was, Really?
“Why, have you got anything better to do?”
“No.”
“So let’s go.” He put some pages in his frayed green backpack and slung it over his shoulders.
Since our last bike ride to B., he had never asked me to go anywhere with him.
I put down my fountain pen, closed my scorebook, placed a half-full glass of lemonade on top of my pages, and was ready to go.
On our way to the shed, we passed the garage.
As usual, Manfredi, Mafalda’s husband, was arguing with Anchise. This time he was accusing him of dousing the tomatoes with too much water, and that it was all wrong, because they were growing too fast. “They’ll be mealy,” he complained.
“Listen. I do the tomatoes, you do the driving, and we’re all happy.”
“You don’t understand. In my day you moved the tomatoes at some point, from one place to another, from one place to the other”—he insisted—“and you planted basil nearby. But of course you people who’ve been in the army know everything.”
“That’s right.” Anchise was ignoring him.
“Of course I’m right. No wonder they didn’t keep you in the army.”
“That’s right. They didn’t keep me in the army.”
Both of them greeted us. The gardener handed Oliver his bicycle. “I straightened the wheel last night, it took some doing. I also put some air in the tires.”
Manfredi couldn’t have been more peeved.
“From now on, I fix the wheels, you grow the tomatoes,” said the piqued driver.
Anchise gave a wry smile. Oliver smiled back.
Once we had reached the cypress lane that led onto the main road to town, I asked Oliver, “Doesn’t he give you the creeps?”
“Who?”
“Anchise.”
“No, why? I fell the other day on my way back and scraped myself pretty badly. Anchise insisted on applying some sort of witch’s brew. He also fixed the bike for me.”
With one hand on the handlebar he lifted his shirt and exposed a huge scrape and bruise on his left hip.
“Still gives me the creeps,” I said, repeating my aunt’s verdict.
“Just a lost soul, really.”
I would have touched, caressed, worshipped that scrape.
On our way, I noticed that Oliver was taking his time. He wasn’t in his usual rush, no speeding, no scaling the hill with his usual athletic zeal. Nor did he seem in a rush to go back to his paperwork, or join his friends on the beach, or, as was usually the case, ditch me. Perhaps he had nothing better to do. This was my moment in heaven and, young as I was, I knew it wouldn’t last and that I should at least enjoy it for what it was rather than ruin it with my oft-cranked resolution to firm up our friendship or take it to another plane. There’ll never be a friendship, I thought, this is nothing, just a minute of grace. Zwischen Immer und Nie. Zwischen Immer und Nie. Between always and never. Celan.
When we arrived at the piazzetta overlooking the sea, Oliver stopped to buy cigarettes. He had started smoking Gauloises. I had never tried Gauloises and asked if I could. He took out a cerino from the box, cupped his hands very near my face, and lit my cigarette. “Not bad, right?” “Not bad at all.” They’d remind me of him, of this day, I thought, realizing that in less than a month he’d be totally gone, without a trace.
This was probably the first time I allowed myself to count down his remaining days in B.
“Just take a look at this,” he said as we ambled with our bikes in the midmorning sun toward the edge of the piazzetta overlooking the rolling hills below.
Farther out and way below was a magnificent view of the sea with scarcely a few stripes of foam streaking the bay like giant dolphins breaking the surf. A tiny bus was working its way uphill, while three uniformed bikers straggled behind it, obviously complaining of the fumes. “You do know who is said to have drowned near here,” he said.
“Shelley.”
“And do you know what his wife Mary and friends did when they found his body?”
“Cor cordium, heart of hearts,” I replied, referring to the moment when a friend had seized Shelley’s heart before the flames had totally engulfed his swollen body as it was being cremated on the shore. Why was he quizzing me?