Great.

The months drag on turbid and slow like a muddy river. Emmanuel, as consumed by an internal fever, continues to fluctuate from one experience to another without actually experiencing any of them; he appears exhausted by this senseless drift and at the same time unable to stop. Sometimes he sits for hours staring at me with an awkward stare, chasing me through the rooms with a completely opaque blue gaze, so different from what I remembered. There is a mechanical inertia in the way his eyes follow my movements, with sharp angles like the broken flight of a fly. I am frightened by the emptiness of his eyes that stare without seeing, distracted by an obsessive thought. He took a strange path.

This morning I went into his room with a dark foreboding, while he was at school, and opened all his drawers in search of his diary. Finally I saw it at the foot of the bed, upside down and half open as if the arrival of someone had interrupted him while he was writing. I leafed through it and read the last few pages with an anxious heartbeat. His style became convoluted and enigmatic, I couldn't grasp the facts: I could barely glimpse confused and dreamlike moods that frightened me, sentences in English taken from pieces of music unknown to me; I leafed through it backwards: at a certain point, under a date a few months earlier, there was a name that looked like mine, written in capital letters and crossed out with angry pen strokes; immediately, however, I realized that it was a singular case of homonymy, because the person to whom he was referring in the following lines was a male: "They told me that you are dating Elettra. Fuck, Elettra!". Three exclamation marks followed; the diary continued, "You're a goddamn asshole, you fucking hypocrite, I hate myself for loving you." In the following dates it was all an overlapping of emotional expressions, little more than interjections, from which a convulsive inner chaos emerged; I was struck by the sentences "she's like a bad angel, she makes me feel terrible, God I thank you, finally".

I closed the diary with an overwhelming sense of anguish and left the house, promising myself to go back to the villa in the afternoon to keep an eye on him while awaiting Michael's return.

I enter the house with a general greeting to which no one answers: Emmanuel is studying mathematics in the living room with a schoolmate of his; I go to the kitchen and ask Teresa to prepare something for a snack. While I help her stuff the sandwiches, the maid, without looking at me, says:

Master Emmanuel isn't well, did you notice?

I pretend not to understand:

Is he sick?

She purses her lips by forcefully squeezing a lemon:

He's with a girl older than him.

Teresa doesn't know that what she's squeezing into the glass is my heart. After a moment of terrible disorientation I recover: I mentally repeat the lesson I've learned by heart, I tell myself that losing him is in the natural order of things, that I've always known it and that it's childish of me to arrive unprepared for the fatal moment. I try to smile:

If it's just that, Teresa, it's nothing serious: being with a girl isn't an illness.

She stares at me with a very hard look, aligning the sandwiches on a tray:

Some women are worse than a disease.

She turns her back on me and opens the refrigerator, "ay Madre de Dios".

I am very struck by the fact that Teresa seeks an ally in me, overcoming her distrust of me: this means that she considers the situation truly alarming. After all, I'm the only person in the house who can understand and help her: no one knows Emmanuel less than his relatives. That woman's intuition is infallible, supported by her visceral attachment to him: she knows everything he does in his room as if she sees through the closed door.

An "older" girl, but not only: evidently also very dangerous. Jealousy devastates me at the thought of that uncomfortable and unexpected passing of the baton. However, I force myself to let the urgency of the moment prevail: I receive Teresa's message and prepare myself to do my best to be up to the task. I take a deep breath, then walk into the living room with my legs shaking and place a tray with drinks and comfort items on the table.

Here you go, guys: enjoy your meal, I say smiling.

The friend thanks, Emmanuel says nothing.

Everything OK?, I ask him.

Great, he replies without looking up from his math book.

The dark shadow under his eyes indicates fatigue, insomnia, profound unease,

and also something else that I prefer not to understand.

Teresa is right: he is not well at all. I feel such an intense affective impulse that it causes me physical pain to have to repress it. I stroke his hair and this give him a sudden shiver. Then I leave the room and go back to the kitchen to make more sandwiches.

From the kitchen I hear his friend's voice:

Your mother is young.

A moment of silence. Theresa looks at me. Emmanuel bursts out laughing.

I cut myself with the bread knife.