However, with her I couldn't go hard for long; I always collapsed at the finish line. As I buttoned up my jeans again and sat back in my place, I felt her shivering: I thought she was cold (it was an unusually cool April, with almost winter temperatures), I made her lie down in the hay and wrapped her in my blanket, but she didn't stop shivering. What's the matter, I asked her. Nothing, she replied, it's just that you are so handsome, so young, and I... I would not have loved a perfect woman as much, it was her very weaknesses and flaws that pierced my soul, but how to explain it to her without offending her to death? I am so afraid; afraid of what, I asked her; of losing you, she answered in a low voice. I held her in a tender embrace: you will not lose me Antonia, I told her, unless you yourself want to lose me; you are the one who is doing everything possible to lose me, you are doing everything yourself. I covered her with kisses while firmly pushing away her hands that were trying to cover her breasts, you don't have to be ashamed, you have nothing to be ashamed of. I was ready to start again, this time all for her. I don't know how to describe those moments, doctor; something blocks my fingers on the pc keyboard. I was acting in the grip of a kind of hallucinated exaltation. When I think back on it, it is not the facts that hit me, but my words; as I uttered them, I did not stop for a single moment to look into her eyes, almost as if I wanted to hypnotize her: I had the impression that I was building everything with those words, a kind of mantra that I whispered in her ear in a pagan rite of which I was the officiant and whose outcome was always exactly as hoped. Let me caress you, don't be afraid relax look at me don't worry I'm here, that's not good you're resisting open your eyes, that's good, think of something else, think of a summer forest, you're walking through the trees, breathe smell the grass, you're beautiful look at me, now you're out of the forest in a green meadow, don't be afraid I'm here I won't let you go, trust me let yourself go breathe, I'm holding you don't be afraid, shout if you want no one can hear us, look into my eyes look at me now come now come with me it doesn't matter if it ends I'll start again, I'll start again right now, I'll go on all night long, I'll go on forever. There is a Greek motto that expresses the Apollonian spirit: medèn àgan. I had never understood the meaning of this admonition: now I know that it is profoundly true. I read somewhere that not sensing excess as such, is typical of junkie psychology: evidently mine, with or without drugs, is junkie psychology. Antonia was similar to me, the lost half of my androgyne. So I tied her to me, so I lost her. What happens to me? Rereading these last lines, I felt a gag reflex. My mind is becoming weak, no longer recognizing what is true. I am letting myself be influenced by the cure, as if curing the pain of living is possible. I am giving in to the demands of those who want me alive, as if surviving is important. Screw that, doctor: I wrote a lot of self-righteous bullshit, and I wrote it just so you would read it. The truth is, I was fucking her until my soul melted. On some levels sex is pure mysticism. The culmination of pleasure coincided with a zone of ecstatic emptiness, a fall into a psychic abyss, fragments of prenatal memories sucked me into the womb of being, and as I poured out in rhythmic waves my soul, primal whispers rose to the surface that coagulated into three words: I love you. I could no longer say those words to anyone. I died and rose again, who knows who I became. A nobody, anyway. Everything was different with her, and I don't pretend to understand why, just as I don't pretend to understand why the sea exists. The difference between me and you psycho-somethings is that I admit I don't know shit, Doc. Was it love? Was it paranoia? I don't know. The fact is that you don't know any more than I do, and you have the pretense of judging me, classifying me, healing me even, when the only thing that ever made me feel alive was my illness. But what do you know about it? To understand this, you would have to be alive, or at least have been alive at some point in your existence. I owe you everything, I owe you the loss of my sanity, my stupefied soul, my innermost upheaval; I owe you the fact that I did not spend my life without something being in a condition to shake me; I thank you that I will not die without having loved. ... Our rediscovered, or rather reconstructed Arcadia, did not last long: those April days passed in a flash, filled with a happiness imbued with melancholy, as if it were evident to both of us that we had previously lived in Eden, and were now, so to speak, camped outside its gates, nonetheless happy to see the garden again from the outside and well determined not to let the two guardian cherubs chase us away: fortunately, they turned a blind eye. At the end of the month Antonia left for a vacation in the mountains with my brother and some friends. She was tense and worried: she feared that without my daily dose of endorphins I might return to harm, but I calmed her, assuring her that this danger did not exist. And in fact I stayed home to study all the while and spent that brief period in absolute chastity, not feeling any need for chemicals, or strongly rejecting it if by chance it came up again. My spirit was making progress, I was somehow back on the trail of my lost self: I saw him as if from a distance, I watched with amazement and compassion that barefoot and poorly dressed 16-year-old boy running to dive into the stream with his dog, feeling at one with nature, unaware of how cruel it can be; he may not have been much of a person, but he was certainly better than me: he did not deserve to be dragged by me to roll in the muck among the matter-worshippers, who had chosen him as a sacrificial victim. I reflected on the fact that there must have been a purpose if I had been put in their path, and that purpose was evidently not to be sacrificed by them, since I had shirked their game. I also reflected on the fact that I had lent myself to that game, however. I reflected on the fact that I had wished to die that way, allowing myself to be dismantled like a soulless mannequin. I reflected on the fact that I had enjoyed doing it. I wondered who the hell I was. Yet, unlike those devils, I had a soul: I did not understand exactly what had happened to me, what was the root cause of my instinct of self-destruction, which clearly could not have been merely a consequence of the failure of my relationship with Antonia. Many questions were piling up in my mind, and I would certainly have done better to seek an answer to them, but at that moment I set them aside with annoyance: all that was needed, I thought, was to exhume that spiritual component and bring it back to life, because Antonia was mine again and this time I could not fail. The statement is incorrect: in fact she had never stopped being mine. It was only through a grotesque misunderstanding that I had been able to believe otherwise, but now it was clear to me that, whatever existential choice she might make, Antonia would love only me. During her absence she phoned me a couple of times secretly from my brother, with a trembling tone of voice that betrayed her distress: I, who felt perfectly calm, tried to convey my serenity to her. When I saw her again at my house on the way home from school, it seemed to me that she had lost weight and was pale despite her light tan: her face sprinkled with tiny ephelides was strangely scarred. In the afternoon we met at the barn and I was astonished at the eager haste with which she wanted to make love, without greeting me, without saying a word, without even undressing, like one drinking greedily at a spring after a desert crossing. I asked her about her vacation, but I had the impression that she pushed those memories away with annoyance, as if they only evoked feelings of boredom in her. She preferred to let me do the talking, though I had very little to tell her, but halfway through my speech she stopped listening, drew me to her, and wanted to start again. She was panting and moaning as we made love, so much so that I wondered whether she was experiencing pleasure or pain. She could not stop, she swept me away in a kind of whirlwind that continued uninterruptedly until evening. I sensed something out of tune and disturbing in all this, but at the moment I did not worry about it. The next afternoon, as usual, I heard her footsteps along the step ladder; suddenly, however, they stopped: having almost reached the top, she slipped, bending over herself. In an instant I sprang to grab her by the arm, miraculously managing to prevent her from falling. I helped her up and laid her down in the hay. - What happens? She asked me for water. I made her drink by supporting her head. - What's happening to you? - I repeated. Instead of answering he reached out a hand and pulled me down by my hair, kissing me desperately and undoing the waistband of my pants. She was shaking from head to toe. As, upset and with hesitant hands, I helped her free her panties, I felt a warm, wet sensation and withdrew my hand: it was full of blood. I knew there was no physiological explanation for that bleeding. A shiver of horror seized me. I pulled back and told her seriously: - Antonia, you are not well at all. - Don't worry, I'm not afraid to die. She tried to draw me back to her, but I got up and walked away from her with my heart in my throat. - Tomorrow you go to the doctor - I told her - And no more sex, it's bad for you. - But you will miss it: you need it. - I won't fucking miss it at all, Antonia. I miss you: you're leaving. I understood her unexpressed fear and added: - I won't look for anyone else and I won't hurt myself, I swear. She looked at me with deep gratitude: only then her body, tense as a violin string, relaxed, as if pervaded by a deep stillness, and she laid her head on the pillow. I encircled her shoulders with one arm. - I am a little tired - she said with a pale smile. - Get some rest, I'm here. Sleep for half an hour, if you can - I said, kissing her forehead. I covered her well, got up and went to sit on the edge of the barn, my legs dangling in the air. I felt dazed, dismayed, drained of all energy. My heart was pounding with fear. Dusk was falling, as the moon rose on the horizon, and the bats, my kind, fluttered through the trees against the purple sunset, hunting for insects. Stunned by the analogy, I stood staring at the scene for a long time, biting my lips bloody.