He looks at me with cold detachment, shaking his head slightly: I told you, little sister, I told you.
Frédéric's prophecy came true: the bomb exploded with me sitting on top. For days, weeks, after Emmanuel's departure, I wandered blindly through the tunnels of my life groping for the way out as if in the meanders of a labyrinth: he was everywhere, invisible but implacable, I could feel his breathing around every corner. I hoped he would find me and finish me once and for all, in a rush of pity that I knew I didn't deserve: I would have welcomed that end with joy. But he hid, played with me like a cat with a mouse. I continuously heard inside me the heartbreaking bleating of a drowning lamb, I was devastated.
Every morning, as soon as Michael left to go to work, I would fall with my face into the pillow hoping that he would telepathically sense my call. It was atrocious to enter that silent house, pass by that empty room with his posters on the walls, walk along the river and no longer see him sitting on the bank, return to that deserted barn and find his jar of Nutella still half full in a corner, smell that smell, that smell, the smell of cut grass in her hair. My life was reduced to a continuous escape: I ran away from one source of pain only to stumble upon another even more unbearable.
Once I found a cassette still inserted in the stereo in the barn and mechanically pressed the start button. That heartbreaking and desperate voice screaming marijuana threw me back to the moment I heard it for the first time, with such violence that I fell on my back into the hay holding my hands to my heart. I was about to have a heart attack. I never went back to the barn.
I didn't miss sex with him. Never before had I realized more than in that moment that what I had with Emmanuel had not been sex, but a ritual of self-immolation to the divinity that every day demanded my soul and my body as a sacrifice: I couldn't rebel, I couldn't do anything but climb the steps of the ladder that led to the altar, let me fall into the hay, cling to his hair, close my eyes so as not to be incinerated by his frightening beauty and dissolve in a nameless pleasure. I had loved madly every moment spent in the arms of that divine adolescent beast.
I have never been a connoisseur of music: I appreciated it superficially and listened to it as a pastime, like many. But Emmanuel, who loved it deeply, wanted to share it with me in all its intensity: he had a violent yet sweet way of forcing me to do so, literally thrusting it into me with every pelvic thrust, every look, every sigh, every moan whispered to my ear while we made love immersed in his music. A wonderful and chilling experience, capable of destroying a person's psyche forever.
The result is that now I perceive the power of music with a sense of intimate upheaval, but all this is of no use to me, as I no longer have anyone to share it with: every time I feel a sense of painful emptiness and heartbreaking regret. I concluded that mediocre people should avoid sublime experiences.
Of all the memories, two in particular haunted me. One afternoon, while they were lying in the hay after making love, he had put on one of his favorite songs, a long song lasting seven minutes and fifteen seconds, he lay down next to me and hummed it all into my mouth, looking into my eyes, stroking my hair and alternating small sensual kisses with the words of the song. I was in disbelief, overwhelmed by a sense of unspeakable amazement in the face of sensations that I didn't think I could experience, while I vaguely realized that the gaze of the gods is slightly cross-eyed, their fingers brush without contact and their breath smells of peach jam and violets like Alexander's sweat. I held my breath the whole time so as not to expose my human nature, aware of the sacredness of that moment: the god had stolen seven minutes and fifteen seconds from immortality to give them to a common mortal.
The other memory was linked to those three incredible days we spent in Tuscany. The evening before Emmanuel's surreal marriage proposal in the context of the open-air Templar abbey, the farmhouse had organized an evening of dancing on the veranda adjacent to the restaurant room; there was no orchestra present, but a simple DJ, a boy of around twenty years old who tried to offer musical pieces suitable for a clientele who was no longer very young. However, the boy tried to avoid too popular choices, and at one point he put on Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven". Immediately Emmanuel, sitting in front of me, smiled, stood up, held out his hand, invited me to dance and took me to the veranda. Rather than hugging me, he delicately wrapped me in two large angel wings, rested his cheek on my hair and remained like that, with his eyes closed, for the entire time of the song. Everyone looked at us, but he remained completely indifferent to the judgment of others. The sensation I felt was indescribable: his embrace had nothing to do with sex or carnality. They were eight minutes of pure Heaven.
But now all this, as superhumanly beautiful as it had been, was no longer important: I had always known that I was destined to lose that angel, that young god. It wasn't him that I missed, but my baby: I missed his eyes, his smile, his music, his inconclusive chatter, his funny imitations, oh to be able to see him, be able to feel him, watch him exist, see him exist in any way, even with another woman, even in the arms of another woman. I would have forced myself to love that Arianna if he had loved her, as long as it was possible for me to see him again.
His mobile number was deactivated. In the grip of a paroxysm of unbearable pain I obtained his new address, the telephone number of that house; I wrote to him, but my letters were intercepted; I found the strength to call and ask for him: a female voice replied with polite firmness that I had dialed the wrong number. 
Then, suddenly, my psyche exploded into a thousand pieces and desperation was replaced by the paralysis of resignation, that sort of catalepsy into which the prey of big cats fall when they realize they are doomed. From that moment on I no longer felt anything and now I am clinically dead. There would be nothing wrong with that, if only I didn't have to pretend to be alive.
I know well that it's better for him this way, there's no room for two on the raft and it's right that he should be the one to save himself, but I don't know how to continue living: it's ridiculous to think that in these conditions I can take care of the house, of classical philology, of rising prices, of my marital duties. My God, marital duties!!! At least one thing Emmanuel taught me: there is nothing more unnatural than sex between strangers.
Every now and then I turn to look at the long trail of blood that I leave behind me: I see it clearly, but no one else sees it, like Orestes with the Erinyes. Like him, I'm going crazy. No one listens to my cries, I am voiceless as in dreams of impotence, everyone takes it for granted that I must be happy, everyone would consider me crazy if they knew that I would like to be dead, dead, dead in every single moment of my life.
I feel like the ceiling of a bombed-out church.
I would like to dissolve like smoke, I would like to be able to float in Michael's life for a little longer, disappear slowly, become more and more transparent, make my dissolution imperceptible to him, and in the meantime leave an ectoplasm to have tea with his family and cheer for him when he plays tennis. Michael is distracted, he wouldn't notice the difference. One day, when he turns around, he simply wouldn't see me anymore.
I have to give him time to get used to my disappearance, but to do that I need the only person capable of destroying me without killing me: Frédéric.
He is the solution.
He became more cautious after my operation, but the rough simplicity of his way of having sex remained the same. There is no pretense of feeling, nothing but his body. It's not sex, it's not pleasure, it's nothing that resembles love: it's like experiencing the fury of the elements, flying in a vortex without ever touching the bottom, floating far from the ground in a rarefied atmosphere that does not transmit sounds, where I can scream at the top of my lungs without anyone hearing me. From above I see shreds of fiction below me, lifeless automatons, ridiculous puppets impossible to regret... If I close my eyes I hear the archaic and lulling rhythm of the choriambic dimeter, a sign that Aristophanes has forgiven me.
Frédéric manages to create a void inside me: the nothingness he gives me has become my everything.