All the tones of a farewell II.

II. Of the uselessness of talking about love.
Antonia, think again. You are alone, you have no friends. If you had at least one friend you could count on I would worry less.
I have a great friend: my mother.
Luckily, Antonia. But what's wrong with you? You're staggering and very pale: in your state you shouldn't get so worked up. Do you want me to take your blood pressure?
No thanks, I'm fine.
Sit down here, you can't drive in this state.
Only half an hour though.
Yes, certainly. I'll sit down too, if you don't mind: I'm a bit shaken.
You'll feel better when I'm gone.
I doubt it. Rest, stretch your legs: you have to keep your feet up, I'll put a pillow for you, like this. You better?
Yes thank you.
Do you want to tell me a little about yourself? There are many things I don't know about your past and that I would like to understand before you go.
I don't want to talk about my past.
I don't mean the recent past: I wanted to ask you about when you were a little girl, before we met.
What do you want to know?
There's one thing I've always wondered: why don't you have any friends? All girls have some.
I have a very introverted character, Michael. They hurt me, it's like a barrier has gone up somewhere in my soul.
Why didn't you ever tell me about it?
Because you never asked me. And then I don't like to talk about it. There were several unpleasant incidents that I never told anyone about.
Try telling me one, if you feel like it. You want?
One of my best friends, in high school, took my first boyfriend away from me, a relationship that only lasted a year, but which was very important to me. I was fifteen. I confided in my classmate, she consoled me and kept my spirits up; we also went on holiday together, to a very nice place in eastern Liguria where her parents had a house. I suffered, but as a normal teenager can suffer, who knows she can count on her family affection: I had a very close bond with my father and this gave me all the strength I needed. I was only eighteen when he died: for me it was a catastrophe. Immediately after my father's death, that girl wrote me a letter to inform me that she had always made fun of me and that she had had fun behind my back with our classmates. She told me that she had taken part in a bet: that boy had bet a sandwich that he would be able to seduce me within a month. She bet against me and won.
A sandwich?
Yes, a sandwich.
But what's the point of writing something like that in those circumstances?
She said she had done it to apologize and take some weight off her conscience.
What a bitch: no sane person hurts someone who is sick to apologize to her. She was a horrible person, your classmate: she was probably dying of envy. You were probably prettier than her but very childish, an ideal target for bad people: I imagine you with braids and short stockings.
You too?
Why, who else imagines you like this?
Your brother.
Good blood doesn't lie.




However, I was just like that, dressed and combed like a little girl, with braids or hair held back by crocheted headbands made by my mother, a pathetic thing to think about; and I also wore braces. I was ridiculous. I should have known that all that interest from the cutest boy in class couldn't have been sincere.
Why not? I liked you straight away.
It's not true, Michael: maybe you forgot that you initially left me in the lurch after a few weeks.
I hadn't yet understood how important you were to me: it was precisely by being away from you that I understood it.
You may have understood it, but I didn't: I really don't know what you saw special in me. You could have half of female Turin at your feet: why me, just any girl?
Maybe because you're not just any girl. Go on.
Another time, at a party, while we were drinking a cocktail, a friend of mine said to me in front of everyone: "Why don't you decide to get your breasts redone? You're as flat as an ironing board." And to think that I had worn a new dress and thought I looked particularly pretty. But why are you laughing?
You had a collection of girlfriends from Barnum's Circus, Antonia. However, that girl was stupid, as well as a rude person: you have always been very pretty precisely because you are inconspicuous. Redheads, if they wear a lot of makeup and try to attract attention, immediately become vulgar, while you are refined, you have a natural elegance.
I'm fond of you, Michael.
But you never loved me.
I thought I loved you, before I fell in love.
With Emmanuel, obviously.
Yes. I had never loved anyone like this.
Does he love you?
I do not know. A lot of nonsense is said about love: this is one of the very few things I learned from this matter. The sauce of history, to quote Manzoni.
The two of us have never talked about love: we have always taken it for granted that our relationship was fine as it was. It was a mistake.
I too thought that it could work like this, that it was enough to let yourself live, but that's not true: as soon as you lower your guard, the fist comes right in your face. Be careful, Michael, I tell you with all my love: sooner or later it will happen to you too.
I don't think so: I'm not saying this out of presumption, but because I know myself well enough.
No one knows himself well enough before he has tested himself. I don't wish you to live such an experience, but until you have lived it, don't judge what you don't know.

Why don't you try to explain it to me? Maybe I understand anyway.
No, believe me: these are things you don't understand before you've tried them. Being in love is a pathological condition, because it is the disease itself that becomes indispensable for you to live, like drugs: the more the disease worsens, the happier you are. If you try to do without it, you go into withdrawal and suffer terribly. It's like dancing on the edge of a cliff while under the influence of a hallucinogenic substance.
You're right, maybe I've never been in love: something like this horrifies me just thinking about it.
Luckily, Michael: one crazy person in the family is enough.
You and my brother would be an absurd couple, but perhaps, thinking with a cool head, you are made for each other. Now I'll tell you something that will make me sound crazy too: I would have preferred to see you together rather than lose you completely, Antonia.
I couldn't do it, Michael.
To do what?
To accept being destroyed: I ran away.
Why destroyed?
How can I explain it to you? Loving your brother is like watching a Supernova explode: you know it will kill you, but you can't help but be amazed to watch the spectacle. It releases tremendous energy: one moment before being incinerated you are grateful for existing, the next moment you are dead.
I knew I had a rather peculiar little brother, but you're describing him to me as an atomic bomb. I'm not surprised he fell in love with you: you're the only one in the world who sees him that way.
I see him this way because "he is" this way.
I understand. I, on the other hand, don't explode or disintegrate, so you didn't find anything special in me, right?
Don't be unfair: I really loved you. I was overwhelmed by something bigger than me, I couldn't defend myself.
And to think, I thought yours was more of a sex story than anything else.
But no, what nonsense: sex is just a consequence. It's impossible to love someone so much and not be physically attracted to him as well. But Emmanuel doesn't need sex to destroy: for months he demanded that we observe the most absolute chastity.
Seriously?
Yes, seriously.
And why?
To prove that we are souls. Your brother can have uncommon strength, if he decides it's worth it.
A bit like running barefoot on rusty nails because your soul doesn't get tetanus anyway. There's something medieval about it all: it reminds me of flagellating monks and the Black Death; my brother was born in the wrong era. However, I understand less and less: if he loves you so much, why did you leave him?
Michael, I don't know how to tell you: you wouldn't believe me.
If it's the truth I'll believe you.
Your brother asked me to marry him.
Really?
Really. I feel bad just thinking about it.
This changes things, Antonia, and quite a bit. You have to give me time to metabolize.
Metabolize what? It was madness.
Antonia, forgive my accountant mentality, but the math doesn't add up to me: you say you suffered like a dog for missing him, you say you're leaving because you can't bear to see him again without being with him, but you rejected his proposal of marriage. What is it I'm missing?
It's useless, you just can't understand.
Try to make me understand.
It's so obvious that it seems incredible to me to have to explain it to you: and you also make me feel humiliated.
Excuse me. Unfortunately it is necessary.

Your brother is a little out of his mind, Michael. There is a seed of madness in him, of absurd exaltation. He is a visionary, a mystic, he alternates moments of unbridled delirium of the senses with ascetic phases worthy of a cloistered monk. This is precisely why I loved him with all of myself, but I was always afraid of him.
A little out of his mind, you say? Who knows what madness is, Antonia: perhaps he is saner than us. In any case, madness united you, since you loved him for it. What were you afraid of? You could be crazy together.
I see you still don't understand.
What should I understand?
Yet it is so simple: I am a normal, if not mediocre, thirty-two year old woman of modest social background; he is a rich and beautiful eighteen-year-old boy, out of the norm in every way. I'm attracted to madness, but I'm not completely insane, Michael: I realized what would have happened if I had complied with his crazy proposal. I would have felt ashamed of myself in every single moment of my life, I would have continually felt uncomfortable, old, ugly, insignificant, out of place, out of role, so stupid and presumptuous as not to understand that I would make a fool of myself. And sooner or later he would throw me away like an old shoe. I already felt this way with you, let alone with him. I would have died of shame and pain.
You are not at all mediocre and insignificant. But I understand your point of view.
No, you don't understand at all: I would have accepted any role to continue having him by my side. You can't even imagine how I felt that day: he offered me the only impossible role, the only one that cut me off from everything. I understood that it was over, that I had lost him forever, that nothing would be possible anymore, nothing. I thought I was dying of pain.
Antonia, my brother is strange: he doesn't care what others think. I'm sure he would have done his best to keep his commitment.
But why do you torment me, Michael? There's no point in talking about it now. And then, thank God, I don't suffer anymore: I have his baby, I don't need anything else.
And he?
He will suffer a little, but then he will start his life again, as is natural. At his age you quickly forget.
It depends, Antonia. Sometimes you don't forget at all.
If Arianna is as you describe her to me, it won't take long to get him back on his feet.
On the other hand, I think he will give that poor girl a lot of trouble: I don't see how a balanced and normal person can cope with someone like him.
Which means I'm unbalanced and abnormal?
You're not so normal, Antonia, otherwise you wouldn't have accepted such absurd deals: cheating on me, staying with him with or without sex, harming yourself needlessly, reaching the point of a nervous breakdown, even pregnant with him, for the sole pleasure of losing everything you had conquered, including the person you sacrificed yourself for. If all this seems normal to you, you have some serious masochism problems.
I don't know if she will make it, but I didn't make it either: I wanted to live, despite everything.
Normal survival instinct.
I was hoping you could save me.
You miscalculated, at least judging by how things turned out.
I know, but I couldn't have known it then.
However, I can still help you if you want: you don't run any risks with me. You will heal, it's just a matter of time. Maybe I don't know how to love in the strict sense of the term, but I know how to care for someone. Affection doesn't go away, it's not like falling in love: it is stable and resists storms.
For nine thousand years...
Why nine thousand?
Anyway no.
No what?
I don't think I can heal, Michael, not now or ever. In fact, I don't want to heal at all. Let me go, please.