Nothing That Concerns You - Part I

At first I don't understand: then everything becomes absolutely clear. The silence torn by the cries is an eternal moment of intermittent white light, filled only with the vortices of the clouds pushed by the wind.
Antonia reappears holding a child in her arms.
My son she smiles, as if it weren't obvious.
And while the most insipid of mothers warbles wave hello with your little hand, say hello to the lord, I continue to wonder who that idiot is who filled my eyes with pins. I abandon my inert body on the chair and evaporate: I float around her, licking the impenetrable contours of her motherhood.
That voice that emits preconscious babblings of a brain-damaged woman cannot be the same instrument that once intoned the arcane prelude to the conjugal embrace.
And so we come to the katastrophé, the end of the tragedy.
This awareness suddenly gives me a deadly calm. I forestall the next wave hello with your little hand with a dry question:
Are you with a man?
No she replies surprised, as if I were the strange one.
Can I do something for you?
Thank you, we don't need anything.
How did your mother take it?
She shrugs and smiles.
How do you think she took it? She's become a grandmother, after all. Sure, she's sorry about the separation, she loved Michael, but she's crazy about her grandson.
The next question dies on my lips.
One thing at least is clear: the father is not Michael. I know my brother too well, for no reason in the world would he have behaved like this if the child had been his: he would have continued the marriage even at the cost of painful pretenses. With a starched smile I bend over the little one, who, sunk in the nest of his mother's womb, sucks his thumb and gives me a perfectly azure look, or rather blue, very serious for his age. His hair is a magnificent Titian red.
What is his name?
Martino.
I mean, you named him after my grandfather?
It's a nice name, I think.
He's a wonderful child.
I'm about to add "congratulations", but I stop on the edge of the cliff, just in time to avoid that abyss of banality.
Yes, he's really nice.
Strange though: I don't think he looks much like you. The hair, sure. Then maybe the shape of the nose and mouth, but otherwise he must have taken after his father.
God, what a clumsy statement. She doesn't answer, instead she folds her arms over her chest. I try to make up for it with a flippant remark:
When he grows up he'll be a real heartbreaker.
She takes up the provocation and turns it against me:
There is no doubt, if he will look like his father.
Yet a simple question would be enough: but it's too embarrassing, I’m too scared. I cross my arms over my chest and go back to contemplating the sky, trying to distance myself from everything. The clouds are now racing faster in the burning air and the wind has almost undone the bun on the back of her neck; the child is holding on with his little hands to the fluttering locks and she smiles at him like a Raphael Madonna; her hair is melting on her shoulders around her suddenly rejuvenated face.
I decide to ask an important question:
How many months old is he?
Five. He turned five last week. He's very precocious, you know? He's already teething.
Teething? Oh yeah, you have to get teeth at a certain point.
She smiles, amused by my idiocy. The fact is that my brain is too distracted to be able to produce any meaningful statement: the blackboard of my mind does the calculations, frantically erases and redoes them, and always gets the same result. Impossible: it should have happened during the honeymoon . But how could she have betrayed Michael during the honeymoon? I feel a sense of solidarity towards my brother: after all, we were both betrayed. My suspicions obviously fall on Frédéric. I am looking for an elegant periphrasis to tell her what I think of her, when a sudden thought strikes my brain.
I redo the calculations slowly, methodically, and the result I get is always the same. I stare at her with infinite bewilderment; but her whole attitude says that it is nothing that concerns me, and I end up convincing myself that it is so, that it is my mind that is confused, incapable of elementary calculations. In the meantime she has completely forgotten about me: she has put the baby on the grass and has started playing with him. Her indifference at such a tragic moment for me hits me like the most violent of slaps. I stand up.


I have to go. It's getting late.
She suddenly wakes up as if from a kind of dream and looks at me in amazement, as if my reaction were unexpected and unmotivated.
What, late? It's only four o'clock. Stay a little longer.
I can't, Antonia, my parents are waiting for me.
I finally managed to say her name: it burns my lips like a drop of boiling jam. It is terrible to say it at the moment of farewell, because this is a farewell, Antonia, I do not intend to tolerate this degrading and offensive situation any longer. I walk quickly toward the exit; she follows me. At the threshold she hesitates: she puts a hand on my arm and speaks to me in an almost pleading tone:
Sorry Emmanuel, I didn't even offer you a drink: can I make up for it somehow?
At this point a man of character, a real man, would answer with a firm no. I, of course, say yes. We go back to the garden, she puts the baby in the stroller and places him next to me. I smell his milk. My heart beats painfully, torn between joy and despair.
Can I leave the baby with you for five minutes? Time to make you a juice. Do you like juice?
Certain.
She should fucking know.
Orange or grapefruit?
I hate grapefruit: she doesn't remember it anymore.
Oh yeah, sorry, you don't like grapefruit.
She remembers it.
At the threshold she turns to look at us smiling:
You look beautiful together.
She disappears into the darkness. I put my head in my hands and rest my elbows on the table, gripped by an inexpressible anguish; I remain like that for a few minutes, not knowing what to do, while the child stares at me from the pram with his blue eyes so serious, sucking thoughtfully on his pacifier. If it weren't absurd, I would say that I feel judged.
Suddenly a large sooty-colored cat with yellow-green eyes appears from a bush: I immediately recognize Gino the cat. He trots beside me and rubs against my legs, purring. He hasn't forgotten me, at least: I pick him up and pet him, whispering that he's become a really beautiful big cat; he raises his tail, as cats always do to warn us that the cat is finished, and continues to purr loudly. Emotion assails me unexpectedly, I bite my lips bloody to keep from crying. After a few minutes Gino jumps nimbly into the stroller and curls up at the child's feet. I look up to observe the little one: he's a beautiful child and seems to have a good nature. I smile at him for the first time, bringing my face close to his: he slaps me with his open hand. A proper slap, not a pat. I step back, amazed: he rips the pacifier out of his mouth and bursts out laughing.








He likes you: look how he laughs!, Antonia says when she comes back.
Well, not so much: he just slapped me.
A slap? Of course not. He probably gave you a little pat.
I'm telling you it was a slap.
Exaggerated! Here's your orange juice.
She hands me the glass.
Thank you.
I gladly drink the refreshing drink.
You still have the cat Gino, I tell her.
Sure. How could I get rid of him?
Yeah: how could she have gotten rid of him ?
Suddenly the little one begins to kick and whimper nervously.
Be patient, she says to me with a sigh, it's time to breastfeed him. Wait ten minutes, I'll be right back.
I nod, while a very bitter sip goes down the wrong way, causing me to have a coughing fit.
Breastfeed him?
To this point? To this point has she fallen into matter?
I am reminded of a scene I saw as a child in my grandfather's country house: a large female spider carried her babies on her back, while they sucked her belly like a grape: her skin slowly shriveled, emptied of its contents, and she, patient, let herself be eaten alive by the disgusting and cruel beings she had given birth to. The meaning of that scene was so unacceptable to me that I crushed all those filthy creatures under the sole of my shoe.
The thought of her unbuttoning her nightgown and becoming food for the child, holding up his little head, is intolerable to me. Disgust mixes inside me with a dull jealousy. I try to explain the meaning of this to myself and am forced to translate it into a thought of discouraging childishness: from every point of view I have been less important to her than that little usurper: after all, for me she has never managed to produce milk.
I get up and walk around the garden, counting and recounting the number of my steps, gathering my scattered thoughts in the gravel like Tom Thumb. But there is no longer a path back to her, the rival is too strong this time. Whatever the reason why it happened, that child is me. That is why she is happy, that is why she does not miss me. But if she wanted “me”, if she wanted me to this extent, then why?
The paradox suddenly overwhelms me. I remain still for a few minutes, with the blood pounding in my temples, trying to understand what is happening.
There is something wrong with this story: it is all too fake to be true. I ended up in a Kafka novel, or worse: here even the dignity of the nightmare is missing, the illogical Kafkaesque logic; this story is more like one of those insipid Hollywood films in which the director has foreseen a happy ending for everyone: it was easy, all he had to do was eliminate the protagonist from the cast. Even for my stunt double the script has foreseen a happy ending: the story with Arianna. But that guy who everyone calls by my name is not me: I am this thing full of amazement and pain that doesn't understand what's happening and doesn't know what his name is anymore.
One thing is certain: everyone is happy about my disappearance, starting with Antonia. The evidence of this fact is so clear to me that it causes me physical pain. I am dead and in my place there is this character who plays my part, quite badly too, but he is successful and everyone applauds him. But why does everyone want me to believe that this stupid fiction is reality? Everyone except perhaps my brother, who speaks to me in riddles like oracles instead of telling me things like they are. It is all unbelievable: Antonia who excludes that I have anything to do with the child, Arianna who knows nothing about it, my parents who seem to be suffering from selective amnesia.
I try to find a logical explanation: maybe I've gone crazy, maybe I've always been crazy and they know it, that's why they indulge me: Antonia treats me with the benevolent softness due to a poor idiot, my brother tries to fulfill the last wishes of a madman, Arianna is not an angel, she didn't appear before me by chance: she's a nurse from the psychiatric clinic where I'm locked up.
Arianna, yes. Why do I feel so far away from her?
I lean my back against the trunk of the cypress tree with a confused sound in my brain.
Finally she returns without the baby, emanating a faint dairy odor. Her nightgown is still unbuttoned. I glimpse a breast terribly different from what I had in mind: I remembered two small and firm champagne glasses, now what I see is a generous size four, definitely too soft. She buttons her nightgown back up with absolute indifference: she doesn't even feel modesty or embarrassment in showing herself in front of me half naked, I am nothing to her anymore.
He fell asleep, she says, and smiles. What the fuck is she always smiling about?
I look at her without moving. She is so distracted that she doesn't even notice that my mouth is trembling in the effort not to cry. 


I control my emotion and continue in a cold tone:
Who's providing for you? I mean, until you can work again.
Your brother. He's an extraordinary man Michael, he doesn't know how to hold grudges: he would have liked to buy us a penthouse on the hill, but we're fine here, me and the little one.
I feel an intense rush of admiration for my brother and an equally intense urge to vomit.
Your brother has the ability to play the game to the end, she insists. It's typical of true champions: he was born a winner.
I have to call upon all the resources of my rationality to elaborate an answer capable of explaining what I feel without being needlessly polemical and without pointing out to her that the current developments in the affair do not exactly constitute a win-win situation: no more than mine is, in any case.
Yes, it's true: my brother likes to win, I begin, with a calmness that surprises me. I await her reply, already knowing that it will be stupid and/or childish. In fact she answers:
There's nothing wrong with that.
Certainly, I admit indulgently, indeed, I will tell you, I have sincere respect for my brother, especially lately.
I pause and take a deep breath.
But you see Antonia, winners love to win. It's not exactly love, but a form of self-gratification: pride, you know? Self-love. They don't know how to lose. You have to be a loser to love in a certain way.
Her answer completely baffles me:
There is no need to love in that certain way.
She takes advantage of my silence to land another low blow:
After all, even in Platonic terms it is enough to have experienced it just once in your life.
She has just admitted, with absolute indifference, that I have been her only true love, the one that comes only once in a lifetime, and that I am no longer necessary, since the experience has already been had. I still find the strength to contradict her with polite firmness.
No, in Platonic terms it is not like that at all: you explained it to me yourself. Once the process of anàmnesis has been triggered, one cannot dive back into the matter and pretend nothing has happened. Or rather, one can, but it is not exactly the path indicated by Plato: what is the point of having had the experience, if one then doesn't care and goes back to living as if nothing had happened? 
She answers me in an absorbed tone, as if she were talking to herself:
Not everything is the same. In fact, quite the opposite: everything has changed for me now.
What do you mean?
What if I told you that the male universe no longer interests me?
The male universe in general?
Yes, in general.
Shocked, I ask her:
Isn't it a little early?
Yes, perhaps. I think I've skipped the stages. On the other hand, Plato speaks of the need to love, not to love people of the opposite sex.
I hesitate, then decide to be honest.
What if I told you that I don't care about the female universe anymore either?
She smiles.
It's really a little too early for you, don't you think?
No, I don't think so. It seems to me that we have already talked about this in some previous life, or am I remembering wrong?
No, you remember well. Are you interested in the male universe again?
I'm not gay.
I seem to remember that you, at some point in your life, were. 
Not anymore, not now.
There wouldn't be anything wrong with that either. I just would have felt a little sorry for Arianna.
I cut it short:
Anyway, Antonia, I am not the male universe: I am Emmanuel.
She smiles, this time with a light irony:
I'd say there's no point in talking about it anymore, judging by the choices you have made.
The choices ”I have made”.
A dull indignation boils inside me: I realize that I have collected a series of own goals. I am about to explode and scream in her face that it was she who forced me to make those choices, but I cannot risk offending her; this is her house, I am her guest, she can show me the door whenever she wants. For the first time I realize, not without amazement, how different it was to meet her in my house, where I unconsciously made her feel my position of superiority, or in the barn, so to speak on neutral ground. Now I am playing away and she is the one in control of the field. I have to find a way to calm down so as not to be forced to leave. I don't want to leave, damn it!
I suddenly change the subject.
The garden needs a little work. I'll cut the grass for you, if you want.
You're very kind, but you don't need to bother about me.
It doesn't bother me at all, I do it willingly.
Since when have you been gardening?
It's something I often do at Arianna's. I've always liked plants, you know: I'm also learning how to prune them. I know how to prune roses, pear trees and apple trees.
That girl taught you a lot of things.
Yes, and all of them are of vital importance.
She doesn't get the irony. She smiles sweetly at me:
I'd rather you stay here and keep me company, if you don't mind. Do you want to?
I feel a lump in my throat.
Yes Antonia, I want to.
I am on the verge of tears again. I count to one hundred, I visualize flocks of sheep grazing with dogs and Arcadian shepherds, I mentally recite a heteroclite sonnet by Pascoli, and finally I manage to control the emotion. She turns to look for something behind the chair.
Did you drop something? Can I help you?
No thanks, I was just looking for the work basket.
She takes out a small wicker basket lined with red and white checked fabric, trimmed with lace. She moves with a certain awkwardness, as is typical of someone who has a few extra pounds. This makes me smile and arouses a sudden tenderness in me. I lean back and calmly observe her gestures.