Emmanuel's Last Journey. Part I. What remains to be said. Bye then. That's all that remains to be said. The amethyst horizon is filled with the last summer crickets. This place isn't so bad. I hesitate with a shifty gaze around, no longer knowing what to pretend to observe. I feel her hands touching me and tightening the noose around my neck. Tighten more, once and for all. The shirt is perfect: you look very elegant. I don't answer. She caresses my cheek and holds out her hand. Say hello, little boy. You have to go, they're waiting for you. Little boy. There is only one way to stop her from continuing to utter irritating banalities: I kiss her brutally on the mouth. She remains a little speechless, as if she does not remember exactly what it is for. I move my mouth away and remain with my forehead resting on hers. So this is what you wanted?, I ask her. She nods yes. You could have told me. I told you. Yeah. I'm afraid I helped you a lot to get there. She doesn't answer. I continue: So what now? I'm free now. And me? You forget me. I reply harshly. You know I can't. You were already doing it: you've been away from here for over a year. I've never been away from here. Never. It's not hard to forget me: I've grown fat and ugly, I'm wearing slippers and my socks are runny. Pathetic strategy: you did it on purpose. I look her in the eyes. Antonia, I tried to forget you: I tried my best. But then I realized I couldn't. I realized it that day of the fox. Which fox? She was a poor lactating beast, she was trying to escape the hunters, but they shot her and killed her. I was shocked, my brain was in a tailspin: I couldn't understand why, but it was that detail of the lactation that was driving me crazy. Now I know why. What do you know? I didn't care if I got shot for defending her. That's when I understood. What did you understand? That running away is cowardly: you stay, you suffer, you endure everything there is to endure. Emmanuel, please, come to your senses: you are with Arianna now. Antonia, what was the point of this night? To remind us who we were. I didn't need this to remind me. It's water under the bridge: you're big, you have to be a man. The atrocious banality of these words causes me a feeling of disgust that is reflected in a grimace. Be a man? Yes. And what the fuck is a man supposed to do? Learn to lie? Face your responsibilities as an adult. But I have always been ready to face my responsibilities, Antonia!, I exclaim with disdain. The point is that you pretend to be the one to decide who I have to face them with. You and Arianna are a perfect couple. It's a shame we're so far away: you could send me a photo of you every now and then, or maybe... It's too much, I can't stand it anymore: I cover her mouth with my hand. Enough, Antonia. She kisses the palm of my hand. Enough you, Emmanuel. She looks up and adds in a whisper: Seriously, please. It has the tone of a plea, but the sense is that of an irrevocable verdict. I do not accept it, I firmly reject it. Enough of this shit! Listen to me: there's at least one thing to clarify before I go. What thing? The child. I want to know the truth. Sorry, what do you mean? How what do I mean? Antonia, good God, don't act like someone who doesn't understand! Tell me what you're not convinced by. Everything, Antonia, absolutely everything. One thing in particular: he has blue eyes. Not light blue, deep blue, almost purple. Even darker than mine. So what? He could have inherited them from any of his ancestors. I also inherited red hair from my great-grandmother: there was no one in my house who had it. Antonia, you have no right to do this to me. What do I do to you? I really don't forgive you for that. You have nothing to forgive me for. I don't answer, but my gaze is so penetrating that she is forced to lower hers. Finally she stops with that charade; she is silent for a few seconds, then she raises her eyes and says to me in a dry, almost harsh tone: You’ll never be sure, Emmanuel. Never. So trust me, forget it. You know it, I tell her firmly. No, you see, the fact is that I can't know either. I went through a very confusing period after the wedding, the crisis with your brother began very early. A little too early, I'd say, if math isn't an opinion. Already during the honeymoon, or more likely earlier. It's first-grade arithmetic, Antonia: you know, the one where two plus two always makes four. If you're so keen on having children, get busy with Arianna. This vulgar and inappropriate statement outrages me. What the fuck are you talking about?, I blurt out. I don't care at all about having children, I just want to know if... The moment I'm about to say "if Martino is my son" my tongue suddenly stops. She has crossed the line: I do not intend to stay here one more minute being treated like an idiot, or worse, a beggar, pleading with her to tell me if I have a child in this world or if she had one from who knows who. Also, the feeling I get at the thought of becoming a father makes me uncomfortable: I can't decipher it, it caught me off guard, it's an intense and painful feeling. If the child were not mine, I would never want to find myself wishing to be his father. And then I don't know where to start being a father: I'm too young and completely unfit for this role. On top of all, that that purple-eyed child is a disturbing creature, I wouldn't know how to handle him. As he grows up he will become of a dangerous and very strange beauty and will end up getting into trouble like me, and I won't know how... I shake myself with a shiver, forcing myself back to reality: I stare into Antonia's empty eyes and understand that I have dreamed it all. Our story is truly over: I am cradling a corpse. A sense of death freezes my soul, wiping out every feeling. The very moment I understand that I no longer feel anything for her, I automatically realize that I no longer feel anything for anyone. She was the source of my love, the one who allowed me to love other women by reflection: now that it is dried up, I am a desert. Okay, you're right: enough. I coldly move away from her and with a formal gesture I slip a note into her pocket: My new cell phone number, in case you need anything. I bend down to caress Gino the cat who is sleeping in the armchair: he answers me with a trembling and affectionate meow that moves me: maybe I still know how to feel love, maybe I do, but only for simple creatures like animals. Then, without saying goodbye, I quickly walk to the car, get in, turn the key in the ignition, maneuver in reverse, reverse course and I am back in front of her house. I don't answer her nod: answering her would mean endorsing the pretense, so I push the greeting back into the opposing camp with a decisive stuff block, my specialty when I was on the school volleyball team, I had a lot of girls who applauded me adoringly every time I jumped the net with a feline leap with my hands outstretched and I couldn't wait to go home and tell her about it, to make her jealous. All this in another life, another fucking life that doesn't want to repeat itself. I angrily step on the accelerator and set off, determined to reach my new reality as soon as possible: I will say goodbye to my family and return to Tuscany today. I don't know what I will tell Arianna, but it will certainly not be the truth. The fact is that I don't give a damn. With a sense of estrangement from myself that strikes and scares me, I understand that the truth no longer has any importance for me: if I am destined to pretend all my life, if my life is all a comedy, what importance can it possibly have? No one has ever told me the truth, not even Arianna. I've been driving at one hundred and eighty miles an hour for an indeterminate amount of time, obeying her command like a puppet, when I suddenly feel that she has cut the string. She's probably gone to breastfeed, change diapers, knit slippers, do one of those womanly things she said she hated and for which I'm no longer useful to her. I reflect on the concept of being useful. What is the child useful for? What was my dog useful for? What is the cat useful for? You don't love what’s useful. What you love is useless. I don't want to be useful. For anything. I slow down, stop, rest my forehead against the steering wheel. I remain still with my eyes closed, listening to the heavy beating of my heart. My rush to return to Tuscany completely abandons me, I feel a sense of loss, a real dizziness at the mere thought: to return to do what? To play the part of the promised groom? I love Arianna, but on another existential level, parallel to real life. I am fine being with her, but it must be clear that ours is only a comedy, one of those brilliant and witty English comedies in which everything is polite and fake: if we put it that way I am okay with it, acting it is pleasant, but the truth is something else and I have just come across it again, bruising all my bones. The truth is recognizable by instinct, even if it wears a mask. The truth is recognizable because it hurts. So there is no rush. I don't have to go anywhere, anywhere. I have to stay still, just stay still, give this chaos a chance to settle. Disjointed fragments of recent and violent sensations swirl in my mind, her crocheting, the blue puppies, Gino the cat, me sitting in front of her bare-chested, the laughter of the little monster with purple eyes as he slaps me. An assembly of pieces of madness that I should flee from in horror, but which instead have penetrated me like knife blades, together with the most destabilizing of certainties: Antonia doesn't want me anymore. I wasn't prepared for this. The truth appears to me in all its naked clarity: she doesn't want me precisely because she loves me, she doesn't want to love like this anymore. And in her maternal affection there is no more room for me, now that I have been replaced by the little animal. It's over, it's really over. Suddenly I feel a surge of angry rebellion: where is it written that it's over? Things can, must change. It's up to me. No one can afford to write the script of my life: I decide that, not the lousy screenwriter who has had fun at my expense until now and who I would like to meet so I can spit in his face. This story has dragged on too long, I know very well how it has to end: I've always known it. It's just a matter of making sure that I can get back on the scene, that's all. Get back on the scene with any role, even if in the meantime I have to do a lot of ridiculous things like get married in church with Schubert's Ave Maria and start working as an accountant. Around me there are only mentally ill people, and the more ill they think they are the sane, so the essential thing is to be able to pretend, to indulge the comedians like Henry IV, to propose myself as the uncle of the adorable brat or something like that, and meanwhile play the part of the devoted fiancé, get used to doing idiotic things with indifference: the indifference of an actor who knows he is playing a role that is not his. Anything to achieve my goal, which at this point I no longer know what it is: to go back to bed with her, to review Plato, to be a father, to marry her or to play cards with her: it makes no difference to me. I just have to be there, it doesn't matter how. I have everything to learn from my brother. This will certainly happen, in the not too distant future. And then my brother will give me a hand, I'm sure of that too: paradoxically we are in the same boat, we have the same goal and little chance of achieving it, so the rivalry between us makes no sense. Oh yes, it will happen, I'm sure of it: she won't be able to deny me at least one game of trumps, after we've put the baby to bed. The bed is good for playing scientific games, so we will certainly do that. But right now the gear has jammed, I can't do anything at all. I stand there staring into space for a long time. Suddenly I have a confused revelation: the journey as the key to everything, the only possible dimension, a metaphor for something else. The journey as a gap, waiting to find the answer. No rush to escape, no rush to arrive: arrive where? I make a decision: I start the engine again and take a side road that gets lost up the hills; I will go ahead randomly without a destination: it will be fate that decides, if fate exists, otherwise it will be the roll of the dice. Suddenly I catch my gaze in the rearview mirror: I turn the mirror with a jolt of shame. Another mirror, the one in her bedroom, has imprinted an indelible sequence on the retina of my eyes, like the four flies on gray velvet in the old movie I watched with her one afternoon a distant day. In spite of myself, my mind replays the scene from a few hours ago, I see it pass before my eyes, I relive it all in the present. She is sitting on the bed and holding me in her arms, I am kneeling in front of her with my useless elegant trousers on and I cling to her body while my disconnected brain produces a short circuit of words that I pronounce with my mouth on her belly: you let me die, you let me die without lifting a finger, how could you, I am not normal I am sick and I do not want to get better, I may as well have the right to remain sick, I do not love Arianna I do not love anyone else and the reason is simple, the others are outside and you are inside me, I love you Antonia and you love me too, and that is all. She kisses my hair and passes her hand over my forehead like mothers do when their children have a fever whispering speak softly, you will wake up the baby, and suddenly I bite that hand angrily, tell me whose child it is, but she smiles without answering. That child hates me Antonia, why? It doesn't matter, he'll learn to love me: get in the car, let's run away together, let's go to a place where they can never find us again, take the cat and the baby, don't forget the litter box and the blanket with the blue puppies. She smiles, she thinks I'm joking, but I'm not joking at all: let's leave Antonia, let's go away, it doesn't matter where. I can't save myself without you, we have to save ourselves together. She smiles again and tells me simply: but I'm already safe. I look up at her, two words agonize in my throat: and me? The floor sinks, I fall, I feel the heat of her thighs on my face, the fabric of the sheets, the cold of the marble. Then who knows, I don't remember anything. She must have picked me up by the scruff of the neck, confusing me with the cat. She was rocking me, her breasts were strange, swollen and full of bruises, the taste of her milk was sweetish, my life was ending as it had begun. Maybe we made love. Yes, I think so. I certainly remember whispering to her, take me Antonia, I've always been yours, only yours. And she must have done it. I see myself lying on my back in bed next to her, without those stupid pants, without anything on. I stare at the ceiling without speaking, with an indescribable sense of anguish. Antonia. Suddenly I sit up in bed, staring into space. My eyes, wide open like those of a blind man, see only the darkness: instinctively I seek her hand. I see with my mind's eye, like the soothsayer Tiresias, and suddenly everything is clear. I am like one who rises from a temporary death and is still illuminated by the eternal. Antonia, we really loved each other, but we were not strong enough. Love is strong and fights: we did not know how to fight. Antonia. We were weak and cowardly: it was easier to run away, it was easier to keep the cat and my son. Antonia. I love you more than my own life, and now that I’ve understood it I can't live anymore. Antonia. I was sent to save you, but I failed, like with Grandpa, like with my dog. If I am an angel, I am the stupidest of angels. Antonia... I would like to say maybe it's not too late, maybe we can still do it, but from my mouth comes only a plea, please don't send me away. She, cradling me, whispers to me with an absurd sweetness: Emmanuel, you have to go to the pound to get another dog: that's where everything stopped, you have to start over from there. Take it ugly and old, just the way you like it: promise me you'll do it, my love, promise me. Overwhelmed by excess awareness, I dive headlong into nothingness, barely held back by her arms. I wake up with a start from that trance with the labored gasp of someone emerging from a very long apnea. My heart is racing. I stop the engine, open the window and stick my head out, panting. You are the crazy one, you are the sick one, it is your illness that makes you believe otherwise. Salvation is afloat, on the surface, where Arianna moves with the rational elegance of a minuet. It is Antonia who sends you back to Arianna, she knows that you need her because you are sick. Arianna knows it too, she knows where I am right now, she also knows that I will return to her. Arianna always knows everything. I am a worm, I betrayed her, me who hates betrayals and never forgives them: so why don't I feel any remorse? Nothing at all, absolute emptiness. My God, this must mean something... I start driving again with shaking hands and a pounding heart and set off in any direction.