Omnipotence

That night we slept like this, embracing like brother and sister. It didn't cost me any effort to repress my sexual instincts: they were literally zeroed. 
About five o'clock we got up and walked to our transports without saying a word. Antonia had a ghostly face in the dawn light, marked by deep dark circles, so much so that I was almost frightened: "Don't worry I told her mechanically we'll see each other every day at my house." She burst into tears, nodded her head and gave me a desperate hug. She tried to kiss me, but I pulled my lips away and looked at her with mild reproach. Then I jumped on my scooter and went home. 
At school I couldn't understand a single word of what the teachers were saying: my head was filled with a strange buzzing, like a wasps' nest in the middle of August. After lunch I locked myself in my room and started listening to loud music.
That accursed afternoon at the end of September something had broken in me, perhaps the umbilical cord that kept me attached to life, and I wandered differently and incoherently like a drunk puppet. My relationship with her was the perfect synthesis of life's nonsense: a waltz in the fog, a horizontal flight in the dark without radar, blindly. The evil she had done to me was rotting inside me and I couldn't forgive her. It was like a burn in the soul, it hurt like hell. But I endured in silence, waiting for the moment of revenge.
I told Antonia that it was over, but it couldn't end like this: it was too shabby an epilogue, in which I had the role of the idiot, loser on all fronts. A minimum of redemption was due to my character, at least for the useless passion I had put into interpreting him.
In retrospect, doctor, I can tell you that I have radically changed my mind about that period: however terrible, it was still a way to feel alive. If I could go back, I would choose to suffer the pains of hell rather than face the senseless chaos that awaited me; yet at the time I was stupid enough to consider revenge more important. The fact is that you can't imagine how serious and irreparable certain mistakes can be, before life has given you some memorable lessons.
School had long since resumed and I owed exclusively to her obstinacy the fact that I somehow managed to drag it forward: she was after me like a hound. The staging of our afternoons by the river had lost all attraction for me: I rarely went there, alone, or rather in the company of Saucepan. Mostly I stayed at home, in my room, keeping the dog on my knees and turning my back to her while I studied, to let her know in the clearest way that I no longer needed her. I rarely asked for her help: just enough to force her to stay in my room, apart from the fact that she wouldn't leave for any reason in the world: I was as necessary to her as the air she breathed. 
She would sit next to me for hours, immersed in reading her abstruse texts and preparing her university articles. I purposely kept the door open, so as not to arouse Teresa and my family's suspicions and also to scare her a little, as if there was nothing left to hide. It was nice to watch out of the corner of my eye how alarmed she was, even though she tried to hide it: sometimes her hand would shake as she wrote in her notebook, probably without understanding a thing of what she was scribbling. But then I would close the books and the door, turn to look at her without saying anything, and the game would start again.
Knowing that she loved me, even in her own strange way, gave me a huge advantage. It was obvious that she trusted me blindly, and this gave me absolute power over her. I had always been careful not to exercise it out of respect for her, but now the respect was gone to hell: so I took the plunge and began to overdo it.
By now I knew her so well that I could predict all her physical reactions; I could provoke them, impose them on her, even impose the timing if I had to hurry. Like all intellectuals, she had no defense against her animality: her attempts at rationalization were simply ridiculous. I had always known I was the strongest, I had her in my grasp. A sense of omnipotence had taken hold of me.
I invented new games for her, I devised conventional signs to be sure to control her even in her absence. When we couldn't see each other, three rings of my cell phone at a certain time would warn her that I was thinking of her; I knew that she couldn't help but get in touch with me telepathically and feel the same sensations as me, because my body was hers, I was able to transmit them to her even from a distance, wherever she was, whoever she was with. In this way I was always with her, day and night.
Meanwhile, my disgust grew exponentially. The idea of mixing my physical secretions with those of someone else, even my brother, weighed on me more and more every day. I bombarded her with indiscreet questions while we made love: I wanted to know how many times she had done it, and when, and where, and how, and what she had felt. I wasn't satisfied with generic answers: I wanted to know every little detail of the foreplay, what position they had chosen, how long it had lasted exactly, how many orgasms she had had, how long and how intense, how much she had liked it on a scale of one to ten, and if she answered three I didn't believe it and got pissed off, and if she answered nine I told her you're a slut. She was more and more scared, she didn't know how to calm my destructive madness. Sometimes she would burst into tears like a child, and then I would kiss her and reassure her, I would tell her good, you have to be honest with me, don't be afraid, you can trust me, you don't have to hide anything from me, anything. And as I turned her soul inside out like a glove, I felt a cold, inexorable nausea.
I was constantly looking for ways to hurt her, it gave me a strange pleasure. I am not a sadist and I remembered that I had loved her: I promised myself almost daily to restore a higher meaning to our relationship, but for the moment the instinct to fully experiment my power prevailed in me.
At this point I must open a parenthesis, doctor.
What is commonly understood by love is a psychic pathology, a form of mental imbalance: if it were not so, it would not suddenly turn into its opposite, it would not transform from one day to the next into hatred, or worse, into indifference. Suddenly, you no longer care whether that person, who was previously your whole life, is alive or dead, and you don't even stop to ask yourself why.
Like all unbalanced people, the lover is also terribly dangerous: a betrayed lover hates the person he loves, wishes him harm, can kill "for love". I don't understand why this idiocy is exalted in literature, in songs, in art, takes up so much space on TV, in people's dreams and desires; I don't understand why kids are taught to defend themselves from alcohol, drugs and not from love. The Greek philosophers, apart from Plato, knew it well; Flaubert knew it too, Tolstoj too. We don't know it anymore, and in my opinion this is serious.
I have the impression that today, instead of adults, there are decrepit children who play at life and pretend to be educators. Never trust an adult . Antonia was one of them: woe betide anyone who trusts her. The last real adult I knew was my grandfather. Not that adolescents are better, but at least they have the mitigating factor of still evolving: I am fully aware of having behaved badly with her, doctor, but I was really young and I still hadn't understood many things.
Antonia was starting to be afraid of me. At times she would wake up as if from a dream, tell me “enough”, tremble as if she were cold. She would start to leave, but then she would fall back into a sitting position as if stunned: she couldn’t move away from me. She would rest her forehead on my shoulder as a sign of surrender, saying my name softly and asking me to please stop. Even now, remembering that whisper of hers sends shivers down my spine. She was too proud to ask me, but I knew she needed to be hugged: she felt that I was moving away from her, that I was only physically close to her. Her silent pleas for help gave me such a deep sense of laceration that for a moment I forgot all my resentment: I would wrap her in my sweater, put my dog in her arms and rock them both, whispering “everything’s okay”, until she stopped trembling and fell asleep. I would stay awake and listen to the voices of nature, her regular breathing, the beating of my heart. Oh, if she had been a blind, deaf-mute child, a poor idiot to be rocked like this forever. Now don't be surprised by what I tell you, doctor: this is the purest and most intense of my memories, the only one I associate with the idea of eternal bliss.
But suddenly an obsessive image would fall into my mind, always the same: her lying beneath me on the blue tile floor with her eyes closed, her imagining his black hair instead of mine, her scratching his muscular shoulders instead of my adolescent ones, her letting herself be insulted, hurt and meanwhile repeating yes in a dizzying crescendo, so much so that in the end I had to press a towel over her mouth to keep her from screaming his name in orgasm. I could clearly feel the crash of my soul.
I had always accepted Antonia's physicality as a given; now it was like a spider, a disgusting black spider between us, and an uncontrollable urge drove me to crush it. I just had to find the way, the moment, the opportunity; and finally the opportunity came.
Frédéric was here yesterday, I told her one evening, without any connection with what we were doing in bed.
Why are you telling me?
Nothing, like that. He was with a girl.
She answered nothing.
Very beautiful I resumed Long hair, tall, beautiful breasts. And then very young: she must have been more or less my age.
You weren't so sensitive to this kind of female charm once.
Maybe I don't, but he apparently does. And then you know, growing up we change.
Nice coup, scored with elegance.
The next day she refused to see me; I called her around ten in the evening: she wasn't at home. The fierce jealousy I felt all night made me especially ruthless.
The following afternoon, while I was preparing a school test with her, she affectionately put her arm around my waist and leaned on my shoulder, as she often did. She immediately backed away.
You have a strange scent she said.
Maybe: last night I went out with a friend and then I didn't take a shower.
She said nothing.
Don't count on me today, I added I have nagging back pain. You know, if it wasn't understood, we didn't just go get ice cream.
I closed the book and assumed a serious expression.
I wanted to tell you about it, Antonia. It's the first time I've cheated on you and it's only right that you know it. You know I've always been honest with you.
She continued to be silent.
I guess you want to know how it went. All in all not bad, I would say. The best part was the foreplay. The rest was rather tiring, the young lady had some problems with frigidity. But overall I was good: you can be proud of me.
She said nothing. I closed the speech with a tone between bored and impatient:
Well? What is this silence? Let's not make a drama out of it: in the end, all I did was put myself on the same level as you.
A very violent slap almost knocked me off my chair. I straightened up in a daze. She looked at me for a long time from some remote distance, like someone who sees a loved one again after many years and finds it hard to recognize him.
I wanted to say something, I wanted to explain, but she got up and went out.
I ran into the hall: Teresa informed me that Miss Antonia had gone away without taking her purse. I heard the roar of his car in the garden, the tires squealing on the asphalt road.
I went back to my room and leaned back on the bed. I was doing everything wrong.
But she couldn't do without me: she would come back.
At least to get back the purse.