Antonia never came back: I must have wounded her to death.
The human psyche is strange, doctor, so strange that I don't know if it's worth wasting time trying to decipher it: it doesn't help to avoid the tragic mistakes that we are bound to make in any case.
At first I felt nothing: neither pain nor regret, nothing at all. The sense of liberation prevailed over all: I felt like a balloon that had thrown ballast into the sea whose weight had now become intolerable. I was floating, in the truest sense of the word. I was happy to exist, to warm up in the sun, to breathe the air, to walk the streets with my nose up, to look at the clouds, free, alone, clean. I was experiencing again the sustainable lightness of being, which had been my way of being for all the long months spent at the river with my dog, before a hiccup came to disturb my serenity.
After a few weeks I began to feel a little too light, more than a hot air balloon a balloon, full of helium, full of emptiness. My afternoons became the apotheosis of nothingness, that naive serenity gave way to boredom. I began to feel transparent: they were projecting me onto a screen, and the film was boring to death. Then, I don't know how to express that feeling, the film started to get thinner. I spent the hours lying on my bed staring at the ceiling; I no longer took Tegame to the river: when he complained I opened the door for him and let him go out into the garden, alone.
One day, for no apparent reason, I started opening all the drawers in my room. I began to find pieces of memories: they slipped everywhere, between the pages of books, between the notes of a song, in the smell of the pillow, and filtered by the distance they weren't so horrible anymore, on the contrary they brought with them a kind of seductive pain . And the memory of pleasure, well, that was all too tangible.
And here we are, Doctor: I had never come to terms with abstinence. It was different before, I had never known real sex. I missed it more every day. However, incredible to say, at first I didn't worry about it: I was still in the grip of my delusion of omnipotence and I thought I could easily replace it.
What was she after all? A mediocre thirty-year-old, a bitch in heat with glasses and an intellectual air, a bluff: the males sniffed her willingness to mate and mistook it for charm. There wasn't much to regret: from this point of view she was right, I was objectively too young, our relationship would have ended soon anyway. Too bad for her if she was stupid enough to get involved.
I ended up convinced that Antonia had been only a chapter in my life, however important: "an experience", as they say; but now it was water under the bridge and I had to look ahead. I had my whole life ahead of me and all. And so, from cliché to cliché, I managed to recover a sort of unsteady inner balance, even though something inside continued to gnaw at me and in my heart I knew that this was not the case. The answer was too trivial, and trivial answers, unlike simple ones, are never true. But at that moment I had no alternative: I had to believe it.
That's how I got some sex with girls whose names I can't even remember. I was convinced that with those vulgar experiences I would silence my body, and then finally be able to dedicate myself to more serious things.
I was literally overwhelmed by the surprise: during those sexual encounters everything remained the same, the furniture remained mobile, the carpet remained a carpet, you could smell the wax just passed and that of deodorant from their armpits, they demanded condoms (with her I never I never used it), they said oh yes come on again as in a fourth-rate photo novel, I showed off my technique as best I could, but I was no longer very good, indeed not even good, in fact I was barely passable, in fact, to be honest, I don't care gave a shit what they felt and i couldn't wait to finish. And then that unrecognizable sensation, which did not rise to the brain: no cosmic thrill, no delirium, no take-off.
The discovery of the mediocrity of sex between strangers came as a real shock to me. I stopped looking for those girls and began to spend the hours shut up in my room recalling her in my thoughts. I have always harbored a secret contempt for masturbation, which I consider a poor substitute for real sex; venting hormonal tensions in that way appears to me for what it is: a degrading and self-referential practice.
I would like to clarify one thing beyond any doubt: sex for me is a means of deep and intimate communication. Communicating with myself doesn't interest me: if I really have to, I prefer to write a diary. Yet at that moment it seemed to me the only alternative to the squalor of those casual relationships: Antonia dreamed, Antonia only imagined was a thousand times more satisfying than those girls; I could close my eyes and delude myself that I was once again prey to one of his deadly ambushes in the closet, I could think that those hands were his, I could dream again.
Then I would leave my room and see her sitting in the living room, intent on chatting with my brother as if nothing had happened. She ostentatiously ignored me, so as to arouse Michele's amazement, who one day asked her what I had done to her and why she didn't want to tutor me anymore: she replied that I didn't study enough and turned for a moment to look at me, throwing an ironic look at my dark circles. I went to Teresa's kitchen, who consoled me with the usual hot chocolate.
I was sick: I swam in the aquarium with that strange mold on me, waiting for the drop of formalin poured by a pitiful hand. I was just waiting for a sign. And the sign came, on a terrible afternoon at the end of October.
I can't tell you this, doctor: I can try to tell you everything, but not the horror. So you'll excuse me if my account is vague and approximate, but really, you can't expect this from me.
I was in the room, lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling trying to imagine an alternative to my music, which I could no longer listen to. My brother looked at the door and said something like but you have nothing to study, no one to visit, the dog to take out, by the way Pan where is it? You shouldn't neglect it like that. I mumbled something back and refocused on my problem.
Suddenly I heard a yelp coming from the garden. As if awakened from a stroke of sleep, I looked on the bed: Pan wasn't there. How long have I not seen him?
I rushed into the garden with my heart in my throat and saw him sitting on his hind legs in a strange position: a large Doberman was running away through a hole in the fence. I approached with trembling legs: his jugular was torn open by a deep bite; he was bleeding from his nose and mouth, he coughed and looked at me wagging his tail as if to apologize. I immediately realized that there was nothing to be done.
I completely lost track of time, of space, of my own identity: I was just a deep abyss of horror. I stayed close to him, stroking his head, until the end, and in those forty-five minutes, which I wouldn't even describe under threat of torture, my soul was torn apart beyond repair.
I wrapped my dog's body in its new blanket of very soft fleece, a kind thought from my brother for my return from Cambridge, I took it on my moped to the clearing in the woods and with makeshift tools, pieces of planks and splintered branches, I dug a deep hole. I covered the hole with leaves, so that the earth was not in direct contact with the body, and then I planted a rudimentary cross over it.
I sat there all afternoon, numb with grief and remorse, shaking convulsively, not shedding a single tear.
The sign had arrived: now everything was finally clear. All I believed in was a child's dream, and that dream was over. A geological era, not a chapter in my life, had ended.
I knew perfectly well that remorse would haunt me all my life and would be indelible: because it is impossible to forget that you have caused the terrible death of a creature you deeply love and trust in you, and it is useless for you psychologists to try to convince us of the opposite: it's like forgetting the child in the back seat of the car in August and finding him suffocated in atrocious hardships: how do you recover from such a thing? How the fuck do you do it, doctor?
The truth is that the soul receives mortal wounds from which it never heals. You can only try to survive.
I was terrified by the thought of the future. Everything that had represented my faith, my belief, my trust in good, my will to do good, had fallen apart. I had done evil, I had been capable of it: not only had I knowingly hurt Antonia, but I had done horrible harm to a creature that I had saved, that I loved very much and that I wanted to protect. What abominable irony of fate, what wicked God had played this awful joke on me? Whose laughing stock had I become? Who was I ?
I was only sixteen: I felt that already at twenty my psyche would have been devastated by this inner torment. I knew it was impossible not to think about it, to forget about it: perhaps only with an electroshock or a lobotomy could I have succeeded, perhaps only Antonia's presence by my side, for better or for worse, could have saved me at that moment, but she wasn't there. it was more: neither to console me nor to slap me. I would have accepted anything from her, even to share her with Frédéric or anyone else, even to set aside sex and stay close to her like a brother, as long as she wrapped me in an embrace and stunned me with her it's all right.
Only once, a few days after Tegame's death, did she approach me in the corridor on my way to my room and take my hand. I was too depressed even to feel my heart leap in my chest: I felt only a confused pain in my stomach.
- I'm so sorry, Emmanuel. - he said - I know how important he was to you and I loved him too. Don't let the sadness get too deep, get another one now.
I looked at her with distant pity:
- Another one, sure.
She continued:
- In any case, I will always be close to you: never forget that.
I released my hand from his and went alone to the river, where I stayed all afternoon beside my dog. It was cold, autumn was now well advanced and the grass was spotted with golden leaves that had fallen from the poplars: I wrapped myself up in my jacket and curled up on myself.
I understood that all this was not accidental: I just had to make an effort to understand. I talked about it at length with Tegame. Then I took him for a few steps along the bank.
Staring at the shimmer of the water and listening to his soft voice, I understood the answer, of a disarming simplicity. I didn't have to suffer much longer: my elimination was near.