Don't Move by Margaret Mazzantini

Author:Margaret Mazzantini
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307425591
Publisher: Anchor Books
Published: 2009-03-27T16:00:00+00:00

22

Your mother’s leaving on a trip. Her job will take her away for a few days, which means a nice stretch of free time for me. She puts the last items in her suitcase, the same spotted suede bag she took on our honeymoon. Her arm brushes me as she searches for a foulard scarf in the closet with the multiple doors that cover an entire wall. She’s wearing a soft nutmeg brown pantsuit with a shawl collar and a very simple necklace made of big amber beads strung on a thin strip of black satin. I take out a shirt. All my shirts are white, and to keep from making mistakes, I keep an appropriate tie wrapped around each of the hangers that hold my suits. Occasionally, Elsa urges me to be daring and wear something different, perhaps a hat. She’s got a friend, a writer from Berlin, who affects ostentatious headgear: berets, Panamas, cocked hats, felt hats. On him, they look good; he’s eccentric, bisexual, extremely intelligent. I’m sure she’d be happier with the writer from Berlin. Maybe they have assignations in literary cafés. He places his sombrero or busby on the chair and reads her some things he’s written; she gets excited. Yes, she’s reached the right moment; she’s ripe enough, and bourgeois enough, for a bisexual lover.

Having so elegant a woman at my side has always filled me with pride; today, however, her elegance depresses me. The umpteenth disguise. This morning, she’s the comfortingly feminine journalist, traveling on assignment. Even her gestures annoy me; she’s abrupt, perhaps a bit rude. She’s already slipped into the role that she’s going to play out in the world, among her riffraff colleagues. I pull my pants on, the ones with the belt already passed through the loops to make things easier. I’m going to tell her now. Yes, this is probably a good time to tell her. This way, she can go on her trip and think over what I said. By the time she gets home, she’ll have given it a lot of thought. So now I’ll tell her: I love anotherwoman, and that woman is going to have a baby; you and I, therefore, must part. I don’t intend to tell any face-saving lies, to say I want to live alone or some such palliative nonsense. I don’t want to live alone; I want to live with Italia, and if I hadn’t met her, I probably would never have found a single good reason for leaving Elsa. I have nothing to reproach her for—or perhaps too much. I don’t love her anymore, and maybe I’ve never loved her; I’ve merely been seduced by her. I’ve submitted to her tyranny, sometimes enraptured, sometimes intimidated, and at the last quietly exhausted. Now, if I watch her closely—and I can, for she’ll never notice—if I watch her closely now, while she’s making an inventory of the cosmetics in her beauty case, and I see her fixed stare, her dull eyes, her slack jaw .

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