Roberta Mezzabarba - The Confessions Of A Concubine

Thinking about what I was doing made me feel sick, I recognized that I was a two-timer, but looking at the thing from my point of view, I could no longer help but seek a little appreciation.

With a bitter smile, I remembered when I accompanied my father to the conversations with my teachers and, after listening to the praises they

wove about me, he invariably concluded by advising them to ask more from me. I justified the embarrassment and disappointment of never receiving any praise with the conviction that in doing so I was driven to do better and better. And instead I realize that all this desire for recognition comes, perhaps, from the lack that I had experienced until then.

The manager, who was now assigning me more and more tasks in administration, had sent me to the stationery shop to buy some office supplies.

I was wandering among the shelves going past packets of clips, reams of paper, notebooks, when my attention was captured by a notebook with a hard cover in scarlet red.

I took it, even though I had no idea what I would do with it: it had been impossible not to buy it, as if that object had had a will of its own, and wanted to come with me.

Holding it in my hands I remembered my

grandmother and her exercise books in which she wrote her recipes and the phrases that struck her, and which she also used to dry the daisies that I sometimes picked during recreation, at school.

I went back to the office with two bags of supplies, and my notebook in my bag.

Pietro came to meet me at the door, took one of the bags, and helped me put away everything I had purchased.

As I passed him a pack of paper he said to me:

"We should find our own place, somewhere just ours where we can meet without problems."

"Pietro, are you crazy? What do you want to do, rent a room in a hotel by the hour? And where, anyway, in this provincial town, where everyone knows everything about everyone?"

"Don’t worry baby, the important thing is that you want me. We could take a train and go a bit further away, and find some place near the station."

I didn't want to go a bit further away and find a place near the station. I feared that that moment would soon arrive, I feared that Pietro would ask me for more. It was enough to feel his gaze on me, his words, I needed it desperetely.

That might have been enough for me, but maybe not for him.

***

I had put the pots with lunch for the next day and the stew for dinner on the stove, when I took the notebook out of my bag, put it on the kitchen table and opened it.

Spontaneously, without knowing where the pen would take me, I began to write.

If loving is a mistake

then I am guilty.

Tie my lungs

and stifle the song

that comes out improperly

to disturb the sleep of the righteous.

If loving is a defect

then I am imperfect,

Unworthy.

Tear pieces from my heart

and lay them on the cold tray

of respectability.

If to love is inappropriate,

when the path deviates,

lose me.

Nothing is more dangerous

than a burning spark

when dead branches

are stacked around it.

But if loving is inevitable,

appropriate

deserved

if it is breath,

light

magnificence of the soul,

pathway,

discovery,

youth,

ransom,

mutation,

motive,

I love for all this,

but above all because in me

the stele of courage

it is not yet lost.

I stopped, rested the pen on the table, vibrant with emotion and surprise from my own words.

It was the first time I had stopped thoughts with ink.

It was time to turn off the stove and start waiting for Filippo to come home.

My mind wandered freely in dreams, imagining that Pietro came in through that door, with his smile, with his fresh love.

The phone rings and abruptly brings me back with my feet on the ground.

"Hello?"

"Hello baby, can you talk?"

"Yes, but how did you get my home number? And why..."

"I took the number from your file, in the office... I just wanted to tell you that I love you and I want you so much."

My right hand clutched the handset of the phone feverishly, as the front door opened letting my husband in.

I immediately closed the call, leaving the phone on the kitchen bench and with my back to my husband I started to move pots and ladles.

My hands were shaking.

He was talking via radio with a colleague, not yet tired of twelve hours of service.

"Is dinner ready?"

8.

Bitter morsels, sweet crumbs

Perhaps all women find that they have to accept situations that rationally seem impossible to bear, unsustainable.

I did all I coud to try to understand Philip, I justified his attitudes, always so aloof, his manner which had become more and more brusque lately, but all this hurt me so much that often in the recurring moments of solitude I burst into floods of tears that could find no consolation.

Even when the tears stopped falling and the sobs calmed, I did not feel a little more relaxed.

I was just tired.

Tired inside.

And as I felt myself founder, the only thought

that gave me a reason to exist was Pietro.

***

It was a cold winter, it had been raining incessantly for too many days to remember how many.

I was sorting invoices into the files, hidden by a shelf full of papers.

I hadn't heard Pietro approaching.

"I’ve found a place."

His warm breath on my neck left bare by my hair gathered on the nape of the neck confused me.

"Go down the stairs to the ground floor, then continue for two more ramps, where there are all those boxes. See you down there."

That said, he disappeared just as he had appeared, leaving me in the throes of a cyclone of emotions.

My arms felt heavy, and my legs did not support

me, my heart was thumping so fiercely that it seemed to me that everyone in the studio could hear it.

What was I to do?

Think.

Reflect.

I didn't give a damn about reflecting at that moment.

Think, make your head work.

What should I do?

Do I go down?

No, I don't go down.

What if I don't go down and he gets upset and doesn't talk to me again?

I can't risk being left without what only he can give me.

I’m going down.

No.

I don't know.

So I found myself going down the steps of that

place which was so squallid, where the entire condominium piled up things of no use.

It was dark.

What if Pietro hadn’t come down?

What if he had played a bad joke on me?

In the dim light that enveloped me I saw his face emerge, and his hands outstretched looking for me.

My steps raised small clouds of dust that danced in the beams of light that penetrated through the dirty windows.

I let myself be lured as if in a dream, as if it were not me taking part in that encounter, but that I was seeing it on a television screen.

His arms were strong and squeezed me hard against his chest.

"I have wanted to hug you like this for so long,"

he said to me.

I couldn’t speak: a knot of emotion and fear gripped my throat suffocating every syllable in my mouth.

His hands wandered over my body exploring it, showing him by touch everything that the darkness, which surrounded us, concealed from view.

Then gliding gently down my neck with caressing fingers he stopped at the first button of the cardigan I was wearing.