Мелисса П. - The Scent of Your Breath

When you swapped the yellow 127 for a red car, our relationship changed, and I was forced to go alone to the enchanted places, the places of illusions.

“Tomorrow your daughter will be able to walk the roads of life alone, the roads woven of tears and dreams, and perhaps her wound will be in her heart.”

Do you remember those words? I remember them. Every day.

“I’m going to buy some cigarettes,” Thomas said as he left, slamming the door behind him.

I was smoking the last one, lying on the sofa, transfixed by the pictures and the voices on the television. I nodded, looking straight ahead.

When I heard the elevator door opening and closing again, it was as though a flash of lightning had suddenly passed through me and filled me with superhuman energy. I ran to the window and grabbed his mobile phone from the sill.

Frantically fingering the keypad, I dash through the messages in his in-box. There’s nothing there to give me any concern, although for a moment I have a sense of foreboding that he might have put another girl’s number under my name or his mother’s. Then I run through all the texts of the messages and that hint of foreboding fades away.

Suddenly a loud cough right behind me makes me start, and I feel the air stirring my hair.

I turn to see a woman behind me and say, “What the fuck do you want? I’m busy. This isn’t the time.”

The woman smiles at me and whispers in a croak, “I like what you’re doing. You’ve got to know everything. Go on, go on checking his every move, follow his every footstep and listen carefully to his every word: he could be lying to you at any moment. I’m here to help you, to make you realize that reality isn’t as you imagined it; it’s actually very different.”

“Really?” I say contemptuously, “and what would you know about that?”

She doesn’t reply but goes into the kitchen and pours a little water into her glass. Without saying a word, she turns toward me and inverts the glass of water. To my astonishment the water doesn’t fall to the ground but instead follows a precise and perfect horizontal line. A line that stops a few inches from my nose.

I look at the woman and ask her in amazement, “What is this?”

She folds her arms and, with a smile, replies, “This is your reality. Transparent, resolute, fluid. You poured it out where it seemed most appropriate to pour it, and now you’re living in it, but the space in which you’ve liberated it isn’t one that belongs to you. What you see before your eyes is your reality, your true reality, in the place where it should be: in a perfect straight line flowing in different directions simultaneously. That line is you.”

“So what you’re trying to tell me is that I’ve made bad choices? Is that it?”

She shakes her head and comes over to me, sending ripples through the water that still hangs over the room.

“What I want to tell you,” she says, “is that until now you’ve concealed your true nature because you’re attracted by the idea of a peaceful, normal life. But that isn’t what you want; it never has been. And what you’re doing now, checking up on him, is a sensational gesture on your part: the first in a long series. That’s why I say to you: enough of this nonsense, take a good look at what’s in that bloody mobile, and think hard about what you find.”

The rapid stream of words makes her cough again, and while the convulsions make her tremble and twist, she disappears. She fades away.

The little stream that floated a few inches from my nose vanishes, as well, while the sounds and the cold of the room are heard and felt once more.

Not upset in the slightest, as though I had just opened the front door to a neighbor asking to borrow a couple of lemons, I go on running through the fascinating data supplied to me by that diabolical little machine.

A new name jumps out from among his incoming calls: Viola. So who the fuck is this Viola?

All of a sudden, sweet but forbidden features appear in my mind. Two long, well-manicured hands, two slender, agile legs supporting a perfect bottom. Suddenly the woman of his dreams appears before my eyes.

A thin, pungent layer of fear insinuates itself between the folds of my muscles. My mouth contorts and begins to tremble, while my heart thumps harder and harder. The cold of the room mixes with a rare sensation of warmth that makes me sweat and shiver at the same time.

While a series of obscene photographs is filling my mind, dragging me to dark and unexplored places, he opens the door.

One is tall and thin, with a burned face and a brown shawl that completely envelops her. She shows me her wrists and they’ve been slashed.

The other is small and blond, with blue eyes, a purple hat, and a purple shawl. She looks like a circus performer. Her legs are stumps.

A mother and a daughter stand hand in hand. The daughter has a white dog that she’s holding by the collar. The little girl’s name is Obelinda and she’s wearing a brown floral blouse buttoned up to the neck. Her mother is almost identical, although her eyes are a different color. They have gassed themselves.

A Turkish couple smile; they look as though they have just emerged from their own wedding. They’re happy and content; the woman’s wearing a pretty pink dress. I saw them smashed against the wall by a car.

When my soul returns to my body, my head is heavy and the first thing I think is: what death do my ghosts think I have died?

As we watch a comedy film that doesn’t make us laugh, Thomas tells me a dream he has had.

We are sitting at a sumptuously laid table with a brilliant white tablecloth, and the courses have been arranged in an elegant and orderly fashion. Pouring some red wine into a glass, I clumsily knock it over, making a purple stain that spreads across the white cloth. Then I start crying, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He kisses me and tells me it’s nothing, that it could just as easily have happened to him. He demonstrates that he’s equally capable of spilling his wine on the tablecloth and making a stain. But I go on crying, saying it’s all my fault. His stain covers mine and he says, “You see? No one will notice, the whole tablecloth’s dirty now.”

He falls silent and looks at me without speaking.

I know he’s afraid. I know he knows that I’m afraid. We both know that this bloody fear will kill us. I’m too weak to kill him because, in the end, I like fear. But I like the desire to go on loving him even more.

Today, once again, he left without saying good-bye. And yesterday he came home without a surprise present: no ice cream (he used to bring me an ice cream almost every evening, with loads and loads of cherries), no film from the video shop, not even a kiss.

Yesterday as he was brushing his teeth, I came into the bathroom without knocking, and I saw him kneeling on the floor peering into the toilet bowl.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

Embarrassed, he drew himself upright and replied, “Nothing…”

I immediately understood the cause of his unease and, at the same time, his curiosity.

“I flushed it away,” I said. “There’s nothing to see.”

“I know, I’m not crazy like you,” he said cruelly, slaying me with his eyes.

As in the first months of our affair, we aren’t making love. Back then, abstaining before immersing ourselves in each other was a wonderful erotic game, though. Now it’s a source of unbearable pain, but I know it would be much more unbearable if we actually did make love. It’s as though his awareness of my sexuality has shrunk and is starting to crumble. I no longer want to fall in love with him, to be inside him.