Мелисса П. - The Scent of Your Breath

I look at her again, think for a moment, bite my lip, and then whisper, “I’ll go and see her.”

I open my mailbox and see that the letter’s there, and I don’t care, I don’t give it a thought. But when I see her photograph only one thought occurs to me: She’s more beautiful than I am. And my mind’s made up.

I’m on the train. The landscapes of Lazio and then of Umbria run parallel to my face, but my eyes are fixed on the seat opposite mine, and I am listening to a familiar but by now an ephemeral voice.

Thomas looks at me as he looked at me some months ago, straight into my pupils, with his eyes gleaming, his nostrils twitching, and his mouth half open. He looks at me as he looked at me when my excess of life was still so feeble.

I no longer have death in my heart, because my heart has already been stripped down to nothing. Now death is advancing like a tumor; I feel it itching as it settles among my joints and muscles.

It’s slow, tender, sinuous, feline. I’m not afraid. It’s playing its part well; it knows how to catch human beings in its noose.

I’m abandoning him and going back to the red house on the hill, bringing his torn-up T-shirts impregnated with his smell. I don’t sleep because I sense that if I did, I would never ever wake up again. I huddle up on the sofa and think, until the light’s excitement has subsided; then at night I light the fire and bring tears to my eyes by fanning the flames.

I don’t know what Penelope did — I wonder if she ever came. I really hope she did, so I huddle up and think of the two of them. He says, “Come on in. Melissa should be here any minute,” and she says, “Oh no, I’m sorry, I’ll come back later,” and then he looks at her and realizes that she has beautiful eyes and a beautiful face framed by beautiful hair. But he doesn’t desire her, no, not yet. She goes downstairs to wait for me, and I will never come, so she will ring the doorbell and say to him, “Listen, she hasn’t arrived yet. My train has gone…I can take the ten-thirty,” and then inevitably he will invite her up and maybe offer her a cold beer, and then, only then, will he realize, as he watches her sipping her beer, that she has the most beautiful mouth he’s ever seen. And then, only then, will he decide to kiss her.

And I go to sleep.

When I heard you crying at night, before I abandoned you, I turned to face the other way and thought, Basically it’s my life. I could have made it happier in the past…but I couldn’t do it. Should I apologize?

Should I apologize?

My new snakeskins are burning too quickly.

I follow him at night as he runs about the city on a moped with Penelope’s breasts pressed up against his back. I remember when we used to enjoy ourselves counting the holes in Rome, the huge crevices that pierce the streets. From Trastevere to the Esquiline we counted thirty-eight holes; from Piazza Fiume to the Cassia there were too many to count.

I stagger among the stinking narrow streets, a poodle is shitting on the steps near our apartment, the shutters are closing, the mechanics are saying good-bye to one another, arranging to meet again tomorrow, and people are walking their dogs on leads. He comes out of the door first, followed by her, and then by the dog. I hide behind the steps and watch the girl lift up her dress and climb onto the moped — she sits like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. Every night for three months I’ve gone to spy on the door of the condominium, hoping to see them come out together. I take the six o’clock train and go, and every night I wander about Rome like a junkie, except that my drug is love. People who recognize me in the street look at me and don’t talk to me, and in their eyes I see that they think I’m an addict, a star hurled too soon into the galaxy, unable to find her integrity. It’s true, I haven’t managed to find my integrity. I’m disturbed to the marrow.

She has a beatific smile I know very well, full cheekbones, and tousled hair. He has a kind of moribund sense about him, a dirty inheritance he must bear which also smells bitter.

I’d like him to fall hopelessly in love…not because his well-being makes me happy, but perhaps because I enjoy the harm I am doing myself.

Five months later, I go and stand beneath the balcony and hear her moans of pleasure, and I go home and cut my skin. I carve his name and mine with a box cutter, writing what I used to write in the toilets at school: “Melissa and Thomas forever.”

He will never know of my pain, because my eyes are silent dogs that follow him, foaming at the mouth.

His happiness gives me pleasure because it’s the very source of my pain, the harm I’m doing myself.

That’s why I’ll be eternally grateful to him. Damnation.

I curse them all.

I feel the tapeworm wriggling, nestling amid my fears and becoming their high queen.

I’m still very frightened of the dark, of monsters under the bed, and of the blood that might come out of the plug hole. I see eyes in the walls, I feel hands beating against the floor, wolves howling from somewhere over in the hills.

At night the red house assumes a dark color, it turns scarlet, and I feel as though I’m in a huge pool of blood, floating in it along with my ghosts.

The pain I feel confesses things it has never confessed before.

Pain is the source of my life, the source of my imagination. To love I must first feel pain; to feel pain I must die.

So many things have changed, Mum. It really is true that life is a concentration of many lives which, all added up together, can never give you a satisfactory result.

I’m just nineteen, and yet I’ve lived so many lives, too many. I’ve lived more lives than all the characters in my stories.

I’ve abandoned you, I’ve abandoned a love that still pulses vividly. I’ve abandoned myself.

Mum, everything I’ve lived through I want to live again. I want to make the same mistakes.

I’m locked away in my room all day and the stench of cigarettes fills the air.

My dead hair scattered on the carpet, my white, tapering fingers, my yellow irises.

I think of the dragonfly, Viola, and imagine myself reincarnated in her, if I am ever reborn. I reflect that while she may not have been part of my reality, mine and Thomas’s, in reality she was there. She’s always been there, and she’s dug a deep, deep hole inside my soul, like a wizard with a sour apple.

I sleep, I look at myself in the mirror, and I laugh. I laugh at myself, I laugh at my ghosts, I tell them to fuck off, and they start running madly all around the house. They start chanting, they tell me I’m going to die. Today Obelinda came back to see me, and she said, “Don’t imagine you’re going to get away with it.”

“I don’t imagine anything of the sort,” I told her, my eyes elsewhere.

In less than a second she slipped to the foot of my bed, widened her eyes, and asked me, “Do you know what’ll happen to you afterward, do you really know?”

“Will I keep you company in the other dimension?”

“No, worse than that,” she replied, her pupils now covering the whole of her face. Cheeks, mouth, nose — none of it existed anymore, just the eyes.

“Worse my dear,” she went on. “Don’t you know what happens to those who die of love?”

I didn’t move.

She touched one of my legs and I let out a shriek of pain. She burned my skin.

“What happens?” I asked with tears in my eyes.

“You’ll be forced to kill the one who brought you to your death. It will be your task, it will be your purpose.”

I shook my head — I didn’t want to do that.