I had trouble falling asleep. I tossed and turned, the bed and the room had the odors of other bodies, an intimacy similar to that of my house but in this case made up of the traces of possibly repulsive strangers. Then I fell asleep, but I woke suddenly: someone had come into the room. I whispered: Who’s there? Juan answered. He said, straight out, in a pleading voice, as if he were asking an important favor, like some form of first aid:
“Can I sleep with you?”
The request seemed to me so absurd that, to wake myself completely, to understand, I asked: “Sleep?”
“Yes, lie next to you, I won’t bother you, I just don’t want to be alone.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Why?”
I didn’t know what to say. I murmured: “I’m engaged.”
“So what? We’ll sleep, that’s all.”
“Go away, please, I don’t even know you.”
“I’m Juan, I showed you my work, what else do you want?”
I felt him sit down on the bed, I saw his dark profile, I felt his breath that smelled of cigars.
“Please,” I said, “I’m sleepy.”
“You’re a writer, you write about love. Everything that happens to us feeds the imagination and helps us to create. Let me be near you, it’s something you’ll be able to write about.”
He touched my foot with the tips of his fingers. I couldn’t bear it, I leaped up and turned on the light. He was still sitting on the bed, in underpants and undershirt.
“Out,” I hissed and in such a peremptory tone, so clearly close to shouting, so determined to attack and to fight with all my energy, that he got up, slowly, and said with disgust:
“You’re a hypocrite.”
He went out. I closed the door behind him, there was no key.
I was appalled, I was furious, I was frightened, a bloodthirsty dialogue was whirling in my head. I waited a while before going back to bed, and I didn’t turn out the light. What had I intimated about myself, what sort of person did it seem that I was, what legitimatized Juan’s request? Was it the reputation of a free woman that my book was giving me? Was it the political words I had uttered, which evidently were not only a dialectical jousting, a game to prove that I was as skillful as a man, but defined the entire person, sexual availability included? Was it a sort of membership in the same ranks that had led that man to show up in my room without scruples, and Mariarosa, also without scruples, to lead Franco into hers? Or had I been contaminated myself by the diffuse erotic excitement that I had felt in the university classroom, and that, unaware, I gave off? In Milan I always felt ready to make love with Nino, betraying Pietro. But that was an old passion, it justified sexual desire and betrayal, while sex in itself, that unmediated demand for orgasm, no, I couldn’t be drawn into that. I was unprepared; it disgusted me. Why let myself be touched by Adele’s friend in Turin, why in this house by Juan, what did I display, what did
19.
I couldn’t get to sleep. Added to my strained nerves, to the contradictory thoughts, was Mirko, who had started crying again. I recalled the powerful emotion I had felt when I held the child in my arms and, since he didn’t calm down, I couldn’t restrain myself. I got up, and, following the trail of his wailing, reached a door through which light filtered. I knocked, Silvia answered rudely. The room was more welcoming than mine, it had an old armoire, a night table, a double bed on which the girl was sitting, in baby-doll pink, legs crossed, a spiteful expression on her face. Her arms flung wide, the backs of both hands on the sheet, she was holding Mirko on her bare thighs, like a votive offering: he, too, was naked, violet, the black hole of his mouth opened wide, his little eyes narrowed, his limbs agitated. At first she greeted me with hostility, then she softened. She said she felt she was an incompetent mother, she didn’t know what to do, she was desperate. Finally she said: He always acts like this if he doesn’t eat, maybe he’s sick, he’ll die here on the bed, and as she spoke she seemed very unlike Lila—ugly, disfigured by the nervous twisting of her mouth, by her staring eyes. Until she burst into tears.
