Read Online Don't Move by Margaret Mazzantini, John Cullen - Free Book Online

father’s funeral, I stood listening to the priest give the homily. Elsa was next to me, wearing an embroidered black veil over her face and crying. I’m not sure why—perhaps just because it seemed to her like the right thing to do. A thickset man with white hair moved out from behind a column and walked past me. He was wearing a shabby velour tie with its label half off and dangling against his shirt. He stepped up to the microphone and read a little page he’d written himself. Flowery, useless words; my father would have liked them. This must have been one of his best friends. Clutching a snotty handkerchief in one hand, he read in a voice drenched with authentic grief. He had a peculiar manner, affable and repellent at the same time, and his whole face, from his hair to his collar, was yellow with nicotine. Afterward, he stood in front of the church, smoking a cigarette. He shook my hand and tried to embrace me, but I recoiled. Nobody in the family seemed to know him. He went away, hopping down the church steps, his sturdy body stretching the seams of his iridescent jacket. In that unknown man and the mixed impression he left, I thought I recognized my father’s only legacy.
    One day, driving toward the sea, toward your mother, I thought about my father. In the months following his painless, sudden death, it had tormented me more than I would have expected it to. Sometimes I’d wake up at night and go to the kitchen and realize, between the refrigerator and the table, that I was an orphan. Not because I’d lost
him,
but because I’d lost any chance of having the father I wanted; whatever remote possibility there might have been had died with him. Maybe it had always been there, that possibility, and my pride would never let me see it. Remorse, somber and silent, had crystallized inside me. Now it was summer, and I was still lying awake at night, brooding over my strange sadness. I thought that maybe the arrival of cooler weather would get me back on track. As I drove to the beach, I thought Elsa and I might go to Norway for the August vacation. I wanted to walk along the precipices of huge rift valleys, sail into fjords, cross the Vest-fjord to the Lofoten Islands. And then I wanted to stay there and catch giant codfish in the cobalt blue ocean while the wind turned my skin red.
    A middle-aged woman was driving the car ahead of me—I’d been behind her for some time. I could have turned on my blinker, sounded the horn, pulled out to the left, and zoomed past her, but instead I leaned on the steering wheel and bided my time. Her short hair was pinned up with a comb; there was something pensive about the back of her neck. She was a woman who was coping, stiffening her girlish back, but she’d lost her bearings.
That’s enough; now I’m going
to blow the horn and rattle her backbone.
But then I thought about my mother. She got her driver’s license late in life, a gift from herself. She would climb into her little runabout—it smelled like furniture polish—and drive away to parts unknown. Her herringbone overcoat, carefully folded, was on the passenger’s seat. She drove the same way as the woman in front of me, clinging to the steering wheel for dear life, afraid that the car behind her would blow its horn. Angela, why does life come down to so little? Where’s mercy? Where’s the sound of my mother’s heart? Where’s the sound of all the hearts I’ve loved? Give me a basket, my child, give me that little basket you used to take to nursery school. A few bright lights have shone on my life, like fireflies in the dark, and I want to put them inside.
    The woman in front of me slowed down, and I slowed down, too. I let myself be led along, as docile as a newborn in a baby carriage. The roadside fields were dirty. It was somewhere around here that my car had broken down a few weeks earlier.
    The green door was bolted shut. I knocked several times, but no response. Up above on the overpass, the cars went