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

her wretched life. What was she like? Why did she wear so much makeup? The patchwork purse hung on its long shoulder strap and beat against her legs. I had to leave. She stopped inside a cone-shaped shadow. She put one bag on the ground and touched her overheated neck and fumbled with her peroxide hair. I stayed so I could capture that gesture, remembering the scent of her sticky neck. I hadn’t had anything to drink. My stomach felt fine, my head was clear . . . and in that sober, normal, clearheaded state, I desired her. I couldn’t trust myself anymore; already, while I watched her, I was violating her. It was all a lie. I hadn’t waited for her so I could apologize; I’d lurked around like a hawk, ready to swoop down on her and do her in again. She was close to the car now—she was going to pass by without noticing me. I thought I’d look at her in the rearview mirror until she was out of sight, and then I’d go away and never come back again. I lowered my head, looking at my hands. They were resting on my thighs, as if to remind me that I was a respectable man.
    Her belly came to a stop outside the passenger’s window. I raised my eyes, and though I expected to find two wells of terror in hers, I saw instead a look of slight confusion. I got halfway out of the car and leaned on the open door, with one foot still inside. I said, “How are you doing?”
    “Fine, sir. And you?”
    “Don’t call me ‘sir.’ ”
    “What brings you to these parts?”
    “I forgot to pay the mechanic.”
    “He told me that, sir. He wanted to know if I knew you.”
    “Don’t call me ‘sir.’ ”
    “All right.”
    “What did you tell him?”
    “I said I didn’t know you.”
    She didn’t seem angry; she didn’t seem anything. Maybe she’s used to it, I thought; maybe she’s a woman who goes with anyone who turns up. And now I looked at her, and all my fears were gone. The dark rings around her eyes made them sink even deeper into her bony skull. Bluish veins showed in her neck and ran down under her black-and-yellow-checked shirt. It was made of some stretchy material that sparkled in the sun, two-bit stuff stitched together on a sewing machine by some Asian juvenile. She brought a hand up to her bangs and began to pull at them, spreading them out in little tufts to give her oversized forehead some cover from my stare. The full sunlight exposed every flaw in her face, and she knew it. She must have been well past thirty—there were already tiny webs of wrinkles around the corners of her eyes. All her skin looked wan and sickly. But in her openings, in her eyes, in her nostrils, in the narrow gap between her lips, wherever her breath passed, there was a rustling, a gentle calling, like a heavy wind wedged in the thickest part of the woods.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Italia.”
    I received this improbable name with a smile. “Look, Italia,” I said, “I’m sorry about . . .” I shoved my free hand deep into my pocket. “I wanted to apologize to you. I was drunk.”
    “I have to go; I’ve got frozen food in this heat.” And she bent her head to peer inside the shopping bag she had never put down.
    “I’ll help you.”
    I bent to take the bags from her, but she resolutely held on to them. “No. They’re not heavy. . . .”
    “Please,” I whispered. “Please.”
    There was nothing left in her eyes except that absence I’d already seen there, as though she were emptying herself of all will. In the palms of my hands, I felt the sweat in hers, which were still clutching the handles of the shopping bags. We went through the apartment building and down the rusty fire escape and came to earth in front of her house. She opened the door, and I closed it behind us. Nothing had changed; everything was enveloped in the same desolation: the flowered cloth on the little couch, the poster of the monkey with the baby’s bottle, the same odor of bleach and poison. I felt something shift inside of me, a sort of interior