Four Girls

 

How young I was then! All I could think about, that day, while the small glasses filled with fresh Frascati wine touched and chinked, was that I had made love to each of the four girls sitting at the table with me. A dinner: me and them, they who did not know, did not bear in their minds the burden of the intricate map of the plots that bound us. This realization explains the permanent smile on my lips, my unusual cheerfulness.

At that time I did not even realize that waking up in the morning and not having any pain in your body is a miracle to be grateful and moved for. That being able to serenely gulp down pizzas and pies, beer, wine and limoncello, skip a night of sleep, sleep on the ground without second thoughts, are conditions that do not last. In your little personal piece of DNA there is written the exact number of times you can get away with it. In addition, only now do I realize that some sides of my character, that then seemed so personal and only mine, that feverish impatience for example, to aim at nothing less than the greatest and intolerably intense, were rather generic attributes of many a youth.

Mind you: I could be called many things but not a seducer, not even in front of that quartet of girls. Inexperienced, naive, distracted, insecure, skittish, not at all attractive. The love stories of my life were all there, tangled in that quicksand of appetizers that would cost me dear, although we would split into five. So at least I hoped, because the money to pay for everything, I didn’t have.

 

Eva was taller, richer, stronger, older, more mature and intelligent than me. The day that I saw her for the first time, there were twenty of us; on a trip to the mountains. A friend of a friend. She showed up with her boyfriend, a strapping athlete, already balding. He had to be something like twenty-five, and it seemed to me immensely old. After a few hours of hiking in the forest, once the group returned to the village, she sent him to buy ice cream for all, approached me and said she wanted to spend the night with me. Did I have a room where we could go? Yes, I replied, hesitant and confused; in the bed and breakfast right behind there. She took my arm and we crossed the street, while our friends exchanged glances and her boyfriend, just out of the ice cream parlor, stood still, holding three cones that were beginning to melt.

Once at the hotel, on second thoughts maybe we should not have being kissing so brazenly while waiting for my room keys. Moreover, Eva should not have slipped her hand inside my shirt. The old receptionist framed me with a supernatural selective look that managed to be indignant with me and to ignore Eva, and said that ladies were not allowed in the room. So I paid what I owed, quickly took the bag with my things and we started walking around for hours in search of someone with a spare room and willing to accommodate young clandestine couples. We walked, we laughed and we often stopped to rest and kiss. Late at night we found an indifferent young man who was especially interested in an old movie, who had the last free room and did not have objections.

We threw ourselves onto the bed and began to kiss and undress. Eva was very tired. Due to a fall in the forest she had a swollen ankle, bruised and painful. I began to massage it, and after a few minutes I heard her breathing heavily. Let’s just say snoring. She had fallen asleep. I thought of the boyfriend and I had a fit of laughter. I had replaced him as therapy and a sleeping aid. When I covered her and lay down at her side I was still laughing.

We recovered in the morning, when she joined me in the shower and in a few hours she taught me a world of new practices, covering almost everything that I still know in the field. She liked me. Her moans certainly kept the staff cheerful; no one dared to knock to redo the room, that we left when it was late afternoon. She said I was beautiful, poor thing, for we humans are subject to such refined and imaginative deceptions. She said that our level of understanding was rare, and that we should move in together.

The next day everyone went home. From her distant address Eva would call me every day and send me gifts. Silk shirts, books. I explained patiently that we did not really understand each other, that out of bed our tastes clashed, that I could not imagine waking up next to her. We were too different. Our bodies, this is true, they got along fine, but I, who lived in a scarcely physical world, I did not give too much importance to that. Perhaps, in retrospect, the fact that she had declared herself so openly and passionately was a tactical mistake that made her less interesting. Maybe if she had not left her boyfriend, who knows?

 

Ingrid was small and dark, a rebellious child with black and short tufts that would leave her neck uncovered, making her look like a bird and leaving me with the irresistible desire to protect her and surround her with my arm, to kiss her olive nape.

She never liked me. At her age, she could not be affected anymore by that form of hypnosis that makes you fall in love. Too expert, too many stories; she moved amongst men with the same pragmatic attitude that I held in my kitchen, where I always knew hot to fix a nice meal, no matter what sparse combination of foods there was in the fridge. The fact that she didn’t like me made her irresistible. I courted her furiously, something I had never done before or after. Courting was not in my field of experience, in courtship I was like she was in the kitchen, where, however many good things there were in the fridge, only pitiful dishes would result. The fact that Ingrid would sleep with many others only stimulated me more. I was better than them, right?

We made love just once, after months of my blind and almost raging insistence. She gave herself this way, without warning and without ceremony, the day I went to visit her having long since abandoned all hope. Later she explained to me that she still did not like me, but my insistence at the end had engendered some sick desire. She used the word perversion. I did not understand her explanation. I still don’t understand.

We made love and I knew immediately I had disappointed her, not to being able to satisfy her, to be just one of the many that would be confused in her memory. While desperately stroking her, this thought was unbearable; and is still intolerable, even today, when I don’t even remember her face well.

 

Giorgia, who was one of the great loves of my life, had just left me. We had been together two years, that was enough for her to teach me how to get drunk without being sick the next morning, and to use watercolors. Both disciplines require a considerable theoretical knowledge and constant practice. In both, although I should not be the one to say, I reached a good level of mastery. I, for my part, taught her to read, or maybe I should say I taught her what to read, since the art of extracting sounds from the traced alphabet, either in print or the characters written by hand, she already possessed. At the end she couldn’t take anymore of me and my books, and cups and brushes, and unyielding opinions, and went with the first passer-by, making sure that I was clear that this was not one of the usual light betrayals, which would have allowed a continuation of the relationship, albeit uncomfortable and unhappy. This was a permanent change, as set out by the fact that she moved to another city and took away three suitcases of clothes, which included my favorite black T-shirt, which certainly was taken by mistake, but that from now on would have been worn by someone else. I knew that she would regret it, that she would spend years wallowing in dead end stories; and that one distant day we would be reconciled and she would even return the shirt, religiously kept for years, protected from the clutches of her lovers, in an envelope scented with lavender. But even so, it would then be too late.

 

Bea had red hair and loved books. She lived in Northern Europe. A skin so white it looked like she had always lived in the bottom of an underground cavern, like one of those eyeless salamanders, although she did have eyes, green and beautiful. I met her because of the marketing strategy of my boss, which he summarized on the day of the employment interview: “Until now I have been the only salesman in this company; now I need help. You will go where it’s cold and they eat meat, I’ll go where it is hot and they eat fish. Ah, that hair: you need to cut it.” I did cut it, though it was always clear to everyone that this short hair was just a bad disguise and slowly, an inch at a time, I let it regain the ground that was its according to certain ancient pacts.

Bea had the noble and adult beauty of a queen. Reserved and coy, reminding me of a badly tamed cat. She would never say anything that was superfluous, leaving ample room for silences that would send me into ecstasy, although certainly they lacked a certain warmth and family intimacy that could also be comforting. Even tangled together in a bed, the distance that separated us was always clear.

We had met in a deserted restaurant. Only she and I, sitting opposite each other, within reach of eyes and voice, but at two different tables. Smiling quietly, I signaled if I could join her at her table, I pointed to my bottle of wine with inviting raised eyebrows, she opened her arms and nodded her head, amused.

Once near her I did not want to do the Italian thing and woo, and this pleased her. We talked quietly, without a shadow of flirting, which neither of us liked, even if the attraction was working its subterranean silent way. At the end she told me with a serious face that she liked me, but did not know how much. She suggested a vacation to explore it. We chose a date there and then. A month later we were at the sea together. She liked the right music, and read the right books, and expresses the right opinions, that is, similar to mine. She even tanned, took the deep golden color of fried fish, which really killed me. By day, long hours of blessed silence, which I had never experienced with a woman. In the evening, over a bottle of wine, we agreed on the most delicate matters. Maybe that’s why, at the end of the holiday, we agreed on the fact that a week of our lives was exactly the right time to share. We were so alike that we lost interest. We parted as friends, with a homely ceremony that included good wine, sex, silence and complicity.

 

_____

 

This thing of attraction and affinity, I was thinking, it is really mysterious.

At that time, without ever realizing it, I was looking for people like myself as male friends: tastes, clothes, opinions, even haircuts; if you could call haircut the deal: I’ll let you grow out never touched by a comb, just a single rake of my fingers after showering, and in return you you will fall in acceptable convolutions and will not do the trick of dropping out prematurely. Keeping on being different from everyone, I was wedged into a comfortable club, a quarantine composed of identical characters, the only ones whose proximity I could bear. And although surrounded by clones, my tendency to detach, to feel different, was stronger than anything else. I could always find some irritating difference to get indignant about, like:, Okay, we both admire Czech writers, and Kafka among them of course, okay, we agree to prefer his short stories to novels, but how do you not recognize the absolute superiority of his latest works? In short, I was shrinking like a prune.

Women, I now understand, were my only opportunity to meet with the dissimilar. A nice pair of legs, and suddenly attending a concert of some crappy pop singer who was even in the top ten, was not so unthinkable. In this way I widened my experiences, I became democratized. I came into contact with what people -that incomprehensible tangle of beings that fluttered in the space just outside of my bubble – did and appreciated. In contrast to today’s dating sites that make you fill in detailed questionnaires based on the ridiculous idea of couple affinity, as if it a love relationship were a pastime based on shared tastes. As if it wasn’t just the opposite that I always unconsciously sensed in a woman: a potential for change, a dark energetic entity, a black hole capable of taking me out of myself, saving me from my own tastes.

 

So, I am there to enjoy my dinner with my four women. The third glass of wine begins to do its job, and I start to think: I hope that the intertwining of our lives, at least has served a purpose; the prodigious sequence of failures that first had brought together, then unhooked me from each of these beauties, and at the end, with its lessons, remorses and repentances brought me to what I am. To allow us to spend a pleasant evening together. To toast with a light wine of the Castelli.

Nice idea, this dinner. How did it start? I asked myself, as the waiter, a sad boy wearing a black T-shirt that said happiness, brought another bottle.

Well, first of all the other week I met with Eva at the supermarket, and in front of the meat counter, with elegant turns of phrase she told me that after our day together she went back to the balding athlete, married him and had three children; that he is often away on business, and that one of these evenings, as soon as he turns the corner and the babysitter is free, we could also meet for a reunion, and that precisely tomorrow night would have done just fine for her. How did that sound?

 

I realize it is hard to believe, but ten minutes later I met Bea, in front of the fish counter, where I could see that she had not changed at all, and that these two adult wrinkles around the eyes made her even more beautiful, and objectively measured the whiteness of her skin comparing it with the fresh squids on display. I came looking for you, she told me candidly. I went to your house and they told me you were here. I just got divorced and I’m making a trip to meet everybody I had a story with. To see what I missed. Now I have to run, but how about tomorrow night?

 

Giorgia had already got in touch, a few nights before. The next evening for some reason she would be in my area, she had declared herself happy to have a dinner with my friends. Better than alone with me, I thought. No explanation required. I just called her back to arrange the dinner for the next day.

 

I called Ingrid, too. She was the last witness of that time, I thought, without her, the dinner would be incomplete. I found her cheerful and helpful. She just said: just do not try it on again, as if the experience had been such a shock to her that she could not afford to return to it. To all the women I said it would be a dinner with friends, and for reasons that are too complicated to explain, tomorrow night will be all women. With each there was an implicit understanding that we would not talk about the past.

 

And in fact nothing of the past was mentioned. The girls were well-versed in care of one another, passing along information on creams and natural recipes, glimpses of tourist geography and titles of books. So much so that at one point I felt a little overlooked. Because we reunited, I thought. Why didn’t I want to see them one by one, maybe the flame could have been rekindled. The way the dinner is happening is a bit superficial, and the girls are becoming all too friendly. At any moment it could pop out why each one is here, I thought, what really unites them, and at that moment a feeling of dizziness and nausea, a certainty that the next morning I would have a headache proportionate to my mistakes, that the stuffed peppers were an error in judgment, that my DNA had decreed my entry into adulthood, that from now on I would not get away with more, I would have to pay for every single tiny deviation from a healthy and responsible diet.

I got up to go to the bathroom. The four women did not seem to notice anything, they were laughing at a joke that I had missed. They continued to talk about something else, but it was clear that the information was passed, transmitted through a kind of osmotic process of which I was ignorant. How can you think that the common denominator of the dinner is not obvious? How can you fool yourself that they do not know? I thought. They are women. And a woman is a devil that knows everything. Are you sure that it was you who organized this dinner?

About the rest of the evening, when I returned from the bathroom, I will not say. Suffice it to say that I started the dinner as a boy, I finished as a man, except for the time of paying the bill. Suffice it to say that it was like mixing glycerin and nitric acid, and accepting the consequences. Sitting, motionless, polite, composed, a half smile on my lips.

Maybe another time I’ll tell the story in detail. It takes strength.

 

____

 

It’s been twenty five years. Now that the steam from the shower clears, I force myself to look better in the mirror. My DNA has done some work. Yes, I’m still me, no doubt; but at some point in the path my eyes have become more rigid and shrunken in a way that I do not recognize. You can not earn experience and keep those eyes. I can try to open them wide as much as I want, none of my expressions can reproduce that swollen and surprised look, that expression in search of wonders, that mischievous face made to be teased and deceived.

 

Really, how young I was then! It seems impossible that the far-fetched creature, that bumbling and adventurous idiot, and the sad and wise man with close-cropped hair that now faces the darkness of the bathroom mirror, are to be even remotely associated. How many ideas do I share with that guy, you tell me? And you also have to explain to me how is it possible that the fading memory of that face as a kid could be more familiar than the irrevocably current crumbling ruin that I see right now in the mirror?