Page 20 of Three Times You

“A messenger, around noon.”

“Okay, thanks.”

I see Giorgio lowering his eyeglasses, and in one hand he’s holding several sheets of paper, possibly a project.

“How is it?” I ask.

“Excellent. It strikes me as first rate. I’ll talk to you about it later.”

“Okay. Later, then.” And I shut my door again. I sit down at my desk and remain motionless for a short while, eyeing that package. Then I pick it up. I heft it. It seems like a book. Maybe it is one. But bigger than a book. So I finally make up my mind to open it. I unwrap it and sit there, surprised. This is really the last thing I was expecting. It’s a photo album. On the first page, I find another letter.

Ciao, I’m so happy you opened the package. I was afraid you might throw it away without even unwrapping it. Luckily, I can see that’s not the way it went. I always made two albums. I have one exactly the same as this one, maybe because I’ve always thought that someday this might happen. I’m happy in a way I haven’t experienced in a long, long time. It’s as if a circle is once again unbroken, as if what I’d lost so many years ago has now been found. When I saw you again, I felt beautiful, accepted, and welcomed in a way I’ve never felt before, or if I have, I no longer remember it. Yes, maybe that’s a better way of putting it because, when we were together, I felt the same way. Now I don’t want to bore you with more words. If for any reason, you decide to throw this photo album away, please let me know. I worked so hard on it, and I’d be sorry to think that something I worked on with such love should wind up in a trash can. B

Once again, the signature is nothing but that initial:B. I look at the letter, and I see that her handwriting has improved. It’s nice and round, but it’s lost that childish playfulness that she once had with certain vowels. No, Babi, your words haven’t bored me. You’ve shed a different light on our life back then. The way I experienced you, what you meant to my life. How I was able to make you happy. How I was able to anticipate your bad moods and wait just the right amount of time to come back and find you. Difficult, demanding. With those sulky, pouty lips of yours.

“I warned you that this is the way I am,”you’d said to me. You knew how to make me laugh. You knew how to prompt my patience, my tolerance, the qualities I never thought I had. You made me a better person. Or maybe you just made me think I was. During that time when everything seemed wrong and backward, upside-down and inside-out, when I was driven by a deep-seated simmering sense of uneasiness. When I constantly felt like a tiger in a cage. I was in continuous movement; I couldn’t stand still, and all sorts of things were enough to push me over the edge into pure violence.

I look at my hands. Webs of tiny scars, knuckles knocked out of alignment, the indelible marks of faces that I ravaged, smiles gone forever, shattered teeth, broken noses, swollen eyebrows, split lips. Dirty punches, low blows. Fury, violence, savagery, anger, like a sky about to burst into a thunderstorm, a tempest.

Then, with Babi’s peace and quiet, all she had to do was caress me, and it was as if it sedated me. Another type of caress, tender and sensual, kindled a different type of shiver in me. “We’re a high-octane couple, erotically speaking, and that ought to be enough for you,” she would say when I overdid it with high-proof beverages. There were times when she’d spew out the kind of things only an uninhibited, daring woman would say, but she was always amusing. Like the time she said to me, “You can work miracles with your tongue.” She liked to make love and look me in the eyes while she was doing it. She kept them open until the wave of sheer pleasure made her shut them and let herself go without restraint.

“Only with you,” she said. “But I want everything. I want to try everything.”

I’m lost in ancient memories. I’m shipwrecked sweetly into a number of unexpected flashes of back then. Babi, so soft; laughing on top of me, sighing and her head tipping backward, moving faster. And then, stupidly, I get aroused as I envision her breasts, so lovely, two perfect miniatures that drove me nuts, perfectly sized for my mouth. She, all mine.

And as I linger over these last three words, it’s as if I see the picture of her shattering into dust. I see her at the door with a sad smile, looking at me one last time and then turning to go. She isn’t mine at all. She’s never been mine.

And with that horrifying thought, I open the photo album. The first picture is a photo of the two of us. We’re just kids. I had long hair, and her hair was blond, bleached pale by the sea. We were both tan and bronzed. And our smiles gleamed even brighter against that dark skin. We’re sitting on the fence in front of her little house at the beach. I can still remember it. We’d gone there that last week in September when her folks had already gone back to Rome. We’d lived a day together as grown-ups, as if that house belonged to us.

We bought groceries from Vinicio, the only shop open there in Ansedonia, buying a few bottles of water, espresso for the next morning, bread, tomatoes, some cold cuts, and an excellent mozzarella that came from the Maremma. And then a couple of steaks, some charcoal, a bottle of red wine, a couple of beers—already ice cold—and a wrapper of big green olives. The cashier seemed astonished, so much so that she asked Babi, “So, how many of you are there?”

“No, these are just for the aperitif…”As if the fact that there were olives and beers for the aperitif justified all the rest. And then we sat out in the backyard of her house on Viale della Ginestra, just a few miles away from that house on the rocks where I’d taken her, blindfolded, for our first time together. “But I know this street. I’ve always come here to go to the beach, my grandparents have a house here on Viale della Ginestra, just a little farther on,” she’d told me when she took off the bandanna.

“I always came here too. I have some friends who live in Porto Ercole, the Cristoforis. And I went to the beach in Feniglia.”

“You too?”

“Yes, me too.”

“Seriously, and we never ran into each other?”

“No, apparently not. I would have remembered.”

And we’d laughed at destiny. So weird. We’d always gone to the same beach, but at the two opposite ends of it.

“Feniglia is long. It’s a good four miles all in all. Every so often I’d walk the whole length.”

“So did I!”

“And we never ran into each other?”

“We’ve run into each other now. Maybe this was just the right time for it.”

I lit the fire in the little garden while she set the table, and then we settled in to bask in the last light of the setting sun. Babi had just taken a shower, and I can still remember that she was wearing the yellow sweatshirt that I’d bought in France, during a trip with my folks. Her hair was wet, which made it look darker, and smelled sweetly of having recently showered. And I remember that she was brushing her long, wet hair and had her eyes shut and that the sweatshirt was clinging to her legs, which poked out from underneath, while she was wearing a pair of Sayonara sandals and her toenails were perfectly adorned with red nail polish. In her other hand, she was holding a beer, and every once in a while, she took a sip. But I was the only one eating olives. Then, at a certain point, she set her beer down on the fence and took my hand and guided it up under the sweatshirt.

“But you’re not wearing anything…You’re not wearing panties…”

“No.” At that very moment, a Vespa pulled up in the street below the house, and Lorenzo—whom everyone called Lillo, an asshole from the group of young people from Ansedonia whohad always had the hots for her, though Babi had never given him so much as the ghost of an encouraging nod—dismounted.

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