Roberta Mezzabarba – The Confessions Of A Concubine (страница 9)

"I took the number from your file, in the office... I just wanted to tell you that I love you and I want you so much."

My right hand clutched the handset of the phone feverishly, as the front door opened letting my husband in.

I immediately closed the call, leaving the phone on the kitchen bench and with my back to my husband I started to move pots and ladles.

My hands were shaking.

He was talking via radio with a colleague, not yet tired of twelve hours of service.

"Is dinner ready?"

8.

Bitter morsels, sweet crumbs

Perhaps all women find that they have to accept situations that rationally seem impossible to bear, unsustainable.

I did all I coud to try to understand Philip, I justified his attitudes, always so aloof, his manner which had become more and more brusque lately, but all this hurt me so much that often in the recurring moments of solitude I burst into floods of tears that could find no consolation.

Even when the tears stopped falling and the sobs calmed, I did not feel a little more relaxed.

I was just tired.

Tired inside.

And as I felt myself founder, the only thought

that gave me a reason to exist was Pietro.

***

It was a cold winter, it had been raining incessantly for too many days to remember how many.

I was sorting invoices into the files, hidden by a shelf full of papers.

I hadn't heard Pietro approaching.

"I’ve found a place."

His warm breath on my neck left bare by my hair gathered on the nape of the neck confused me.

"Go down the stairs to the ground floor, then continue for two more ramps, where there are all those boxes. See you down there."

That said, he disappeared just as he had appeared, leaving me in the throes of a cyclone of emotions.

My arms felt heavy, and my legs did not support

me, my heart was thumping so fiercely that it seemed to me that everyone in the studio could hear it.

What was I to do?

Think.

Reflect.

I didn't give a damn about reflecting at that moment.

Think, make your head work.

What should I do?

Do I go down?

No, I don't go down.

What if I don't go down and he gets upset and doesn't talk to me again?

I can't risk being left without what only he can give me.

I’m going down.

No.

I don't know.

So I found myself going down the steps of that

place which was so squallid, where the entire condominium piled up things of no use.

It was dark.

What if Pietro hadn’t come down?

What if he had played a bad joke on me?

In the dim light that enveloped me I saw his face emerge, and his hands outstretched looking for me.

My steps raised small clouds of dust that danced in the beams of light that penetrated through the dirty windows.

I let myself be lured as if in a dream, as if it were not me taking part in that encounter, but that I was seeing it on a television screen.

His arms were strong and squeezed me hard against his chest.

"I have wanted to hug you like this for so long,"

he said to me.

I couldn’t speak: a knot of emotion and fear gripped my throat suffocating every syllable in my mouth.

His hands wandered over my body exploring it, showing him by touch everything that the darkness, which surrounded us, concealed from view.

Then gliding gently down my neck with caressing fingers he stopped at the first button of the cardigan I was wearing.

I stiffened.

And he felt it.