Emmanuel - Part I: The Wind Inside

Antonia never came back: I must have wounded her to death. The human psyche is strange, doctor, so strange that I don't know if it's worth wasting time trying to decipher it: it doesn't help to avoid the tragic mistakes that we are bound to make in any case. At first I felt nothing: neither pain nor regret, nothing at all. The sense of liberation prevailed over all: I felt like a balloon that had thrown ballast into the sea whose weight had now become intolerable. I was floating, in the truest sense of the word. I was happy to exist, to warm up in the sun, to breathe the air, to walk the streets with my nose up, to look at the clouds, free, alone, clean. I was experiencing again the sustainable lightness of being, which had been my way of being for all the long months spent at the river with my dog, before a hiccup came to disturb my serenity. After a few weeks I began to feel a little too light, a balloon full of helium, full of emptiness. My afternoons...

That night we slept like this, embracing like brother and sister. It didn't cost me any effort to repress my sexual instincts: they were literally zeroed.  About five o'clock we got up and walked to our transports without saying a word. Antonia had a ghostly face in the dawn light, marked by deep dark circles, so much so that I was almost frightened: "Don't worry - I told her mechanically - we'll see each other every day at my house." She burst into tears, nodded her head and gave me a desperate hug. She tried to kiss me, but I pulled my lips away and looked at her with mild reproach. Then I jumped on my scooter and went home.  At school I couldn't understand a single word of what the teachers were saying: my head was filled with a strange buzzing, like a wasps' nest in the middle of August. After lunch I locked myself in my room and started listening to loud music. That accursed afternoon at the end of September something had broken in me, pe...

  With a superb backhand demi-volley, Frédéric secures the decisive point: a chorus of compliments rises to his address; Maurizio shakes his head and abandones: - Whatever, guys, there's no match when Freddy is in such good shape. The doubles begins, Emmanuel and Michael against Giorgio and Riccardo, while Maurizio actes as chair judge. It is a Saturday afternoon at the end of September; I am reading Dostoevsky's Humiliated and Offended and absent-mindedly follow the match, sitting on the bench with Saucepan at my feet nibbling on some imaginary flea. This novel disturbs me deeply, causes me a strange heartbeat, sounds like a sinister premonition. That woman is me. This can't go on, I have to stop, I know I have to at all costs, but every day I come back for it. I didn't think I could desire someone so intensely and absolutely. My God, I am climbing the ladder in reverse. I don't know why I delude him and delude myself: he takes our relationship seri...

School has started again, but Emmanuel has missed the first three weeks of lessons: he has just returned from a two-month study holiday in Cambridge, where his parents have forced him to go to perfect his English, a language which, like many boys of his generation, he has learnt mainly from the lyrics of pop songs. He loves American music very much, and this has given his pronunciation a slightly Yankee accent that offends Mrs Helena's hypersensitive ear: hence the decision to send him to the most exclusive heart of England for a while. It was very difficult to overcome his resistance: he would not have wanted to leave my side even for a day; but at such junctures I force myself to let the mother prevail over the woman, and so he left.  The night before he greeted me with a very long hug, but I am no longer the age for romantic illusions and I told him don't be a child, behave yourself and call me as soon as you arrive. He called me almost every night, not without my m...

I'm not at all sure this therapy is doing me any good, Doctor. Recalling the period after that night has more of an emetic than cathartic effect on me, a bit like someone walking on my stomach with hobnailed boots. If I have to do it, I can only do it by recounting it in the distant past in a vaguely literary style, to distance it as much as possible from me and feel less the pain it causes. Good thing I went to classical school. In the course of the days that followed, the spirituality of that night turned, who knows how, into a spasmodic physical need. Soon my supposed strength of mind, of which I was so proud, revealed all its insubstantiality. When I saw her again a few days later, one look was enough for me to realise that she felt the same way as I did. We were looking forward to being alone. She left first, I found an excuse and joined her. During the car journey we said nothing. We skipped all foreplay, we only took off the bare essentials in frantic gestures, in an...