I landed stirring up a throng of sweaty bodies and you were just sitting there in front.
You cut out smiling little men holding hands in a paper accordion, you raised your eyes and gave me a nod, as if you had been waiting for me for an infinite time.
We were all crowded together, dirty and terrified, the hot air stank of blood, burnt skin and mud that drove your stomach into your throat with every breath. We would have spent the night vomiting if we hadn't been fasting for three days.
I had no papers, the only bastard soul without baggage. Not even a handful of blackened rags to throw over like a backpack. You didn't care, you just kept watching me with the slanted smile of a little girl who has just discovered a rare and fascinating insect.
I stood motionless taking pushes and kicks like a buoy tossed by the waves because that was exactly how I felt at that moment, a damned buoy at the mercy of waves that spared nothing.
We deserved no distinction from goods.
You took the first step. You placed that decoration on the string bag you kept by your feet, shook your knees from the remaining confetti and reached out a hand.
"Come with me."
The best welcome a clandestine soul could aspire to.
I tried to make you understand that I had no name worth remembering, and that even if I had, our adverse tongues would never allow us to share it properly.
I would never have been able to speak your language, I wanted to let you understand right away. I wouldn't have succeeded even after years of study, I knew there was no need for so much apprehension, but I still felt compelled to clarify. I had lived too long with the hatred of strangers, all that spontaneity made me uncomfortable.
Your smile didn't waver. I could see the silhouettes of sunburned ships in the reflection of your eyes.
"I'll call you Nero."
I shook my head.
“Not because of your color, stupid. Because until today I could see nothing else.”
We walked side by side outdistancing that mass of thin, sun-hardened bodies when the day was starting to send its first yawns.
Those greasy and sweaty skins that had been my pillows and handholds for days became blurred silhouettes against a sunset that hurt my gaze.
As I brushed against your fine linen dress, I thought that every port smelled exactly the same. The smell of rotten fish, of seaweed piled up around the pylons. That humid stench that at first tastes only salty, but then thickens on your skin, in the middle of your hair and at the end of the day you feel it all over you. As you walk in that border town, among the lupins' skins that when the plagues scatter far away like dead insect shells.
We were invisible, two ghosts fleeing the past, in the midst of a crowd drowning in its present.
Your home was just how I imagined it as I secretly smelled your carrot-colored hair. A clean and bright nest, with lively paintings and white shelves crammed with books. A shelter from the world that can hurt, a refuge of the right size to cram dreams and hopes in, without succumbing to the silences of walls that are too high or too empty.
There were three cats lounging among the cushions in the living room, maybe you read my mind or maybe my expression was enough.
"They're not leaving!" you hurried to clarify before bursting out laughing. Even if I had spoken your language I would never have told you that in the country where I came from, we still ate cats alive.
You were still laughing that I didn't have time to look away from the frame next to the sofa.
"This is Richard."
Before the dream was shattered.
“We were supposed to get married in September.”
I lowered my eyes trying to mimic sadness, letting myself be hypnotized by the veins of the marble.
"Car crash. She came back from a business dinner, she never drank but that evening they had forced him because of a stupid bet. »
God only knows how much I wished I could say a word, I approached your body which had started to lose color. I wanted to warm you, protect you from that eclipse that had begun to devour you.
“When they showed it to me, it was all crumpled up in an absurd way.”
You started crying, you couldn't stop repeating his name. "Richard, Riccardo», you fell on your knees and started banging your head on the wooden table. The photo had fallen to the floor, the cats had escaped into the other rooms.
It was just me, by your side.
That evening we ate dinner without turning on the lights.
The next day you took me to the kindergarten where you worked.
We both knew it wasn't going to be a good idea. I tried to make you understand that I should stay at home, that I was able to look after myself, that I wasn't going to run anywhere and that, even though I had never believed in love at first sight, my nature forbade me, I was starting to feel something for you that wasn't just living together.
Those freckles the same color as your hair, the white skin that made you look like an alien… I didn't rebel, I didn't have the strength, anything would have been better than your tears.
The mothers looked at me with contempt. Only a few approached me asking for my name, pretending to be really interested in my situation, when in reality they were just gathering information to make sure their child was safe. My face had never inspired too much confidence, maybe that's why you chose me among many.
You didn't lose sight of me for an instant.
"Racist," you exclaimed to one of them.
"What nonsense," the woman replied. «What does racism have to do with it, this is about the safety of our children.»
"Racist," you repeated.
Our bond grew stronger and stronger.
I wiped your tears every night. I slept in his place, breathed into the same pillow. I was with you, everywhere, just like he was. It wasn't easy to fill the hole Riccardo had left, even less for someone like me.
I knew I was just a substitute, a surrogate. I knew it and I didn't make a drama of it. Only one is the first, all the others are nothing more than copies, attempts. One after another, until the end. Till death.
We walked on the beach not knowing where to go, we simply followed the line of the water as far as the eye could take. We stopped to look at the bathrooms as they closed, we imagined the voices of the patrons who had soaked the sand all day.
You looked at the swollen sea in the evening and your face seemed to say to him "now leave me alone" or "be quiet, everyone, I don't care what you have to say anymore".
You sat on the sand that was still capable of absorbing the sunlight, impregnated with warmth like a mother's blanket. You stood there listening to the noise of the cars whizzing by on the road and thinking that you never, ever wanted to be anywhere other than that.
"Do you know what's wrong with this place?" you asked me.
I just stared at your windswept face.
“It's all this infinity. There are no mountains, no buildings, just straight lines. If you let your gaze go, then you run the risk of never going back."
I turned towards the sea which at those words seemed to have calmed down even more.
“If you look at those lines and get nowhere, sooner or later you risk going crazy.”
At night, the walls of the house violently vomited the heat of the day. The nights were always the worst.
I heard her cry, gasp, she grabbed the sheets with her teeth, she tore the skin of her thighs by cutting them with her nails, she didn't stop tossing and turning until her strength left her. I stood still, pretending everything was normal.
I even pretended that night.
The night of September XNUMXst.
A night that should have been la night.
The night of the wedding.
She tossed and turned in bed, her panties slipping on the silk revealing that body of interrupted youth. In the dark, her waxy, sweaty skin seemed to give off an ethereal glow, I couldn't help but notice that she also had freckles on her inner thighs.
She wriggled like a nightmare but she was awake, wide awake. She put a hand between her legs. She fingers young and soft. She expert fingers. Her fingers that taught how to draw, that fed and cared for children, other people's children.
Fingers that couldn't replace the warmth of a touch.
I was motionless, pretending not to see, not to hear.
But I was excited.
She poured herself some cold beer, let me lap it up.
That you lick off that foam along with the bad memories, the disappointments, the lines that are too straight.
Then it was she who pulled my wet body towards her. She was the one who let me take her in the wildest way, no tears, no screams, no voices.
Subsequent times it got better.
You get used to everything.
It became more and more natural.
Often she let me penetrate her to the end, sometimes we even did it on the beach, after work, when the lights of the last baths of the season went out and we fell exhausted on the shore after running and chasing each other for hours.
Sometimes as he came he let his name slip.
He yelled "Richard!" as he thrust my cock behind her and she dug her fists into her pillow.
He kept repeating it for hours: «Riccardo. Richard. Richard".
As he fell asleep, stroking my tail.
The author
Stefano Bonazzi, Born in 1983 in Ferrara, web master and graphic designer by profession, for over ten years he has been creating compositions and photographs inspired by the world of pop surrealist art. His works have been exhibited, as well as in Italy, in London, Miami, Seoul, Monaco and Melbourne. As an author, he made his debut in 2011 with the story Post stations in the anthology Car grill. He has written and published several works. The latest are The massacre of Italicus with Vittorio Santi (Yellow Beak, 2019) e With your mouth closed (Fernandel, 2019).
