“Have you any idea how idiotic you’ve been?” he says to me, without losing his temper but with his eyes moving from one side of my face to the other.
“What was I supposed to do? She’s testing us,” I reply.
“But testing us with whom, with what?” he says, angry now.
“With you,” I snarl candidly.
“You know you’re an utter maniac?” he shrieks, his voice almost as high-pitched as a woman’s.
I defend what’s mine.
“That poor thing came to me in tears, saying that you left a threatening message under the door of the shop! You’re completely out of your mind!” he continues.
“Aha!…so…she went to see you…,” I exclaim furiously. “She came to see me, too, did you know that?”
“When?” he asks, startled.
“First, you tell me if you’ve fucked her. Or more simply: tell me if you’re in love with her or what…,” I say, pointing a finger at his chest.
“Fucking hell! Nothing like that, but how on earth can I get you to believe me?” He’s desperate and he puts his arms around me. “Why do you go on hurting yourself? Why do you think she means anything to me?”
I pull away from him and look him straight in the eyes.
“Because I can feel it,” I whisper.
After an incalculable period of time suspended between silence and complete impotence, he asks, “When did she come?”
“She left just before you got here. She flew out of the window,” I say, pointing to it.
“What the f—,” he exclaims.
“Dickhead. I didn’t kill her. She came in a different form, and I recognized her. She wanted to pull a fast one on me, the whore, but she didn’t succeed,” I say proudly.
He shakes his head and goes into the other room. Without a word.
Fear holds me by the hand now and my trembling never ceases. I’m trembling now as I write, I tremble when I’m eating, I tremble as I let the water flow over my body, I tremble as I look at him, as I stare at the sky, I tremble as flocks of birds make shapes and patterns in the Roman sky. I spend hours staring at them from the window, as they perform pirouettes and veer to the right and then to the left, making circles, whirlwinds, they look like hairy moles, then they plunge down, down, to the branches of the trees.
I tremble. I tremble as everything vibrates in the world, in the air. I tremble because I know that there’s still life out there and I can’t live it.
I need to look at the life I have inside me, that dark life, disconnected from all the others; I need to live inside myself, because outside no one can let me live. I thought he was capable of letting me live and wouldn’t let me die one day at a time. But that’s what he’s doing, and I’d rather he killed me all of a sudden, once and for all, with a well-aimed blow.