Don't Move by Margaret Mazzantini, John Cullen Read Free Book Online Page A

was one of the splendid evenings of my life. In such a moment of serenity, I thought, I should fold up my embarrassment and put it aside.
    She returned, wearing her plum-colored bathing suit and carrying a towel under her arm. She was still incredibly beautiful, thinner than when I’d first met her, maybe a little harder, but more open. Her well-kept figure corresponded perfectly to her soul.
    “Shall we go in?”
    The lining inside her swimsuit, the white gusset before which I had trembled as though before a judge, had disappeared between her thighs. With a sudden movement, I sprang to my feet. She was standing still at the water’s edge. I gazed at the curve of her back. I was the love of her life, the old man who’d wait for her, double-parked, outside the shops. Maybe she desired someone else; maybe she’d already had him. When you’ve reached a mature, rational age, fidelity isn’t so valuable. But infidelity is, because it requires precautions, frugality, discretion, and various other attributes of senility. We two together were starting to resemble an old overcoat when it’s lost its original shape, together with any uncomfortable stiffness, and this very collapse, the natural wear and tear of its fabric, makes it unique and inimitable.
    I opened my bathrobe and let it fall on the sand. Elsa’s head snapped around in surprise. “You’re naked!”
    She laughed as she waded into the sea, following my white ass, which was really too broad to be a man’s ass. Did she still like it? Surely she preferred me with my clothes on, camouflaged under pieces of cloth. My belly stuck out; my arms had no muscles. I wanted her to look at me without indulgence; I wanted to let her measure objectively the imperfections of the man with whom she proposed to spend the rest of her life. I dived into the sea and swam underwater until I felt my chest swelling and hardening. I turned over on my back and floated while wavelets lapped at my mouth. Before I saw your mother, I could feel her arms displacing the water, and then suddenly she emerged at my side. Her wet hair made her face look bare. No, even if I had told her the story of my erotic adventure, she wouldn’t have believed me. I thought about some of the sexy scenes we’d watched at the movies, risqué images that came rushing down upon us from the screen in the darkness of the theater. Your mother would sit as though thunderstruck, holding her breath, while I felt irritated and shifted about in my seat.
She can’t be stupid enough to believe
people screw like that in real life, can she?
But when we left the movie house, she’d look as dreamy as the face on a playing card.
    She spat a little seawater in my face, then kicked out and started swimming ahead of me. I listened to the sound of her body moving through the water, farther and farther away. I lay still, floating with my eyes half-closed and my legs a little apart, letting the current rock me along. Maybe some little fish below me was observing the keel of my body. I turned over and dived, keeping my eyes open in the blue underwater glimmer. I went all the way to the bottom, where the water was cold, and I lingered there for a while on the slowly shifting sands. I opened my mouth, shouting into the deafness of the water: “I raped a woman!”
    And then, with my arms spread wide, accompanied by my air bubbles, I swam back up like a big white fish toward the light that suffused the surface of the sea.

4

    When I was a medical student, Angela, I was afraid of blood. During anatomy classes, I used to duck behind the other students’ backs. I’d listen to the sounds of intense surgical activity and the voice of the professor as he explained the details of the operation. In the room where the cadavers were dissected, blood wasn’t gray, as it was in our textbooks; it had its real color and its real smell. Sure, I could have altered my plans and schemes: I could have opted for a career as an untalented doctor of