Knotted

He tells her I’ll show you Riccione, you’ve never been there, and now she’s on this train running to a place that has never piqued his interest, moreover out of season except for someone from the real cold, but he really cared, he even got her the ticket and said it was a nice thing that they were meeting halfway, he coming from the north she from the south.

She is tired and confused, she has no desire to see him and then this story was already ending when it had started, on her birthday, that he had bought her a gold bracelet that weighed half a kilo and was offended because she didn’t want it – she didn’t even like it, it was modern and whatever – he had her name and date of birth engraved on it even though he had met her only a few days before. He said if you don’t want it I’ll throw it here in the basket; on the one hand his insistence attracted her. She took it, and it was the first in an unfortunate series of egregious mistakes.

She just wanted to go back to school and finish the year, even if it meant buying drawing materials every other week and food, very little food, chicken giblets, oil, lemon; every time his roommate opens a package of pasta he steals some noodles from him and sets them aside until they become a meal.

She arrives at this semi-deserted station; it is daylight but the light is slanted, it is cold, she catches sight of him at the end of the platform, wearing a flowered shirt, too loose Bermuda shorts, flip-flops, long, skinny legs, blond and white as a German. She tells him you don’t go around town in a costume in March, he doesn’t take it well, feels awkward, and say he had fascinated her by being mature and responsible for his age, good at his job, so much so that she didn’t realize how self-referential, ignorant, anempathetic, unintelligent, uninteresting he was, and how psychologically abusive he was.

She doesn’t even understand it while she is in the car and she takes her defilely to this hotel without infamy or praise; just enough time to change clothes and take her to the kind of beach she doesn’t like, very long, straight, deserted, all the same, an endless row of closed umbrellas, under a pale, tense sun.

She lives in the fog, she is always cold. She tries to cover her back, fumbles in a rational panic, hopes to spot an island, a rock, roots to belong to, to rely on; she has no time to figure out who she is and what she wants, basic needs come first: food, home, warmth, she would like a small TV set because the ground-floor room she lives in at night becomes a hole of anguish.

Instead he has this wonderful hotel in one of the most beautiful places in the world. He is good at everything he does, and he expects to become much richer than he already is in a short time, and he will. He’s not going to restore the beautiful old traditional hotel he bought; he’s going to turn it into a huge fairy-tale castle on the border between luxury and vulgarity. The frescoed stube, the wooden staircase from the 1800s, everything will end up in the fire or where in short his border people put their past.

This promise of a solid, quiet life blinded her and she kept bumping into it like a bug on an irresistible lamp. Then he asked her to work for free, from dawn to late at night, in the bar, in the restaurant, doing the rooms. Because he said he wants her to be, and feel, family. And he wants to marry her, right away, he’s very insistent about that, but she laughs and thinks he’s joking, it’s too early, and her parents look at her with rage in their eyes, and they’ve broken into the little room where she sleeps and thrown all her things down the stairs.

They go back to the room, it’s evening; she has a big headache that doesn’t let her know what’s going on; she locks herself in the bathroom, but he knocks, comes in, approaches her, and she tells him she’s sick, but he mumbles something that means he took her there and now you do what he decided you have to do; he drags her to the bed. She tells him please no I’m not okay, tomorrow, tomorrow we’ll talk about it, but he has that expressionless look that means it’s too late, and her head hurts so much that it seems to her that undergoing this rape is better than pissing him off, and she just hopes it will end right away, but it doesn’t end right away, and she can only see that foggy look, the one that doesn’t look at her, and in that moment he goes away and he’s not there, he’s not there but what’s happening is not that something is ending, it’s that something is starting because he wants it to start, but she doesn’t understand it, she’s so confused, so sweet summer child.

Two months later she struggles with terrible nausea and knows only that she does not want a child with him. She does not understand that this angel was the first step in a plan, and she will not understand it for a long time to come. She calls him and tells him that she will not let this child be born, even though she is torn, even though at the counseling center they tell her he already has a beating heart, even though her mother says she could, that it would be nice, but then in her instinctive sun-and-moon-in-Pisces wisdom she lets her do what a glimmer of instinct screams at her to do. She can’t stay close to her emotionally; it’s bad enough that she has accompanied her to a place that by beliefs and pasts of his own unsettles her, a place that doesn’t live up to what she wants her life to be.

After a couple of days he asks her on the phone why you are not coming up to help; she tells him they told her not to exert herself for a couple of weeks. He says my mother lost eight and never stopped working. And nothing, she stays with him another year.