She was playing Debussy’s Children’s Corner. I remember it quite exactly because when her brother informed me, the following day, of the name of the piece, I ran, and that’s not a figure of speech, I literally slingshotted myself to the ricordi store on Piazza Indipendenza to buy the record. Performed by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. And that was the first record of classical music that I bought with my own money.
AT FIRST GLANCE, there could be no doubts whatever about Leda’s family ties. But all the facial features that were excessive in Arbus, and therefore unpleasant, as if they’d been composed on his face without taking into account the proportions and distances between one feature and another, were in perfect harmony in his sister, Leda, to such a degree that perhaps the sole defect of that assemblage of eyes, lips, nose, and hair was precisely its perfection, making Leda look like a doll, a painting, a drawing traced with a pencil rather than a flesh-and-blood girl.
When I first met her she was fourteen; two years later you’d expect me to write that she had changed . . . but no, she hadn’t, she looked exactly the same, just a little taller, a little bigger, and she played the piano better. The scene was the same: she, facing the piano, with her back, erect, to me, and her shoulders loose, playing Schumann this time, the suite Papillons (it was she who told me so, after she finished playing the piece), while I listened to her from the door of the living room, leaning against the jamb. The suite is played continuously, without hesitation, and as far as I could tell, without the slightest mistake; but when Leda turns around, surprised by my applause, which comes of my sincere enthusiasm, and yet, perhaps, out of an incurable male shyness mixed with a certain aggressiveness, is also meant to ring faintly ironic, I realize that everything has changed in her, while still remaining the same. Her gaze is calm, pellucid, apparently devoid of any emotion, and in this, only in this one aspect, she reminds me of her brother as he removes his eyeglasses to rub his eyes after solving—in just thirty seconds, practically without removing the chalk from the blackboard—the physics problem that three other classmates labored over in vain, until the teacher, out of patience, summoned him to put the matter out of its misery: clearly, in the Arbus household, emotions were banished entirely, or it was forbidden to display them, or perhaps they simply didn’t exist, and Leda had played that deeply moving piece by a half-mad composer without a twinge of real feeling, nothing more than the satisfaction of having played it well, and possibly not even that.
But the absence of feelings or any manifestation of them in Leda, I don’t know why, was something I liked, it attracted me very much, just as it had magnetized me in her brother. I felt as if I were falling into a deep and wonderful void; and what’s more, the calmness and lack of reaction in Leda’s eyes allowed me to gaze into them without inhibition, admiring their beauty in perfect tranquillity.
Later, at the university, I would study hundreds of pages of art history, aesthetics, and philosophy that attempted to express in concepts an ideal of uncontaminated, pure, placid beauty, undisturbed, in other words, classical: but never in any statue, painting, or poem have I ever found the calm—so close, truth be told, to chilliness and yet by no means cold—that I saw in Leda’s eyes when she turned to look at me after playing the last notes of Schumann’s suite. Even the word that she said to me, the most ordinary word in the world, seemed to come from a distant universe and sounded singularly precise to my ears.
“Hi,” she said to me.
“Hi, Leda.”
What’s so memorable about this very brief dialogue?
The fact that it contained everything that we had to say to each other, she and I. In fact, I’m convinced that Leda was aware of our bond, even though in the unmistakable light of the facts there was no bond between us at all: I was just another of her brother’s classmates who occasionally came to their house to study, in the afternoon, to get that class genius to explain what I hadn’t understood that morning. The smile that she gave me was pure, too, so pure that it seemed false, considering that it didn’t go with any particular feeling. In fact, I don’t think she was happy to see me, but rather that she assumed it was something inevitable: that I was there was fate, and therefore a normal thing. Therefore, why be astonished or get worked up?
I understood as I watched her get up from the piano bench, amazing me with how tall and skinny she was, close her sheet music, lower the lid over the keyboard, and then walk past me with a handful of musical scores on her way to her room, I understood at that moment that one day we would kiss, she and I, that it was entirely inevitable, the two of us were destined to kiss, even though I had no idea of when it would happen and what path would lead us there, indeed, I was so certain of it that to me, it was as if it had already happened, which is why I felt free of the anxiety of having to imagine the steps necessary to reach that point. That point had already been reached and bypassed. As she brushed my shoulder with hers and walked past, and I watched her go, following her with my gaze down the dim light of the hallway, I was in fact convinced that it was every bit as clear to her what I had seen and understood, as if it were there before her large dark eyes.
It would be reasonable to doubt that Arbus and Leda were brother and sister. As I think I have said before, my friend had raven-black hair and small blue eyes, while Leda instead was blond and her eyes were dark, such a deep clear brown that you’d say they were practically black. The contrasting colors seemed to have drawn at random from a contradictory genetic patrimony, as is the case, for example, with my family, where there’s a bit of everything—tall and short, blond and brunette, slender and muscle-bound. And yet there was something unmistakable in the Arbus family that made it clear that they were brother and sister, specifically the way they had of tilting the head, leaning slightly forward, so as to toss the hair hanging on either side of the face, Arbus’s hair long dark and dirty, Leda’s blond, fine, and gleaming. In both cases, locks of hair escaped from behind the ears where they’d been tucked, and wound up dangling over the face, concealing the eyes, grazing and covering the corners of the mouth . . .
“WHAT ABOUT ARBUS?” I asked her. “Isn’t he home?”
“No.”
“Do you know when he’ll get home?”
She shook her head.
She pointed me to my classmate’s bedroom.
After fifteen minutes he finally arrived.
“Sorry,” he muttered. His hands were black and he seemed upset.
The door to Leda’s bedroom was shut.
THE TIME CAME when what had been clearly prefigured from the very beginning finally happened, but not the way I’d imagined. In a certain sense, it was better the way it turned out: more interesting and unique, and nonetheless quite absurd. I’ve often wondered if certain deeply unsuccessful or aborted experiences are at least as significant as those that are fully consummated, whether it was worthwhile to live through them as they were, rather than in a more fully achieved and yet unremarkable realization. Most of my amorous experiences bear the seal of incompleteness, of absurdity, but maybe that’s why I remember them in particular, because they spoke to me or taught me something, because they pushed me to shed tears, but far more frequently, perhaps many years later, they have made me laugh out loud because of how ramshackle and misbegotten they were, off-track, partial, funny, exhausting, either because of the way they played out or failed to, in whole or in part. Even though sex is something fundamental to me, something I’ve thought about perhaps every day and every hour or fraction of an hour in my life, including times when other important and dramatic things were happening, in fact, especially during those times, as if sex was the perennial distraction, there to help me face up to and overcome every challenge, a sort of promise on the other side of the obstacle, an indirect and hallucinatory compensation for the all-too-real annoyances we are forced to put up with, if I think back on how my interactions with nine out ten women in my past have actually gone, if I remember the times I’ve developed a crush, or just a fondness for, or eve
n fallen seriously in love with a woman, or even just been aroused, well, I can only conclude that what prevails in the entire affair is the demented, mad, lunatic aspect, and it often takes the form of a prank, a mockery. And yet, as far as these pranks and mockeries are concerned, in some cases pranks played by the women, more frequently suffered by them (and not just women . . .) but more often experienced jointly with them, as if we were reciprocally playing pranks, taking turns mocking each other, each with the same impression, I believe that what we’re doing is something eccentric, odd, in defiance of all logic, and about which, if it weren’t for the arousal that clouds the mind, or a speck of self-respect, or a sort of tacit understanding that instead of recognizing the ridiculousness of the situation we should just go ahead and kiss and take off our clothes, as per the standard script—if, as I was saying, it weren’t for that, it would be more appropriate to just burst out laughing together.
What the fuck are we doing, you and me?
The list of surreal situations would be too long and might be mistaken for a confession or a parody.
. . . WHAT ABOUT the one who started doing a belly dance to get me excited, and came close to making me burst out laughing right in her face? (Shamelessly erotic undertakings have only one outcome, they depress me, and let me inform you, brash and enterprising ladies everywhere, I am not alone in this, many males share this view with me, men who are reasonably capable, they are left appalled, or choking back a snicker, so look out for those lacy outfits, those hyperbolic offers, those feline moves, because they can achieve the desired effect, but if they fall so much as a millimeter short, they will plunge the situation deep into its implicitly farcical aspects . . .)
. . . and the young Rhenish woman who had to go pee every five minutes? Maybe because of the excitement, or perhaps it was a case of cystitis, even in the flower beds in front of the church of San Giovanni a Porta Latina at three in the morning . . .
. . . and the one who was decidedly too beautiful, too beautiful for me . . . who had loaded her armpits down with heavy applications of stick deodorant and when I had the unfortunate and misguided idea of licking her there, to seem like quite the fiery lover, my tongue dried out till I couldn’t even speak . . .
. . . or the one who was playing hard to get, indeed, didn’t even notice the invisible bonds that I was launching and drawing close around her, until one day, to strike a blow to her heart, I decided to leave a note for her, tucked into the seat of her Piaggio Ciao moped, a scrap of paper with a poem by a Surrealist poet, “. . . et je neigerai sur ta bouche,” realizing only too late that this was no brilliant poetic image, but rather a filthy metaphor, which, seeing that I had never yet succeeded in placing a kiss on those lips, that mouth into which I was now suggesting I might go so far as to “snow,” disgusted and offended her, driving a wedge between us once and for all?
. . . and the one who threw the dice to decide whether or not I was going to sleep with her . . .
. . . and the one who kneeled down at my feet, sucking me off as she stared up at me, her mascaraed eyes wide open, imitating something she must have seen in some porn film, in the mistaken belief that it was every man’s fondest dream to be gazed at like that . . .
. . . and the one who lured me into her room, after I chanced to walk past it, by leaving the door ajar, so that I was able to see her as she stood at the window, her back to me, scantily dressed, looking up at the full moon . . .
. . . and the one who told me, the first night, “Sodomize me, I’m having trouble getting to sleep . . .”
. . . and the one who exclaimed, ardently, “Take me!!” thus demolishing once and for all my already wavering erection . . .
. . . and the one I pursued with a full heart, and whose little toe was the only part of her that I ever managed to touch, just the little toe, not even the foot, and none of the rest of her lovely honey-colored body . . .
. . . and the one I still love insanely, because unfortunately there is no other way to love?
Her image appeared to me in the night
and I was so frightened that I experienced at once
desire and the fear of dying. I don’t know
which feeling was stronger (perhaps
the first). I’ve always experienced greater attraction
than repulsion: if there was something that
I would have been better advised to avoid and ward off,
it was exactly what I liked best. With her, too,
that’s how it was and continues to be: even
at night, even beside her or embracing her,
even when I’m inside her, I can’t
free myself from this infernal attraction:
and I continue to plunge toward her.
But, I ask you, how can you get any closer than that?
Once you have reached the center of the earth
what could be deeper than that?
Shouldn’t the force of gravity suddenly cease?
HOWEVER YOU WANT TO PUT IT, my encounter with Leda, Arbus’s younger sister, was memorable.
I still remember with great precision every instant we spent together, first in an apartment where she lived with her mother, Ilaria, after Arbus had left and their father had left, too, in the wake of his notorious declaration that he was homosexual, and always had been, and then, some time later, when she had gone to live on her own in a garret that she called “the studio.” We saw each other for six months, practically on a weekly basis, once or twice a week, but toward the end, less and less, and in the last month we might have seen each other only a couple of times, and yet I have the impression of remembering every single instant of our times together: but not because anything extraordinary happened, who knows what wonderful things, in fact, little or nothing happened, six months that converted my curiosity into, first, affection, then passion, and at last, a sweet sickness.
I’ll try to recount that little or nothing.
I’VE SAID THAT I REMEMBER EVERYTHING, with the exception of the first time that we met again, after I fell out of touch with Arbus, their little house in Montesacro, the four-handed piano recitals. From the account that I have laboriously reconstructed, extracting segments of memory and pasting them together, it would seem that I ran into her again at the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, but not inside the museum, instead on the monumental staircase leading up to the front entrance, and specifically on the steps where everyone camps out, smoking, sunning themselves, talking about the art that already exists and the art that hasn’t yet been made, the privileged domain of those who are lazing about on those steps. That apparent leisure, those idle yet impassioned conversations, constitute the incubation of artistic careers. I believe I’ve already mentioned Giuseppe Salvatori, Felice Levini, Marco Tirelli, Ceccobelli, Santo Spatola, Cecafumo, Pizzi Cannella, Mariano Rossano, Biuzzi, but they are only a few of the artists I spent time with on those steps. And then there was the art dealer Giovanni Crisostomo, also known as Boccadoro, which is the translation of his name from the Greek.
Back then, the books of Hermann Hesse were very popular, as they are now, especially Siddhartha and Narcissus and Goldmund, and I believe that Crisostomo’s name came from there, rather than from the etymology of his surname. I wonder why I never read Hesse, everyone read him back then, I mean everyone read at least Siddhartha, that is.
Maybe to stand out.
Boccadoro in any case claims that it was he who had come accompanied by Leda. That she was twenty years old. And I didn’t recognize her. Spatola and Pizzi Cannella immediately tried striking up a conversation with the young female painter. Back then, Pizzi Cannella had the chiseled profile of a Roman centurion, Tirelli and Biuzzi were both charming fellows. Boccadoro claims that I didn’t exchange so much as a word with Leda that day. And that was exactly the clue that I had made an impression on her, and that in turn I had been deeply struck by her. And he was right.
IT WAS STRANGE to lie next to her.
On the bed, fully dressed,
a man and a woman, in a deeply intimate position that was therefore in need of further developments, because there’s only so long that a person can lie there without doing something, changing state, trying something . . .
The horizontal position is for sleep, otherwise you necessarily have to start talking, or caressing, or undressing.
We invariably ended up stretched out on the hard, thin mattress on the floor of her studio; she would lie down first, then I’d join her, easing myself down next to her supine body, perhaps a foot apart, her shoulder next to my shoulder, her hip by mine, her gaze focused on the ceiling. At that point, it wasn’t all that different from being alone, alone but with a woman next to me, whose scent I could smell, whose quiet breathing I could hear, a woman who was beautiful, among other things, a woman with her body and thoughts and feelings. Just what Leda’s thoughts and feelings might have been I never found out, she never expressed them in any shape or form, or at least, not one I was able to decipher. The fact that we were lying together on that mattress meant there must be some reason, on her part, I have to guess, maybe she liked me, or she didn’t dislike me, or else (I’m going by trial and error here) that position and that nonaction already meant something to her, perhaps it meant everything, or perhaps she didn’t think there could be anything else.
I’m torn between two hypotheses: the first is that she expected me, out of the clear blue sky, to turn and kiss her on the lips, climb on top of her, start fondling her breast, in other words, that I would do what other boys and girls normally do, the things that I, too, when I find myself in a similar situation, had always done: kiss, or try to kiss, fondle, or try to fondle, unbutton, unzip . . . and so on, ordinary, obvious things, things you take for granted, but things that were anything but obvious when it came to Leda, in part because it’s unusual to start from such a well-defined, static situation, lying in bed without looking at each other . . . with any other girl you arrive at that position only after already kissing and fondling, and as a transition to something else . . . whereas the two of us already seemed like husband and wife lying on the carved stone lid of an ancient tomb, sculpted in that position for all eternity.
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