One More Day

by Fabio Volo

  I was listening to Michela, sitting in front of me, and I felt as if I had known her for years. I felt relaxed. As she spoke I imagined her naked. I wanted to kiss her and make love to her.

  Those images distracted me, so much so that when she asked, “And what are you doing here? What kind of business brought you to New York?” she had to ask it twice because I wasn’t listening. She must have figured it out from my expression.

  “No business at all, I just came because I felt like seeing you again. Don’t freak out though, don’t get the wrong impression, I’m not going to ask you to marry me.”

  “I’m not freaking out.”

  After dinner, with the burgers still sitting in our stomachs, she took me to Magnolia Bakery, on Bleecker St., for dessert. We shared one. It was basically butter mixed with sugar.

  “I hope you don’t always eat like this. My liver is screaming revenge.”

  “No, only for tonight. I wanted to show you some of my favorite spots. Would you like another desert?”

  “Would you like to see a human body explode?”

  After a few seconds of silence, Michela asked me, “Why did you want to see me again?”

  “Because I think I like you, and I was thinking about you all the time. I also think that it was a test of courage, something I had to do for myself. I wanted to risk being ridiculed. A friend of mine convinced me it was best to open the door with your name on it. From your office address, she tracked down your email and told me I should try and contact you. Then one day I decided to come straight here because it felt like the right thing to do. As I told you, I’ve never acted like this for any other woman, but what really surprises me is that it seems like the most natural thing in the world. I don’t think I did anything strange. Coming all the way here without knowing whether I would have seen you or whether you wanted to meet me, strangely enough, doesn’t feel absurd at all. That is, I realize it’s something absurd, but that’s not the way it feels to me. Oh well, everything’s strange… It’s not like I’m in love with you or like I want us to get engaged, or that I think you are the one for me. I just followed my instincts without asking myself whether it was the right thing to do. Maybe I’m here out of curiosity. I don’t know why I keep thinking of you and I would like to find out. I’m probably attracted to what I don’t quite understand.”

  I walked her home. She lived on Prince St., above a bread shop, the Vesuvio Bakery. I wanted to kiss her. We didn’t talk about the things she wrote in her journal, but they led me to believe that she wanted to kiss me, too. Actually, I was sure of it, but she wasn’t giving me any signals.

  I even stared at her for a moment while in my head I kept wondering, “Should I do it or not, should I do it or not…”

  I was about to move in when she told me, “You must be tired, it’s better if we call it a night.”

  “Yes, it’s better,” I said suddenly, following her last words. Then I added, “You are a full person.”

  “Was that a compliment, or do you mean that I ate too much?”

  “No… I mean yes. It’s a compliment. You are full in the sense that you seem full of things, intense. I know, it doesn’t sound like a good compliment, but it is.”

  She smiled. “I think I understand. You’re complicated even when it comes to compliments.”

  We said goodnight. She handed me the phone charger and went back inside. I walked back to the hotel. On my way there I remember I kept repeating, “Maybe she changed her mind. Maybe she doesn’t like me anymore now that she’s seen me. But then why did she invite me to dinner? Maybe to get it over with? I don’t understand. I did say, however: ‘You are very cute…’ I wonder if she would’ve gone along with it if I had made my move?”

  I couldn’t wait to get to the hotel so I could call Silvia and tell everything to her answering machine. Suddenly I received a message on the cell phone Michela had given me, “That was fun. Thanks. I know what you’re wondering: it would have been a yes.”

  12

  The Next Day

  I’d been in New York for more than four days and I still hadn’t gone to the bathroom. I felt bloated. As I was walking down the street I would often release spurts of air, which, among other things, didn’t even seem like my own. I couldn’t even recognize them; they had a different smell. When you’re abroad they’re not yours, they’re foreign. As I walked around Manhattan I would produce what you would call the “bloodhound” type. You think you’re leaving them behind, but instead they come after you. They’re thick and won’t give up. The most basic mistake with the bloodhound type is to let them go right before you get in the car, thinking you’re leaving them outside: instead, a moment after you sit down, you can feel them. They rise to the top like clouds along the face of a mountain.

  Those days, every time I went to the bathroom to go number one, I would try to figure out if, by really concentrating, I could also do the other. Even though I am a man, I pee sitting down, like women do. Growing up with my mother, my grandma, and my aunt I’ve always seen people peeing sitting down. I do it standing up only when I’m in a public bathroom. Even at my friends’ I sit down when I do it. Also because when you do it standing up it splashes everywhere and I don’t like it. Plus, I have all my quirks when it comes to going to the bathroom. At home, I always take my shirt off. I’m afraid it will get caught somewhere. In summer, I like to strip down completely. Pants off, so I can spread my legs and feel free. When my legs are all tied together, it always feels like I’m shitting fettuccine.

  Those first four days in New York I would sit down and push. I’d grind my teeth and rock my body back and forth. I looked like Ray Charles playing the piano.

  My constipation usually gets worse when I travel. I remember one vacation with Camilla, when I set a record. The problem, in that case, was amplified by her presence: with another person in the room it was even harder. Even if she was my girlfriend. I remember we had a hotel room where the bathroom door was very close to the bed. I couldn’t do it, thinking that there were only a couple of inches of particleboard between her and I. I was afraid of making too much noise, but I didn’t have the courage to tell her. Being an only child, I have a strange relationship with everything that has to do with this subject. I can fart like a trumpet as I’m walking outside, on the street, but that’s about it. Standing in front of a girlfriend, even after years, I could never do it. Many times I had to repress and smother the air that wanted out. I can’t even do what my friend with the same problem suggested, “I go to the bathroom and fart into a towel, I press it against my butt and you can’t hear a thing. It silences it. Believe me, it works. You have to silence them.”

  I’ve never been able to do it. In any case, I often asked myself, “When I block it, where does it go? Where does it end up? If I finally do it when I’m alone, is it the same fart that comes back, or is it a new one and that one is lost forever?”

  Once, as I was driving a girl back to her place my gut was about to explode. As soon as she got out, I let it go. I was afraid the car alarm would go off; it was that powerful. After a moment she came back because she wanted to tell me something.

  “What’s up?”

  “Open up, I need to tell you something.”

  “Say it, I can hear you.”

  “Roll down the window then.”

  “No, no, it’s ok, I can hear you.”

  “I see, well, I don’t have anything to tell you then. Bye.”

  And she left. Our relationship was ruined. Well, it must have been a weak relationship, since a gust of wind (metaphorically speaking) was enough to make it topple…

  On vacation with Camilla, when I felt a movement coming on, I would convince her to go out with me for a walk, and as soon as we were at the front desk, I pretended I had forgotten something in the room and I would go back up. So I had to do everything in a hurry, without any satisfaction whatsoever.

  There in Manhattan, after the fourth day, still nothing. “I wonder if they have effervescent
suppositories in the States,” I thought. “I could definitely use seven or eight. I’d gladly enter a burping contest.”

  My phone rang. It was Michela. She asked me if I wanted to stop by her office and have lunch with her. Like the day before, after a couple of hours I was in front of her building. When she got out, we went to a small restaurant nearby. Morandi Vini e Cucina, on 7th Avenue South.

  “What’d you do this morning?”

  “Nothing. I took a walk. After last night’s dinner, I think I’ll have a salad.”

  “Me too.”

  “Are you a good cook?”

  “Yes, my mother taught me. She taught my sisters and I. You know, the way she sees things, it is crucial for a woman to know how to cook.”

  “Well, she’s not completely wrong. I mean, I think it’s a good thing, regardless if you’re a man or a woman. Knowing how to cook is a good thing.”

  “I agree.”

  “Did you live with your ex? Did you cook for him?”

  “Yes, we lived together. We both cooked. But rather than living together, it’s better to say we coexisted.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Maybe because living together implies sharing, and I preferred not to.”

  “And that’s one of the reasons you left?”

  “That too. But it took me a while to make up my mind, as I was telling you yesterday.”

  “I have a friend who’s going through the same thing, only she has a daughter. It must be hard to live in a house where you don’t want to be.”

  “Very hard. Plus, when you have children, everything is more complicated. I got to the point where I was happy if he stayed late at work. At home, I tried to go to bed before him, or I would stay on the couch. When I went to bed early, sometimes he would reach for me, and I pretended to be asleep, but if I really had been asleep, at a certain point I would have woken up; instead I would just let out strange sounds and moans until he would give up and go to sleep. He wasn’t stupid, he understood what was going on, but lovers usually pretend nothing is happening because they’re terrorized to venture into certain conversations; they don’t want to have confirmation that they’re the only ones in love. It’s not fun to say, “no, love, it’s nothing, I’ve been working too much lately and I’m just tired.” I had enough of it; I don’t want to put myself in that situation again. Toward the end, the very idea of the plural thing bothered me. You know, when friends invite you or talk to you always referring to you in the plural: are you two coming, going, joining? But I couldn’t leave him. Maybe because my mother and my girlfriends were convincing me not to.”

  “In the end you managed to do it, though. Not everybody does.”

  “That’s because it’s not easy. When I left Paolo I got in trouble with my family, in addition to his. His mother would call me and tell me to reconsider, that her son was a good guy and, even though she never said it in so many words, she implied that even from a financial point of view, it was in my interest to stay with him. My family was telling me the same things, too. My parents have always considered me a “strange one.” They’ve always cared for me in a clumsy way. I’ve never been like them. They put a lot of pressure on me to get married, they thought that after the wedding I would have “settled down,” as my mother would say. One thing less to think about. Anyway, everyone expected me to stay with him. Even though I wasn’t in love with him anymore. This is the thing that really made me sad. A girlfriend told me I should have married him just the same, because he was a good guy, and it’s not like there was anything better around. Plus, given my age, I would have been best to stay with him. ‘You’re almost forty, what do you want to leave him for?’ Not to mention I was only thirty-five… I was tired of living among those people that after you turn thirty start asking you: ‘How come you’re not married?’ It is as if a woman who doesn’t marry hasn’t done it because she couldn’t find the right person and not because it was her choice. It is always seen as a consequence. How cool would it be if instead they started asking women, “Why did you get married?” I was tired of being looked down upon by women who dream of becoming a wife, no matter the cost. So I decided it was time for a change of scenery.”

  “And now, are you looking for the perfect man?”

  “I should hope not… you know, I think the perfect man would understandably be looking for the perfect woman. I wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “What are you looking for, then?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing, maybe everything. Perhaps now, rather than looking for something, I want to enjoy what happens, what life gives me. I love playing. Being free. In New York I have a job I like and that I landed all by myself. I’m happy and proud of myself even when I’m buying groceries and pushing the cart. If I feel like it, I go out at night, otherwise I stay in to read a book, or watch a movie, or cook something good for myself, or for my friends. Sometimes I set the table and I eat there, other times I sit on the floor, with my back against the couch. I open a bottle of wine even if I’m by myself. I don’t have to argue with anyone. I’m independent. I would defend this situation with all my strength. Always. And yet, sometimes I, too, feel like a hug, like I need to surrender and lose myself in a man’s arms. An embrace that makes me feel protected even though I can protect myself. I’m perfectly capable of doing everything I need to do, but sometimes I’d like to pretend I can’t do it, just to have the pleasure of having someone else do them for me. It’s a feeling. But I don’t want to be with a man for this reason. I can’t compromise, and I can’t give up everything I have, my freedom, just for a hug that, after a few years, isn’t even there anymore.

  I woke up late. I haven’t had many men. I’ve always had a boyfriend and I’ve always been faithful. I’ve been with the same people for years; in the end I can count them on one hand. My niece is nineteen and she’s already had more than I. I’ve never managed to open up and be with a man without loving him, or without him being my boyfriend.”

  “You’ve lived in the opposite way I have. Very few love stories and many affairs. In order to be happy with a woman I need exactly the opposite: the less I feel tied to her, the better I feel. But then, what would you like to find in a man?”

  “How am I supposed to know? … I’d like a man who makes me feel good. A man who sits next to me when I’m at the movies, or on the bus. I’d like to find a person with whom I can share the journey. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a marriage, with kids, etc. But he shouldn’t be one of those men who get scared if you mention a plan for more than two days, either. Once, last June, I asked a guy I was with what we were doing for our August vacation. He got so upset that for the next two days he lost his tongue, and then he started saying that we needed to talk, and that maybe the following August he’d prefer to be alone. I’m not looking for a family, but I don’t want someone with whom I cannot even plan a vacation, either. I’m tired of man-children. I’m too old to pretend I’m still young, and too young to behave like an old lady. I want someone I like and I want to be able to tell him I like him without him freaking out, without him making me feel like I’m suffocating him. I want a man that would calmly come looking for me even when I am not looking for him. Like the way you did, coming here. And then, most of all, I want a man who is there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know what I mean, even though I can’t quite explain it. A man who’s there. It’s all in the gaze. A look that’s behind everything. A way of looking in silence, which means everything to me. It shows he’s there.”

  Michela was speaking from the heart, and, in the end, she seemed to be looking for the same things as I was. When I told her I had many affairs and few love stories, I didn’t want to get into the details. I didn’t feel like explaining that, when I’m with a woman, after a while everything feels less powerful. The body never lies. After a while my drive begins to fade. If I happen to be making love with a stranger, I’m as hard as marble, I’d like to have six of them, because one
is not enough. I’d like to stick it everywhere. But in a long-term relationship, after a while my erections become weaker. Sometimes I have to use my fingers to keep it inside. Once, as I was doing it in these conditions, she wanted to get on top of me and, as we were switching positions, it slipped out. In those situations I usually need to get back on top, or behind her, which is a position I’ve always enjoyed.

  That’s because what excites me about women is the mystery, the stranger that lives inside them, I like to discover what their body, their skin, their smell are, how they pant as they make love. I’m an explorer, a seafarer, a sailor, a pioneer, a traveler. I love women. That’s why I’ve basically never had a girlfriend. Because I love them, and I don’t like cheating on them. Other women would distract me from the one I was with. I can’t give up all the others because I’m a victim of the kiss that hasn’t been exchanged, of the unknown body, of the mysterious look. The excitement for the first kiss, desired for so long. A new body that allows you to touch it for the first time. To finally see the breasts, which I had only imagined based on the curves of her dress. To pull up the skirt and see the legs, the thighs. The line of her panties. To kiss a foot. To smell her neck. To discover the expressions of a woman when she reaches the climax of pleasure. To realize the world stops when a woman smiles at you. A woman’s décolleté, even when she’s not particularly beautiful, is like a car accident: you always slow down to take a look. All these sensations have the same effect on me as drugs.

  I love women, I always have. How can you not love them? Because woman are beautiful. Their outline is beautiful, their hands, their skin, the crooked threads of their thoughts are beautiful. The colored perfumes of their desires are beautiful. As well as their fears, their little worries. I love the beauty of their gestures. I love the way they dry their tears with their hand and the sudden smile they give you after they cried like little girls. Unexpected bursts of light. I love women. Without them I would have already been gone. Without them I would have never come back.