it in my hands I remembered my
grandmother and her exercise books in which she wrote her recipes and the phrases that struck her, and which she also used to dry the daisies that I sometimes picked during recreation, at school.
I went back to the office with two bags of supplies, and my notebook in my bag.
Pietro came to meet me at the door, took one of the bags, and helped me put away everything I had purchased.
As I passed him a pack of paper he said to me:
"We should find our own place, somewhere just ours where we can meet without problems."
"Pietro, are you crazy? What do you want to do, rent a room in a hotel by the hour? And where, anyway, in this provincial town, where everyone knows everything about everyone?"
"Don’t worry baby, the important thing is that you want me. We could take a train and go a bit further away, and find some place near the station."
I didn't want to go a bit further away and find a place near the station. I feared that that moment would soon arrive, I feared that Pietro would ask me for more. It was enough to feel his gaze on me, his words, I needed it desperetely.
That might have been enough for me, but maybe not for him.
***
I had put the pots with lunch for the next day and the stew for dinner on the stove, when I took the notebook out of my bag, put it on the kitchen table and opened it.
Spontaneously, without knowing where the pen would take me, I began to write.
If loving is a mistake
then I am guilty.
Tie my lungs
and stifle the song
that comes out improperly
to disturb the sleep of the righteous.
If loving is a defect
then I am imperfect,
Unworthy.
Tear pieces from my heart
and lay them on the cold tray
of respectability.
If to love is inappropriate,
when the path deviates,
lose me.
Nothing is more dangerous
than a burning spark
when dead branches
are stacked around it.
But if loving is inevitable,
appropriate
deserved
if it is breath,
light
magnificence of the soul,
pathway,
discovery,
youth,
ransom,
mutation,
motive,
I love for all this,
but above all because in me
the stele of courage
it is not yet lost.
I stopped, rested the pen on the table, vibrant with emotion and surprise from my own words.
It was the first time I had stopped thoughts with ink.
It was time to turn off the stove and start waiting for Filippo to come home.
My mind wandered freely in dreams, imagining that Pietro came in through that door, with his smile, with his fresh love.
The phone rings and abruptly brings me back with my feet on the ground.
"Hello?"
"Hello baby, can you talk?"
"Yes, but how did you get my home number? And why..."
"I took the number from your file, in the office... I just wanted to tell you that I love you and I want you so much."
My right hand clutched the handset of the phone feverishly, as the front door opened letting my husband in.
I immediately closed the call, leaving the phone on the kitchen bench and with my back to my husband I started to move pots and ladles.
My hands were shaking.
He was talking via radio with a colleague, not yet tired of twelve hours of service.
"Is dinner ready?"
8.
Bitter morsels, sweet crumbs
Perhaps all women find that they have to accept situations that rationally seem impossible to bear, unsustainable.
I did all I coud to try to understand Philip, I justified his attitudes, always so aloof, his manner which had become more and more brusque lately, but
