Free Don't Move by Margaret Mazzantini, John Cullen

landslide, slow and soft and warm. My sexual impulse seemed to be in no hurry; it was languid, plodding. I put down the shopping bags. A can of beer rolled under the table. She didn’t stoop to pick it up. She was leaning on the wall, looking out the window through the slats of the closed shutters. As I moved closer to her, I loosened my tie. My testicles felt like a painful weight between my legs. This time, I took her from behind. Her eyes worried me, and besides, I had an agenda. I wanted to be able to enjoy her bowed neck, the twin rows of her ribs. I might have scratched her back; I couldn’t avoid doing that. Afterward, I rummaged in my pants pockets for my wallet. I left some money on the table. “For the frozen food,” I said.
    She didn’t reply, Angela. Maybe I had finally managed to offend her.

7

    Your mother was in the garden with Raffaella, who rented a cottage not far from us every summer. They were laughing. I bent down and grazed Elsa’s cheek with a kiss. She was sitting in a lounge chair, and she reached up and tousled my hair with a limp hand. I straightened up at once. I was afraid she’d smell something strange. Raffaella got to her feet.
    “I’m leaving. I promised Gabry I’d take her some of the mousse I made.”
    Raffaella passed a good part of the day in the water, wearing a terry-cloth cap on her head. She’d float a few yards offshore, waiting for someone on the beach to decide to go for a swim. You’d make a few strokes, and there she was in front of you, like a buoy. She loved to gossip while she soaked, and since she traveled all the time, she had plenty of stories to tell. Now Elsa was turning purple next to her, but Raffaella never suffered from the cold; her bathing suit was permanently wet, even after the sun went down.
    I gazed, for no particular reason, at Raffaella’s sturdy thighs. She laughed, overcoming my look with her usual irony. “What do you expect?” she said, pointing at Elsa. “All skinny women have a fat bosom buddy.” She picked up her pareu. “You look pale, Timo. You should get some sun.”
    She died three years ago, you know. I operated on her twice. The first operation was on one of her breasts. The second time, I cut her abdomen open and sewed it back up again in the course of half an hour. I went through with it because she was a friend, but I had known all along there was no hope. She’d never come in for a single checkup after the first operation—she went to Uzbekistan instead. She gave her sarcoma the opportunity to metastasize undisturbed. Raffaella was a tolerant woman. Live and Let Live was her motto, and it applied to everybody and everything.
    At the time I was talking about, of course, she didn’t have cancer. She was wearing a pair of clogs, and they made an unbearable clatter on the brick pavement as she walked away. I stayed tense until her annoying shuffle reached the silence of the sand.
    Elsa’s feet and calves extended past the end of the chair she was stretched out on. I sat down next to them and started to stroke her from her toes to her knees. Her skin was smooth and fragrant with sun lotion. Every time I arrived at the beach house to meet her, every time I thought about arriving there, it made me happy. And now there I was, huddled at the foot of her lounge chair, not happy at all. I had recently become aware that something was out of balance. There were some slight oversights: nothing cool to drink in the refrigerator, my bathing suit left to fade in a sunny corner after the last time I’d gone swimming, my favorite shirt not yet ironed. And, most of all, there was Elsa herself, her impassive face. I didn’t feel waited for; I didn’t feel loved. I knew I wasn’t being fair. Elsa loved me, but with the reasonableness that I’d reduced her to; in the beginning, she’d been far more passionate than I was. She’d adapted herself, for love’s sake, to my caution, my reserve, but since my father’s death, I’d been