Free A Private Venus by Giorgio Scerbanenco Page B

make up some story: nobody’s ever free. I know allthat, but all I can do is repeat the same thing. I’m not trying to blackmail you emotionally, you’re the dearest, most polite, most sensitive man I’ve ever met. But only you can save me. If you don’t, the only other thing I can do is slit my wrists.’
    ‘Why me?’ Her last words had made him tense: they sounded like a threat.
    ‘Because I don’t have anyone else. There’s no other solution, no other remedy. Either you let me get in your car and take me at least a thousand kilometres from here or I’ll do what I said.’ Her voice was normal, without emphasis, without drama: she was simply explaining, as if to one of her pupils.
    That was what struck him and started making him anxious. ‘I ought at least to sort things out with my father, I can’t be away for three months like that, there’s my work, too … Maybe we can meet again in a couple of days, maybe I can manage to—’
    ‘Darling, there’s no time. And even if there was, you wouldn’t come back. Either we go away now, immediately, and you let me stay away with you as long as possible, or there’s no point.’ She kept repeating the same grim dilemma. Then she fell silent again, leaving him more time to think.
    But maybe he had stopped thinking. The anguish had made him nervous, and nervousness makes us closed and unemotional, it gives rise to cold thoughts. Maybe this was hysteria, lucid hysteria. A normal woman wouldn’t just decide to kill herself one day and then ask the first man she meets to save her because she doesn’t want to die and to take her away. This was abnormal behaviour, and the suspicion thathe was dealing with someone abnormal sent a chill down his spine. He didn’t know what else to say to her.
    She waited, smoked, looked inside her handbag, looked at the marathon runners of the autostrada coming in and out of the bar, opened her handbag again, looked inside, then said, ‘Please, let’s go.’
    They got back in the car. Davide drove in silence, not very fast, and at the first station he left the autostrada, drove the long way round through secondary roads and came back to the entrance to the autostrada, but on the other side, the lane that led back to Milan.
    ‘No, no,’ she began to moan. ‘I don’t want to go back to Milan, take me away, take me away.’ Her childlike whining was completely unexpected in a woman like her, it was a sign of hysteria, he thought.
    ‘I’ll talk to my father tonight, maybe I can convince him and tomorrow we’ll leave.’ He was lying, the way a doctor lies to a seriously ill patient.
    ‘No, if you leave me we’ll never see each other again, take me away now.’ She started moaning even more loudly as soon as he got in the lane to Milan.
    ‘Calm down, I can’t now, don’t do that.’
    ‘No, take me away immediately, otherwise I’ll have to kill myself.’ She was rigid, distant, hidden behind her hair, yet imploring.
    ‘Please try and calm down, when we get to Milan we’ll talk some more.’ But now he was afraid, a woman having a crisis would make any man afraid, all he wanted now was to hold on until he could get rid of her without making a scene,but at any moment she might start screaming, struggling, forcing him to stop in the middle of the autostrada, the traffic police would arrive: hell and damnation, you spend five minutes with a woman, and after it you find yourself smashed to bits, as if you’d fallen from the last floor of the Pirelli skyscraper. The woman had seemed so calm, and now this was happening.
    ‘Turn back, darling, take me away.’ It was the same continuous lament, the obsessive lament of a little girl asking for ice cream, mummy ice cream, mummy ice cream, mummy ice cream, mummy ice cream.
    He decided not to answer her any more.
    ‘Take me away, for pity’s sake, or I’ll kill myself … Get out here, get out here, at this service station, turn back, take me away, for pity’s sake … Take