Manuel was looking at Eva, who was nodding off in an armchair. She seemed like another person, someone different from the woman he was accustomed to living with, whose bursts of anger and sudden mood swings he’d grown so used to.
She was much more like her father than she was willing to admit in the long tirades during which she cursed his personality, his harsh nature, his lack of generosity, before suddenly attacking Manuel for his inability to earn. In general, while he tolerated the cascade of insults as if they were a summer thunderstorm, knowing that it was sure to pass eventually, however intense, he also thought that his girlfriend wasn’t being fair to her old and sickly parent.
Yes, he was a bastard and a son of a bitch who refused to loosen the purse strings of his immense fortune, as if he could take the money with him all the way to hell, which was where he would certainly wind up sooner or later, in fact, sooner rather than later, given his health. And he never missed an opportunity to point out what a useless fellow Manuel was, a gigolo that his daughter had taken in like a stray dog, to her own detriment as usual. Through that old witch Peluso he’d also turned off the taps, as if he had no idea that the scum who held his gambling debts weren’t kidding around, and would before long leave him lying in some alley or other spitting blood. He, of all people, a man with a sensitive soul and an aversion to violence.
All this was true.
But it was also true that, for now, thanks to the old man’s money, he’d been able to avoid entirely the trouble of working for a living, a vulgar, tawdry consideration that his elevated soul couldn’t bear contemplating. Equally true was that thanks to all that wealth, built up over a lifetime of being miserly and dishonest, he, Manuel Scarano, an artist, had been able to cultivate his own interests without having to worry about how to make ends meet, something that he’d watched his own parents do over the course of their unhappy lives until they’d finally had the good taste to die, thus unburdening him of their awkward, sometimes embarrassing existence.
He only wished that Eva, his partner, the woman who was meant to share in his aspirations and support him, could understand that creative blocks happen, and that a temporary sluggishness in the market for his paintings was more than understandable, especially given the unscrupulous dealers and whorish critics. But things would get back on track soon enough, and then he’d be revered and acclaimed all over the world. After all, he’d had a solo show in Venice, like all the greats.
But Eva, who was now sleeping openmouthed, her face still red from crying—mamma mia, though, so much crying, it’s been three days and she hasn’t done anything else—failed to understand the needs and the infinite nuances of the soul of an artist. She didn’t even understand that it had been for her, in an attempt to liberate her from her father’s control, that he’d first started playing cards. So he could get rich quick and slap that old bastard in the face with the full measure of his disgust. Okay, so things hadn’t gone quite as hoped, and now he also had the not insignificant problem of having to steer clear of dark and deserted streets: But no one had had the last word yet. Great souls, thought Manuel, are unfailingly optimistic.
Suffering ages you, thought Manuel, as he watched Eva toss and moan in her sleep. She looked like a dolente, one of those women who, until the sixties, worked as paid mourners at funerals. But to Manuel, such sorrow was incomprehensible. He’d never much cared for the snot-nosed brat, who had anyway spent most of his time locked in his room with those damn action figures of his. Manuel had often wondered whether the boy might not be retarded, the way he dulled his senses playing war and combat games.
Perhaps it was a simply that he resembled his father, that obtuse and violent gorilla who had been on the verge of attacking him just the other night. It was obvious why Eva had dumped him the minute she’d met a sensitive soul like him.
Eva, Eva. I’m sorry to see you suffer, Manuel said to himself, but every cloud has a silver lining. Who knows, perhaps this will mark the beginning of a brand-new life in which we can think about ourselves and no one else. Grief ends eventually, Eva, and it leaves scars that you can learn to live with. And on the way, perhaps, it will give the old man his coup de grâce, finally leaving the two of us free to cultivate our love and my art.
Perhaps, my love, this grief will actually be a blessing. We can shed some dead weight: your father, that primate ex-husband of yours, the old witch, those goddamn criminals trying to track me down so they can get their money. And to help us forget, we’ll go away, all alone, to some faraway island, like Paul Gauguin. I’ll strike creative gold again and a few centuries from now, in the books they’ll write about me, they’ll tell the story of our lives, and they’ll point out how this tragedy was the necessary preamble to my masterpieces.
A ray of sunshine came in through the window and struck Eva’s closed eyes. The woman jerked upright.
“Dodo? Dodo? My God . . . how long did I sleep?”
Manuel did his best to calm her down: “Just a few minutes, sweetheart. Just a few minutes. I was here beside you the whole time. I’d have woken you if anything had happened.”
Eva blinked and looked down at her hands. She seemed to be having some difficulty returning to the real world. Then she murmured: “I had a dream. But it was so realistic that I can’t help believing it was something more. I was lying next to him, stroking his hair, the way I do when he has a fever or one of those sore throats he gets at the beginning of every season. I was singing him our song, the one that helps him get to sleep; I was just humming it, softly. And he had the smell he had when he was first born, a scent that only I can smell. Oh God, it was all so precise . . .”
She started crying, louder and louder, until her shoulders were shaking with sobs.
Here we go again with the same old lament, thought Manuel.
And with the appropriate pained smile, he walked over to take her in his arms.