He opened his eyes again. His head was aching even worse now. The throbbing came violently, as if from outside his head: a goddamned drum pounding endlessly and without any rhythm or beat.
He’d vomited all over himself again. He felt a surge of disgust for himself, for life, for the world, for that damned city.
How long had it been since he’d gone out? He’d paid for three days in advance when he’d checked in, and so far they hadn’t come knocking at his door, so more time than that couldn’t have gone by.
Even if, he thought as he struggled to get up into at least a seated position, they could perfectly well have come and he might not have heard them.
Maybe that’s what the drum was.
He got up, walked over to the door, and pulled it just ajar. Outside was nothing but the darkened hallway, with the dirty, ragged carpeting. From one of the rooms he could hear the dull, repetitive thumping of a bed banging against the wall. He was reminded of the black whore who had come there with him, who had steered him to this pensione. Maybe it was her. Maybe it wasn’t.
He shut the door again, trying to master his nausea and his vertigo. He felt a profound loathing for that place. He felt a loathing for the black whore. But above all, he felt a profound loathing for himself.
The room reeked of his vomit, but also of mold. There was a diseased heat, dank and oppressive, fed by a heater vent that spewed air from above. He felt as if he couldn’t breathe, and he dragged himself over to the window.
He struggled to get it open; the sash was rusty and covered with dust. He finally tugged it open and the cold poured in like a ferocious beast, taking his breath away and slicing through the torpor that covered him like a blanket.
In spite of the temperature, the street was full of life; even a scooter zipped past, driven by a man bundled up like an astronaut.
He took a deep breath, filling his lungs. He liked the cold. The cold was free. In prison, what dominated was heat, the same as it was here in the room: a heat made up of too many people, a grim dreariness, unwashed flesh, and obsession. The only place you could find cold was out in the yard, in that illusion of an outdoors, of a world where if you chose to, you could go back to living or at least dream of doing so.
But instead, that’s not how it went. Instead, what happened is you didn’t go back to living at all. The world outside was just another prison.
Either space, or money. They’d take either the one thing away from you, or the other. You were obsessed either by the lack of the one thing, or the lack of the other. Space in prison, money outside. Otherwise, there was really no difference.
That’s what he had told him: I’ll give you money. You just leave her alone, let her do as she pleases, and leave me alone too. And I’ll give you money.
The words surfaced again in his mind when he felt the first shudder. I’ll give you lots of money.
What the fuck do I care about money? That’s what he’d said to him, in his language, in that language that he too was speaking again after all this time. What the fuck do I care about money? I don’t even want to know where you get your money, you who live in this miserable apartment, who don’t own a thing, and with all your books and all your scraps of paper, you still live like a bum.
He had confronted him face-to-face, as if he were a man. As if he didn’t still stink of his mother’s milk, as if he didn’t remember who he was, just who it was that he was dealing with, where he came from and why. There he’d been, an inch from his nose, eyes hard behind the lenses of his glasses, the eyes that, he hadn’t been able to avoid noticing, were the same as the eyes he’d seen reflected back at him in that shard of broken mirror, the same eyes that he had narrowed against the glare of the sunlight when he’d finally found himself a free man, no longer behind bars.
He’d seized him by the throat.
Bellowing, he’d seized him by the throat.
His own flesh, his own blood. The reason why—for every day and every minute, for more than sixteen years—he’d dreamed of finally getting out.
The only factor that had allowed him to get through the endless nights. The reason he’d been able to tolerate the silence.
He hadn’t dropped his eyes. And he’d kept his hands at his throat like a lamb, like a child.
If he hadn’t squeezed, hadn’t throttled, it wasn’t because his blood wasn’t boiling in his veins, nor was it because he’d remembered who this actually was. It was because in his eyes there wasn’t fear. There was pity.
I’ll give you money, he had said.
He breathed in the cold air one more time, and he suddenly felt like crying.