Then one day we overdo it. He wants me to feel ridiculous, he says we’re all ridiculous. That’s why I have to go around naked with a scrubbing brush attached from behind and I have to clean the floor like that, but with each tile the handle goes further in, causing excruciating pain.
I start to feel sharp pains in my stomach. Terrible nausea. A pool of blood forms on the floor. I want to go to my real home, to my family, but how can I in this state. That’s why I give him Mauro De Cortes’s mobile number and address. I feel sure he’s returned. It’s a scientific fact that he’s always there for me.
‘You can just drop me outside the front door of the building and leave.’
‘Fuck that. I’m taking you to hospital.’
He picks me up in his arms and like that other time he places me delicately on the seat of the car as though I was made of crystal. He tears off with a squeal of the tyres leaving behind our world with the door open, the bed unmade and all the traces of his secret love.
‘You can just drop me at the front door,’ I keep begging. ‘Why do you want to get yourself into trouble?’
‘Be quiet. Even on the point of death you can’t shut up.’
I don’t remember a whole lot more, apart from him cursing the stupidity of God, and yelling at the piece-of-shit doctors in the Emergency Room for not throwing everyone else out to make space for me, and also taking one doctor by the scruff of the neck and threatening to kill him so the doctor calls the police and he has to give his particulars and all that.
Then nothing. I’m stretched out in a clean, perfumed hospital bed and Mauro’s there holding my hand tightly and stroking my head without tiring and fixing my hair constantly as if I were about to go to a party.
‘So, the Sardo-Masochist has struck again. Don’t laugh, you silly little girl, it’s bad for you.’
‘Did you see each other?’
‘Who? I didn’t see anyone. A dickhead criminal phoned me and told me where to come to collect you.’
‘So that was you yelling.’
‘Afterwards I apologised. We have to inform your family, little one. The official version is peritonitis.’