At one pm I received a call from Letizia, who asked me if I wanted to have lunch with her. I answered yes, partly because I didn’t have enough time to return home: the rehearsal for the play would begin at 3:30. I longed to see her; at night I often thought about her before going to sleep.
In person she was even more beautiful, more real. I watched her soft hands pour the wine and then immediately examined mine which, thanks to the cold I brave every morning on the scooter, had turned red and chapped like an ape’s.
She talked to me about everything; in an hour she managed to tell me her entire life. She talked about her family: her mother, who had died prematurely; her father, who had emigrated to Germany; and her sister, whom she rarely sees since her marriage. She told me about her teachers, her years at school and the university, her hobbies, her job.
I gazed at her eyebrows and was overwhelmed with the desire to kiss her. Eyebrows are such bizarre things! Letizia’s move with her eyes and are so lovely as to induce you to kiss their perfection, then descend to her face, her cheeks, her mouth … Now, Diary, I do know I desire her. I desire her warmth, her skin, her hands, her saliva, her whispery voice. I would like to caress her head, visit her island and breathe in its air, thrill every inch of her body. And yet I obviously feel blocked, it’s such a new thing for me, and I certainly can’t pretend that she is experiencing the same sensations, or perhaps she does have them but I’ll never know. She looked at me and moistened her lips; her look was ironic, and I felt myself surrender. Not to her, but to my whims.
“Do you want to make love, Melissa?” she asked me as I sipped some wine.
I placed my glass on the table, looked at her, unsettled, and nodded my assent.
“But you’ll have to teach me.”
Teach me how to make love with a woman or teach me how to love? Perhaps the two things compensate for each other…