Naples, highway tollgate

We meet as usual, at the tollgate in Naples. This time there is a lot of traffic, and we exchange a hurried kiss. Then, in the parking lot, I hug him and hold him tight for a long time. We go into his car. He begins driving while I buckle-up the seat belt. I look at him steadily; as he busily negotiates the intersection into the state road and the happiness of having him once again so close. Everything around is muffled, even the loud rumble of the passing trucks, even the light of July. Everything has a dreamy flavor. I try not to think about time I must leave in an hour as I caress the back of his neck, my fingers under his dark curls. He turns to look at me, takes my hand and kisses it. We stay silent for a while, observing the industrial area, the roads, the houses, as if we were tourists with all the time in the world. Even the car moves at a lazy pace. I lean my head on his shoulder, trying to feel the sound of his breathing above the purr of the air conditioner. I stare intently at every detail of his face. Again I forgot to bring the camera with me. I would like to photograph him, because when I am away from him I never know how long it will be until I see him again. As the weeks go by, I try to remember his face, but I cannot. I cannot bring the details into focus. So I begin to think about him, the way he is when he arrives with the car to our dates. I imagine his clothes, the posture of his body. For example, he keeps his head slightly tilted down while he looks at me, waiting for me to reach him, indolent. He has a different pair of glasses every time, and then and then the hair, always long at least down to the shoulders, and the large eyes, green. I ask him some questions about work, and he tells me about the latest advertisement he is working on, a movie trailer actually. Yes, because this director wants to relate Naples to Harlem. he says, laughing and stumbling slightly on the words, with those long pauses that he always makes when he talks with me. He wants the entire trailer to be some kind of blues flash. He puts a hand on my left knee; I squeeze it with a conspiratorial gesture, as if we share a secret. He slows down and stops on the side of the road. Its a parking area so small that his car barely fits. There is not enough time to find a hotel, not even enough time to make love. I love you I tell him, but the words seem oddly inappropriate, looming gigantic inside the car, but then slowly melting away, like the expression I can read in his face. I promise myself I will never tell him that again. I shift my body to a more comfortable position on the seat, and lay my head on his legs, while he leans down over me. I stifle the impulse to unzip his pants, to bite his abdomen, and kiss his penis and make him come like that, on the side of the road. How is Luisa? I ask. Fine, fine He stumbles for something else. You knowwe are thinking about having a baby. Within milliseconds my mind does a somersault. He wants a baby of his own? After all those years reporting from the Middle East, shooting news in Africa, after the movie about India? The thought of putting a new baby into this world, the way things are going. I quickly start to analyze my life, myself. Thoughts knife in about how little we manage to see each other, with all my responsibilities, and his, and now also a child? All these thoughts must have me making a strange face, for he has fallen silent. He doesnt look at me anymore. He stares at a point very far away. But he finally speaks. All those stories of mistreated children, the trafficking of live organs, taken out like that with the heart still beating, and then this latest discovery I heard from a journalist friend, it will not appear on the newspapers because it is just too crude His silence is pained. When I told Luisa we both started crying, babies used as lab animals, filled with carcinogenic chemicals, locked in rooms filled with cigarette smoke, to test new medicines, safe medicines, to rapidly satisfy the human testing requirements, to later undergo clinical tests in hospitals. One of those scientists has confessed everything: third-world children sold by their parents, after the tests they are killed.

I shudder as the images are refused by my brain. The level of sheer abjection reachable by the human mind he says and the voice trembles. I stare at him with dilated pupils that let in way too much light. His shape seems gigantic above me. I cannot focus on him. I know how much he is suffering, in that mind of his, that also is a child, that doesnt find anything better to do than trying to fill that which cant be filled, to give happiness to a child of his own. We remain like that, in the car with the slowly overheating engine. We watch the sunset and we count the minutes left to spend together.
translated by Renzo Balducci

Alda Teodorani Rome, Italy