The great thing about S. was that she loved the bum no matter what. He sometimes didn’t treat her as well as he should have (moods, stress, personal problems, and so forth), and even when they were apart for periods of times over the years, as when … Continue reading Unconditional love
They drank and they did drugs and they had sex with anyone they fancied, it was the 1970s, who didn’t! And then to everyone’s surprise they got married. As the years went by he found out that she had been to bed with some of … Continue reading Sex, drugs and marriage
Alone in his cell, Vito read the letter from his wife’s seventeen-year-old niece. One paragraph in particular amused him: “I’ve always thought of you as someone who is living on the edge. I’ll never forget when you were living in Gore Bay and we were … Continue reading Stop the biscuits from dancing
The poet Guglielmo Michelini became old, it seems overnight. He remembers being in his forties for quite a long time and in his fifties for a somewhat shorter time and in his sixties for a much shorter time. The next thing he knows he’s seventy. And his wife is seventy-four. They have been married for fifty years.
When he was a young man the idea of marrying an older woman was wonderfully seductive. He loved women. The architecture of their bodies, the audacity of their breasts, the arc of the waist, the anticipation of the vulva, the slender ankles, the arch of the foot.
He loved this older woman, Suzanne Marrôn. They met in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. She was a poet lover with perfect arches. They were married in a hail of hope and illusion.
It amazes him that they are still together. Sometimes he cannot believe it and thinks he is dead.
They are reading in bed. He looks at her. She has a dignity and a vulnerability grown more fragile with age. She looks like a photo of his mother. He is in bed with his mother.
She looks at him looking at her. She puts down her book. She says, “You never touch me anymore.”
He doesn’t know how to answer that. He sees her eyes moisten. They look at each other for four seconds. Four seconds is a long time when your heart is dying for a leap backward.