"I like it when things are clear"

"It’s fair to share the fuel"

You did not want me to share your nights. The fragrance of summer evenings in Rome when the light slowly fades and from my room, behind a closed window I look through the panes, my eyes just like the glass, a still hard surface reflecting the world devoid of any sound. Dark cinema in which you find me, sit beside me and without asking if you can hold my hand you grasp it, take it far from my body and hold it firmly, warming it up. That warmth runs along my arm and to the chest and up and down till I cannot breathe, I want to leave that obscurity, go away, but it’s too late: you take me with you to a park, your car sighing up a hill where if we park right at the top we can walk along the path that separates us from the whole town, with its proud dome swelling under the sinking sun.

Your room is silent. A door opens like an apse onto a small garden. The door is closed when I come. We are sitting on the floor listening to a record that goes on goes on goes on like our kisses. Then you close the shutters mumbling something about your neighbours and I feel so selfish now because I could not understand; you hiding, you treating badly one of your students because she is in love with you and you could lose your job if anyone knew that she had given you her telephone number.

So you worry about my age. I ask you what do you think of my body? looking at myself framed in the mirror and I am wearing those shiny white trousers that my mother bought; you put your hands flatly on my bottom and say that I have to grow up. It’s true, I am only seventeen but I am aware. Excruciatingly self conscious.

Why do these evenings in Rome come over me like a high tide, warm and smelling of flowers, of those oranges in your tiny garden that you never picked? The eyes of your lover and the slides you show me filled with them make me feel guilty for a moment and then too young, useless, because I think you must really love her. You are seeing me and suffer so much: you slapped her when she came back in the morning, after the first night you had all for yourself, for your pain.

I shouted at her you are saying to me while we are the only people sitting on the grass and a statue in the centre of a pond turns her back to us, to our reflection in the water.

Your head resting on my breast you look so small, I can’t explain to myself how the small woman that you are can make me feel so sad, too empty to be able to give you what you want. If only I knew what you wanted.

When there was no longer any light in the room you would tell me that she was coming back and that I had to leave. Maybe if I stayed I would tell her everything. She came in with a white smile once and we had dinner together but I shut up because she’d been too kind to me.