Sabrina

“It’s late, Mario, let me go”.

She had thrown herself out of the car, she had fumbled with the lock, for a moment the light had illuminated the entrance hall. She wore a shirt that was a little big on her. He was impressed with the image of her thin shoulders disappearing inside the door.

He had just asked her to marry him.

“Sabri, wait… where are you running? At least tell me yes or no. “

“No.”

It was the eighties, the years of prospects, of the still open future. He never saw her again.

Until this Sunday afternoon.

She is with a friend, one he does not know, they speak in a low voice during the film intermission. Ironically, he looks her shoulders even now. The elasticated top binds her, there is a puff of flesh around the straps, and red pimples on the skin.

His wife is restless in the chair next to him, she crosses her legs, then unties them. Mario gets angry, nudges her. “Stop it, Carla. You are annoying the whole cinema line.“

Carla sighs, stiffens, but then she immediately resumes the hateful contortions in the chair. Under the soles of her sandals, peanut peels creak, and the noise drills his skull as he stares at Sabrina, without taking his eyes off her now heavy shoulders, and the bra strap that marks her flesh.

They met at one of those house parties, with the girls on one side and the boys on the other, the handmade canapes, the vinyl records.

She then had no breasts, her eyes ate all her face, her legs were two twigs sticking out of her dress. He liked her right away, even with the smudged blue eyeshadow, even though all evening she had talked only about how in Greenland seal pups are killed with sticks, even though she had forced him to sift through the buffet for something that did noit contain animal flesh. Since there was nothing of the sort, he had run down to the greengrocer at the corner and bought a bunch of carrots. He had had it wrapped up properly — the greengrocer had looked at him as if he had escaped from the asylum — then he had rushed back up the steps two by two. “For you, Sabrina,” he had told her as he knelt down.

They got togheter immediately, they drove around the countryside, they watched the sunset over the Arno, they made love in her attic, under the window from which you could see a piece of the Leaning Tower.

The note she had written to him, he did not understand. It had arrived after she had denied herself on the phone and changed the lock on the attic. There was no mention of love in the note, it did not say whether she loved him or not, but she mentioned the pursuit of happiness, the impossibility of stopping in the same place and with the same man.

They had seemed to him the phrases of the exalted, the feminist, the crazy one she was.

“A girl is as good as another”, he said to himself the day he married Carla, and “one job is as good as another”, when he was offered the chair of English in high school.

Two rows away, Sabrina raises an arm to look at the clock, she complains about the film intermission being too long.

She has no wedding ring, Mario thinks, she has never married. Or maybe she is divorced. Nowadays, a successful marriage is rare.

Later, when they leave the cinema, he sees her lingering along with her friend to read the billboard of a “coming soon”.

Mario helps his wife put on the sweater and her sharp scent makes him sick. Carla is a good woman, but something, he thinks, is tightening his stomach, something that, perhaps, has to do with nostalgia, with youth, with everything that could have been and will never be again.

He slams the car door violently.

“I have the right to happiness”, was written on the note. Who knows if Sabrina is happy now?

Oh…?

Bullshit … One life is as good as another.

Yeah.

Mario starts the car, while, around, the street lamps light up.

“Sabri, shall we have a coffee?”

And Sabrina says wearily yes, that she too wants a coffee.

They drink it in the corner tobacconist’s bar, standing near the football betting counter.

“What are we going to do tonight, Sabri? The guys all go to Luana. “

Sabrina sees them, the “guys”, filling Luana’s living room with their sickly cheerfulness. Sweaty little businessmen, mature women with uncovered navel and wrinkled elbows. Evenings between elderly singles, who always laugh at the same jokes and seem happy, even if they are bored to death.

If she goes too, she will pretend to have fun at Giovanni’s usual jokes on Roberta’s big ass — which is like listening to the same tape every time — she will drink until she gets a headache, she will smoke the whole pack of cigarettes.

If she goes, then Giovanni will accompany her home and insist on going up. She, being drunk, won’t say no to him. She will let herself be touched by his wet hands, she will close her eyes so as not to see the belly, the baggy pants around his knees.

The usual voices, on the tape of habit.

“No, Bea, I’m not going to Luana tonight, I must have a fever. I’ll call you tomorrow.“

She walks towards her apartment. She lives on the first floor of a building not far from the cinema.

At home she takes off her shoes and lays down on the sofa. She turns on only the small lamp on the side.

With the cigarette in her mouth, she tries to explain the discomfort she feels.

Sometimes, she thinks, she would like to be another person, anyone. Maybe a little girl, with her whole life ahead of her. Or an old woman, with arthritis and the ailments of her age, but serene, sure that all the games are over, that there will be no more missteps, or difficult decisions to make. Yes, a granny that others take charge of.

And instead she is too old to be young and too young to be old.

Her life is a limbo of alike days, where she gets up and then goes to sleep; where faxes about invoices and reimbursements are translated, which have nothing to do with Shelley or Keats.

Was that what she was preparing for in the nights spent studying with her university mates, up there in the old attic, with the black coffee pot beside her, while Mario, sitting on the ground, drank wine and read the manuscript of his novel aloud? Mario was convinced that all of them would become famous, that they would break through.

Why hadn’t she married him? She had wondered this many times.

Not that she didn’t love him. She loved him more than she then loved Fabrizio, and Lele and Franco. Certainly more than Giovanni.

It was fear that had stopped her. She feared that, after marriage, there would be nothing else to wait, that love would turn into habit, that she would end up envying her children, young, with all the roads still open.

She hadn’t wanted to meet Mario anymore, she had refused, she had left for London. She had scribbled a note in which she stated that she was seeking happiness, freedom, that marriage is bourgeois.

Bullshit. In fact, she didn’t want to live.

She had condemned herself to an eternal youth that saw itself growing old. Until she had achieved nothing, until she herself had become nothing, she deluded herself that she still had a potential life. In order not to lose her life, she had postponed it from day to day, indeed, she had renounced it forever.

Sabrina lights another cigarette, then she sleepily closes her eyes. She has a vivid memory of her college years, of how she was greedy for emotions at the time.

She does not know what happened to Mario and now she no longer cares to know.

She doesn’t know if she’s done right or wrong, she doesn’t know if she’s ever really happy, she doesn’t even know what she intends to do tomorrow.

She will probably get up early, she will go to the office and in the evening she will see “the guys”.

Truth be told, her greatest desire, right now, and for years to come, is to stop asking questions like these.