Malina

Because dinner is all ready, I’ve put on makeup and combed my hair. “For it is futile to try to feign indifference concerning inquiries whose object cannot be indifferent to human nature.”

For if Ivan should no longer belong to me, the way I belong to him, then he will one day exist in some normal life, which will make him become quite normal, he will no longer be celebrated, but maybe Ivan doesn’t want anything other than his simple life, and I have only complicated a piece of his life with my silent stares, my flagrantly bad playing, my confessions constructed out of fragmented phrases.

I’m staring at the wall, which is showing a crack, it must be an old crack that now is gently spreading because I keep staring at it. It’s late enough, I could get a chance to make a phone call, and I pick up the phone and want to say, are you already asleep? Then it occurs to me just in time that I’d really have to ask, are you already awake? But today it’s too hard for me to say good morning, and I quietly
replace the receiver, I can feel the scent so distinctly with my whole face, so strongly that I think I’m buried in Ivan’s shoulder, in that indispensable scent I call cinnamon, the scent which always sustained me, which staved off all drowsiness, the only scent that let me breathe more easily. The wall doesn’t yield, it doesn’t want to give in, but I will force the wall to open along this crack. If Ivan doesn’t call me at once, if he never calls me again, if he doesn’t call until Monday, what will I do then?

But now I want to prolong this happiness, like anyone who’s experienced this good fortune. I want this happiness which has had its time and is now departing.

Ivan doesn’t contradict me, he doesn’t say, you’re crazy, what are you talking about, what do you mean when we get a chance. He already thinks it’s normal for us to phone each other when we get a chance.

I’m simply not looking at him anymore, I see something else, a shadow is sitting next to him, Ivan is laughing and talking with a shadow, he’s a lot funnier, more exuberant, he was never so awfully exuberant with me, and I say that I’m sure Martin or Fritz . . . but that I still have so much to do, no, I don’t know. We’ll phone each other.

Is Ivan also thinking how different it used to be, or does it only seem so to me, that things used to be different than they are today.

Ivan is no longer Ivan, I look at him like a clinician studying an X-ray, I see his skeleton, spots on his lung due to smoking, but I no longer see Ivan himself.

(più mosso) But even if there’s nothing to be done, even if we are powerless to intervene, the question nonetheless remains: what is to be done?

Beauty is no longer flowing from me, it could have flowed from me, it came in waves to me from Ivan, Ivan who is beautiful, I have known one single beautiful human being, nonetheless I have seen
beauty, in the end I, too, became beautiful one single time, through Ivan.

It’s my own manner of clinging to myself when I can’t cling to you.