Sabrina

“It’s late, Mario, let me go”.

She threw herself out of the car, fumbled with the lock, for a moment the light illuminated the entrance hall. She wore a shirt that was a little big on her. He was impressed with the image of his thin shoulders disappearing into 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 softly during the intermission of the film. Ironically, even now he looks at her back. The elasticated top wraps her body, there is a puff of flesh around the straps, and red pimples on the skin.

His wife squirms in the next chair, crosses her legs, then unties them. Mario gets angry, nudges her. “Stop it, Carla. You annoy the whole line. “

Carla sighs, stiffens, but then immediately resumes the hateful contortions in the cinema chair. Under the soles of her sandals, peanut peels creak, and the noise pierces his skull as he stares at Sabrina, without taking his eyes off her now weighted shoulders, from 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.

Then she had no breasts, her eyes ate her face, her legs were 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 not. contain animal flesh. Since there was nothing, he had run down to the green grocers on the corner and bought a bunch of carrots. He had it wrapped properly — the gardener had looked at him as if he were a man who had escaped from the asylum — then he had done the steps two by two. “For you, Sabrina,” he had told her as he knelt.

They got together 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 that she had written to him, he had not understood. It had come to him after she had denied herself on the phone, and she had changed the lock of the attic. There was no mention of love in the note, it did not say whether she loved him or not, but there was mention of the pursuit of happiness, the impossibility of stopping in the same place and with the same man.

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

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

Two rows away, Sabrina raises an arm to look at the watch, complaining of the interval 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 with her friend to read the billboard of a “coming soon”.

Mario helps his wife put on the sweater and its sharp perfume 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?

But…?

Bullshit … One life is as good as another.

Yes.

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

“Sabri, shall we have a coffee?”

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

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

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

Sabrina sees them, the “boys”, filling Luana’s living room with their sickly cheerfulness. Sweaty little businessmen, mature girls 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’ll pretend to have fun at Giovanni’s usual jokes about Roberta’s ass — which is like listening to the same tape every time — she’ll drink until she gets a headache, smoke the whole pack of cigarettes.

If she goes, then Giovanni will accompany her home and insist on going up. She, drunk, won’t say no to him. She will let him touch her with her wet hands,s he 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 coming to Luana, tonight, I must have a little fever. I’ll call you tomorrow. “

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

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

Her life is a limbo of equal days, where you get up and then go to sleep; where faxes are translated about invoices and refunds, which have nothing to do with Shelley or Keats.

Was to this that 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. He loved him more than he later 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 his own children, young, still with all the roads open.

She didn’t want to meet Mario anymore, she refused, she left for London. She had scribbled a note stating that she was looking for happiness, freedom, that marriage is bourgeois.

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

She had condemned herself to an eternal youth that see herself grow old. Until she had achieved nothing, until she herself had become nothing, she deluded herself that she still had a potential for 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 closes her eyes sleepily. She has a vivid memory of her university 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, go to the office and see “the boys” in the evening.

To tell the truth, her greatest desire, at this very moment, and for years to come, is to stop asking questions like these.