I stagger among the stinking narrow streets, a poodle is shitting on the steps near our apartment, the shutters are closing, the mechanics are saying good-bye to one another, arranging to meet again tomorrow, and people are walking their dogs on leads. He comes out of the door first, followed by her, and then by the dog. I hide behind the steps and watch the girl lift up her dress and climb onto the moped—she sits like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. Every night for three months I’ve gone to spy on the door of the condominium, hoping to see them come out together. I take the six o’clock train and go, and every night I wander about Rome like a junkie, except that my drug is love. People who recognize me in the street look at me and don’t talk to me, and in their eyes I see that they think I’m an addict, a star hurled too soon into the galaxy, unable to find her integrity. It’s true, I haven’t managed to find my integrity. I’m disturbed to the marrow.

She has a beatific smile I know very well, full cheekbones, and tousled hair. He has a kind of moribund sense about him, a dirty inheritance he must bear which also smells bitter.

I’d like him to fall hopelessly in love … not because his well-being makes me happy, but perhaps because I enjoy the harm I am doing myself.

Five months later, I go and stand beneath the balcony and hear her moans of pleasure, and I go home and cut my skin. I carve his name and mine with a box cutter, writing what I used to write in the toilets at school: “Melissa and Thomas forever.”

He will never know of my pain, because my eyes are silent dogs that follow him, foaming at the mouth.

His happiness gives me pleasure because it’s the very source of my pain, the harm I’m doing myself.

That’s why I’ll be eternally grateful to him. Damnation.

I curse them all.

THIRTY-NINE

I feel the tapeworm wriggling, nestling amid my fears and becoming their high queen.

I’m still very frightened of the dark, of monsters under the bed, and of the blood that might come out of the plug hole. I see eyes in the walls, I feel hands beating against the floor, wolves howling from somewhere over in the hills.

At night the red house assumes a dark color, it turns scarlet, and I feel as though I’m in a huge pool of blood, floating in it along with my ghosts.

The pain I feel confesses things it has never confessed before.

Pain is the source of my life, the source of my imagination. To love I must first feel pain; to feel pain I must die.