In the tearoom where we often meet in the afternoon, Titti sits with her back to me, facing the window, lit by the lovely May sun and, it seems, lost in thought.
On her feet, a pair of medium-heeled Chanels, one leg stretched out and the other bent, the tip of her toe touching the floor.
On one of the many afternoons I spent dazed in front of the television, I had heard an obese doctor in a white coat gloss the heel as the engine of the female’s springing step. Oh… blessed medical stupidity! How often, as she walks, does the female seem to totter along on stilts! – It is in STILLNESS that the stiletto imposes on the slender ankle that upward motion which first bursts along the line of the calf and then, at the end of the tapering stretch, resumes its impetus toward vertigo: scrambled eggs, oh my darling how I love your legs (Lord Almighty, I am turning into Hyde! Can I no longer control myself?)

***

I had met Titti a year and a half earlier. She a brilliant chemistry undergraduate, I an anonymous, overdue student of Modern Literature. She had come to sit in the only free chair, at my little table, left empty in the university bar, and had asked in a low voice, with the distracted air of a woman used to males who snap to attention (with a lecherous eye), permission to sit down. Beautiful, far too beautiful for me to think up a pretext and strike up a conversation, we had stayed silent for at least twenty minutes. After drinking a cappuccino she had begun to read, and it took me a good while to make out, peeking while I looked the other way, what book it was. It was PLEASURE. And there was no embarrassment of any kind, because the quip came out on its own: «Do you like it? – I had asked her – it strikes me as a windbag! Can you imagine someone who talks like that reeling in lovers by the dozen?» Titti, instead of leaving or scowling at me, gave a hint of a sweet smile, the kind you send to children. «Listen, at first I too thought it really was too rhetorical and a bit ridiculous. But then, I don’t know… it began to appeal to me. It amuses me… or maybe it distracts me. I don’t know. If I had to say why I like it, I couldn’t.»
So as not to waste the unhoped-for gain, all I managed was to stand up and tell her that, should we meet again, she would explain to me the unknown qualities of Pleasure. «My name is Lorenzo», I said, rising and stretching out my arm. «A pleasure – she replied, shaking my hand and giggling – my name is Titti».

***

Two years ago I had attended a seminar on contemporary Italian literature devoted to Pleasure. The professor had invited us to speak freely, American-style [to ramble on!], without fear. I had spoken up a couple of times, mumbling more or less what I had told Titti – otherwise what kind of yankee seminar was it. The professor had looked at me mournfully, perhaps opening his mouth and curling up his upper lip, the way one does when about to retch. By now we were in the second year of the Master’s – he began to sermonize – of course we had to say what was in our heads, but not let the cerebral froth spout nothing but nonsense: the importance of D’Annunzio’s novel for the Italian literature that followed was, without exaggeration, c-o-l-o-s-s-a-l; the howls of ’68 were long over; one had to make at least a little effort to grasp its atmospheres and above all to pay attention to the language, quite apart from its sounding bombastic; the Italian language deteriorates fast, etc. etc. After the second question I had shut my mind and gone quiet so as not to jeopardize the exam. And so, with hindsight, I had discovered that a chemistry undergraduate had more literary sensibility than I did! My studies were made of words. Did the words perhaps slide over my flat mind like little drops of oil on a sheet of ice?

***

I began to stop by the university bar every day thereafter and, incredible to say, after three days Titti had come back and sat down beside me, and then had returned and again sat next to me, and then once more. She chatted freely, about the novels she was reading, the thesis she was preparing, her home and her girlfriends – never about males.
At our fifth meeting she told me that she had rarely met a boy who, like yours truly, knew how to listen – thank you, blessed Doll, I had nothing to say!
I seemed to be listening, enraptured; in reality I was gazing in ecstasy, and now and then I whispered “but of course!”, “I see!”, “really?”, the stimulants for the long-winded. Then, in time, the mystery of her mysterious interest in me had cleared. During her school-leaving exam Titti had had a terrible nervous breakdown; a family ailment, she specified. After a year of chatter and chemistry she had recovered, but the wound was deep. From then on, one could tell, she had begun to be interested above all in herself, in her anxieties and fears, in the morning dread when, with the sun up, she longed for the night. She would relapse and recover. She had managed to study, but she got no further without weekly talks with the shrink. Relations with others had become a real torment, with her parents, her girlfriends and in particular, needless to say, with men. She had had two important affairs, she confessed, one of them even passionate. But it didn’t work, it hadn’t worked, however handsome the boy was, and sharp too. He couldn’t understand her and wouldn’t listen; he tried to show off and always wanted them to be alone, to undress and touch. He said he had fallen in love, but to her, before long, nothing came through. Perhaps he felt and desired, but in solitude. You see, with you we talk – Titti would conclude – but even after the evening pizza (twice!) you don’t ask to come to my place (with my parents?) or to stay in the car (the little Fiat?), you never try to make yourself interesting, to amaze me or to talk for hours, without noticing whether I’m following you or getting bored. When I see the frustrated eyes of a man because I’m not looking at him with interest, that pressure in the stomach starts at once, radiating to the chest and turning into anguish. With you none of this ever happens to me, never. You always respect the pace and don’t want to hold me back! How I love that you don’t absent-mindedly stroke my hand, that you don’t let your palm drop onto my arm or playfully knead my shoulder. You’re never in a hurry and, if you speak, you have no secrets!
But of course you were well, so very well, with me, my Titti. I had become your best FRIEND, a female one at that and silent besides: an angel’s head without wings. I don’t suffer from anguish, I’m not neurotic; if anything I lean toward madness. Perhaps that is why I shared, with feeling, more in the life of those poor wretches than in yours. What erotic ordeals they must have gone through: whispers and cries. And yet, and yet, perhaps because I don’t agonize with the agonized, and because you are a stunner the likes of which never came my way and never will again, the more time passed the more I overcooked, like a cod forgotten too long in the pot over a lit flame.

***

Six months after our first meeting, something had changed all the same. In the sense that I too had begun to talk, and she to laugh and to listen.
I know I am intellectually mediocre, without that awareness raising my brain by so much as an et. My father, poor man, had in his day insisted that I enrol in philosophy; it would have given me “structure”, he said. Of my high-school years I remember only the Socratic “knowing that one does not know”, and the maxim has always struck me as the threshold of delirium: knowing ourselves to be imbeciles, we ought to become, by some sophic marvel, intelligent.
I do, however, have one rare quality: I have an extraordinary memory.
Aunt Gasperina pressed me to enrol in languages, but my memory holds on to words, to sounds, less to meanings, and almost not at all to the rules that bind them together.
Well then, after that first chat about D’Annunzio, I had reread Pleasure – that much should be clear, no? And then, after the bard, it was a river in flood, an alpine torrent: salads of poetry and Landolfi, Gadda, D’Arrigo; I pushed on as far as Pizzuto. It wasn’t that I liked them, told them apart or understood them, but I remembered the words, and along with them: alliterations, anastrophes, chiasmi, zeugmas, hyperboles and synaesthesias. What stayed in my head was a gluey matter, a sort of limbo between the sounds and the world. But the real fun was not reading, it was repeating! Or rather imitating, or regurgitating at will what I had read. I would take my cue from a fact or an object and try to describe it through the molasses of terms I had swallowed. Spur, or spar (you see?), of the monomania into which I had got myself was Titti too. Not only because I had set out from an interest of hers in order to interest her, but because, hearing me one day muse absent-mindedly upon a daring description of a moiré silk she had on, she had begun to enjoy herself and to goad me into presenting, in my own way, this and that. So she would invite me, for instance, to describe a couple sitting near us.
«Tell me, what are they doing?». And I: «Perhaps he is telling her that he wants to face the damp, glistening night as if she were the darkness itself, his body lost in the night together with hers. And that even in dreams, sensing her, he sinks into the warm, dark wave of voluptuous abandon». «And what does she answer?». «Ah, her! The woman does not open her mouth to stir the air. Let him range the whole quarter for himself, in the glimmer of the infrequent lamps! In foro interno a shiver runs through the very marrow of her bones if she imagines hearing other words from another». «So she is with him and thinking of someone else!». «Another, or someone never met, an unknown? Might the other not be the future? What joys or sorrows does what is to come hold in store for her? Will she be able to escape the passion that draws her, dazzling her?».
And Titti, bless her, laughed at such droppings. Of course, when I dragged it out, she would begin to look at me, puzzled. I caught her embarrassment at once and fell silent.
Worrying, very worrying, though, was the fact that often, in foro interno, I would carry on by myself.

***

When a year had passed I graduated, on Mario Soldati, with a 95. For the thesis they had given me two points. Supervisor and second reader agreed in judging the work poor in ideas. But it wasn’t too badly written, they said. Above all, the second reader, who had leafed through part of it, observed that I had not copied. «You know what, Mr Farneti – he added -, you did not copy, but your thesis reads like a paraphrase of the meagre critical literature you have read».
My family wanted me to look for teaching posts up north, but I had applied in Rome. How could I leave Titti? Already now I spent hours on the sofa or on the bed spinning conceits. What would I do on my own, without my moments with her? And besides, had I found a post, what would I have told those poor souls?
So keenly did I realize it, I was seriously ailing (falling ill).
Sometimes I would ask myself, for a few seconds, what sort of mental malady had befallen me. There were no madmen in the family. Why did I chase after meaningless words for hours? The answer was, I think, Titti’s: «it AMUSES me… or maybe it distracts me». I too have my sorrows, and the constant spinning of conceits is a feather cushion that dulls the aches, including those for this radiant and unreachable piece of blonde.
One thing, however, I had grasped, an intoxication or rapture all my own. To muse, to leap from word to word, is like going down icy steps in leather soles. So as not to fall you must NOT pause for an instant. For me too the passing of time brings sadness. And in those silent singsongs I would PASS along with it, I climbed astride it.

***

A year and six months, and the thing drags on. Like this I cannot go forward. My mother is convinced I’m depressed and my father that I look more and more like Uncle Aldo, the family’s superhydrophobic kept man: six months shuffling about our place none too clean, and six squabbling ever more foully with his sister, Aunt Anita. I have to give the affair a turn, a Kehre, all the more because I run an ever greater risk of losing my mind. And the only way to cut the knot, to leave the labyrinth, is to ask Titti whether she wants to be with me: yes, with me! She will look at me the way she would look at a girlfriend on discovering she has otter bristles on her legs. I too will have betrayed her, she will tell me. She will not want to see me again. But something, whatever it may be, will change. I have to start again from the beginning, even if I don’t know from where.

***

Two weeks ago I thought I had settled the matter the quick and simple way. We had taken a long walk on the Janiculum, sat down in the shade on a bench and talked at length and without idle babble (on my part) about our past, about everyone’s difficulties, our own included, of getting by in peace without always being smothered by the anxiety of doing goodness knows what and achieving nothing. All of a sudden, right after a brief, embarrassed silence, I don’t know how, I had taken her hand and begun to stroke it ever so slowly, but with passion, then bringing it to my cheek. To many, if not to all, it will seem a fool’s gesture rather than a bold one, but ardour varies with context, and if I have managed even a little to explain myself, to make clear the wretched circumstances, it was the utmost carnal lust I could attempt. It was more than touching her in secret places.
Well then, Titti had not turned to stone, she had not lost her composure, that is the point! She repeated the sweet smile of the first time. You know, she began, yesterday I went to a conference on evolution and emotions where they slobbered on at length about the clash between our ancestral serpent brain and cultural adaptation. As you know, I believe only in the reality of chemistry and the dreams of literature; in between, for me, there is very little. In the end they even discussed, imagine the level, the difficulties of friendship between the sexes, as if deducing them from our biological and evolutionary features. Banalities, twaddle, certainly, and yet it is true that I have had these difficulties all my life, just as it is true that every rule has its exception. As you can see, you are mine, we caress each other as friends do.
Words, words, I have to find words to make her understand! With gestures I can do nothing. Either I stay, as in this case, with literature, or, by overdoing it, I run the risk of seeing her run off offended, given over to chemistry. The point is that words, for me, are the problem, not the means to bring Titti to the blessed middle way.

***

And so I find myself at the bar. The point from which I set out in my brief account.
Titti has her back to me in front of the window, and with my heart clenched tight I make up my mind.
«Hello, Titti»
«Ah, there you are – she turns -, I’ve been waiting half an hour!»
«Titti, I have to talk to you»
«So talk!»
«Titti…. Don’t be angry. I imagine… for you it will be a bolt from the blue (what a literary gem!). But you must have understood something… How am I to say it to you? As a phrase full of substantial marrow that lives and breathes and throbs like the thing whose form it renders? Your friend has lost his head… To put it in the old style: I wish you would become my woman!»
«Lorenzo, what the hell are you saying!?»
«Never mind the manner, keep to the substance. Of me, alas, you know everything. You know what I can give you. No jokes, no jesting. It is the only thing I want. Either you, or I lose everything!»
Titti, with a slightly dazed, open-mouthed smile, is about to answer again, but then she understands, at last she grasps why I rave even when I am not joking, and how far I have gone. She sits down abruptly: legs apart, elbows on her knees, and her head hidden in her hands, the way one is when very, very tired. Two eternal minutes pass, and I don’t know whether she is muttering something or whether it is my own brain: «this was all I needed, God help me. But anyway… no worse than this. If only… ould… one…. nounced».
Then she raises her head. Perhaps it is the sun beating on her cheek, but her translucent complexion is full of pimples under the skin. And the eyes, the eyes! Bright, large, blue and lit up, now they are red and watery. Empty too, or dull, the way they are when you look at someone from too close. It is like a science-fiction film: Titti, in two minutes, has aged!
At last she resumes, though she speaks with effort.
«I don’t know what to tell you, Lorenzo, I really wasn’t expecting it. I feel a little betrayed. But what could you and I do together? There would be no shortage of talk, that is certain. And the closeness I have with you! But then what? To put it bluntly: I’m fond of you and I don’t love you, you know that. Of course, you’ll say, one can try, perhaps to think it over. After all, don’t take offence, I’ve tried so many… but is it dignified? Is it, for me and above all for you? And besides…»
She rambles on for a long while and I no longer hear her. I AM GETTING DISTRACTED. Surely because I am a coward and afraid of the answer. But it may also be that my head is turning entirely to mush: Lorenzo, a latter-day Jason in quest of the golden dream; the Oblomov of blather. And so I find myself describing, who knows why – the cinema too has lately entered the tangle of places to digress upon – the ending of Antonioni’s Eclisse, a film in which, out of boredom, I could not even sleep: the velvet sky, the diaphanous halo of the street lamps, the mobile crates, the heaped columns of ants…
I don’t know how long the excursion lasts, but all at once I wake and catch Titti’s last sentence, sweaty and as if resigned.
«So be it, Lorenzo, so be it. Perhaps not seeing you any more would be worse. It’s that…, I confess it, when you’re not there, I HEAR THE SILENCE, and I’m afraid. For now – but, honestly, for how long? – I consent!»
What words, what words! To doubt you have found an answer. At last, words precise and mighty, even if lascivious.
Good God!
But… are they hers
… or mine?