Don't Move by Margaret Mazzantini, John Cullen Page A

I’m the one that’s the insect, I thought, not her; she’s just a poor woman, a victim of chance, whom I violated, whom I bit, whom I sucked dry. I saw the rubber hands down there, not mine, and yet thoroughly mine, gleaming white hooks at work in a world where I knew how to handle myself and where I was a doer of good deeds.
    Electric scalpel. Cauterize the blood vessels.
They’re still
out there, waiting for me. I’ll be wearing my scrubs when they arrestme—what an absurd way to go to jail.
Kocher forceps. Swabs.
They’re leaving me a little time for remorse. That’s why
they didn’t grab me before; they want me to go through this torture.
Pure cruelty. Yes, she was in that room; she saw me pass and
nodded her head. Then she collapsed in her chair like a broken
reed. They brought her a glass of water and told her, Don’t worry,
ma’am, the son of a bitch won’t get away from us. We’ll get him
and his dirty little dick, too. I didn’t look into the room when I
passed it. I didn’t have the nerve. Too bad.
    I made an effort, but I couldn’t recall what that room was used for.
The first door is the one you go through to get to the
blood-sample room. But what’s behind the open door the policemenin the gray uniforms were standing next to?
    In my mind, I rushed into that empty, unknown space, where I thought the woman I couldn’t remember anymore was hiding. And it seemed to me, Angela, that this memory loss was enough to erase what I had done.
    Why didn’t I go back and caress her and persuade her that
nothing had happened? When I want to, I know how to cajole a
fragile heart. I could have begged her pardon; I could have offered
her money. I could have killed her. Why didn’t I kill her? Because
I’m not a murderer. Murderers kill. Surgeons rape.
Vascular clamps. Aspirator.
She’s filed charges against me. She picked up
her patchwork purse and went down to the local police station.
    I felt as though I could see her, sitting on a chair in one of those rooms that smell like rubber stamps and torturing her fingernails to keep her courage up. While she was pressing her pale legs together and describing the distinguished-looking man who had assaulted her, someone was typing at a desk behind her back. Who knows what she told them. . . .
    What part of me stayed with her? I’d like to know what
trace I left on her uninviting body. I was crazy with liquor, with
heat, with perverted lust. But she was sober. She looked at me; she
suffered me. Whoever suffers remembers.
Autostatic retractor.
Maybe they gave her a gynecological exam; she lay on the narrow
white bed and turned her face to one side and submitted to yet
more humiliation. And there, with her legs spread wide apart,
staring into space, she decided to ruin me forever.
Kelly forceps.
Maybe they got a sample of my seminal fluid.
Kelly forceps again.
No, she couldn’t possibly have found me. She doesn’t know
a thing about me; she doesn’t know where I live or what I do. On
the other hand, maybe she does. When I went into the bedroom to
use the phone, I left my bag on the sofa and she went through it.
You bitch, you ragamuffin bitch. They’ll never believe you.
Swabs.
I’ll defend myself. I’ll say it was her. I’ll say she used some excuse
to lure me into her house and rob me, maybe even kill me. Wasn’t
I afraid when I was following her inside that unfinished apartmentbuilding, with the darkness and the stench and the squatters?It was fear that put me in such an altered state. I attacked
her to protect myself from the fear.
Isolate the choledoch duct.
She was behaving obscenely, I’ll say. She tricked me; she gave me
drugged coffee. . . . Yes, maybe there was something strange in the
coffee she gave me. It stinks like poison in that shack, Mr. Commissioner. You should go there and inspect the place.
Cystic duct. Thread.
Maybe there are some bodies buried in that dusty garden. The cars passing overhead on the viaduct rattle the windowpanes,and all