Death of Ivan Murgia
She is Amora, not Amore or Ramona but, my love, Amora, and I am Ivan Murgia. Amora believes firmly in polygamy like it is a religion, like it is a brand or an influencer; this girl will be the death of me. The thing is she doesn’t want me to kiss my wife. She wants me to find other girls, just so our thing will be on the level, even-stevens. Make sense? No, it makes no sense to me, either. We pull a left over the traffic lights and head back toward her home in the centre of the city.
I had been the assistant to the Engineer Cabras (in many senses I still was) and had met her thirteen years earlier in his sleekly upholstered third-floor offices. Tasteful pictures were paraded along the walls and well-groomed plants at their skirting boards. She had certainly made a singular impression. She blustered right into my studio, with the shredded leaves and cooking smells. Initially, neither accepting or refusing my invite to sit down at the other side of the desk, she sniffed nonchalantly at the air and shot me a smile through clean sparkling teeth.
“What’s that smell?” she asked me. I had no adequate response.
She had something going on with her ceiling coming down in her apartment, and mildew that was extending from the one corner that covered a window, which looked out onto Piazza San Domenico. At that time, I was studying Engineering. I was in the last year of an ever so long degree course that looked like it would continue ad finitum. The degree required me to apply logic, common sense and a tremendous amount of patience when things didn’t stand up to scrutiny. I was becoming a professional problem solver, a well-oiled cog in the never-ending story of Italian higher education. It was a drudgery, a mish-mash, a simulation of all the world’s lessons wrapped up in a shiny gold-embossed certificate.
Working part-time in that office with Engineer Cabras allowed me to pay the mortgage on a small flat in the Is Mirrionis zone of central Cagliari. I wasn’t married back then. I was single in the modern-day sense, working my way through some stuff, trying to keep it all on the straight and narrow. It was a time of clean habits, clean living and clean clipped Italian consonants. There was light heartedness and hope. Amora came in and she started telling me about her problems. She had no focus; there was only the occasional pause in her obsessive sequencing. She could talk, she could reel off names and events and the discography of at least ten bands that I loved dearly. We ran off a couple of e-mails to lawyers, we contacted the local building offices, we leaned on her landlord a little bit; we sorted it out. She told me that she was indebted to me. We went out for coffee and cigarettes, I was touched, I was aroused. That was thirteen years ago; that was the where and when of how it all started.
Today, I’m in the here and now of all this. What’s more she wants proof, wants the thing in writing, she wants to see the messages; she says photos must follow. How am I gonna go about this? I guess I’m gonna fake it. Love and all its associated destruction; that’s what you do, you just fake it.
Being a writer, you see, you can get away with certain things that the keyboard and phone people, the diggers, cannot. You can push the bounds of possibility. Can is the operative word here. Can is a modal; its meaning changes as you move its context. I’m just gonna take aim and fire; use art and engineering as my shield. The thing about asking ladies to pretend that they have kissed you is you’ve gotta target the right people. If you ask someone who is actually attracted to you, you risk the whole thing kicking off. If you ask ladies who don’t like you at all, you’re not gonna be looking at a positive outcome. If I ask anyone too close to Amora or my wife, there will likely be a flux, feedback in the negative.
Camona is my first option. I’ve known her for a while, she reads my stories before I send them off to be published. She has the smile of an angel, and her body is ever so slightly out of balance from a two handed backhand that she adopted as a teenager. It was a rage, it was a fashion, she followed it to the letter and ever so slightly unbalanced her body. Her right-hand side drifts slightly downward. I know that because she is my padel instructor. She had been introduced to me by a friend and I had accepted his recommendation with glee and gumption. I find her imbalance attractive and I struggle to rationalise that. It’s a bit like the imperfections in pornography that render the heart-breaking monotony somewhat more real, the dark non-symmetric mole, the squiggle of cellulite, which render it congruent with actual lovemaking. She has a laugh that I could die for. She giggles, she whinnies, she whelps and she woos. When she asks me if she can adjust my posture, I fake indifference and tell her not to touch me. The truth is I live for her touch as she adjusts my swing, the times she attempts to hold my ageing structure upright.
I call her up and I tell her I need to see her. We agree to meet for coffee the next day at the padel courts near the port. I close the phone and ruminate on her possible responses.
Only she can’t say no. If she says no, that only leaves me with Fabiana and Portia. Portia is not her real Shakespearian name. Her name is Portia because she drives a Porsche. It’s a nickname that we furtively thought up, Fabiana and me. She was married to some golfer or sportsman or pharmacist or something, and the divorce settlement dealt her the apartment in the centre of the city, full custody of a cursory teenager and of course that Porsche. She tells me that the styling on her car is strongly influenced by the Mission E concept, with suicide doors and B pillars, there’s a powerful rear spoiler and retractable door handles. She tells me all sorts of things like that, and I have no idea what they mean. I work with buildings, you see, cars just pass me by.
Portia tells me that she’s seeing a shrink. She’s been seeing him for a while now and his reputation is better than mine and his client list is wealthier. Sure, it is. Who can afford to go see a shrink? I ask her if he charges more than I do and of course he does. I tell her to bin him and come to me. What’s an engineer but a guy who gets things to work better, somebody able to pick at, diagnose and mend the broken? She considers it as a possibility in a future line of money saving options. I have to be careful of Portia, though. Maybe, I will ask her to pretend we’ve kissed next week.
Fabiana is her cousin. They come to see me together. They have some part ownership of some house along the western coast of Sardina. Portia has the most part of the share, but Fabiana is always there to sure her up, offer support.
There’s a gaudy resplendent sun that peaks over the padel court nets when I meet up with Camona. It’s November and in the mornings the sky is still lit bright. I have sun protection on, and I am wearing an NYPD baseball cap. I have given some thought to my get up, but maybe not enough. We take up our places at the bar and order, then I usher her over to a quiet corner. I tell her that if my proposal makes her feel uneasy in any way, shape or form, she should say no. She takes a seat opposite me at a discreet distance from her clients, who are scattered about the bar.
“You can definitely say no, but…” preamble, preamble. “I am a writer,” handing over copy of collected poetry previously published. “My second novel is in the write and I my first novel is out next year. I struggle with basic romantic elements in the texts that I scribe. I can’t get into the ladies’ heads, I can’t reach their hearts. I am lacking in recent knowledge of how a kiss might be conceived, considered, labelled and archived. I need your help. What I’d like you to do is imagine that I have kissed you and that it’s the day after. I need your imagination because mine is unfocussed, misfiring. My love scenes are crippled, my sex scenes are invaded with dark breathy, ungainly manoeuvres. Message me, tell me how you feel about the kiss, and we will see how the story progresses.”
“I am honoured that you should ask me a favour of this type. I do, after all, have a fine imagination and an artistic side.” That I wasn’t expecting, or maybe I was. One of my deepest flaws is that I tend to get ahead of myself.
“I shall have to tell my husband.” Maybe I was expecting that a little more.
Sure, she’d have to tell her husband. She’d have to give the whole thing one big, jagged shudder of fear. Still, if I remember correctly, her husband is a hippy, used to play bass in some Grateful Dead cover band at college, never moved around the stage, just stayed put. If things got nasty, he could be handled.
“I would expect nothing less.”
“He does get very jealous.” And there it is, the potential end of my road.
She lets out a sweet smile which I try to mirror. She tips her head to her lower left-hand side, and we leave it at that. She tells me that we will start the next Tuesday, kick it off mid-week. Nice to see that she has already taken control of what might only be described as a false kissing affair.
Amora always wants to control things, yet she is rarely able to. Amora would like to dictate where we are but I must perceive her ideas, her volition. I try to define things to give myself more security. I know just how weak and sensitive I am and how potentially dangerous that information is to all of those around me. I tell Amora to live in the moment. There are only moments and then we disappear forever. Neither of us has any faith in an afterlife. The only energy that we perceive, is here and now, suspended on my breath, in this asphyxiating room of our singular lives where we wait for the inevitable. The walls seem to move closer. I move her phone to the bedside table and knead selflessly at her back.
I will be seeing Amora again this evening. We have a date for an apericena before I go home to my wife for dinner. I will touch Amora’s hair, rub her thigh under the table and generally feed on my own desire, as I temper it with numerous glasses of wine. I have bought her a book by one of her favourite authors, Giuseppe Deri. As a gift, it is not so subtle, not so delicate. He writes about desire and unrequited love, relationships and how they come about and fall to pieces. He makes you think more closely about the colloquial, the everyday. She says she loves his work; this is yet another thing which draws me to her.
I will not tell Amora anything about Camona. I must wait until everything has been written. I must have gin and nakedness baked into the whole equation. I must present a choking checkmate that descends into bliss. The thing is that Amora really does want to kiss me. She has told me so. She just needs an external exchange of saliva with a third party to be on a completely equal footing. She needs to know that what we have is as easy and uncommitted for me as it is for her.
She messages me now and asks me what time we are due to meet up. I know I shouldn’t answer straight back, but I answer straight back. It’s an impulse, my own upbringing gone mad. From this moment on, I’m just counting down the hours, the minutes, the seconds. I’ve put on my best suit, I’ve donned an ironed shirt. My hair is clean and gelled, and I’ve polished my shoes. Amora likes to cancel at the last minute, she divides her life between mini-crises and crises writ large. No excuse is too big or too small to sack me off and go after something or someone else. I know this, she tells me this is the way it has to be, and she is right. No possession, no obligation. The only constant is that she has total control; she calls the shots.
Amora’s come straight from work and her arms and legs are discreetly covered. She has on an eight-panel, grey and blue, tartan skirt, an Andy-Pandy blouse and a non-revealing baggy jumper. For now, we pretend that there is nothing between us; it builds the suspense, accentuates the charge. She arrives punctually (the first time ever) and slopes down onto a chair in front of me. I keep a distance and address the papers she presents before me. I’m only gonna give a cursory glance to these documents and then hand all this stuff on to the Engineer, get him to advise me on how to advise her, and she knows this full well. She knows I’m a novelist now, first and foremost, and all this engineering lark is just an excuse to see her in a professional context.
“So, how’s it all looking?” she asks me.
She looks spectacular and I tell her so. She tells me to stick to the plot, look at the planimetry and that is the end of that. We go out for wine and then I see her to her car. I give her the book I have bought and she hugs me sincerely, maybe too sincerely. Is that a goodbye? Then, she tosses it onto the back seat. When I turn back around the corner, she is examining the note that I have folded inside the inside cover of the book. That’s a good sign, I think, but 24 hours later when she has no longer written a message of thanks, I start to second guess what her reaction might have been.
I write to Camona that Saturday had been great. There has been no Saturday. She says she needs time to answer. She’s just starting a padel lesson, her racketeers await. The office walls are closing in; it is becoming harder to keep calm. I’m gonna dazzle with the eccentricity of my grammar, my knowledge of buildings, the amalgamation of engines, machines, and structures.
When Camona comes onto Whatsapp two hours later, she asks me if I enjoyed my time with her on Saturday. She tells me that I reeked of melancholy. I was casting dark thoughts, brooding. Funny, how the others see you. Funny, what you look like on an invented date. She writes that she has to see me soon. I like the imperative, it gives impulse. That might be more convincing to Amora when I leave my Whatsapp messages open on her kitchen table. Camona tells me we have to go to the sea next weekend. She longs for calamari and oysters and a fashionable Karmis, she wants to see the waves crashing onto the beach in autumn. I question her taste in wine and approve the rest. I set about looking for a suitably false restaurant for a suitably false date and send her some suggestions.
In the meantime, Amora has gone cold. I’m setting this whole false affair up and Amora has turned to stone. She’s busy and she doesn’t know when she can see me, Sure, we’re all busy, I scuff my shoes petulantly on the pavement. I consider aborting everything, abandoning my false kiss plan, but, on reconsidering, I opt to plough on the same.
Amora wakes up the next day and performs a startling volte-face. She writes that she’s really looking forward to our evening together. Probably because I have booked dinner and aperitifs in the most beautiful hotel in Cagliari. We get there early and order 4 cocktails, we don’t like to get caught short and the waiters are soon pandering to her desires. She knows two of them and they’re soon chatting the wind. I act out extreme comfort and disarming unease in equal proportions. Within these elegant surroundings, I gaze upon her beauty.
We eat nouvelle cuisine at considerable expense, she chooses an Italian Chardonnay and we consume an extremely large number of absurdly small cocktails before and after dinner. A local singer croons soulfully into a microphone, while his friend dollops his thick fingers across a double bass. The restaurant fills up as we are leaving, and we partake of a sixth cocktail in the gardens behind the hotel. I drop hints about Camona, I make reference to the fact that she promised to kiss me if I were to steal a kiss elsewhere, but Amora doesn’t seem to be listening. She plays dumb and changes the subject, apparently unaware of what I’m referring to.
I walk her home, and she prepares two gin and tonics as I massage her feet. It’s a locally produced gin, which I bought for her the month before, and she complains that the flavour is overbearingly herbed and bitter. I have never come across a gin that is too bitter for my Amora. I pause a moment for dramatic effect and then I ask her if I can stay the night. She responds in the negative. She tells me she can’t, and she tells me she won’t and then adds that the mere idea disgusts her. She reiterates her thoughts on my proposal, and I leave with a bleary eyed, hangdog expression, my tail tucked ever so tightly between my weakened hind legs. I hadn’t anticipated her answer, although I should have, and I am left somewhat hollowed out by the whole experience. I drive home and get diverted by those at work on the streets. I’m soon lost in a hinterland that I thought I knew so well.
The next day, Camona writes and tells me that she is no longer willing to play my game, exchanging messages about a kiss. Her husband has intervened and told her that he isn’t happy with the whole thing. It’s ok because I do have the evidence on my phone of the false date we never went on, the calamari, oysters and dark brooding thoughts, and I think it may still be more than enough to convince Amora of the veracity of my kissing claims.
I’m sitting there looking through a planning project with Portia and Fabiana when Ramona’s husband pushes petulantly through the door into my office. The long hair of his younger years has disappeared and his head is closely shaven; the bushy sideburns are no longer there. He is sporting a pair of expensive square framed glasses so I presume that he is not here to fight. He sees that I have company and clearly reconsiders what he is going to say to me. I take him outside the office into the corridor to avoid as much embarrassing my guests.
“What did you ask Camona to do?”
“Simulate a literary kiss.” That was about the truth of it. Nothing to see here.
Engineer Cabras pushes open the door of his study and casts a glance in our direction. I’m relieved that there are witnesses present.
“Pervert.” And that was probably it, he’s just about summed the whole thing up in one necessary emission.
“It was for a story I am writing.”
“Stay away from her.” He pushes me backwards onto the low blue satin sofa that stood at the end of the corridor. The end of my padel career?
I resume my consultancy with Portia and Fabiana after he has left. My ladies don’t appear too disturbed by the altercation, which I presume they overheard. Maybe I should ask them for their simulated kisses now, maybe I should explore all the options I’ve left closed until now.
Amora, my Amora, puts me off and sets me back a couple of times. I go around for dinner two weeks later and embark on a wavering monologue. She’s not drinking, says she’s on meds, anti-allergies and a strict diet. She dresses down appropriately for the occasion, I guess cos she knows she’s gonna get it full on. I’m not effective in monologue. You know when they do the summing up at the start of a new episode of a fading Netflix TV series. They like to do it for those who are joining the series late, those who have not been attentive. This is what I sound like in my head, but I lack the clarity, the multi-persona write overs and rearrangements. I’m gonna have to think about hiring a team to write my stilted scripts.
We are alone in her flat and we are watching TV. It’s the first time she has cooked for me. There is octopus, potatoes and roast vegetables. I touch the casserole dish that has been in the oven and burn myself just a little. I don’t cry out, make a fuss. That will come later.
She shuffles her university papers away and we sit on the sofa watching some football apropos of nothing. I take her into the third person.
“Maybe you didn’t catch what’s been going on in the previous episodes of this series. Everyone loves Amora, everyone loves Ivan. Ivan adores Amora and has done so for thirteen years. Amora loves Ivan a little bit. This little could become a lot, but she is afraid of disturbing the equilibrium. The kiss would be that element of disturbance. In her opinion, spending the night in each other’s arms would have a similar effect. To my eye, it would change very little. I don’t think that we can be more intimate than we have been.”
She umms and ahhhs, sighs deeply and asks me what I think is actually happening here.
“We’ve sat in a garden together; I’ve given you poetry on unrequited love, you’ve framed it. I’ve stroked your feet, I’ve massaged your back, I’ve kissed the side of your breasts, I’ve kissed your lower back. I’ve heard you sigh; you’ve asked me to have a baby with you, I shed tears. You cried on my shoulder for the death of your brother. I think at this point we have been as intimate as intimate can muster. To your mind, a kiss between two mouths is everything. You’re afraid that a kiss of this type would make one of us lose her/his bearings. Control would disappear. You’ve said that you want me, but you cannot/don’t want to/mustn’t give yourself to me. Delete as appropriate, my love.”
She looks at me to tell me I have gone too far. She tells me I’m overplaying my very limited, poorly engineered, cards.
When I asked if I could stay the night, you said abbiamo sempre detto che… abbiamo sempre detto che…abbiamo sempre detto che... and then you never concluded the sentence. What have we always said, exactly? You said that my staying over the other night would be disgusting, I feel the opposite way. To have spent that night with you in my arms would have been the most beautiful thing I had ever done. Then you qualified it and said that it was not just me; it was sleeping with anyone that disgusted you. I asked a second time and then I was asked to leave.”
She claims she doesn’t remember. She was drunk. Funny how she can’t recall each attempt to reach out I have made. Funny how each time she has pushed me away, she has forgotten.
“Do you recall telling me that if I kissed someone else, you’d kiss me. You told me that on the dual carriageway near the Bussola between Quartu and Cagliari. I nearly took the car off the road. Two weeks later, I implied that I had kissed Camona. You didn’t bat an eyelid.”
“I never said that…” Said THAT or said that. She tails off into a mumble, an aeroplane starting its engines.
That was a dirty low-down plot of mine, manufacturing a kiss to steal Amora’s lips, and it was never gonna come to fruition. Neither was it too honest on Amora’s part.
“You have always condemned possession. On my part, there is no will to possess you. I couldn’t if I tried. In the event of my divorce or my wife’s death, we couldn’t be a couple; we could never be together. You wouldn’t want it, I couldn’t bear it. We could never live together.”
She nods acknowledging that the idea of the two of us ever being together is sheer impossibility and suggests that our friendship is special to her. Special is a low-down blow and it’s gonna be pretty hard to forgive that singular deprecating adjective.
The only thing I have ever asked of you is that if you should cut me from your life, that you do it permanently and severely. As long as I am alive, I will always be here for you.”
She just shrugs her shoulders and takes a calculated sip at her glass of water, longing for a large well-structured white wine, with a few fruity notes. She can object to what I’ve said but not to what I feel. She asks me to leave before ten o’clock and I drive silently home. I turn on the electric blanket and twenty minutes later twist softly into bed.
I try to put it all behind me and forget the whole thing, but the rejection proves too much. The heart wants what the heart wants. The liver feels much the same way. The winter kicks in and I don’t hear from her again. A melancholy comes to me when I drink, and an ague takes up residence in my glassy bones. With her rejection, there has been a slow but tectonic movement in my own self-awareness.
Towards March, I think I see her unloading her shopping from a small red Japanese car. The figure turns toward me, but it is not her. My heart returns to its regular solemn rhythms. I attempt to get lost in my work and daily routine.
A week later, when I am out walking, I come across a church in the Villanova district near to Amora’s flat. I have a key as I have been engaged by the local priest to check some structural damage in the western wing, caused by recent torrential downpours. Some of the main atrium has been flooded and considerable investment will have to be made. I admire the tower from outside, a common element of religious architecture generally viewed as an attempt to reach skyward toward the divine. I place the old iron key in the rusty lock and open the main church doors. I climb expertly up to the lantern and step off the stairs into the belfry. There is an open area that has been sectioned off by the workers that we have engaged on the job. I tear away the plastic hoardings and look out at the brick framework of the city below. I admire the randomness of the architecture and the sheer unadulterated madness of the buildings that have been assembled individually or in groups and subsequently locked together.
I throw myself from the church tower and pepper myself awkwardly on the cobbled street below. I do it instinctively and without considering the consequences. Had I known that I was about to do that, I am sure I would have stopped and pondered. Momentum, though, is so something that we are rarely able to check. At some point, I believe that I glimpse my brushed splintered bones pointing out of the tops of my thighs. Is that even possible? I am finished by my own spontaneity and sense of having squandered love. I give my life for Amora.
It is with profound sorrow that my relatives are informed, my wife is understandably devastated. Some real tears are shed, but most of the sadness can be put down to misunderstanding. My relatives come together, a plot is decided upon, a gospel choir is engaged. I feel that I should have emphasised that I had never liked gospel music.
There are few people at my funeral, but several kind comments are posted on social media. Camona, Portia and Fabiana wear black, Amora remains silent and at a distance. Each of my friends and acquaintances now becomes aware that I am dead, yet they are still here.
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