Anamnesis by Zorina Alliata (ebook reader ink txt) 📕

smoke. This was my first cigarette ever. I just wanted to be with you here, away from the crowd.

He kissed as he lived, forcefully, manly, with no embarrassment or doubt. His lips tasted of exotic leaves from forgotten mountains; his tongue, always finding its way inside my mouth with no hesitations or apologies, felt like fresh oranges yet to be picked. We kissed a long time; he stroke my hair tenderly, touched my face and my neck, leaving burning traces along my skin. We stared into each other’s eyes and we knew we have found our destiny.

He took me home in his car, and we passed through the sleeping campus, still under our magic blanket of new love. I live in there, he said, pointing out one of the buildings. My roommate is out. Want to come in?

I had never wanted anything more in my whole life. But then I remembered; it came back to me, the reality I had forgotten for a few hours; who I was; my illness; my inability; my hanging out of the branches of the tree of life. I was surprised and shocked to remember; that couldn’t be me. I was a young, beautiful woman in love now; for sure, the nightmare had passed. But then I knew it hadn’t.

I can’t, I said. I can’t. He shook his head, he understood. He was a gentleman. He drove around to my dormitory and took me to the door. A summer rain had started, rushed, noisy. It was a wonderful evening, he said. It was magical, I answered. And so I passed through the glass doors and instantly returned to my Cinderella self, dust and dirt grown on my bones and my mouth, bitter saliva in my throat.

Later that night, I was awoken by the silence. The wind had stopped raging at my window; I heard a knock at the door. There he was – Dan. All wet, panting. I had to see you again, he said. I climbed through the balcony. Please let me in. I can’t go to sleep without you. I love you. I love you already.

He kissed me again, rain drops on his lips. Before I knew it, he took me in his arms and carried me to my bed. We opened our eyes to see each other naked, amazed, in love. His body was smooth and strong, his skin sweet like honey. He was the only man I saw naked. He was the only man I ever let see me naked.

You are so amazing, he said. I have never seen anyone so beautiful.

I can’t have sex, I said.

He stopped. I’m sorry, he said. I thought you wanted it too.

I do, I answered. God knows I do. But I can’t have sex. Ever. I am sick. I don’t have the equipment. It’s physically… almost impossible for me to have sex.

He got up from the bed, a hurt look on his face. Got a cigarette? he asked.

I don’t think he ever really believed me. I think that he always hoped that our love would conquer this small impediment. At times, he might have thought that it was all in my head; or that I didn’t love him enough. But I did.

“So you never had sex with him?” asked Lou.

“What kind of stupid question is that?” I barked. “Of course not. We did other things, sure. But I can never have real sex.”

“But you’ve been together for 5 years”, Lou wondered.

“And by the end of our relationship, Dan was smoking two packs a day.” I said.

We never stopped planning for our wedding. We were so much in love; he had accepted my condition with that fatality of a man who understands that life is sometimes good and sometimes not so good; he accepted the fact that he will never be a father, and yet he still wanted me as his bride. We planned the wedding in detail; the ceremony; the three priests; the location – Voronet, one of the most beautiful monasteries in Romania. It was to be an extraordinary event, and I imagined it as a truce between me and Nature, a unilateral acceptance, now that we shared a precious being – Dan.

Ca la nunta mea
A cazut o stea;
Soarele si luna
Mi-au tinut cununa;
Brazi si paltinasi
I-am avut nuntasi;
Preoti, muntii mari,
Paseri, lautari,
Pasarele mii,
Si stele faclii…

He proposed three months after we met, in the impetuous manner he was making all his decisions. I have never loved anyone the way I love you, he said. If I can only be with you for the rest of my life, loving you, then I am happy. Let me love you, he said. And I did, for 5 years. But I could never bring myself to set a wedding date.

Three years into our love, Dan fell sick and fainted as we were walking down on the Copou Street in Iasi. He recovered immediately and joked about it, but the nausea came back the next morning. A 25-year old, 6-feet man fainting two times in 20 hours was highly unusual. We went to several doctors and Dan underwent several tests; was tested for and cleared of several diseases; in the end, the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with him and had to let him go.

But I knew what was wrong. It was me. I was bad for him, bad for his health, just as I was a danger for any other plant or animal in Nature. I was poison for his soul and his body. As we went along, he lost weight; he was pale. In the mornings, especially after our awkward sex nights, a white powder lay beside his side of the bed; dead cells shed off his body in his sleep. Slowly, his numbers turned into a prognosis of leukemia and death.

“And so I left him”, I said.

“Did you tell him why?” asked Lou.

“Of course not,” I answered. “Nature was killing him off because of me. Instead of him dragging me into the tree of life, I was dragging him out of it. He was not fulfilling his purpose in life – to be with a normal woman, to procreate. I had to leave.”

I chose to disappear one day, quietly, irrevocably. No reason, no other communications with him. I packed and came to America, put the ocean between us. I left no address, no phone number. He suffered for a while, but he got better. Eventually, he forgot me. He was not weak. I was a strange memory from his youth, just another thing that made him into the man he is now.

“A pillar of the community”, I told Lou. “Happily married, with four children. Healthy as a horse. Ski champion of Iasi county.”

“Wow”, said Lou. “Nice job.”

“I hate his wife”, I admitted. “I hate her so much I could kill her. But I won’t. Because that’s a chapter of my life that is done and closed.”

“I sometimes wish he had died of leukemia.” I said later on. “I sometimes wish I had stayed, even if it would have killed him. If he were dead, this would be so much easier to deal with than being forgotten.”

“You did the right thing”, said Lou.

“Yeah,” I said, “like I really have the luxury of being nice. I have to think of myself first if I want to survive. He was my only charity act. And it hurts so much, even after all this time. And I will never do it again. I can't afford not to be selfish.”

*-*-*

When Dante got home that evening, a man was waiting for him. He had a briefcase and a suit. He was sitting on Dante’s townhouse stairs when Dante parked his car.

“Can I help you?” asked Dante without surprise. Sometimes, women and men would follow him home in adoration and sleep on his lawn.

“My name is Chris Henderson,” the man offered, shaking Dante’s hand with energy. “I am a lawyer and I work for the Company. Can we talk about your stock options?”

“Well, okay,” said Dante. “But I don’t have any stocks or anything.”

“It’s only a legal matter, sir,” the man added hurriedly. “Can I come in?”

“OK,” Dante accepted. “I gotta tell you though, I figured everything out already about these shares of mine. And my dad’s. Yeah, that was interesting.”

“I’m sure I can explain everything,” said the man as he was entering the house. “We did not contact you because we had express orders from your father since 3 years ago. But now that he’s gone and the new CEO wants to take the company public, it all came out of the archives and I understand it must have been quite a shock for you, sir.”

Dante had frozen near the door, keys still hanging in his hand.

“What?” he asked. “3 years ago? And what do you mean he’s gone?”

“I apologize for using that word, sir,” the man answered. “I definitely did not mean gone as in dead, sir. Everyone who loves him in the Company hopes and prays that he is still alive. Even three months after his disappearance, I’m sure he’s fine.”

“In the Company?” Dante repeated.

“Well, it’s hard to find a better CEO than he was. People really loved working there when he was in charge. And he’d been running that company since it was founded in 1968. He sold the first strategic study ever that year, sir.”

Dante sat down on the couch slowly.

“What do you want?” he asked the man.

“I just need your signature here, sir,” the lawyer answered. “You are authorized to sign for you father too, as tonight the official 3 months is over and he is formally declared… well, gone. He has instructed us to contact you in case something like this might happen.”

“Sign for what?” Dante asked, looking at the thin contract.

“For the shareholder’s meeting, sir,” the man answered. “It’s next Monday and you need to sign for the delivery of all the documents about the Company’s IPO. You need to do this if you want to vote next week.”

Dante didn’t want to vote. Voting was very much the last thing he wanted to do just then.

“Okay,” he said, signing the papers. “I guess I’d like to vote. Especially if I get to vote for my dad too. He’s gotta have some bunch of shares, right-o?”

“Quite a few indeed, sir,” the man answered. “49%, as a matter of fact. With your 1% added on, you make it very hard for anything to pass if you don’t like it.”

“Hmm,” Dante nodded approvingly. “Can’t say I dislike that idea. What do they do at a shareholder meeting anyway? Can I fire my boss and a guy who tried to beat me up today? I could vote for that.”

“You can take your place on the Company Board, sir,” the lawyer answered. “From there you can pretty much tell the CEO whom of his employees you consider incompetent.”

“Wow… In this case, I have to start making a list right away… ”

“If you don’t mind, I’m going to go now, sir,” the lawyer said. “I have to pick up my son from school. My colleague was supposed to be here, not me, but he got himself into some car accident.”

“OK then,” Dante said getting up and showing him to the door. “Thanks