Amantine's Song

Chapter 15

CHAPTER 11

Crazy. Crazy, wicked and shameless. But I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t bend my will to reason. I felt, in that precise moment, a bit like one of the characters of The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni. The nun of Monza, to be exact. I had found the novel years ago in my mother’s library. Here, precisely the quote “The poor wretched answered” seemed written just for me.

I walked with my eyes down, as if I didn’t even want to look at the road that would lead me to him. I lifted them only when I realized I had arrived right in front of his gate. That was the number, Peter Wiles’s house.

A large, multi-storey white house with blue shutters, surrounded by a dark grating. The upper floor was taken up by an immense terrace and a large window. The Parkers’ home paled in comparison. So, being a low-key pop star and strumming little songs paid more than an accountant’s job. As an aspiring academic, I didn’t even try to compete, they would have torn me apart.

I stood there, arms crossed on my chest. How stupid! What did I think I was doing? No, no, it wasn’t the right situation for me. I had to get back on track as soon as possible, go to Geoffrey, argue with him, fight over the story of his father and Frey too. Peter Wiles was a distraction that threatened to compromise my career in addition to my private life. I could hold onto the curiosity of what might have happened.

Go away, Amantine, go away immediately! I turned my back on the big white house with blue shutters. I couldn’t keep myself from imagining him inside there. But I wouldn’t go beyond imagination. And mine would be an affair without a sequel, an adventure on which I would only fantasize in the moments of boredom.

‘Where do you think you’re going, sweetheart?’

I felt myself held by my wrist. It was the first time he touched me. Without letting me go, I found myself in front of him.

‘I was just walking around, I’m leaving now.’ I felt like I was burning even though it was November, as his hand slipped from my wrist to my hand.

In my mind there was a repeated symphony that reminded me that he was Peter Wiles and had nothing to do with me and my world, my environment. Another idea, more shameless and daring, reminded me that it wasn’t necessary for him to understand the intensity and the depth of my soul and my intellect, to do what I really wanted to do with him, whether he was Peter Wiles or any other.

‘What do you want?’ He tilted his face slightly, narrowing his eyes so that they looked even greener and animated by a light that seemed intriguing but a little perfidious.

‘Nothing. I mean, I just want to get away from here.’ I feared his look on me. Even more than his gestures, his touch.

‘You must want something if you’ve come over here.’ He suddenly let my hand go, almost sharply, and unexpectedly, I missed it. Yet I had never been very predisposed to physical contact, far from it.

‘You’re wrong. I had the note from Jacob and... I just wanted to take a walk this morning, so…’ I didn’t want to justify myself. I just wanted to leave, to get away from him once and for all. ‘If you think I’m here for a particular reason, you’re wrong!’

‘So, let’s see if I understand correctly, Amantine...’ He remembered my name? Yes, he had just said it. So he remembered it. Why didn’t it sound the same from others’ lips? Why did it seem sweeter and more intense at the same time coming from him? ‘You got my message and you thought about walking up here and then going back.’

‘You see, I might have time to waste. A bit like you who spend early Sunday mornings at the corner of a street pretending to be a vagrant!’ Well done me, I thought, deserving my self-compliment. Why should I ever be the only one to justify my actions?

‘What’s wrong with your life? Because I can see you’re looking for something. Probably I am not what you are looking for, I grant you this. But it’s from the first time I saw you that...’

‘My life isn’t going anywhere. And anyway, you have no right to interpret it, whoever you are!’ He bothered me. This kind of investigation bothered me and forced me to get defensive. ‘Maybe your life is perfect! Maybe nobody gets in the way of what you do, nobody trips you or complicates your existence. Nobody expects anything, nobody torments you every day so that everything is done in a certain way, according to the rules and…’

I tried to breathe deeply to calm myself. I wanted to scream. And to take it out on him because I didn’t know who else to take it out on. My parents? The Parkers? Frey? Gregor? Geoffrey? No. They were no use. They would have tried to calm me, talk some sense into me and bring me back on my straight and narrow road. And I didn’t want to. I wanted to get angry. I wanted to provoke, react and create havoc!

‘Amantine, Amantine…’ He put both hands on my shoulders. I didn’t understand whether he realized the physical and emotional reactions he was rousing inside me. He couldn’t be so naïve as not to notice it. For a moment I wondered if it was the same for him too. Then I struggled to remove the question from my mind. I didn’t want to know. I was just a girl passing by. What did he want from me? Surely not much more than what I had wanted from him, from the first moment. He wasn’t Geoffrey. I didn’t have to force myself to be a good girlfriend, clever, beautiful, sweet and kind. It was a great relief.

‘Peter, Peter…’ I repeated, imitating his tone a bit, and a bit the Shakespearean tragedy in which Juliet invokes her Romeo. ‘Why the hell did you leave me that note, Peter Wiles?’

‘You didn’t recognize me…’ He chuckled, pulling me towards him to whisper in my ear, ‘You’re really in another world, Amantine.’

I pulled away from him, pushing him back. In order to do this, I had to put my hands on his chest, and I noticed that his denim shirt was half open. It wasn’t a great image for my fleeting emotional state.

‘However, nothing changes. You remain a vagrant I met on the street, from my point of view. And let’s say your world doesn’t exactly coincide with mine. I don’t feel obliged to recognize you.’

‘You mean your incredibly self-centred, snobbish little intellectual world, Amantine?’

No way, that was too much. I wasn’t a little... I mean, I wasn’t really!

‘You dare calling me egocentric?’ I should have been long gone. Instead I was still there arguing, as if his eyes and all his body had nailed me to the ground in front of his house.

‘Let’s say I notice someone who tends to compete with me...’ He smiled. Suddenly. I hadn’t seen him smile like that before. It was a spontaneous smile, almost sweet. Seductive. So much that I wasn’t able to resist and I returned it, I smiled too.

He took my hand again and held it in his. The contact with his skin caused me an unwanted chill, especially because I was sure he had noticed it. He said nothing, but with a nod he pointed to the entrance to his house. My resistances were now broken down, collapsed. I did not want to object. I just wanted to live a bit. I just wanted to try to be another version of myself. Freer, bolder. Perhaps even more eccentric, unrestrained, uninhibited. I had no idea what would happen inside Peter Wiles’s home. But I was ready to experiment with him whatever he offered me. Even what my education and my composure had always forbidden me. However, there was a certainty in me, perhaps wrong but undeniable. I could reach a completeness with him, a part of me that I still didn’t know. But he wouldn’t hurt me. Not physically, at least. About it, I was confident.