It’s now, with you wanting to have a party for New Year’s, that I get angry. You aired the idea a couple of weeks before Christmas, said you’d like to throw a party, but we’ve hardly discussed it since then at all, you’ve got so little energy and in the evenings you’re often out of sorts, and if occasionally we have guests over, you have to disappear off into the bedroom after a while and rest for a bit, so I think to myself it’s just a thought that wafts by you every now and then, to throw a party, I suppose because you want everything to be the same as before, for everything to be light and buoyant, and of course I can understand that, only it’s not the way things are and so I don’t think anything will come of it, I assume you’re grounded enough to realize. But then, the Saturday before Christmas, at an afternoon party at my friend’s, my bridesmaid, who lives in this huge apartment and mixes with such a wide circle, and both of whose grown-up children are there, and their friends and some other people too, a writer we’ve met a few times and his wife, they smile the whole time and are both so vibrant, we’re standing there with our proseccos in front of a table resplendent with olives and panettoni and little bruschette with different sorts of prosciutto, and you invite them to a New Year’s party at ours. I sense it at once, my reluctance, but keep it to myself. They thank us and say they’re not sure yet if they’ll be able to come, they’re planning a trip into the mountains with their little daughter and her grandparents and are looking forward to the break (he’s just finished a novel called Everywhere the Child) and they’re probably going to be there until after New Year’s, but if they do decide to come back to the city before that, they promise to let us know. You invite my friend too, and her new boyfriend, and they don’t know if they’ll be able to come yet either, and it makes me think then that we can let it pass, that it’s not like we’ve agreed to anything and set the ball rolling. And after that we go to Oslo and are there from the day before Christmas Eve until Boxing Day, you sleep on the sofa the whole time apart from when we’re celebrating Christmas at my brother’s and the day after at my dad’s, and on Boxing Day we get up very early and catch the tram to the main station in the cold, and the train from there to the airport. You lie on the sofa in Oslo with a blanket over you, the standard lamp shining down on your head, it’s dark outside, or else the sky is all colors in the transitions of the sun rising and setting, I watch you from the other sofa or the kitchen, you lie there with the iPad in your hands, reading, but then it’s as if sleep simply wipes you out, it comes so gently, you’re holding the iPad, but then your jaw drops and you’re away, and it looks so very frail then, the life in you.

  Then we’re back in Milan and we’re having this party, and all of a sudden you’ve invited another writer, someone I’ve also met, he’s good fun, and his wife, they can come, and Ciro, the gourmand. That means there’ll be five of us, assuming the others can’t come. I don’t want a party, but five is manageable, I can cope with five if it’s so important to you, but the next evening a friend from Rome comes by with her husband and their three daughters, I barely know her, she’s a journalist and does podcasts for RAI and is open and direct and engaging, I like her very much, it’s the first time I’ve seen her kids, three lively girls who pitch in with their own stories, and we’ve bought apple juice and cookies, and the grown-ups are drinking wine, I’m looking after everyone’s glasses and keeping the conversation going, and bringing and fetching and topping up, and listening to what’s being said, and then when the medication has melted under your tongue you come into the living room and sit down like them on one of the orange stools, to join in and be a part of it all. A couple of hours later when they’re getting ready to go and I’m feeling dazed and reeling from such an eddying confusion at such close quarters, of arms and legs and eyes and lives in motion, when my friend gets to her feet and they go out into the hall, to the great pile of sweaters and coats and scarves and hats that have been dumped there, you ask them then if they’d like to come over, them as well, for New Year’s Eve. But we’re here with a couple we know, my friend says, they have two children with them, and she smiles and raises an eyebrow in a beseeching question, and you say Great, fantastic, the more the merrier. I say nothing. I feel only resistance, only I don’t know then what it is, or where it comes from. And after that they leave, my friend and her husband and their daughters, and you go and lie down again while I clear things off to the kitchen.

  * * *

  —

  Why can’t we speak the truth? Why can’t we say things the way they are? Why do they have to hide your death from you? Do you really not want to know, not be in contact with, not feel, the truth about yourself?

  Today is Wednesday, January 8, and when I got back from the gym just before twelve you were getting dressed. All I do is sleep, you say, I never get out. And I sat down on the floor in my sweaty gym clothes in front of the bed you were sitting on the edge of, putting your socks on, those long, knee-length stockings gentlemen wear in Italy, and I looked at your face, which has become so wrinkled, and yet still it’s you, still these are your eyes, and I feel as if I’ve come home when I look into your eyes. The way I look into your eyes and at the same time, always, know that you’re going to die. It’s been you and me and death for so long now. Although in a way it’s just you, with me and death on the other side, because we don’t talk about death. I can’t understand how you can manage not to talk about it. I can only believe that somewhere inside you you do think about it. Are you not talking about it for my sake? It leaves us each alone with it.

  I write still it’s you, still these are your eyes. But is it still you, the person I see in those eyes? You’re so medicated, your eyes aren’t the same anymore, the look in them isn’t the same, the place I found in them is gone in a way, that vast place that was there when I first met you, before you became ill, or our places, the places inside us, because I assume that’s how it felt to you too, that we wandered through each other’s inner places together, in each other’s eyes. That we were a home to each other, there. But your eyes now are as if stiffened, they have no depth anymore, as if they’re no longer in touch with anything inside you, or there’s no opening in them that will allow me to slip inside. It’s no longer home to me, to look into your eyes. They’re just there.

  I’m sitting here writing and you went out shortly before twelve, now it’s ten past three and I hear your key in the door, you’re home again. Hi, I call out, and you come in with your coat still on, straight into the study, and I get up from the computer and step towards you and kiss you on the mouth. So lovely to see you, you say with a smile, and I know you mean it with all your heart, but you’re not feeling well, I can tell. I’m freezing, you say, it’s warm in here, but the office was so cold. You’re in pain, but the pharmacy was still waiting for your morphine pills to come in, you popped in there on your way home, but you say you’ve got something else you can take instead, you go into the bedroom and lie down, I want to fetch you a blanket, but you don’t want one, and I can see there’s something about your eyes, a darkness, I ask what you’re thinking, standing beside the bed, smoothing my hand over your knee, is there something on your mind, I ask, meaning death, can we talk about death, only with a nod you indicate the briefcase you’ve left on the floor, the book I’m reading, you say, I was thinking about that.

  And I’ve written fourteen novels, and if there’s one thing my writing has to be, for me, it has to be truthful. What I write has to be truthful. I’ve wanted that to apply to my whole life too, in my relationships with other people, my relationship with myself. I broke off with my mother for two years, three months and four days when I was about thirty, because I couldn’t feel myself when she was around or when I spoke to her on the phone. All I could feel then was her. Or the person I thought was her, what she was inside me, regardless, I no longer knew what I felt inside. It was either me or her. And so I broke off with her, because I needed to be with myself first. To grow strong inside so I didn’t disappear when she was around. All those counseling sessions, all those body treatments and all that meditation and analyzing my dreams. Carl Gustav Jung said somewhere that all we can hope for on our journey through life is an ego strong enough to endure the truth about ourselves. And I’m under no illusion that I see the full and complete truth about myself, but one thing I do know is that I have a compulsion for truth that feels like my very life force itself. And that it makes me ill when I go against that force, when I go against myself.

  How ill I was that New Year’s Eve. It started the evening before, when I submitted to holding a party the way you wanted it, with all the children and everything, when we took the red wheelie shopper and went out to buy what we needed, it was late, but everything’s open late here, you’d had your chemo in the afternoon, it was December 30, the same day the doctor stepped closer to me and said, Not a year from today, which meant that it was our last December 30 and would be our last New Year’s Eve too, and you wanted us to throw a party for nine adults and five children, you, so steeped in chemo and morphine, and I, so exhausted from being by your side in all this, from doing everything on my own, because you’ve so little energy. You want us to spend our last New Year’s Eve making food for people we hardly even know, or don’t know at all, people who don’t have death on their minds every single minute of the day, for whom New Year’s Eve is all about fireworks and champagne and looking gleefully ahead into the future. But we have no future to celebrate! Don’t you get it? I can’t throw a party without truth. But I didn’t tell you that. You insisted on a party. It was so important to you, that party. And I was angry with you for being so insensitive to the situation, for not tuning in to how I felt. What’s this party all about? You couldn’t answer me that, not properly. It’s for you, you said.

  And on New Year’s Eve I woke up with a temperature, phlegmy and coughing, I sat down on the sofa with you in the morning knowing that I could choose to go back to bed, like you, only I didn’t, it really felt like there was a choice I had to make and that it was crucial, and after a minute I erred in the opposite direction, got to my feet and got started, slowly working my way through the day, systematically preparing the food, the things that could be done well in advance, the things that couldn’t and had to wait, I brought our Vietnam stools in and washed them down, got the living room ready, put tea lights out, and fat candles, organized a table for drinks and glasses, set out the plates and cutlery, and napkins, bowls of clementines, chips, and olives. We’d told everyone half past eight, but Ciro came early, with his suspenders stretched tight over his shirt and a magnum of champagne that we put outside to chill on the balcony, only he left again just after ten, the bottle’s still on the floor in the hall, but before he went I sat down with him on the sofa for a bit, Ciro with his big belly, he asked me to, Come here, he said, and patted the cushion beside him, he was the one I knew best out of everyone there, and he told me about the two women he was seeing, coincidentally they had the same name, which was practical, he said, and we laughed, and then he lowered his voice to a whisper and said it’s hard for the one who’s ill, but much worse in a way for the one who isn’t, and that’s when I teared up, I don’t care who it’s worse for, it’s just so seldom anyone ever talks to me or asks how I am, and when everyone arrived at half past eight I sat down on a stool in the kitchen with a huge gin and tonic and my phone and wouldn’t speak to anyone, I was ill, and they could tell from my voice that I was, but mostly I was angry, or else I was so angry it made me ill, for not saying I was angry, but anyway I sat there for a whole hour on my own.

  And you were okay with that, you weren’t angry about me being angry, because I make you happy, you always say so, that I make you so happy the way I am, so me needing to sit on my own in the kitchen was something you respected and supported, you were on my side, you give me space, always, and it’s up to me to find out what’s good for me and draw a line. I make you so happy. As you make me happy, which was why I wanted to throw that party even though I didn’t want to. I did it for you.

  * * *

  —

  Maybe I should have gone at things differently from the start. But in a way it’s as if everything hangs together, from long before you got ill, from right back when we first met. We’re so different in the way we relate to the world, in what’s good for us. Your equivocation, for instance. You say you love me, and in everything you’ve ever done you’ve always shown me you do, you want me with you wherever you go, on your business trips, yet it always felt like there was a hesitancy there, that somehow you weren’t going all in and that everything came with a certain reservation or uncertainty that perhaps wasn’t to do with us at all, but with you, or perhaps it is you, the way you are, a person who hesitates and waits and sees, but whatever it was it played on my deep unrest as to whether you actually, really wanted me. That’s how it was with our sex too, you indulged, yet often it felt like you stopped being a part of it, as if you pulled back halfway through instead of pressing closer. When we talked about it, when I said I wondered if there was an intensity between us that we weren’t releasing, which I felt was missing, you said at first that you considered it was just a matter of time, that we’d get there further down the line. But then not so long ago, when we talked about it again — and now talk is all we do, because we don’t have sex anymore since you became ill, it’s as if everything’s dead down there, you said, indicating your limp dick as we sat in bed one night, your penis, once such a fine cock, looks quite forlorn now beneath the long scar from the surgery, when they clawed so much out of you it left a hollow — you said you weren’t sure if there actually was anything more, anything stronger in you, further down the line. That maybe there just wasn’t anything wilder in the person you were, you said, that you think that’s probably just the way sex is, for you.

  And it was such a relief when you told me, because I began to think then that the idea of intensity was perhaps just another of our porn-infected illusions, the videos, all those images of panting, perspiring, high-powered sex, the wanting and taking, the moaning and groaning, the slapping of flesh and screaming, and maybe the idea of there being some kind of release in that was just an illusion too, that the promise of the boundary-pushing encounter, and the release it would give, the belief that there would be something there, which had made me feel a sorrow of sorts for our not having embarked on finding that place together, maybe that place didn’t exist.

  Why can’t we talk about you dying? In that, too, we’re far apart. I think it’s possible to give ourselves up to each other and go new places together in sex too, but it would take tenacity. Is that what’s missing, tenacity? What can I do for you now? How can a person give tenacity to someone? When that other person doesn’t want tenacity and would prefer not to relate to the fact that he’s dying. I can’t force it on you. I can’t force you. I can’t press death into your face like a pillow. All I can do is be here, beside you.

  * * *

  —

  Are you in your pictures? You’re a publisher, that’s how we met, you publish my books in Italian. But when you were young you wanted to be an artist, you wanted to paint, and you went to art schools in the US and Paris, that’s what you’re trained as, you didn’t study literature. And you carried on with your painting when you came back to Milan, your mother supported you, she bought you a two-room apartment where you set up a studio, that’s where you painted, and sometime when you were in your twenties you had your own exhibition, landscapes on copper plate, they gleam like gold from the copper underneath. A single exhibition, and when it was over the woman you were married to at the time said that was enough, it was time you joined the publishing house, held down a proper job and earned some money. And your father, who had founded the publishing house and was held in such high esteem, a cultivated gentleman as they say, whose interests lay in art and design and antique Chinese furniture and prints, he never hung a single one of your pictures in that huge apartment. As a painter you meant nothing to him. And you stopped painting. The studio was rented out to a student. You’re an intelligent, sensitive man, and you made a good publisher, you read Harry Potter and enthused about it, long before it was a thing, and you’ve published Astrid Lindgren and Žižek and Jung, The Red Book, you’ve got good Italian authors, and between you you’ve built up a flourishing house with a host of imprints all with their various focus areas, you’ve even started a very strong small publishing house in Spain.

  In a way, we’ve opposing stories, I wanted to be a psychologist and scholar, but then in a waiting period I started writing and at the same time fell in love with a writer and he helped me to believe it would work out for me, that it was actually possible to make writing the most important thing in my life. I found support. You didn’t. But I think I went looking for that support. I went to someone who some part of me must have known would help me live the life I needed to live in order to grow. How was I able to do that? I went looking for the support I needed, found it and have been writing ever since. Whereas you sought support in someone who only made you give up what was yours.

 

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