Since Pomellina’s childhood she fantasised about him.
What he would feel like on her skin.
What the small valley between his throat and shoulders would taste like.
She was impatient to grow up, her eyes on him.
He was older than her.
She had made herself grow up too fast.
In front of her eyes: a puppet show of adolescence and adultery.
Pomellina had no idea who this man really was.
So familiar she grew with this vision of him, self-created.
There was no way out of it.
Not realising what moved ahead of her.
All the shadows became a sunshine.
She thought she was old enough.
He thought so too because that’s what she projected.
In his presence she could barely utter a single word.
What to tell him? What would he even want to know?
Except for the crucial answer to his raw question.
The question that terminated her girlhood.
He believed what she presented.
Her head nodded, and thus she lost, he put his hand on hers.
No words of consequence, skin on skin.
She thought with repetition came love.
She had no idea what love was and thus she kept looking.
In his arms, she was persuaded that she found it.
Found it in this man who had no idea either, who was never waiting for her.
She just turned up on his doorstep one day and he saw it, seized it.
She was convinced that things would change now.
That her body could indeed be the focus of love.
When she spoke of love, he fell into silence.
She became the angler who wouldn’t let go.
How could she destroy something in terms of love?
She came from a territory of disaster and mutilation.
How could this have been the same?
Then he wrote her, the words so loud and clear, a hammer in her face.
It was just sex, nothing more.
He thought she knew. She thought he had felt it too.
RECITAL BY FEDERICA BIANCO IN ITALIAN
Croque-Melpomene 