Sliding doors to close. Women's stories.

In the beginning it was summer.

The man I sat with at dinner on a warm evening in June was just as beautiful as it had always been since the first day we met. A lot of years had passed before he showed up with me in an email: – Are they in Padua Tuesday, do we eat together? -

The mail struck me for his going directly to the point and for his coming from a distant past and from a man who suddenly blocked me also the Skype contact about six years before and no reason whatsoever. Then I thought it was typical of his, a man always of few words and the elusive look.

At his email, read from the iPad while I was still in bed early in the morning, I answered: – You are crazy, so I come to dinner. Here's my cell phone number.

We had met in the piazza delle Erbe and he had kept intact the intriguing smile and acute look together with the fiery shyness of a teenager.

We sat at the tavern table after he asked for a little reserved place. He ordered a Franciacorta with which he kept filling both glasses.

Surprisingly we had a lot to tell us: I asked about his son who was supposed to be five years old, his wife, but he had a great desire to talk about me. He told me details of my separation seen from another point of view: he called that episode "the bomb" and snoised me words, comments and facts that I did not know.

Among all, at the time, my husband had asked him comfort and an opinion. "What do you think you gave him?" I asked to empty the glass. He lied, and I thought it was better that way, so now things had gone as they had gone.

So we were sitting at the Anphora table, and without any need for stress, he kept talking about me, about how he had seen me from afar, about how he had been mute viewer of a marriage that dwelt on himself without any of us understanding the deep reasons he had well identified. And he said to me, so little he said.

He made a shiny and faithful portrait of my early years of marriage and asked me things he didn't know. I answered, more to myself than to him, troubled by an analysis that I wanted to be able to do before and not after, or at least during. Because the bottle was over, he ordered another bottle. There was a fresh warmth at that table that was in a dark corner, a place of the heart rather than a restaurant and I don’t remember seeing the waiter. The glasses were filled and emptied, the pen shadow prevented me from being acute in thought but in the end I had no weapons, I had no goals and also seemed to have no future. So I was still floating between words and wine without trying to understand things. I stopped asking questions and so I didn't even ask him, who seemed so confident and quiet in spending a couple of hours with me, drinking and chatting.

While we were there, seemingly analyzing my last twenty years of life, his cell phone shook: he was my husband.

The coincidences are never such and I began a suffocated rice, he did not answer and looked at me amazed and then laughed also him and let him ring. On my husband's second phone call (which usually never responds to calls but expects others to do so) he replied with a short text: sorry I am busy at dinner, I'll call you tomorrow. "But did you tell him that you are at dinner with me?" he asked me and I slightly shook the head, tilting the face a little left smiling. "In fact," he said, "I know you well, I know you wouldn't."

We finished the second Franciacorta and asked me if there was anything he could do to help me.

– I don’t believe – I answered, so aware that the only person who can help me is myself and maybe a stroke of luck (see never exists).

We got up late from the table and walked in the ovate city of the night.

Then, I took the car, he accompanied me home that was now the one passed.

When he said goodbye again with the engine on,

– I tell you, I've always been in love with you. It was an impossible story from the first moment I saw you. My life and my choices were partly the fruit of the fact that you were there but you were on another galaxy. It's the sliding door.-.

I was petrified in the seat next to him and my bored friendship for him immediately took another meaning. So I have appeared clear certain messages, certain escapes, certain insurmountable obstacles, the always wrong choice of his women and their abandonment, up to his wife and son, married because he had to make family and live a life.

I was silent about thinking and he said to me:

– You don't have to tell me anything. It’s the beginning of summer, I would love you to solve your concerns. I live well now with my choices even though I know I could do more and change my life before, much earlier but for some reason I needed to tell you. -

We stayed silent, I always have the words suitable for every situation, I looked at the edge of the well that had uncovered before me, and I saw nothing. He interrupted silence:

"I had to close the slinding doors-

At the brain turned off, my instinct was activated, finally free to move as he seemed.

I kissed it on the cheek (as I love the cheeks of men, smooth and rough as their heart, instilled in unthinkable, fragrant and soft corners, impervious places on which to draw paths with the looks and slip down, in the recess of the neck, and then, behind still the nape, the ear and away) and silent I came out of the car. I turned my head in the car and said, "Thank you."

Thanks for what I don't know yet, but I closed the door and gone.

When I got into the door, he left, and then I still left to see him go. After about thirty meters he stopped the car, he approached the right and remained still there, the head maybe laid on the steering wheel, or who knows, china on the mobile phone.

I came back and I closed the door slowly behind my back.

I know he's alive, but I haven't seen him. Then they finally deleted Skype and so I no longer track even our ancient chats.

If you have missed the last article of the Bianconiglio Tana, a science book dating back to 1700 at this link