We were three.

Three is the perfect number, they say.

So, we were perfect.

Perfectly encased in each other. This is what I meant to say.

Three hearts and three brains, three mouths and three pair of (hungry) eyes.

Mine hazel with lots of tiny golden specks, hers grey almost greenish at time depending by the clouds in the sky, and in her heart as well.

His eyes brown almost black sometimes, two black, beautiful deep ponds.

We liked to open our three mouths at the same time and talk to each other, fast and eagerly while often dropping three sounding laughter between the spaces of our conversations made by serious remarks and intellectual references and silly jokes.

If you would have seen us you would have thought we were a little off, as I might say...

Too extravagant, too peculiar, maybe?

People call you names when they don’t understand you; people never understand who live life on a different rhythm.

We had those three bodies, so different from each other but forged by the same number of years and the same Mediterranean ancestry.

Hers was a minute, almost bony body with a skin that looked like she was constantly shivering, revealing a myriad of tiny minuscule bumps that my fingers learned to follow, like Gretel might have follow her breadcrumb’s trail.

His body was a strong, compact and stupefied body. A young man growing body expresses strength and an abandon that can be really distracting, sometimes.

My body was one ready to discovers. It was a bold, admired and therefore almost arrogant body. I used to throw it at men like a tease more than an offer.

She loved Mozart.

She used to loose herself in his music for hours.

I was the one exploring the Western culture, dreaming of going to San Francisco or wandering in the Arizona desert. She was studying Germany and French feeding me with Old European beauty.....Mann, Ibsen, Proust, Kafka. I was spooning her with indie and American movies and Kerouac, Sontag, Dickinson, Sylvia Plath.

He was the quiet one,  happily adapting to our girlish moods, owner of a brand new car with which he would drive us to beaches and coffees and museums and parks and political events and big apartments in a Roma that was easy like a whore.  

Those three bodies of ours were always touching each other. Close skin to closer skin in the car, on the couch, at the movie theaters, in line at the university cafeteria, on the bus, on a train, or simply aligned - parallel - on a towel on the beach in July, while the kids were screaming around us and we would keep our shades on and grin peacefully together at the waves.

They were the couple, I was the friend.

.

My elbow would always poke her ribs, she would always touch my shoulder, and he was constantly stroking her hair and my hands. Knee bumping against knees, hair brushing each other cheeks, fingers crossed, and countless cigarettes passed between our lips.

Plainly in sight of our three pair of eyes, our three bodies were growing slowly aware of an unavoidable, subterranean desire.

It didn’t happen as we had planned it.

It didn’t happen as we had sought after it.

It happened because it needed to be.

It happened in a very domestic ambience...my brother’s room floor, to be exact.

Since she (and consequentially I) loved Mozart so much that one was the music we were listening that warm afternoon when the house happened to be empty and we were the only ones going thru its rooms.

Because he said.

“Let’s go, you and I”

And because she smiled and kissed him and got up.

And because I was on the chair and I was listening Mozart with my eyes closed.

And because she got up and, walking past me, she caressed my cheeks.

And because she told me

“You don’t mind, do you?

I kept my eyes closed. .....Mozart was irresistible....violins exploding in my brain, musical orgasm.....

I nodded and then I said “I don’t mind, no. I don’t”.

So, because my brother room was at the end of the hall, they walked away.

The light was golden that afternoon. The tiles of the marble floor were cold though....I remained seated on the chair fro a while......

And all of a sudden not even Mozart could ease my restlessness.

I felt I was missing something. It must have been something to do with the Jack Daniels we have been drinking earlier in those thick shot glasses my father used to keep in the china cabinet.

People would say we were completely wasted....too young and bored to death and drunk....people has always an explanation.

I know we were not.

Because now I know why I got up and tip toed at the door of the room.

And there I heard them......her moans, his voice turned raspy because of his desire, the soft whispers she was pouring in his ears, the shuffle of a body against a body.

I felt like Gabriele at the Heaven’s door...like the fallen angel expulsed by the Paradise, or like a poor kid forgotten outside school.

Because I felt so alone and left out I sat down on the floor and kept listening to their love dance.

I don’t know how long I remained there because suddenly, the door sprang open. I jumped back, gulping for the surprise and the embarrassment.

I felt shameful. Being caught there, like a filthy perverted spy.

But she smiled and without a word she took my hand.

I, still at that moment, wasn’t grabbing the meaning of all.

I looked at her and wanted to ask her so many things and tell her how beautiful she was to me, while looking at me so intensely, standing barefoot with those tiny, pearly toenails of hers on the  white sheets on the floor, almost iridescent in the glowing golden light on the afternoon.

She was naked. Like an angel.

Her curly reddish hair were like flaming against the light coming from the window.......she was looking at me with her eyes semi close, those eyes of her still lost in the lust, still longing to come back to the desired dance.

I don’t know what got into me there.

I could have said no, I could have told her to really don’t mind me. It was ok.

But instead I held her hand back and got up and slowly entered in the blessed room, in that garden of Youth and Beauty where I have been accepted.

Because I was again half of a whole shell.

He was lying on the floor. Smiling, sweetly. None of us was uncomfortable or embarrassed and yet I asked

“Do you really want me here with you?”

They didn’t answer. He got up from the floor and walking on his knees and hands got closer to me. His body was naked and his desire was plenty in display for our six eyes to see.

A wanderlust.

Our three bodies were just perfect together, as I told you.

The light was surrounding my body and her body and his body.

He came closer and looking at her he started to undress me. Gently and slowly.

Always staring at her, he made me naked.

In the room there was a silence made of alliance, understanding. No jealousy, no envy.

She let him undress me and then went close to me.

And she kissed me.

I kissed her back with a transport I didn’t even imagine to have for a woman.

I was a virgin.

She was my first woman.

He was looking at us and when we finished that womanly kiss he came in front of me and took gently my face with his cupped hands and approaching his lips to my lips, nanosecond after nanosecond, he kissed me too.

His saliva was melting in my mouth with the saliva she had left earlier.

A haven of possibilities.

Our three bodies started to dance an unfamiliar and yet welcomed dance.

My hand and their hands, their hair and my mouth, those skin stretched for miles over three unknown territories, three pair of hard nipples, three pair of wrists and ankles and feet, six legs intertwined.

And three navels and three asses and six ears to bite, three lips to suck, one hard cock to please and from which being pleased, two pussies to offer to three hungry mouths, and breast to caress, thighs to squeeze, hair to pull back.

I was lost in our bodies while the flowing light wasn't hiding anything from our six mesmerized eyes.

And then, years later, she left us one day, dying like any body can die, 9 years ago...

9 -9-99.....9 September 1999.

People were talking about the odd coincidence...all those nines...all those strangely combined numbers. People always try to find a meaning.

At her funeral he run toward me as soon as he spotted me in the midst of all the people who had gathered for the mass where I arrived alone, and devastated.

Our two bodies sat close on the church bench in front of her body lying in that cherry wood basket. She had not wanted flowers. The money, she had asked, needed to be donated to her many charity organizations.

My body sat close to his body. They were the bodies of two orphans.

We both looked at each other and held our two pair of orphaned hands when a friend started to play her beloved Mozart.

Then he read the poem he wrote for her.

It was a poem talking about a shining star, something found in the sky and forever kept now in his heart.

Our two bodies got up and had to follow her body trapped in the casket.

I was keeping hold of his arm, the arm of this husband, lover, friend who had loved her constantly for all those years. Their two kids were holding each other hands and his.

We were like a small chain of pain walking behind her.

Before leaving the church he stopped and hugged me tight.

His body close to mine, his mouth in my ear to not let anybody else listening.

“She is looking at us, remember”

There is no day I don’t think of her.

This body of mine remembers her too.