Patrizia Cavalli
TRANS. BY Gregory Mellen
The Sheets Thief
The dog was sweaty and gross. He stank. He had propped his snout on the armrest, and thick drops of slobber were falling from his tongue onto my hand. The tranquillizer was finally starting to work. It calmed his nerves; his eyes would grow drowsy and dull, opening here and there, almost by chance, for no reason, without seeing anything. Then he would close them again with a sigh, nudging his snout still closer to my hand, or underneath my arm and into the crevice of the chair. From time to time, with an abrupt sense of urgency, as though he had suddenly remembered something extremely important, he would stand up with a start and leap down from the chair, but I would just grab him and place him back on my lap without any resistance on his part. He had already forgotten where it was he had so frantically needed to go only a second before, and he would yield himself up to capture as soon as he noticed the slightest opposing force. It wasn’t resignation, really, so much as a sudden disappearance of the will, a dissolution of memory, a blank.
The flight had been easy—no turbulence, no keeping your seatbelt fastened. The others had already gotten the lunch set up, and they were about to show a film. People were hurrying back and forth through the halls incessantly, and as each person passed, I was blasted by a whiff of cologne. It turns out people simply cannot resist the chance to use something for free. I discovered that some even splash small quantities of gloriously gratis perfume into little bottles, so they can take it home with them later. Same thing goes for soap, tampons, salt and pepper, sugar, cheese, and bottles of mineral water. It must be a particular kind of euphoria, this, occupying an intermediate space between the sharp frisson of theft and the full-bodied ecstasy one feels when participating alongside others in a collective illusion of superabundance. It’s a kind of stealing halfway, a stealing without feeling guilty—actually, with an inner sense of pride for being so clever, for not letting the chance slip by, for not wasting one’s hard-earned cash. Somebody once told me about a guy who would take the sheets from his hotel rooms—every single hotel, and he was the kind of guy who got around. In the end he wound up with piles of linens, lightly soiled, lying there in his house, never reused, never resold. At a certain point he had to find a new apartment because he didn’t have any more space for them; he just left all the linens crumpled up together in the old one. But even so, he kept on stealing, never staying in the same hotel for more than five days straight, afraid the cleaning ladies might change his sheets without advance notice, and then he’d have lost forever the ones he’d slept in thus far. The idea that the thing which had rested lightly against him while he slept, the thing which had enveloped his body and absorbed its fluids in the hours of his dreams and anxious vigils, in those hours of darkness when mysterious substances seep out of the skin, the excretions of one’s weaknesses and reveries—the idea that such a thing might somehow not be his, that it could be obliterated by a washing machine, that it could be lost amid chemical explosions, colliding with objects belonging to other humans—he couldn’t stand it; he wouldn’t accept it. In taking his sheets, he felt like he was reclaiming his nights, he felt like he was awarding himself, justly, the spoils of an expedition he had undertaken day in, day out, night after night, ever since that first morning in his childhood when he had awoken and recalled the first fugitive dream: when he had begun to see that, as you close your eyes and go off to sleep, you aren’t slipping away into an absence from which you will peacefully return, with your head inexplicably bathed in sweat, confused by the change in the light, but rather into an event—an event with which you must struggle, an event for which you may find yourself, in fact, completely unprepared, an event that consumes all the energy you have, that can leave you stunned and hurt, mangled and marred by an unknowable number of lesions, bruises, fractures, scars. In the daytime he would try to summon back all these enemies; he chased after their features, their words, their gestures, but they always managed to evade his grasp, impalpable, inexorable.
The first time he’d thought of stealing his sheets was after a particularly intense night, during which he’d had dreams that weren’t exactly dreams—that is to say, they weren’t unfolding in some other place, in some other time; they were emerging into existence right there, in his bed, between one sheet and the other. They had gathered around his body, and as he lifted the top sheet with his knee, he realized that he was making a shelter for them, a tent, and they entered it. They weren’t persons; they weren’t objects, not spirits or monsters; they were just dreams. They were his dreams, and they were right there in his bed. He touched the sheets, he felt the texture of the fabric, the little knots in the stitching, the hills and valleys that the pressure of his body had carved into the mattress, the recesses, the borders, the trenches, the abyss on each side of the bed. For the first time in his life, his dreams were right there with him, all of them, not in his head, not in his mind’s eye, but in corporeal form; he could almost hold them in his hands; he was afraid they might fall, physically, off the bed. And they kept coming. They kept on filling the space between the sheets until, at last, he was certain they had all been gathered together, not a single one had been left out. He felt that finally, that night, he would be able to truly sleep; he would be able to glide away once again into total absence. After all, if his dreams were housed snugly in his bed, then surely they couldn’t bother him; it seemed like they too would just go on sleeping there, alongside him, keeping him company. Eventually he dozed off, feeling freed of an enormous burden. Every so often he would start awake, for a moment, to reassure himself that they were still there, and then he would drift back off, glide back away. When, in the morning, he woke up to face the new day, he found he was covered with sweat, and he felt within himself the sweet signs of a return to infancy, the weakness which comes after a long period of rest, a touching tenderness of the muscles and the flesh. He remembered every single thing that had happened. He was almost afraid to move the sheets. First, he touched them with his hands, testing them; then he slipped his head underneath, and, little by little, he lifted the top sheet upwards. It’s not that he expected to find anything there, concretely: he was trying to summon back the sensations of the night gone by. And then all of a sudden, a warm aroma reached his nostrils, caressing them, like the fragrance of fermentation, of leavening bread. All that he had felt during the night with his hands and his skin, now he felt with his nose. It was as if the dreams had been burnt down to ash and had left behind only the warm hug of their scent. He got up, he got dressed without showering—the water might have carried away some of the honey that was sticking softly to his body—but as soon as he was back on his feet, he was seized by an intense feeling of solitude and nostalgia, of longing to be back in bed: like when you leave your best friends at the end of a great night, like when you depart from a lover and head back home, alone. He knew that if he simply left, just like that, the dreams would return to torment him by night in their usual form. They had offered him their company; they had approached him seeking a truce, maybe even a definitive capitulation; they had surrendered their weapons, gently—and there he was, leaving them on their own, to go their own way, without any protection. He sniffed the sheets again, and again he recognized the dreams. And seeing as he had to check out of the hotel that day, the only option he had was to take the sheets with him. The following night more or less the same thing happened in the next hotel, and the morning after he took those sheets with him, too. The dreams weren’t exactly the same; they were a little different; even their fragrance was different. For four nights in a row, in different hotels, he slept, then he stole his linens, and finally he returned home with a suitcase full of sheets which he stuffed in a dresser.
But what was he going to do now, in his own bed, with his own sheets? He would have to change them from time to time, even if he was resolved to do so as little as possible. He kept the same set of sheets on his bed for over two weeks, and every once in a while, he went and sniffed the ones he had stolen from hotels, and each time he saw gathered there the same happy population, happy and by now harmless, guaranteeing him a restful sleep for as long as they stayed comfortably captive.
Over the next three months or so he changed his sheets once every two weeks, without washing any of the dirty ones. Then, when finally he had no more clean ones to use, he realized he would have to wash a set, the last set he had slept in. He decided to wash them himself. He would do it by hand, in the bathtub; the massacre would somehow be less abhorrent if he executed it with his own hands, in his own home. But as soon as he had washed the sheets, he felt a hole emerge in his stomach, tiny at first, but widening slowly, steadily, growing and growing till it encompassed his entire body. His flesh itself was becoming a void. His blood was being sucked down into the gulf to disappear there and never return. Each of his body parts was being swallowed up into the chasm, one by one, faster and faster. The hole was insatiable. At a certain point the only thing left of him was a small part of his head, his mouth, and his feet—the rest was gone. Then the hole began to contract and to restore what it had devoured, shrinking bit by bit, until it returned to the little point it had started as, a half-healed wound. Every so often it would widen again, then contract again, till, at last, it settled into its definitive shape, like the tip of a needle.
Patrizia Cavalli (1947–2022) was one of Italy’s most beloved contemporary poets. She published numerous collections of verse, from Le mie poesie non cambieranno il mondo (Einaudi, 1974) to Vita meravigliosa (Einaudi, 2020). Her only volume of prose, Con passi giapponesi (Einaudi, 2018), was shortlisted for Italy’s Premio Campiello.
Gregory Mellen (he/his) is a teacher and translator living in Florence, Italy. His translations of 20th-century Italian writers (Mario Luzi, Virgilio Giotti, Patrizia Cavalli) have appeared or are forthcoming in the Journal of Italian Translation, Asymptote, and the Massachusetts Review.