The Advertisement
By Natalia GinzburgAct Three. Teresa addresses Elena, who was her roommate for a time before falling in love with Teresa's estranged husband Lorenzo.
TERESA:
I could have married someone else, if I hadn't met him that day. I was so young and pretty. There were lots of men after me. I could have picked a nice, quiet, simple man, and had a settled, orderly life. Instead, I fall in with him. That's my luck! He ruins me. Destroys me. And goes away, like somebody who's just trampled his way through a cornfield.
"You're nothing," he told me. "You're not a person at all, as far as I'm concerned. You were unfaithful to me, but that doesn't bother me. I'm millions of light-years away from you," he said. What am I to do? Tell me what I should do next. The only thing for me to do is put a bullet through my heart. Did you know that I have a small pistol? I thought I'd be frightened, being alone in the apartment.
It was a dreadful night. We fought. I can't remember why. Some idiotic little reason. A lost key, perhaps. Or even just a word. A simple word, between him and me, could turn into a monster. He'd disembowel it. Vivisect it. He'd squeeze the very last possible bit of meaning out of it. I bit his hand. He slapped me. My ears were buzzing, my nose was bleeding. There were marks of my teeth on his wrist, and on his forehead there was a wound I'd made with a pair of scissors. I even used scissors on him.
One day I shall shoot myself. Then the two of you won't need the annulment. I'll make him a widower.
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