The Last Bullet Is for You Read Online Free PDF

the best way to feed my resistance.

You left Montreal after living here eight months, refusing the whole time to get interested in the place, acting like you were above all that, he who must be desired because he is handsome, intelligent, an artist whose talent will be recognized one day, especially since he is always threatening to head for the door. You were the one to be desired but never trusted, people had to walk on eggshells around you, so great was your sensitivity, as if you were some precious object that had to be protected. God’s gift to Western women.
    You left after eight months of destruction and crisis, eight months of rage and contempt for all that had been given to you, me, this country, without saying if you would come back one day and live here for good. All that remained was the dream of spending time together in Prague, to save our love. When you left, the idea was still in the air, I offered to come during the summer, in a final attempt to forestall failure, in the mad hope of building one last bridge between us, if I came to you one final time perhaps you would be appeased.
    But when you left Montreal, when I put an end to us, I traded in the Czech Republic for Italy.
    You thought it was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, I was refusing to come to your country out of revenge. But it was really about survival, I had turned in the circles of hell long enough and the idea of visiting them again with the Prague sun setting behind the thousand towers and thousand steeples wasn’t going to change anything, the old main square and its astronomical clock wouldn’t soothe your tormented soul nor your desire to keep me under your thumb, submissive to your will, and a stroll on White Mountain wouldn’t make me forget the price I had to pay to live with you, you whom from the first instant I had fabricated with all my strength, whom my love had invented since I had been unable to see reality and now I would have to live with that side of myself, the face of a woman blinded by passion.
    You left like a bubble floating over the ocean, convinced that all I needed was your desire and I would open my arms again when you were ready. You left like Ulysses thinking I’d be Penelope, patiently weaving your return. You never suspected that once the house was emptied of your presence, I would realize that bars had surrounded it the way vines climb walls by digging into the mortar, that once you left the wind would begin to blow once more. You never imagined for a minute that I would not be that bird in a golden cage, and that you didn’t own me, I wasn’t your object, I wouldn’t take you back in my bed no matter what.
    You sentenced me to wait so you could go on defining my world, but I put an end to it. You were a hurricane, you flattened everything in sight, but instead of cowering in the basement, I moved away. I traded Prague for Rome, the castle for a rooftop deck with flowers, St. Nicholas for St. Peter’s from the window of my room.
    The day I left for the Eternal City, I wandered through the Montreal airport like a ghost who didn’t know what she’d died of. I wandered through the interregnum of the airport, you on one side and the Via Candia on the other, yearning for both, though I knew which would come out on top. I was like a robot. I put my pain on the back burner, and with it all the heaviness that might keep me from moving forward. I imagined I was someone else. I was going to leave, nothing could stop me, least of all my own cowardice.
    Print the boarding pass. Check the suitcase. Go through security. Take the computer out of the backpack. Take off my shoes. Put my shoes back on. Put the computer in its case. Walk to Gate B51. Wait for the boarding call. Board the plane. Lean my head against the window. Watch one film, two films, three films. Eat a lousy meal. Doze off a while and try not to let my head fall onto the shoulder of the bald guy sitting next to