The two large windows are being kept wide open to try and entice a passing distracted gush of air into the room with the sole purpose of keeping alive the fiction that somehow it will make it cool off. Since early morning the too-infernally-hot-for-early-May spell of oppressive heat hadn’t stopped creeping into the cramped and asphyxiating space that had long turned into almost unbearable agony. Beyond the windows, the quaint vista that hangs outside conveys a twisted sense of untroubled serenity. It may look as such, this stretch of bucolic sun-rubbed valley that extends eastward from Oliena, especially when bathed in a downpour of vertical light as it stands framed against the Gennargentu massif, but serene it is not. No respite passes through the imploring windows, though no shortage of other stuff does. The ubiquitous humming of the torrid midday insects, the cadence of car engines in and out of Nuoro, a pervasive tractor that ploughs an unending field nearby, a medley of dissonant voices that surfaces from time to time. Mostly, though, there’s this aroma of citrus that permeates the room.

 

He strokes her spiky hair with the copious quantum of fondness his tense fingers can carry. They slide through it, fondle it, caress it in a frenzy of pent-up restraint. The din of a helicopter gets into the room. For a moment his mind seems to careen off. It tracks a flock of birds that invades the piercing blue rectangle of window as they take to gliding along the valley until obscured by the wall. Insects, cars, the tractor. But then at once his thoughts are back on her. His hand sets sail over the frail skin of the back of her hand. Up her forearm with an upsurge of necessity. Up the shoulder, the neck. The other hand charts the silhouette of her visage, its fingers run along the forehead, skirt the thick eye bone, skate around the cheekbone, the thumb takes its time to linger over the dense soft flesh within her lips as it sketches a circumnavigating line over them and then presses a touch harder until it feels her teeth. The right hand joins the echo of the route the other had taken up until both are held in parallel. They hold and hoist her obliging face up towards his. His head travels down in the opposite direction until their lips meet halfway. There, for a lengthy while, he immerses himself in birds, mountains, out-of-season heat, buzzing insects, citrus, a very intense aroma of citrus, cars, a tractor, voices.

 

He gratefully would have stayed there for the remainder of his existence had the doctor not walked the few steps from the wall behind him and reached for his shoulder. That very tame pat wakes him from the vortex of torpor he’d plunged into. It doesn’t take half a second for the two men to exchange a glance to which he complies with a fleeting nod. The doctor draws back two steps and in his quasi-hushed tone shares a whisper with the closest ear of one the men waiting by the door. You can take her now. When he files out after the men he cannot avoid noticing the intense aroma of citrus that is taking over the room and that for the first time a stream of fresh air had managed to flow past the windows.