Chapter 1

[Pages:6]Chapter 1

Soft sheets of light fell through the window as I pushed open the shutters. Voices drifted up from the street, and a swaying finger of some once-flowering vine cast a sinuous shadow against the flaking stucco walls where last year's faded blue had peeled away in patches to reveal other colors from other years. The ceiling fan wobbled with an odd, mournful sound I would have missed had it suddenly quit lamenting and died.

The cry of gulls reminded me I lived by the sea and for a moment my thoughts raced through the last few years, trying to piece together how, by such subtle degrees, my choices had taken me to this place.

The aroma of coffee wafted on the morning's chill and urged me down to the caf?, to a favorite table by the hibiscus bush and that first cigarette and cappuccino of the day.

Questions about my nomadic behavior prodded me again for an answer. What would be the assessment? Failure, or something I could excuse simply as change? The lines of distinction had blurred as the rearrangement of my life sprawled vast and undefined across time and distance.

The first person who said change was good was a pacifist; all those since were parrots. My experience with change had been mostly a struggle

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with adjustment. Stubborn, some said. Scared breathless, I sometimes thought.

I was partially assuaged by these musings, though they'd now become a mantra, a sort of intellectual shooting-up.

A dockworker bellowed in the distance and the chink of spoons against saucers beckoned, so I slid cigarettes into my pocket and headed down to the caf?. Soon, Arturo, the old man full of sea stories?and too old to go to sea?would show up and greet me. Buon giorno, he'd say, then ogle my smokes with ill-concealed covetous eye and I'd offer them and he'd talk, tell stories, always to my utter amazement, in proper English. Where, by whom, had he been taught the language so well? He didn't otherwise appear educated. Only in moments of revelry or poignancy, when his eyes went far away or his mouth pulled into a wistful smile, did he slip into Italian, his voice raspy or hushed in one emotion or another. It was then I truly regretted not knowing his native tongue.

Arturo was already at the caf? this morning, sitting in my favorite chair. Currying favor for my smokes, he made a ceremony of relinquishing the seat. I found it impossible to resent his obvious cunning, in fact smiled inwardly at it, and chided myself for doing so only because I allowed him latitude since he was to me a novelty.

This disparity in my treatment of people suggested to me that the good among us are few. A curious observer might notice my deference to Arturo, my quiet, measured voice and generosity, and think me civilized and charitable; yet I would not have tolerated the same transparent pretense from someone else.

Arturo looked at me and I saw the glint of something in his eye. Perhaps he took my measure when he put on his performances. I couldn't tell whether smile or smirk tugged at his face. He may have thought me simple. Or perhaps he was aware I made allowances for him because I liked him, and he reciprocated.

But it was too early in the day for a salt-of-the-earth old fisherman to turn into an enigma in front of my eyes, particularly before coffee.

Arturo was lean, and tall for his generation. His hair curled in white contrast against his dark, weathered skin. Blue eyes danced like children in his wizened face. His hands were large, big-knuckled hardnesses, the joints of his fingers like leather stretched over stones.

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I pushed a full pack of Luckies to his side of the table as I ordered my coffee, took a partial pack from my pocket and laid it in front of me and lit one, careful not to pay any attention to those I'd given him. I exhaled and looked up, where a woman pulleyed faded wash out on a line that stretched above the street. She was in her mid-thirties, I guessed. I could see her from the waist up. She was a little heavier than I was used to, but her sensuous plumpness stirred me. Her auburn hair had been pinned up, and fell in sprays lit by the early sun. I wondered if she'd been made love to this morning, then reminded myself not to stare. But I looked on, for I was helpless with these things. She smiled, gazing not quite directly at me. There lay across the fullness of her lips and the lines of her aquiline nose a mystery that tortured the imagination. She turned slowly from the window back into her rooms.

When I looked back at the old fisherman, he watched me, almost grinning. A cigarette dangled from his lips as he truncated the protocols of warm-up conversation and said, "I was leaving my seventies before the torments of lust retreated and allowed me some peace."

I smiled at his words. He reminded me of an account of Sophocles who, having gotten on in years, was asked if he still retained his sensual desires and replied that no, they had left him, and he felt as though he had been freed from a madman.

I'd been without a woman for a while, since Gail had tearfully told me she couldn't free herself from her ex-husband, even though she knew we were meant to be together. That made about as much sense as the rest of our carrying on. If we were meant to be together, then by extrapolation the human species was predestined to a mutual suicide pact.

Whatever had inflamed us with one another had been fervent, but had cooled. I looked on it with acquiescence. We had burned down, but that was what fires did eventually.

I thought of the night I'd got to the bottom of a bottle of wine with a pretty German girl, she willing, shifting ever closer to me on the sofa, and I doubting I would do the occasion justice, or do anything at all because suddenly I had thought of Zinna. Right out of the blue. Not that Zinna was ever that far out there in the blue. And I sat there suspended between her and the woman whose knee I absently patted in a pitiful, regretful manner, an almost unconscious act of apology. That had not gone over

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well. A shadow had fallen across her face, chasing the intimacy from her expression. When her voice turned too friendly and casual, I suspected she thought me impotent. Then when her words broke off in small, hard pieces, I knew she thought I'd rejected her.

I once jokingly told Gail she'd ruined me for other women. Not a healthy thing to give voice to. And a lie, at any rate, though perhaps not as much to her as to myself. She'd been the latest diversion in a series, as I engaged the theory that episodic dysfunction could dislodge the suffocating sense of loss when I thought of Zinna.

My coffee arrived and I took a swallow. When I looked up, Arturo's eyes were stalking a croissant with cream cheese and strawberries on its way to another table. I would have ordered us both the same, but didn't want to run the risk of offending his dignity. A pity. Now I had a taste for nothing else, but couldn't bring myself to eat it in front of him. So I'd have to wait for brunch. I sat thinking that a truly intelligent?and rational? person could figure out a way to have the damned croissant without the hand-wringing.

The wind freshened suddenly, lifting napkins and empty sugar packets from the tables. The breeze, laden with brine, blew fresh off the Tyrrhenian Sea and gave me a taste for oysters. Maybe I was coming round; my appetite sure as hell was. Libido couldn't be far behind.

Or not. Could be eating would be my last great pleasure in life. As Arturo told me of a stew the fishermen used to make, I watched a heavy-set woman sweep leaves from her stoop onto the cobbled street. She wore a white apron tied over a long, dark dress hemmed just above serious black shoes. Arturo quit his recipe. "She is Concetta Guglielmo. She has lived in that house all the years of her life. Her mother and father lived there all of their lives. When she finally married, her husband Adolpho also came there to live with her." I grimaced at that last detail. Leaning a little toward me for emphasis, Arturo said, "The day after the wedding, Adolpho Guglielmo paid Concetta's father the worth of his house. This maintained the honor of Concetta's husband as a man. And made a...a comfort for Concetta's parents in their old age." "Hmm." I nodded.

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"It is the way." Arturo nodded with me, eye to eye, then added, with a small sigh of resignation, "It was once the way."

I observed his apparent lament for the death of a cultural heritage and thought, with some relief, that maybe difficulty with change was a universal affliction.

"Ahh," he said dismissively, shrugging his shoulders. "She has long since buried them all."

My ears twitched dog-like, in that atavistic way that always puzzled me, when the widow began whistling, bitterly off-key.

"It has always been the same tune, as ugly fifty years ago as now." Arturo made a face of disgust. "Her father, old man Berletta, would yell at her."

I grinned at the image. "And Mrs. Berletta..." Arturo smiled so widely he could not, for a moment, put his lips together to speak. "...she sometimes would cuff her daughter about the ears and shoulders. `The girl who whistles is no lady, and no daughter of mine,' she would tell poor Concetta." Pathetic as the story was, I had trouble containing my amusement. "It is understood that we laugh at such things," Arturo said. "We find comical the tragedy we do not own." We are all savages in our hearts. "Concetta," Arturo went on, "complained many times that she was resented and unloved because she was a girl and the only child." He looked at me with a matter-of-factness. "And she never abandoned that sorry tune." I glanced up the street at the subject of our conversation. "As I have told you, she even caught a husband, though it was late in life. Her self-pitying mother and father had given up on their whistling daughter by then." Arturo made a wry expression. "She must have been at least twenty-five." I couldn't help but laugh, which seemed to perplex Arturo. "Concetta," he said, gesturing with his arm toward the woman, "says she is happy now, that she has been so for twenty years, since her husband Adolpho died. Adolpho Guglielmo could father her no children, and Concetta found her grandest dream stilled forever. She had wanted to have daughters and marry them all off to American men who would not

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treat them like orphan servants. `They treat them like whores,' she says, `but they pamper them.'"

I couldn't get rid of my grin now, but it was no bigger than Arturo's. "She says she never knew any peace until her parents and husband were gone." Arturo lit another cigarette and the blue smoke lingered about his face like a veil, for the air had gone idle. "But she still whistles that tune, rancid as boat bilge." A sudden, wild gust lifted unsecured clutter from our tables and flung it into the street. I turned toward the annoying squeal of a woman who had lost her hat, obviously color-keyed to the rest of her cruisewear ensemble. It skittered madly across the cobblestones and lodged against the granite curb. "Harry," she whined, "my hat!" I supposed we would probably share a mutual distaste, she likely disapproving of my faded and half-pressed clothes. The wind had carried Concetta Guglielmo's foul tune away, though I could see her lips still pursed. Knowing of her as I did now, she seemed a determined and bitter mime, stabbing with her broom at the leaves the gusts had redeposited on her stoop. The caf? had accumulated too much commotion. It was time for me to go. I paid the waiter and nodded to Arturo, ignoring the pack of smokes, and looked up once more to the empty window from which had come the enigmatic smile. The clothes flapped happily in the breeze. They would dry soon.

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