Abroad, p.9
Abroad, page 9
* * *
The next morning, I woke with the poisonous remorse that is often alcohol’s parting gift. The very air in my room felt acidic. Claire was strumming the guitar in the living room, and though there was a door between us, it sounded as if her fingernails were raking my head.
“Made you breakfast,” Claire said when I came out.
I shuffled to the counter, where she had set out a bowl of fruit and some yogurt. In my diminished state, the colors looked positively radioactive.
“Thank you.”
“Time-tested U of M recipe. Yogurt to calm down your stomach. Fruit for detox. Juice for sugar. And the most important food group? Advil.” She pointed to two pills she’d laid by my plate.
“This is so … kind.” I poked the yogurt with the spoon, knowing I’d never be able to get it down.
“No worries.”
“I’m so sorry about—”
“Please. You know how many times I’ve puked my guts out from drinking? God.” She sipped her coffee. I sat near her, setting the food on the table. “I’m just glad I was there. Did your friends not hear you or something?”
“No. I guess not.”
“Pretty insane in there, I guess.” She looked at me over her coffee. “Taz, can I say something to you?”
“I can’t pretend to be coherent. But yes, of course.”
“Just because we’re away from home doesn’t mean you have to be something you don’t want to be.”
I pushed the yogurt around. “I’m not following you.”
“The clothes. The drinking until you can’t fucking stand up. It’s not … you.”
“How do you know what’s me?” I said, my face flushing. “You just met me. And anyway, you’re the one who was talking all that liberation rubbish.”
“I’m not saying I’m a guru. Half of what I say is bullshit. You have to figure out what makes you happy. You’re different.”
“Different?”
“I’m saying don’t push yourself into being slutty because your friends want you to.”
“Well. Maybe I’m trying this freedom thing, too.”
“All right, okay.” Claire held up her hands in surrender.
“Who were you with, anyway?” I asked. “It was really nice of you to leave on my account. Did you get a chance to say goodbye?”
Claire shrugged. “I was just by myself.”
“At a club? Really?”
“I go out by myself all the time.”
“Seems lonely.” I tried to picture going to the Red Lion alone, without the promise of a single familiar face inside. “What for?”
“Oh, I like it, actually. I like to be able to come and go when I want. You know. If I meet a guy. Or get sick or something.”
She winked. I sipped my juice wanly.
“Kidding. So what are you doing today?”
“Dunno. I was planning on lying down, mainly.”
“And miss the festival?”
“Ugh—I can’t.”
“Come on. Come with me. It’s, like, the Capulet versus Montague parade, or some shit. It’s a big fucking deal.”
I looked out the window. The sky was an achingly clear blue. I could hear it now: the music from the square was already ricocheting off the hills.
You get to be this happy now.
“All right.”
I went back to my room and pulled on jeans and my Nottingham jacket. Too tired to shower, I rinsed my face and brushed my teeth, then froze when I saw my reflection in the mirror. My skin had a green cast to it, and there were dark smudges under my eyes. My teeth looked yellowish in the bathroom light.
“God,” I cried. “I look thirty.”
“You look great,” Claire said, crowding in beside me, her face right next to mine. Her cheekbones slanted upward whereas my cheeks were full. Next to my dark eyes, hers were a shocking hue of green. There was something otherworldy about her beauty. It made one blind to anything else in the room. I moved back, afraid I would disappear.
“Well, we both look kinda tired,” Claire said, nudging me. “But who cares, right?”
We stepped into the garden, through the gate, and made our way up to the main piazza. The air was thick with the smell of cooked sugar. The alley we took was narrow and steep; the sun was blocked on three sides by the high walls, so that the only light fell from the opening between the houses hundreds of feet above. Every balcony was crammed with herb pots and laundry. All around us students and families pressed upward toward the festival. Claire grabbed my hand, so as not to lose me. Then, just as the little street was too crowded to bear, we were tossed into the wide main square, punctuated by the huge fountain. We dropped hands and took a breath, looking around. A band was set up on a stage in front of the palace steps, and well-dressed children ran back and forth, darting by our legs.
Festive as it was, the crush of people was weakening my resolve. There was still too much alcohol in my system. My head felt caught in a vise grip, my vision blurred; it occurred to me I was still a little drunk.
“I really think a nap—”
“Wait here,” Claire said, parking me on the edge of the stone steps of the cathedral. “I’ll get us whatever it is they’re rioting over.” She muscled her way through a small crowd out of sight for a moment, before appearing a minute later with two paper cups. “Chocolate brandy, I think?”
“Claire, I can’t drink this.”
“No, it’s exactly what you need. Here—just try it.”
We put the limp paper cups to our lips and tasted it. The concoction was bitter, yet sweet and spicy. She was right—the warmth in my throat and stomach helped. She took my wrist and led me to the steps of the cathedral, where I’d first seen Claire just weeks before. We sipped our brandies and looked out at the throngs.
“Did your friends call yet?”
“No.”
Claire rolled her eyes.
“What?” I said.
She paused. “Taz, look. You disappeared from a club at like, four a.m., drunk. Don’t you think they should have called before now?” She looked at her empty cup. “Oh, fuck it. Never mind. That’s exactly why I don’t go out with swarms of girls like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Girls in groups have no qualms about stabbing one another in the back. Friend on friend? There’s some loyalty. Groups? Forget it.”
“Seems a bit of a generalization.”
“I really don’t think so. I mean, I get it. Women in a foreign country, blah, blah. It’s good to go out together so you can have, you know, someone to walk in with. Also so you don’t get fucking roofied. But then, after that, everyone’s just going for the same guys. Right? And by the end, no one can even keep track of anyone anyway.”
“Very modern of you.”
She shrugged. “Or stupid. Who knows? Maybe I’ll go out with you guys one night,” she said, standing too quickly for me to tell her she wouldn’t be welcome because of Jenny’s laws.
I bought some olive oil for my mother (found later under my bed, wrapped), then we wandered over to a less crowded pocket of the festival. There was a puppet show in the little square in front of the Irish pub, a rendition of Peter and the Wolf. Parents stood around as their children strayed in and out of the crowd. Their voices rose, melded, and spiraled around us, caught by the stone walls of the square.
Suddenly, to my left, I heard a roar. I looked around the corner and saw a Fiat—its driver obviously uninformed of the festival—hurtling up the tiny street. I grabbed Claire’s arm. Just a few feet from us, a little boy was playing with a ball directly in the path of the car.
“Riccardo!” a man shouted.
Claire shook me off and lurched forward, though there was no possible way for her to get to the child in time. A few yards ahead, a man—perhaps the father—launched his body in front of the car. He flew through the air, as if in a stop-motion movie, then bounced off the hood and rolled into the street. The impact didn’t stop the car, but it did slow it down, and an older man reached out and snatched the boy out of the way.
The little boy screamed, as did the women around him. The man in the street groaned in pain.
“Water!”
“Ambulance!”
“Get back!”
“Maria! Get the mother—”
“Fuck! What should we do?” Claire cried.
“Get out of the way.”
“No. No. We should—”
“Really.” I tugged her arm. “They’re not going to want outsiders here. Come on.”
It was hard to pull her out of there, but after a minute or so, she finally relented. We retreated down the alley back toward the fountain and the cathedral steps.
“Well, I guess they’ll be okay.”
“Yes.” The festival was pulsing harder now. Revelers swelled around us, jostling our shoulders, spilling glasses of beer. Another band had started—tinny Italian rock—and the sound was deafening.
“Please. Can we go home now?” I begged.
“Sure.” Claire hooked her arm in mine and steered me on a roundabout path to our cottage. We passed beneath an Etruscan arch into a small stone stairway, and, as if a cruel spell had been lifted, the music diminished. I concentrated on the steep, narrow steps, coated in dust and gum. Two black dogs darted back and forth in front of us, searching for scraps in the bins.
“Well,” I said after a while. “You got right in there.”
“What do you mean?”
“All I did was stand aside. Of course there was no way to … But you were actually running to save that tyke.”
“Eh, it was just instinctual.”
My head was pounding again from the hangover.
“Yes. I suppose that’s what I’m talking about. I’m impressed by you.”
“Taz, it was nothing. Stupidity, if anything. You know, like, if you see a baby going for a socket with a fork, you don’t just sit there and do nothing. You run for it. It’s called being a human. It’s just your gut.”
Looking back on this now, it’s hard for me to believe this conversation really happened. That, after coming so close to witnessing a death, she and I spoke these words, as if the day were scripted to give us hints of what was to come.
For this is not just a memory selectively shaped by the things a girl is willing to admit and remember. I can’t tell you much about where I am, but I can say this: Later, you can hear your life again. Word for word, unbiased. As though recorded by an invisible hand. And you know, it’s the silly things that become extraordinary. When you’re going on and on, thinking you’re being meaningful, it’s all just garbage. It’s the throwaways that count in the end.
“You have a stronger gut than I do,” I told her.
“Oh, come on. You’d come after me if I were the baby. With the fork, I mean. Right?”
“Sure. I suppose.”
“Oh, I’d fork anyone for you,” she said.
She said that. She did.
“Mother forker.”
“Shut it, Claire,” I said, laughing.
“Fork it,” she said.
Althea, 6th century AD
While Grifonia was under siege by the king of the Ostrogoths, Althea was put in charge of catching and killing pigeons. She hated the task, but was frightened of starving, so she stalked the alleys with a net and a knife.
After two years, the Porta Sole was opened by a traitor. The Goths rained over the city, stabbing children with their swords, pulling women to the ground and raping them, striking down the old men who pleaded for their daughters.
In the great square where the fountain now stands, the soldiers dragged the city’s bishop to a platform. Behind him, looking on in horror, was a line of faithful soldiers, and at the end of that doomed line, Althea.
Using daggers freshly sharpened for the purpose, the Goths cut long slits circumventing the bishop’s arms, legs, and torso, and peeled the skin from his limbs. Afterward, they started on the soldiers, flaying them one by one.
By the time the executioners had finally gotten to Althea, a small band of the Compagnia had formed next to that stack of skinless bodies. Before the Goths could flay the girl, the rebels grabbed her from the platform.
Buona morte. Buona morte, they murmured. They were now trained to slit throats quickly. Cleany. In the same manner as a butcher killing a sow.
The Goths executed them all immediately, and split open the girl’s chest as a lesson. The crowd cried out in wonder. When the soldier held it up, the young girl’s harvested heart was still beating in his hand.
Althea Francisco, fifteen years old, 6th century AD
9
I went back to the cottage, took some aspirin, and slept, waking after three hours in a pool of alcohol-tinged sweat. The clock read four p.m., and the house was eerily silent. I sat up gingerly, pulling on my clothes. Shuffling into the living room, I saw that everyone’s doors were open, as if they had rushed out to see something in the street. The front door was ajar. Gia’s underwear was drying on a rack on the terrace; Alessandra had a pot of bean soup on the stove that was still warm. The table was hidden by newspapers, magazines, and espresso cups. The air had a pungent smell that begged for the rubbish to be taken out.
Glancing out the front window, I walked into Claire’s room. Not that she would have minded; she looked in my bureau all the time for clean socks. Still, the intrusion. I opened her drawers, looking at her mismatched bras and panties, tangled with balled-up shirts. Jeans, shorts, one yellow sundress dress presumably for special occasions, all stuffed in. That electric blue frock, dangling from a wire hanger. Beaten-up American paperbacks: Kerouac. Grace Paley. An impossible-looking tome by Bolaño. There was a blue journal I didn’t touch. Some condoms in a plastic bag shoved under the bed.
I stood there for a few minutes, feeling the oddness of quiet in a place that usually is not. Finally, I returned to my room, brushed my hair, and went out.
In the last few weeks, my favorite stroll had become a narrow yet lovely road that led from the university to a quiet pocket of town, ending at one of the city’s seven ancient gates. Despite the neighborhood’s charm, in places it was quite seedy, simmering with bad ideas. Locals spilled into the street from cafés, sitting on the sidewalk, smoking spinellos, shouting to one another through the windows and doors. Dogs ran back and forth, most without collars. Girls who must have been five years younger than me leaned against the thick walls in torn dresses. Socks and underwear hung to dry above, from huge stained jockeys that billowed dreadfully to the briefest slips of gossamer lace.
That was the way it was in Grifonia’s old town: if you lived there, your life was flung onto the sidewalk for anyone to sift through with a stick. Though the wooden shutters were often closed to block the sun, the inner panes would gape wide to encourage cross-ventilation such that, at any hour, shouting, ecstatic moans, or sobs seeped out of the flats, in an endless drama available to any passerby who cared to listen. I had always been rather squeamish, yet the frank, almost sexual squalor of it all fascinated me. Who were these people, I wondered, letting out their sounds with such abandon? The screaming, the bodily squawks. It couldn’t be real, the way these people lived. None of it, it seemed, was real.
At the end of the road, past the antique shops, the notary, a mosque, and the world’s shabbiest gym, the businesses thinned out and the neighborhood became blissfully quiet. In the shadow of the outer gate, I came across a small stone courtyard planted with wilted flowers. I sat down, thinking of the day’s strange events. So thick was my haze that I didn’t notice another figure standing near the far wall—a stooped old woman, dressed head to toe in white and covered in a white shawl. She was running her blue fingers over what appeared to be an inscription.
“Buon giorno,” I mumbled, just to let her know I was there. She didn’t acknowledge me, and before I could say anything else she was making her way out. I saw, as she passed, that she wasn’t old at all, but a lovely young woman, with a face so pale it was blue, body hunched as if from the cold. As soon as she stepped into the sun, she vanished.
I poked my head out after her, searching for her apparition. She wasn’t there, but I forgot her quickly, as the man from the museum was, just then, ambling around the corner toward me.
“Oh,” I said, blocking his path. “Hello there. Hi.”
I never would have been so bold even two weeks before. I can be anything I fucking feel like, Claire had said. I didn’t know who I was trying to be, but certainly I desired to be different from the shy, slightly jaded girl who had arrived on the train.
We stood there for a moment. Up close he was paler than I remembered, and bigger. He was at least six feet tall, large shoulders and hands but not heavy. He had dark, straight hair that needed a cut. There was an academic air about him. Again, he was carrying his notebook. And oddly, he seemed not at all surprised to see me on this abandoned street corner on the outside of town.
“Here we are again!” I said, my voice cracking.
He nodded.
“I’m Tabitha.”
“Colin,” he said. Then, after a pause, “Nice to meet you.”
“It is.” A car tore up the street. He lightly pushed me farther inward on the sidewalk. “So did you have a good time at the party?”
“Not particularly,” he said.
“No?” A group of girls was coming up the street, presumably to sun in the park by the gate. Colin’s eyes flicked over toward them, then back at me.
“There’s one every year. I’ve been going with my father since I was thirteen.”
“So you’re Italian, then?”
“Yes. Half. My mother’s back in Surrey, but my father’s Grifonian. He lives here with his second family, down near the San Francesco church.”
