An Astrological Guide for Broken Hearts

by Silvia Zucca

  Prompt and silent like a robot, the platinum-blond girl at his side hands me an envelope.

  “You will also find the B roll material to be incorporated. No more than seventy seconds, to be distributed throughout the course of the piece. She will explain where and what to use after the interview. Now, you two can leave.” He moves his chair to sit down at the table, and Davide pulls back his and motions for me to do the same.

  “Point four,” I say, addressing Davide through clenched teeth. “I’d rather have Edward Scissorhands as a gynecologist than him.”

  I realize that it is only two o’clock, which means we have all the time in the world before tomorrow morning and the interview. For the next twenty hours, Davide and I are alone.

  • • •

  My survival instinct, or rather my Sextile aspect between Saturn and my Ascendant, tells me that I should steer clear of Davide as much as possible to avoid problems.

  I take out the city guide that I remembered to stuff in my bag at the last second. There, the Eiffel Tower could be the perfect solution. Looking at Paris alone from the top of the Eiffel Tower will give me a sense of infinity and control, I am sure of it.

  I dog-ear the page and close the little book, and my stomach howls like a werewolf. Damn Klauzen and the pyramid of baguettes I left untouched out of politeness.

  “If you like, I know a really nice bistro where we could go after we drop off our bags in the room.”

  Between hunger and anxiety, I cannot help but look back at him, eyes widening.

  Room?! He can’t have meant that there is just one room, but why do I have this obsession? Damn, as soon as I’m looking at him I can’t help but think of anything but sex.

  “Oh, I thought I would take a walk around the city. I don’t want to sit down to eat just yet.”

  Excellent. Let him do what he likes. It’s not like we’re joined at the hip.

  But when the taxi stops at the hotel, tachycardia hits me. What if there really is only one room? I am gasping for air by the time we reach the reception desk.

  “Bonjour, mademoiselle. Nous avons réservé deux chambres pour le compte de Rete Mi-A-Mi,” says Davide, laying his passport on the counter.

  The young woman types quickly into her computer keyboard.

  “Oui, monsieur . . .” she says. Then she lifts her eyes and frowns. “Je suis désolée, mais il y a un petit problème avec votre chambres.”

  Even with my limited French, this seems to sound like: I’m sorry, but there’s been a problem with your rooms.

  Oh, damn. I knew it! There is a whole romantic filmography of accidents like this!

  I wonder where the blood goes when I feel it all drain out of my body like it does now.

  While Davide asks: “Quel genre de problème?” I mentally review that (a) I did get waxed; (b) the lingerie that I brought is not overly sexy, but not from the supermarket either; and (c) I brought penguin pajamas. Damn!

  And so on, practically until I reach z, which is nonsense, because I really don’t want anything to happen between Davide and me.

  “Vous avez demandé deux chambres sur le même étage, mais ce n’est pas possible. Donc je dois vous donner une au troisième étage et l’autre au cinquième. Je suis désolée . . . ”

  My French stops more or less at Oui, je suis Catherine Deneuve, so I don’t really know what’s happening. Then the receptionist puts two keys on the counter.

  “Pas de problème,” says Davide.

  No problem.

  “What?” I ask quietly. Inside me, John Travolta is still dancing in Saturday Night Fever.

  “They don’t have two rooms on the same floor. Yours is on the fifth and mine is on the third. Not a huge problem, right?”

  My interior John Travolta stops dancing, turns on the buzzing neon lights, and begins to sadly tidy up the confetti from the party. “No, not at all . . . Not a problem.”

  I take refuge in my room and consider the possibility of taking a cold shower, but then I go to the bathroom and see a magnificent double Jacuzzi, perfect for a romantic encounter, and I close the door with a crash. Best avoided.

  Actually . . . That gives me an idea.

  In the elevator, when Davide said, “Half an hour . . . ?” I didn’t answer, so . . .

  I pee quickly and then check my purse before grabbing the keys and leaving in a hurry. If I go downstairs immediately, he will still be in his room. Then I can immerse myself in the streets of Paris, alone and undisturbed. I will send him a message when I am safely in the Metro, just to get rid of my guilt, although I have no idea what I will say. I practically throw the keys onto the reception desk as I dash toward the revolving door like a hundred-meter runner in the final rush.

  “You’re already ready. Great!” Davide closes his newspaper and leaves it on the table, getting up to join me. “What would you like to eat?”

  “Actually . . .” No need to invent anything. “I wanted to walk around a bit on my own,” I admit. I am sure that he understands. He must understand.

  “But you have to at least stop to eat something. Keep me company at the kiosk next door. I love galettes, but I hate eating alone.”

  I blink a few more times, in a continuous attempt to avoid direct contact with those eyes, capable of transforming me into jelly.

  “OK, OK . . .” I give in. After all, we’re just going to eat. It seems a modest price to pay for the freedom that I will enjoy afterward.

  We devour the first galette in silence.

  On the second, we start to emit a caveman-like grunt of appreciation.

  On the third, he says, “You sure are high-maintenance . . . What an appetite, ha!”

  I stop with a mouthful of food halfway down my throat, then gulp it down with a sip of Coca-Cola.

  “Look who’s talking!? We’ve eaten the same amount.”

  “But I’m a man.”

  “So?”

  “Aren’t women supposed to eat like birds?”

  “I’ve read that birds eat eight times their bodyweight.”

  “Know-it-all.”

  “Sexist.”

  We both bite our lips to hold back the laughter; Davide, because he doesn’t want to be first, I imagine, and me, because I don’t want to give in—and also because I’m worried I have food in my teeth. Then those little wrinkles that accentuate his sharp eyes get the best of me, and I can’t help myself.

  “Must be the Paris air . . .” he says, smiling and shrugging. “Everything’s magical, isn’t it?”

  “Do you like it?”

  “I lived here for a couple of years.”

  “Paris, too?”

  Davide shrugs and starts telling me about when he moved here to do a master’s at the Sorbonne, right after college.

  Oh god, I feel so small and stupid. He has lived in the world, and other than as a tourist. I haven’t even moved away from the neighborhood where I was born.

  “It’s best if I go,” I say out of the blue, pretending to look at the time. “Since you know Paris so well, I don’t want to force you to be a tourist.” I take out my wallet and fish out twenty euros that I place on the table for the bill.

  Davide puts his hand on mine. “No, I’ll get this . . .”

  “I can put it on production expenses,” I reply, resolute, laying down my wallet to grab the bill.

  “You’re still mad at me, Alice.”

  It’s not a question, but I’m forced to look up.

  And I must not trust his Mercury in Leo, because it would be capable of selling ice to Eskimos. “We are only here together for work, Davide.”

  He sighs. “We’re not friends anymore, then?”

  I’m seething with anger. “When have we ever been friends?” I say, without expecting an answer. Then I shake my head at the hurt in his eyes. “I’m just trying to live my life, Davide.”

  “And you don’t want me to be part of it.”

  I bite my lip, as if something in me wanted to eat those words, too, but then I say, �
�No. I don’t want you to be part of it.”

  35

  * * *

  You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Leo

  Paris is a seriously overrated city.

  It’s like walking barefoot on glass. At every glance, it whittles you down, pushing its thorns deeper into your flesh with its colorful bistros, tree-lined streets, and postcard corners—where there is always a couple kissing or asking you to take a photo of them. They should write it in the brochure: if you have a broken heart, you should not come to Paris. Admission reserved for happy couples only.

  “Fuck Paris.”

  My cell phone rings. “Whatever you are thinking, stop, right now. And remember to buy me a present. An Hermès scarf, if you’re on the Champs-Elysées . . .”

  “I’m not on the Champs-Elysées.”

  “What a shame.”

  “Not for my credit card. What’s up, Tio?”

  “Your horoscope is a disaster today.”

  “Not just my horoscope.”

  “Exactly.”

  It turns out that these days are “a bit tense,” astrologically speaking, because I have seven Negative Transits out of ten. I would say that is almost a record. My Birth Moon must withstand an attack on all fronts from the Sun, Mars, and Neptune, who offer me unforgettable moments of irritability, depression, lack of objectivity, and mood swings. In short, it will be as if I have constant PMS.

  “I can’t take it,” I say. “Paris, Davide . . . Doesn’t it seem like too much? Why are the stars so cruel? Why don’t they leave me alone and let me have a calm, classic, bump-free relationship, at least for a while? I’m tired.”

  “Because this is the time to open yourself up to change, sweetie,” says Tio. “To be able to give up, even on what you set out to achieve. Alice, you also have a Positive Transit—between Mercury and Uranus—which means awareness and adaptation to new situations. You are a Libra, which isn’t easy, because you’d like to build your castles in the sky out of steel. But you have to let it go. Hon, that’s what the stars are trying to tell you right now. Don’t keep on beating a dead horse and simply . . . let things be.”

  “Bye, Tio,” I say, with a lump in my throat the size of a turkey.

  “Wait, Alice!”

  But I don’t want to hear any more and quickly end the phone call. I find a bench and sit down, tucking my legs against my chest and leaning my chin on my knees, like I did as a child.

  A couple passes by me, and I watch as they tenderly embrace each other. If I had gasoline and a lighter, I would set them on fire.

  With an angry gesture, I take the guidebook and toss it in the trash. To hell with this romantic city and its romantic monuments; to hell with all my plans and everything I’ve set my sights on.

  I start wandering, slipping through side streets, going up and down stairs, popping into small or large, more or less crowded squares. I want Paris to absorb me and show me who she is, if she has the strength.

  Paris is resting on my shoulders with the weight of many hours of lost sleep, an endless journey, and a heart that has been shattered into more pieces than I ever could have imagined.

  The problem is that now I don’t have the slightest idea where I am, and, what’s more, because I was stupid enough to throw away the guidebook with the map and all the other information I need, I have to go and buy another one if I want to have any chance of figuring out where I am.

  “Bravo, Alice,” I tell myself, ducking into a bookstore to grab a map only to realize, when I get to the checkout line, that my wallet is no longer in my purse.

  Panic.

  How the hell do I get back to the hotel?

  Shit. My passport!

  The only thing left for me to do is to prepare myself to swallow down all of my bile and call Davide to come and get me.

  While fiddling with my phone, I prepare to cross the street.

  I wait diligently for the light to change and, as soon as it clicks, I stare straight in front of me and take a couple of steps into the crosswalk, but I stop, right in the center.

  Davide is in front of me, on the other side.

  “Are you following me?” he says.

  “You followed me!” I reply.

  I press hard on the screen of the smartphone to cancel the call that I was about to make. Too late. He rummages in his pocket and pulls out his phone, which evidently is only on vibrate mode, and he looks at me, lifting a corner of his mouth. I shift my eyes away, and he doesn’t say anything.

  “Where were you going?” he asks me when we are safe and sound on the sidewalk.

  “Nowhere,” I admit, pretending to be interested in a pair of shoes in a store window. “I’m lost.”

  “You could have just used the navigation on your phone.”

  Technology and Me, chapter one: “The Basics.”

  “Anyway, it’s running out of battery, and I was robbed. That’s the worst of it. My wallet is gone and that means that I’m in trouble. What do you do in situations like this? Do you go to the embassy? The police? The gendarmerie?”

  Davide smiles again and shakes his head. “No police. And no gendarmerie.”

  “So a life in clandestinité awaits me.”

  “No, you just have to say, ‘Thank you, Davide.’ ”

  I turn toward him as, like a magician, he pulls something out of the inside pocket of his jacket.

  Mon salvateur! It’s my wallet. How the hell . . . ?

  “You left it on the table at the café, when you slipped away, and it gave me the perfect excuse to follow you.”

  “You were following me?”

  “I followed you. I wasn’t following you. If you say following, it makes me sound like some sort of stalker.”

  “OK. Followed.”

  “Yes. But then I lost you. And you reemerged right in front of me at that intersection.”

  “Why didn’t you come up to me?”

  Davide shrugs. “I thought that you might rip me to pieces, in spite of the galettes. You looked . . .”

  I shrug, trying to steer the conversation to a safer topic, to anything other than us.

  “I wanted to see if Paris would amaze me . . . outside of the usual tourist destinations.”

  “Well,” he says, trying to offer me his arm like a gentleman from the Belle époque, “what better guide than a slightly nostalgic ex-Parisian?”

  At this point, I don’t even have the strength to say no. “What’s in your Guide to Paris for Skeptical Women?”

  36

  * * *

  The Leo on the Bridge

  Et voilà, la Promendade Plantée,” says Davide.

  We are on an old redbrick bridge, a former railway track that has been transformed into a walkway with a garden.

  “It doesn’t even feel like we’re in a city.”

  “I used to come here a lot when I lived here, on beautiful days like this.”

  I imagine that he came here to read or perhaps to study; this place certainly lends itself to it.

  “I bet you came here on walks with some beautiful French girl . . .” I say, specifically seeking a detached tone, like that of an old friend nudging him. I give him a sideways glance, and once again I see the image of a man seeking solitude. I ask myself what that could mean in his life and also for his future.

  “No . . .” He hesitates. We sit on a bench.

  “What?”

  Davide shakes his head and smiles enigmatically, as only someone with Pluto in their twelfth house can, then stares at something in front of him.

  Just behind the trees, we can make out the windows from the upper levels of the houses. A woman appears in one of the windows, carrying an evening dress on a hanger. I watch her open the closet door to put it away.

  “I’ve never brought anyone here,” he says then, without turning toward me.

  “I’m the first?” The thought hits me as soon as I’ve uttered the words. I gulp trying to drive my heart back to its place.

  “So many years have passed.”<
br />
  “Does it seem different?”

  “I am . . . different. But I still find it fascinating.” He carries on staring ahead. “What do you think that woman will do tonight?”

  “I don’t know. Probably have dinner, I imagine. Do you know her?”

  “No, but I’ve always loved peeking into houses and wondering what kind of life the people inside them lead.”

  This is very odd. I never would have imagined him doing something like this.

  “Maybe she needs to go out to dinner,” I say.

  Davide looks at me skeptically. “With a man? Perhaps a man who is secretly in love with her . . .”

  I bite my lip without saying anything else. Sometimes, it’s so easy to be with him.

  After crossing the strip of garden for about a mile, we go down the stairs and immerse ourselves in the colorful galleries under the arches.

  “This is Viaduc des Arts, the Viaduct of the Arts. For the most part, the spaces were converted into ateliers for artists.”

  There are paintings, textiles, and souvenir shops that would make Paola’s eyes gleam, and I can’t deny that they have the same effect on me. For a couple of minutes, I lose myself among the stalls, trying to decide what to bring home.

  “I buy a magnet from every place that I visit, to stick on my refrigerator. I know it’s not a very original souvenir, but I like it,” I say.

  “I never buy anything,” he replies.

  “Too bad! Your fridge would be a masterpiece!” I reply, laughing.

  He shrugs. “When you know that every object you buy means another box for the next move, you really consider whether you want it or not.”

  “Practical!”

  “You would learn to be practical if ever since you were seven years old you knew that all you could take from place to place was one backpack and one suitcase.”

  The sun is setting as we emerge from the subway at Havre-Caumartin, and Davide crosses the threshold of the big Printemps stores where he decided that we should eat dinner. While we sip champagne on this beautiful panoramic terrace, the city lights up and shines with the colors of evening, and the tower sparkles more than anything else as if it were studded with diamonds.