Farfalla had jumped the train without a ticket from Milano all the way to Napoli. Six and a half hours of dodging the conductors. After that, she jumped a bus to the ferry to Capri. She paid nothing for that, too.
She had no way to sneak aboard the hydrofoil to Capri. The ferry had only one gangplank, with two sailors watching it. So, Farfalla had to pay.
When she finally arrived in Capri, lugging her rolling suitcase, Farfalla had nothing.
Well, almost nothing. Farfalla found a stray two-euro coin stuck in the lining of her purse. And in her cardboard pack of Tarot cards, one twenty-cent euro coin. A coin with a beautiful statue created by an Italian Futurist.
Farfalla told herself that a Futurist coin meant good luck. It was a sign.
The Capri Trend Assessment Congress was a paying gig for Farfalla. She was there to translate for the foreign conference speakers, and to run errands for Babi, one of the organizers. The work would pay cash, but Farfalla wouldn’t see any of it until the event was over.
That meant that Farfalla had to survive for three days in Capri with two euros and twenty cents.
Farfalla had her iPhone, her conference badge, and a couch in a stranger’s apartment. Farfalla could manage with that. She had managed with less, in places worse than Capri.
Beautiful, gorgeous Capri! Lovely Capri, charming Capri! The island of romance! Capri could be a very romantic place, if you were a princess in disguise, like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. Italian men hitting on Farfalla often told her that she looked like Audrey Hepburn. Farfalla Corrado was nobody’s Audrey Hepburn.
Farfalla dragged her luggage through the narrow Capri streets, which reeked of fried fish and boutique cologne. Wobbling on heels over the cobblestones, Farfalla hiked to her accommodation – a spare couch in the small, cigarette-hazed apartment of one of Babi’s many friends.
Farfalla’s hostess, Eleonora, was a washed-up Italian television showgirl. Eleonora gave her a spare key to the flat, and then talked at her for half an hour. Eleonora’s one-sided conversation was just like Italian television- loud, colorful, sexy, a vacuous tube.
Farfalla abandoned her rollaboard next to the couch, grabbed her purse, and left the apartment. The Capri Futurist conference was being held in two different buildings, both downhill, both five blocks away.
One building was new, tall and imposing. The other building was old, low and ruined. The future had joined them together and nothing could pull them apart.
Farfalla took a breath and entered the shiny five-star conference hotel. Towering palms and undulating balconies rose above spas, gyms and swimming pools. With glass elevators, brass staircases, and a cellar full of fine wine and fine luggage, this glorious Capri hotel was a mousetrap for wealthy foreigners. The cheapest room in the place cost 220 euros, exactly one hundred times as much money as she had.
Farfalla snagged two perfect apples from a hammered silver bowl in the hotel. She stuffed her purse with the hotel’s soaps, shampoos and body lotions. Farfalla would eat and have a good hair day. Here in the future, her life was already improving.
On her way out of the conference hotel, Farfalla saw a local cabbie harassing an old lady.
Old Lady Tourist wore a sturdy houndstooth coat and Anne Klein gloves. She looked close to tears. “He won’t accept American Express,” Lady Tourist lamented in English. “He wants to drive me to a bank machine to get euros.”
Farfalla confronted the cabbie at once. “Che accidenti ti prende, razza di truffatore? Cosa sei, albanese?”1
“Me, Albanian? I’d rather be dead!” the cabbie protested.
“You Rumanian vampire, you steal fares from these people and cheat your blessed grandma here? Get lost or I will call my old man at the Tourist Board, and he will break both of your legs!”
The driver ducked behind the wheel, slammed the door, and fled the failed scene of his crime.
Tourist Lady had hastily removed her heavy bag from the taxi’s trunk. She watched the taxi roar down the tilted street. “Miss, you seem to have saved me thirty euros.”
“Ma’am, the trip from the ferry costs ten.”
“Well then! I don’t think my driver was entirely honest!”
“He is a clandestino, an illegal alien. Not like you, our honored guest!” Farfalla spread her hands and gave the Tourist Lady her best big American smile. “There’s your little train, to go back to the Grand Marina. It’s over there, see the signs?”
Farfalla helped Tourist Lady lug her ungainly bag up the broad, stone stairs. The bag was very old-fashioned- solid and square, brass buckles and leather. No wheels. How old did a lady have to be, to own such a travel bag?
She hauled the ancient bag to the hotel’s registration. Farfalla had warm, protective feelings about all tourists and travellers. Guests should always be treated kindly, because you never knew who they really were. Billionaires maybe. Saints, angels, vampires, a guest could be anybody.
Farfalla herself was a wandering guest most of the time. Nobody knew who she really was, either.
Especially, foreign little old ladies — helpless old ladies were the most sacred guests in Italy. Old ladies needed to be watched over, comforted and protected at all times. Because Italy had more than a thousand dark surprises for nice little old foreign ladies.
Tourist Lady announced herself at the hotel desk. She was an American professor from the University of Virginia, and had a reservation in a room for two.
“So, Professor Milo,” said Farfalla to Tourist Lady, “you must be here for my Futurist Congress! Benvenuta! Let me show you to our venue.”
“No, thank you,” said Professor Milo, removing her hat with a prim little nod. “I came here to Capri for private reasons.”
Farfalla blinked. “For private reasons?”
“Yes, very private reasons.”
“How private could her reasons be?,” thought Farfalla at once. Was this stout, blue-haired American professor checking into this fancy Capri hotel for some frolic with a secret lover? Why not? She was old, but love was strange.
Farfalla politely shook the professor’s little gloved hand and left.
Farfalla ventured past the soaring glass panes of the Capri tourist traps. The streets swarmed with housecats while the shops peddled odd-shaped limoncello bottles and island necklaces of ragged, red coral. She walked a narrow, winding lane between walls overhung with dark, crooked, odorous fig trees.
The site of the Futurist Congress was a wreck. The venue was a former medieval convent. The convent had tumbled down onto the stony ruins of an even more ancient Roman structure. Southern Italy was full of such layer-cake buildings. Italian earthquakes made that a inevitability.
Babi claimed that the convent had once been a brothel. Babi was from Naples and had incredible street-smarts. Only a woman from Naples would argue that a brothel and a convent were basically the same enterprise. As Babi pointed out, as long as big stone walls locked out the men, you could make a pretty good business of it, either way.
This convent had a broken forest of marble columns in its inner courtyard. The columns towered over the crumbled ruins of many small cells. Here the wimpled nuns had passed their sunlit days and their starry nights in prayer. Quietly reading Holy Scripture and tending gardens of pretty flowers. Italian women, free of the bellowing demands of Italian men.
Farfalla had to envy this quiet life of female spiritual contemplation. Farfalla had always lived out of a suitcase, a multilingual world traveller, a woman without a patch of Earth to call her own. Farfalla was also very spiritual, but never in any simple, classic, Roman Catholic way. Farfalla’s intense spiritual life was Futuristic- hot, and loud, crowded and eclectic, polluted and beset with voodoo, and thoroughly Brazilian.
This convent possessed a large stone chapel, which had stood the test of time among the ruins. The chapel was the speaker’s venue for the Capri Futurist Conference. The government of Capri was an official sponsor of the conference, and it stuffed conferences into any empty build
ings that Capri had handy.
Farfalla knew that she would have to work hard inside in this futuristic-medieval venue, so she took a good look around the place. The chapel’s cold stone walls featured half-decayed sacred plaster murals and its ceiling swarmed with cherubs, or rather putti.
Farfalla despised Italian putti-flying, winged baby heads. Putti were supposed to be the sweetest, cutest, most harmless things in the world, but Farfalla had never trusted cherubs. Never.
Cherubs were horrid baby ghosts. Alien to the past and future, cherubs would never grow, never become men and women. How could cherubs possibly be good? Even vampires and zombies were at least human for a while.
Thanks to her childhood in Brazil, there were aspects of Italy that Farfalla had never accepted. Evil aspects of Italy, mostly. Farfalla had a keen sense of evil because she had so much of it inside herself.
Italy and its swarms of sweet, rosy-cheeked cherubs. Italian cherubs always appeared in the places in Italy where truly dark and awful things had happened. Sites of martyrdom, massacres, torment and hideous slaughter. It took a while to catch on to this fact about Italian cherubs, but it was the spiritual truth.
Farfalla studied the chapel’s faded blue ceiling. The nunnery cherubs, buzzing around like bluebottle flies, circled a king cherub angel — a perverse cherub mafia boss. This decaying angel was obviously very old, older than Italian dirt. Yet, he had a perky, disconcerting, juvenile-delinquent look to him. A boy with a bow, still up to mischief.
Farfalla pulled the iPhone from her knock-off Versace purse. She examined the dozens of applications that she had downloaded and found the one that told her the exact time, atomic time. Local time: ten minutes, two seconds past six p.m. Ten minutes past the start of the big Futurist Congress. It was time to get on with the serious business of foretelling the future.
This Futurist Congress would be a grand event, or so she’d been told. The Congress featured trendy, Brazilian pop-stars, modish European celebrities and high-tech “thought leaders,” mostly American Internet types. A dazzling crowd, fit to do Capri proud. None of them were here yet, though. The future had arrived and no one was here to see it. Farfalla was all alone.
All these futuristic beautiful-people were in Capri already, but none of them were working. Instead, they were off having a Campari somewhere, gossiping with each other, dawdling over the cashews in their five-star hotel bar. Her futurist chapel was as empty as a vampire’s tomb.
Farfalla felt slighted and bitter. Why was her life always like this? Why? Here she was, all the way from Milan after untold risk and trouble.
Her nails were done, her hair was done. She was also dressed to kill, in a creative outfit up to downtown Milanese standards. Farfalla’s gleaming new silk dress featured a vibrant and beautiful Futurist print by the artist Fortunato Depero. Yet, there was nobody there to notice her very apt choice of attire.
Farfalla thought wistfully of her time in the United States. When in Italy, Farfalla often dreamed about distant America. America was a grand, old-fashioned country, where people drove huge cars and ate colossal meals. Americans always showed up on time. If you said six, Americans arrived at six. In Italy, six meant six-thirty. In timeless Capri, “six” was printed on some tourist brochure that nobody bothered to read.
Farfalla stalked across the chapel’s stage, with its translucent podium and giant projection screens.
The niche behind the stage was chaos. The Web people had taken over everything. The backstage was crammed with cascades of multicolored cables, power cords and blinking media boxes. The Capri Trend Assessment conference would be live-streamed over the Web.
The Web people were the worst. Farfalla haunted tech conferences because they paid translators so much to translate computer jargon. Farfalla liked computer jargon, because it was so futuristic, but Web people gave her the creeps. Every year, more people watched conferences on the Web. The Web video made real places go all spidery, until the living audience was mostly distant ghosts, lurking from the Internet. Even undead baby cherubs were pretty wholesome, compared to the Web people.
A pasty-faced Web geek emerged from an unruly heap of glowing hardware. Farfalla put her hands on her hips. “Dove sono finite le vecchie consolle che c'erano prima?”2
“I’m from Brazil! Do you speak English?”
“Okay, dude, sure, onde estão os fones para escutar a tradução do grande evento?”3
The Brazilian geek grinned in surprise and shrugged. “Eu gostaria de poder te responder. Estou tentando conseguir os projetores para o trabalho!”4
With a clouded brow, Farfalla left. After this exchange, premonitions were crawling all over her. A wave of bad vibrations. Why had she ever agreed to come here to Capri? She could have stayed safe in Ivrea, in her abandoned typewriter factory.
Farfalla felt her head swimming. Was a thunderstorm about to break? Had they poisoned the apple that she had stolen from the hotel? Something awful was about to happen. An omen was at hand.
Farfalla trusted her premonitions. She had no choice because her premonitions were true.
A stranger arrived in the chapel. He was the first Futurist from the coming crowd. He sat down in a folding conference chair, in a slanting beam of golden Capri sunlight. The bright glow fell on him like a blessing.
The stranger was tall and handsome, ominous and fatal. He was the One.
Farfalla could not believe her eyes. Here in Capri, the island of romance! Here he was, he was the One! Here he was out of nowhere, like a golden mushroom.
Farfalla had been expecting the One to arrive since the age of twelve. In Sao Paolo, her mentor – the fortune-teller – had read Farfalla’s palm, and told her all about the One.
Every woman’s true-romance story had the One. The world might be full of random men dying to kiss you, but the hero of a woman’s romance story was the One that story was about. When you met the One, he was your only One. That was why he was the One. He was the only One you would ever truly love. He was yours, and you were his. The romance story was the story of your union with him. Romance was destiny.
Romance was the most beautiful story in the world. Romance was believed and beloved by billions-inexhaustible, strong, ancient, divine, evergreen, the ultimate story. Unless you were a fortune-teller, a fortune-telling woman could see her way through any story like that.
As the wise woman told her — after you meet the One, all other men became useless to you. Huge armies of useless men suddenly inhabit your world. That’s a big drag in a fortune-teller’s business, to say the least. The fortune-teller, who had magic powers, understood romance with a terrible, paranormal clarity. Her clairvoyance let her see right through romance.
Because the poor fortune-teller also had a One. She loved her One with an almighty passion, she was the tender-hearted slave of her One, and she had no other One. That was why she was a miserable fortune-teller, instead of having a secure, high-paying job.
Now, the fortune-teller’s prophesy had come to pass, as Farfalla had always known that it would. That feeling that had been ominous, huge, cloudy and fatal. It had lived in the beating core of her heart.
Farfalla turned her back on the One, pretending to study the podium. She turned around again, to sneak another look at the One. The insight of Mother Hepsiba, the great fortuneteller off in distant Brazil, had finally found her here in Italy. No doubt about it, her One was indeed her destiny.
Farfalla’s premonitions of futurity were gone. This wasn’t the future any more, the future had become the here and now. What was foretold had come to pass. Moments ticked by on the clock, and then, the awesome, creepy feeling of déjà vu enveloped her. Déjà vu, cold and numbing, right to the bone. Farfalla was no stranger to déjà vu. Déjà vu was her personal curse. She’d suffered from déjà vu before she even knew how to spell it.
Déjà vu was the feeling that one had been here before, and Farfalla knew in her soul that she had already met this man. He was her One and he had somehow, terribly,
always been around her. Her destiny had always been a hidden part of her life, and until this strange moment of revelation, she had never been able to see him.
He had to be her One, because he was so different from other men. A normal woman’s One was some lovable guy that she fell for, and did anything for, and just had to be with. Farfalla had it figured that she could probably manage with a guy in her life like that. Because her One would just be some everyday normal guy, and she was a woman who could foretell the future, so, probably, she would be able to deal with him. Somehow. But this guy wasn’t like normal or everyday. This guy was a futurist.
The two of them were both futurists, and they had a future together, because they shared a past together. Farfalla couldn’t quite remember their very personal history, but it lurked in her like a recurring nightmare. It was buried very deep, an ache hidden within her heart. Deep in her soul like a buried splinter, too deep to get her fingers around.
She and this tall man in his pretty beam of sunlight, they had a future together – and they also had a long, colorful history together. They had a too-long, too-colorful history. They had a history like Italian history.
Thankfully, her One hadn’t seen her. Not yet. Thanks to her spiritual powers, Farfalla had foreseen this trouble before it had happened. The romance hadn’t actually happened yet. Her burning, flaming, abject, passionate love, all heartfelt pangs and spiritual torment, was not quite there yet. Mercifully, she was still being spared.
Her knees trembled with the urge to flee.
The One did not realize that she was standing there, trembling, and sneaking awestruck looks at him. He did not know who she was and he couldn’t care less. Camera in hand, he was snapping shots of the evil cherubs. He looked like any Capri tourist — happy and slightly stupefied.
Farfalla made a move to creep out of the place unseen. But it was too late. Suddenly, like a tide, futurists arrived for the conference. They were crowding through the church doors in a mass.
A damp-faced, gangly Goth girl slouched into the chapel, along with the crowd. She saw the One and moved to join him. She sat down in a shadow, next to his beam of light.
Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance) Page 2
