A Semester Abroad

by Papa, Ariella

  “Make sure to put enough sugar in mine,” Janine shouted into the kitchen at her. I watched as Janine’s hand, a toad’s tongue, reached across the table to take one of Lisa’s cookies.

  7.

  A sickness started slowly in me. All of us in the group were coming down with one thing or another, because of the weather and the lack of heat in all the old buildings. I woke up one morning with my head feeling congested and heavy. I coughed throughout my language class, drawing annoyed looks from my classmates and Signora Laza. I couldn’t help it. The cough bested me. It could not be controlled.

  I didn’t eat much because I couldn’t taste it. I bought canned soup from the store and heated it. I took a lot of naps and stopped going out at night. No matter what time I went to bed I felt exhausted. In the morning, my eyes were sealed shut.

  I didn’t want to go to the doctor. I was scared, and I wouldn’t even know how to find a doctor or how to describe my problem. I considered asking Lisa for help, but decided against it. I just need more sleep, I told myself.

  So I carried my sickness with me, bringing bits of toilet paper from the università wherever I went. I was disgusted with myself and I hid out in my room away from the rest of the dirty apartment and the dishonest food thief.

  I didn’t miss class, though. I was there to learn. I owed it to my parents. Maybe I needed a break from partying and this was a way to focus on learning, though I could barely stay awake to do my homework at night.

  It was on the way to the group class that I saw Gaetano again. It had been over a week since our dinner. I was bundled up with a scarf wrapped around my head, and my jacket that was not warm enough.

  He called to me, as I almost walked by him. I stopped to talk, but I didn’t want to be out in the cold for long. I yearned for the warmth of the università. My head was so congested. I couldn’t think straight enough to worry about what he thought. I told him that I was cold and sick. And then I asked him if he could get me anything from the hospital, any drugs. He was a medical student after all, wasn’t he? He said he would try, but he didn’t really have that kind of access.

  “I must get to my class,” I said in my Italian.

  He smiled at my bad accent, worse from the cold. He told me that he would be at the Barone Rosso on Thursday. I nodded, said that I would try to make it.

  In class, Arturo called on me and I could barely hear him from the pressure in my ears. My throat hurt when I tried to answer his question about which Lorenzetti brother painted the depiction of just and unjust governments. I had a fit of coughing in the middle of my answer, and I had to start again. I was required to answer in Italian, no less. Arturo corrected each grammar mistake I made, rolling the r’s and the l’s in the word frattello tauntingly. I raised my voice above the cacophony of coughs of the rest of the class. More than half of us sounded like death. I had to keep saying my answer again and again until it was perfect. Except for my accent.

  On the way home, I stopped with Janine and Michelle at the trattoria across the street from our apartment. I hadn’t been out to the stores all week, and I had nothing to eat in the house except for some olive oil and old bread. When I sat down I began to feel sick. I ordered tortellini in brodo and both girls looked at me.

  “Is that all you are going to have for dinner,” asked Michelle, who would eat a few leaves of lettuce and claim to be full.

  “I don’t think I can keep anything else down,” I said, truthfully. My face should have conveyed my sicknesses. They nodded and changed their orders so that they got even less than me, so that they would not feel like pigs compared to me.

  I ate two tortellini and tried to sip some of the broth. They cleaned their plates and finished my soup, shaking their heads as if I was not eating it because I didn’t like it. I gave them 8,000 lire and told them I had to go to bed and I would leave the front door open for them.

  In my bed under the scratchy blanket, I peeled off everything but my underwear and a tank top. The room was cold, but I was sweating. It was only nine o’clock. I spent that night between sleep and wake. I was hypersensitive to everything happening in the house, to Janine staring at her face, plucking her eyebrows, to Michelle quietly puking my tortellini into our bidet and to Lisa crying into her pillow. I even heard the rustling of a bag of biscuits in the kitchen. The food thief struck again.

  I heard all of those things, and they disturbed me. I could not rest because of them. I was not sure if everything was a dream, but every time I thought I might sleep peacefully, something else pulled me out of it. I tossed and turned all night, flinging off my covers and then desperately trying to get them back. When the travel alarm clock beeped in the morning, I shut it and stayed in bed for two days. I was missing a quiz and missing the trip to look at Saint Catherine’s finger remains in the church, but each time I went to the bathroom, I felt so unsteady.

  The roommates, when they were there, brought me juice and water. They asked me if I wanted anything. They didn’t know me well enough to force me to drink or to eat the way Kaitlin would have. She would have made me soup by now.

  What if I never got up? I had never felt so sick.

  I didn’t communicate this to my roommates. During the day when I spoke to them I said I just needed rest and asked Lisa, who was, in spite of herself, in my level, to get my homework.

  Jonas came to me during the night. He spoke words I couldn’t hear. All the things we said on the bus he said in a low whisper, just out of my reach. But he touched me. And his touch on my skin brought my fever up.

  It had been almost a year since I walked into the room where he blew pot smoke in my face. It was after he waited for me at the bus stop. He invited me to a party, Kaitlin and me like it was no big deal. She raised her eyebrows when I asked her but put on her lipstick and came anyway. She was good like that. She indulged me when she knew better. She never said I told you so.

  That night he danced a circle around me without picking up his feet. I knew that he had a girlfriend who lay sick in bed across the country in her hometown, but still her influence was strong. He kept his dancing circle wide enough that he was just out of reach, at least for a little while. He laughed when I passed the joint the second time and blew smoke in my face, smiling. I just inhaled his breath.

  And then, we were together all the time. At a party in the corner, just the two of us. Somehow we never ran out of things to say. His roommate had a girlfriend, which made it almost obvious that he could stay with me when Kaitlin was at her boyfriend’s. We were just friends, though. It was all cool. There was a girlfriend we were supposed to be thinking about, but she never came up. She was sick and not getting well. I didn’t worry. He said don’t worry. I believed him.

  In the bed in Siena, I could not focus on my thoughts. They were slipping away from me, but it wasn’t sleep. My resistance was weakening like his faraway girl. I knew her name but I always called her Mono Girl. I created a face for her because she had only been the back of the hair the one time I saw them walking together. I was behind them. She didn’t see me, but he did.

  My friends also called her Mono Girl. I’m sure her friends called me something worse. I’m sure she hated me. I never hated her. I envied her. Our only connection was Jonas.

  There is always someone else, isn’t there? Two of the worst words in the English language. I couldn’t think of how to say them in Italian in my sickness, and at that point I probably couldn’t have figured it out right if I was well. But there was always someone else in the mind of the person you want when they should be thinking of just you. There was always a reason for them to be guilty, preoccupied. There was always an excuse not to give you all of them. Mono Girl was someone else. And then maybe now, somehow, I became the “someone else” that he thought about. And she had to deal with my shadow the way I dealt with hers.

  Maybe not.

  “What does she look like?” I asked Kaitlin when Mono Girl returned, the next semester able-bodied and ready to pick up where I left off.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  “Nothing like you,” Kaitlin said in a way that made me love her all the more.

  In my crazy fevered visions, I gave Mono Girl the face of Santa Caterina, whose fingers I didn’t get to see at her church in Siena. I was sweating, imagining Saint Catherine and Mono Girl and I were one falling into ecstasy as that parasitic boy crawled inside us. What good did the ecstasy do you if your fingers wound up preserved away from your body? With my fingers still attached, I wiped the sweat from behind my knees. I cannot stop these images. I’m helpless. In Italy, I didn’t know who would care.

  The weirdest things went through my mind. They were strange enough for me to know that I was delirious. I remembered that first night when he stayed over my dorm room, how we just pretended to fall into it, because it was easy, but down the hall a woman was sitting outside a door. Kaitlin and I called her the Stalker. She was obsessed with a kid on my floor. She waited for him. She banged on his door in the middle of the night, but the he never opened up.

  I must have told Jonas about her when we came in. I must have whispered that she was a stalker disapprovingly. What did he say? I can’t remember. I only remember how Jonas shrugged when I told him he didn’t have to sleep on the floor. Why do so many things from the past go out of focus? You don’t know your past; you won’t know your future. I told myself I would never be like the Stalker. I didn’t understand how someone could go so crazy.

  And I fought it. I ran from it. But as I was sweating and sick in that bed Crazy was catching up with me. I was going to give in.

  “What are you going to do when she comes back?” I whispered. I thought the answer was simple. Remember, I was trying not to be worried. For some reason I thought there were promises in words and kisses. I thought listening to someone’s breath as they slept and feeling content meant more than it did.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “This is so crazy.”

  He smiled at me all the time, until she was back and then I never smiled. I didn’t want to be the Stalker. I didn’t want to be the Someone Else. I just wanted to be me, with him, like I had been.

  But one night Crazy found me. The night started too easy. It was the end of the semester. I thought I had begun to accept that Mono Girl was back. If I could hold out another few weeks, I would be away from it all. I would be in Italy. I was starting to study for finals and write papers. Kaitlin was studying, too. It was her class on Native American art. I peered over her shoulder as I walked to our mini-fridge. There was a portrait of an Indian in vibrant colors. I looked closer at the picture.

  “What’s that on his face?” I asked Kaitlin about the deep red color.

  “It’s a hand. They think it means he killed someone with his bare hands. I guess it’s a reminder. I’m not sure if it’s pride or shame.”

  I nodded. Pride and shame I understood. Crazy seduced me at that moment. She made it all make sense. She had been beckoning me. And maybe all the stress wore me down. With her hand in mine, I snuck to his floor. I pressed my ear to his door. Know your past, I wanted to shout. Know me. I covered his wipe board with question marks.

  I couldn’t breathe that night. I was holding my breath. But I must have at some point, because there was noise. I thought the squeaks were the sound of the marker on wipe board. Then I realized that it was me and I had no longer confined my question marks to the wipe board, I had covered his door with black lines.

  When he opened his door, he stood there, blinking at me. He didn’t stop me when I pressed the marker into his forehead to draw a question mark. He had killed me somehow, killed something, and I wanted to remember. I wanted him to remember. Pressing. I pressed the marker into his skin. I hit and slapped and spat. I found ways to hurt him. He stood there and took it all. Was that pride or shame?

  I wasn’t sure why I stopped or what I said. When I got back to my room, Kaitlin tried to clean the ink from my hands. I was in a daze. She wiped the sweat from my face. She didn’t ask me any questions.

  “I am not a violent person,” I said. I was starting to cry.

  “I know, Gabriella, I know. You aren’t.” She gave me some Nyquil and tucked me in once again.

  I asked to take my finals early so I could get home, get out. I didn’t see him again to see if the marker had actually been permanent.

  That was as low as I got, that was right before I left.

  “I am not a violent person,” I whispered in that sick, small Italian bed, clutching my hands again. If I held them, Crazy couldn’t take one. But maybe she could help me find him again. Let Crazy comfort me. I will give in if that’s what it takes.

  And it worked. I brought him back.

  Jonas turned on the lamp and heard me groaning for him. It was real. He was speaking to me loudly. But it was Italian. I was squinting into the light, but I didn’t recognize him. Moaning. Shivering. Sweating. Jonas came to me, and though it didn’t look like him, it had to be. Who else could hear my thoughts? Who else always knew what I was thinking before I said it? Though I couldn’t recognize him, I reached for him.

  But his cologne was strong. It was not the smell of an American boy. It confused me to have this smell wrapping around me. I expected something else.

  He wiped my head. He touched my hair. He could do anything to me now, and I would lie here in sweat. Then he left without turning off the light or closing the door. I opened my eyes and tried to focus. I knew I was not well. I pulled the blanket over my head to block the light. I could still smell Jonas’s new scent.

  Then the blanket was pulled from me. Had I dozed? The light was still on. It was Gaetano. He was the man with the cologne. But there was another stronger smell coming and I knew that smell was going to burn me all the way down my insides.

  He put a glass with the smell on the nightstand, pulled me into a sitting position. I wouldn’t stay up by myself, he leaned me against him. I was aware of how little I was wearing but too messed up to really care.

  “Sei dimagrita.” I didn’t understand what he was saying. I started to protest when I got another whiff of what he was holding out to me in the glass. But I was weak and he was fast. He pushed the glass into my mouth, so the liquid rushed onto my tongue. I drank it down quick, because I didn’t want the strong bitter alcohol taste in my mouth for too long. He held me still for a minute, timing the minute even as I started to feel it come back. He whispered something to me about learning this in his country, paese, whatever. He said he would take me to see it one day when I felt better.

  “Allora,” he said when the minute was up. Then he led me to the bathroom and waited outside, listening to me wretch.

  “Brava,” he said. “Stai meglio adesso.”

  I nodded, understanding. I would be better now. I was doing the right thing. I needed to purge the sickness from me, get everything out. I felt better already but weak. I climbed back into a bed. He pulled the blanket around me. I knew that I would at last be able to sleep. He kissed my forehead and turned off the light in the bedroom.

  “Grazie dottore,” I said from my dreams.

  “Grazie a te.”

  I stayed in bed for another day and then spent a miserable day back at school, where everything remained cloudy. On the third day, I could hear better, my head felt lighter, and the fog on my brain seemed to lift.

  The cough remained, though. I carried it with me for the next two months. And after a couple of weeks it sounded a lot worse than it felt. It remained beyond my control and came out at the worst times, drawing looks from the class and Signora Laza whenever I hacked.

  I still didn’t have much of an appetite. I forced down the canned soups from the supermarket. I lost weight from not eating for so long. I noticed my pants were falling off and my shirts were bigger, but I only realized how different I looked from Janine’s daily sweep of me.

  “You lost weight,” she said. She and Michelle were flipping through fashion magazines in their room when I went through to take a shower in their bathroom. It wasn’t a
compliment or an expression of concern. It was like she was acknowledging a threat.

  “I guess,” I said. I hadn’t been trying to and I didn’t think the sickness was something positive.

  “How did you do it?” Michelle asked seriously, almost admiring.

  “It’s called the get really sick and not be able to eat diet. Oh, and throw in a couple of pukes. It’s great,” I joked. Michelle nodded.

  “That’s Michelle’s daily life,” Janine said, smiling. I couldn’t believe she was making a joke out of this. Neither could Michelle. She looked embarrassed. Janine backtracked. “Just kidding, Michelle.”

  I looked at Michelle who buried her face in pictures of skinny bodies that looked a lot like her. I wasn’t sure what to say to that. “Well, I’m going to take a shower if you guys are done in the bathroom.”

  “Go ahead,” Janine answered for both of them.

  I went into the bathroom that smelled faintly of vomit and wished that I could take a shower without being scrutinized.

  Olivia was waiting for me outside my apartment building one evening. It was a surprise. Her bright smile, her cold cheeks accepting my kiss.

  “It’s freezing out here. What are you doing?” I was already a thousand times happier from her presence.

  “Your roommate Lisa didn’t exactly look thrilled to see me. She was trying to study. I decided to wait for you out here. Ecco!” She handed me a bag of prosciutto bread from the pork store. I hadn’t really figured out how to order from the pescheria and macelleria yet. The pigs hanging in the windows intimidated me, and I doubted I could afford meat or fish anyway. Occasionally I bought some cans of tuna at the supermarket.

  “I saw Gaetano on my way up. He had come to see you, too. He said you were a tesoro, a treasure, that everyone waits for you. I think it definitely helped to sour Lisa’s mood.”

  “Jeez! Well, come up. I’ll make you some dinner. Then we’ll go out.”