Through the Bookstore Window

by Bill Petrocelli

  What did they sense about me? Did my hunger show through on my face? Did they see the fear in my eyes and guess what it was? I didn’t say anything about how desperate I was to get out of there, but I probably didn’t have to. Whatever the two of them may have thought remained unspoken between them. We all just continued to walk, talking only occasionally, as the tour group got closer and closer to the water and their chartered boat. We reached the gangplank, and several of the others in their group started boarding the ship. We were in the middle, and my two companions stood patiently, waiting their turn. I waited with them. I felt something, and when I looked up I realized she had placed her hand on my shoulder.

  If I was going to leave, that would have been the moment. And if they expected me to leave, they would have begun their goodbyes and starting giving me their good wishes. I expected at any minute they would start saying, “If you’re ever in America…” But they didn’t. They just stood there, waiting to get on the boat, not showing the slightest concern that I was still standing there between them. If I’d been in that line alone, I would have been spotted by the dock officials immediately and pulled aside. But standing between them, I looked like a slightly bewildered teenager who was in the middle of a pleasant European vacation with his grandparents.

  Once on board, I moved away from them as soon as I could. There was a brief nod between us. They seemed to know that I needed to get out of sight, and they were probably just as happy that I was moving away from them and keeping them out of any trouble. The trip lasted only a couple of hours. At one point, I wanted to walk over and thank them, but I knew that might be a bad idea. The boat’s next stop was Bari on the Italian side of the Adriatic Sea, and I slipped off as quietly as I could.

  I never saw them again. I’ve looked for them at book conventions and trade shows but with no success. They may have retired or gotten out of the business. They wouldn’t recognize me now, because everything about me has changed. But I’d know them. I just wish I could thank them.

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  There are days when I hate what I’m doing. This was one of those days.

  We received notice that our worker’s compensation premium would be increased by 6 percent in the coming year. That news came in a nasty-looking white envelope that was lodged under an even uglier envelope from our credit card processor. That one said that our transaction fee was going up, and we would need to purchase new equipment. Both of those bombs landed on my desk in the same week that San Francisco announced an increased fee for the city health plan. The week before that our bank had raised the interest on our line of credit, and PG&E put another service charge on our utility bill. And that list of horrors didn’t even include the new credit manager at a major publisher who said she was “reviewing our payment terms.” Where were we going to find the extra money to pay all this? It wouldn’t be from our customers. The price of each book is printed on the cover, so there’s no wiggle room there. We’d just have to eat it.

  We needed more sales. That was the answer to everything—we always needed more sales. There’d been five browsers so far that morning, and only one of them had purchased anything. I wasn’t happy with that ratio. One customer in particular was really starting to annoy me. He was thumbing through a biography on the “new arrivals” table, and he’d been standing there long enough to arouse my suspicions. A lifter, maybe? He didn’t have a booster bag or a jacket with big pockets, so I decided I was wrong about him. But then he pulled a smartphone out of his pocket and aimed it at the book.

  He was showcasing us! I’ll be damned if he wasn’t photographing the barcode and ordering the book from some online company. And he was standing right in front of me while he was doing it. What the hell? Was he planning to pay for the lights, the rent, the staff, and all the things we provided him, just so he could stand there and buy it from somebody else? Of course not. He was hovering over my carefully arranged display and running the purchase through some soulless computer somewhere off on the cloud. I would have liked him better if he were a thief.

  My evil instincts took over. I moved in next to him and dropped a box—quite by accident—that knocked the phone out of his hands. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I told him. “Let me hold that for you up at the counter while you browse…” He tried to object, but I cut him off. “No, no, it’s no problem. I’m happy to keep it for you.” Fortunately, I’d picked on a guy who was so sheepish about the whole thing that he was willing to wait and retrieve his phone at the counter a few minutes later—along with his book and his change. I was lucky. When I pulled a stunt like that once before, Sylvia pointed out that the customer could just as easily have reported it to the police, claiming that I’d stolen his phone. For a few days, I waited for that guy to come back with a cop.

  “How do stores make any money selling books?” Sylvia once asked me.

  “I’m not sure any of them do.”

  Given what I’d been through in my life, you’d think that I would be more detached about these sorts of things. But I love the book business, and it pisses me off when everything seems to be conspiring to make it fail. I walked around the store trying to cool off. I finally settled down and watched Morrie Richards as he sat in the middle of a group of children reading books to them during story time. He’d been coming in on his own for weeks, reading stories to the littlest children, until I finally asked him if he wanted a second career managing our children’s events. He’d been bored with his retirement, and the idea of being a kind of troubadour for little kids appealed to him. The look in their eyes as he was reading got to me. I wanted to call Sylvia right then and say, “We’re not just selling books. We’re spinning dreams.”

  There were a couple of packages on my desk with advance copies of new books. That always perked me up. One of life’s great pleasures is to open a new book and let yourself be mesmerized by the smell and the feel of it. There was also a message from our local booksellers association, wanting to know if I’d be on a marketing panel at the fall trade show. I’d probably say yes, since a couple of my friends from other Bay Area stores would be on the same panel. I was happy to talk at gatherings of booksellers, but that was about as public as I was willing to get. I had good reasons to stay out of view—lots of them. And the next message made me realize I was getting careless. A woman from the Italian Cultural Institute had called. She had heard about Gina Perini and wondered if she would come speak to a business group of Italian American women.

  No—she would not. This “Gina Perini” would be doing no such thing.

  The Italian American woman that the public saw was something I’d created for myself. Gina Perini came into being at a time when my life had bottomed out and I had to start over again. The original version of me was gone—long vanished, I hoped, from the mind of anyone who used to know me. All of this happened when I was a teenager living in Italy, and it seemed simpler to adopt an Italian name to go with my new personality. The persona I created at that time worked well enough in most places, but I wasn’t about to try it on Italians. They’d want to know what part of Italy I was from. Which province? Which commune? “Perini’—what sort of a name is that? Are you related to the Perinis in…” After an hour or so of that kind of friendly banter, the whole story would come unraveled.

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  When I snuck off the boat in Bari, I had no idea what I would do next. I’d gotten as far as Italy, putting the Adriatic Sea between me and my pursuers, but I hadn’t thought beyond that. I had a vague hope that things would get better, and I suppose they eventually did. But before that, they got worse.

  A few days after I arrived, I made contact with someone I knew living in Bosnia. But after I did, I almost wished I hadn’t. The news he gave me hit me hard. My fears about Anja and the family had come true. They had been taken captive by the Militia, and no one had seen them since. It was all secondhand information, and for a moment or two I tried to deny it as just a rumor. The man I talked to said
he hadn’t actually seen it himself but had only talked to some people who witnessed it. Maybe they were wrong, I said. But the more he talked, the more I realized that the little details of the story were too accurate for it to be anything but true. A group from the Militia had surrounded the house where the family was hiding. They’d marched them out at gunpoint and manhandled them as they were tossed into the back of the truck. According to the witness, the Komandant himself was there, puffing on a cigarette as his soldiers roughed up the prisoners, finally grinding out the butt with a satisfied grunt as the padlock on the truck was snapped into place. No one had seen or heard anything of them after that. What more was there to say? We both knew what that meant. They would probably never be seen again.

  “What about the baby? Did they take Jelena, too?”

  No one had seen the baby, he said.

  “How can that be?” I kept asking. “Are you certain? A child that young doesn’t get up and walk off. Maybe she was being carried by someone, and no one noticed her.”

  “The baby wasn’t there.”

  The people who saw the incident knew there’d been a small child in the house. They would have noticed. No one saw her then or after that.

  I hit rock bottom. During the next few days I sensed that the tentacles of war had somehow reached across the Adriatic Sea and were smothering me. I was in a strange country with no papers, no friends, and very little money. The closest thing I’d ever had to a family had now been lost, and what happened to them was partly my fault. My despair had opened up such a big hole that I didn’t dare think about who or what I was. There was something going on inside me that I couldn’t articulate, but at that point I couldn’t do much more than let it rumble around on its own. For several days, all I could do was hold myself and shiver.

  I finally headed north for Rome, because it seemed like the easiest thing to do. I had a sense that Rome was a place where you could find yourself—or get completely lost. I still think all of the world’s abandoned people must wander through there at one time or another. Later on, I learned to love Rome, but that wasn’t true at first. I arrived there on the run and felt totally helpless. I eventually learned how to survive. I hung around the buildings of the Comunità di Sant’egidio in the Trastevere area, living off the generosity of that group. They were focused on helping refugees, and they must have realized that the sad-looking kid sitting in their doorway had escaped from something awful. They kept me alive.

  After a few months, I found work with a printer who needed an assistant for odd jobs and errands. Paolo worked by himself, but he took me on—no questions asked. There was nothing official about my relationship with him. It was all lavoro in nero, as the Italians would put it, “working in the black.” Everything about me was off the books. I had no visa or work permit. As far as the authorities were concerned, I wasn’t working at all—in fact, they didn’t even know I existed. Given the nature of his business, Paolo had a good reason to keep everything in nero. Publicity was the last thing he wanted. He called himself a printer, but he was really a forger. Birth certificates, death certificates, marriage licenses, work permits, visas—he could do them all, and he did them well. There’s still some paperwork sitting in an office in Rome that was convincing enough to get me an EU passport many months later and a work visa for the United States.

  Paolo wasn’t the only fraud. I called myself his assistant, but that was just to make me feel better. The exchange rate between us was never spoken, but we both knew what it was. There was sex for food, sex for shelter, sex for medication—sex for whatever I had to have. He had his needs, and I had mine. There wasn’t any serious affection between us. When he needed me, he took me—not roughly or without a bit of kindness, but not with any real love either. At that point, love was just a distant abstraction for me—I doubt if I was even capable of it. I wasn’t proud of my arrangement with Paolo, but it was better than walking the streets. I knew that firsthand. During my first, desperate days in Rome, I went out one night on a stroll, walking slowly along the Via Salaria, getting set to offer my body to the first taker with a pocketful of lire. But within minutes I got violently sick to my stomach and started to shake. I spent the rest of the night huddled behind a tree.

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  One afternoon, I delivered a packet of some of Paolo’s specially made documents to a bank manager in the Campo de’ Fiori. He looked surprised to see someone like me at the front entrance to the bank. I was wearing jeans and a zippered sweatshirt that hung loosely over my shoulders. I didn’t look much like a business courier. It took him a second to realize why I was there, and then he got a stricken look on his face. He motioned sharply for me to go around and meet him at the back entrance, where I slipped him the paperwork. I knew why he was nervous. I’d read the documents as I walked across the Ponte Garibaldi on my way to deliver them. One of them was a woman’s birth certificate with a German seal on it. I was certain it was a forgery. There were other dubious but official-looking papers in the envelope along with it. He was probably planning to use the paperwork to keep his mistress in the country. By the look on his face, I seemed to have guessed right.

  After he unceremoniously slammed the door in my face, I walked away, feeling as insignificant as I was at that moment. I headed past the cafes on Via dei Baullari, ending up at the Piazza Farnese, plopping myself down against the Vasca—the big bathtub-looking fountain in the middle of the piazza. I found a spot between the bicycles and the Vespas, trying to lose myself among the scruffy, lost kids who liked to hang out there during the day. Scruffy and lost—that’s how I felt most of the time, but that afternoon my confusion had built to a crescendo. I was unhappy with my life, with my body, with my soul, and with everything around me. I stared at the Palazzo Farnese. According to Puccini, that was the place where Tosca had shoved a knife in Scarpia’s ribs when he tried to rape her. I knew how she felt.

  Looking back, it seems clear that the moment in the Piazza Farnese was a turning point. Something inside me had opened a door, and a new revelation was waiting to enter. As my eyes wandered around the piazza, I looked over at a café and saw something that changed my life.

  Two young women were sitting at a table, talking animatedly. The one on the left—the one who caught my attention—had mid-length brown hair that curled luxuriously over the back of her neck. As she leaned over her espresso cup to say something, she brushed back her hair—not continually, but often enough to appear that she was following some inner rhythm. I realized at that moment that I was running a hand through my own scraggly hair, trying in some pitiful, subconscious way to imitate her.

  The young woman raised her head slightly when she made a point, following the rising timbre of her voice. When her friend spoke, she inclined her head to one side, waiting in that suspended state while the other woman talked. Then she would tilt her head back and break out in laughter. There was nothing forced about her gestures, nothing unnatural. There was an easy fluidity that had me mesmerized. She moved her hand forward until it came to rest on the forearm of her friend. She let it sit there lightly for a few seconds, giving a small, knowing tap or occasionally lifting a finger to wag when she wanted to say something. It was an easy intimacy that plucked at a chord somewhere inside of me.

  I moved in closer to hear her speak. She had one leg crossed over the other, and she moved it rhythmically as she talked. It was an unstudied motion that seemed as perfect as all the others. She had a white blouse that was opened down to the third button, and with it was an elegant, understated silk scarf tied around her neck in a kind of casual knot that Italian women seemed to have invented. Her eyes and skin sparkled. She must have taken great care to make everything look so simple. There were probably lotions, hormones, and dozens of other things that she needed to bring herself to that point, but none of that was noticeable in this, her moment of everyday glory. I listened to her voice—a rich contralto that modulated itself into a variety of tones and textu
res. I tried to imitate the sound in my mind. If I’d gotten close enough to detect the scent of her, I probably would have been overwhelmed.

  I was smitten. Later that afternoon, I found some sheer hose in a street market that matched what she had been wearing. I was almost afraid to pick up the package, and by the time I gave the handful of lire to the proprietor, my palms were covered with sweat. She didn’t seem to notice how nervous I was as she handed me my change. I went back to my tiny bedroom and made sure the door was closed. I unrolled the stockings slowly up my legs and became immersed in that new sensation, wondering if that was how the stockings felt when they were on her. It was a feeling of enchantment. For a moment I imagined myself back at that table with the two women, becoming part of their world.

  You could call it love at first sight, I suppose, but that didn’t quite describe the feeling. I didn’t want to be with her. I wanted to be her. And from that moment on, I was. Since then, I’ve often wondered if I had always been like that and just didn’t know it. I’m not sure. I only know that on that warm afternoon in the presence of that signorina—my unaware mentor—I became Gina.

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  I had just finished breakfast and was on my way downstairs to the bookstore, when I got a phone call from Rome. It was Paolo. I hadn’t talked to him in over a year, and I didn’t know what he wanted. It took me a second to get back into the rhythm of speaking Italian. But I wasn’t sure that I really wanted to talk to him. I could feel immediately the edge to his voice.

  After a bit of friendly conversation, Paolo finally got around to the point of his call. He said he’d had “dei visitatori.” It wasn’t so much the words but the way he said them.

  “What kind of visitors?”

  “Well, you know, investigators.”