by CD Reiss
My memory is triggered but still vague. A little boy and his father were early for Little League pitching tryouts and were warming up his arm. When he kicked away the dirt behind the rubber, he came in contact with Elio’s buried head.
Loretta sighs, and that’s the answer. Same guy.
“Elio was a mechanic. Santino said he was the best he ever had. Elio could marry a Toyota to a Honda and make it look like a Cadillac. I thought, what will the babies look like when he marries me?” Loretta pauses while Celia chuckles. “I found out I was pregnant, and he said, ‘Let’s get married tomorrow.’ So I bought a white dress on Flora, went home, and waited. He was working late, and I didn’t find out until the next day. Saturday. When the boy… You know what happened.” She takes a deep breath, knitting her brow and shaking her head. “Carlo Tabona wanted him to work in their chop shop. Offered everything. He refused, but he thought even being asked was disloyal. So he didn’t tell Santino or anyone. He left himself with no protection.”
Her voice cracks. She doesn’t have to say she loved him. It’s obvious his death left a hole in her life my husband never filled.
Celia puts her hand on Loretta’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” I say, hand on her opposite arm.
“Well,” she says. “The Tabona family was smaller after that. The king ran through them like a disease.”
It will be hard to trust anyone after Gia’s betrayal, but Loretta may deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Zia used to say, Dagli amici mi guardi Iddio, che dai nemici mi guardo io.
God protects me from my friends, I protect myself from my enemies.
There’s no instruction on how to discern between the two. That’s up to me. If I’m going to stand beside a king, I have to keep his entire domain in view.
With that thought, I feel him near and turn toward the back lawn. He’s standing in the morning breeze, talking to a man who is slightly taller, with the same regal bearing. He’s not Santino, the ruler of my heart, but—just in bearing alone—he’s closer to an equal than anyone I’ve seen in my husband’s presence.
Santino sees me watching him through the glass, finishes his conversation, and walks toward me. I drift away from Loretta and Celia to open the door.
“My violet,” he says, leaning in for a kiss.
The way his lips touch my ear, then the side of my neck right now is something I won’t let another woman have as long as I live.
My feelings are intensely private, but there are people everywhere. I feel as if we’re in the middle of a piazza. The source of my irritation is back in the house. So I pull him away from the main house to a quiet spot between two buildings on the opposite side of the lawn.
“We have no time to fuck,” he says. “And we probably shouldn’t, so soon after…” Mr. Tough Guy’s unable to say the word miscarriage. God, I fucking love this caveman.
“I don’t…” I pause, because when I lay my hands on his chest and feel the muscles there, every neuron in my brain reroutes the current to feeling how hard and substantial he is. “I just… I want you to know that I’m not some jealous little girl. You’re mine. Always. If you ever even thought about another woman…”
“Why would I?” He takes my wrists and keeps my hands close to his heart.
“You’d spontaneously combust. Poof. Go up in flames.”
He raises an eyebrow and fails at taming a smirk. Let him laugh. I have things to say.
“Don’t make me explain the science of it,” I continue. “It’s got to do with the friction created when you rub your dick against the natural order of things. Okay? So I’m not worried about Loretta, per se.”
“If you want her to go,” he whispers close, “I’ll send her away. I want you to be happy.”
My husband’s face is soft for me, but I see the hardness of a man who has had to make difficult decisions, and the regal indifference he will exhibit when he sends Loretta away.
“No,” I say. “It’s fine. She’s all right. But there’s history, and I don’t want it to come up in conversation. I don’t want to hear about how much you liked tasting fica or how rough you were or any shit like that, because I won’t take it out on her. I’ll take it out on you.”
For a moment, I worry that I’ve overstepped into a serious threat, but he smiles.
“You make me weak. I’m standing here, ready to promise my woman anything and everything to not take her jealousy out on me. Without a single detail from your lips, I find myself afraid you’ll take your love away. Who would I be then, my violet? Without you loving me, who am I?”
Before I can explain that’s not what I had in mind, he spins me around and—gently but firmly—pushes my back against the wall with my hands over my head. My body is stretched before him, and like an animal, he runs his nose along the edge of my jaw to inhale my scent.
“So I need to know,” he continues. “how will you abuse me if you’re unhappy, my violet?”
“I’ll come into bed naked and suck your dick.”
“This is not much of a punishment.”
“I’m not done.”
He kisses me over and over and says, “Go ahead then.”
“I’ll take it, but I won’t swallow. So when I kiss you, I can wash your filthy mouth out with your own cum.”
He keeps his grip on me when he laughs, but lets go when he kisses me, still smiling as he wraps his arms around me so tightly I’m lifted from the ground.
“Violetta,” he says into my shoulder, rocking me back and forth as he repeats my name. “I didn’t imagine a woman like you existed.” He pulls away, brushing my hair from my face with tender urgency. “You won’t ever hear a word about the past. I will treat your heart with care… as if it’s fragile, when it’s not. And I’ll love it as if it’s my own, because it is.”
We kiss again, and the world falls away. We are a normal couple worrying about normal things, a mortgage, a birthday party, who’s doing the dishes tonight. It’s as if there’s no crown, no war… nothing but us.
“Come,” Santino says after a one minute eternity has passed. “Let’s get you to the doctor.”
11
SANTINO
I park the Alfa Romeo near a field with rows of white tents and signs pointing students toward the first letter of their last name. Registration day at the university. If her life had gone to plan, Violetta would be here with a list of classes, but she stopped asking about it, so I stopped promising it.
She’d be pregnant, but that stopped too.
Everything stops for this war.
In the waiting room of the student clinic, a girl with a nose ring and her mother try not to stare at me with loathing, but can’t help themselves. They know I end what other people begin.
“I don’t think they like me,” I murmur to Violetta.
She picks up a magazine, flips through it, and holds it up to hide our faces. “They think you gave me the black eye.”
“Cosa?” I ask her what, but I am not as surprised as offended. I need to explain to every one of them that I do not, will not, cannot ever harm this woman.
“Violetta?” a nurse calls from the desk.
My wife stands. I stand with her.
“You can go ahead and sit down, sir,” she says with a smile so fake it looks painted on. If this woman had been born on the other side of the river, she’d be one of those wives knocking around her husband’s business, exacting revenge for petty slights against her children. I remember why I don’t like crossing the bridge at all.
In Secondo Vasto, I am king.
Around here, I’m a diseased fruit on a healthy tree.
“Where is she going?”
“We’ll have her back in a jiff.” She winks at me, acknowledging that she knows who I am and what I’ve done.
My skin gets hot. Blood flows to the bruise in my chest, making the pain pound with the hammer of my heart.
She doesn’t know the half of it.
They’re separa
ting us to ask questions about me. About us. About the bruise on her face and the blood afterward. How dare she try to separate us so they can convince my Violetta that I’m her enemy. How dare they pretend to understand what my wife’s been through or put her in the position to have to relive it by explaining. This clinic is owed nothing but the number on the bottom of the bill. They are not owed her story.
“Santino,” Violetta says, putting her hand over mine. “On the way in, I saw a vending machine with fruit in it. I’m kind of hungry.”
She’s giving me a way out of the office that won’t injure my ego.
This is meant to soothe me, but leaving her alone in that room has nothing to do with my manhood. I don’t need to save face. My Forzetta needs me, and if I leave, I can’t be here for her.
“I have it,” Violetta adds. “Trust me.”
I trust her. She does have it. This is her world. She doesn’t need protection here any more than I need to be treated like a plate tipping over the edge of a shelf.
“Bene.” I pick up her hand and kiss it. “I’ll be outside when you’re ready.”
“Then we go get what’s ours.”
I nod quickly to the nurse and leave before I tell her what I think of her suspicions.
The vending machines stand sentry on either side of the elevators. Anette has a bowl of waxed fruit in the dining room that looks exactly like what’s in the machine. The apples and oranges are perfect, brightly-colored, huge. The one banana left is more green than yellow because Americans would rather eat an unripe fruit than see a single brown spot.
I never hit my wife, but the entire country would assume I did. I never drugged her. I never hurt her.
That’s a lie.
I should have stayed in Italy, where this happens all the time.
The machine rejects my five dollar bill. I punch the clear plastic front, but all that does is make the security guard and the guy waiting for the elevator with his son look at me.
Right now, I hate it here. I want to go home. I should have gone home years ago. Should have stayed in Naples after my obligations died with Rosetta.
I straighten out the corners of the bill and try again. The slot sucks it in. I clench my fists, waiting for it to get spit out because when it does, I’m going to throw this entire thing right out the fucking window.
But a green light goes on. I punch the numbers with my knuckle as if I want to hit this spiteful box the way I never, ever, even once hit my wife, no matter what they think.
A little box slides across the machine on tracks, picks up the orange as an arm pushes it in, moves it over the slot, and drops it in. A lighted message tells me to open the flap for my prize and pick up the coins that slap into the change slot.
I pick out the fruit and sniff it. Where I expect the clean bite of citrus, there’s no smell at all.
I hate it here. They can keep their fourteen quarters.
The orange is still pressed up against my nose when my phone rings. Blocked number. Knowing it would do no good anyway. Good chance the phone will be at the bottom of the river before the sun sets.
“Pronto,” I say when I answer.
“Santino.” I remember the voice from the era of my first hundred cigarettes, but not the commanding tone it comes with.
“Damiano,” I answer, ducking down the hallway and continuing in Italian so I’m not understood. “Where are you?”
“So unfriendly. No buon giorno?”
“When you’re dead, I’ll call it a good day.” I back into a less-trafficked stairwell.
“You’re killing me now with this drama.”
Two women in white lab coats come down the stairs, chatting amiably. I nod to them and face the fire extinguisher as if that will shut out the world.
“It’s not like you, Santi.”
I have no time for this bullshit. Violetta will be out soon, and I need to be there for her.
“You tried to have me killed so you could take my wife. Is this phone call an apology for that? Because I’m busy.”
He laughs too humorlessly and for too long. He’s enjoying this. He thinks he’s winning, and I’m still trying to figure out the game.
“Come on, man. It’s a courtesy call. Old style. Like my father and his father used to do.”
I make eye contact with three people in scrubs. One smiles. This stairwell is too crowded already.
“I got guys everywhere. You know that. You saw it last night. So this is where I give you a last chance to surrender it all to me.”
I should laugh, but a call like this requires a serious response. The stairwell door opens, and yet another witness comes through. I can see the obstetrics waiting room just down the hall. Is Violetta out yet? I have to see her.
Catching the door before it closes, I look for privacy in a public space, hissing into the phone, “If you think you can win a war with me, you’re mistaken.”
“Look, my old friend, here’s the thing. We got the Tabonas.”
“What I left of them won’t follow you.”
“Wrong. I’m the one in the golden seat. I’m the one with the power. I’m the one with the future this time. Okay? I have friends. You have none. You’re running a town full of people who don’t follow you out of love, or fear, or nothing. They follow out of habit, and if you don’t have the crown, I can pluck them off.”
“You don’t have it either.”
“You sure, bro? You really so sure? Hey, Gia!” he calls out, away from the phone. “You got that ring with the number in it?”
“Right here, baby.” Gia’s cheerful little voice comes from the background.
“So like I told you,” he says. “This is a courtesy call.”
“You come for my wife again, and you will die. I will rip you from this earth.”
“Better keep your eyes peeled then because we’re coming.”
My blood flows faster, hotter, pushing against my veins so something, anything inside me is taking action while the outside stays calm for Violetta’s benefit. Standing in the corner of the obstetrics waiting room, facing a plant that could be real or plastic, brow knotted, I put every ounce of energy into staying calm.
“Mr. DiLustro?”
At my name, I turn to find Violetta standing next to a woman in her thirties with a ponytail and a tag that says “Dr. Sanchez.” I nod and—with a gesture—ask her to wait before I give Damiano my final answer.
“I’ll be ready.”
I hang up and go to my wife without fear that I will be falsely accused of violence. The true violence is invisible, silent, painless, and it has already started.
One day in late August, the volcano tried to destroy everything around it.
The lava flowed in all directions, destroying foothill cities before hardening to porous, black rock. It was the spitting ash that was deadly, and the wind decided to push it over Pompeii—not Naples.
Every schoolchild learns that their ancestors lived because of the wind, and what any child can tell you is that the wind can change any minute, and rich or poor, young or old, strong or weak—you cannot fight the wind once it’s decided where to blow.
Before my mother took me on a climb up the volcano that shaped my horizon, I wasn’t that different from any of the other kids. We had nothing, but I wasn’t the only one. My mother cleaned the rooms at the hotel and sometimes brought home fancy chocolate. She’d hide it and give me clues to its location. When I found it, I’d insist on sharing with her, and she’d cut it in half with a knife. We tapped them together like wine glasses.
She told me that when she saw me with the other kids, she could tell I was like my father, and that men like him and me had no choice but to rule over others. This was the opposite of everything I experienced outside the walls of our apartment.
When I came home from school that day, Mamma took my books from my bag. She chattered about wrongs done to her by her father. Grandma dying out of spite. When she got like this, I usually ran outside to be with my friends, but tha
t day was different.
“You have a purpose, Santino,” she said, stuffing sandwiches and a bottle of water into my bag. “You’re meant to be a great man. They won’t believe it, but you are. We just have to prove it to them. Go get a pair of socks.”
I did as I was told, wondering…socks? Why would she put socks and sandwiches in my book bag? Where were we going?
Giovanna—the most popular girl at school—was making a black and red scubidù for my belt. The twist of two plastic strings was going to be three inches long, one inch for every year we’d been friends, which should never have happened since she was always so sparkling and beautiful and my clothes weren’t always clean and never fit right. She hadn’t ever made one for a boy before, and she said she’d be done by that night. If Mamma wanted to prove I was special, all she had to do was wait for Giovanna to be done with her gift.
“Will we be home for dinner?” My question was timid, and I avoided Giovanna as the reason I wanted to get back. I was eight. Maybe nine.
To this day, I don’t know what triggered my mother. I just didn’t want it to be me.
She shrugged. “It’s up to God.”
So I prayed.
We got on a tour bus to a parking lot at the base of Vesuvius, which looked a lot like the rest of Naples. The other passengers chatted and pointed out the window. They were on a pleasure trip to a corpse—hiking up the spine of a dead god. My mother looked straight ahead with her mouth set firm. She and I were on a sacred mission to find the source of its power. I held this in my head along with the grumble in my stomach and the setting sun—at the same time, I held out the hope that I’d get home in time to accept the scubidù.
When the rest of the travelers trekked to the start of the trail that would lead them point to point up a safe, guard-railed path to the peak, my mother led me in the other direction. Once we were out of sight, she pulled me aside and put my jacket on me.
The sun was setting, and the wind was picking up.
It was January, and down in Naples, nights only got a few degrees above freezing. She told me to keep my mittens on even if my hands got sweaty, because it would get colder up there, and it did.
