by D. L. Smith
Throwing open Carmen’s door she discovered the bed empty. Since the hallway was clear Marta concluded that her idiot daughter was by now on the ledge outside her window, around the corner, and headed for the empty rose trellis.
Carrying her shoes in a small handbag, Carmen worked her way along the wobbly old tiles of the narrow overhang that skirted the back of the hotel as quickly as possible, but every time she stepped the tiles slipped or cracked beneath her bare feet. Her escape route was less substantial than she remembered. The roof gave an odd moaning sound and it occurred to her that if she fell she could be seriously bruised or even scratched, and her best skirt might be torn. She just needed to get over to the trellis by the kitchen door, and then she could climb down it like a ladder.
When she had imagined this evening’s escapade, it had not included danger, pain, or ruined clothes. The prospect of an evening with Solly Puce wasn’t even all that appealing, but Carmen had her reasons. It wasn’t like she didn’t know what Solly wanted—at least, she thought she did. She had seen enough kissing in the movies, and her girlfriends certainly talked about it enough. Carmen knew what Solly had in mind—and he would just have to learn to live with disappointment. He promised to take her to Grosseto and Grosseto had movie theaters and nightclubs and bars where people danced. It shouldn’t take her long to dump Solly for some rich man with a nice car.
Scrambling down the bare rose trellis, she heard Salvatore Puce stop his ridiculous scooter down at the bottom of the road as agreed. His timing was perfect. At the far end of the flagstone path she could see a moonlit figure step out from behind the stone wall. Of course, it was too dark to actually make out his face, but even in the pale blue light of the moon there was no mistaking Solly Puce’s twitching.
Solly had an unpleasant quirk that was more than just a series of disturbing twitches, it was more like an eerie ritual. Without warning, in mid-sentence sometimes, he would suddenly jerk his head backward as if tossing thick locks of luxurious hair off his forehead. He would then roll his head to the left and rotate his right shoulder in a great circle, like a stretch designed to relieve tension in a muscular neck or shoulder. This sequence happened dazzlingly fast and was followed up by an abrupt shake of his whole torso—much as if his body were a sack of randomly disconnected bones— and this tremor put everything back in proper position. The truth was, Solly didn’t have luxurious locks. His black hair was piled and greased into a pompadour of preposterous proportions that wouldn’t budge in gale force winds. And he certainly didn’t need to relieve tension in a muscular anything. He was not only shorter than Carmen, but one of his most amazing features was that anyone could be that skinny and live. Actually, this whole series of bizarre spasms and tics that Solly performed with clocklike regularity found their origins in old American rock and roll movies of the 1950s, and if the routine weren’t so weird, it would have been comical. But, in his mind, his moves projected a powerful and dangerous virility, and he knew that women found his contortions irresistibly sexy—witness Carmen Fortino hurrying down the flagstone path toward him.
As she drew closer Solly started to speak, but his eyes suddenly became wide with terror. Then, even more unexpectedly, he performed what seemed an odd variation of his predictable twitch. His new little dance followed a strange moment when Carmen could have sworn she saw something like a rock bounce off Solly Puce’s pimply forehead with a surprisingly deep thud, but it was hard to tell in the moonlight. For some reason Solly’s legs did turn to jelly and he staggered around in a complete circle with both hands gripping his forehead. When he finally wobbled back into place and looked toward Carmen, his face was white as a sheet, except for a large dark smudge in the center of his brow. Then he shrieked in terror and Carmen turned in time to see a giant apparition striding toward her with what appeared to be an ax raised in the air—or perhaps it was a scythe. This shadowed Grim Reaper was moving fast and its obvious intent was death. Carmen’s scream mingled with Solly’s girlish shriek and she stumbled backward into the herb garden, landing painfully in a prickly rosemary bush.
Marta swung her shovel at Solly’s head with all her might, but the little weasel fell backward into the dusty road as her shovel crashed against the stone wall with the resounding clang of an alarm bell and a surprising flash of sparks. As quickly as she could recover, the shovel was raised over her head again and, this time, directed down at the terrified boy screaming in the dirt. But he was already twisting and spinning down the road like a top, and by the time the shovel landed he’d rolled away. Marta strode forward to get a better swing at his backside, but by now Solly was crawling down the lane faster than most people could run. So Marta shouted something indistinguishable after him. Even she had no idea what exactly she said, but her intent was clear— “Return and die!”
By now Carmen was on her feet and screaming at her mother for this attack on her independence, but all of the adolescent outrage in the world was no match for Marta’s wrath. When her mother turned on her with the shovel still held high, still eager to dig someone’s grave, Carmen discovered how seriously she was overmatched. Marta’s voice was so swift and intense, her threats so honest, her daughter was chilled with fear. In the distance poor Solly Puce yelled some frightened vendettas and sobbed a feeble promise of vengeance as his old Vespa putt-putted down the hill and Carmen listened to her chance for bright lights and a reckless night disappear into the darkness. Amid a hail of curses and tears Carmen retreated into the house.
When she was alone, Marta dropped the shovel and sank to her knees on the path as silence enclosed her. Marta didn’t cry often, but when the river overflowed its banks it was usually a flash flood. The deluge passed as quickly as it came and when she was finally able, she looked into the dark sky and said simply, “Help . . .”
That was all. Help. She hadn’t intended it as a prayer. She hadn’t even intended to say it, but within that simple plea her splintered heart spoke of regret and fears and questions. It was a plea for solutions to terrors so thick and knotted that words tangled inside her like matted hair and couldn’t be spoken, only felt.
Father Elio was tired, his chest hurt, and he longed for his bed, so progress around the empty sanctuary was slow. He shuffled around turning out the main lights, unplugging the extension cord, and rehanging the old blanket over the Mystery. He managed to do all this without once meeting the eyes of the figures that watched him from the wall. It was a practiced procedure. The light bulbs were hot and he was too tired to juggle with them tonight. Everything he needed to do in his bath or bedroom he could do in the dark. Nina did everything in the dark every day and she lived every day with grace.
He extinguished the altar candles he had lit earlier in the evening and the room was finally dark. Moonlight through the upper windows spread a series of small silver pools down the center of the sanctuary and Elio sat on the stone floor in one of those small pools of moonlight thinking about his special mass. No one had come. Not one person. He had donned his robes alone, but with expectations. He had prepared the Eucharist alone, but with hope. He had knelt alone at the chancel for over two hours, praying softly and straining to hear the sound of someone entering the vestibule. No one came. Tonight he had discovered a new depth of being alone. It wasn’t loneliness. He was well acquainted with loneliness and it no longer bothered him. This was different. For the first time he felt abandonment.
Angry voices shouted somewhere off in the night. Women were arguing somewhere about something, but it was all too faint to make out and he was glad when they stopped. It was only people arguing. People argue. People fight and they say things they don’t mean, but they say them anyway. When he was a young man living in Bologna, late at night he heard people fighting all the time. Sometimes he heard them scream. It was awful when he heard distant screams. He was studying to be a priest because he wanted to help people and angry shouts in the night meant people were suffering. Priests were supposed to make things better.
He was star
tled by the sound of his own moan echoing around him and without warning his tears washed the ancient stones. A prayer escaped before he even knew he was going to pray.
“Help . . .”
Help whom? Help him? No. He was a failure and he knew why. God had rejected him—to deny him the privilege of the Holy Spirit was only justice. Elio had perpetrated his monstrous sin every day for almost fifty years. No, this was a prayer of bewilderment he felt for the people of Santo Fico. They hadn’t sinned and yet they were the ones who were being punished. They hadn’t even lost their faith. They simply no longer cared. Apathy wasn’t rejection. But it was as if God had also abandoned them, and so it was for them that he prayed for help.
In his little room down by the pier, Nonno had just finished supper when he heard what sounded like the postal boy’s motor scooter headed south out of town and he wondered who might be receiving a letter at this time of night. Actually, the gray dog heard it first, and when Nonno saw him suddenly perk up, he paid special attention too. Time had taught him to pay attention to his companion. He wasn’t really Nonno’s dog, but for many years now they’d lived together in this shed down by the wharf. The single room had once been a part of Angelo de Parma’s house, but the connecting door had been mysteriously sealed off in some previous century and Angelo had allowed Nonno and the dog to live there for so many years they’d both forgotten what the original arrangement was. Neither cared anymore anyway. The walls and roof, like so many ancient buildings, were thick and snug, but Nonno particularly liked the room because he was just across the harbor road from the bay and he loved the ocean. The dog never complained either.
Nonno had no idea why he so loved the sea. It probably had something to do with his past and so he resolved that he would never know. There was so much in his past that was blank he’d finally stopped questioning—not because he didn’t care, but because it was too frustrating. It was like trying to fill your hat with fog. You think you have some until you go to check it in the sunlight—then it’s gone. So much about him had evaporated under the Tuscan sun. Like his name—everyone had called him Grandfather for so long his real name was probably forgotten forever. But he didn’t care anymore.
The old people still remembered him wandering into town in the dead of winter, starving and delirious with fever. Even back then he wasn’t sure of his name or where he was from. He knew he had a wife and three sons, but to the best of anyone’s knowledge Nonno’s family were all dead, probably killed. No one knew for sure because too much war, too much killing, and too much grief had jumbled Nonno’s senses. Back then he talked angrily about killing Germans—not prudent talk in Italy during World War II. But the villagers of Santo Fico took him in and now the old man’s mind wandered around his memories much in the same way he wandered around the village—like a man lost in the clutter of his own house, searching for something significant that can be known only when discovered. Why he bore a personal guilt about the fountain’s missing water was a mystery, but most of Nonno was a mystery. He often spoke cryptically of misplaced times, or of soldiers and battles, or war in the mountains. He would ramble on about women he had known, or his lost pocket watch, or his lost sons. Nonno knew that he got confused sometimes, but then at other times he couldn’t understand why those around him were so confused.
“Like this afternoon with Nico,” he thought out loud as he wiped his dinner plate with a dirty towel. “Nico’s a good boy, but he’s so unhappy all the time,” he said to the gray dog sleeping in the corner.
As he sat on the edge of his bed and pulled off his shoes he confessed to his dozing companion, “I don’t understand why he acts like he doesn’t know me sometimes.”
But it was enough just to be around him after so many years. Nico was all he had left, so it didn’t bother him too much when sometimes the boy acted like he didn’t know his own name. Leo just passed off being called Nico as some obscure term of affection, and unfortunately there was no one in the village who knew the name of the old man’s youngest son. Nor was there anyone able to recognize Leo’s resemblance to the sorrowfully handsome boy that Nonno had buried with his own frozen hands forty years ago in the snows of the Dolomites where he and his two brothers had died fighting the Germans.
As Nonno put out the light and lay back on his cot he determined that what he should do is pray more for the boy. And so he did.
On the plains south of town, Topo stood by the side of the road and peered into the moonlit darkness trying to see if Leo was still conscious. But the star-filled sky and the low moon weren’t offering enough light, and he shuddered with a nervous chill. At least Leo’s revolting gagging had finally stopped, but now the eerie silence was bothering him. He considered moving away from the safety of the truck to search for his friend, but there might be snakes out there. So he just called again, “Leo?”
Silence.
His little truck was parked just beyond where the road turned out of the trees and then curved west across flat fields that ran on toward the ocean. From this spot to where the cliffs met the sea was only a few kilometers of dry plains filled with weeds, cactus, and rocks. The road then turned north at the headlands and ran along another kilometer of treacherously narrow cliffs to the top of the promontory until it reached Santo Fico. Topo could see a few random lights in the distance and could almost make out the bell tower silhouetted in the moonlight. He could be home and in his bed in minutes if Leo would just come back to the truck. This had not been a merry night and now it refused to end.
Topo hated Grosseto—not the whole city, just the places that Franco and Leo liked. When he allowed Leo to convince him to take their new wealth to Grosseto for a good time, he also made Leo promise that they would stay away from Il Cavallo Morto. Topo hated that place most of all.
They tried numerous bars, looking for someplace that Leo felt had the right mix of noise, smoke, and congenial company. And Topo noticed that Leo became increasingly irritated with their inability to find that perfect spot. So they kept bar hopping, always drawing nearer to where Topo feared they were headed even before he reluctantly left Santo Fico. By the time they did finally arrive at Il Cavallo Morto, Leo was not only drunk, but also generally belligerent.
It had been eighteen years since their last visit to the rough bar on the edge of Grosseto’s railroad district. In all the years since Franco’s terrible bachelor party, the seedy little saloon hadn’t changed—the clientele hadn’t improved, nothing had been cleaned, and Topo still couldn’t figure out why anyone would name a bar after a dead horse. But Il Cavallo Morto had been Franco’s favorite watering hole and now for some reason Leo was drawn to it.
It sure isn’t the happy memories, Topo thought, and their last visit burned in his mind. The night before the wedding . . . They had sat at a big round table in the back for hours, eight or ten friends—all drinking and singing. Then it got to be late. Sofia de Salvio was sitting on Franco’s lap crying and begging him not to get married and Franco was laughing. And the more he laughed, the more she cried. Then Franco said something to her—Topo couldn’t hear, but it made Sofia de Salvio laugh too. Leo was across from them with his head on the table and everyone thought he was asleep, but when Franco whispered that thing to Sofia and they both laughed, Leo was suddenly on his feet. He roared as he leapt completely across the table at Franco. The three of them—Leo, Franco, and poor Sofia de Salvio—all crashed to the ground, and then they were brawling on the filthy floor. Leo and Franco battled for almost twenty minutes and pretty much destroyed the bar, not that there was much in this bar to destroy. It was the only time Topo saw Leo win a fight with Franco, but Leo’s rage was fearful to see. When it was over Franco lay in the street and Leo took Topo’s truck. Franco and Topo had to hitch a ride back to Santo Fico. The next day at the wedding Franco walked with a limp. One of his eyes was puffed shut and his jaw was so swollen he couldn’t say “I do.” He had to nod. Topo’s truck was abandoned outside town and Leo had disappeared. Topo had to be the best man
and he lost the ring. Marta couldn’t stop crying. Later in the afternoon it rained. What a terrible wedding.
Now, standing in the dark field, waiting for his friend to stop throwing up, Topo realized that tonight had already turned out more like “the good old days” than he had hoped for. The drinking, the singing, the reminiscing had been good—but by midnight the liquor in Topo’s stomach had turned sour, he had a headache, and he wanted to go home. That was about the time that Leo decided to join a card game in a back room. He was going to win enough money to “get the hell outta this piss hole.” At least, that’s what his garbled slurs sounded like to Topo. Later there was the pushing and the shouting at the card table after he’d lost all his money. Next came the punching and the falling down in the street when they were tossed out of the bar. Then there were the protests about being cheated, followed by the bumpy ride home filled with angry threats against every male child ever born in Grosseto. Leo finally reached his peak of self-pity with a demand that Topo stop the truck, and even before the truck came to a complete halt, Leo was out the door, staggering and vomiting his way into the darkness. That was twenty minutes ago.
“Leo?”
Silence.
Straining against the moonlight, all Topo could make out were mounds of shadowy boulders and cactus. He knew that one of those motionless lumps was Leo, but since the retching noises stopped he’d lost track of which one.
“Leo? Are you okay?”
Silence.
Leo struggled to his knees and was glad it was dark. He looked terrible, that was for sure. He remembered the jacket ripping in the fight and one of the knees tore when he fell on the greasy pavement. All his money was gone and his suit was ruined. With one hand he checked the top of his head—at least he still had his hat. He tried to climb up to his feet and failed.
Topo called again from the truck. Kneeling against the low boulder Leo let out a sound. It was supposed to be a word, perhaps a phrase—something to let Topo know that he was all right. Instead what came out was the cry of an animal in pain—something terrified and trapped. Leo moaned angrily to the sky; it was as close to a prayer as anything he had uttered in years. Why had he returned? Why had God trapped him in this place again? Why did God continue to humiliate him and mock him? It may have been a prayer of sorts, but he was surprised to discover that it was also a challenge because as he knelt clenching the boulder, he felt defiance growing in his heart and he tossed contempt upward toward the night sky. No words, no real thoughts, but abstractions of anger raced in his mind and he tossed this defiance into the teeth of God. He would not accept this fate—a lifetime of disrepute in Santo Fico. No matter what it took he would escape and this time he would not be tricked into returning. He dared God to stop him.
