The Girl at the Border

by Leslie Archer

  “But don’t you need to ask your folks?” Orfeo asked when she accepted his invitation. “Don’t you need to call ’em or something? Else they’ll worry about you.”

  “As long as I take a couple of hours to get home and fix dinner,” she said, “it’ll be okay.”

  Orfeo’s thick eyebrows scrunched up like a Muppet’s. Then he shrugged. “We eat at seven.”

  “No problem,” she said. “I’ll see you at six thirty.”

  Orfeo lived in the far western precincts of Fourteenth Street, in one of the row tenements so old all the sharp edges had been worn off the corners of the brownstones. The last vestiges of the Western European immigrant waves had mostly departed decades ago—Irish, Spaniards, and Italians, barbers, window dressers, bartenders, housekeepers, masons, waiters, carpenters, shipping clerks, messengers, beef slingers at the nearby Meatpacking District, and the enterprising owners of a shoe-repair shop, a deli market. All gone now, giving way to a mixture of working-class Hispanics and a growing number of young, upwardly mobile Caucasian families.

  “So,” he said just after he had opened the front door with a key that looked like an antique, “now you must tell me about your parents, even if it’s the bare minimum.” As if this was the price of admission to his home and hearth.

  She thought about how she would go about explaining the inexplicable. “Let’s see,” she said, stalling for time. “My mother’s a ghost. She could be living in Paris or Istanbul or around the corner.” She paused, summoning up a healthy serving of chutzpah, as her insightful English teacher, Mr. Solomon, a Jew of the old school, would say. “As for my father, he’s always been a hardworking guy, holding down two jobs. That was before my mother left us. He wore himself out for her.” She heard the bitterness in her voice. Judging by his expression, Orfeo had, too, but she didn’t care.

  The pressed-tin-ceilinged vestibule smelled of cooking grease, fried spices, and old leather. A narrow, recursive staircase graced with a volute newel post and beautifully turned balusters led steeply upward. The handrail, polished to a dull luster by time and calloused palms, was cool and silken under her hand.

  As they approached the first landing, she saw an arched niche in the wall ahead. When she asked Orfeo about it, he said, “For bringing down the dead. Coffins are too long to make the turn otherwise.”

  This was her introduction to the matter-of-fact manner in which people with one foot in the Old World viewed the continuum of life and death. Deep inside her, she was wary of their sainted forebears.

  Reaching the third floor, Orfeo led her down a hallway so narrow they were obliged to walk single file. The door was flung open even before he could put key to lock. A round-faced woman with flushed cheeks and wisps of damp hair coiled across her forehead smiled broadly, and when Orfeo introduced them, Sofia drew the girl to her prodigious bosom, sheltering her with her arms and showering her with kisses.

  “For so long Orfeo has spoken about you and promised to bring you home.” She had a voice like a trained soprano, high and clear and inherently musical. “Now, at last, you’re here.”

  In this effusive way was Laurel welcomed into Orfeo’s Italian home as a member of the family. An orphan coming in from the increasingly cold and dark city streets. Somewhere deep inside her she was wary, holding back much of her real self, hiding it from these people who opened their arms to her. This came as naturally to her as breathing.

  The apartment was a bubbling warren, filled to the brim with Orfeo and Sofia’s three children, a boy of eight and two girls, twelve and thirteen; an uncle and aunt, apparently feuding, from opposite sides of the family; and most notably Orfeo’s mother, whom everyone called Nonna, rather than her Christian name, Rosa.

  Laurel’s first impression of Nonna was of an old, crooked Italian woman with voluminous white hair, tied severely back in a bun at the nape of her neck. Nonna’s face was a cameo from another, gilded age. Her gaze was curious, keen as the blade of a knife. She wore a flowered housedress; old-fashioned lace-up shoes, blocky as a man’s; and a sprightly yellow apron. Cradled in the crook of Nonna’s arm was a bundle wrapped in layers of pure-white cloth that Laurel at first took for an infant. Nonna would not let it go, no matter what else she was doing.

  Laurel made friends with the girls as if it was nothing at all. Their shared computer wasn’t working correctly. She sat down in front of it and within three minutes had identified two viruses and three Trojans piggybacking on sketchy executable files the girls had downloaded. In those days viruses were few and far between, and those that did exist were rudimentary, as hackers were just starting to experiment with them. She got rid of them all, discovered a tricky rootkit virus, which took her fifteen minutes to clear out. Then she restarted the operating system, and all was as it had been before the infections. The girls were so grateful they listened intently as she tutored them on being more careful about what they downloaded.

  As suppertime neared, Laurel was astonished to see that the bundle Nonna was cradling wasn’t a baby at all but a huge ball of dough. Orfeo, laughing, explained that Nonna needed to keep the dough warm while it cured, so to speak. Nonna’s hands might have crepey skin, but they were as strong as a man’s, as capable as the finest craftsman’s. Thirty-five minutes later they were all sitting down to a feast of fresh salad and the best pizza Laurel could ever remember tasting.

  “Buono?” Nonna inquired of her from across the table.

  And Laurel, ever the natural linguist, ever the bookworm, grown up at light speed, said, “Sì, sì, Nonna. E’ delizioso. Mille grazie,” which brought a big smile to Nonna’s gorgeously creased face, a Renaissance portrait, a Madonna in comme il faut decline, while all around them raucous laughter radiated like a halo.

  Afterward, Nonna gathered all the children, Laurel included, and bundled them off to the compact city church on Eighteenth Street for a late Mass, this being All Saints’ Day, a Holy Day of Obligation on the Church calendar. Nonna made sure Laurel sat next to her. “Believe it or not,” she said softly, intimately, “there are lessons to be learned in high places.” By this, Laurel took her to mean holy places; even she, so far from God or faith of any kind, intuited that.

  Nonna pointed out the acts and scenes of the Mass but fell silent when the sermon began.

  “Today, we take example from the book of Job,” the priest said. “We hear the word of God through Job’s trials and lamentations. ‘God has made my heart faint,’ Job cries to the heavens. ‘The Almighty has terrified me. If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face!’ What does this mean? God has forsaken Job. He is nowhere to be found—not in the shingle of land on which Job stands; not in the depths of the sea, among gliding monsters; not even in the bird singing its sweet song on the hilltop behind Job. God has turned his face away from Job, who has, after all, been God’s faithful servant in every way.”

  Laurel, thinking of chapter 9 in Moby-Dick, where Father Mapple delivered his terrifying sermon on Jonah and the whale, was both electrified and spellbound.

  “‘God,’ Job asks in utter despair, ‘what more doth thou require of me?’

  “And the answer is this, my friends: God requires everything of you and nothing at all. God requires only faith. Faith to set aside all earthly treasures, for they are not treasures at all. Acquisitions of money, properties, power are fetters that bind you to the earth, that blind you to God’s words, numb you to God’s love.

  “You who are as Job once was are alienated from your family, your community, your country. From yourself. You cannot hear God. Neither can you experience God’s divine love. But, hark, you are here now, and here in God’s house you will hear his words; you will feel his love. This is my promise to you. What you experience now is the beginning of faith. Because God is within each and every one of you. Each and every one of you has the power within him to return from the wilderness in which you’ve been lost. To be human is to change: this is one of the greatest gifts God had bestowed on us. You hav
e the power to change. You have the power to redefine yourselves, to become better.”

  Afterward, Nonna did not insist that Laurel take Communion. Laurel watched her herding Orfeo’s three children down the center aisle, there to take into their mouths the blood and body of Christ. Laurel, who had never before seen such a rite, though already she was well read enough not to be ignorant of it, found something of the barbaric in it, something atavistic, so primitive that it might even have preceded the Catholic Church itself. It was, in its own way, akin to the scene in a TV documentary she had seen of a crocodile, a survivor of a prehistoric age, eating a goat. The terror in the goat’s devil eyes as it was being devoured was impossible to forget.

  She mentioned none of this to Orfeo, who asked in his good-natured manner what she thought of a Catholic Mass when she trooped into the overly hot apartment, Nonna gasping at their heels. Instead, she gave a more measured answer: “The priest seemed to think that alienation is the flip side of faith.”

  “And how do you feel about that?”

  “I think alienation has to do with feeling different.”

  “True. But it also has to do with depression. Seriously depressed people feel themselves isolated, misunderstood, or, worse, ignored. Could be this is how sociopathic behavior is born, tested, tolerated, and, finally, embraced.”

  “Are you talking about anyone we know?” she said with a sly smile.

  They had cake Nonna had baked that afternoon. The adults had coffee, the children milk. While Sofia and Nonna cleared away the dishes, Orfeo ducked into his small bedroom, returning with a guitar, and for the next hour and a half he played and sang plangent Italian folk songs, composed long ago in the verdant hills of Tuscany. His singing voice was revelatory, angelic. He ended the impromptu concert with “Maremma Amara,” which told of the hardship of life in Tuscany during a time when Saracen pirates were sacking the cities and towns along the coast. In those days malaria had been rampant. The Etruscans had begun an extensive project to drain the marshlands in an attempt to create more arable land. As the Romans rose to power, they continued the complex blueprint laid out by their forebears. But the fall of their overextended and decadent empire returned the Maremma and its surrounds to their primeval and perilous state. Thousands of men seeking their fortunes died there, hence the song’s title, “Bitter Maremma.”

  All this was described to Laurel and the other children by Orfeo in a voice effusive with drama. She had the impression the kids had heard the story many times before; all the same they seemed as rapt as she by this lovingly told slice of history.

  When she announced her departure, Orfeo touched her arm. “Let me walk you home.”

  “Thank you, Orfeo, but I’d rather be alone.” She shrugged. “I’m used to being alone.”

  “Were you alone this evening?”

  She scrunched up her face. “Of course not.”

  “Piccola,” he said, his level gaze on her, “everyone needs a home, especially those who think they can do without.”

  Out on the street in front of Orfeo’s building, Laurel turned to head east on Fourteenth Street; then, almost immediately, she turned back. As she looked up at the warm, gentle light streaming from Orfeo’s apartment, tears started to overflow her eyes. There’s a family up there, she thought. A real family. Generations. They have swept me off the street, out of the cold. They have taken me to their bosom. In that moment, it was never more clear to her what she had been missing, what she never had, what she might never have, despite Orfeo’s family’s warmth and generosity of spirit. She had never met people like them. Perhaps she never would again.

  But of course there was more to it than that, and the true poignancy of the latitude and longitude, as Melville would put it, of her situation threatened to drown her. A longing rose in her with such strength she nearly staggered. Family, people who loved you, a place to belong. Not even up there, in that warm, fragrant apartment.

  She raised her hand to wipe the tears from her cheeks but checked herself in midmotion. Those tears were an unexpected explosion, like fireworks lighting up the night. They were a badge, proof that she was really and truly alive.

  TEN

  The resurrection of Cul took up all their daytime hours. The more they uncloaked her, the more amazing she became. There had never been a piece of Etruscan art unearthed in such a perfect state. “As if she had been in suspended animation,” he said. “Partly that’s due to Crete itself. The dryness of the climate and the nature of the rock here. Where I worked previously in southern Tuscany—especially around Vulci, Tarquinia, and Orvieto, for instance, where the majority of sites are found—the stone is tufa, very soft, porous, embedded with harder pebbles that fall off over time, leaving holes and gaps. Here, Cul is whole, complete. A miracle.”

  He pointed out the vertical indentation down the center of her forehead, the shape and position of the ears, the musculature and tendons of the legs. “All of which,” he said, “are consistent with carvings from the last quarter of the sixth century BC.” Brushing away a film of grit that had settled on her nose, he continued, “What I find personally fascinating is that even though Cul was carved to strike fear and dread in those coming upon it, she has the opposite effect on you.”

  “I think she’s cute.”

  Richard stopped what he was doing. “Cute?”

  “Well, maybe not cute, per se. But she speaks to me.”

  “One lost soul to another.”

  “Yes, but you see, after all these centuries, she’s been found. By us.” She pointed. “Look at that face, Richard. She loves us.”

  He laughed, shaking his head as he went back to work.

  Five days later, Richard and Angela uncovered the left forepaw of Cul’s consort. Angela, who had been reading up on the Etruscans in between writing her unanswered emails to Bella, immediately named him Culsans, the god of doors and doorways, the Etruscan precursor to the Roman two-faced god, Janus: one aspect watching the world of the living, the other observing the underworld. Her supposition of his gender was confirmed the instant they freed his head, which, unlike Cul’s, sprouted a central mane that began just above his eyes and, as they discovered a day later, ran up and over his skull and down onto his muscular back.

  Richard was obviously pleased and impressed by her research. But he was even more pleased that the two tomb guardians were four and a half feet apart. “Just the right width for the entrance to the tomb,” he said. But they could not dare tackle drilling through what Richard confirmed was solid rock—perfectly set blocks, Egyptian-style: no mortar; Cretan granite, not Tuscan tufa—until both Cul and Culsans had been completely freed from their entombment. With the discovery of the second guardian, excitement ran like electricity through the already buzzing site. There developed a veritable scrum of professors and archaeologists who had abandoned their own finds to work at Richard’s site. The area was too small to accommodate everyone who wanted to pitch in. To Angela’s great surprise, Richard left it to her to choose the two or three people who would help them each day. From Kieros’s point of view it was bad enough that Richard had hijacked his dig, but when the discovery drew members of his crew away from the Cretan areas that were near and dear to him, he almost had an embolism. But there was nothing he could do. The discovery was its own unstoppable force.

  As for Angela, the archaeologists’ respect for her work with Richard and their desire to stay in her good graces so they could work on the Etruscan find vied with their opprobrium over her affair with her mentor. Quite quickly, Angela realized that his decision to allow her to pick their assistants was deliberate; he was conferring part of his power to her, someone who, until he arrived, had been treated with disdain. Because Richard was unperturbed by rumors, she resolved to ignore them, looking each man in the eye as she picked him or passed him over each morning. As rumors will, the stories became wilder and wilder, until Kieros, driven to distraction, as Richard had rightfully foreseen, called a halt to all gossip. “Return to your work
,” he admonished his staff one evening at dinnertime, when they were all assembled. “Has it lost its importance?” He glared at each and every person as his gaze circled the room. “Have you forgotten why you’re here? Have you forgotten who you are? Shall you force me to ask the museum to replace you?”

  Later, outside the communal tent, he took Richard and Angela aside. “Look, you two, what you get up to on your own time is your business.”

  “Stay out of my personal life,” Richard said.

  “We’re both wholly focused on Cul and Culsans and what they’re guarding,” Angela added.

  Kieros looked hard at both of them. “Just be more discreet, will you, hmm?”

  Angela realized that Richard had been right about this too. No matter what they said or did, no one would believe they weren’t having a torrid affair à la Liz and Dick during the filming of Cleopatra. The die had been cast; it wouldn’t matter if she moved back into her own tent now. Richard had seen this coming the first night she’d come to sleep in his tent, and yet he’d made no move to send her away. He knew what sleeping next to him meant to her. He knew what people would think and didn’t care. She loved him more and more each day, in glittering moments like this, seeing in him the love and care she wished she’d had from her mother and father.

  Hey, Bella,

  This is Angela, your father’s assistant. He told me it would be all right if I emailed you. He’s told me so much about you I feel I already know you tho we haven’t even met! There’s so much happening here, and it’s happening so fast it’s made my head spin. We’ve discovered that Cul has a mate. He’s fiercer looking than Cul, tho maybe that’s just my imagination. Or it could be his male energy. Who knows? I think abt you, believe it or not. So many things abt both our childhoods that line up, like the moon & the earth during an eclipse.