by Glenn Dixon
She stared at her feet, not saying anything. Then she looked up at me with a lost expression on her face.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I almost died,” she said.
“What?”
“I was fifteen.” She gulped in a breath of air. “They rushed me to the hospital in an ambulance.”
“Jesus. What happened?”
“I had a severe allergic reaction. I couldn’t breathe.” She shook her head. “My skin turned bright red like a boiled lobster. Except for my fingernails—they were blue. Then . . . then . . .”
“It’s okay,” I said. I reached for her, palming my hand on her shoulder.
“I’d had allergic reactions before, but they were getting progressively worse each time. This one almost killed me, so I thought the next one . . .”
“What caused it?”
“Walnuts,” she said. “Stupid walnuts. I’m allergic to all nuts, but some are worse than others. Some will kill me.” She gulped in another breath and calmed a little. “After that, I decided to live my life the way I wanted. If it was going to be short, then I didn’t want to die with any regrets.”
“That’s not such a bad way to live.”
“And here I am,” she said. “I’m still alive, a full-grown adult. And I’m lost. I’m lost, Glenn. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve lived all over the world but I don’t feel like I belong anywhere.”
She looked totally despondent in that moment. There was nothing I could say to help. “Come here.” I wrapped my arms around her and she sank into me.
“You are still here,” I whispered into her ear. “And you’re in Italy again.”
She pulled away from me a little. “This was where I came first,” she said. “Italy. I wanted to live here, and you know how that worked out.” She shook her head. “Nothing in my life has turned out the way I expected.”
“Maybe nobody’s life turns out how they expect it.”
“I know, but . . .”
“Are you going to be all right?”
“Yeah.” She wiped at the corner of her eye.
“Giovanna will probably be back soon,” I said. “Should we . . . ?”
She nodded and trailed after me, back to our office.
The letter from Fiona was still sitting on the desk, slightly askew. I thumped down into my chair. “Maybe,” I said, “we’ll just answer this one later.”
Desiree sat, expressionless.
“Here,” I said, pulling in a sheet of the Club di Giulietta stationery toward me. I hunched over it, writing a sentence in the bottom corner by the graphic of Juliet. Desiree watched me. I reached for a pair of scissors and cut off the strip I’d written on. On the paper, in my very best printing, I had written, “To thine own self be true.” I passed the tiny scroll to Desiree.
“What’s that for?” she asked.
“For your locket,” I said.
Her fingers were already on the locket, opening the latch.
It fit perfectly.
* * *
That night, Desiree and I bought tickets to the opera. I didn’t tell her that I’d gone the year before and that it had been a colossal letdown. Then again, this time we were seeing Aida, not Romeo and Juliet.
The performance didn’t start until dark, so we strolled around the piazza in the gathering dusk, the sky above us a delicate, pale blue. A single star floated above rooftops and in the distance the coliseum heaved itself up, ancient and foreboding.
I realize I haven’t done this remarkable place justice. The coliseum, first of all, is literally at the center of Verona in a vast cobblestone square called the Piazza Brà. At one end of the piazza sits the neoclassical city hall. At the other end, the place is lined with cafés, like Paris, with outdoor tables where you can sit and watch people promenade by.
In the middle, though, the Roman coliseum rears up above everything else. This stadium once held thirty thousand people. The pink-and-white limestone blocks were quarried from the nearby hills of Valpolicella and they reflect the sky, leaden in the rain but a shimmering ethereal light in the sunshine. About a thousand years ago, the outer curtain wall collapsed in an earthquake, so what’s left is a central structure of two levels. Each level features seventy-two arches, and each arch is as big as a train tunnel. Around the back, near the ticket office, the only remaining wall from the original outer ring still stands, rising up another level above the rest, and there you can fully appreciate the glory that was Rome.
Desiree was entranced. We’d dressed up for the opera, and when she’d first come out of her room at Emiliano’s, wearing a yellow summer dress, her hair shimmering and cascading down her shoulders, I had fumbled for words. “Wow” was all I could manage.
“You just smarten it up, mister,” she said, but her eyes were dancing.
We melted into the tuxedoed crowds milling about the entrance. I’d forgotten to bring something for us to sit on, so I steered Desiree toward a stall that sold cushions and we bought a couple. I also picked up a little maroon booklet that described the story of Aida—with the complete libretto in both the original Italian and in English on the facing page. We strode in through one of the train-tunnel archways, up a set of weathered marble stairs to our seats near the top of the stadium. I couldn’t help but think of all those who had climbed these steps before us—those who had come to see the gladiators and staged hunts of exotic animals.
Tonight, it was the story of an Egyptian slave girl who fell in love with a captain in the army. The music is some of the greatest ever composed, the masterpiece of Giuseppe Verdi, and the crowd was buzzing with excitement. We sat high up to the left of the stage with some fifteen thousand people filling the seats below us. To the west, the sun had already set in an apricot sky and, as it bruised and darkened, a dozen klieg spotlights blasted up into the night, bright shafts of illumination that flickered back and forth across the clouds. Hawkers sold cold beer and water and popcorn. Across from us, the outer ring of Roman arches rose above the crowds, the old stones silhouetted in purple. And as the warm night settled over us and the crowds stilled, the people below us began to light tiny handheld candles. The klieg lights shuttered off and in the blackness, the candles glimmered, tens of thousands of them, like stars. Desiree leaned into me.
A single spotlight illuminated the conductor, who marched onto the stage, tails flapping, a sweep of long gray hair bouncing off his shoulders. The crowd roared as he stepped onto a podium. He raised his baton, and the glorious music began.
The stage lights came up and we were in a palace complex in ancient Egypt. Painted columns lined a throne room, and in the middle of it all sat the great pharaoh. The string section swelled and a long line of ghostly figures paraded out onto the stage. Behind them the palace complex rose, four or five stories tall, with figures scurrying up into it, Egyptian soldiers, all a part of the story, clutching spears that flashed in the stage lights.
Of course the singing was in Italian, and even Desiree soon pressed over to read along in my maroon booklet. At one point, about a hundred slave girls in diaphanous gowns performed a ballet. They swept around the pharaoh like gusts of wind. Desiree had been a ballerina herself. She watched, enthralled, shuffling over closer to me as the evening cooled, until her shoulder was nestled into mine.
It was almost eleven o’clock by the time the first intermission was called, and when the lights blinked on, the crowd bustled around us, standing, laughing, heading for the exits. “Fifteen minutes,” Desiree said, translating the announcement that had come over the sound system.
“Let’s go stretch our legs,” I said. It felt good to get up, to join the streams funneling down the timeworn steps. It didn’t take long until we were out on the piazza again. We walked past the props for the other operas, and arrived at an archway that was lit up. It must have been a dressing room, because a dozen or so men lounged there, all wearing Egyptian headdresses, their eyes lined with dark kohl, smoking cigarettes and chatting. One sat on a wooden k
itchen chair outside the archway checking texts on his iPhone. He looked up as we passed, this character from three thousand years ago, the blue glow of his phone shimmering on his painted face.
The crowds spilled around us, revelers in jeans and silver-haired men in tuxedos, their hair-sprayed wives on their arms, all pearls and evening dresses. We weaved through them, farther out into the darkness, across the cobblestones, to a low fountain, and we sat on its ledge.
I opened the little maroon booklet.
“What happens next?” asked Desiree.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” I held the booklet up and away from her.
“Hey!” she said, laughing, snatching the book out of my hands. She read some lines out loud. “Farewell, thou vale of sorrow. Brief dream of joy condemned to end in woe.”
She heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Why do all these love stories have such sad endings?”
“Stories need drama,” I said.
“I don’t need any more drama.”
“No, me neither.” It occurred to me then that I had let go of some of my sorrow. I wasn’t thinking about Claire anymore. I was here, now, in the present. And at that moment, I really didn’t want to be anywhere else.
A gong sounded. “Time to go back,” Desiree said.
The second scene of act 2 began with the triumphal entry of soldiers, hundreds of them, a row of desolate prisoners between the columns, spear points edged into their haggard backs. A march boomed out from the orchestra pit, a martial blast of victory. And then came the horses, great white stallions, heads held high, prancing, golden harnesses sparkling in the glare of the stage lights.
If I had to guess, I’d say there were three hundred performers on the stage.
“Spectacular,” I said. Below us, Aida made her plans to escape into the desert, to flee with the one she loved. In the next scene, a boat drifted along the Nile and an aria arose. The audience began to sing along, a chorus of several thousand people rumbling behind the orchestra like thunder. I felt a shuddering chill zipper down the back of my neck at the beauty of it all.
By the time it ended, Aida and her lover were imprisoned in a vault, doomed to their deaths, almost like Romeo and Juliet, and a quiet grief fell over the crowd. And as the opera drew to a close, even as the last strains of the violins lapped across the ancient stones, the stage lights dimmed and the entire coliseum stood deathly silent for a moment, until a roar erupted, a bellow of approval and shouts of Bravo! Bravo! Bravo! The applause went on for ten long minutes, the conductor forced to walk the length of the stage twice, probably fifty yards from the wings to the podium, while the crowd chanted and clapped. Desiree had her hand up over her mouth, mesmerized. “Amazing,” she said. “Absolutely amazing.”
It was well after midnight when we spilled back onto the piazza. Taxis shunted the curb, though most of the concertgoers seemed to just drift off into the night.
Sometimes, I thought, the real magic is not in the spectacular. Sometimes it’s much more subtle. After the crowds and the timpani and the oratorios, we walked through the gates of the medieval walls, the stars above us, and Desiree’s hand slipped quietly into mine.
* * *
The next morning, a sunbeam slanted in through my window. I came to with a start and realized it was already late. I dressed quickly and stumbled out to the front room. Desiree was sitting at our breakfast table, long finished eating, working on her laptop.
“Good morning, sunshine,” she said.
I wanted to say something, but all that came out was a grunt.
“We have a free day,” she said. “Giovanna e-mailed to say not to bother coming in this morning.”
“Really?”
“But we’re still meeting Anna at three,” she said.
“So what do you want to do?’
“See more of Verona, don’t you think?”
“Sure.”
She stood up. “How about I show you the Italy I know.”
“Okay.” I wasn’t sure what she meant.
“First,” she said, “we go to a bar.”
“A bar? Isn’t it kind of early?”
“A coffee bar for cappuccino and bomboloni.”
“What’s that?”
“Pastries,” she said, “with cream inside. You just wait.”
We headed west, into a part of Verona I didn’t know. Desiree was in a buoyant mood. She skipped along at a good clip, her face alight. “It’s great to be here,” she said. “I really didn’t think I would ever come back.”
“Because of Rafael?”
“Yeah, mostly. He was a huge part of my life here. We thought we were soul mates. It was us against the world.” She gave a sort of half chuckle. “Did you know in Italy it’s bad luck to get married on a Tuesday?”
“So you got married on a Tuesday.”
“Yeah. We didn’t care.”
“Why did you get married at all?”
“There,” she said. “There’s a coffee bar.” She beelined across the street and we went into a little shop. It smelled of old wood and coffee beans. A few men were leaning against the bar, one reading a newspaper, two others engaged in conversation. Desiree said something to the man behind the bar and he swung off to the espresso machine, an ancient thing with levers and dials, and steam hissing out of a pipe. She pressed in against the bar, just like the men. “I needed the marriage certificate,” she said, picking up the conversation again. “So I could keep my visa, you know. That was the only reason we got married.”
Our coffees arrived in mugs no bigger than teacups. And then came two small plates, each with a paper doily under a fat, round pastry. They were coated in icing sugar and still warm from the oven.
She stared at her cappuccino but didn’t reach for it yet. “Within the first year, everything changed. Everybody thought of us as a married couple—except for the two of us. The worst thing was being called Rafael’s wife. I hated that.”
I poured some sugar into my coffee and waited for her to continue.
“It’s just . . . it was family, I guess. In Italy everything is about the family. You have to know that. His family had a business and he . . . Well, his family wouldn’t let him go. I finally realized that he would never leave his little town. He couldn’t.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Almost ten years have passed,” she said. “A long time. I did a master’s degree. I went back to my original plan of working toward a PhD but . . . I don’t know, that didn’t completely work out either.”
I took a sip of my coffee. It was so powerful I winced.
“There’s more,” she said. “There’s something else I should probably tell you.”
Now what?
She had just begun to speak when the cathedral bells started ringing, a long string of them. When they finally tapered off into silence, I said, “You were going to tell me something.”
“Ah, no,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.” She reached for her cappuccino. “Let’s just enjoy the rest of the day.”
* * *
After that, we wandered the cobblestone streets. I steered her away from the Casa di Giulietta knowing that we’d be there at three to meet Anna. By two o’clock, the sun was high in a bright blue sky. It was still a little cool for early September, but at least the rain had stopped.
We picked up some pizza to go from another little shop. The slices were square and wrapped in thick brown paper so they wouldn’t drip on you. One street over, we found a tiny square with a covered portico where we could sit and eat our pizza. Washing hung from a line on a window above us and, across from the pillars, a green door had a knocker of brass in the shape of a small human head. Behind us, a knot of children took turns kicking a soccer ball against a wall.
“I still think a lot about my students,” I said, watching the kids. “I remember this one assignment I used to give before Romeo and Juliet. It was a sort of questionnaire you had to answer. It wasn’t for marks.”
“A questionnaire ab
out what?” Desiree peeled back the paper and took a bite of her pizza.
“It was about your internal locus of control.”
“About your what?”
“Internal locus of control. It means how much control you think you have over your own life versus the outside things controlling you. Fate, I guess.”
Desiree considered her pizza.
“All the students had to answer this questionnaire, then add up their responses to get a number on a scale. I can’t remember, but I think it was something like one to thirty.”
She took another small bite.
“The lower the number, the more you believe you have complete control over your life, the higher the number, the more you believe that external forces control your life.”
“Did you do it yourself?” asked Desiree. It was a good question.
“Yes,” I said.
“And?”
“I scored a nine.”
“So you don’t believe in fate.”
“No, not really.”
“But a nine,” she said, “doesn’t that mean you believe just a little?”
“Here’s the thing. This test, the instructions on it, said that a seven or an eight is just about optimal. It’s the healthiest, mentally speaking.”
Desiree scrunched up her nose. “Why?”
“Apparently most of the CEOs of major corporations are sevens or eights. Billionaires are almost always sevens.”
“Not sure that makes them better people.”
“No.”
“Are you going to eat your pizza?” she asked.
I looked at my slice. The cheese was cooling, but it still smelled quite good. “I guess,” I went on, trying to finish my thoughts, “just the belief that you can control things allows you to be more successful.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But some things are definitely out of our control. I don’t care what anyone says.”
The kids had stopped kicking the soccer ball. One small boy was looking over at us. I took a bite of my pizza.