by Lee Gutkind
But the next day, when the talk was sharpened by the heat and the salt, the older kids would remind us how Lucia smoked, how she was one of the “absent ones,” this girl who dressed in men’s suits three times her size, this girl who was caught at night drinking and sucking up joints. Everyone knew that Lucia was headed for “the bad finish.” Not even her mother, Marta the drunk, could stop her, and her father, the Alitalia pilot, was too busy flying and womanizing to bother. Who was there to stop Lucia, who ran away at night sneaking through the window, such a pretty red-haired girl with wide green eyes, headed for a bad finish? We, the girls, we wanted Lucia’s long eyelashes and the happy red strands of her hair, but we didn’t want her life, and we certainly didn’t want that gossip, rising after each of her footsteps like a black puff of dust.
“Ghosts?” The boys laughed. “You say ghosts? She sleeps all day because she’s too tired from poking herself.”
The older kids pushed on their veins and wiggled their eyebrows. And you were supposed to know, even if you were a little one, that it meant Lucia was a heroin addict. She was a lost one, they said. It had started like a joke, one or two joints once in a while, but it ended up like that, she and her ghost stories and her tragic family: her mother who drank, her father who cheated, her brother, Fabrizio, who was a delinquent and failed all his classes (at 15 he was still in the eighth grade), and little Marzio, the youngest, who had turned stupid from taking so many slaps on the head from his drunk mother, and from those nasty, nasty boyfriends of Lucia’s who liked to use their hands, so much that Lucia sometimes sported a shiny pulpy cheek just under her eye and blamed it on the ghosts.
We local children went to Lucia’s house every afternoon, that little stucco cottage complete with solarium and draping bougainvillea, its coarse, shepherd-style, chestnut furniture a mirror reflection of ours, and we watched, through her living room’s windows, the preening Lucia with the long red hair looking at herself, her mother already too drunk to notice her. We’d shake our head at Lucia the beautiful for wearing these foolish-looking clothes, and she’d throw us a smile through the window and sometimes even asked us, “How do I look?” not realizing we were too shy to tell her that girls weren’t supposed to wear boys’ clothes, that pants and jackets on a girl didn’t look so good, and she was pazza!, crazy-crazy, for asking us. But we always nodded, because in somebody else’s house you had to be polite, and we said that she looked all right. So she glanced at herself once more, smoothing her lips with a wet finger, mussing a curl around her sweet oval face.
“Lucia, won’t you tell us about ghosts? Won’t you come and play the medium for us, for a seduta spiritica, a spiritual sitting?”
“But you kids are too young! You think it’s a joke. You have to take things with respect, otherwise you can call on the devil. And once the devil is in your house, you can never get rid of him.”
“We’ll be careful, we promise.”
“Oh, you promise, do you?”
“Oh, yes, please, Lucia. We want to see about ghosts.”
“But who will be there to call on the ghosts?”
“You, Lucia, you’re the medium, the psychic. Everyone knows you’re the best.”
Lucia looked scared sometimes, shaking her pretty red hair, her green eyes wide.
“No, no. Because … if you laugh? If you laugh, you attract negative spirits, even the devil. And who will pay for it, huh? I will! Because I will be in a trance. And do you think it’s fun to be in a trance when the devil is about? This is serious stuff. I can’t do serious stuff with foolish kids. Forget it.”
But if we were patient, and if we insisted, sometimes, if her boyfriend had stopped coming around—if she didn’t have a red Fiat or a metal-blue Alfa waiting out near her window—then she’d come and sit with us on the front porch under the flowering bougainvillea to drink fizzy sugar water, and listen to us talk about who was the cutest boy on the beach, who was the best body surfer, who had been the smartest and the funniest when old, crusty Mr. Duri came back to find his palm trees de-fronded.
So it went that the lights went out for a flicker, and someone foolish said, “Ooooh. Here comes Spirit to warn us.”
“Shut up, stupid. Don’t make fun of Spirit like that.” It was that easy to rile up Lucia, a rebellious red lock already falling on her freckled cheek.
“Spirit is bullshit.” Pietro Testa had a reputation for being good at making people “dick-off like a bull,” pushing on buttons until those buttons popped off and hit you in the teeth. The mothers said it was because he was fat and had an insecurity complex. (They said that only when Pietro’s mother wasn’t around.) He did it just to show that he was somebody, the mothers said. And he always got the other kids—the good children, the innocent lambs—he always got them “in an ugly situation.” But try to remind a mother of that explanation when her sandal is in mid-flight aiming for your head. She’d say, “Me? I would never say that about a child!” And for that, you’d get the other sandal, too.
“So the light went out,” Pietro said, his voice like an out-of-tune mandolin. “It’s all a bunch of shit. I don’t believe in Spirit.”
Except the lights went out again. Lucia spoke to the darkness. “Spirit, we apologize for foolish Pietro. He doesn’t know better. Spirit, we humbly ask your permission that you restore the electricity in this house.”
And just like that the lights came on again!
We held our breaths and looked at Lucia, who was trying to freeze Pietro with her eyebrows bunched up and low. But Pietro was unflinching, a smug smile stamped on his lips, his fatty cheeks pushing over his cheekbones, making his giblet eyes look even smaller.
“Yeah, Spirit, suck my cock!”
Lucia gasped, and we saw her reach over the table for Pietro, and just then the lights went out again.
“Pietro!” we all screamed.
“Come on! This is a fucking island. It’s just a blackout.”
The light bulb flickered a bit as Lucia muttered prayers, an apology to Spirit for the unbelieving boy who had dared call into question Its power.
When the light finally came back, Pietro was laughing.
Lucia pushed away from the table, all choked up and ruffled.
“I pay for this,” she said, pointing at Pietro. “That’s why I don’t like to talk about this stuff with kids. Then Spirit takes it out on me.”
She could not be persuaded to stay, but had we been any older we might have realized she relished somewhat the attention she had garnered in that one session of light flickering on the front porch of our house. What we noticed was only our thirst for this ghost business. Now that we had witnessed the Almighty Light Withdrawal, there was no mission nobler than persuading Lucia to lead a seduta spiritica, a séance.
During those evenings in Sardinia, the only thing we talked about was the night that the lights went out because stupid Pietro made fun of Spirit in front of Lucia. All we needed was little Marzio’s official report that Lucia had been found the next morning on the floor of her bedroom, naked and beaded in sweat, her eyes rolling back in their sockets, her mouth coated in saliva, a gasping not unlike that of lovemaking heaving through her chest and neck. It convinced us without a breath of doubt that she had been punished by Spirit on Pietro’s account, even if the adults dismissed this tale as yet more evidence that the Della Rosa girl was a junkie, a drogata headed for “a bad finale.” She was sent to Rome, but came back three weeks later when her Alitalia pilot father got tired of taking care of her. We hailed her arrival with renewed insistence that she lead a séance. But it wasn’t until Giovanna returned from Cagliari that we finally had our wish.
Giovanna was among the spottiest of the regulars at our little beach enclave. She was a Sardinian, a native of Cagliari, and thus had the freedom to come and go without the restrictions of plane fares and ferry schedules that those of us who resided on the Italian peninsula had to respect. We’d known her from early on, when Costa Rei was just a spatter of rocks and shrubs
near the beach. There were only twelve cottages then, and it was us, the Della Rosas, the Testas, the Fornarinis, the Duris, and the Sobreos, Giovanna’s family. We knew Giovanna as one of the settlers, and it didn’t matter that she came and went, that some summers she was with us on every game and stunt, and some others she puffed up her cheeks and looked to the side with her mouth all puckered up and said with breath and boredom, “Pietro is an idiot and Fabrizio is a fool. I can’t believe you’re so hung up on their juvenile bullshit.” Giovanna, so queenly, as if she had better things to do than picking berries and making hot homemade jams; better than finding unexplored beaches or unearthing broken terracotta vases in the hidden caves just under the hills; better than morning body surfing in the ten foot waves in the deep blue Sardinian sea; and better than wading with stolen kitchen knives through the cane fields to steal bamboo for our play forts and for our bows and arrows … as if walking her two mastiffs and learning German from the Bavarian swim coach in the villa next to crusty Mr. Duri’s was more fun even than peeling open, frond by frond, Mr. Duri’s palm tree!
When we were all still little, so little that our mothers still fed us Nutella on bread every early afternoon for snack time, Giovanna had acquired, on account of her long hair and skinny legs, the much undeserved reputation of being beautiful. This went on for years, until Pietro called out that she was not only ugly but also a bitch, especially since she had taken to smoking. Even so, those afternoons that we walked the four miles uphill to Monte Nai for the disco dance for minors, the boys lined up to dance with her all the same. Giovanna had straight reddish hair like Lucia, and small maroon eyes that fixed intensely on a person. She had developed the peculiar habit of snorting hard enough to make the tip of her nose veer to the left. And the meaner boys, especially Pietro, said that the bouquet of whiteheads blooming periodically on the well of her chin was “clear evidence” that she wasn’t a virgin. She was the only girl on the beach never to wear a bra, even though her breasts bounced when she ran, enough to attract attention from the “old people”: the gardeners, the occasional, wandering, sphere-eyed goatherd. And some of the mothers even whispered about her father, the famous journalist Sobreo, and how he kissed Giovanna on the lips too much like a lover. But nobody ever said Giovanna was headed for “the bad finale.” Mothers only muttered under a tight lip, sucking their breath through their teeth, that “the girl should wear a bra,” and they walked away before Giovanna could stare them in the eye and laugh, even though they could slap us silly if they wanted to.
Giovanna was like a shaken fizzy water bottle, like when we held the thumb on the tip and pointed it at the boys if they acted stupid. She was the sticky spray, the icy cold surprise, the gooey sugar stain on our brown calves. When Giovanna arrived, things happened (including Fabrizio showing us his penis by moonlight after the bottle settled on his flip flop, and though bored even as he zipped and tugged and declared with a grin, “This is too big for you little girls,” he nonetheless obliged, leaving us to contemplate in shameful silence how that sharp curve to the left may have inspired poets of days gone by to refer to their reproductive organs as bananas).
That summer Giovanna, who was in the seventh grade, had failed Drawing and History (Pietro Testa said because she was caught shirtless with a boy in the well of her high school stairs), and she had to go to summer “repetition school” in order to be able to move on to the next grade. When, midway through summer, she was finally absolved, Giovanna came in strutting, demanding to catch up on all the huff.
“Giovanna! You should have been there! Pietro dared Spirit and the lights went out!”
“Marzio, shut up! She didn’t really say it exactly like that, not exactly, and …”
“No, no. It wasn’t Lucia who started it! It was because we were talking about the girl who drowned who was found half nibbled by sharks …”
“Idiot! There are no sharks in the Mediterranean sea, and you’re getting it all confused …”
Giovanna listened, her maroon eyes moving to the right and to the left, her nose veering with her regular snorts, an upper lip now and again disappearing under her tongue, but she said nothing until the end, until all of us had spoken by turns and deprecated Pietro Testa, his bad timing, and his big mouth, and praised Lucia and her fearful ways. We described in detail how, the next morning, her eyes rolled back in her sockets and the sweat covered her skin, even though none of us had been there to see it but Marzio, who couldn’t be understood because he stuttered a little when he was excited, and if someone interrupted him he sighed and stuffed his thumb in his mouth and rubbed his head as if remembering all the hard knocks he had taken lately.
Finally there was silence. Giovanna snorted meaningfully. We heard the snot rolling back into her throat, and we secretly recoiled.
“And why, exactly, do we need to wait for Lucia?”
Collectively, we began to wonder if arrogance and skepticism weren’t embedded in the mysterious genes of the natives (Pietro Testa was the only other Sardinian on this tourist-contaminated side of the island).
Giovanna scanned our faces.
“Anybody can be a medium,” she declared, hands on hips. She scratched her chin and picked at a pimple. “Hell, I could be one if I wanted to.”
“Noooo! Lucia warned us! You could call on the devil!”
Giovanna clicked her tongue and hissed, making a noise that the locals often made to signify that we Northerners of the peninsula had buried our common sense in the cement and asphalt of our sky-scrap-ered cities. She meant what she’d said plainly for years now: we were juvenile. We were gullible kids caught up in foolish endeavors, and when it came right down to it, we could “do the talk, but not the walk.”
She turned back to her mastiffs, demonstrating their knowledge of her newly acquired German dog orders: Platz! (Sit!) Ge Vek! (Go Away!) The matter of the ghost was temporarily dismissed, at least in front of Giovanna, who would send the issue to an early grave by suggesting that we call on Spirit ourselves with a hand-drawn Ouija-style alphabet drawing and an ashtray for a pointer.
Even though all of us thought about it at our nightly gatherings on the porches of our villas, while the adults proceeded, oblivious, with their dinners, card nights, and Marilyn Monroe movie nights (only two villas actually had strong enough antennas to pick up the two state channels), we talked instead about Giovanna’s demonstrations of her mastiff’s identity crisis, and how she hunkered down on all fours for him, laughing when the confused dog tried to mount her through her thick bikini bottom.
It made us feel better to point out her slutty shamefulness because she often shunned us to hang out instead with those hated German tourists, whom we blamed for having mistaken Sardinia for their personal nudist beach and for the frequent forest fires that happened during the droughty summers. We had all noticed how, whenever one of those fires seared up another slice of hill, some bleached German investor would end up buying the burnt up land and building another villa. In the five years that we had frequented Costa Rei, we had grown from a spitradius village to a sixty-five villa complex, and for this we blamed these harsh-speaking, sausage-loving people whom we had a duty to despise on account of what they did to Italy during World War II, even if our parents had barely been toddlers then, and even if our history books reluctantly acknowledged Mussolini had had something to do with it. But for Giovanna to prefer the company of Germans to us, for her to bask in the glow of their melanin-deprived hairless chests, for her to take up predilection for their sun-exposed genitalia was insult greater than we could bear, and we drank up bitterness with our sugared fizzy water, remembering her insults and enlarging them with our gossip.
For a while, and with Lucia missing, we were too demoralized to bring up the ghosts, and we focused our efforts instead on stuffing plastic sandwich bags filled with sand and water into the gas tanks of those ill-fated weekend dwellers whom we considered intruders, and on ripping up Mr. Duri’s bougainvillea, and on taunting relentlessly a rather large
group of modest Sardinian children whose parents had come on this side of the island to be gardeners and housekeepers to the richer cottage owners. On the outside we were a cheerful group of deeply tanned savages in fabric hats and Speedos, allowed to roam free with our parents’ blessings (the older kids were trustworthy in their naïve adult eyes). But on the inside we were dangerously bored, gritting our sand-speckled teeth at Giovanna’s betrayals and huffing around impatiently under Lucia’s window.
At night, while the adults gathered in mosquito-safe kitchens, the clinking of the ice against their glasses fading proportionally to the rising volume of their laughter, we took to terrorizing the darkened home of the Sardinian pack because they had dared to attempt to infiltrate our bamboo play coves by spying on us, then ambushing us with wet scarab balls that became extraordinarily heavy when dipped in sea water and made an odd, splattering sound when colliding with our heads. We vowed revenge and obtained it at night, posting vitriolic poems of Pietro’s creation that made rhymes with the most unsightly body parts of the Sardinians’ oldest girls, and by smearing their windows, doors, and car windshield with tree sap and Fabrizio’s own, lovingly donated cum juice.
Then we rang the doorbell.
And courageously ran.
This went on for some nights, until the weaklings betrayed their cowardice by turning to the vilest of all weapons: they complained to their mothers, who in turn complained to ours. There was a brief and angry congregation of the Twelve Mothers from those families who had first “settled” Costa Rei back in the twelve-cottage days. Though it was later rumored that all Twelve Mothers believed it was Pietro Testa’s fault for being fat and needing to prove himself, the Mothers came to the consensus that we had all “taken up too much rooster” (we’d gotten too cocky), and to rectify this alarming development there was a vigorous raising and falling of the hands on our Speedoed butts with harshly uttered pronouncements on our state of delinquency, until we children confessed ourselves humbled and defeated, and we apologized, tear-faced, to our teeth-sucking, shit-grin-witnessing enemies. The Sardinians seemed satisfied, though they insisted on watching the spanking, and even asked for repeats. When they left, they glanced back over their shoulders, and by their whispers we suspected the feud had not yet ended.