by Lily Prior
Late into the night I sat and waited. Please come, I thought. Please come and make a mockery of these awful thoughts.
I left the villa after midnight, sadly retracing my steps to the Via Vicolo Brugno, my mind deadened.
The next day, after a sleepless night, I returned to the villa. All of his things were still there. His floppy garden hat and a half-empty packet of cigarettes on the kitchen counter made me crumple and sob for the first time. The cold braciolettine was still on the table.
Upstairs, his room remained the same as it had been all those years ago, before everything changed. His books were still piled up by the bed. Among them I found the sheaf of notes he had made that Monday in the manuscript room at the library. The pages were bordered by obscene doodles of figures, which resembled the two of us. I touched them gently with my fingertips, my mind reliving that day when it all began.
His clothes were still hanging in the closet. I buried my face in them, absorbing his smell. His shoes were lined up in pairs, ready to be put on.
I stayed there a long time. All day, and into the night, I sat on the edge of the bed where I had enjoyed such exquisite pleasures, but now they seemed like a dream, a distant memory of another life. Our smell was still on the bedsheets.
I mourned for l’Inglese, for the time we had had together, and for myself: for my true self, which I had become with him, quite suddenly, in a blaze of color like a butterfly, and which I would never be again.
A vision came into my mind of a day in summer, of the blinding white light of midday that strikes the eye as you emerge from a shady interior. I was back at the fattoria, looking over the top of the stable door that opens from cucina onto the yard. I was wiping some flour from my hands onto the skirt of my apron. Somewhere in the background was the sound of children’s voices. In the glare I struggled to identify a figure standing at the gate. A late summer wasp buzzed angrily in my face, jolting me back into reality and the lonely truth of l’Inglese’s disappearance.
The following day I came again to the villa. This time I found it all locked up. I could not find a single door open to get inside.
Suddenly fall had come into the gardens. The flowers had wilted and dropped their heads, scattering petals onto the walkways. The fountain no longer played; it had been boarded up for the winter. Grapes rotted on the vines, feeding swarms of fruit flies that rose up in clouds as I walked by. The hammock had gone. Everywhere there was an air of decay and sadness.
I left the villa knowing that I would never see it again. I knew instinctively that that phase of my life was over.
CHAPTER TWO
I wandered the streets the same way I had done on the first day I came to Palermo. Then I mourned the loss of Bartolomeo; now I mourned the loss of myself.
Eventually I returned, through no conscious will of my own, to my little apartment in the Via Vicolo Brugno. Almost like an automaton I went into the kitchen and began to prepare a comforting sfincione. This is the same dish that my mother was preparing at the time of my birth.
I switched on the oven to heat, then dissolved some yeast in a little tepid water and left it to foment until a froth formed on the surface. The yeasty smell was like that of l’Inglese’s skin after we had made love. It filled my nostrils, and closing my eyes I could almost make believe that I was back in his arms, as we lay tangled in a heap after loving one another.
Rousing myself from my reverie, I poured the yeasty froth into the well I had formed in a pile of flour mixed with salt. Then I kneaded. Oh, how kneading still had the power to soothe my soul like nothing else could. Thump, thump, thump, thump. Pound, pound, pound. Pulse at the temples, sweat beading down the spine. How good this felt. I continued pounding at the dough for a long, long time, until I felt weak, and my anger had, temporarily, diminished.
Then I incorporated a little olive oil into the dough before rolling it into a rectangle and covering it with diced caciocavallo cheese, anchovy fillets, passata, and eye-stinging onions. It felt good to cry with the onion vapors; they lent legitimacy to my outpourings of grief. Wiping my nose on the back of my hand and sniffing loudly, I mixed some two-day-old bread crumbs with some crushed oregano leaves I kept hanging in a little bunch by the window, and sprinkled them over the top of the sfincione.
Finally I drizzled over some more olive oil and left it to rise for an hour in the warmth of the kitchen, during which time, miraculously, l’Inglese returned.
He had simply been out of town for a few days, on business, and had no way of contacting me. He clearly had not changed his clothes in the time he had been away; they were stained with grime and sweat. He had not shaved either, and the three days’ growth of stubble lent him the rakish air of a man who breaks the rules. His eyes were red; he had obviously been drinking hard, and they were hungry, for me, for not having to pretend anymore, for the fundamental understanding between a man and a woman.
I inhaled his irresistible aroma, the scent of a fully aroused man; strong, musky, unmistakable. He was ready for me, there was no doubt of that. God, I had missed him. I wanted him so much I was throbbing.
Picking me up in his arms as if I weighed no more than a suckling pig, he kissed me fiercely; his breath a witch’s brew of whiskey and tobacco. Then he threw me onto the table so that my head landed in the rising sfincione, which cushioned it like a pillow. He ripped off my brightly colored apron, my tight pink blouse and brown skirt, but he did not have time to remove my stockings and my little high-heeled shoes.
Standing erect at the end of the table, he pulled me toward him. I screamed so loudly that the whole neighborhood heard me. It is said that even the vespers then being conducted in the duomo were halted by the cry.
Nonna Frolla, the pug, her husband, the regular customers at the grocery store, and the other tenants of the apartment building all ran forth and gathered in the corridor outside my apartment, deliberating as to whether they should force entry. Signor Rivoli was fantasizing about doing precisely that, and from his living room across the street was enjoying this unexpected upturn in my fortune while he jerked himself off on the carpet.
This time it was l’Inglese’s turn to bay like a wolf as I gripped him with my muscles and squeezed him and squeezed him again. The assembled crowd responded with a shout of encouragement—all except Nonna Frolla, who sniffed with a prudish air she did not feel, while the pug, Nero, uttered a sound for the first time in its life. It was not exactly a bark; no, it would not be accurate to describe the sound made by the pug at this juncture as a bark, but nevertheless it was a sound that proved that he too was all too fully aware of the events then taking place inside the librarian’s apartment, and this earned him the grudging respect of some of the onlookers, who had, up until now, regarded him as nothing more than an ornament.
The climax was a long time coming. Despite the enormous longing we felt for each other at our long-awaited and very poignant reunion, we managed to continue our lovemaking far into the night. There were the inevitable lulls, times when the tide seemed to ebb slightly before crashing onto the rocks with renewed force, during which the crowd grew restless, but the highs were so high as to be an education for all those gathered in the corridor.
There were, indeed, occasions when the crowd thinned as those who waited there felt themselves swept up in the excitement of the moment, and disappeared for their own bite of the cherry. Strange couplings took place as the urge struck and new friendships were formed.
Quinto Cavallo, the goldsmith from the Via d’Oro, got together with the draper’s assistant, Paula Chiacchierone, and the pair disappeared into the communal bathroom; some time later an ugly scene ensued as Signor Placido, in his customary urgency to pee, tried to gain entry by setting his heavy shoulder to the door.
Nonno Frolla himself succumbed to temptation and was discovered by his wife sharing a close embrace with the widow Palumbo in a darkened stairwell. The tensions in the apartment building that day brought about by our reunion took a long time to heal; for t
he first time in almost a century Nonna Frolla took the decision to deny her husband his Tuesday night rights; and for months afterward neighbors were at war with one another.
Only when the fire engine came to a screeching halt outside did anyone notice that black smoke was seeping out from under my door. In the ensuing panic to evacuate the building, the pug Nero was trampled fatally underfoot; Signor Placido got his bulk stuck in the stairwell, causing a blockage that could only be released by the strategic application of all available hands to his person. Once the pressure eased it was like a torrent of water breaking through a dam as the residents surged coughing and spluttering into the open air of the street. Nonna Frolla herself broke a leg in the crush, trying to save the pug. She was subsequently carried away on a stretcher in an agony of grief and pain as the little broken form of Nero was tossed down from a broken window. It lay for a long time in the gutter with its four little stiffened legs pointing up until someone threw it into a trash can.
The onlookers and residents gathered outside in the Via Vicolo Brugno could now see smoke escaping from the windows of my apartment. As the firemen smoked cigarettes and played their hoses against the windows of the upper floor, Quinto Cavallo and his newfound sweetheart, Paula Chiacchierone, staggered naked and dazed from the building to a round of applause from the crowd.
“Where is Rosa?” cried Quinto, seeking to shield his modesty from the general view behind cupped hands.
“Rosa! Where is Rosa?” went round the cry.
“She’s in there still!” they shouted to the officers of the fire brigade.
“Get her out. You must get her out.”
“Do something!”
“Quickly. Quickly.”
“You’ve got to get her out. She’s in there with that Inglese. They could be dead by now.”
The burliest and bravest of the firemen stormed the building, choking in the thick black fumes as they made their way up the staircase to my apartment. The crowd went suddenly silent. How could we be inside after all this time and still be alive? The chances were small, it had to be said. All stood silent, imagining the charred corpses of the lovers still in flagrante amid the raging inferno. Still, that is the price exacted for an immoral way of life. The headlines of L’Ora the following morning would read LASCIVIOUS LIBRARIAN DIES IN LOVE-NEST INFERNO. It was a judgment; that much was clear.
Wait, though, just a second, the firemen were stumbling from the building bearing a stocky figure between them in their arms. They laid it gently down on the sidewalk. It appeared to be lifeless. One of the firemen knelt down and delivered the kiss of life. There had to be some hope then. Whoever it was was not dead yet. The crowd strained forward, craning their necks to see beyond the huddle of firemen gathered all around.
“It must be Rosa,” the crowd muttered.
It certainly looked like me.
The figure began to convulse and cough and spit and splutter. It was me and I was alive. A cheer broke out among the onlookers as I was placed on a stretcher and carried to an ambulance bound for the infirmary.
“But what about l’Inglese?” asked Quinto Cavallo, who by this stage had managed to borrow a pair of pants, albeit a rather short pair that barely covered his knees, and a threadbare shirt.
“There was no one else in there,” replied the chief fire officer, his face blackened with the smoke.
“But of course there was. Her lover, the Inglese. We heard them in there. Up to all sorts of things they were.”
“Signor, we looked everywhere. There was no one else in the apartment. She was alone in the kitchen. The oven caught fire. There was certainly no man with her; if there was we would have found him. There was only her, and the charred remains of a parrot, burnt alive in its cage.”
“Well, fancy that,” said Quinto, rubbing his head in confusion.
The other residents too could not believe it.
“What happened to him then?” asked one.
“He certainly didn’t come out while we were up there,” replied another.
“No, of course he didn’t. If he had come out we would have seen him.”
The truth was that the man whom it seemed had just vanished into thin air had in fact been missing for three days. While the sfincione was cooking in the oven I had sunk into one of my fantasies and had become so engrossed in the imagined reunion with l’Inglese that first the sfincione and then the oven had caught fire before I myself had been overcome by the smoke.
As I lay in my little white bed in the infirmary alongside Nonna Frolla, who had been placed in traction, I wept bitter tears for the beautiful dream that had cheated me, while Nonna Frolla wept inconsolably for the death of the pug.
CHAPTER THREE
I really was very ill. The smoke I had inhaled had badly damaged my lungs and I was left with a racking cough, which tore at my entrails. I remained in the infirmary for several weeks and was fed a diet of thin gruel and a little fruit. The sisters were convinced this was the only food I could digest. As a result I lost a substantial amount of weight, and one day when the nuns were lifting me into my bath I felt thin for the first time in my life.
Nonna Frolla, in traction in the adjoining bed, chattered all day and most of the night. I could have willingly strangled her if I’d had the strength.
The stream of visitors was constant. Nonno Frolla had practically taken up residence at the infirmary and was treated as something of a pet by the sisters on the ward. Each day he brought a rose for Nonna Frolla, but he was still in disgrace over the incident with the widow Palumbo on the night of the fire, and Nonna was determined to make him pay for this for a long time to come.
Despite the whispered explanations of her visitors, which were accompanied by many gestures and nods toward the adjacent bed where I lay, Nonna Frolla could still not grasp the situation with regard to l’Inglese.
“So where is he?” she would demand of me again and again. “I don’t understand why he doesn’t come and visit you.”
My illness gave me an excuse for closing my eyes and feigning sleep.
During the night Nonna would dream of the pug, and would then awaken in the early hours of the morning calling loudly for Nero. She refused to accept that he had died and demanded that Nonno Frolla bring him for a visit. Nonno Frolla went along with the fantasy to avoid hurting his wife with the truth, and began to invent anecdotes about the pug, pretending that it was still alive. It was pathetic to witness Nonna Frolla retelling these stories, suitably embellished, to the visitors who streamed to her bedside. Of course they all knew that the pug was dead and was still lying stiff in the trash can at the corner of the street, but they humored Nonna Frolla and indulged her in her fantasies.
My dreams were now in black and white and shades of gray. In my weakened state I no longer had the powerful fantasies and daydreams that had led to the fire and its ripple of consequences. My dreams were confined within narrow gray boxes, black and white lines. Faces made mouths at me. White-clad figures hovered in shadows. I had great difficulty in breathing; in my sleep I forgot to breathe.
All I wanted to do was sleep so I could escape from the awful reality of life and exist solely in the gray corridors of my deadened mind. But even sleep evaded me. I could not sleep at night, as that was the only time when I could think, and during the day there was a constant crowd of visitors in the ward and their incessant chatter disturbed me.
All the customers of Nonna Frolla’s grocery store came by at least once a day, as did the tenants of the apartment building. Signor Rivoli, the perverted bank manager, came primarily, I am sure, to try and catch a glimpse of me in a state of undress.
I too received a share of the visitors: all the personnel from the library came. Restituto, the one-eyed replacement doorman, came with gifts of wild strawberries and grapes and books of crossword puzzles that I never opened. He tried to engage my interest by talking about the regular readers, the students, the gossip, but I was not interested, and simply wanted to be left alone, to
rest. I found out subsequently that he had completed the circle by marrying Signora Rossi, Crocifisso’s widow, and they went on to produce another two bambini to add to their cares.
The library assistants led by Costanza came once or twice. She came only to pry, to see if she could enliven the gossip surrounding me back at the library, which had become old news. I stayed resolutely silent when they came and tried to deaden my ears so as not to hear their inane chatter and false laughter. The library girls soon switched their attention to Nonna Frolla, who was able to supply them with all the gossip they needed. They discussed me openly in stage whispers, but even this did not bother me. I lay still and silent and tried to imagine what it was like to be dead. Costanza made a great fuss of Nonno Frolla and once even sat on his lap before the jealous Nonna Frolla administered a sharp slap to her face, which sent the pack of library assistants scurrying from the ward. They did not return.
One day, shortly after my admission to the infirmary, the director of the library came to visit, with his wife, the sophisticated Signora Bandiera. She had a regular weekly appointment at the Per Donna hair parlor and even had the time to apply nail polish. Everyone in the ward looked up at her entrance, which, of course, they were intended to do.
The signora had brought in a few of her discarded things for me: a silk scarf that had been damaged by a careless laundrymaid, a string of simulated pearls with a broken clasp, some decorative hairpins, and a bottle of cheap perfume, a gift from a thrifty friend that someone of the signora’s sophistication would never wear. I received these gifts graciously, and when the stilted conversation had become embarrassingly slow, the Bandieras got up to leave, satisfied with the feeling that they had done their duty.
I quickly lost track of the passage of time; I knew vaguely in the recesses of my mind that it was the fall, but I did not know which month, date, day, or hour. The days in the infirmary merged into an uninterrupted procession of gray dawns, white sheets, thin gruel, foul-tasting medicines, the unpleasant smell of disinfectant, Nonna Frolla’s annoying chatter, and the unending feeling of exhaustion.