by Anna Chillon
Ambra? Fantastic. Another precious stone that Vincent could add to his collection. I crossed my arms, tapping on the ground with the tip of my foot, dressed in a pair of pink sandals.
She stood by me, studying my profile, uncertain about how to approach the subject. She did it almost timidly. “You know, Vincent wanted me to meet you, he said that I would’ve liked you, but I've always preferred not to.”
So for her it wasn’t a problem that I was in that happy ménage, just as long as she didn’t have to meet me. Really generous on her part.
“He's all yours now, isn’t that enough? Enjoy it as long as it lasts” I replied unhappily.
“Please, you’ve misunderstood. It wasn’t easy for me to run to look for you, Vincent doesn’t even know I did, so let me talk to you, damn it.”
By now she should’ve been making peace with him and I should’ve been sobbing in a dirty tram station. None of this made sense, but I let her go on, avoiding eye contact “All right, tell me whatever it is that’s so important for you to tell me.”
She made another step towards me so she could speak more quietly. “It was shocking for me to find out that you two were together: I just screamed at him about it and I’ve never been angry with him. Never, not once in my life, so this is yet another thing I have against you. But I also know that he loves you and I can’t stand that he’s suffering for your bullshit. If he was there to listen to your offences without trying to defend himself just because he didn’t want to say anything he regretted. I want you to realize that and take back what you said, and the only way that can happen is for you to hear my story.”
I would’ve loved to be able to tell her that I didn’t give a shit about her story. I’d asked in so many ways for an explanation and now I was going to receive it from the only person I would have avoided at all costs, especially at that moment. “I’m going to get on the next bus, so hurry up.”
“Look, if you want to go just go. If you want to be an idiot it means you don’t deserve him. Otherwise let me talk to you, damn it.”
I bit my lips suppressing the instinct to strangle her and put an end to her words once and for all. A sigh of exasperation made her understand that she could go on.
“All right.” She calmed down slightly, putting her cap on. “So, it's not easy... where do I start? It's a story that I myself came to know only about three years ago, rifling through Mum's things.” She put her fist to her mouth, organizing her thoughts, then went on. “So, my mother knew Vincent when they were young. She worked at the bar where he had breakfast, so between a cafe and a cappuccino they became friends, but she was in love with someone else; a married man, with a sunnier disposition, kinder, at least so it seemed... well, in a moment of weakness she ended up going to bed with him. Only that then she got pregnant with me, and he, my father I mean, got really angry, blamed her and told her that she had to abort at all costs if she didn’t want to ruin her own and both of their lives. He convinced her that it was the only solution.”
At the end of the sentence, her voice changed in a way that touched me. I wasn’t one of her fans, but I imagined it was painful to risk not coming into the world by the hand of those that conceived her. I’d been lucky; maybe my father wasn’t an expansive man, but he was a great father, a protective man, loving and honest. He was the perfect man to have a family and it should have been like that for all the little girls in the world.
“But your mother didn’t abort,” I said to her with a slightly less aggressive tone. If I’d been able I’d have laughed at myself, at my ability to feel compassion even towards her. Yet, it was as though sharing Vincent had somehow linked me to her as a person.
“Only just,” she said, placing her denim bag on her shoulder. “My father gave her the money to do it and told her they would never see each other again. She was alone and frightened, but Vincent understood that something was wrong. If you know him, you know what he’s like. He managed to make her talk and, hearing everything, he agreed to go with her to the clinic. But when they were in the waiting room, she despaired. She told me that she could already feel me inside her and that she already loved me.”
Mamma said Vincent took her trembling hands in his and told her she didn’t have to abort if she wasn’t sure and no one had the right to ask her to do such a thing. He made her realize she still had an alternative when she already thought she didn’t have a choice. He assured her that he would help her and that she had to make her choice without thinking of the past or fear of the future.”
Yes, they were definitely his words, I recognized them and I shuddered about how heroic they seemed to me on an occasion like that when the life of a little creature was in balance that had nothing to do with him.
“He saved your life,” I whispered. In front of me was a frenzy of cars in the growing traffic, I looked at them, but I couldn’t see them. I saw a terrified girl in a sterile waiting room and a young Vincent, already with life experience, already strong for those who couldn’t be.
“Do you understand now? I wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for him,” she said with a voice broken by emotion.
“I didn’t know.” I found myself in front of what my eyes perceived as an orange stain. I realized the next moment that it was a bus directed to who knows where. The door crashed open and even this driver waited for me to climb aboard.
Ambra stepped back. “You still don’t know everything.”
I nodded no and even this chance of escape from reality went away.
Meanwhile a woman had approached and sat under the shelter. “It's not over.” Ambra grabbed my arm and moved me aside, resuming talking to my profile. Avoiding looking each other in the face was easier for her, as well as for me. “You can’t imagine what Vincent did next: he was true to his word, he helped my Mum move to France so she could have me in secret, away from my father. But when a person is unlucky, they are up to the end, aren’t they? The wheel can’t turn properly even once. So a few years later she had an accident that left her disabled, her legs completely out of use. Vincent came to give us a hand then as well, but she wasn’t going to improve and I was still very young, so we moved back to Italy so that he could reopen the studio and work like crazy to help us economically. Mum still has epileptic fits that frighten me and leave her exhausted, I call him every time it happens and you know what he does? He drops everything and runs to us. Can you believe it? Every single time, I can count on his arrival. Do you know what that means for me? I only have to say, ‘Vincent’s coming, Mum!’ The last one was about a month ago, I think he was with you when I phoned him.”
Of course, I knew what day she was talking about: our last day together. He’d received that call and I’d tried to stop him leaving in vain. Mad with Jealousy, I’d fled from home, leaving him in desperate attempts to find me. I wanted to punish him for going to her, even though he continued to say that there was no one else.
I turned towards her, dropping my eyes to her smooth, unharmed wrists. No marks, no bracelets. “You two have never been lovers?”
“How could that thought enter your mind? He’s my idol and he’s seen me grow up.”
If that was the reason he’d seen me growing up too, so my doubt could have been founded and there was no reason to react as if I’d blasphemed. But she threw her head back like a lioness ready for battle, though her eyes were shiny. “My Dad rejected me, but Vincent has been far more than a father. Now he says he wants to pay for me to go to university after school, if I want to. I neither want to go nor put such a weight on his shoulders: at the weekend I do the washing up in a restaurant, I don’t earn much, but I won a competition thanks to his pictures and maybe I'll start bringing some extra money home.”
I felt like a short-sighted person putting on glasses for the first time and what I saw in clarity, clear and glaring, was that Vincent had never lied to me. He’d omitted details, but he’d never, in any way, lied to me.
While I told him that he was fake and selfish, that he didn’t kno
w what it was like to be responsible for a family, he’d actually taken on a family that wasn’t his, without saying anything to anyone. I’d seen the pain in his eyes and hadn’t been strong enough to believe him.
I took my sweaty hand to my forehead. “It can’t be true.”
Ambra tapped her feet on the ground, agitated as much if not more than me. “It's all true, though. He doesn’t deserve what you said to him. If anyone’s selfish, it’s you,” she lashed me with words, but if she could, she would have done it for real. It might’ve been good for me too, to open my eyes and help me read between the lines.
“Do you think I wouldn’t prefer to go around the world taking pictures? That I’d work continuously if I could reduce my income?”
In so many ways he had told me the truth, confessed to the prison he’d locked himself into.
“But why did Vincent do all this?”
Vincent had no difficulty in telling people what he was thinking. I would’ve expected him to take Ambra’s inept father and tell him in no half measures to affront his responsibilities. If her mother didn’t have the courage, he certainly could have. Once the baby was born, that man could no longer pretend that she didn’t exist.
“Your father should have provided for you. He made the mistake, he had to fix it.”
She shook her head back with a mocking smile that had nothing to do with cheerfulness. “I told you, the solution was abortion as far as he was concerned: he didn’t want to have anything to do with me. He’d also gone to bed with my mother just to escape his wife's post-natal depression. It must have been convenient at the time, but really he was only interested in his perfect family and his perfect, tiny little newborn baby...”
“He already had a daughter?”
She pressed the back of her hand against her nose and groaned “...you, Giada. You were that little girl.”
It was like receiving an unexpected slap full in the face; a shock that left me astonished, with wonky vision. My heart jumped in my throat as I tried to make sense of those words. “What the hell are you saying?”
“You're my sister. Don’t you see how alike we are?” She picked up a piece of hair the same colour as mine, to show me.
Breathless, I had a sense of dizziness. I was now shaking my head furiously, stumbling to the right and to the left. “You're lying.”
“No, I assure you.”
“Then you're wrong.”
“I'm not mistaken, Giada. It's the truth, damn it! Do you have any idea how much I hated you when I knew the whole story? You had all the luck and I had none, except Vincent's generosity. That's why I decided I never want to meet you or Aaron.”
I covered my mouth. “Not Daddy... it couldn’t have been him,” I said with a pain, caused by the realization that there was no other explanation.
She put a hand on my curved shoulder making me straighten up. “I’ve got no reason to lie to you. Think about it: otherwise why would Vincent give me his word to keep silent with you and your family? It was him that chose my name: ‘Ambra’, to have something in common with you.”
I looked up and saw all the similarities between us, those I’d already noticed but that now found meaning. I also saw the biggest difference: I was wanted, she wasn’t. Because she would have destroyed my family: Aron knew that my mother wouldn’t forgive an infidelity, especially just after my birth.
Even Vincent knew that.
“I don’t want to hear Aaron blaming me for not having looked after his daughter. He could never accuse me of that.” He’d told me, unveiling a bitter smile.
I’d misinterpreted everything.
“Oh God, I'm sorry,” I said, through my hands that were over my mouth. “You are... Aaron's daughter...” no longer blinded by jealousy, I tried to see a sister in her, but it was too difficult. “Yet you’re a stranger,” I confessed with astonishment.
She relaxed her shoulders and looked me in astonishment, in disbelief that she’d told me the truth and realizing that, as Vincent had assured her she would, she felt lighter.
“Well, you are for me too, but we’re half sisters. Even though I made Vincent swear not to tell you anything, I'm glad I did now.”
A drop fell from the sky, wetting my cheek, and another joined it immediately, slipping out of my eyes. “I'm so sorry for what Dad did to you. It's not right. Sorry, it's stupid to repeat it, but I don’t know what else to say.”
“Yes, but it’s not your fault. Now I know. That is, I always knew, but it's as if it just came true right now.” Now that she’d let go of her grudge against me, her vulnerability was evident. I saw myself in her, with one year less and one father less. “I actually always wanted a sister,” I said.
I stretched my hand shyly, she looked at it and took it. We clutched each other and it felt strange, unable to fully realize that my family had suddenly overturned and enlarged without anyone else realizing yet.
But more than how upset I was about finding out about my Dad and finding out having a sister, there was only one thing that mattered to me at that moment. Not Dad, not Mum, not Ambra.
“I got it all wrong. I must go to him,” I announced, pervaded by sudden urgency, as if the world would collapse if I didn’t do something immediately. “You're right, I have to take everything back.”
“Finally you’ve understood. Promise you’ll look after him,” she really cared and wanted to reassure herself, pulling her hand away and wrinkling her eyebrows.
“Yes, yes, you can count on me, I'll apologize for the rest of my days and I'll crawl on my knees if he’ll listen to me,” I started walking backwards. “I have to go…”
She raised her hand to say goodbye. “All right, go, hurry up!”
“Can I see you again?” I asked before I left.
“Yes, if you like.” She smiled at me happily.
“I want to.” My smile of reply was with lips pressed, burdened by my own and my father’s guilt, but equally sincere.
“Thank you!”
I waved my hand, turned around and started to run as fast as I could, with my heart thumping in my chest. Drops of rain dampened the hot asphalt, releasing the smell of a summer thunderstorm.
Chapter 16
I had to take off my sandals to run faster without the risk of twisting my ankle. I was permeated by a turmoil of emotions. I felt guilty, sad and happy, all at the same time.
The sky released a thin shower, and people turned to see where I was running to with such fury, but nothing distracted me. I got there exhausted, I stopped literally slamming against the door of the building. I leaned against it swallowing breaths of air while my hand reached out to ring Vincent’s studio bell.
I put my mouth next to the intercom, panting against it, ready to announce myself. I waited, but didn’t hear a response. So I rang again a few times every couple of minutes, but didn’t get a better result. Obviously there was no one there.
Twenty minutes later, still attached to that bell, the rain got harder, and I began to wonder if Vincent would come back at all that afternoon. I sat on the step in front of the door to decide what to do, where to start looking for him. That was when I saw him on the other side of the road.
Vincent crossed over deep in thought, holding his right arm against his chest carrying a paper bag with a toner or something similar poking out.
I jumped up with my sandals in my hand. Then he saw me, his face clouded over and he slowed his pace. Stepping onto the pavement, he looked at me with dark eyes, stopping on my bare feet, where he allowed himself to linger longer and, even more upset, he snatched his gaze away from me.
“Vincent...” I called him as he walked straight past ignoring me.
“I'm not interested to know what else you want.” He moved the bag on the other arm and pulled the keys out of his pocket, about to enter. “Go home, Giada. It's going to rain.”
He had no intention of listening to me and I had so many things to tell him that I couldn’t even think of one. I should have prepared a speech t
hat made a bit of sense, but I felt like a fish out of water.
“Ambra told me everything!” I was able to throw in before he got away.
He stopped a moment with the keys hanging in mid air. “Good. It was about time.” He slipped them into the lock and opened the door, holding it open. “But this doesn’t change me,” he made clear. “I’m still the same, as I was this afternoon or a month ago: still selfish and irresponsible, as you said. So please do us both a favour, actually everyone: leave me alone, for fuck’s sake.”
“But I just wanted to tell you...”
Bam!
He crossed the threshold and the door was slammed in my face.
It was obvious, he was punishing me for what I’d said and it was the most painful punishment I’d ever received from him. The only one, among all the ones that he’d inflicted on me, that I wanted to avoid.
I dropped my shoes and slammed my fists on the massive doors, screaming at him to open it.
“Go home, Giada!” I heard him shouting as he walked up the stairs.
“No!” There. Eventually I managed to say that word to him. My palms stuck to dark wood. “I'm not leaving! I’ll stay here until you listen to me. Do you understand? I’m not going anywhere!”
I didn’t receive an answer. The sky had darkened quite a bit, the air was cooling and the rain got harder. My head was already wet and soon my clothes would be too. I resumed ringing the bell, but after the fifth attempt I imagined he must’ve unplugged it.
Well, at least I didn’t have to look all over Rome for him; it was four o'clock in the afternoon, sooner or later he’d have to come down.
I huddled up and tried to stay against the wall but it didn’t protect me much because the rain was falling horizontally. In spite of the bad weather and the circumstances, a quiet determination made its way into me. I’d said I’d stay there and I that’s what I would do.
As the minutes went by, then half an hour and even hours, people came out and went into the building. None of them were Vincent. Some people asked me if I wanted to go in, but I always refused, with the most banal excuse to justify behaviour that would make no sense to anyone.