Somewhere in the Stars
Page 28
“Go back to your parents. You are ruining this night for me.”
Nick stood up. “I’m not leaving this spot until you ask me to come ashore.”
“For what? Some Romeo and Juliet scene where we both wind up dead.”
“Do you want to hear the truth?”
“Talk is cheap.”
“Since I left you, my feelings have been out of kilter. It’s like motion sickness on a boat but time hasn’t cured me. È vero, sono un cretino. When I returned home, there was no faithful Penelope waiting for me.”
“That’s your problem, not mine.” The volcano was smoldering gray puffs, as the fire died down.
“See the constellations out there?”
Caterina looked at the sky. “Allora, I see the Pleiades very clearly. Perhaps this is a good omen for you? Didn’t you tell me what a good sign it was supposed to be when we were in Roma? All lies, you tell me! Then like your stars you vanished without warning. I suppose you would call it a natural phenomena.”
“Nature is unpredictable and I learned it the hard way.”
“What were you doing out there anyway, trying to kill yourself?”
“It was just bad luck, Caterina.”
“On second thought, no. You’re too narcissistic. The sympathy game suits you better.”
“If sympathy works with you, that’s okay with me.”
“You men just want to win all the time. Ride out any storm, defy the flow of lava.”
“Maybe so, Caterina. I already proved to myself that you can’t stop nature’s power. But there’s one thing you shouldn’t stop …”
“Words and more words.”
“Shouldn’t stop the natural power of the heart, even if it sounds corny.”
Caterina retreated to her house, the beads crackling in the night air. The lights went out and Nick sat down again, stationed on a darkened sea, the volcano leaving a wind-blown ash cloud on the horizon. He turned away from the house and lay back in the middle of the boat to gaze at the stars, propping the small of his back on life jackets. The soft waves lulled him into a drowsy state where he imagined that he drank from the waters of Lethe, so he would never have to remember his own odyssey to the islands of wind.
Several hours may have passed or at least that’s how Nick perceived it, when he felt the bow tip. He assumed the tide was beginning to shift and opened his eyes to stars that blinked in no special pattern. He conjured the floating stars into the shape of Caterina’s face, that she was somewhere in the stars and she would always be there for him, no matter what his miserable life was like on this planet. Nick couldn’t blame Caterina for rejecting him because it was the worst mistake of his life. He had no right to think that she would take his pathetic self back into her new life on an idyllic island in the Mediterraneo, no less. Suddenly, Nick felt chilled drops on his forehead. Caterina knelt beside him smiling, her hair hanging loose, pressed to her sarong, her breasts visible through the cotton cloth. He knew this was not a dream as she wrapped herself around him. He felt the cold sting of her wet shape for a second but soon their body heat took over, as they nested in the same wooden boat on the same cobalt blue sea under the same dazzling stars.
Bibliography
Bettina, Elizabeth. It Happened in Italy: Untold Stories of How the People of Italy Defied the Horrors of the Holocaust. Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2009.
Clark, Lloyd. Anzio: Italy and the Battle for Rome—1944. New York: Grove Press, 2006.
D’Este, Carlo. Bitter Victory: The Battle for Sicily, 1943. New York: Harper Perennial, 1988.
Konstam, Angus. Salerno 1943: The Allied Invasion of Italy. South Yorkshire, England: Pen & Sword Books, 20007.
Morison, Samuel Eliot. Sicily—Salerno—Anzio: January 1943–June 1944. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1954, 2002.
Parker, Matthew. Monte Cassino: The Hardest-Fought Battle of World War II. New York: Anchor Books, 2004.
Wolff, Walter. Bad Times, Good People: A Holocaust Survivor Recounts His Life in Italy During WW II. Long Beach, New York: Whittier Publications, 1999.
Acknowledgments
MY GRATITUDE TO MY FIRST READER, my wife, for having faith in me during this four-year process. Thank you to Michael Mirolla, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Guernica Editions, for publishing this novel as part of the Essential Prose Series, works which deal with “the pleasurable understanding of different cultures.” My hope is that this novel will lead to better understanding of the Italian American experience during World War II and the survival of Italian Jews during the Holocaust. Martha Hughes, a novelist, was most helpful with advice on the first draft through an N.Y.U. program. Editor/novelist Maxine Swann read the entire work and provided many useful suggestions. My good friends, Richard Holz and Pete Smith, carefully read and critiqued the chapter on boating and military history, respectively. Thanks also to the members of MCCA for their support of all my literary endeavors.
About the Author
FRANK POLIZZI was the editor of Feile-Festa, a multicultural, literary arts journal (http://www.medcelt.org/feile-festa/). He worked as a Vista Volunteer in New London, CT, an English teacher on the original staff to reopen Townsend Harris HS at Queens College and the Head of Reference and Instructional Services at the Hormann Library of Wagner College. His poems and stories have appeared in The Archer, Bitterroot, Electric Acorn (Dublin Writers), Mudfish, Paterson Literary Review, Wired Art and others. The Guild of Italian Actors (GIAA) accepted his one-act play, By the Light of a Barber Pole for its reading series in 2009. Two years later, Finishing Line Press published All Around Town, his poems exploring Sicilian American roots and experiences in NYC. Several chapters/stories were published from his novel, A Pity Beyond All Telling, and one of them was shortlisted for the Fish Prize in Ireland. In 2015 Bordighera Press published A New Life with Bianca, a story of a young man’s love for Bianca, told through a series of sonnets in English, Italian and Sicilian. His new novel, Somewhere in the Stars, made the 2014 Long list of the UK publisher, Lightship, for its “First Novel Prize” and was accepted for publication by Guernica Editions in early 2016. Frank died on August 23, 2016.