by CD Reiss
“Salvatore.”
Moped Guy scurries away, crying. He picks up his moped with his good hand.
“You know Cosimo?” Santino asks Big Man as the moped zips away as if its driver is terrified.
“Cosimo Orolio?”
“Si.”
“Everybody knows Cosimo.”
Santino slips a few Euro notes out of his wallet and hands them to the guy who helped him.
“If you need some work instead of standing in the street, watching your woman”—he flicks his hand over to the fruit lady, who’s rearranging pears as if nothing happened—“you tell him Santino sent you. I vouch.”
I’m clutching a paper bag of oranges for dear life as they shake hands, and finally, Santino comes back to me.
“Come.” Santino gently taps my shoulder to turn me away from the mess. The fruit lady’s already making another sale. He pinches a cigarette from a tight pack, then gets a metal lighter from the same pocket.
“How’s your ass?” he asks, lighting up.
“Your ass is fine.”
Lightning fast, he pushes me against a wall and kisses me. He kisses me so hard my breath flees and my head spins. He kisses me like I am a treasure he’s spent weeks digging for. He tastes like burning tobacco and power, and when he pulls away I am not weaker, but softer, still holding a paper bag of oranges.
My breasts heave for breath as he looks down at me with approval, taking a pull on his smoke as if he’s happy with the way he’s brought the blood to my lips.
He hasn’t smoked in days. He always smokes at such weird times. Day. Night. Not at all.
But now he’s so relaxed. Like a man rolling off a woman after great sex, and the cigarette was punctuation. But of what? If not sex, what had happened right before?
“Don’t you think you were a little harsh on that guy?”
“Was I?” With a smirk, he wedges the lit cigarette between his lips and takes the oranges, jerking his head to let me know he is walking now, and I am to follow.
My body obeys without thinking, and we walk into the tiny piazza. His hands are big enough to peel one orange while still holding the other.
“I think you broke his hand.”
“He’s lucky I didn’t chop it off.”
Santino drags on the cigarette, exhaling without removing it from his lips, and sits on the edge of the stone fountain.
“Hold this.” He takes a drag of the cigarette before handing it to me so he can peel the oranges.
Violence is like sex for him. And after great sex, he smokes.
“You enjoyed that,” I say.
“He shouldn’t have touched you.”
He smiles like the predator I remember from our first few days together, then leans over and—without him saying a word—I know what he wants.
I put the cigarette to his mouth, and he drags, eyes on mine as the smoke curls between us and the tip turns bright and hot.
Does he smoke a lot? No.
But if he only smokes after he’s violent, he smokes too much. He’s more dangerous than I ever dreamed, and I’m more aroused than I’m comfortable with.
“Open,” he says, holding out a blood-colored orange wedge. When I take it he leans forward, and with a twitch of his chin, tells me to put the cigarette to his lips. When he locks on it, I bite the orange and my mouth explodes with sweet juice.
I chew it and drop my hand when he lets go. He leans back and exhales before breaking apart the rest of the orange.
“Funny thing,” he says. “It’s exactly the same. Same houses. Same piazza. Same, same, same. But…” he takes a pause to feed me. “The closer you look? Different.”
I get more orange, and he takes the cigarette from me.
“Right there?” He points to some random corner. “That’s where I kissed Ilaria Scotti and that right there?” Another corner. “That’s where her mother almost killed me.”
“Her mother?”
“She came up right behind me with a dishtowel. Wrapped it around my neck. I realized later she used a dishtowel so it wouldn’t bruise.” He points the hot end of the now-stubby cigarette at me before taking a pull. “Smart. Her father would have just killed me.”
“Why didn’t he?”
“He was deployed in Kosovo.” He flicks the butt away. “Killing other people.”
My face must have shown my confusion, because he let out a little chuckle and picked up the second orange.
“Did they teach you there was a war in Kosovo? Or did you just learn to sing and salute?”
“Shut up.” I snap the orange right out of his hands, because I know there was a war in Kosovo, but I didn’t know it was in my lifetime or that Italy fought in it. I don’t even know where Kosovo is on a map. I’m not stupid, but I’m ignorant. I know nothing about anything, because I’ve been kept in the dark.
“I mean, you can’t blame me.” I rip skin off the orange as if it’s offensive. “Why should I assume there was a war no one tells me about?”
“There’s always a war, Forzetta.”
I barely hear him.
“Like I’m supposed to go to the library and look up every war? Maybe I should look up, ‘Was my husband’s mother an adult when she had him?’ or ‘Have I been sold into marriage by my dead father?’ This way I’ll know before you spring it on me.”
The orange is bald, vulnerable, the deep red of an organ carefully and bloodlessly removed from the body.
Santino puts his hand over mine and carefully takes the fruit, drawing my eyes up to his.
“You’re beautiful when you’re angry,” he says in English, as if he doesn’t want to be misunderstood.
“I was fine,” I say. “I knew how to live. But now I’m in this life and I’ll never catch up.”
“You will.” He slides his thumb into the hole at the top of the orange and breaks it apart. The membranes hold. It doesn’t bleed. “For the first question, you know she wasn’t. My mother was a child.”
“What about your father?” It was possible he was the same age as Santino’s mother, and I want to assume the best. Two kids experimenting. Not unheard of, and who even knew what the rules were anymore?
“I never knew him.” He lays half the wedges in his palm and holds them out instead of feeding me, which I appreciate. I don’t want to be fed right now, and he somehow knows it. “He joined the military to avoid me.”
He takes a moment to eat a little orange, and I avoid pointing out that it probably wasn’t personal. His father did avoid him, but he was probably avoiding responsibility, not Santino-the-Person.
I don’t think it’s a language barrier. He means exactly what he said. I let it sink in, occupying my mouth with the raspberry flavor of the tarocco.
“Avoiding me was his only smart move.” Santino eats the last piece and takes a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his fingers. “It saved his life.”
Foolish me to think Re Santino thought his father was avoiding his son because the baby was unworthy. His baggage wasn’t abandonment. It was theft of rightful vengeance.
“Is he alive now?” I ask as I finish my last wedge.
“He was killed.” Santino reaches for me, dabbing the corners of my mouth. “In Iraq. You heard of this war?”
“Shut up.” I snap the handkerchief away. “I’m sorry he died before you could meet him.”
“Mine should have been the last face he saw.” He collects the peels. “But I hope it was my mother’s. I hope he died alone, thinking about what he did, right before he went to hell.”
“I’m sorry, Santino.” I stand when he does and surprise myself by taking his hand. “About your mother, mostly. I’m sorry that happened to her, and that it left you feeling like this.”
He tosses the peels into a gray plastic bin and pulls me in the direction of the street the car is on.
“Morto un papa, se ne fa un altro,” he says.
One pope is dead, another is made.
A deeply Italian way of saying life goes o
n. What leaves us, returns in another form. What is now is eternally true, and no one is indispensable.
I didn’t agree. One pope dies and you don’t always know what’s going to take his place.
Life may have seemed set in stone to him, with predictable patterns and routines, but the stone could be broken, and you had to carve something better into another one.
My parents had been killed, and I’d been taken from this city, sent across the ocean, where I had to set new things into a stone that was destined to break. As I thought this, the visual angle of one of the streets that shot off from the piazza changed, and my brain’s old, dormant neurons fired.
MERCATO ROSETTA BELLA
My feet step in concrete. I stop so short, Santino jerks back.
“That’s his market.”
Santino could come or not, but I have no choice but to go to the market with my sister’s name on it. The world had changed, but the store hadn’t. The fruit looks better, and the sign is freshly painted. Maybe the wine stacked on the clean wooden casks is more expensive, but once I get in front of it, I know for sure this is the place.
“Did you know me?” I ask Santino, staring at my sister’s name on the sign. Our father must have opened the business before I was born, or he didn’t include me in the name because he knew he’d sold me away.
“You were a child.”
The cobblestones under my feet are gritty with the stuff of the street, and I wonder, is there a single cell of my mother’s blood in the honeycomb seams? One molecule of my DNA, a dead map for the making of me, right on this street?
“That’s not what I asked.”
I don’t hide my aggression. My voice cuts him apart without any fear of repercussion, because I’m not hearing his bullshit or his wavering. I’m not tolerating obfuscation or lies, even though I anticipate both. He’ll put up a wall between me and the truth, and I’ll bang my head against it. Again.
“I didn’t know you,” he says. The wall I expect does not appear. “I knew you existed.”
“Because of my father.”
“Because of your father.
“Everyone knows Cosimo.”
“Si. But he was very protective. I never saw your face in Napoli. And I say again, you were a child.”
“But you made the promise.”
“Now you know why I didn’t want to see you.”
His mother. Of course. He wouldn’t want to be like his father in thought or deed.
“Not that it was offered,” he continued. “He was very protective. You were no more than a name and a date.”
Rosetta’s name hovers above us.
ROSETTA BELLA.
She was beautiful from the moment she was born, and I wonder if my father was saving her for a more valuable sale. I wonder if Santino wasn’t allowed to see me because I wouldn’t measure up to Rosetta.
“What about before the day you came to my zio’s? In the hallway. Did you see me before that day?”
Rosetta had been there, alive and stunning at seventeen.
I know Santino noticed me, because he separated my ghost from my body, but being noticed is not the same as being chosen.
“No,” he says.
“Did you ask for me? I know you won’t tell me what was owed or why or anything, and I guess it doesn’t matter now. But what I need to know…was it me you asked for? Or was I what you got?”
“You were a child, Violetta.”
“Was it me?” I’m yelling and I don’t care. “Just answer!”
“No!” I’m only deflated a moment before he continues. “Of course not. Not until you became a woman. Then….then yes it was you.”
In that moment, decisions are made.
I choose the life carved into stone when he dragged me away.
I choose to believe that by letting him see into me in the hallway, I won a prize I didn’t want.
I choose to think he could have wanted Rosetta, but didn’t.
I choose the anodyne path of carving something new into the stone I’ve started, instead of smashing it and starting over.
28
VIOLETTA
Santino drives us to Pompeii, and it takes my breath away.
He has a private tour set up for us, and every stop manages to both fascinate and terrify me. We’ve all heard the stories about how it happened, how tragic it was, but to see it is something else entirely.
I want to reach out and touch everyone who suffocated in a personalized prison of ash. I want to hug the children. I want to hide the pets. Everybody reminds me of my family. My mother. My father. My beautiful sister who was stolen from me too soon.
“Are you okay?” Santino’s hand rests lightly against my lower back.
My body leans against his hand, seeking comfort as my heart stretches into my stomach. His hand covers my entire lower back, like armor for my core. I can’t bring myself to move away from its protection as he leads me into the stone amphitheater.
“I’ll be fine.” I lie, but only a little. Maybe I really will be fine. Maybe this dangerous coil of vengeance and violence will be enough armor.
I swallow the lump crawling up my throat and shade my eyes. Tourists are everywhere, gawking at the destruction of lives and the preservation of artifacts, lining up to sit in the rotunda with their bright fleece and white sneakers.
Santino lays his jacket on the stone seat, and I sit beside him.
The tour guide is a distinguished-looking man in a sport jacket and white shirt. He’s facing into the sun, so he leaves on his sunglasses to launch into his tale of history. The plays, the orators, the music. The life that once vibrated inside these crippled ruins.
“First time I came here…” Santino lowers his voice under the guide’s. “I stayed too long and missed the last bus. Zia Paola didn’t know where I was until the next day. Her fury was worse than Vesuvio, I promise you.”
“How old were you?” I ask.
“Fourteen.”
“I don’t blame her. I would have killed you the minute I found out you were alive.”
“Some nurse you are,” he grumbles, and I try to jab his ribs, but he catches my hand before it reaches its destination and kisses it.
The tour guide gestures across the plains, describing what lays beyond. Santino takes my hand and with a sly wink, we sneak out of the amphitheater. He leads me through the massive city, keeping an eye out like we were on some sort of secret mission.
Where was his security detail? I hadn’t seen any of them since we left the house.
Santino wouldn’t travel without them. Not with me here.
Or did he feel just that safe?
As we run between crowds of people and sneak into dark corners, laughing, I know that’s the answer. This is his home and he doesn’t need men with guns under their jackets.
“Do you like Pompeii?” Santino murmurs in my hair. I can feel the grin spread across his face.
“It’s my new favorite place.” All I can smell is him and it’s intoxicating.
“Mine too.”
I think about his pack of cigarettes sitting on the veranda back at the house, but am too overwhelmed with the nearness of him to dwell on it. When I look up at him, he’s already staring at me with an intensity that weakens every defense I put up between us.
When Santino kisses me, I know he carries the key to my body and soul. I don’t know when he got it, when he had it made, but I know it fits me, because when he turns it, I unlock.
Maybe the heat of Italy in June is getting to me, and I pull away.
“This feels wrong, in a place like this.” I whisper to keep myself from turning into a submissive puddle. “We should be reverent.”
“Do you know how long ago these people died?” Santino asks in my ear, his breath sending cascading goosebumps across my entire body. “Did you know there were people encased in lava as they were lying together? They spent their last minutes on this planet fucking.”
“There were also women cooking, frozen in
place for all eternity in a position of servitude.” I manage some sass even though he continues to disarm me in such close proximity. “They deserve respect.”
“Because they died? Have we not already established everyone dies?” His fingers curl around a lock of my hair and pull ever so gently. Heat shoots through me. “I will not take you here.”
“I never said you could have me.” I level my gaze with his to display the remaining shards of my breaking defiance.
His gaze runs from hot to humor. He laughs heartily and kisses my forehead. I have never in my life wanted him to kiss my lips hard and real and deep this badly.
“Come, Violetta. We have much more to see.”
And see we do. The king knows how to travel. We tour wineries, cathedrals, orchards. Every day is a new adventure full of wine and food and immaculate scenery.
He kisses me gently at each stop, like christening each stop in our travels. As the days progress, I want more. I don’t want gentle. I don’t want a kiss on the forehead and hands laying respectfully on my shoulders or over my clothes.
I want to be owned. I want to be pleasured. I want my body to slow its fucking roll.
Every morning, he walks out onto the back patio with pajama pants slung low around his hips. Here in Italy, he doesn’t swim at night.
He stretches and does his laps in the morning, before drinking his coffee and reading the paper—for once—on the day it’s printed.
Watching his body flow and move while half clothed is something like an awakening. Every. Single. Day. At this point, I’m convinced he’s doing it on purpose.
We go to the markets for fresh croissants and espresso. While there, he picks out a tiny, strappy red bathing suit from a stall that screams “for tourists.”
Red. Just like the clothes he bought me. I put it on at the house and can’t shake the feeling this is exactly what I’d want to wear in Greece while catching the attention of cute frat boys.
I watch Santino outside, stretching and collecting towels for our trip to the beach. He’s better than a frat boy. He’s everything a frat boy would want to be—powerful, sexy, commanding. He’s given me the attention all the other girls would want.