by David Perry
The water of the Bay would be cold, he had thought. He wondered who would find him. Someone would, of course, and for that he was sorry. What a horrible thing to see, to discover, the body of a reprobate, crushed against the rocks and never to see forgiveness. Never to see the face of God. Never to see tomorrow’s sunrise.
It should be beautiful, and he had smiled. He had often walked here, across the famous span, to watch the dawn. Tomorrow, its rays would reach out to warm San Francisco and drive away the forgiving and scar-hiding fog. Like a miracle it had seemed to Lee, from his first day in the city, the finger of fog poking through the Golden Gate and making Mount Tam and the Transamerica Pyramid look like islands awash in a churning tide.
No more. No more dawns, no more rainbows, no more miracles.
He looked over at the Vista Point in the Marin Headlands. A gazillion times over the last few months, Lee had planned the photo he would take there of all them, mother, father, grandmother, and himself. He had biked over one day to find the perfect spot and timed it for the exact moment when San Francisco would be ideally lit by the afternoon sun.
A bicyclist zoomed by. Lee looked up and down the walk. There was no one else around. Good. It would be rude to have someone see him jump. Lee’s grandmother had always said that politeness was the most important thing. It was early morning. There were few people on the bridge yet.
Across the Bay, the sun eased its way into the sky above Mount Diablo. Lee looked at his iPhone. It was 6:35 a.m. Dawn. Just a few minutes now. He had timed it perfectly. He would jump at precisely 6:37 a.m. here in San Francisco—the exact moment his family had died. In another city. On another coast. All together, dead in an instant, an instant of horrible, unimaginable terror. They had been en route to him for a three-month visit that would never happen now. Today, they would all have been celebrating Lee’s eighteenth birthday, together.
Lee climbed onto the railing. He’d been so tired, and empty. With one step, all the bad dreams would go away. All the pain, all the confusion, all the memories. All the hate. Everything would just stop. That would be nice. Lee just wanted everything to stop. His brain was a smoldering ruin, like the charred grave in Virginia shared by his parents and his grandmother.
And, now, Lee would join them.
“Don’t”
Lee had stopped, turned, and seen Brian running down the bridge path toward him. Brian had kept him from jumping. Brian had saved his life.
Lee shivered against the cold and the memory and looked out over Umbria, hidden in clouds of snowy mist. It would have looked like this a year ago, Lee thought. This would have been the final thing Andrea would have seen before he died.
Both of us, standing at the abyss. Andrea not able to face a life not dedicated to God. Me, not able to face that I no longer believed in one. The Church had driven Andrea to the cliff. God, or proof that he never existed, had pushed me to the rail.
“Prrrrrrrrrrrr prrrrrrrr.
Lee looked down. La Donna Volsini’s cat had returned, rubbing its silken flanks against Lee’s calves. Behind him, a snowy but quickly filling path of paw prints led the way back to the center of town; to the apartment; to the bed where his lover awaited. Adriano. Lee had so much to live for.
He knew, however, the feeling of wanting to die. He, too, had stood on a cliff like Andrea. He, too, had just wanted it all to end, to make it all stop. Brian had pulled him back from the edge. Lee would never forget. A month later, Lee had gone to sea. Two years later, he had met Adriano.
Andrea had not been so lucky. No one had pulled him back. Andrea had jumped, and Lee understood the feeling completely.
“Hey, honey.”
Lee turned to find Adriano, smiling and holding a snowball.
The couple held hands there on the edge, turning their faces upward to catch the parachuting flakes. After a few silent moments, they kissed, smiled, and turned to walk home hand in hand.
The cat followed, three sets of footprints in the falling snow.
Part II
CHAPTER XXXVII
Excavation
Tuesday, December 17, 2013, Orvieto
By the end of their second week in Orvieto, Adriano and Lee had become locals, or at least liked to think that they had, especially Lee.
They awoke to the bells of the Tower of the Moor and merchants called out their names when they entered markets. La Donna Volsini’s cat followed them everywhere. The pert young blonde owner of what passed for a local gym had shown Adriano where she hid the key so he could let himself in. Lee, who thought the idea of paid exercise on sabbatical was defeating the purpose, eschewed such machinations for morning walks along the cliffs between Il Duomo and San Giovanale. Again and again he walked to the edge of the cliff where Andrea had stood just over a year ago, twins separated by geography but united in spirit. Lee’s nightstand had become a groaning board of press clippings about the deacon’s suicide, Bishop Sancarlo’s forced resignation, and the subsequent exile of Reverend Vicky. Adriano said nothing, but quietly did his own online research, admitting to himself—if not to his husband—a growing fascination with the subject. Lee pretended not to notice.
After their respective morning meanderings, they met up at Café Volsini—usually Lee arriving first—for coffee and a different dolcini every day. Lee was determined to sample every one of the delectable bites that spread toward infinity in the glass-and-marble display case. On their third visit, the café’s sturdily built doyenne had approached their corner table with a two-day-old copy of the International Herald Tribune, folded to the crossword, a pen carefully clipped to the edge.
“Here,” she said. “For you.”
“Grazie,” Lee offered with surprise as she turned away.
Adriano sipped his cappuccino and smiled. “She likes you,” he whispered.
Undoubtedly better than the alternative, Lee had thought, watching the elderly owner return to her perch behind the cash register. The photo of Deacon Andrea was still there, but its wax candle sentinel had been replaced with one of the ubiquitous battery-powered Padre Pio flames like the one in front of Brian’s ashes.
That had been four days ago. Now, by the time Lee’s hand triggered the tiny bell on the café’s front door, he could already spy at what he now considered to be “his spot,” the intellectual stimulation of an aging but virginal acrostic and a powdered-sugar-dusted plate bearing a pistachio creme cannoli.
The Godfather music again played in Lee’s head.
“Buongiorno!” Lee called out with a tip of his Star Fleet Academy baseball hat to tinkling accompaniment, squeezing past the bundled-up local postman, likewise touching the brim of his hat as he headed out on his morning rounds. It was especially cold today. One week until Christmas.
La Donna Volsini looked up—was that the rapid flicker of a smile as Lee entered, or just a twitching lip?—then returned to her pile of receipts. Behind the bar, the morning barista, a delicately pretty girl of about sixteen, looked up with a quietly mouthed “Ciao” as the ancient and elaborate espresso machine whirred into action with Lee’s caffeine fix.
From the back room, Lee could hear boxes being moved about and the low-volume music of a transistor radio turned to a Roman pop station. He noticed a small cloud of flour dust hanging, suspended, in the mottled sunlight that curtained the arch between the front and back rooms of the bar.
Lee sat down, taking off his hat, gloves, and scarf and carefully laying them on the chair next to him as the barista placed the coffee in front of him. He started to unwrap the newspaper, but stopped, feeling as if he were being watched. Looking up, he found La Donna Volsini positively staring at him. Putting down the crossword, Lee took a deep breath, and bit into the proffered pastry. La Donna Volsini watched every bite as if through opera glasses.
The flaky sweetness blossomed across Lee’s face in an explosion of frothy whipped foam while chopped pistachio crumbs rained onto his newspaper and shirt.
It was the most delicious cannoli in the history
of civilization.
“Ol mao Gawd!” Lee moaned through cream filled lips. He felt like a human Twinkie. “Delicioso!”
This time, there was no doubt. La Donna Volsini was smiling. With a satisfied nod, she went back to her accounting and left Lee to his morning ritual.
He was well into solving his Herald Tribune puzzle when the door chime again rattled with Adriano’s crossing of the threshold, preceded by steamy breaths and La Donna Volsini’s cat, who instantly jumped onto the chair next to him.
“Buongiorno, Signora Volsini! Come stai questa bella mattina?”
“Ciao, Signor Coráno,” La Donna replied with genuine enthusiasm as she pushed herself up from her chair and ambled toward the bar with something approaching enthusiastic rapidity. “Motto bene. Fa freddo, no? Mi permetta di ottenere il vostro caffè e qualcosa di speciale per scaldarsi.”
“Grazie mille, Signora.”
Lee just stared at his husband in mock scowl.
“Is there any language you don’t speak?”
“My Serbio-Croatian is not terrific.”
“Show off.”
“You have frosting all over your lips and your breakfast is being pilfered by a cat.”
Lee looked over quickly to see his pastry-mustached visage in the mirror behind the bar and Madame Volsini’s cat carefully licking pistachio crème from a now empty cannoli shell.
“Si, scacciare gatto birichino! Che non è per voi!” La Donna Volsini shooed away the cat but chuckled as she did so. The feline departed with an emphatic flick of her tail, as clear as any middle finger. “She the boss.” La Donna Volsini sighed, switching to broken English. “I only live here. She let me feed her and she like my cannoli.” Next to Adriano’s dry cappuccino she placed two delicate crystal cordial glasses, brimming with a clear liquor. “Drink this with coffee. Good for cold day.” And with an efficiently satisfied nod she returned to her station by the door.
“Caffè corretto,” Adriano said with a melancholy smile. He held the glass up to his nose for a second, then poured about a third directly into his coffee.
“Sounds like a crossword clue I should know,” Lee said, mimicking his partner and taking the aroma into his nose before taking a sip. “Tastes like grappa.”
“It is grappa,” Adriano said, his grin punctuated by an ever-so-slight glistening of the eye. “Caffè corretto is what Italians call this. Literally, corrected coffee. You can use brandy or saltimbucco, too, but grappa is the most authentic. My grandfather had it every morning until the day he died.”
Lee just sat.
“You know, that’s how I learned my Italian,” Adriano continued.
He didn’t speak of his family much. Lee wasn’t about to interrupt. “My grandparents on both sides fled Franco after the Spanish Civil War, to Venezuela, although they didn’t know each other at the time. It was a pretty common escape route, but expensive. Evidently the ship was some horrible old prewar relic from Greece. Anyway, my mother’s father—”
“The caffè corretto guy,” Lee prodded.
“Yes. He loved everything about Italy, especially its ancient Etruscan and Roman history, but was fiercely Spanish.” Adriano smiled. “He settled in the Italian section of Caracas. I learned to swim at the Italian social club. I practically grew up there. My two grandfathers met there, trading war stories and smoking strong Venezuelan tobacco. I can smell it now. They all played escala cuarenta—a popular card game from Italy. They hung out with a group of Italian expats, anti-Mussolini soldiers who ended up in Spain during the war, also fighting the Fascists. God, the stories they would tell. My parents met there too, as kids. Their wedding was all around the pool.”
At the mention of his parents, Adriano’s visage changed and his jaw tightened. He finished off the remaining grappa in his cup at a gulp. Case closed.
At voluntary risk, Lee ventured a bit further over the conversational barbed wire into the no-man’s-land of his husband’s family. “Your parents named you for your paternal granddad, then?”
“Yes, with an extra vowel.” A bit of his husband’s smile returned. “My grandfather was Adrien—for Hadrian, the Roman emperor born on the Iberian Peninsula. He thought my name was the perfect blending of both the cultures he loved. After my grandmother died, he returned to Spain. He wanted to die in his own land—immigrant to the core. ‘One day you will visit Rome and see all the pagan temples that I never got to see,’ he told me before he died. ‘And, you can spit on the Vatican for me.’ At this, Adriano laughed, a dark and mirthless grunt. “He hated the Catholic Church. Franco used it to divide Spain and my parents used it to divide my family. He was horrified at my mother’s religiosity. Didn’t understand what happened to his daughter at all.”
“So your grandfather taught you Italian?”
“Mi abuelo? Not really, although Spaniards and Italians understand each other well enough. The languages are similar. You know that from your Latin. He only spoke Spanish and the language of cards with his buddies. I watched them play and I also listened. I picked up my Italian from a bunch of Italian Communists far away from their homeland. My grandfather only saw two countries in his life, Spain and Venezuela. One he fled to escape the Fascists. The other he fled to escape his children and the Church. I travel for him and learn as many languages as I can for him. Salud, mi abuelo di mi corozan.”
At that, Adriano reached over and finished his husband’s grappa as well with a tiny tip of the glass.
They sat for a bit in silence: Lee noodling over his crossword, or pretending to, Adriano reading the two-day-old European news wrap of the Herald Tribune. Madame Volsini had disappeared into the kitchen, obviously at work on another carbohydrate bomb of delicious decadency.
“Bongiorno!” Don Bello burst in with a simultaneous symphony of bells. Everyone looked up and spoke greetings, even the cat. “Ah, I see La Donna is warming up to our newest Orvietani.” The elderly cleric sat down next to Adriano and Lee as the barista prepared his coffee.
“What do you mean?” Lee asked.
“The crossword,” Don Bello said with a sad smile and a bit of a sigh, tapping the newspaper with his finger. “She saved them for Andrea too. He loved to sit here and work them out. We’d do them together. He was a fanatic about figuring out a puzzle. Quite good at it, actually. Shhh, here she comes. Brrrrr. It’s a cold one this morning. Grazie, La Donna Volsini, grazie mille!”
Don Bello pulled on a smile, but nonetheless one of genuine affection, as La Donna Volsini placed a cappuccino with a side of grappa next to the Pastor of San Giovanale. Over her shoulder, Lee could see a well-formed and muscular arm handing up bags of flour from a hidden hatch in the floor of the kitchen beyond. A culinary miasma of dough and cinnamon wafted heavy in the air as each bag hit the tile with a cloudy announcement. Lee’s nose twitched with a memory. That smell was so familiar. Where had he experienced that scent before? It was almost too sweet for cooking, more like… Lee was pulled from his olfactory reverie by Adriano’s foot on his shoe, redirecting him to Adriano and Don Bello’s conversation.
“I’m sorry,” Lee said. “I was distracted. What did you say?”
“The Presepe.” Don Bello was positively puckish with enthusiasm. “It’s the biggest thing at San Giovanale all year. Can I count on your help?”
“Of course,” Adriano answered for them both, giving his husband a playful “pay attention” look. “We’d be honored.”
“What’s a Presepe?”
“A living Nativity,” said Adriano, jumping in. “It’s almost the same word in Spanish: presipio. Remember, Marco mentioned it the other day when we were having drinks.”
“Exactly right,” said Don Bello. “A real-life reproduction of the Holy Family reenacting the first Christmas, complete with sheep and goats, the Three Kings—“
“We used to do this at my church back in Virginia!” Lee exclaimed. “I was Baby Jesus!”
“Of course, you were.” Adriano rolled his eyes.
“The newest baby in
the parish got to have their picture taken in the manger on Christmas Eve. I’ve still got that picture somewhere. Whenever I got a bit full of myself, Mama would say, ‘You played the Son of God when you were a month old and you never got over it.’”
“Could explain a lot,” Adriano offered drolly.
“So, you want us to play Joseph or one of the Wise Men?” Lee could already envision his costume.
“No, dear boy. Not to disappoint you but we have our cast, as you say. I need help building the stable and the village. We’re a little behind this year. Andrea always organized the Presepe and recruited volunteers and oversaw everything, starting around the first of December, but, well, of course—“
“We’d love to help,” Adriano jumped in, with Lee nodding enthusiastically.
“Of course. Anything you want.”
“Splendid! That’s wonderful! Everyone gathers this Thursday in the garden at San Giovanale. Make sure to wear old clothes and boots. There will be a lot of lifting and toting as they say. The preparation is almost as fun as the Presepe itself, and we’ll have lots of mulled wine for our army of helpers. All the young men in the town turn out to help.” Don Bello clapped his hands, looking like an elf who just sent off the first FedEx of Christmas. “Ah, perfect timing! Here’s one of our helpers now!”
The trio turned to see a vision of maleness emerging from the hatch door in the kitchen floor. Venus in jeans, lit from behind with a halo of sunlight, the intoxicating youth was bursting out of a work shirt, struggling to contain his almost comically precise musculature.
“Lee. Adriano. This is Grigori.”
The leather boy from Sant’Andrea. The Swiss Guard from Rome,
“Ciao.”
CHAPTER XXXVIII
Brave New World
Wednesday, December 18, 2013, Orvieto
Bishop Arnaud sat at his desk in front of an overflowing bowl of tobacco corpses. Luke had warned him sternly against smoking after he was released from the hospital last week. Stupid ass. It wasn’t smoking that poisoned my bread. Oh yes, I know who my enemies are. There will be a time for you, old woman. The foundations of Café Volsini may have stood for a millennium, but nothing was eternal. He’d have his vengeance on the crazy bitch. Of course, he had to admire her. She was relentless. If she’d meant to kill him, she would have. She just meant to remind him that she was still there, that she remembered.