A Cage of Bones

by Jeffrey Round

  Valentino turned to Warden. “You are free to go for a ride now?”

  “He’s not free, but he’s relatively cheap,” Joe piped up.

  “What does this mean?” Valentino asked.

  “I’ll explain later,” Warden said as they stood to leave.

  “Make sure you’re not out late, Ward. You know how we worry,” Jimmy said.

  “Yes, Val, we want him home by midnight,” Joe added. “We’ll be waiting.”

  “Don’t worry, guys—I’m in good hands,” he said. “Ciao.”

  They crossed the darkened street and passed a fence topped with dangerous-looking spikes constraining a garden. Valentino took a penknife from his jacket, reached through, and cut a blossom free.

  “What’s the rose for?” Warden asked.

  Valentino looked at the blood-red flower as though he’d just discovered it in his hands. “I think it is for you,” he said, offering it to Warden.

  Warden took the rose and considered it.

  “You have a problem?” Valentino asked.

  “No,” Warden said, inserting it through a buttonhole in his vest over his heart. “It’s just that in my country boys don’t give other boys flowers,” he said.

  “This is not your country. It is mine.” Valentino stood over the motorbike and gunned the starter with his foot. It roared and shook with life. “Climb on!” he yelled.

  Warden slid a leg over the seat and sat unsteadily behind. Valentino turned to give him a sarcastic stare.

  “If you sit this way you will fall off. You must put your arms around me. Are you afraid?”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  Warden gripped Valentino tightly, feeling his ribs through the jacket. The bike rolled onto the pavement, picking up speed. Warm wind lifted his hair as they sped through the city, passing under stone archways and along winding streets. The facades of ancient granite buildings flew by until they seemed to have left the twentieth century behind, vanishing into the cool face of antiquity.

  Warden held on tightly, leaning in with the curves. Smooth leather grazed his cheek as they wove in and out of traffic. The bike veered onto a narrow roadway following a shadowy canal.

  “There is the naviglio,” Valentino shouted over the noise of the engine.

  The bike glided to a halt and they dismounted.

  “I will take you to my favourite bar,” Valentino said, leading them along a dark cobbled street, pursued by the echo of their footsteps.

  The water rippled off to the right, reflecting the pale street lamps lining its sides. They came to a building with a flashing sign—Scimmia Jazz—that lit up the block.

  “What’s it say?” Warden asked, looking up at the sign.

  “Shee-me-yah,” he pronounced. “It means the animal that lives in the trees and likes bananas. How do you call it?”

  “A monkey?”

  “That’s it—Jazz Monkey.”

  The bar bristled with music. A saxophone made clipped squawking sounds like coins tossed across a tabletop. A singer poised in a pinspot of light broke into melody as though she’d been waiting for them.

  “I will buy the beer,” Valentino said, as a waitress came up balancing a tray.

  He held up two fingers and she pushed the glasses across the water-beaded tabletop. He fanned a collection of bills at her, allowing her to pull several from between his fingers. She said something in rapid Italian. Valentino turned to Warden.

  “She says you are a very handsome American boy.”

  “Grazie,” Warden said, removing the rose. “May I?” he asked Valentino.

  “Of course.”

  He laid it across her tray.

  “Per me? Grazie,” she said, laughing as she went on to the next table.

  Warden relaxed beside Valentino, their bodies gently nudging one another. Whatever was happening between them felt slow and easy. Valentino laughed when Warden explained Joe’s parting comment at Bar Magenta.

  “I did not think you would come with me,” he said. “Most American boys do not talk to the Italians.”

  “I’m not American—I’m Canadian.”

  Valentino shrugged. “Is it not the same thing?”

  “Not to a Canadian.”

  Valentino considered this. “You are quiet and more polite.”

  Warden laughed, thinking of his orderly, well-mannered compatriots back home. How happily they queued up for anything. How politely they behaved even when they were on strike or protesting the government.

  “But you have the same country,” Valentino persisted. “The American president is your president, no?”

  Warden shook his head and laughed again. “We share the same continent, but we’re a separate nation with our own government. We definitely don’t want theirs.”

  “Who runs your government, then?”

  “We have a prime minister. Technically, the Queen of England is our head of state.”

  Now Valentino laughed. “You are joking me,” he said in disbelief. “The Queen of England does not run your country.”

  Warden tried to explain, but Valentino remained sceptical.

  “What is it like to be a Canadian then?”

  Warden had to think about it. “It’s very clean back home,” he said. “Canadians believe in fairness and respect for the individual and protecting the environment. And we’re…” But he couldn’t think what they were exactly, unable to define his fellow citizens or the very place he came from. “It’s a big country, so it’s a lot of things,” he said with a shrug. “What’s it like to be Italian?”

  “The best—of course!” Valentino said, laughing. “Italians have passion and we love beauty and our country. But you are a lucky country, I think. It was never a big war in Canada.”

  Warden recalled the great train station he’d arrived at that first afternoon, a long crypt-like monument fronted by prancing stone horses erected to the glory of Mussolini and his Fascisti.

  “No,” he agreed. “Not a big war.”

  The music flowed, shifting moods with the crowd. Each time the singer appeared her costume changed, becoming more and more extravagant. It was well past the oasis of midnight when the band stopped playing, disregarding the stamping and cheering of the patrons hoping to extend the night for just one more number that might possibly stretch on to eternity.

  Outside, it had cooled slightly from the day’s oppressive heat. The evening was deflating like a balloon in small degrees. They mounted a footbridge over the naviglio and stopped midway. The moon, exactly half-light and half-shade, reflected soggily on the water rippling with the slight breeze that had arisen.

  They leaned on the railing, staring out. Street lamps traced an ephemeral path along the canal. The silence was comfortable. Occasionally their eyes met.

  “It’s nice here,” Warden said.

  “Yes, I think to myself you will like this place.”

  Warden pondered Valentino’s face framed by its dark ringlets. They watched one another in silence. Valentino reached out and touched Warden’s cheek. A smile flickered and faded. He moved closer. Breath held, lips apart. Warden shivered as their lips touched—moist, warm—then parted.

  He stood there, unmoving, as though becoming aware of certain things—a taste of salt in his mouth, the smell of flowers in the air, the infinitesimal distance between stars. Things that had been there all along which he’d never noticed before. It was like looking over the garden wall into an unknown country.

  He’d never kissed another man before. In the world he’d inhabited until that moment it would have been impassable, like Gulliver’s distance. Tabu. But here was a boy in a leather jacket with curls fawning around his neck. Valentino’s lips pressed forward again, retracing their eager route. Warden felt a sense of trepidation, as though he’d broken some inviolable rule. He pulled back.

  Valentino’s face wore a look of intoxication. “I think this is another thing the boys in your country do not do with each other,” he said.

  All at o
nce, the trepidation vanished. “No—none that I know.”

  “I had to kiss you—you were so beautiful.” Then, almost apologetically, “I do not kiss other boys very often,” he said.

  “You could’ve fooled me,” Warden said.

  Valentino grinned impetuously. “You have a problem?”

  “No,” Warden shook his head. “Not any more, I guess.”

  They laughed at the same time. Warden felt Valentino’s hand steal into his own, their fingers intertwining.

  “Come, I must take you home,” Valentino said, heading back to his motorcycle. “A photo-model must sleep so he is as handsome in the morning as at night time.”

  They sped through the empty streets in the coolness of the morning. It was nearly 3 a.m. when they drove up to the albergo, the motorcycle’s echo roaring around them in the streets.

  “What room are you?” Valentino asked.

  “Twenty-two.”

  “You are free later this week?” he shouted. “Or do I say ‘cheap’?”

  “For you, I’m always a bargain.”

  “Thursday I will come at seven,” he said, and drove off in a roar, leaving a cloud of exhaust hanging in the air.

  Warden jaunted up the steps. The door was normally locked at midnight, an old-fashioned form of curfew imposed by pious hotel owners in the Land of Love. Latecomers had got into the habit of wedging a piece of cardboard in the doorjamb to assist the next latecomer who, it was understood, was to do likewise. It was in place that evening.

  Warden slipped quietly inside. He didn’t stop on the second floor, but instead continued up to a rooftop patio hemmed in by two walls and a sloping tiled roof. He lay in a hammock strung up in one corner.

  He thought of Valentino’s kisses, how his lips felt and the touch of their bodies gently nudging together. He listened to the stillness between his heartbeats like the silence that follows a sound in the darkness. He fell asleep feeling like a thief in the night.

  8

  Warden stopped in at the agency one morning later than usual. The lobby was a circus of comings and goings as lunch hour approached. Calvino fluttered around like an excited butterfly, chiding him for his lateness. He stopped short to say he’d had a favourable report from a photographer who’d dropped by the agency looking for new faces and had seen Warden’s card on the rack. “Who is this boy with the spiritual face?” he asked, picking up the card. He had “oohed” and “aahed” over it, making a fuss until Calvino had to ask him to leave to make way for a long list of appointments.

  “This could be very good for you,” Calvino said, rubbing his hands over his head as if in memory of hair. “Many models have been discovered by photographers who give them the chance which makes them famous. He said yours was a face ‘to die for.’”

  A look of suspicion came over him, as though encouragement might not be an altogether good thing for a model showing signs of losing self-discipline.

  “We work so hard for you and you think you can just come strolling in at a quarter-to-eleven. You’re getting lazy,” he warned, shaking a mercurial finger at him. “That is every model’s downfall.”

  He recited the photographer’s address, admonishing Warden to go immediately before he’d wasted the entire day. Then he held him back a moment, hesitating.

  “If you work very hard, you could be up there,” Calvino said, looking up to the rows of celebrated faces on the lobby walls.

  A receptionist smiled and asked his name when he arrived at the studio. It was like dozens of offices he’d seen as one more hopeful face in an endless trail of go-sees in the last few months. He sat and looked at a wall hung with photographs of models—all male—in a variety of poses and backgrounds. They looked, he thought, like a lot of young boys running around trying to act like grown men.

  The door opened with a sigh as a beaming, effusive man came toward him, hands extended. A shapeless smock draped over his features made him resemble a large teddy bear. He pushed a gorse-growth of shoulder-length hair away from his face, which had the all-accepting look of an idiot or a saint.

  “You have come at last!” he said. “I am Andreo Oliviero.”

  The hands extended toward him were not intended to shake so much as define the air around him. He crouched before Warden and held his index card up as though to compare the original with its image.

  “When I saw your face I told Sr. Calvino to send you immediately,” he said, eyes blinking on and off like a stoplight. “Yes, yes—I knew you were the one. It is such a spiritual face.”

  He stood, swaying lightly, hands clasped as though in prayer.

  “Come with me, please,” he said. “I would like to show you my work.”

  Warden followed him to a well-lit studio. There he handed Warden a portfolio, something the other photographers hadn’t done. Between its covers Warden recognized half a dozen celebrated advertisements he’d seen countless times in places he couldn’t begin to remember.

  Oliviero’s style was distinctive as much for its personality as for its beauty. His models glowed with the languidness of gods. Each photograph bore the mark of a master, unique and immediately recognizable, as if it could belong anywhere—between the pages of a high-quality fashion magazine or plastered over billboards on a street corner.

  “Your work is beautiful,” Warden said. “I’ve seen a lot of these before.”

  “Thank you—I’m so glad you like it,” he said excitedly. “Because I would like very much for us to work together.

  Warden wondered if the photographer were selecting him, or he the photographer, whose hands were busy defining the air again.

  “I would like to use you for a series of things. Individual pieces—some interesting, some not so interesting,” he explained. “Once the clients know your work with me they will see what I can do with you. Then we will see what we will see. But don’t worry. Basically they let me do what I want.”

  He smiled and rubbed his hands together like a child contemplating a choice of desserts.

  “You see,” he began, “there is something special about you. I feel it. For every decade there is a face that captures the imagination. In the ’80s there was Jeffrey Aquilon. Do you know him?”

  Oddly enough, Warden did remember the man with the blue eyes and handsome face who had been dubbed “the world’s most beautiful man.”

  “He was famous! Everybody knew him instantly—he got fan letters in bundles. So far there has been no face to appear to dominate the male fashion world in this decade. That face could be yours.”

  Warden listened to this wizard of photography making success sound like child’s play.

  “When shall we start?” he asked, anxious to unspool the fun he was envisioning.

  “Any time,” was all Warden could think to say.

  “Good. Tomorrow, then.” He clapped his hands in joy.

  Warden’s head was buzzing. When he wasn’t thinking of Andreo’s pronouncements, he thought of Valentino. The memory of his kiss stayed with him all week long through a blur of appointments and castings.

  On Thursday, Valentino was sitting on the steps outside the albergo when Warden returned, motorcycle parked off to one side. “At last!” he exclaimed. “I am afraid you will forget me.”

  “Not a chance,” Warden said. “Just let me drop this off in my room,” he said, indicating his portfolio. “I’ll be right back down.”

  Warden ran up and changed and returned in a few minutes.

  Valentino said, “We will walk to the Giardini Pubblici. It is very nice in the evening.”

  Along the avenues vendors sang the praises of their wares, fresh-cut crescents of watermelon and jumbled pyramids of coconut shells stacked under trickling silver fountains. Above, the clouds rolled coolly away in massive twilight shapes.

  They walked the darkening garden paths lit by glowing lamps like stars in a terrestrial universe. Warden told Valentino of his meeting with Oliviero.

  “This is indeed fortunate for you,” Valentino sa
id, putting a hand on Warden’s shoulder to keep them in step. “Oliviero has a big reputation. He gives a good image of what Italy is.”

  Their bodies brushed lightly against one another as they walked. Valentino’s hand felt natural on his shoulder. Warden sensed a new language, one of touch and physical affection, far from the crisp clean sanitation of his own emotions, and hinting at the possible amalgamation of passion and reason.

  “When I am kissing you last weekend, I hope I am not making you angry,” Valentino said.

  “N-no,” Warden said. “I think … I liked it.”

  “I think you are liking it, too,” Valentino said with a grin. “It is because I love beauty!” he exclaimed. “Just like your photographer, Oliviero. I want to hold it to my soul like a candle.”

  They both laughed at his poeticizing.

  “Sometimes I would like to make in love with you,” he said, treating the felicitous phrase as a noun.

  “You mean you’d like to make love to me,” Warden corrected.

  “Yes—I would,” Valentino agreed.

  Warden laughed.

  “Why do you laugh? Is it not possible for you to make in love with another man?”

  Warden tried to explain what he’d meant.

  “You do not want to make in love with me?” Valentino asked, pouting.

  “It’s not that. I mean…I don’t know.”

  They stopped and looked at each other.

  “What don’t you know? I will show you,” Valentino assured him. “When I make in love with a girl it is one thing and when I make in love with a boy it is different.”

  “You make love with girls, too?”

  “Of course!” He looked at Warden as though sizing something up. “You have never been with a girl?” He laughed. “Ah, you are a bambino, my friend.”

  “What’s it like—I mean, making love to another boy?”

  “It is solid and strong, like a rock or a tree. With girls it is softer and gentle, like a flower.” He winked.

  “You make love to girls and yet you make love to boys, too?”