by Joseph Grady
“Indeed. And you’re Brian, correct?”
“Correct.”
“And I don’t remember if I caught your name yesterday afternoon,” said Natasha, turning towards Lucy. “I’m awfully sorry about all the drama with the police and the translations. You really did save my life, there.”
“My name’s Lucy,” she said, extending her hand, but not getting up. “It’s no problem.”
Natasha came into the kitchen, hesitated for a split second looking at Lucy’s hand, but eventually shook it. She pulled a chair out from the table, looked down at it, removed a Clorox wipe from a packet in her pocket, gave the chair and her right hand a once over with the wipe, and finally took a seat. Her posture was impeccable.
During the ritual, Lucy’s eyes met Brian’s. They both had an oh-crap-who-the-hell-just-moved-into-our-builing look written on their faces. Lucy stood up and filled three mugs with coffee. She placed Brian’s sixteen-ounce Starbucks Singapore mug in front of him, her own favorite mug with the entire calendar year of 2010 printed on the side (with all the months in German) at the head of the table, and – as a tacit assertion of her own power and authority – she unilaterally decided that the ownerless dark blue Knights of Columbus mug would now be assigned to Natasha.
“You don’t mind American drip coffee do you?” asked Brian. “Or what do they drink in South Africa anyways?”
“Oh, the tea is wonderful everywhere, but Cape Town is one of the only places with a real coffee culture. In a lot of the country they’ve just got instant coffee. Terrible. I had been trying to drink stronger espresso to see if I could get used to it before coming to Italy.” She took a sip out of her mug. “But I suppose inculturation only goes so far. Anyways, can I ask you both a question? Do either of you have a mobile in Italy?”
“You mean a cell phone?” asked Lucy?
“Don’t answer that question,” said Brian. “She knows what you mean. She’s just got this habit of making everyone in Europe use American vocabulary when speaking English.”
“Well, when I first got here, I had a cell phone,” said Lucy. “But I never really had anyone to call over here. It was just a waste of cash, so I got rid of it.”
Lucy slouched down into the seat at the head of the table – an exaggerated slouch in the face of Natasha’s incisive angles – and put her feet up on the empty seat next to Natasha to see if she couldn’t provoke a germaphobe reaction.
“I’ve got a mobile,” said Brian. “Some of us have real jobs and need to be in touch with people.
“Well, my boyfriend gave this to me in South Africa and he told me it would work in Italy.” Natasha gingerly placed one of those miniature brick cell phones with a manual keypad on the table. “I can’t seem to get any calls to go through. Yesterday afternoon, everything was working just fine, but now I can’t get ahold of him.”
“Your account’s probably just out of credit,” said Brian. “Everything here is pay as you go. No contracts. What company do you have? You’ll just have to go to a tabaccheria and fill it up with credit.”
“Oh my God!” Natasha turned to look at the feet on the chair next to her. Lucy tried not to smirk and Brian rolled his eyes. Natasha looked even closer at her feet and said, “Where on earth did you buy these shoes? I absolutely adore them!”
Brian now tried not to smirk himself. He knew exactly what Lucy was trying to do, and he knew that Lucy had failed to provoke the desired reaction. She wasn’t going to give up that easy, though.
“I slaughtered a bison, tanned the skin, and sowed them myself,” Lucy answered with a straight face.
“Really? They do that sort of thing in America?”
“What? You’ve never been on a bison hunt?”
“Not at all.”
“Oh, come on. I’m just messing with you,” Lucy finally laughed. “Have you ever heard of Hobby Lobby?”
Natasha shook her head. Her cheeks turned even redder and she tried to laugh along. Except when running, Lucy almost always wore handmade moccasins. I had tried to convince her to go and hunt an animal by herself, but she insisted that leather and other materials could be found at this place called Hobby Lobby.
“G’Day, mates!” all three turned their heads to watch Andrew stride through the door, throwing his school bag on the floor. A huge cheesy grin spread across his face as he patted Natasha on the back, “Who’s the most excited here for her first day on the job? Oh, you’re gonna love it! Two hours of chatting with old ladies. Get ready!”
“But don’t get too big of a head on your shoulders,” said Brian. “They always love the new student for the first month or two. You’re going to be the most popular girl at lunch today, and everyone will want you to be at their table.”
“It’s true,” said Lucy. “There’s these three old ladies. We call ’em the ‘mean girls’. They sit by themselves, or sometimes they let me sit with them, but nobody else. You’ll probably have to sit with them today as a test, which is a very special thing.”
“Yeah, it’s a big day for you,” said Andrew. “When I started, I was as nervous as a gypsy with a mortgage. I only got just one day with the mean girls before they decided they didn’t like me. Brian got four before they didn’t like him anymore. Today could make or break your whole career at the Palazzo. You might be spending the next few years with me and Brian in the nerds section. No worries, though. Brian and I will keep you company.”
“But I hardly speak Italian,” said Natasha. “They’re going to hate me.”
“But it’s not about speaking Italian,” Lucy shook her head and caressed her popped collar. “It’s about being a bad ass, and that’s it. You either are or you aren’t.”
Very soft footsteps came down the hallway in their direction. A young Asian man in black pants, a grey clerical shirt, and a black blazer made a bee line through the kitchen to the fridge. Before opening the door, he stopped and performed a slight head bow towards the table, solemnly pronouncing, “Buon giorno,” and left the kitchen with a Mountain Dew and a Tupperware of fried rice.
“That’s Master Miyagi,” explained Lucy. “If you’re interested in learning Karate or Feng Shui, he’s the guy to talk to. Or actually… he doesn’t really talk much at all, but you can give it a shot.”
“But then why was he dressed as a priest?” asked Natasha.
“In Asian cultures, they use western clothing differently,” said Lucy. “It just means he’s a black belt in Zen. If you’re awake at the right hours, you’ll even see him levitate sometime.”
“Okay, just to be clear,” interrupted Brian, “that’s Fr. Damien. He’s not a Karate master or Zen or anything like that. He’s just a normal Catholic priest from Korea, and he’s another one of the grad student residents on the hallway.”
“But he doesn’t have to volunteer like the rest of us,” Lucy rolled her eyes at the grave injustice.
“He does have to volunteer like the rest of us,” said Brian. “He’s the chaplain. He has to say Mass every day in the chapel, hear their confessions, and be there to anoint anyone who’s about to die.”
“It’s a pretty good deal, actually,” continued Lucy. “The residents all love having a priest around who doesn’t ever talk with them. They know he barely understands Italian in the confessional. And even better, they know they’ll have someone to wipe some magic oils on their heads to get rid of their sins before they die, so they don’t have to worry about behaving or going to church or anything like that. It’s great. If I were Catholic I’d definitely want to live here, because then I could sin as much as I wanted, and still get a free ticket to heaven just before checking out. They’ve really got everything figured out in this country.”
You could almost see the gears working in Brian’s head, quickly flitting through different theological arguments that had already been hashed out a number of times without success. Reason can almost always prove useless against the impenetrable fortress of Lucy’s sarcasm. She sat back, waiting to see what ridiculous thing
Brian was about to say, hoping she would get to make fun of him more. Probably because of the new girl’s presence, though, he skipped a serious response, and matched fire with fire, “Well, even without being Catholic, Lucy, you seem to sin as much as you want anyways, so what’s the point?”
She opened her mouth to respond, but the surprise of his comment took her off guard. What the hell was that supposed to mean? After she’d done the math, it was clear that what Brian had said was more biting and personal than any of the old abstract theological things he’d said before. In the heat of the moment, she forced out a courtesy chuckle, shrugged her shoulders and pretended she thought he was funny. But in her eyes it was clearly a fake laugh. Her eyes also said that the comment had cut much deeper than Brian would have intended. A keen observer would know that she would try to ignore it for a few days, then she’d spend a week ruminating on it, and finally, in a moment of weakness, she’d explode at me or at Brian for something completely unrelated. Hopefully nothing expensive would have to be broken in the process this time.
“But what does Fr. Damien do the rest of the day?” asked Natasha.
“Smoking, sleeping, and studying,” said Andrew. “I’ve got the room right next to his. He does the exact same thing every day. His alarm goes off at 11:40am. He smokes his first cigarette on the terrace at 11:45, showers at 11:53, returns to his room by 12:06, has a Mountain Dew, a cigarette and fried rice for breakfast at 12:17, goes to the chapel at 12:30 for twenty minutes and stares at some book, leaves for the Greg at 12:43, and sits at the exact same spot in the library until Mass in the chapel here at 7:30. He eats dinner at the table by himself in the dining room until 8:20. Then he comes back upstairs and works on his doctoral thesis, taking a smoke-o every forty-two minutes out on the terrace before going to bed at exactly 3:40 every morning. The man is a machine.”
“So he’s already a priest, but he’s still studying at the seminary?” asked Natasha.
“No, he’s not a seminarian. He’s getting his doctorate at the Gregorian University, where I go,” explained Brian. “So he can go back home to Seoul and teach in their seminary there.”
“But what do they do if they die in the afternoon?” asked Natasha. “If Fr. Damien’s at the library, how do the residents get the anointing, or confession, or whatever it is they call it?”
“Oh, that’s the thing,” said Lucy, having quickly suppressed her rage and now back to her normal salty personality. “They don’t die in the afternoon, they always hold on and wait for Fr. Damien to come in the evening. It’s really bizarre. They all like to die in style here with the distressed family members standing around and all the religious rituals. Yeah, and now that you mention it, it was really weird to have someone die in Palazzo Mortimer in the afternoon yesterday. That’s never happened in the three years since I got here. I guess that guy must not have been Catholic.”
Lucy started to chuckle, but fell silent, fidgeting with her mug, when nobody else laughed. Natasha looked down, and Brian looked across at Lucy with a mocking grin. The rage in Lucy’s eyes flickered back on and off for just a moment.
“So where are you going to study?” Andrew asked Natasha.
“Right now I’m just hitting the Italian pretty hard,” said Natasha. “But I’m looking into a few viticulture marketing programs.”
“Viticulture?”
“Yeah, wine production,” said Natasha. “It’s an agriculture specialization. That’s what I’ve got my undergrad in. But now I’ve got to figure out how to sell the stuff.”
“You need to sell wine?” asked Brian. “I’ll buy some.”
“That’s exactly the point,” said Natasha. “How do South Africans get Americans to pay more for our wine? You’ll pay top dollar for swill with ‘Italy’ written on the bottle, but you won’t pay half as much for highly rated stuff with ‘Africa’ written on the side. You heard it here first. The New World — Africa, Australia, the Americas — we’ve got to stick together, and we’ve got to figure out why the Old World can sell sub-par wine for twice as much as it’s worth!”
“I thought you were, Russian, though,” said Lucy.
“I’m not sure if Russia counts as ‘Old World,’ but yeah, I’ve got dual citizenship,” she answered. “Daddy’s Russian and Mum’s South African. I only spend a few weeks or so every year with Daddy in Moscow, so I’m really not much of a Russian at all. Mum and I have been on our own in Cape Town since whenever the wall came down, and Daddy was allowed back into Russia.”
Nobody quite knew what to do with that last statement, either, and it was followed by a pause, until Andrew, again, saved the day, “Alright, well I’m interested in hearing all about South Africa and Russia. Right now, though, we’d better head down to lunch.”
CHAPTER FIVE
LEI È LA SIGNORINA LUCY FOX?
That day at pranzo, morale was absolutely through the roof. Two new things. First, the new girl. The residents would spend the next two weeks analyzing and dissecting her appearance, her dress, her words, and her gestures. So who’s that new girl? How long has it been since last time we had a blonde? Maybe ’07 or ’08 when there was that funny looking German one, remember her? Ma questa qua invece, che belle chiappe che c’ha, no? Hai ragione, è proprio carina. Where’d they say she’s from? Must be Milan. No, no, she don’t speak no Italian. Maybe German? Polish? No, no, I heard say she’s from Africa. What are you crazy? A blonde from Africa? Yeah! You mean Africa Africa or just Sicily? No, Africa Africa. They got blondes in Africa? Sure do. You gotta go down far enough, though. What? Yeah, keep going down south. They’ve got winter when we’ve got summer, just like we’ve got Norway and Sweden up here in Europe. You don’t say. Yep. So you’re telling me they’ve got blondes on the other side of Africa? Course they do. I got a cousin who spent the whole war in Mozambique. Told me all about it. So why’s she all bundled up? What do I know? Think about it. She was just coming out of winter down there, but we’re headed into it up here. Should take a few weeks to adjust. You think it’s real blond hair or just dyed? No, I think it’s real. No, that’s bleached for sure. Look it only goes down past her ears. Real blondes from Sweden have long hair. This one’s a fake.
Second, and more importantly, a murder. Finally they had something to talk about that wasn’t the weather or what their children might be doing with their money. The residents were in such a good mood that the staff was wondering if they could have a dead body delivered to their door every Monday afternoon. Did you see the body? I’ve seen plenty of Saudis. No, I said did you see the body yesterday? What? The body? The dead body? Did you see it? Carolina saw the body, I thought. She said it was under a tarp, though. What? A tarp! I bet it was the mafia. I’ll bet it was the staff, I know exactly who it was, but I’m not telling. They were after money, I’m sure, it’s all about money. No, it was sex and drugs. All the killings these days are about sex and drugs, not money. I know a guy in the police department, he told me he’s gonna bring me all the files to look through tomorrow. I once knew a guy from Brescia who got killed. I knew a guy from Perugia who got killed. Oh yeah, I knew three guys who got killed in Perugia! Mafia? Gambling? I bet it was the wife who couldn’t take it no more. Did you hear the gun fire? Was it a gun? No, it was a knifing. I heard the gunfire, loud and clear, and I said, Antonio, somebody oughta call the cops ’cause that ain’t no firecracker, that’s a gun. Oh, you’re full a crap, it was a knifing. You haven’t heard anything more than ten feet away from you since ’97. What? Like I said. You didn’t hear nothing. What? Forget it. What’s for lunch? Again? We just had that yesterday. That was two weeks ago. Yesterday we had the lasagna. All right. Let’s eat. let’s eat. Can we eat now in peace or are you just gonna stare at that food? What? Let’s eat! Yeah, pasta’s made of wheat. Forget it.
Lucy was the first student to come downstairs to the dining room, strolling through, indifferent to the Tiffany stained glass windows and the enormous high ceilings with intricately painted panelling and trusses. The mean girl
s flagged her down. She stood by the one empty seat at their table, but waited to sit down, knowing exactly what was going to happen. Natasha finally came through the door and stopped. Her eyes flew up, and her jaw fell down, awestruck at the windows and ceiling.
The ringleader of the mean girls, Signora Pironi, held up her hand to Lucy, telling her not to sit down. “Oh, ma aspetti un attimo. La ragazza là è la nuova che è appena arrivata?”38
“Sì.39”
“Grande, la dica di venire qui. Vogliamo conoscerla.”40
“Certo.”41
Lucy walked over to Natasha, and took her by the arm, interrupting her wonder moment and dragging her over to the mean girls’ table. “Ciao, ecco, ti voglio far conoscere alcune delle più illustri residenti qua al palazzo. Signora Pironi, questa è Natasha Abramova, la nuova arrivata fra noi studenti.”42
“Piacere.”43
“Piacere mio.”44
“E poi, la Signora Sbarra.”45
“Piacere, signorina.”46
“Piacere mio.”47
“E poi, la Signora Torretta.”48
“Piacere.”49
“Piacere mio.”50
“Prego,” said Signora Pironi, pointing to the chair in front of her. “Si accomodi.”51
“Grazie, molto gentile.”52
“Lei, da dove viene?”53
“Sono sudafricana.”54
“Bello.”55
Lucy walked away to sit at the vulgar old men’s table that was always closest to the mean girls. So it wasn’t true that Natasha was completely inept at Italian.
The vulgar old men were the definition of exhausting personalities. They demanded constant attention, and they kept Lucy from eavesdropping on the mean girls’ conversation with Natasha at the next table over. When the daily four courses were finally through – primo, secondo, insalata, frutta – Lucy looked up from her fruit salad to find the adjacent table already empty. She was burning to know how bad things had gone. What magnificent Roman insults had Natasha been served? Afternoon programming in the lounge, immediately after lunch, involved a game of Tombola – a kind of Italian Bingo – led by Brian, and virgin daiquiris served by the paid staff. Natasha and the mean girls were AWOL. Lucy made a tactical mistake and for the full duration of the social hour was locked into a seat on a couch next to a clingy lady who grew more and more tipsy after each non-alcoholic cocktail. The chatty resident finally passed out five drinks in, right in the middle of a slurred anecdote about the time she went out dancing during World War II with American presidents and sailors. Lucy, not giving the woman a chance to wake up and rally for another round, gently lifted herself out of her spot. She abandoned Brian to hand out the Bingo prizes by himself, and snuck off to find Natasha or the mean girls and hear about lunch.