He remembered laughing with Walter over the Don’s short-lived fitness campaign. After three days, and the kind of slopes that daunted even the most seasoned cyclists, Don Paddy had been only too happy to squeeze his girth back into the white Cinque Cento. Something had helped the priest shed the kilos lately, but it certainly didn’t look like doctors’ orders. Sam doubted the priest would miss the bike.
He found a pump and went to work on the tires. They seemed to hold the air and he heard no hissing. He hiked up his pants, put on the cassock, dog collar, glasses and hat and got on the bike. It felt solid under him. He got off again, wheeled it out onto the road, shut the gate, then swooped out across the road and headed up toward the cemetery. Taking a tractor path through the fields, he glided and bumped his way down to the cracked and pitted old road, prone to mudslides, that passed fields, olive groves, vineyards, huge villas, and came out at Girone.
He lifted the bike over the barrier that blocked the road at the bottom, and swerved out into the short section of Via Aretina. At the light, he got off and crossed, then rode across the grass and down into the public park. From there he took the bike path that followed the bank of the Arno River all the way into the city. He pedalled easily for half an hour, encountering only a few hobby fishermen along the dirt and grass tracks that lined the river. He crossed the river at Ponte Verezzano. Another twenty minutes of pedalling took him into Via Dei Bardi.
He thought about going to his own place, “The Hole”, but realized he had no food there. He got off the bike and pushed it along, amused at the way the crowds scattered, like cockroaches at the flick of a light switch, on seeing a priest. There were three trattorie nearby, but he only had a few Euros in his pocket. As he neared Via Maggio, he remembered the language school and continued on to the Piazza.
He shoved the bike into the crowded rack and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. The sun was now less like rays of heat and more like a suffocating plasma. He dodged into the cool entrance to the school, squeezing past the Japanese students and their black lacquer language. When he went past the front desk, the secretary was on the verge of recognizing him. She had that smile like a light dawning and was about to say something (that damned Acqua Cristallina) but he didn’t give her the chance. He ran down the stone steps to the school's canteen in the old cellar.
Sam had started coming here a few years before he met Katia. There was a buffet of foreign girls, pliant young things in skimpy dresses, bursting with the very idea of being in Florence. And lunch was a real deal, cheap and simple, a plate of pasta, a few slices of hard unsalted Tuscan bread, a piece of fruit, and as much water and wine as you needed.
Sam found a small table in a dark corner near the kitchen. He was waiting for a tall Prussian girl to come over and take his money, when he felt the rush of someone sliding into a chair just behind him. A hand ran over his thigh and a woman’s voice said, “Forgive me, Father, for I’m about to sin. Big time.”
Sam caught the scent of wet grass and Shalimar and turned to look at her. He laughed, surprised at his own excitement. “Carla.”
“Padre Montefalcone?” She turned up her hands and shrugged in disbelief. “Sam Montefalcone a man of the cloth? What terrible thing did we do to deserve this?”
“I’m on a job.”
“So you’re not married to God?”
He shook his head. “I’m not even flirting with Him.”
“What a relief.”
“You look great, Carla.” Great was stretching it. Good. She looked good, tanned and still slim under the full-length black apron, honey-coloured hair, pulled to the top of her head, though quite a bit of grey he hadn’t seen before. But apart from that.
She smiled. “Tell the truth. You came to find me. You knew I’d be here.”
“I did,” he lied, then remembered. “De Capitano said he’d seen your father and that you were back.” He raised his eyebrows. “How long has it been, Carla?
“A decade or so. At least.”
“How the hell are you? Didn't I hear that you were going to Australia?”
“Oz. Yeah. I went and now I’m home again. I managed to stick it out for five whole years. The reality is so different from the fantasy. I found out I hate compromises. I came back a couple of months ago.”
Sam sat up a little straighter. “How are your parents?”
“My father just left for the seaside today, Castiglione della Pescaia, and my mother’s gone off to visit family in Scotland. They left me behind to run the school.”
“How’s this place going? It looks busy enough.”
She shook her head. “The school has been taking a hit like you wouldn’t believe. We thought we were going to have to close. Since the banks fucked up, no one's had money for frilly Italian language schools. Then things picked up a bit. And now with Japan... when the quake hit… it’s…” She looked straight at him, her eyes, an icy northern blue, then slid her hand over his. “I’m so sorry about Walter.”
Sam took a deep breath. “Yeah.” He lifted Carla's hand in his and turned it around, examining it. A phantom band of white skin encircled her otherwise tanned ring finger. “Nobody told me you got married, Carla. I thought you went to Australia for a job.” Carla had always claimed that love was Public Enemy Number One.
“I tried. I really did.” She shook her head. “What about you? You must have somebody wonderful... and permanent by now?”
Not wanting to jinx Katia and himself, he said, “Not really.”
She looked into the distance then back at him. “Hey listen, don’t eat this stuff. The cook spits into the sauce. Come over to my place. I’ll make us something? It’s been so long. We could ...talk. And there was something I wanted to tell you about Walter.”
“What?”
“Say you’ll come, then I’ll tell you. I went to see him as soon as I got back, thought you might be there, but Walter said you were abroad.”
“On a job.”
Carla nodded. “Walter said you were. So say you’re coming for lunch? Right now?”
Sam didn’t have to think. It was out of the way of Marta La Stella and her sbirri. “Sure,” he said.
“Just let me get out of this thing and get my bag,” She untied the apron and rushed off into the kitchen. Sam took a slice of bread from the basket, broke off little pieces and chewed them slowly, thinking, Carla Cremini, the first love of my life.
Right on cue, Walter was there in his head.
My dear boy, just as you know that you can never retrieve the past, it will occur to you to be curious about an old liaison in a way that can only be described as anthropological.
You shall find yourself visiting her precisely to see what dim and hobbled future you escaped by the skin of your exorbitantly expensive straightened and whitened teeth. However, at the same time, you might still have a winkle of feeling left, perhaps a sense of nostalgia dressed up as guilt over this long lost paramour.
And looking at her again, seeking in the worldly and slightly sagging woman the fresh girl you once knew, you might wish to know if it is possible to redeem something, anything, from a love whose expectation was too great to survive over time. You might (and here Walter would have winked) wish to reward, to celebrate, to commemorate, to wrap up the memory of your old love with the convivial ribbon of one last fling.
As Sam and Carla went up the stairs and across the piazza, he had an image of their first meeting. English class at Liceo Classico Galileo. The sudden plunge back into his fifteen-year-old self made him feel anxious.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Carla.
Sam drew in a breath, held it, then let it go. “Busted. Yeah. The shadowy past. I was thinking about your singing. I was your best groupie, you know.”
“I remember.” Carla scuffed a cobble with her sandal. “You know what still gets me about back then?”
“What’s that?”
“That producer who said if I wasn’t so white I could be the next Ella Fitzgerald.”
<
br /> “If you want, I can find him and kill him for you.”
“That’s very gallant.”
“You weren’t too white. You just had too much spirit. That producer envied it. He wanted someone he could manipulate and that wasn’t you. He was a mean little man. He wanted to suppress something in you because he was afraid you would take his torch and run with it.”
“Nice analysis, Doctor Sam.”
“You were good. You could have been great.”
“Now you're just trying to butter me up.” She hooked her arm through his.
They left the piazza, weaving around the clusters of dazed and roasting tourists, then turned down one shady alley after another until they were in Carla’s street. When they reached her front door and stepped back into the darkness, it was a relief.
Sam felt a sudden calm, being at Carla's place again. He was bombarded with memories of her, English class and their clique, that special tribe of kids with the Italian father and English-speaking mother besotted with Florence. Carla’s parents had insisted on their daughter misbehaving under their own roof. There’d been a lot of partying, with the kids talking too much and Carla’s parents listening, eavesdropping.
He couldn’t quite remember what he’d told them, but they’d always treated him with excessive kindness, as if he were a homeless orphan rather than the child of divorcing parents at war, offering him meals, moral support, a place to sleep whenever he needed it. It had left him confused.
Carla unlocked the inner door where the main hall greeted them with an echoing emptiness. White covers concealed the shapes that Sam knew were antique furniture. A narrow aisle of clean black marble floor shone through the layer of dust that had settled everywhere. Sam nearly walked into a huge spider’s web, a masterpiece of the arachnid arts. He batted it and sent the web and tiny creator floating to the floor.
“Like what you’ve done with the place, Carla.”
“Those little bastards work fast.” Carla disappeared through a door next to the dining room and re-appeared a minute later. “Bugger it. I was sure there was still some left.”
“Of what?”
“I had two bottles of a great Brunello. I swear it.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“C'mon. Follow me.”
They went through the cavernous rooms, up a wide staircase, across a hall, out through French doors onto the balcony. Carla opened another door and they entered a suite. She went to the windows and opened the shutters. In the light, the room’s Spartan bareness was emphasized. Whites and unbleached cottons, no pictures on the walls, no colours or knick-knacks.
“This place is looking kind of …uh… zen.” said Sam.
“I’m paring down. Stripping away all the excess. It becomes necessary as one prepares for death.”
He looked at Carla’s face, which was now unsmiling, more drawn than he’d noticed before.
“Carla… I’m sorry. Do you want to… uh… talk about?”
Her mouth curled up. “You always were so fucking gullible. It’s been the au pair’s room for the last decade, scemo. I haven't had time to fix it up.”
He pointed his index finger like a gun. “I’m going to get you for that.”
Carla went to the window and closed the shutters again. “It's too bright in here,” she said, “too hot.” She went over to the bed and sat down, then patted the spot beside her. Sam felt more at ease with her than he’d expected. He went over and sat down next to her.
In that past life, on another bed just a couple of rooms over from this one, they’d spent hours dreaming their futures, mapping them out on each other’s inexperienced bodies. A thin veil of drugs and alcohol covered all those memories, but the essence of them was still there. Their plans and projects. Leaving this place, this bony, stony old city. Conquering something, though neither of them had been quite sure what.
Carla had been so close to making it. In the days of gawky youth Sam had played piano for her, until she found someone better, someone more committed to the cause. Her singing voice had been raucous and beautiful, but jazz didn’t make you famous or rich. After a few years of singing in small smoky clubs all around Europe, she finally kicked it in. A little after Sam left to join the Legion, Carla surrendered to the local psyche and enrolled in a course to become a sommelier. It often happened that way, that the brittle dry yellow Tuscan dirt chose a person’s life for them. It enfolded them in its hedonistic embrace and never quite let them go.
Sam tried to suppress a yawn, then surrendered and said, “You don’t mind if I just close my eyes for a second. I had one hell of a night last night.”
“No, go on. Listen, I’m going to fix food like I promised. You just relax.”
Within seconds Sam was somewhere else, cities he’d been to with Carla. He was driving through night streets, a strange cross between Florence, London and Edinburgh. Black swans swam on a dark blue canal, or maybe it was a river, lined with grotesque monuments, fat Byzantine pillars, gargoyles and satyrs. He arrived in a place that looked like the hot springs at Saturnia except that in the darkness, the small natural pools of warm sulphurous water were steaming and infernally red. Sam realized that he was already naked and sitting in one of the pools, when he heard the voice above him.
“Shame on you, figliolo,” snapped Walter. “How dare you. She was such a pretty little thing. You murdered my Emmie.” There were tears in Walter’s voice. Sam tried to see him but he couldn’t turn around. “You toyed with her. You must never toy. Either you take her, or you let someone else have her. And Carla. What about Carla? What are you going to do to her?”
“Carla’s just an old friend.”
“Katia will learn of this and then you will wish you had never been born. I will wish you had never been born.” The last words were shouted. Walter’s hand came down hard on Sam’s head, shoved him under the water and held him there. Sam gasped, choked, kicked, struggled, and finally, jolted awake.
Carla was shaking him. “It’s ready.”
She had made spaghetti and put out slices of tomato with mozzarella. There were cold roasted red peppers and mushrooms in oil, gondolas of melon and sliced salami.
Sam picked up a slice and dropped it in his mouth. “Finocchiona. I love finocchiona.”
“I know. I remembered,” said Carla. She was about to say something else when her mobile phone rang. She looked at the number. “It says ‘sconosciuto’. Should I answer?”
“Probably not,” said Sam. He watched as Carla answered then listened to her caller. Her features cramped with annoyance. “I’ll be right there,” she said. She sighed and closed the phone.
“What is it?” asked Sam.
“Pain in the ass students. We rent the Boboli apartment to them. Says the water heater’s broken. Who needs hot water in this kind of weather anyway?”
Sam said, “I’ll come with you if you like.”
“No, I’ll deal with it. You look tired. I’ll go and see what's going on, do what I have to do, then be right back.”
“Sure.”
“And eat some of that food.”
“Yeah. I will.”
Carla seemed to rethink something and came back to perch on the edge of the bed. “You’ve been on my mind all these years, but especially the last couple...”
“Go find out what they want. You go and when you get back, I’ll be here.” She kissed him on the lips, gave him a remorseful little smile, got up and hurried out the door.
Sam went over to the window, opened the shutters again and looked out. The garden, once a tidy arrangement of cypress, oleanders, persimmons and box hedges, was dried out and unkempt. Despite the heat, the sight of that withered garden made Sam feel cold, peculiar, as though someone had just danced on his grave. In his teenage years, the palazzo had boasted a kind of shabby genteel splendour, but now, despite the clean whiteness of Carla's room, the atmosphere was one of decay.
Sam ate a couple of olives. He was too hot and too edgy to sleep. He went
into the small pristine bathroom, quickly stripped off all his clothes and turned on the cold water. When he turned sideways and looked in the mirror, the muscular man staring back looked grim.
The bullet hole near his hip and the long scar crossing his ribs were familiar friends, talisman souvenirs that always brought him back to a sane place. He stepped under the gushing water and let it stream down his body. He soaped up, scrubbed himself, then turned the water off and stood motionless in the shower cubicle. Without a towel he was dry in two minutes, and damp again with sweat in three.
He dressed, went back into the bedroom, and stretched out on the bed. He slipped into dreaming again. He was on a street in Florence. A woman-he was sure it was Katia- was running ahead of him. He could see her long red hair, sense the essence of her. He chased her, calling her name, but instead of turning around, she ran faster. Then Sam was climbing an impossible rock face to catch up to her. He struggled, hauling himself up from one tiny foothold to the next. As he was just about to near the top, Walter’s head popped out, looming out over him, pontificating. “This is not anthropology as you suspected, Samuele. You must get straight to the point, once you've decided that she's the one, you must move in and help her fulfil her destiny.”
Sam laughed in his sleep, aware now that he was dreaming. He forced himself awake. One of Walter's expressions for a seduction had been ‘fulfilling her destiny’. Walter had always maintained that the sole purpose of the female of the species, any species, was to procreate. His exact words had been, “Whether you like it or not, whether she knows it or not, sex, in one form or another, is always on her mind. It is in the female nature. She was created that way and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.”
Sam looked at his watch. An hour had passed and Carla still hadn't returned. Carla’s laptop was sitting in plain sight on the bureau, and he took the liberty of opening it. There was no password protection. He checked his email. No messages. He signed out and closed the laptop.
He wondered whether Carla was getting flack from tradesmen and decided to go looking for her. He knew where she would be. The apartment had a view of the Boboli gardens, right at the spot where the peevish and bored au pairs took the equally peevish and bored children of wealthy families out to play.
Galileo's Room (Noir Florentine Book 1) Page 8