A Semester Abroad (6 page)

“So you are from the south, too?”

“Well, I’m an Italian–American.”

“The north and south are different you know. The south is better.” Dino, who was from the north, said something to Gaetano that I didn’t understand. Gaetano ignored him and continued. “People here don’t like the people from the south, and we don’t like them.”

“You like Dino.”

“Dino is different. He is good.”

“I see.”

“For me you are Italian.”

“I am. Italian-American.”

“Your mouth is like the south. And your dark hair and eyes. Like the women of south Italy.” I didn’t know what to say to him. Dino winked at me and switched to English.

“The men of the south are all criminals.”

“Are you a criminal?” I asked Gaetano.

“No,” Gaetano said with a wry a smile. “Sometimes, the men of the south who move north have to do things that are a little illegal.”

“Like…criminals,” Olivia said. I laughed feeling nervous, and Gaetano said something else to Dino that I didn’t understand.

“You know Gaetano is priest?” Dino asked. The Italians at the table cracked up. Gaetano wanted to speak English now. They all did; they all wanted to show off the little bits they knew.

“Are you a priest?” I asked. This was starting to get weird. I wasn’t sure what was worse, having a criminal or a clergyman looking at me the way he was.

“He say this because I live with monkey,” Gaetano practically screamed for emphasis.

“You live with monkeys?” Olivia laughed. “In a zoo?”

“Are you a zookeeper?” I asked.

Dino corrected Gaetano in Italian.

“He live with monk, not monkey,” Dino explained. I shrugged, not sure if this was a joke. “How you say where live monk?”

“Monastery?”

“Yes, yes. I live monster with monk, no monkey,” Gaetano said. The Italians laughed again. Paolo began making monkey noises. Olivia and I looked at each other waiting for the punch line.

“No, is really,” said Gaetano, nodding. “I live ’ere. In monster.”

“Okay, sure.” I guessed it was like a dorm.

“So we mus’ go your 
casa
,” Gaetano said, winking a gray eye at me. The Italians thought this too was funny. Gaetano translated for Giovanni. Giovanni turned a little red.

“We are not going to go to my apartment ever,” I said. Then I switched to Italian, for the benefit of anyone who needed clarification. “
Mai
.”

The waitress brought another round. It was the last round for us. It was after two. The boys conferred in dialect. They were trying to plot ways of making us stay. We wouldn’t stay. We needed to go back to our beds and sleep. We used sleep as an excuse.

“
Andiamo via
,” I said. “
Siamo stanche
.”

Confused, they followed us out. They said they wanted to walk us home. They asked us to go dancing. They asked us to go to a hot spring. To each request we shook our heads. We continued to tell them that we had to leave. We were tired. They didn’t believe it.

“Why?” Gaetano asked. Everyone seemed to be waiting on me.

“We’re not going to get in a car with strangers.” I said, using a word I learned in class that day, 
sconoscuiti
. I could tell immediately I hadn’t used it right. Gaetano was genuinely offended that I said that. He claimed not to be 
sconoscuito
, whatever the damn word meant. He insisted that we go with them to the hot springs.

“He says it’s nice for tourists,” I told Olivia, not sure why I was translating.

“We’re not supposed to be tourists,” she said.

“They probably want us to go skinny-dipping,” I said.

“Let’s just go home,” Olivia said, starting to walk toward the 
campo
. She waved back to the guys. “
Ciao
!”

“Wait,” said Gaetano, walking over to us. He looked at me. “You call me.”

“I can’t.” I said. “I don’t have a phone.”

“She ’ave none in ’er 
albergho
?” He pointed at Olivia.

“You can give it to her,” I said. He wrote down his number and handed it to me. I took it and gave it to Olivia. I had no intention of calling him.

“To the monster,” he said, pointing at the paper. “You call me.”

“The monster, yeah. Scary,” I said as Olivia laughed. I grabbed onto her sleeve. The rest of the boys kissed us on both cheeks, and Gaetano got too close to my mouth. I moved away quickly and tugged Olivia down the street. We shouted 
ciao
 at them, letting the end ring out like the Italians did.

We walked down Via di Citta, arms linked as if we were Italian women and Siena was our city.

I set rules for myself, so it would be easier. One was not mention his name. It was an old rule, started by my friends when his girlfriend, Mono Girl, came back. They stopped bringing him up. They thought they would protect me. But they didn’t realize that conversations for me became yet another waiting game. No matter who I was talking to or what I was doing, I was waiting for a clue about him.

But in Siena, no one knew me or him or anything. If I didn’t mention Jonas, if I didn’t speak his name, I told myself things would be fine. In Italian, the letter that started his name didn’t exist. I told myself, He will not exist for me here
.
But whenever I looked at the poster of the Italian alphabet in my classroom, the first thing I thought was that something was missing. I had to stop it. If I could manage to get through a day without relating everything back to him or us, this would all be worth it.

But, it was so hard to walk those narrow streets. The couples stopped everywhere to kiss each other, to heat each other up. The men looked at the women in a way that broke my heart. Their love was on display. These couldn’t be the same men who wanted to fuck blonde
americane
in my apartment.

I couldn’t help picturing the two of us on these small streets. Sometimes he came up behind me and placed a hot hand on my neck. I saw us together in the kissing couples. I closed my eyes to envision him pressing me against the gray walls, more persistent than he had ever been. My skin shivered against the stone from where my shirt was lifted by his hand.

These were the images that would do me in. This was Crazy trying to trick me.

I should have listened to Kaitlin that day when Jonas came up to us in the student center. I was helping her work on a mural with her art class. I couldn’t draw, but I was letting her boss me around, enjoying the sight of her red hair tied back, fingers pointing and wiping paint on her jean cutoffs. All I had to do was keep filling in the sky with the cobalt blue paint it had taken Kaitlin hours to decide on.

Kaitlin ran a tight ship, and she went to pester one of the freshmen about his choice of color for one of the parts of the mural. She left me alone with Jonas.

I knew him through friends. I knew him from parties. He lived in my dorm. I chatted with him about our plans for the weekend.

“You, uh, got a little something on your face,” he said, gesturing to his own. He smiled at me. I don’t think we ever really looked at each other before that minute. I don’t think we saw each other the same after that. I don’t know why, how it happened. I could feel the paint on me, but I wiped the opposite side of my face.

“Other side,” he said.

“Oh,” I said and overshot so I was scratching above.

“No, here,” he said, shifting his book bag and touching my face for the first time. I smiled at him.

“Are you going to the cafeteria soon?” I asked hoping it would sound casual. “I could use a dinner break.”

“I, uh,” he hesitated. In that hesitation, I understood how out of reach he was. In that hesitation, I was hooked. “I actually have to go to a screening for class.”

“Okay,” I said, hoping it wouldn’t sound devastated.

When he was gone, Kaitlin was at my side. “You know he has a girlfriend, right?”

She didn’t think I was that kind of girl. I didn’t either.

I still don’t.

“I heard she took the semester off. Besides, it was just dinner.” I said. I ignored the face I knew she was making and went back to filling in the sky.

Olivia was leaving for Florence. Her three weeks in Siena were done. She would live with a family. She and Suzie agreed to be roommates in Firenze as well.

Olivia and I went to the Duomo because she wanted to go to the cathedral one more time before she left. My group had already been to the Duomo twice. I knew more about architecture, the painters the Lorenzetti brothers and the ancient tribe of Etruscans who founded Siena and their legacy than I ever could have anticipated. Everywhere I turned I encountered a fresco by some famous painter that Kaitlin would have loved. It was mostly lost on me.

As Olivia walked around the cathedral looking at the artwork, I could see that Olivia’s group had also been inundated with “culture.” We started pointing things out to each other, trying to outdo each other with our respective facts about what statement the artist was trying to make through Mary and baby Jesus’ expression. We speculated as to why Jesus was sometimes a sour-faced baby and sometimes a mini adult in Mary’s arms. We tried to keep straight faces as we spoke as academically as possible. Then I started making up facts about the artist Giotto and Olivia lost it, drawing stern looks from the Sienese women praying in the pews.

“
Andiamo
,” Olivia said, laughing hard. “I’m hungry.”

“I could eat a fresco,” I said as she pulled me out of the Duomo and we stood giggling on the steps.

We found an 
osteria
 behind the Duomo. The people in the restaurant were so friendly to us that we knew we wanted to stay. We didn’t even need to look at the menu before deciding to sit down. The host led us downstairs into a cave. He sat us in a private alcove.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, looking up at the cool brown walls.

“It’s like an Etruscan tomb,” said Olivia, not meaning to invoke the game again. The waitress brought us glasses of prosecco for no reason. I looked at Olivia, confused, but when Olivia shrugged, it was good enough for me. We clinked our glasses together and said “chin chin” like we heard the Italians say in all the bars. I drank the bubbly white wine and smiled.

We ordered crostini and bruscetta and declared it the best we had ever had. Olivia ordered a bottle of Chianti, and we each got some sort of pasta that we didn’t quite understand. There was no rush to this meal or to any meal I experienced in Italy. Olivia confessed a secret that she hadn’t even told Suzie. She kissed one of the 
milatario
 that she and Suzie met one night at the Re Artu bar when I was out with Janine and Michelle.

“How come Suzie didn’t, you know, see you kiss him?”

“I waited till she went to the bathroom. Now he’s off to Sicily.”

When the plates of pasta came we ordered another bottle of wine and I was sure that we were glowing from sulfites and happiness. We each took a deep breath of our food and sighed, then smiled, realizing we did the same thing. Olivia got a type of ravioli, and I got thin, small, twisted pasta. We both got sauces made of truffles. The pasta was not drenched in sauce but barely coated. Still, it tasted heavy and rich. It was heaven.

“This meal tastes of everything that is good in the earth,” I said, knowing it would make her laugh. I felt this urgent need to communicate with someone who understood me in my language.

Olivia told me that Gaetano called her hotel the day after we met him.

“I don’t know why. We weren’t even that nice to them,” I said. I was jealous that she had a phone, something to keep her in touch with the outside world. She didn’t have to hope as I did that people remembered me when I ran into them on the street.

“It’s not how nice we are; it’s how 
bella
.” She accentuated the syllables. “You have no idea how hard it is to try to talk to these people over the phone. They just keep saying English words over and over like they have that disorder.”

I giggled. Olivia was becoming beautiful to me. I was getting too accustomed to her looks, to the mole on her lip, her straight dark bangs and the scar on her temple. That was how I could gauge the strength of our friendship. Her features were no longer strange but familiar and comforting.

Olivia wondered what would happen if Suzie and Kurt keep going at the rate they were. “It’s not like school; I can’t just run down the hall and sleep in someone else’s bed.”

“Have they done it yet?” I asked.

“No,” she rolled her eyes. “They haven’t even kissed. She’s one of those.”

“A prude,” I said.

“Virgin,” she said.

“Wow,” I said. “I can’t imagine she will be much longer in this country with all this,” I gestured to the wine.

“I know,” Olivia said, mopping up the last of her truffle sauce with a piece of crusty bread.

For dessert, we had cappuccino and tiramisu and 
zuppa inglese
, rolling each creamy dessert flavor around our mouths. I was falling into a food delirium. We asked for the check, but they brought us 
cantucci
 and 
vin santo
 instead. We were already feeling drunk, but we dipped the little biscuits into the dessert wine. When 
il conto
 came, it really wasn’t all that expensive.

“We could come here every week or at least every time you visit,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as desperate as I felt. Maybe she wouldn’t return. Who knew what Firenze had in store for her? I might be left with no one to laugh with, trapped in someone else’s language.