Abroad (12 page)

The little boy screamed, as did the women around him. The man in the street groaned in pain.

“Water!”

“Ambulance!”

“Get back!”

“Maria! Get the mother—”

“Fuck! What should we do?” Claire cried.

“Get out of the way.”

“No. No. We should—”

“Really.” I tugged her arm. “They’re not going to want outsiders here. Come on.”

It was hard to pull her out of there, but after a minute or so, she finally relented. We retreated down the alley back toward the fountain and the cathedral steps.

“Well, I guess they’ll be okay.”

“Yes.” The festival was pulsing harder now. Revelers swelled around us, jostling our shoulders, spilling glasses of beer. Another band had started—tinny Italian rock—and the sound was deafening.

“Please. Can we go home now?” I begged.

“Sure.” Claire hooked her arm in mine and steered me on a roundabout path to our cottage. We passed beneath an Etruscan arch into a small stone stairway, and, as if a cruel spell had been lifted, the music diminished. I concentrated on the steep, narrow steps, coated in dust and gum. Two black dogs darted back and forth in front of us, searching for scraps in the bins.

“Well,” I said after a while. “You got right in there.”

“What do you mean?”

“All I did was stand aside. Of course there was no way to … But you were actually running to save that tyke.”

“Eh, it was just instinctual.”

My head was pounding again from the hangover.

“Yes. I suppose that’s what I’m talking about. I’m impressed by you.”

“Taz, it was nothing. Stupidity, if anything. You know, like, if you see a baby going for a socket with a fork, you don’t just sit there and do nothing. You run for it. It’s called being a human. It’s just your gut.”

Looking back on this now, it’s hard for me to believe this conversation really happened. That, after coming so close to witnessing a death, she and I spoke these words, as if the day were scripted to give us hints of what was to come.

For this is not just a memory selectively shaped by the things a girl is willing to admit and remember. I can’t tell you much about where I am, but I can say this: Later, you can hear your life again. Word for word, unbiased. As though recorded by an invisible hand. And you know, it’s the silly things that become extraordinary. When you’re going on and on, thinking you’re being meaningful, it’s all just garbage. It’s the throwaways that count in the end.

“You have a stronger gut than I do,” I told her.

“Oh, come on. You’d come after
me
if
I
were the baby. With the fork, I mean. Right?”

“Sure. I suppose.”

“Oh, I’d fork anyone for you,” she said.

She said that. She did.

“Mother forker.”

“Shut it, Claire,” I said, laughing.

“Fork it,” she said.

Althea, 6th century AD

While Grifonia was under siege by the king of the Ostrogoths, Althea was put in charge of catching and killing pigeons. She hated the task, but was frightened of starving, so she stalked the alleys with a net and a knife.

After two years, the Porta Sole was opened by a traitor. The Goths rained over the city, stabbing children with their swords, pulling women to the ground and raping them, striking down the old men who pleaded for their daughters.

In the great square where the fountain now stands, the soldiers dragged the city’s bishop to a platform. Behind him, looking on in horror, was a line of faithful soldiers, and at the end of that doomed line, Althea.

Using daggers freshly sharpened for the purpose, the Goths cut long slits circumventing the bishop’s arms, legs, and torso, and peeled the skin from his limbs. Afterward, they started on the soldiers, flaying them one by one.

By the time the executioners had finally gotten to Althea, a small band of the Compagnia had formed next to that stack of skinless bodies. Before the Goths could flay the girl, the rebels grabbed her from the platform.

Buona morte. Buona morte
, they murmured. They were now trained to slit throats quickly. Cleany. In the same manner as a butcher killing a sow.

The Goths executed them all immediately, and split open the girl’s chest as a lesson. The crowd cried out in wonder. When the soldier held it up, the young girl’s harvested heart was still beating in his hand.

Althea Francisco, fifteen years old, 6th century AD

9

I went back to the cottage, took some aspirin, and slept, waking after three hours in a pool of alcohol-tinged sweat. The clock read four p.m., and the house was eerily silent. I sat up gingerly, pulling on my clothes. Shuffling into the living room, I saw that everyone’s doors were open, as if they had rushed out to see something in the street. The front door was ajar. Gia’s underwear was drying on a rack on the terrace; Alessandra had a pot of bean soup on the stove that was still warm. The table was hidden by newspapers, magazines, and espresso cups. The air had a pungent smell that begged for the rubbish to be taken out.

Glancing out the front window, I walked into Claire’s room. Not that she would have minded; she looked in my bureau all the time for clean socks. Still, the intrusion. I opened her drawers, looking at her mismatched bras and panties, tangled with balled-up shirts. Jeans, shorts, one yellow sundress dress presumably for special occasions, all stuffed in. That electric blue frock, dangling from a wire hanger. Beaten-up American paperbacks: Kerouac. Grace Paley. An impossible-looking tome by Bolaño. There was a blue journal I didn’t touch. Some condoms in a plastic bag shoved under the bed.

I stood there for a few minutes, feeling the oddness of quiet in a place that usually is not. Finally, I returned to my room, brushed my hair, and went out.

In the last few weeks, my favorite stroll had become a narrow yet lovely road that led from the university to a quiet pocket of town, ending at one of the city’s seven ancient gates. Despite the neighborhood’s charm, in places it was quite seedy, simmering with bad ideas. Locals spilled into the street from cafés, sitting on the sidewalk, smoking
spinellos
, shouting to one another through the windows and doors. Dogs ran back and forth, most without collars. Girls who must have been five years younger than me leaned against the thick walls in torn dresses. Socks and underwear hung to dry above, from huge stained jockeys that billowed dreadfully to the briefest slips of gossamer lace.

That was the way it was in Grifonia’s old town: if you lived there, your life was flung onto the sidewalk for anyone to sift through with a stick. Though the wooden shutters were often closed to block the sun, the inner panes would gape wide to encourage cross-ventilation such that, at any hour, shouting, ecstatic moans, or sobs seeped out of the flats, in an endless drama available to any passerby who cared to listen. I had always been rather squeamish, yet the frank, almost sexual squalor of it all fascinated me.
Who were these people
, I wondered,
letting out their sounds with such abandon?
The screaming, the bodily squawks. It couldn’t be real, the way these people lived. None of it, it seemed, was real.

At the end of the road, past the antique shops, the notary, a mosque, and the world’s shabbiest gym, the businesses thinned out and the neighborhood became blissfully quiet. In the shadow of the outer gate, I came across a small stone courtyard planted with wilted flowers. I sat down, thinking of the day’s strange events. So thick was my haze that I didn’t notice another figure standing near the far wall—a stooped old woman, dressed head to toe in white and covered in a white shawl. She was running her blue fingers over what appeared to be an inscription.

“
Buon giorno,
” I mumbled, just to let her know I was there. She didn’t acknowledge me, and before I could say anything else she was making her way out. I saw, as she passed, that she wasn’t old at all, but a lovely young woman, with a face so pale it was blue, body hunched as if from the cold. As soon as she stepped into the sun, she vanished.

I poked my head out after her, searching for her apparition. She wasn’t there, but I forgot her quickly, as the man from the museum was, just then, ambling around the corner toward me.

“Oh,” I said, blocking his path. “Hello there. Hi.”

I never would have been so bold even two weeks before.
I can be anything I fucking feel like
, Claire had said. I didn’t know who I was trying to be, but certainly I desired to be different from the shy, slightly jaded girl who had arrived on the train.

We stood there for a moment. Up close he was paler than I remembered, and bigger. He was at least six feet tall, large shoulders and hands but not heavy. He had dark, straight hair that needed a cut. There was an academic air about him. Again, he was carrying his notebook. And oddly, he seemed not at all surprised to see me on this abandoned street corner on the outside of town.

“Here we are again!” I said, my voice cracking.

He nodded.

“I’m Tabitha.”

“Colin,” he said. Then, after a pause, “Nice to meet you.”

“It is.” A car tore up the street. He lightly pushed me farther inward on the sidewalk. “So did you have a good time at the party?”

“Not particularly,” he said.

“No?” A group of girls was coming up the street, presumably to sun in the park by the gate. Colin’s eyes flicked over toward them, then back at me.

“There’s one every year. I’ve been going with my father since I was thirteen.”

“So you’re Italian, then?”

“Yes. Half. My mother’s back in Surrey, but my father’s Grifonian. He lives here with his second family, down near the San Francesco church.”

“That’s why the British accent.”

“
E I’italiano perfetto
,” he said, smiling.

“Sorry you had a rotten time at the party. I thought it was grand.”

“Well, there were all these crashers,” he said, tipping his head back a bit.

I blushed. “Oh, right. That was my friend’s idea.” Behind the wall across the street, some children were shrieking. “It wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“You ought to be careful. Some of these Grifonians can get territorial.”

“Actually, we had invites,” I said, remembering. “These coin things.”

“You shouldn’t have been given those.”

“What was the party for?”

“Just a local organization. Sort of a Masonic thing.”

We regarded each other. Or rather, he regarded me. Because of the difference in our size he had to bend down to speak to me, the same way a gardener stoops to tend to a flower on a shelf.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Twenty-one,” I said. “You?”

“Older than you.”

“Too old?”

He cocked his head, as if trying to make me out. “It depends on how old a twenty-one-year-old can act.”

My face had become hot. I knew I couldn’t keep this up.

“There are a lot of uni kids here.” He pushed his glasses up his nose. “A lot of brats from London.”

“I’m Irish,” I said, quickly.

“That I discerned,” he said.

“I just go to school in the U.K. I’m on an Enteria scholarship.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought.” He nodded. “And your friends, too.”

He said this as though perhaps Enteria was not something he particularly liked.

“What do you do here?” I asked.

“My history dissertation. I’m getting a PhD.”

“Wow. Well, then maybe you can tell me something,” I said.

“Maybe.”

“I was looking at that garden there. There’s this plaque … my Italian is pretty good, but I can’t quite make it out.”

He straightened, pleased. “That’s Nicolai, the martyred bishop. Another gory story.” Colin smiled again. I felt as if I’d earned a prize. “You like those, it seems.”

“I do, I guess.”

“All right. Well. The city was under siege. For two years. There was no food, and the Grifonians were dying of starvation, on the verge of defeat. So the bishop—Nicolai—he had an idea. He took the very last goat out to the hills where the Goths could see him, then slaughtered it so that they’d think we had all the food in the world. He thought if they presumed we had enough supplies to last through winter, they’d give up.”

“Did it work?” I asked.

Colin raised his eyebrows. “Suppose you haven’t gotten to the history section of your classes yet? No, it didn’t. A traitor let them in, and what followed was a period of bloody Goth rule.”

“Ah. Right. Goth rule. I’ll look into that.”

He crossed his arms and looked at me, amused. I felt a fluttering I hadn’t experienced for some time.

“Well … I better be going,” I said, hoping he’d think I had things to do. “Maybe I’ll see you soon.”

“Maybe,” he said, heading toward the gate.

Well, when? I wanted to ask. I should have. I should have said so many things.

Instead I watched Colin walk through the city gate until he disappeared from view around the corner. I stood there for a moment, hoping he’d come back. He didn’t. To my left, the woman in white hurried back into the courtyard. I glanced inside again to see her crouched there, her finger out, tracing the stone.

*   *   *

Just as Claire had predicted, Jenny, Luka, and Anna seemed less than contrite about not following up on my disappearance from the bar. As I climbed the brick stairs to the Club, I experienced a distinct air of foreboding. It was the first time I’d been truly angry with any of them. I could hear their laughter trickling down from two stories above, which only provoked me further.

“
We
thought you’d gone off with some guy, finally,” Jenny said offhandedly when I presented my complaint. She got up to refresh her glass. They were sitting on the floor with two bottles of Orvieto and a large platter of pasta tossed with oil and shaved truffles. Luka had asked her housekeeper to make it that afternoon.

“I told you I had to go. That I was sick. Remember?”

“Must not have heard you. Anyway, I met a lovely bloke,” Jenny said. “In fact, I seem to be the only one out of all of you able to hook up with an Italian.”