The Demon Catchers of Milan (7 page)

I had so many questions I didn’t know where to start. I felt so tired I didn’t ask any of them.

What I did notice was that everyone seemed pretty shaken, and that they were trying to hide it from me, talking loudly to one another, even cracking jokes that sounded like they had to do with what had just happened. Then we arrived at the restaurant, and the mood seemed to get lighter. I felt safer than I had
on the street. Maybe it was just an illusion, but it was very nice to have a roof over my head again.

The owner of the restaurant kissed Giuliano and Laura and shook hands with everyone else. Giuliano introduced me. Then he introduced me again, at the first table we passed, where half the people at the table seem to know half of the Della Torres. Then he introduced me again at the second and third tables, but not at the fourth, which held American tourists. (I had only been in Milan twenty-four hours, and already I could recognize them. What is it about us?) After the sixth and seventh tables, I got to sit down. I knew I would never remember anybody who had shaken my hand in the last ten minutes.

I recognized a few words on the menu, like
pomodori
(tomatoes) and
insalate
(salads), but then found a lot of phrases that translated suspiciously in my head as “cones with fungus” or “ovoid car parts.”

“Would you like some help?” asked Emilio.

“Yes, please …”

He translated various dishes for me but in the end, between jet lag and street attacks, it was just too much, and when he said, “Shall I order for you?” I nodded.

“I will order typical Milanese food, for your first night here, so you can get to know the city.”

“Okay, but nothing too weird,” I said, trying to sound polite about it.

“This from a child of the land of peanut spread and jam on bread, and coffee that tastes like water.” He laughed.

Uncle Matteo, across the table, called out to Emilio.

“He wants to know what I think is so funny,” Emilio explained. Everyone laughed when he told them.

“Uncle Matteo says that you Americans are nothing compared to the English, when it comes to food.”

“I don’t know anything about English food, but I love peanut butter and jelly, and the only thing weird about it is that some people don’t,” I retorted, surprised at myself. It felt good to smile some more.

We argued about food. I missed most of the jokes that people made, since if they got translated at all they didn’t arrive in time, and I would end up laughing long after everybody else was finished. By the end of the meal, though, I was catching more words.

Meanwhile, I ate real Italian food for the first time. Okay, Nonna’s breakfast and lunch should count, I know. But.

The waiter set down a plate of small, toasted triangles of polenta with mushrooms on them. I had never tasted anything so wonderful. I bit through the delicious, bubbly crust, thinly coated in melted cheese, and found the soft, warm cornmeal center, with no hard bits like the kind that sometimes sneak up on a person while they are eating cornbread, and the mushrooms joined me there in a sauce that tasted sweetly of wine.

That was just the appetizer. I had no idea, even though I had watched everybody take a million years to order, that there was so much more food coming. I could remember one or two long meals with my grandfather in childhood. They came back to
me after the third course, when I realized we weren’t finished.

They had put the gawky, big-nosed cousin on the other side of me. I tried to catch his attention while he talked with Giuliano.

“Francesca?” I asked.

He ignored me, but Emilio’s elegant sister looked up.

“Sì?”

“Oh, no—I meant—”

Why on earth did they have to have the same name, separated only by a vowel?! I looked down at my plate. She frowned and went back to talking with Anna Maria.

At that moment, a waiter swooped down with a risotto that wasn’t anything like my mom’s heavy, creamy mess. For one thing, it was yellow.

“Saffron,” Emilio explained, between bites of his own. “It’s a famous local dish.”

By then, I was so much in love with the food that I paid attention when he told me things like this. Across the table, it seemed like everyone was talking about cooking. I asked Emilio.

“Yes, a national obsession.” He smiled.

“What about
your
national obsessions?” asked Anna Maria.

Whether I just stopped hearing everybody else, or whether everyone else fell silent when she spoke this one English sentence across the table, I don’t know. I was so excited to hear English that I didn’t notice the glare in her eyes at first.

“Anna,” said Emilio in a warning voice.

“Well, it has to be okay to ask!” she snapped at him.

“Um, I don’t think we have any,” I said. “None that I can think of, anyway.”

“None?” She rolled her eyes. “What about the war on the terrorisms? What about this—this criminality, in Iraq and Afghanistan?”

My face felt hot.

“Anna, it’s her first night here,” said Emilio.

By then I’d figured out who she reminded me of: a friend in school who had gotten really involved in human rights and stuff. Anna Maria’s eyes had the same look in them, like this was too important to wait for me to get over my jet lag. But what did she think, that I spoke for all Americans or something? And anyway, wasn’t she a model? Did models care about politics?

“Uh,” I began. “Look.”

Now I noticed how quiet everyone was. I wondered how many actually understood what we were saying to each other. Not that I could think of anything else to say.

I hadn’t expected to feel so angry and so sad at the same time. It kind of struck me from behind. It struck Anna Maria, too, I guess, because her eyes were softening.

I looked up at her.

“We were trying to do what was right,” I said. “But now it’s all messed up.”

“We sent soldiers, too,” Emilio cut in. “But I think that you, Anna Maria, ought to remember that Mia can’t even vote
yet, and she isn’t responsible for everything her country does. Besides it will be a terrible waste if our osso buco gets cold. Please,” he added as Anna Maria glared at him, “there will be time to talk about all these things.”

“Okay,” she said, and added something in Italian under her breath. It took me three tries to get Emilio to translate it, and even then he made me promise first that I wouldn’t argue with her: “If the American voters are that ignorant, I don’t think much of her country’s chances.”

By then, her mother had worked out what we were talking about and scolded Anna Maria into behaving better, so that between Aunt Brigida and Cousin Emilio, family peace was restored, if the arguing that continued around the table—about the best way to cook osso buco (veal in a crazy-good sauce)—could be called family peace. How little I knew!

After that, there was a salad made of tiny, sliced, raw artichokes and thin slices of Parmesan cheese. I would never have expected to like it, but I actually mopped up my plate with a slice of the wonderful restaurant bread, after I made sure with Emilio that nobody would laugh at me for doing it.

Then it was midnight, somehow, with all the courses of magical food behind us and my head confused, since this was the first time I’d ever had a second glass of wine. I was puzzling over dessert, which I had been looking forward to, but which turned out to be a bowl of fruit and a plate of cheese and nuts that excited the heck out of everyone else for no good reason I could see. Even when Emilio explained that the pears were at
the height of their season and these were the first chestnuts and walnuts from the harvest, to which I wanted to reply that where I came from we could get them all year-round in the market, what was so special about that? But I didn’t. Then Emilio said, “May I help you on with your coat?” which was another way of saying, “I have been standing here for five minutes with your coat in my hands.” We passed slowly through the restaurant, saying good-bye at almost every table, of course, and stepped out into the sudden, chilly dark. It had gotten cold while we were inside; autumn was coming in, just like back home.

Only when the first shiver of cold struck me did I remember what waited in the street. The sleepy buzz of wine in my head stopped. I paused where I was, right on the edge of the sidewalk, and let the others flood out around me. Somewhere on my left, Giuliano spoke what sounded like quiet orders. The Della Torres shifted and shuffled, following Giuliano while they kept talking about dinner, or was it politics? Something, anyway, which seemed to involve important policy decisions, I thought.

When we started walking, we moved like a school of fish, with me as the littlest minnow in the middle. I wanted Emilio never to leave my side. He would protect me; he would translate what was happening for me, just as he had all through dinner. It was very hard to let him walk away with Francesco when we finally arrived at the door of the shop. Everyone kissed one another good night, and most of them kissed me, which made me nervous. Francesco hit my nose with his chin. Anna Maria smelled good, and startled me by smiling at me, as if she had
never said any mean things about my country. Uncle Matteo smelled strongly of cigarettes and wine.

Emilio kissed me last. Afterward I knew the exact spot, right on the bottom ridge of my cheekbone, precisely an inch from my ear. He left behind a smell like pinesap, the kind I always managed to get on my feet and hands up at Lake George, that smelled so sharp and rich while I scrubbed to get it off. That stuff sticks.

We stepped into the shop, Giuliano, Laura, Francesca, Égide, and I, and I breathed a sigh of relief to be out of the street. The smell of warm wax was wonderful. Giuliano picked up a long, ornate candle snuffer and began putting out the few candles that were still burning. I watched the thin trails of smoke float up and swayed where I stood, until Laura led me up to bed.

Pompous Voice and Gravel Voice were talking when I came in the room. I was so tired (and probably slightly drunk as well) that I said, “Could you please keep it down? I need to sleep.”

There was a shocked silence. I shut my eyes and smiled.

SEVEN

Arguing Historians, Sighing Candles, Unexpected Visitors

T
he next three weeks seem to involve an awful lot of verbs.
Essere, fare, uscire, venire, andare, capire:
to be, to do, to leave, to come, to go, to understand. I was amazed every time I managed to write a coherent English e-mail to anyone back home. But I studied, oh, yes I did; I studied as if my life depended on it, because I was pretty sure it did.

Hey, Gina-banana,

Psyched to hear you got the part. Does Ariel get to kiss anybody, and if so, is that anybody played by Luke? Life is pretty much the same here in glamorous Milan. At least I think it’s probably glamorous, but I wouldn’t know, since they still haven’t let me out of the house alone yet. I have
to travel with, like, five relatives to dinner or the Castello Sforzesco, a fairly interesting ruin in the middle of the city.

The rest of the time I sit on my balcony, if the weather is nice, and study millions of verbs and some other stuff. Apparently my balcony is safe. Why it is safe and the street isn’t, I have no idea. They haven’t really explained anything about what they do.

So, one thing they make me do is kind of odd. I have to meditate every day. Don’t get the idea that I’m going to start wearing long, floaty skirts and smelling of patchouli. There isn’t a statue of Buddha in sight when I meditate. There is a small sculpture of the Virgin Mary holding Jesus, which Laura brought me the other day. It’s made out of painted wood, and it’s beautiful. There are even tiny animals carved around the base of her pedestal: I think my favorite is the eensy bear with carved fur. The statue is supposed to be very old, owned by one of our ancestors.

That’s the strange thing—everything in the house is “Uncle Martino’s this” or “Cousin Maria’s that.” I get the feeling that except for Francesca’s clothes, nobody in the family has bought so much as a coffee mug for a century. They used to have more, but they lost a lot of their stuff in the war. Milan got bombed pretty badly in 1943.

So I sit and look at this sculpture of Mary, and I’m supposed to empty my mind and picture her in total detail. Here’s what it says in the ancient notes that Emilio helped
me translate (he refuses to speak any English with me anymore, which is a total pain):

“The demon catcher would do well to meditate daily upon Our Lady, Queen of Heaven. The wise demon catcher will meditate for at least an hour a day, imagining her in her perfect form. He must picture her in great detail, from the stars upon her mantle and her robe blue as the sea, to her firm and shapely foot upon the sickle moon. He must picture her shining with a great yellow light.”

Uh, okay. Whatever. Apparently this comes from a really old manuscript, written by yet another relative of ours. I don’t know if it says “he” all the time because only men can be demon catchers, or because people used to (and sometimes still do) say “he” when they mean “everyone.”

So besides Italian verbs and meditation and history, how else are they preparing me? I don’t know. I don’t even know if they know. I go along day by day, and then all at once I’m paralyzed with fear, so frightened I wear myself out. Gina, what am I going to do?

Sorry to freak out on you. I don’t have anyone else who will get it, who I can really talk to, even if they could speak English.

Okay, freak-out over, for now.

Dinner is almost ready. I can smell it from the kitchen. That’s one thing, Gina. I never thought food could be so important. It’s a huge deal here. Every day Laura goes out to the shops and comes home with bags and bags of
groceries and a Plan. Everyone else pitches in with the Plan when they get here, and the Plan is always delicious.

Okay, dinner’s up. Give my love to Mom and Dad. Keep lots for yourself.