The Story of X: An Erotic Tale (27 page)

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-TWO

I
F IT IS
possible to be very gently ejected from a building, then that is what is done to me.
Giuseppe and friends—with infinite care and tenderness—carry me to the front door
of the palazzo and place me in the street, red-eyed, distraught, angry, and inconsolable.

They offer to drive me, but I shake my head. And I stand there. Mute. Defiant. Simply
refusing to move. Weeping.

The door shuts in my face but I go right up to it and knock with the big ancient door
knocker—no one answers, so I knock once more; again, no one responds. The fourth or
fifth time I lift and drop the great brass handle, polished by centuries of visitors,
rich and poor, noble and ignoble, Giuseppe finally and reluctantly opens the door.
He sighs, and looks at me with real compassion, but he shakes his head.

“I am sorry, X. I am
very
sorry. But you can never see the Signor again. It is his orders.”

“But, Giuseppe, no, Giuseppe . . . please . . .
please
.” The tears are coming fast again. There are evening shoppers, passersby in the Chiaia,
and they are staring, inquisitively, at the blond American woman crying and yelling
at the door of The Palazzo Roscarrick. Let them stare. What does it matter now?

Nothing matters now.

“Giuseppe, you have to do something! Tell Marc to change his mind; I want to be with
him. Whatever . . . whatever happens. I want to be with him.”

“
Per favore.
This is from Signor Roscarrick, so you can go away and be safe.” Giuseppe is trying
to give me a big wad of money. I take the fold of notes and gaze at it in contempt,
and then I literally throw it back at him: through the door, so there are fluttering
fifty-euro notes everywhere, like orange confetti. Giuseppe does not flinch at my
anger; he stoops and picks up one fifty-euro note. He presses it into my hand, folding
my shaking fingers around the bill.

“At least take a taxi home,
signorina,
” he says.

Then he shuts the door and I know, somehow, it will not open again. Not ever. And
certainly not to me. Despite this, I bang on it, fruitlessly, several times.

After thirty minutes, the tears stop and the shock ebbs away. Deeper and darker feelings
take over. So I hail a passing taxi and climb in. I ask for Santa Lucia, and look
at the new, dark, empty space inside me, examine it, scrutinize it. Like a surgeon
looking at a scan of a frightful tumor, like a jeweler looking at a terrible flaw
in a gemstone.

This new, searing heartbroken sadness, I know, is going to be with me for a long time.
It may be here for
keeps;
it is moving into the apartment, it will be sharing my home, my life, my conscious
hours, it will be there when I wake up, it will be there when I go to sleep: because
this is the terrible and abiding sadness of losing someone you love, someone who was
so much more than any friend could ever be.

And then, one day, when I wake up, the sadness will actually
speak,
and it will say:
Today is the day
. And then I will turn on the TV or buy the
Corriere della Sera
and I will learn the inevitable news: Marc Roscarrick, the
molto bello e scapolo
Lord Roscarrick, is dead.

Killed by an assassin. Shot on the Via Toledo by some seventeen-year-old junkie from
Secondigliano on a sky blue Vespa; shot for a bounty of one hundred bucks. And then
the sadness will develop, then it will seep into my bones, it will grow into my soul.

“Grazie.”

I pay the cabbie, but as I do he looks at my tear-blotched face and, in that gentle,
kind, very Italian way he says, “
Signorina? S’è persa? Sta bene? Posso aiutarla?
”

He wants to help. He is concerned. I just shove the entire fifty-euro note in his
hand and turn and run into the apartment. Climbing the stairs, I slam the door shut
and start crying again. Maybe I will cry myself to death; literally dehydrate.

My tears and sobs are obviously loud, because pretty soon I hear a quiet knock on
my door and Jessica’s tentative voice.

“X? What’s up?”

“Nothing.”

“X? You’re crying—what’s wrong? You sound terrible. Open the door.”

I am sitting—practically slumping—on the floor of my stupid apartment in stupid Santa
Lucia in stupid Naples and I am numb with grief. I don’t know what to do or say or
think. I look at my balcony and I wonder, for a moment, how easy it might be to just
walk across the room and climb on that balcony railing and then gaze at Capri in the
moonlight and then—it would be so easy—I might just accidentally slip and fall and
then the sadness would be banished.

I come to alertness with a startling sense of shock. This is dangerous. I have to
calm down; I need to talk to someone. Jess is outside.

Standing and wiping the tears from my face, I open the door and Jess is there, wearing
white jeans with a blue top and a big, sad, patient and forgiving smile—but when she
sees
my face
she says, “Oh bloody hell, X. Bloody, bloody hell.”

“Jess . . .”

I stand back wordlessly and Jess comes into the room. She turns to me and we hug for
half a minute and then she makes tea—a British cup of tea—in my stupid little kitchen
where Marc kissed me and stripped me that night, that first glorious night.

No, I have to stop these thoughts. They are soldiers trying to breach the castle,
aiming to force their way in. If I let one through, I will be overrun and conquered.
Then I am lost.

Jess hands me a mug of tea, and sits on the floor beside me. The mug shows a picture
of the Amalfi coast. It reminds me of my mom: where she went on her holiday all those
decades ago. My mom. Maybe I could call her. I want my mommy. My heartbreak is so
engulfing,
I want my mother
.

“Come on,” Jess says, sipping from her own hot tea and staring me deep in the eyes.
“Time to fess up, X. Tell me everything.”

I take a big gulp of the tea even though it is scalding. I force the tears back down
my throat, and then I put the mug on the floor and look at Jess—and I tell her everything,
or at least, everything she needs to know. I tell her Marc broke the code of the Mysteries.
I tell her the Camorra and the ’Ndrangheta
run
the Mysteries. I tell her that the Camorra are now coming after him. And then, gulping
some more of the tea and trying very hard not to cry again, enough crying,
enough
crying, I tell her that he has banished me, exiled me, forsworn me, because he believes
he is a marked man, destined for assassination, listed to die one day soon. And therefore
he wants me away, safe, and out of the picture, forever.

I stop talking.

Jessica shakes her pretty head and I can see anguish in her eyes, too.

“Oh God, poor you,” she says, without a hint of her usual sarcasm. “Poor Marc.”

She goes quiet and stares at the night sky outside the window. The faint crackle of
fireworks can be heard, like gunshots in the distance; probably some Camorra gang
in the Spanish Quarters celebrating the release from jail of one of their own.

“You know,” she says, wistfully and quietly, “I heard a story the other day about
the Spanish Quarters. How they got their name.”

I say nothing.

She goes on. “You remember that street in the middle of the Quartieri, Vico Lungo
del Gelso?
Gelso
meaning mulberries . . .”

I say nothing.

She goes on: “It got its name from the Spanish soldiers, who stained their uniforms
by lying with local girls on the grass, making love.” She looks at me. “The grass
was strewn with mulberries . . . That’s what stained their clothes. That’s where the
name comes from.”

Jessica looks down at her tea. I can see tears on her face, too.

“This means Giuseppe and I are finished too, of course.” She lifts and sips the tea
and shakes her head and says, “Brruh. Enough, enough, enough.” Then she leans and
pats me on the knee. “We have to be strong.”

“Strong?”

A helpless shrug.

“Well, stronger. It’s horrible, X, I know, it’s totally bloody horrible, but if it
is as bad as Marc says, if he really is . . . If they really are . . . Well, I mean
. . . You know how relentless the Camorra can be.”

I nod. Desolately.

“If he really has broken some terrible law,” she goes on, “Then they will . . . they
really will . . .”

“Shoot him.”

“You are better off out of it. You really are. He is doing the right thing, a good
thing, the noble thing. Because you are also in danger, X, serious danger.” She sighs
heavily. “However depressing it is, however heartbreaking, Marc is doing you a favor:
he is trying to save you from, well . . . from God knows what.”

“But, Jess,” I say, looking deep into her soft brown eyes. “Jessica . . .
I love him
.”

T
HE NEXT WEEKS
are weeks of total bleakness. Every morning I wake and there it is: the sadness. There
is sadness in my cappuccino, sadness in my macchiato, sadness in my espresso; there
is the taste of sadness in every cake I eat, the sfogliata, the bigne, the baba; there
is sadness in the cheap shellfish I have for supper, the fasolari, the maruzielle,
the telline.

And the taste of this sadness is the taste of pure bitterness. It ruins everything.
It sours the world. It is a black sun shining down on all Campania.

Sometimes I try to see Marc, despite it all. I walk in my lonely way down the Chiaia
and up to the great big door of The Palazzo Roscarrick, the door I first knocked on
when I came here months ago, when he smiled and joked, and I saw the staircase for
the cavaliers; but this time when I knock either no one answers or a servant I haven’t
seen before briefly opens the door, stares at me, then shuts the door again without
a word.

Other times I call his cell phone. Maybe thirty times in two hours. Then the cell
phone number dies for good and a brisk, automated female voice tells me in Italian,
The number you are calling is no longer available
. I write e-mails that go unanswered. Eventually these e-mails are pinged back, telling
me that this e-mail address is now defunct.

So then I write letters, long letters in freehand, on tear-stained paper, and these
letters, just like the e-mails, elicit no reply, and eventually they are returned
unopened. He won’t even open a letter? Not even a
letter
?

Even worse than this rejection is the tension I experience every morning when I walk
to the newsstand on Via Partenope and I say “
Buongiorno
” to the newspaper guy and he looks at me and says “
Buongiorno
” and he hands me my daily copy of
Il Mattino
.

I don’t want to read this paper. I hate this paper, but it is the best paper for reporting
on Neapolitan crime: it is brave and remorseless in the way it covers the endless
victims of petty turf wars in Scampia, drug slayings in the Forcella, and if I want
to know if anything has
happened
to Marc, then this is where I will first see it recorded. And confirmed. And photographed.

So every day I walk back to the apartment, flicking feverishly through the inky pages,
staring at pictures of men sprawled outside dingy cafes in Miano, with blood running
from their bodies like they are leaking black oil; or sitting in cars in Marigliano
with uncannily neat black gunshot wounds in their foreheads; or simply discovered
as stiff and lifeless bodies in the endless piles of Neapolitan garbage in the Centro
Storico. And as I scan these images I think,
Is that him, is that Marc, is that how it ended, is it all over?

And each time my heart breaks open just a little more, and each time I realize, no,
that cannot be Marc—but each time I also know that one day soon, I will make this
penitential morning walk to Via Partenope and I will say “
Buongiorno
” to the news guy and I will hand over my coins and I will open the terrible pages
of
Il Mattino
and then I will see Marc.

Dead.

F
INALLY, ONE SOFT
evening at the beginning of September when I am on the verge of dissolution, of turning
into somebody I don’t want to be, when it is all too much, I walk the sunny and shady
pavements of the Chiaia to The Palazzo Roscarrick. I am going to have one last attempt,
and then—then what? Then what can I do? I don’t know.

I turn the last corner, and as I do my heart breaks just a little bit more. The Palazzo
Roscarrick is different: the door is
padlocked
. The windows have been closed and firmly shuttered. There is no sign of life. There
is a big
FOR SALE
sign plastered on the wall.

I don’t know what this means, precisely. Perhaps Marc is already dead, and it has
been kept quiet. This happens quite a lot. Alternatively, it is possible he has fled
somewhere, the South Tyrol, London, New York, Brazil, and he is selling the house,
so he can hide away. But the sight of this lovely house boarded up and emphatically
FOR SALE
makes me want to weep, all over again, but the emotion in me is more terminal this
time. I am despairing and desolate, but I am also resigned.

I have accepted that he is gone from my life forever. Dead or departed. Does it matter?
Now I suppose I have to save myself. Jessica was probably right: I am in danger, too.
I have seen too much.

I trudge back to my apartment and pick up my phone to call my mom in San Jose. She
has been ringing me and e-mailing me for weeks, wondering if I am okay. Her maternal
telepathy has obviously sensed that something is seriously awry, but she cannot quite
ascertain what it is—for the good reason that I don’t want to tell her. I
can’t
tell her. Without her knowing about the Mysteries she would be utterly nonplussed,
and there is no way I can reveal any of that, not because I am ashamed or embarrassed—quite
the opposite—but because it is too complex, it is too much—and because I can’t bear
to think about any of it, anyway.