Gabriel and the Swallows (The Volatile Duology #1) (12 page)

“Because I hate you, Darlo Gallo,” I said coldly, somewhat shocked at my own boldness.

“You…
what
?” And there was inexplicable, genuine horror in her expression.

Oh, how she sickened me, sitting there in those ostentatious heels, feigning oblivion to all the torture she had put me through. Anger and alcohol overpowered my cowardice and I said, “Is this a surprise to you, Gallo? You, who have tortured and humiliated me every chance you got? You, who called me a lady boy and made fun of my clothes and my mother?”

“No, it’s not true, I make fun of everyone, I was just kidding around…”

“Sending Christopher Esposito after me into the bathroom?”

“What? I never did! He knows that you belong to—“

“And then you dared,
dared
to hurt Volatile!”

Darlo’s face changed now from stricken to rage. “Volatile? Who is this
Volatile
?”

“Just shut up!” I shouted. “Shut your goddamn mouth!”

“Gabriel,” sobbed Darlo Gallo, “I’m so sorry, I never meant to –”

I leaned in, brandy making a brave man out of me. “You’re a pig, Darlo Gallo. If you ever come near her again, I will kill you. Do you understand me?”

Tears were streaming down her cheeks now. “Christopher Esposito,” she stuttered, “did he touch you?”

“
Vaffanculo
,” I swore with hostile irreverence. “Go to Paris, I hope you rot and die there.”

“Who is she, this Volatile? What does she mean to you?” cried Darlo through tears and snot. But I had already left, and was stomping off to find my parents. Forget this party. Orlando was right. I was filled with a strange exaltation as victory swept over me. I had defeated my arch-nemesis. I felt like I owed Zeus somehow, but was too old and wise now to say a prayer to him, even if I were drunk. Darlo Gallo was going to France for eternity, as far as I was concerned. I would no longer be bullied, hit, sworn at, fondled. I was free.

It was a long, long time before our paths crossed once more, a time when she no longer had the power to hurt me. But I never saw Christopher Esposito again. Not long after the party, the Gallo estate fired his father without explanation. In search of new work, the family left Orvieto.

I
had been in love with Mariko Marino since the moment I first laid eyes on her. It was during a fall farmer’s market, when I was too young to care how unfashionable Tomasso was, and used to accompany my father to town as often as I could. I would always take any opportunity to visit Orvieto in those days; to be lost in a city with walls so high, a sliver of sky would only present itself after the most painful elongation of the neck. The winding, breathing tunnels containing everything from nook-and-cranny apartments to concealed grand ballrooms and monasteries, wrapped in volcanic stone. Every door so monstrous and grand, like an empirical entry to a medieval dungeon. Surprises around every corner – roses growing horizontally five floors up for no reason at all. Little gargoyles and stone lions appearing around every corner to glare at you with critical expressions, and gossip about you once the town had gone to sleep.

Papa had brought several bottles of
Laurentis Dolce Fantasia
to the market in Piazza del Popolo, in hopes of trading them for a weekly supply of grain and cheese. I jumped off the donkey, clutching the few thousand lire in my grimy hand, the very last of my birthday money. I don’t remember how old I was, perhaps six or seven, but my primary obstacle was to get to the
panetteria
and stuff my face with
torrone
– those sickly sweet slabs of nougat stuffed with almonds – as fast as possible. 

And it was there, as I stood at the counter of Montanucci’s bakery on Corso Cavour, my hands and face all sticky from the candy, that the strangest creature walked in.

She was tall and stick-thin, with no bumps and lumps along the way that a woman should normally possess. Apart from her odd yard-stick shape, she had a face so weird that I couldn’t help but stare: impossibly white skin, a flat nose that almost disappeared in profile, slanted eyes with puffy, fat lids that would effortlessly slide over them. She had no eyelashes, and her brows were scattered and scarce. An unusual hairstyle did not help to assimilate her: the black, straight stuff fell in an asymmetrical angle over her forehead and ended just under her ears.

Suddenly, all the women in the
panetteria
were atwitter, glaring and staring, all the while pretending not to. The woman was not alone, her arm was looped through the elderly Signore Marino’s, the retired schoolteacher.  

Word had it that Signore Marino, an educated man, had bad luck in love with the Orvietani women. Two broken engagements, one of which the fiancée called off the morning of the marriage, left S. Marino so frustrated that he fled to Japan, wherever that was. There he lived for a decade or so, teaching English in the schools of Kyoto, until he fell in love with a high school student, Matsuyo.

His elderly parents, opposed to the match, refused their son’s offer of an all-expenses-paid journey to Japan for the wedding. Declaring a war with the elder Marinos, who wouldn’t even budge on their decision once their son wrote that his wife was pregnant, Signore Marino did not return to Orvieto until the elder Marinos had both died, leaving him the apartment along the eastern wall he had grown up in.

Orvieto was rife with gossip when it finally beheld the notorious Signora Marino. It had expected a tiny, childish bride who spoke in a strange, foreign tongue, wearing silk kimonos and wooden shoes. “She will surely have the body of a seven-year-old girl,” sneered the first ex-fiancée, the wife of Orvieto’s post-master. “She will hardly be able to see from her slitty little eyes!” declared the second ex-fiancée with so much glee that the two women promptly mended their rift.

But she was neither of those things: she was so tall she towered over the women of Orvieto with so regal a bearing the women were secretly afraid. Her Italian was fluent and sculpted so beautifully from her soft Japanese accent that the Orvietani felt mesmerized as they watched her order daily fresh flowers in the Piazza Duomo. She wore the flowing black clothes of a deadly samurai, and in winter, expensive furs and leather high-heeled boots. Those that knew her intimately said she could create beautiful little paper animals and birds with a few clean movements from her fingers. They said she owned a small projector and would turn out the lights after a dinner party and perform the most amazing shadow puppets. They said she was a mime artist.

I was too busy staring at this creature that it took me some moments to discover the little girl clutching her mother’s hand. Mariko Marino. Large hazel eyes, creamy skin, jet black hair. And she stared at me too, or stared at my girlish blond curls, and I felt at that moment some kind of destiny between us.

Alas, destiny would have to wait, because during my childhood and adolescence, I could never summon the courage to even speak to Mariko. I would watch her at lunch times, as she played with Darlo Gallo under the Jerusalem tree, her movements ethereal and mysterious to me. I would stare so hard that Orlando would elbow me in the ribs, and Mariko would notice and look a little frightened. She would avoid my gaze and the thick perimeter of air around me at all times. I never caught her watching me out of the corner of her eye. I never overheard my name passing her lips. Still, I would hopelessly dream about her all night long, and in my dreams she loved me.

After Darlo left, the strong boys seemed to disappear too, as if they had had enough of education, and joined their fathers picking grapes in the Gallo vineyards. I stayed at school until I earned my high school diploma, but did not make many friends, even though my arch-nemesis was no more. Olive-skinned Orlando filled all of my friendship requirements, and together, we sailed through the years of school until it was all over, and we left the white building in Piazza Marconi behind forever. Orlando finished a year before me, and I visited him behind the serving counter of the Khan Emporium for espresso most afternoons. Mariko stayed too, because her father was a stickler for education, and I had heard it rumored that she was to study economics in Rome.

My heart sunk at the news, for I could not imagine a day where I wouldn’t wake in anticipation for seeing Mariko, or a weekend spent dreaming about Monday. On the last day of school, I tried to summon all my courage to just walk up to her and say something light and hearty like, “So what’s next for you?” or “Are you glad it’s all over or is that just me?” but I stood there on the steps like an idiot, and watched as she sailed past me, down the front stairs with her friends, a cloud of perfume and giggles. I felt my ribs separate from each other with a sigh, and my spine bend forward from disappointment.

As I trudged home, on that last day of school, I felt like a child and not an eighteen year old man. I had never hated myself more. Twelve years of school with the same girl and I still couldn’t speak to her, apart from that one glorious, incandescent occasion that I relived in my head at least once daily. It alone had given me hope.

It had happened two years ago.

La Teatro Mancinelli, the heart and soul of Orvieto’s artistic community, was a grand little feat of classical architectural sturdiness and general good taste. It hosted a variety of events and productions that took place on a weekly basis: a Tuesday and Thursday night engagement, for example, with a Saturday gala performance and a Sunday afternoon matinee. Religious passion plays too gruesome for the Duomo, Latin-American tango troupes, lesser operas from Rome or Florence, and sometimes a saucy new American play with no music and no dancing whatsoever. No matter the event, all of Orvieto, including the wealthier of the farming folk, would put on their best clothes and could be seen sipping aperitifs in the theatre caffé as the first bells rang announcing the commencement of the performance. The men would stub out their cigarettes and usher their women in, and there would be an air of electricity and anticipation so thick, you could scrape it with your fingernails.

No matter the performance, from
La Boheme
to Tennessee Williams, nothing drew the crowds like the local amateur theatre group, Signore Belivacqua and Company. Whenever a travelling act could not be booked, Signore Belivacqua and his troupe of talented misfits could be counted on to hold the Orvietani in its thrall with their astonishing array of daring productions. Shakespeare, popular musicals, love poetry, folk music: nothing was safe once S. Belivacqua had one of his epiphanies, translating any material whatsoever into a grand, sometimes questionable, production. I had never attended any of them before, and when I saw the posters for the new show, I made up my mind.

I requested a ticket to the opening night for my birthday. Mamma gave me a funny look but Papa pulled his billfold out of his front pocket and withdrew the exact cost of a ground floor ticket and placed it in my hand. In afterthought, he withdrew another stack of lire, the price of a Campari spritz.

On the 14
th
of July (my birthday was ten days prior to this, on some Americano holiday, I have since been informed) I arrived at the Teatro in my best suit, which wasn’t really a suit, but slacks and a vest reserved for weddings. Strange Oriental music poured out of the theatre as I alighted the stairs, clutching my ticket that I meticulously acquired days earlier, choosing the seat carefully and to the best of my advantage.

Classmates at my school worked part-time as ushers, in little suits of red. One youngster checked my ticket and pointed up the stairs. As I followed the crowd through the powder-blue hall, I suddenly felt foolish that I hadn’t asked Orlando to accompany me. I overcame my shame and found myself at a second-floor box, opened the creaky little door and pulled back the red velvet curtain. I sat and gazed down at the ground floor, the plush seats aligned in two columns, the Orvietani people hastening to theirs seats as the bell sounded. I gazed up at the famous chandelier, powered by electricity these days, and the fresco of brightly colored maidens that danced around it. As the lights dimmed, the Oriental music grew louder, and a stage decorated with minimalistic origami-inspired trees emerged, I finally saw what I had come here for: Mariko Marino, in the front row.

I can’t remember the performance at all, as I stared at Mariko most of the time. Sometimes she gazed with pride at her mamma, sometimes cringed with embarrassment, but I could tell she was fond of her papa, whose hand she regularly patted.

During intermission, I fled down to the café and ordered a glistening red glass of Campari and soda, stuffed with ice and garnished with a floating orange slice, before the crowd of ravenous people arrived. As I sat at the bar sipping it, my heart did a backflip as Mariko materialized beside me.

“What do you want, my dear?” asked her elderly papa.

“A Bellini,” replied Mariko in her beautiful voice, and as she brushed her straight black hair from her shoulder, her eyes caught mine and I blushed. She swallowed and stared straight forward.

“I don’t like you drinking, Mariko,” said her father, but it didn’t sound like an admonishment, but a prayer. I sensed correctly that she was the apple of his eye, and could have consumed a dozen Bellinis in his presence, for all he cared.

“Oh please, Papa. All my friends’ daddies let them have a drink on a special occasion!”

“I suppose, just this once,” said her father. “Isn’t your mother wonderful tonight?”

“Yes,” replied Mariko, her eyes lighting up on the jewel toned cocktail set before her. “
Salute
,” she said, and tapped her glass to his.

As she took a sip from her champagne and peach juice, her eyes caught mine again, and I was about to wish her a good evening when three girls flew by and surrounded the Marinos in a fortress of giggling and dangerously waving arms and perfume too suffocating for the season. I downed the remainder of my aperitif and placed my empty glass on the bar. One of the girls eyed me strangely as I turned to leave. The bells began to chime in warning, the intermission was coming to an end.