Gabriel and the Swallows (The Volatile Duology #1) (21 page)

M
amma’s funeral was a quiet, ill-attended affair. It took place on Saturday morning, in a small, newish cemetery in Orvieto town. It lay on a backstreet, and boasted a view of a barren kindergarten playground, as it was primarily known for its last-minute affordability and not its prestige or grandeur like the other graveyards in town. 

Papa held his handkerchief to his face and unashamedly wept throughout the bare, no-frills ceremony the local parish priest, who had never met Mamma, conducted. When it was time for Papa to make the speech he had meticulously written over three sleepless nights in the barn, he broke down, gasping for breath, and Orlando Khan had to help him to his feet. He could not make that speech. The bit of paper he had scrawled it on was bunched up in his fist and sprayed with tears. I could see the ink marks all over his hands. He did, however, manage to hobble over to the little portable cassette player he had borrowed from a neighbor for this occasion.

I was overwhelmed with sorrow as the tinny tune of Mamma’s favorite aria from the opera
La Tosca
poured over the tiny burial ground. I gazed down at the casket in the red earth, its cheap, unpolished pine and lack of fancy fittings. A simple box that contained the corpse of my own Mamma. I tore my eyes away from it and scanned the scene around me. My Papa had been helped into a plastic chair the priest had procured for him. There was a gravedigger standing a respectful distance away, his cap in one hand, his shovel in the other. His head was bowed as he waited for his cue, but he was fidgeting, and I could tell he was thinking about his wife and his dinner. At the entrance of the cemetery hovered a woman in a black veil that covered everything but her face. She nodded solemnly at me, and looked as if she wanted to step forward, but was afraid to enter. She held a bouquet of flowers. Ayisha Khan.

And as I wrestled with the fact that my mother lay dead, I tried to forget that I had lost Volatile, my friend so brutally slaughtered. But I shook the thought out of my head. I could not think of her now. As a fresh wave of grief threatened to envelope me, I couldn’t help but take two steps back. And even though I was a grown man, I leaned my head against Orlando Khan’s shoulder. I could barely stand.

Orlando Khan had arrived the morning after Volatile and my mother had died. Strange, how life worked. I wonder what I would have thought, those years ago when Volatile lived with us like a second child, picking all the meat out of her pasta. I wonder what I would have said, as I looked over at Mamma sipping red wine next to Volatile, if I had known they would die, from different causes, on the same night.

He had arrived searching for her, as she did not return to his attic room at the Emporium that night. No one answered the door, so he let himself in. There was one open bedroom door and one closed. Gingerly approaching my parents’ room, he gasped as he saw my Mamma sprawled out on the bed like a starfish, and my father leaning over her with a comb, brushing out her wiry curls as they fanned over the pillow. He looked up at Orlando, dazed, his eyes bloodshot. “They aren’t awake,” mumbled my father. “No one in this house is awake but me.”

After he had learned the truth, Orlando did not rush out of the house to avenge Volatile, as I had expected. He knocked and knocked at my door but I would not answer. I just lay there, staring at the ceiling. I was senseless, without feeling. I felt there was an iron wall separating me from reality. I had begun to dream again.

Orlando did not force his way in, that was not his way. According to my father, who told me later, Orlando lowered himself to the ground, and curled his legs beneath him, beginning a long vigil, waiting for me. He only left once, and when he returned, so did Ayisha Khan with baskets of exotic food, grilled meats and spiced curries and yoghurts infused with herbs. This type of fare continued to arrive at the house, three times a day. Mine was arranged on a tray and left on the floor inside of my door. But whoever delivered it did not enter further and did not speak.

I believe I slept most of those days. I recall that morning that Orlando arrived, screwing my eyes shut and willing myself back to slumber. It was not to avoid my friend, or my sorrow-demented father, but an anticipation to see what would happen next in my dreams. I hardly ate or drank, and when I needed to urinate, I did it out the window. I stayed in the room for three days.

On the morning of the funeral, Orlando cracked my door open to find me on my knees, staring pointedly at the olive branch outside of my window. He forced a steaming cup of coffee into my hands, and it was not my Mamma’s china, but the delicate Moroccan pink and gold glass set I had sipped from so many times at the Emporium. He peered at me grimly as I swallowed it down, and I noticed there were grey pouches under his eyes, and a black shadow of a beard had spread across his jaw. His hair was unwashed and longer than I’d ever seen it, charcoal-colored ringlets tied with a leather strap at the base of his neck.

He helped me out of bed and suddenly, my Papa’s arms were around me. “Are you all right?” whispered my father. “She’s in a better place now. Your mother…she loved you so much. Her lungs, her heart, she just couldn’t take the news about…about…” And his eyes slid over to Orlando and he hung his head. He was wearing his best suit. He smelled of mothballs.

Orlando pushed me into the bathroom and turned on the shower and left, forcefully closing the door behind him. He had not said a word. I stared at myself in the mirror. My face seemed thinner and my eyes hollow. My mother was dead. My mother was dead.

A cold slab of unleavened bread in my stomach, my wet hair combed and clothes changed, and we were in the wagon, Tomasso wheezing his way up the mountain. There was something different about the world now. Something was missing. And then I realized: I could not see or hear the swallows. Not the flock that followed Orlando everywhere he went. Not the troupes that swooped among the hills and valleys of Orvieto. They were all gone.

The priest was waiting for us and a bouquet of white flowers was pressed into my hand, which I cast down into the grave at the conclusion of the funeral, as if they had wronged me.

I waited there, at the plot, as Orlando steered my father out of the cemetery, the priest following at a tasteful distance, bearing the cassette player. Papa found himself in Ayisha Khan’s arms, who would not enter the burial ground. “Shall I fill it up now?” queried the gravedigger behind me.

I did not turn to look at him. “Yes. Fill it up.” My voice sounded vacant, and I turned to leave.

“You’d better take these, then,” said the gravedigger, pointing to two flower arrangements I had neglected to notice, resting at the base of the grave and not the headstone. I knelt down to inspect them.

One was a perfectly adequate bouquet of ivory lilies. I tore open the envelope.

I didn’t know how Everard Fane had found out my mother had died, but I did not care enough to dwell on it. At least he had sent flowers, that was kind of him.

The other arrangement was much larger and a little ostentatious, presented with splashes of exotic greenery and tropical, expensive-looking rare blooms. A creamy, gold-edged card accompanied them, set snugly against the luxurious fronds.

As I turned over the card, I saw the florist’s address printed in embossed gold. Florence.

“I don’t want them,” I stated to the gravedigger, and turned on my heel. “Give them to your wife.”

That night, not long after Orlando and his mother had left, and I could hear my Papa restacking the stores in the barn, I held the little brown jar in my hands and examined it. For so long now I had relied on the chemicals contained in the tiny blue pills to keep me from dreaming, maintaining my singular and uncomplicated life. As long as I could remember, my dreams were always far superior to real life, and I recalled the duality I felt as a child, not knowing which was the reality. I knew no one else dreamed the way I did, or even if they could, did not retain it, savor it, did not feel it so distinctly it could be mistaken for reality. Why? I thought. Why me?

I was glad to be out of pills, for now. The pharmacist, on a return visit, had warned me that this bottle was the last I’d ever buy, as the government decided to cancel the drug trail in Italy. I minded then, but I wasn’t foresighted enough to care about my future psyche, so distracted by women and alcohol. And now, I was thrilled they were unavailable, if it meant I got to see Volatile again.

I was filled with dread as I thrashed in my bed, sleep mercilessly eluding me. What if she did not return? What if it wasn’t Volatile, but a trick my mind was playing on me?

Before I knew it, I was wandering through dreamscape Orvieto, and she was there, falling silently into step with me, and we passed through the empty streets calmly, like it was an everyday occurrence. Unlike the rest of the white world, Volatile was three-dimensional, full of color, exactly as she always was. Gone were the wings of human bone, her body a skeleton held taut by worn, stretched hide. She looked just the way she did before the collapse of the Gallo estate. “You’re late, as usual.”

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

She was so unchanged, down to her expression. “Look,” she said, and indicated to a set of large stone columns where a sleek cat arched its back and mewled.

“Sweet Vittoria?” Recognizing her name, she ambled over to me and I bent down and stroked her. She looked as if she was assembled from black paint and air and when I touched her, I could not feel fur but a texture I’d never encountered before.

“Why does she look like this?” I asked, and lifted my eyes to where the stonewalls, turrets and secret skyward gardens of Orvieto peered down at me, all shades of grey. It was almost as if, if I cared to walk beyond them, it would not be possible to distinguish them from cardboard cutouts. “Why does everything look this way?

“It only appears that way to you,” explained Volatile gently. “The medication you took affected the part of your mind that translates dreams into images.”

“But you look exactly the same.”

“Your brain does not have the power to contain me,” smirked Volatile proudly.

“But if you are here, then what about Mamma?”

“Shh!” said Volatile, “listen.”

And as I fell silent, just like a cool breeze did the pure notes of the opera
La Tosca
drift over us, and with it, I could smell my mother’s tomato puree. A sense of peace and pure joy drifted over me.

“Let’s go home,” I said to her, and she placed her hand in mind. And I recognized her touch, the smoothness of her skin, the smell of her hair just under my chin.