TWENTY-EIGHT
Summer, 2007.
We arrived in the capital of Campania with our backs apart, not at all like lovers. Rather, we must have seemed more like a corporate master and his secretary come to hammer out a business deal before the close of the second quarter. This to anyone who bothered to look our way. No one did. Setti and I exited the tunnel to find a wide, airy shopping mall lit with gold. I saw jewelry shops and clothing stores. Coffee and pizza. Gizmos and gadgets. Huge squares of tile reflected our bodies as we steadily made our way through crowds of chattery shoppers. Lots of children were running around. Some played on the steps while their parents made phone calls. Others pointed at toys they wanted. Guarda quello! Quanto per quella bambola? I found myself wishing I could be one of them. It was a fleeting, whimsical fancy that resembled the flight of mating butterflies. For one more run I wanted to play around and not care about grown-up things. I wanted to eat pizza in the corner of a candlelit restaurant, invariably making a mess all over my shirt. I wanted to run and jump and swing on an indoor playground. I wanted to make sure my baby sister didn’t fall down on the escalator. I wanted to pick out a new toy, then ride home with it in my lap. Later I might read a comic book near the foamy blue shores of sleep, my bed become maritime, the sill a moonlit pier. Stuff like that I can no longer hold onto. It’s not my business anymore. The seeds we plant in our youth grow into forests dark and deep. The bark absorbs a talon’s muse; the sapling is no more. And yet I could still see little fragments of what once was, there on all the happy faces of these ragazii e ragazze. My youthful, wanton envy resembled their antics, and before it could become anything bitter I pinched it into a cold little tuft of smoke that vanished above the wick.
Our destination was a gigantic, tinted picture window that faced west. Through it I could see the sun—an immense, infuriated eye—on its way down to the sea. As we walked I could not help but feel trapped between it and the mountain behind me. You know which one I mean. In 79 A.D. it had laid to ash the city of Pompei. Today it maintained an uneasy sleep beyond the green-crowned control tower of Napoli. The sun and the rock; the rock and the sun. It burned with jagged memories that had caused harm yesterday, and would do so again tomorrow.
Trentinara lay about 110 kilometers south of the capital. We bought bus tickets and rode without speaking to each other. Setti had the window seat. Her eyes searched the Gulf Of Naples as if she had once lived here. As if she could almost see a happier, more youthful version of herself frolicking about the premises of some pretty little farmhouse that welcomed the wind. Ah yes, there stood her mother by the laundry line, a Mediterranean breeze lifting her hair. Her father was out back chopping wood. And she? She might have been anywhere. For a moment I caught her face at the kitchen window, the flash of a smile, the glint of a venturous eye. Then I saw, or thought I saw, the dancing hem of her dress as she rescued an armload of chrysanthemums from the garden gate. Setti, do please keep those dreams alive for me. With the two of us believing they might one day become real.
There were two main routes to the city. Our bus took the one nearest the coast. We rumbled past western Pompei. Columns of blasted limestone and concrete lay dead by catastrophe’s ancient arrow, their cadavers dry yet clutching to the bosom a final, poetic capelet of despair. This is what seemed to present itself through the opposite side of the bus. Other riders blocked the windows so I couldn’t decipher much. Setti, for her part, never took her eyes off the gulf, until the bus cut around a huge green ridge to Salerno. Here the gulf became the Tyrrhenian Sea, into which she set sail again, joining a tousled fleet of white dots that bobbed in the sun, residents of Amalfi and Praiano and Conca dei Marini with time and money to spend.
I tried to speak to her once. “Setti?”
A little girl seated in front of me looked round. Her hair was long and brown. She wore a red shirt with a pink heart on it. Her eyes were fearful of strangers, but only just, allowing her the courage to ask: “Pronto?”
I looked at her, then at Setti again, who could not be drawn from the water.
“Pronto?” the girl asked again.
Now my Italian was then rough as low grit sandpaper, but I could manage a little. “Ciao. Non e niente.”
She frowned as if my answer were somehow offensive. “Sie da solo.”
“No,” I told her, pointing to Setti.
The bus lurched. We’d hit a pothole in the road, causing many of the passengers to cry out. The girl just shrugged and turned her attention elsewhere. The bus moved southward on SP175. It’s a narrow route that isn’t well cared for. The paint is faded, the curbs warped and broken. We passed a lot of old taverns that reminded me of Manila’s myriad rail-side squatter shantys. Picnic and camping grounds. Bland apartment buildings. In some places the trees marched right up to the road as if in effort to conceal the nakedness—the rather surprising nakedness—of the landscape. In others they betrayed her trust, falling back to provide uninspiring, grass blanket views of oblivious terrain that rolled for miles. I couldn’t help but marvel at how offended the ancient Romans might have felt, seeing these beer shacks and cookie-cutter apartment complexes strewn over field after field of dusty, weed infested dirt. This was not their legacy. These were not their ideals. Alas, alas, all of you reposing emperors who reached for greatness and strolled hand in hand with it upon the limestone highways of your majestic epoch. These are the roads which burgeon from its heart. This is what’s become of your dream. Alas.
It was dark when we reached Trentinara. The city appeared as a crown of lights upon an enormous hill. Instantly I was reminded of my previous year’s trip to Baguio. It, too, bedizened steep slopes with its own, private coterie. As for that of Trentinara, we rolled through a succession of quiet, narrow streets lit by tiny little door-step lamps. We passed an outdoor cafe where maybe twenty people were having coffee. Next came a hotel—a series of lit, flowered windows entranced by the far off Tyrrhenian’s serenade. And after that, the bus stop.
“Fine del viaggio,” the driver called after setting the air brake.
I escorted Setti to the street. The night air was cool with a touch of balm I recognized as the last of the day’s sunny warmth. Other passengers stood around us, discussing things to do and places to go. Among them was the girl in the red shirt. When I waved she moved closer to her mother as if afraid for my sanity. The crowd began to break apart. People floated off in both directions. Deciding to emulate them, I led Setti back toward the hotel. Along the way we passed lanes even more narrow than the main road. They were crowded by two-story houses of concrete and stone. Most were dark. Down others I could see more door-step lamps, in part reminding me of Crane’s midnight ride from that false phantom Brom, and in part calling forth the leather-bound, fireside warmth of dear old friends.
In less than a week a found a villa for rent. The rooms were small, tight cages of white concrete with arched doorways. Some of the kitchen cupboards hung crooked like rotten teeth. Brown water stains tainted the ceilings. But there was also a balcony overlooking the street, and a nice breeze through the windows. I accepted the landlord’s proposal, though it must have been high, for he responded with a crooked grin that seemed to appreciate the axiom about one of us being born every minute.
“Grazie,” he said, and I couldn’t be sure to whom he was saying thanks.
Here Setti and I still live. I am nearing completion of this novel, which I will self publish, and which no one will read. Try to understand this about literature: For us content creators, it is a vocation not a dream. Almost any novelist will tell you—if ever asked—how he or she has tried many times to give up the spirit of the chase. They may also add that, for a time, it seemed the spirit had flown for good. Yet its abandonment is nothing more than a ruse. The spirit does fly, though only so far as the forest edge, here to idle with its back to the open fields of flat, unconscious machination. It cannot escape the curving roads of a set route. It does not even wish to. And thus it returns, dressed in the sheepish smile of a prankster child, to the master. And the journey continues.
Setti used to talk to me while in the same room. Not anymore. There came a point when she would deign to speak only from the next room over, or from behind the shabby little shoji screen that came with our villa. The screen separates the kitchen from the living room. After dinner is the best time to chat with her. She goes to the living room; I go to the sink to wash dishes. I listen to her sit in a rocking chair. The chair begins to creak. And we talk about stuff that would take another hundred pages to describe in detail. America. The Philippines. Italy. Setti always has such nice things to say about all three places. Even when I bring up something negative—crime, poverty, government corruption—she laughs and steers us away.
Once I tried to force her hand. That night I wanted to talk about proletarian rights; she felt more inclined to discuss the flora and fauna of Italy. Frustrated, I shut off the water. I walked to the shoji screen, moved it aside...
The rocking chair was empty.
I could see the last of its movement though. You know the way these pieces of furniture settle into place when a person rises from them. I arrived just in time to witness the chair come to a stop. As for Setti, why, she was gone. I haven’t seen her since.
Today all I have is a series of photographs that vaguely resemble what she must have been. They’re stored on a digital camera I found one day while unpacking the last of our stuff. I don’t remember packing the camera, but I seem to recall taking the photos last year, just before receiving a phone call from Detective Lopez. I’d been spooked that night. Creeped out. On a whim, I’d gone around the condo taking pictures, but hadn’t gotten the chance to look at them. Seeing them today makes me uneasy all over again. Setti’s face appears as a smeared shriek of treachery and outrage. If you happen to be old enough, try to recall that artist from Iowa who’d helped the folklorist Schwartz with his ghost stories. On the camera, Setti is a black and white entity. An indistinct ghost I can sometimes see in the bedroom, the kitchen, the living room. And in some pictures she is in all three places at once. Today I truly feel that she is still here with me, which shall have to suffice my longings, as there seems to be no other compromise.
One last thought before we put out the light: If you, Gentle Reader, happen to be male, then maybe you know the Goddess Venus affords us all the capability of romantic love. It is not ours to keep, however. It is like the soul itself. We cannot claim propriety. To do so would be tantamount to theft, or at the very least, abhorrent selfishness. We must give it to another. That special girl she sends to the shades of our transom. And if we fail with the first girl, indeed, she may send another, and another, and another still. Until we get things right, you see. One cannot deem selfishness anathema while being selfish herself. But if we men should arrive at the end of life while still in possession of what is not truly ours, we’ve failed not only Venus, but the girl—or girls—as well.
It’s the way I failed Giselle. Giselle who became Lysette who became no one at all. And who has left me to live alone in this dreary villa which becomes darker and more lonely by the day.
Yes, I should let them go. I should wait for Venus to send the next and try again. Certainly the goddess would understand. She’s seen already how hard I can try. For the time being, please believe that I thank her for every opportunity she imparts.
That’s all the best I can do.
August, 2020—January 2022