“What?”
“Cream to rub on your chest and shoulders. It’ll make you feel better.”
She sat on the bed—I felt the mattress indent—and she began massaging me. Each caress gave me a shock, albeit gentler than the ones I had felt initially. Soft hands spread the cream across my chest and I began to relax, to feel repentant that I had neglected her. I offered apology for doing so, saying that I must have been preoccupied.
Her lips brushed my forehead. “It’s okay. Actually, I’m hopeful…”
“Hopeful? About what?”
“It’s nothing.”
“No, tell me.”
“I’m hoping some good will come of all this,” she said. “We’ve been having our problems lately. And I hope this time we spend together, while you recuperate, it’ll make you remember how much I love you.”
I groped for her hand, found it. We stayed like that a while, our fingers mixing together. A white shape melted up from the grayness. I strained to identify it and realized it was her breast sheathed in white cloth.
“I’m up here,” she said, laughter in her voice, and leaned closer so I could see her face again. “Do you feel up to answering a few questions? The doctor said I should test your memory. So we can learn if there’s been any significant loss.”
“Yeah, okay. I’m feeling more together now.”
I heard papers rustling and asked what she was doing.
“They gave me some questions to ask. I can’t find them.” More rustling. “Here they are. The first one’s a gimmee. Do you recall your name?”
“Jack,” I said confidently. “Jack Lamb.”
“And what do you do? Your profession?”
I opened my mouth, ready to spit out the answer. When nothing came to me, I panicked. I probed around in the gray nothing that seemed to have settled over my brain, beginning to get desperate. She touched the inside of my wrist, a touch that left a trail of sparkling sensation on my skin, and told me not to force it. And then I saw the answer, saw it as clearly as I might see a shining coin stuck in silt at the bottom of a well, the first of a horde of memories waiting to be unearthed, a treasure of anecdote and event.
Firmly, and with a degree of pride as befitted my station, I said, “I’m a financier.”
DINNER AT BALDASSARO’S
Though she herself was not beautiful, Giacinta had a beautiful sneeze. Scarcely more than a musical sniff, it seemed to restate the cadence of her name and was followed, in short order, by a giggle as she wiped a residue of white powder from the rims of her nostrils. She was thick-waisted, heavy in the thighs, with an undershot chin and breasts no bigger than onions. But her eyes were shots of dark rum, her pale olive skin held the polish of youth, and her thin face had a desperately merry quality. For all her flaws, I considered her quite a prize.
“This…” She scowled dramatically and pointed to the little heap of cocaine on the mirror in her lap. “No good! But I like! I like too much!” She made to hand me the mirror and a straw—the same she had used—and adopted a mischievous look designed to tempt me. I declined temptation and, in faltering Italian, explained that drugs were not beneficial to my health.
“Salute,” she said, correcting me—I had used the Spanish word for health, salud. Her eyes flicked across my body, as if inspecting me for signs of frailty. “Va bene.”
She dipped her head again to the mirror, face obscured by the fall of her chestnut hair.
We were sitting in the offices of the Villa Ruggieri, where Giacinta worked as a receptionist and I had taken a suite. A showplace in the eighteenth century, its high-ceilinged rooms and muraled walls reverberating with the strains of archlute and cello, by the early twenty-first it had matured into a seedy relic of the Late Baroque, a hotel whose best two weeks came during the annual chile pepper festival (just ended), when all the shops of Diamante, the Calabrian seaside village it overlooked, featured fanciful decorations in their windows contrived of chile peppers, and tourists promenaded along the Via Poseidone wearing chile pepper T-shirts and chile pepper hats. Now in October, both the hotel and the village were in the process of shutting their doors, and, that evening, as Giacinta and I walked down the cliff trail and along a narrow, meandering street, we encountered only a few shopgirls hurrying home.
We stopped at a sidewalk café on the corner of the Via Fiume and the Via Poseidone, where we were to meet Giacinta’s friend, Allessandra, for a drink before going to dinner. Incapable of other than the most primitive conversation, we endured an awkward silence of considerable length. She studied the wine list, wrinkling her nose as if responding to the various bouquets, and I examined the mural adorning the facade of the building across the street—it depicted several Renaissance children, elegantly clothed, chasing each other about the columns of a room in a palace, all done in sepia tones. There were hundreds of murals in Diamante. At least half a dozen were visible off along the block. I was mildly curious regarding the reason underlying such a proliferation, but I did not inquire about them, having no wish to endure a labored explanation couched in fractured English, with table objects used for demonstration purposes. The night air was growing cool. Giacinta threw on a light sweater over her yellow summer dress. She smiled anxiously at me, and I smiled in return.
Allessandra, who arrived twenty minutes late, was a willowy brunette who had spent a great deal of time and money at the hair salon to achieve a fabulously tousled and frosted look. She wore a leather mini that showed off her long legs and enormous gold hoop earrings through which, it seemed, a toy poodle could have jumped. She bussed Giacinta on the cheek, lit a cigarette with scarcely an interruption to her rapid-fire chatter, and began to interrogate me as might an anxious mother on the occasion of her daughter’s prom, asking first how old I was.
“I’m forty,” I told her.
“Gia is twenty-six,” she said.
“It’s a lovely age.”
Giacinta looked to Allessandra, and Allessandra translated, apparently accurately, for Giacinta ducked her eyes and blushed.
“Are forty and twenty-six incompatible?” I asked. Allessandra failed to grasp the word incompatible, so I presented her with alternatives. “Unsuitable? Ill-matched?”
“No, no! I was pointing out that for you, Gia is much less, uh…sophisticated.”
“Ah! I see.”
Giacinta wanted to know what was being said, but Allessandra told her to wait and asked my occupation.
“I do some travel writing,” I said.
“For the magazines?”
“Books, mainly. I own a travel agency with offices in Rome, Paris, London, New York…and elsewhere. The business more-or-less runs itself, and I’ve been at loose ends the past few years. So I’ve taken up writing.”
Allessandra paused to translate. Her perfume overwhelmed the less aggressive aura of Giacinta’s scent. Within the café, under a bilious yellow bulb, two waiters in white shirts and aprons were playing backgammon at the bar, while the bombastic pop stylings of Zucchero leaked into the street, seeming to empurple the air. The lights along the Via Poseidone marked the curve of the shore, otherwise the darkened coastline would have been all but indistinguishable from the sea. Two elderly men in caps and bulky jackets strolled along the sea wall; one threw his right arm over the other’s shoulder and, making repetitive forceful gestures with his right hand, appeared to be offering advice.
“Maybe,” Allessandra said, “you write the article about Diamante?”
“No, I’m here to meet some friends. We try to get together every year somewhere in Europe. This year it happens to be Diamante.” I leaned forward and touched Allessandra’s cigarette pack, resting by her elbow. “May I?”