Mizuki turned onto her side and changed her mind about talking. ‘It’s not important.’
Mizuki cancelled the call, rolled onto her back and looked up. The ceiling fan stirred hot air to no result. The phone rang and she looked at the small screen and decided that she wouldn’t speak to Lara again.
* * *
Despite her best efforts Mizuki lay awake, aware of the passing minutes, the tread of traffic, the supple chuff of voices outside the all-night farmacia, and later, much later, the sharp and mournful caw of gulls — sounds so ordinary that ordinarily they would cause her no trouble. She wouldn’t return to the language school. Naples had not provided what she wanted after all, or rather, if she was honest, she didn’t have the courage to follow opportunity when it occurred. The brothers provided a perfect example: supposing these men were interested in her, she doubted she could follow through. She began to consider other cities. Milan, perhaps. Rome. Palermo. Genoa.
When she finally did sleep, in the moment she succumbed, Mizuki felt a weight descend upon her, a rolling tide that brought anxious but unspecific dreams.
* * *
The sun crossed obliquely over the building and spilled through the window, drawing with it the noise of traffic, buses idling outside the station, car horns, the hiss and snort of hydraulic brakes, shouts from the market stalls. Lila woke to the dog’s barks, which sounded less alarmed than usual, a colour to them, frisky, expectant. Today she felt soft, gummy, not one hard bone in her body, not one joint. She liked how Arianna inclined toward her, leaned on her, almost nestling, how their skin brushed lightly when she breathed in.
Rafí returned in the early evening and said nothing at first about the previous night but kept himself busy fetching water for the dog.
‘So I’ll make the arrangements, then?’ His foot nudged Lila’s thigh. ‘What do you think? I’ll get everything organized.’
Arianna turned over. ‘Organize what?’
‘With the brothers.’
Arianna cleared her throat and began to cough.
‘Tonight. I’ll set something up. They’ll come and pick you up.’
Arianna rose herself onto her elbows and frowned at Lila, her face red. ‘What’s he talking about?’
Lila shrugged.
‘I’m talking about the two men from last night,’ he said, ‘they’ll pick you up in front of the station.’
Arianna shook her head. She blinked into the sunlight. ‘You told them where we live?’
‘I told them to meet you at the station.’
Rafí stood over Lila, raised his foot and pressed it onto her stomach. ‘You’re going to be nice tonight,’ he warned.
* * *
They waited under the station hood, anxious about the police, the carabinieri, the station security, the taxi drivers. This surely wasn’t a smart idea. In front of the entire square, fenced off and dug up, cranes reaching over, the belly of the piazza dug out to a vast black pit. A white car drew up to the kerb and the headlights flickered. Two men sat inside and watched the women approach. As they came alongside the passenger opened his door and stepped out. Lila looked across the piazza to the Hotel Stromboli and picked out the windows on the upper floor, imagining herself already in bed, and thought, How is it that this building always appears to be wet? Arianna began to heckle: who did these people think they were? I mean seriously, to pick them up at the station like common whores?
The passenger leaned on the car roof, smug, hands clasped, smiling. They only wanted to be nice, he said. Nice. Nothing more than that. Behind him, from a ring-fenced lot, steam rose from the building work, a new line for the metro, a pipe impossibly crusted with ice.
Arianna gave a huff. ‘Nice. What is this nice?’ She settled her hands on her hips and leaned forward, neck stuck out. With slender shoulders and waist, large hands, the passenger looked out of proportion, a long body of mismatched parts. Not a boxer, Lila decided, but a swimmer.
Now the driver stepped out of the car and Lila could see that the men, unaccountably tall and trim with similarly shorn hair, were undoubtedly brothers. The same features — noses, brow line, small inset eyes like field mice — the same swagger. Men who considered themselves handsome. The driver pointed to Lila and indicated that she should get in.
The driver approached, slid his arm about her waist and brought Lila to the car and opened the door, something gracious about the gesture, his hand in the small of her back. When Lila sat down she thought to open the opposite door and slide out but did nothing. On the pavement Arianna stood with her arms out wide, palms up, face set with disapproval. Ignoring her, the younger brother and the driver returned to the car, leaving Arianna alone on the pavement, behind her the long swoop of the station front, black windows of empty restaurants, chairs on tables, the certain presence of security guards. When the car started Arianna reached for the door handle.
With Arianna in the car the younger brother locked the passenger doors. Lila sat with her arms crossed and looked up at the Stromboli, a thought came to her, wasn’t this what they had talked about, but she kept the thought to herself.
The passenger set his hand on Arianna’s knee and shoved clumsily under Arianna’s skirt. ‘Now you are the one with the cock? Yes? Show me,’ he grinned.
Arianna stopped the man’s advances in a small gesture, a hesitation rather than a refusal. In response the man twisted completely about — and with a swift and sudden jab punched Arianna in the face. The sound of it, a snap, then Arianna’s howl accompanied their acceleration about the piazza.
* * *
When they arrived at the farmhouse Arianna bolted from the car, hurtling into darkness, leaving one sandal in the footwell, another tipped on its side in the gravel, pointing to an orchard, a long wall, dimly lit by the car’s red tail-light. Lila sat with the door open, the night air a soft drift across her shoulders, the realization slowly occurring to her that they would not escape this trouble. The passenger shot swift as a rat after Arianna and leapt on her with poisonous certainty. The driver pulled Lila out of the car, hefting her forward by her hair and dropping her at the threshold so that her elbows struck the flagstone. While Arianna fought and struggled, Lila shut down and made no attempt to protect herself. She focused hard on the details before her, the uneven floor, the tiles, broken but still in place; the peaty stink of rotten furnishings. She knew these smells. She knew this air, how the wind picks salt from the sea so that it can be tasted many miles inland.
THURSDAY: DAY E
Lila and Arianna were abandoned twelve miles outside the city on a slip road off the Domiziana. Hired pickers and farmhands working in the lower fields watched the women struggle out of the car naked and shoeless — and for one bad moment the vehicle jolted backward threatening to reverse and run them down but drew instead hastily off the side road. They had seen women squabbling in awkward brawls, hair-pulling, kicking, ugly slap fights at the roadside, or more usually cars pulling slowly into the tree-line and dropping some girl off, often as abrupt, but never with such threat. Later, confirming the story among themselves, the workmen easily described the women but disagreed on the model of the car, mistaking its dusty coat for grey or tan or silver. The men had barely started work, and the last thin breath of mist clung stubbornly to the irrigation ditches, and there, right before them, two naked women scurried chaotically, chicken-like, across the fields.
First out of the car, Arianna zigzagged across the mud then clambered back up the embankment and stumbled alongside the road, falling more than walking, cars veered wide, her focus set on the distant lilac mountains, her hands covering her crotch. When the labourers caught up they beat their sticks and tools on the road and whooped to drive her down to an irrigation ditch. Trapped in the shallow black water Arianna began to bellow in a language they couldn’t understand, and they could see for the first time cuts and bruises, soiled red skin and fatty white grazes, evidence that she had been brutalized — and they could also see, despite her skinny figure, her long hair and hard breasts, that she was a man.