Warlight(57)

“You like ‘gait’ in women?”

“Yes. Yes, I do. That’s really all I remember about her.”

“There must have been something else…her hair?”

“Red.” He is pleased with his quick fiction, though perhaps he has been too quick.

“When you said ‘mole’ a while ago, I thought you meant like the animals!”

“Ha!”

“Yes, you confused me. What is it, exactly?”

“Oh, you know, they…they are like birthmarks, on skin.”

“Ah! One or two birthmarks?”

“I didn’t count them,” he says quietly.

“I don’t believe the red hair,” she says.

By now Rose would be in Naples, Felon thinks. Safe.

“Also I think she is very attractive.” The woman laughs. “Otherwise you wouldn’t avoid admitting it.”

They let him go then, rather to his surprise. It is not him they are after, and by then they have located and identified Viola. With his help.



The Street of Small Daggers

She wakes, her face against the word ACQUEDOTTO, a burning pain in her arm, her mind scrambling to know where she is, the hour. Instead she remembers another time, hearing a cicada. It had been six in the evening then and she’d woken to find herself lying on grass, almost the same position she is in now, her cheek against her upper arm. She’d been fully aware of her senses then. All that was wrong with her that time was tiredness. She had walked many miles into the town to meet Felon and having to wait a few hours found a small park beside a footpath and slept, then woke suddenly to hear the mournful cicada. But at first, similarly, she had been unaware of what she was doing there. She had been waiting that time for him in a small park.

Confusing her now is the word acquedotto, meaning a path for water, a drain. She raises her head off the drain cover. She needs clarity, to know why she is here like this, needs to think. She sees the range of still-wet cuts on her arm. If there is something voicing itself mournfully now, it is in her. She holds up her wrist, wipes blood off her broken watch, a star of glass, it says it is five or six, early in the morning. She looks at the sky. She begins to remember slowly. She needs to reach a safe house. There is a woman named Carmen she must make contact with, in case she needs help. Rose stands, raises a fold of the dark skirt, holds it in her teeth, and rips the lower third off with her good hand so she can bandage her arm tightly against the pain. Then crouches, breathing heavily. Now downhill to the harbour to find Carmen, wherever she is, and get to a boat. There are always miracles here, they say about Naples.

She leaves the street of the small daggers and recovers the map in her head. Posillipo is the name for the rich part of the city, meaning “break from sorrow.” A Greek word, still used in Italy. And she needs to get to the Spaccanapoli, the street that splits the city in two. She moves downhill repeating the names—Spaccanapoli and Posillipo. The racket of seagulls is loud, meaning water. Find Carmen, then the harbour. There’s light in the sky now. But what is most alive is her left arm, where the pain is, the bandage already heavy with blood. She remembers now the small knives they used on her. They had discovered her and the soldier after the group separated to take different routes out of the country. How? Who gave something away? As she had entered the outskirts of the city they identified her, killed the soldier. He was just a boy. In some building they began cutting open her arm with each question. After an hour they stopped, left her. She must have somehow got away, crawled onto the street. They would be looking for her. Were they finished with her? Now she is walking downhill, thinking, her senses returning. “A break from sorrow.” “A rest from grief.” What is tombiro? She turns a corner and realizes she has stumbled awkwardly into a brightly lit square.

This was the light in the sky all the time. Not the dawn. But families and other groups surrounding a bar, eating and drinking in the night air, a ten-year-old girl singing in their midst. It is a familiar song, one she sang to her son years before in another language. The scene in front of her could be any evening hour, but it is not early morning. Her watch must have stopped earlier when they interrogated her, the watch said five or six but it meant late afternoon, not the hour before dawn. It must still be before midnight. But the seagulls? Were they attracted only to the light in this crowded square?

She leans against a table, a stranger, watching them talk and laugh, while the girl on a woman’s lap sings. It feels medieval, the kind of canvas of a master Felon loved to describe, pointing out its hidden structures, how a crowd radiates out and fills the canvas from something as small as a loaf of bread, which gives it all an anchor. That is how the world interacts, he would say. Here, for her, the loaf of bread is the small girl singing with private joy. It is how she herself feels having come into this loud gathering by following the Spaccanapoli towards where she is supposed to find Carmen. She could take one step forward and be more exposed, but instead she pulls out a chair and sits, resting her wounded arm on the table, the continuous mural around her. She has not lived such a life, of families and community, for a very long time. She has accepted a world of secretiveness, where there is a different power, where there is no generosity.

A woman behind her places her hands gently on her shoulders. “There are always miracles here,” the woman says to her.