Gabriel and the Swallows (The Volatile Duology #1) (17 page)

I was ashamed of being rejected, and instead of pouring my heart out to Everard, I took to ignoring him, as I felt slighted by my friend in my hour of need. But Everard Fane was no fool. He must have understood from the times I passed him in the hallway, my eyes dry and bloodshot, the only courtesy extended to him a terse nod of the head. Little gifts would appear here and there – a cup of espresso gasping steam and waiting for me in the empty kitchen upon my arrival, a case of Peroni outside my bedroom door, even a couple of tickets to a movie on a Saturday afternoon. I didn’t understand what was taking Everard away from me, and over some weeks, I ceased caring. We even began sitting separately during lectures – Everard always being late and preferring to sit in the back, rather than disturb rows of students to sit by me in the front of the hall.

I became solitary again, a loner, my original state. I found myself simply skimming the novels and journal articles assigned to me, the bare bones of each hardly conjoining in my mind. I began to indulge in long Monday nights languishing in the dirty tub in our shared bathroom. I’d haul buckets of water upstairs to fill it myself, hardly bothering to clean it, and sit in the tepid water, a dead spider floating beside me, and the hair of whoever used it last. I would lean back and stretch my long legs out until they were crammed up against the wall, and reach for the bottle of wine, so cheap it had no label.

It was only after the water turned stone cold that I began to long for Orlando Khan. But then I would remember what I saw in the woods that day, and promptly dismiss him from my mind.

I discovered that in Rome, it was easy to find friendship for the night. I half-heartedly believed in my own newfound attractiveness, and after returning to Il Serpente Nero soon after the rejection, I began conversing with a woman at the bar. She had enormous, dark-lashed eyes that reminded me of a mare’s, and after a few cocktails, her hands began wandering all over my chest.

We went back to my room after midnight, and when I woke in the morning, I discovered the heavy, dark lashes were nothing but plastic beginning to peel from her lids, and that her skin was riddled with pock marks, deep lines in the corners of her eyes that simply were not there last night. I was revolted, and ran to the bathroom. After I had vomited, she was waiting for me, her false eyelashes intact, her hair miraculously smoothed, eager and expectant. I can’t describe my disappointment. Not because she wasn’t beautiful. It was me. It was what I had become.

I made her coffee and she told me a little about her life – she was a telephone operator and the wife of a philanderer who had run away to Seville with a shop girl. She lived with her mother and her two little daughters. She was trying to get a divorce so she could marry her electrician lover, but she could not locate her husband. Times were hard. I walked her to the door and agreed to call her, but we both knew I never would.

That experience did not stop me. In the cheap bars of Trastevere, it became impossible for me not to get wildly drunk, and bring home a woman. I wasn’t terribly picky and my judgment was severely clouded. Cabaret performers with voices like a man’s they smoked so much, the wives of Polish immigrants, starving single mothers from Germany who had run away from cruel husbands. A wealthy and curvaceous woman from the Ivory Coast with a rich, cloying accent who I went with more than once. The experience was more or less the same: I would make them an espresso and walk them out the door, or if I was at their place, they would press me to make love again, and try to tempt me to stay by feverishly cooking breakfast. And then I would leave with nothing to remember them by, save for a hazy recollection of body parts and numb sensations, which, after time, all melded into one.

In those last months, I had one rule: I never went with a woman my age, and never an Italian. Those kinds of girls were all Mariko to me. So innocent, they didn’t know their power. So fresh and confident, they had the cruel and careless ability to break a man’s heart. So inexperienced at life they did not need to be gentle. The women I chose were more like me: disfigured by life, bent from disappointment, willing to tread on glass in exchange for kindly treatment; they were imperfect and grateful for any attention they received.

I recall one incident with a French woman. Or was she Czech? I can barely recall. She was so thin I could run my fingers up and down her ribs like a xylophone. She was sitting on me, and her back was arched. I was drunk and hazy from her marijuana cigarette, and imagined I saw large, majestic wings sprouting from her back. I shouted and pushed the woman off me, and sat on the edge of the bed cradling my head in my hands as the women fussed and fussed. And for the first time in a long time, my mind cried out,
Volatil
e!

I felt instantly ashamed. I felt Volatile’s eyes on me, watching as the bag of bones attempted to curl herself around my body, the sharp angles of her frame far more geometric than seductive. I felt Volatile’s eyes peering past the external and through all of the pestilence and the shame and confusion, wading through all the
merda
in my soul.

And then I proceeded to pass out.

I
t was with a sense of urgency that I whirled through my final examinations, although the outcome did not matter to me. The same wild compulsion was present as I haphazardly packed my suitcase, relieved to abandon my stained bed sheets and the carnal secrets they had witnessed, into the hands of the landlady. I had scribbled a note to my parents, instructing them to expect me back at some point that week. I knew Everard was asleep in his bedroom, but I didn’t bother awakening him to say farewell.

The woman from the Ivory Coast picked me up in her Fiat and drove me to Termini station, but not before she had clasped my head between her ample bosoms and covered me with kisses. I promised her I’d write, but we both knew I never would.

I felt clean again as I stepped off the train and onto the platform of Orvieto Scalo, two hours later. I breathed in a lungful of country air, the scent of ripe green grapes and sumptuous red wine barely concealed in the breeze. My suitcase was light and I decided to walk home in the sunset, carrying my leather jacket strung across my shoulder. I had no money left from my parents’ gift, and most had gone into the hands of bartenders throughout the city in the last few months. My very last fistful of lire was spent purchasing a tomato sandwich and a bottle of
chinotto
from the seller on the train.

Nothing had changed in the year I had been gone. The olive groves were the same, the woods were green and beckoning, the vineyards were orderly as farmhands worked away, harvesting the grapes. Some recognized me and waved. I returned their greeting. And as always, Orvieto looked down upon us, the sun bathing its ancient walls in gold, the city seemed on fire. I vowed never to return to Rome, that city of iniquity, of torment. Here I would live a clean life, an honest life. I would strive to be kind and hardworking, like my father.

The path turned into sparse, lonely woods. Long-forgotten decayed fences were covered with vines, stones that once belonged to streams cloaked in slick lichen. The birds of the air cried their eerie song, commanding each other to return to their nests, the dangerous night approaches. There was the sound of rushing wind, or powerful wings beating through the warm air, and suddenly, a woman landed in front of me.

“You’re late!” snapped Volatile.

“Would you get out of sight?” I hissed at her, instantly annoyed. “Anyone could see you!”

“Oh, stop being such a whining baby. I come past here every afternoon. Even freaks need exercise, you know.”

“I’ve been away for an entire year, and the first thing you call me is a whining baby. Nice,” I sulked.

Volatile squinted up at me. She was not petite, like a lot of the girls I had gone to class with, but tall and athletic. Still she had to crane her neck to look me in the face. “You know, I expected Rome to mature you a little. Clearly, I was wrong. Things haven’t been right around here, since you’ve been gone. In fact –“

“What do you mean,
mature
me? You have no idea what I’ve been through!”

“Relax. Goodness, you’re uptight. Has the eternal city made you so uppity you can’t even take a little teasing? Or maybe your suitcase is too heavy for you? Want me to carry it back to the house?” She grinned up at me.

“I can manage,” I replied testily.

“I expected you days ago,” she said.

“Oh, because you foresaw the exact moment I would arrive? With your magical
ifrit
powers?” I was irritated, quoting what Orlando had told me in confidence all that time ago. Volatile immediately withdrew with a sharp intake of breath. “Ha!” I said, rather cruelly, but I did not know why I was delighting in being this way to Volatile.

“Shut up, Gabriel, you have no idea what you’re talking about,” she commanded, a little self-importantly, I thought.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend your delicacy,” I offered sarcastically. “You’re a great, big, mysterious anomaly. I had quite forgotten.”

“Moron!” snapped Volatile, spreading her wings and flying away.

Needless to say, I felt ridiculous after that. Who did she think she was, flying around like she owned the place? Didn’t she realize hunters might be on the loose? How dare she speak to me like that? Implying I was a child, that I couldn’t carry my own suitcase? All I wanted was a kind welcome, was that too much to ask? I had too many things on my mind to deal with her.

My black mood lasted all night, through my Mamma’s tearful embrace, and my Papa clasping me in a handshake and pumping it up and down until my arm ached. I was so incensed I almost didn’t notice the way my mother coughed readily throughout dinner, crunchy, hard coughs that seemed to replace her repetitions.

“Volatile’s not here,” said Papa, over a steaming plate of home-made fettuccine seasoned with a thick pesto of basil, parsley, pine nuts and oil from our defunct olive grove. I had heaped fresh
parmigiano
on my plate and was on my fourth glass of wine.

“She isn’t around much these days,” confirmed Mamma.

“She’s a good girl,” reminded Papa defensively.

“But she is not like us,” stated Mamma amidst coughs.

“She is a bird with human tendencies with she is with them, and a human with bird tendencies when she is with us,” I said in a singsong voice, without thinking. I was probably still hungover from the night before.

“What was that, Gabriel?” said Papa.

“Nothing,” I said.

“I don’t know where she goes at night,” continued Mamma. “She’s very helpful to me here in the house. She made the pesto.”

Suddenly the dish tasted strange to me, like earthworms.

“She’s probably with Orlando,” I offered, if not a little begrudgingly.

“Oh, no,” said Mamma. “Oh, no, no, no.” She began coughing again, and Papa frowned, passing her his napkin.

“I think all that business finished a while ago,” said Papa softly.

“We’re so worried about her future,” Mamma admitted, wiping her eyes. “It was fine when she was a child and we could care for her. But it’s different now. She’s grown up, and you have to wonder...”

“I just don’t think there’s a place for her in this world,” whispered Papa sadly, taking off his glasses and wiping them with his shirt.

“If only there were others of her kind she could go to,” finished Mamma.

“Because what does she have here? A shutdown farm with two old people like us. She can’t go out in public, can’t have friends. What’s a young girl to do—“

“Shutdown?” I repeated incredulously.

Papa sighed deeply. “I’m afraid it’s true. The DOC has spoken. No more
Dolce Fantasia
.”

“What happened? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Well, we didn’t want to disturb you, we knew you were studying so hard—“

“Papa, when I think of all that money you saved for me, and it’s all gone now! We could have saved the farm, we could have—” Suddenly, I wished I could hurl my incriminating leather jacket out the window. It hung tauntingly on the back of my chair, the bold testament of a selfish son.

“It’s all right, Gabriel. Perhaps this farm was never meant to succeed. But you are home now. That is a blessing for us. The Laurentis family was never meant to be great or powerful. We gave our son a year of higher education and not many people like us can say that, small people surviving in this world. I’m glad you’re back.” Papa squeezed my hand, and I saw moisture glisten in the corner of his eyes.

That night, I tossed and turned in bed. It was hot in my bedroom, and I kept my window open, letting the strange sounds of the woods into the chamber. Was it just me, or did everything seem different? Why were the birds still chattering away like it was midday? Why could I hear distinct scurrying, the whir of insects with their blown-glass wings whizzing through the air, and roaches restlessly hurrying through the fields? Why weren’t these creatures asleep, as nature demanded? Perhaps I had grown used to the sound of taxi horns and the catcalls of prostitutes.

The fact that our vineyard was shut down, that my parents were rendered destitute and defeated by the DOC, the Italian wine regulation board, kept running races around my head. Not really understanding why I did so, I leaned out of the window. “Volatile!” I whispered. “Volatile!” I repeated, louder and more urgently. I didn’t know how I knew she was there. But I just knew.

“What?” she snapped, and suddenly, she was in my room. Did she come through the window? She was so fast, like an eagle. Like a genie. Appearing when summoned.

“What were you doing, sleeping on the roof?”

“Actually, I was far away, but unlike you, I have excellent hearing. Now what do you want? I’m rather busy, you know.”

“What’s this about the farm being shut down?”

“Well, I wanted to tell you earlier, but you were in such a foul mood.”

“I’m sorry,” I said begrudgingly. “Now sit down, would you please?”

“I can’t,” said Volatile, her beautiful grey wings snapping closed and settling against her back until smooth, they were barely visible. I was instantly reminded that she possessed the forked swallow’s tail too, and wondered what that looked like these days. With a shudder, I stopped that thought in its tracks. What was wrong with me? Had Rome turned me into a complete and utter pervert? “I have things to do.”

“But I have questions,” I said, shaking my head clear.

“You can ask them along the way.”

“Along what way?”

“Now get your shoes on, we’re going investigating.”

“Aren’t I slowing you down?” I complained as we hastened through the forest. The moon was high and full, and its reflection through the trees made tribal tattoos all over Volatile’s bare arms. The dried leaves and twigs crunched beneath my feet, and I gazed at Volatile in wonder. She was bounding lazily along, her feet barely touching the ground. Her wings, half expanded, would lift her off the forest floor in a slow waltz, and there she would land again, on the tips of her toes. She was like a ballet dancer in the starlight, with her ivory dress pouring around her and her hair like streamers…

“What are you staring at?” she demanded, a little smile playing on her lips.

“Nothing,” I muttered, and quickly averted my gaze.

“You shouldn’t do that, you know,” she commented drily.