Gabriel and the Swallows (The Volatile Duology #1) (6 page)

It was only then that I saw olive-skinned Orlando slinking in the shadows. He winked at me and held open the classroom door. “After you,” he said. His rich accent curled around me like a cat’s tail.

Orlando Khan was an entity unto himself. Tall and as thin as a cigarette, the smell of mothballs and tobacco followed him like a shadow. Nobody at school bothered to associate with him, for he was a foreigner. That alone would have targeted him as a potential candidate for bullying, but it was well known throughout Orvieto that Orlando Khan did not stand alone. In fact, the Turni province was dominated by the Khan clan who boasted an army of fifty or sixty dark-skinned, rough-talking men that would as soon knock you down for looking at them than say hello.

The Khans had emigrated from Turkey generations ago, and with their old money established a number of trades in and around Umbria. Some member of the Khan family owned every tobacconist and sandwich bar in Orvieto. Lamp sellers and curtain outfitters were Khan territory too, importing exotic and impossible materials from their connections in the Eastern regions. Every lottery ticket was purchased from the hand of a Khan. Orlando lived with his parents and two sisters on top of a grocery that did not sell brooms, canned dog food and gardening tools but rather Moroccan spices, Cuban cigars, Darjeeling tea and thick yellow curry powder. And as these faraway ingredients were all the rage, the Khans profited enormously.

They were a handsome bunch, straight-backed and elegant, with noble foreheads and that trademark curved nose. They were schooled, mostly, reading Italian newspapers and large religious texts marked with coiled Arabic script. Their conversation turned often to politics and economics, mostly peppered with complicated and strange tales serving as metaphors to their thesis. Occasionally, one would marry an Italian girl and sire a troupe of children with skin the color of honeycomb, but the Khan women stuck to their own kind, much to the disappointment of many a young man.

I had often noticed Orlando at school, sitting in the back corner of the classroom, a book held open to his face either to shield his view of Signorina Greco, or the other way around. He would disappear at lunch times, but once I thought I saw him under the canopy of a Jerusalem tree not far from the schoolyard, smoking a pipe. He never looked at or acknowledged me, and most students flatly bore witness to my harassment, like it was as common as a birthday. I wondered why he chose today to intervene.

I was resolved to overcome my shyness and ask him this very thing after school, and entertained hopes that we could walk home together; or rather that I could walk him home as a token of my gratitude. At lunchtime, when the stench of my boiled egg excited the other children’s ridicule (the Orvietani only use eggs as an ingredient to a meal, and eating one by itself was equivalent to consuming a bag of flour), I was too enraptured to care.

But when the final bell rang, Orlando Khan had vanished. Only then did I remember my savior worked in the grocery at three and left early each day to do so.

“Mamma, can we go to the Khan Emporium in town?” were the first words that gushed from my mouth as I flew in the front door. The swallow-girl looked up brightly from where she was sitting upright on a low stool. Her wings were folded around her back, and she looked so perfectly normal, her hair brushed and braided and her face scrubbed clean. I noticed traces of seedcake down the front of my frog T-shirt.

“Whatever for?” said my mother from her pots and pans.

“I don’t know, to look around?”

“It’s seven miles to Orvieto and I’m too tired to walk.”

“Please?”

“And what does the grocery have that we don’t have here?”

“Tea?”

Mamma eyed me with disapproval. “I’ll never understand all that longing for foreign tea. It’s just so bitter. No thank you, Gabriel, our own tea is quite good enough.”

“Maybe I could bring back something for you tomorrow after school?”

“There is nothing of interest to us there. Tobacco and turmeric are of no use in this house. And it’s best to stay away from those dreadful Khans.” She was beginning to grow agitated, and repeated herself. “
Dreadful Khans, dreadful Khans
.”

“Why do people say they are dreadful, Mamma?”

A pause while she screwed her eyes tight, willing her head and shoulders to stillness. “Because they are different, Gabriel.”

“Why are they different?”

“They don’t go to church.”

“Neither do we.”

“They act strange and talk even stranger.” Mamma’s head jerked and she began to rub her nose with ferocity, as if it had become the center of her concentration. “
They talk even stranger. They act strange and talk even stranger, stranger
.”

“But so do we sometimes.”

Mamma looked at me steadily. My heart began to pound as I realized what I’d said, and I was frightened. But this time, my mother sighed and stared at her feet. “Why don’t you show Lulu your room?” she asked, too brightly, and turned her back on me.

I gently took the swallow-girl’s hand and led her to my room. I noticed the way she walked, hunch-backed and unsteady, like she was unused to her legs, as if the wings were far too heavy for her frame. I decided I should like to cut them off, and she could be my sister, and accompany me to school. But then I realized that would take away all her wonder, and she would be ordinary, like me.

My room was small with a window looking out toward the vineyard. The walls were brick with tiny nooks where I stuffed schoolbooks and old socks and the occasional pinecone. There was a narrow bed and a chest of drawers that contained my meager wardrobe. A wicker basket in the corner held my short life’s collection of oddities: some dried carcasses of enormous elephant-beetles, a sucked-out stalk of sugar cane Papa bought me at a travelling fair, a bag of marbles, a top from Signora Silvana, a handmade wooden train. The creature made a strange sort of cry when she beheld the contents of the basket. She grabbed the train and began spinning its wheels, and promptly swallowed the elephant-beetles.

I sat on the bed and watched her.

“I met a real-life hero today,” I said softly. The girl looked up at me, cocking her head to one side, like a puppy that doesn’t yet comprehend commands. “He saved me. Maybe even saved my life. I believe he was sent by Zeus.”

She disengaged her stare and resumed her exploration of my treasures.

“His name is Orlando Khan and he lives in town. Did you know he has thirteen uncles? I could never imagine so many relations. I have only Mamma and Papa. I should have liked an uncle.”

The girl would look up at me from time to time, her expression fathomless, as I continued my babbling:

Orlando Khan is a mathematics expert, says Signorina Greco.

Orlando Khan carved a peacock on the topside of his desk and he never got in trouble.

Orlando Khan’s sister is supposed to be the most beautiful lady in Umbria but I have never seen her.

Orlando Khan sometimes wears slippers with curved toes to school for no good reason.

After I had exhausted myself with every good thing I had catalogued on the subject of my olive-skinned savior, I looked over at my companion. But she was fast asleep on the wooden floor, her fist curled tightly around the train. I was frustrated. She hadn’t understood a word I said.

Later that week, I happened upon Orlando Khan as we arrived at the school’s gates. “Hello,” I stammered eagerly.

“Ah, hello, Laurentis,” he replied softly. He strode through the gates with purpose and I trotted behind him.

“You can call me Gabriel,” I said breathlessly, jogging to keep up with his long strides.

“Is that your name?” said Orlando, not looking at me.

“Yes,” I replied, “and can I call you Orlando?”

“Well, that is my name,” Orlando said, distracted.

I summoned all my courage and blurted out, “Will you have lunch with me today? Under the Jerusalem tree?”

But Orlando suddenly froze, and stared at the sky with a quizzical expression. He was silent for so long that I began to deeply regret my enthusiasm.

“You don’t have to,” I mumbled. “I didn’t really mean it anyway.”

“Shhhhh!” Orlando hissed, his gaze still fixed on the heavens. His eyes darted over the clouds and the treetops like a madman.

“What is it?” I inquired, deliciously petrified.

“It is the damndest thing,” began Orlando, finally lowering his gaze to mine. “I could swear I’m being followed.”

My imagination soared by this confession, and I was deeply touched by being brought into the realm of such close confidence. “For how long?” I whispered.

“Every morning and afternoon this week. They follow me to and from school, they wait for me outside, like an escort. Like a guard.”

“They?”

“The swallows.”

T
ime passed; as this is time’s sole responsibility. The swallow-girl remained with us, and I grew to rely on her silent company, and would tell her all my musings. She never revealed a sign that she understood or commiserated with me, but occasionally her head would nod about empathetically in a funny little bob, and I would laugh at her.

Mamma stopped calling her Lulu, and although she didn’t treat her quite like a daughter or even a human child, garnered her with more attention and affection than I had expected. Papa and I began to call her
Volatile
, the fleeting bird, and it suited her. All day she would accompany Mamma in the house if it rained, her legs growing stronger and her wings folded archly across her back, her tail flitting up at a mathematical angle. Mamma had sewn dresses for her, simple things made from old pillowcases, with slits in the back to accommodate her bird-like appendages. She grew steady on her feet, and it wasn’t long before she could run through the vineyard with Papa and I when it was dusk and no one could see her. I had a fit of giggles the first time I witnessed this – her wings beginning to unfurl and assisting the wind in lifting her upwards with every leap, tripping over her tail which was proving tiresome in this activity. Papa had looked at me very sternly then but I couldn’t stop. Volatile merely ignored me.

Volatile grew more accustomed to human food, although she cared a great deal more for sandwiches than our homemade pasta,
umbrichelli
, and turned meat away. Once when Mamma presented us with stuffed pigeon at the table, Volatile had stared at the dish and begun to quiver. Papa immediately removed the pot, and lectured my mother a little too severely. Mamma had had a fit then, and threw the pot on the floor, and I picked up the pigeon legs and wings and middle bits and placed them quietly back on the table. And when Mamma was in her room, crying and rocking, and Volatile had hidden under my bed, Papa and I washed the dirt off the sad, deflated pigeon and we ate it in the barn, because we couldn’t waste food.

Sometimes Volatile dug holes in the dirt and slurped the worms below like they were spaghetti. And as it turned to autumn, she watched the birds of the air migrate in magnetic V formations overhead, and she would make strange, strangled cries from the base of her throat and I would be sad for her.

I liked to talk to Volatile, for there were few people I could really confide in. In those days, my favorite topic was Orlando Khan.

Oh, how I loved Orlando Khan. The son of Zeus himself, so strong and tall and two whole years older than me, my only friend. My comradeship with Orlando Khan did not so much as cause a ripple in the schoolyard society – everyone ignored me as they previously did, and never looked our way. The strong boys did not bully me quite as often as before, for when they did, Orlando Khan would stretch out his arms and make his brown fingers into claws, and his long, curving nails scared the boys, as well as his guttural tiger growls. He would mock them, hiss at them, and thrust his claws at them like a caged animal. The bullies would call him
figlio di puttana
-- whatever that meant -- and something about his kind taking over Europe, and something else about his religion -- whatever that was -- but Orlando would promise his cousins would be waiting for them outside the school gates the very next day, and the bullies would pretend they didn’t care. But Orlando would laugh his loud, musical laugh as we watched them run to the lavatory, because they were about to piss their pants.

Orlando taught me many things. How to swear -- colorful, wonderful words that were much worse than ‘stupid’ and ‘damn’. He called everyone “God-damn
bastardo
salami-eaters, except for you Gabriel,” and I learned that the pretty girls would not always look the way they did, that one day they would possess this thing called “bosoms” that my mother had, and I was terrified thereafter to ever look at my mother’s chest region.

Once, he bought a pipe to school and presented it to me. I took one puff, inhaling deeply as he instructed, but I coughed and spluttered because it was the most God-damn awful thing I had ever tasted. My head swam and my eyes watered and Orlando laughed. When I tried to explain to him that my mother was probably retarded, he shrugged and said, “Everyone’s mother is a little retarded”, and that made me feel better. But I never told him about the swallow-girl, and I never told him my secret. But he would watch me watch Mariko in the schoolyard and sigh, and his eyes lit up like mother’s fortune teller, like he could read the cards that lay in the future between her and I.

And when Volatile’s eyes glazed over from boredom, I would whisper to her with a surprising lack of shame of my dealings with Darlo Gallo.

It had all started, as far as I knew, at
La Casa di Gallo
. I remember that place, a stone palace in the valley, with its manicured lawns and a hundred pruned fir trees, the fountain spouting crystal water from the urn of a marble maiden. I was in a chamber somewhere deep in the house, on a thick sheepskin rug, and I was six years old. My parents had left me there while they drank coffee, possibly in futile business negotiations, with Alfio Gallo. There were toys all round, ceramic harlequins and stuffed bears, wooden alphabet puzzles, and a bleached Pinocchio puppet with hinges in its limbs. But my eyes were drawn to a naked doll stuffed inside a toy truck. I pulled it out, ran my fingers over its hard plastic body, the high arched breasts, the big inane head, the painted blue eyes. I was entranced by its hair, long and white gold and curly, just like my own.  I was kneeling on the rug, stroking this hair, when I saw Darlo Gallo for the very first time.

She screamed. She ran over to me, snatched the doll from my hands, and cuffed me over the head with it. I fell back, not with pain, but with shock.

And as I staggered to my feet to behold this little girl, trussed up in a dress that looked like it had been assembled from five miles of lace, her long auburn hair and her wet open mouth, I was astonished by the blankness within her eyes. Even at that young age, I sensed her soullessness.
Enemy,
my little mind predicted. But something strange happened in that three-minute encounter. As she stared at me, all the rage disappeared from her face, and something seeped over the nothingness in her eyes, something foreign and disconcerting, that made ghost pimples sprout on my flesh. She dropped the doll, in a trance, and her hand slowly stretched out toward me. I recoiled, resisting another slap. But Darlo’s hand remained in mid-air, and she did not break her gaze from mine, until she suddenly became aware of herself and sharply withdrew her hand, running from the room with a loud door slam. I sat back down on the rug, slowly this time, and cradled my knees to my chest, and did not touch another toy until Mamma returned to take me home.

From that day on, Darlo Gallo teased and humiliated me every chance she got. That trance-like look never appeared in her eyes again, only pure hatred. In the first years of school, whenever I bent down to retrieve a missing pencil or paper, she or one of her posse would kick my behind until I fell over, often grazing my chin on the concrete floors. In sports games, which I excused myself from soon after, she and her strong boys would tackle and secretly wound me, a knee to the ribs, a strong kick to the ankle or head. And then when we were older and learned the power of words and wit to degrade and belittle, Darlo and her gang would begin their tauntings of subjects it was too easy to designate to me: my appearance, my mother, my lack of friends, my poverty.

Because of Volatile’s gentleness, her awareness whenever I spoke, although her comprehension was doubtable, I trusted her. So much so that I decided to tell Volatile my only secret. It was something that I held to me like a beggar his one scrap of food, tucked into his underpants and never consuming it, saving it for a special day that never comes. It was something I wouldn’t dream of mentioning to a single soul, not even my conquering hero, olive-skinned Orlando.

“I’m going to tell you a secret,” I said one night to Volatile. We were sitting in the vineyard after dinner, a distasteful meal of unflavored garden roots seasoned with oil and vinegar that we ate so courteously and without complaint that Mamma let us play outside in the dark as a special treat. Volatile looked away from me and I felt safe to continue. “It’s something you can’t tell a soul,” I said, “but I know there’s no way you could anyway.” And Volatile stumbled to her feet and walked a few meters away to investigate the trees.

“My dreams are not the same as other people’s,” I spluttered, all at once, a huge messy sloshing of alphabet soup. “I know this because I told Mamma about them a long time ago. She shrieked and covered her ears. She told me I wasn’t normal. And she told me to never, ever repeat it, because then people would be afraid of me, and I would end up like her, poor and friendless and living at the bottom of the world.”

Volatile continued to ignore me as I went on. The moon was high in the sky. And it was full.

“I don’t remember when they first started. The dreams. I used to have dreams like everyone else. About cars and races and cakes and Sweet Vittoria, and also things that didn’t make sense. But then one night, they changed.” I clutched my head with my hands and shook it, hard. I inhaled deeply.

“And now, every night, I have the same dream. Not over and over, but one long continuing one. I dream about what happened during the day, but it’s different…and it’s more real,
more real than real life
. I can’t really explain it. But I always remember my dreams when I wake up. I think about them all day. Whatever happened in the dream before continues the next time I go to sleep. And the worst part is, I mean, the reason why it is a secret is that…”

Volatile turned to me violently and fixed her pond-green eyes onto mine. “…is that I am not always sure which is the dream. What happens after I fall asleep, or what I’m living right now.”

Did Volatile’s eyes just light up or was I imagining things?

For in my dreams, I lived in the same Orvieto I always had, surrounded by the same people and places. But the colors were more vibrant, and I never felt hot nor cold. The dreams were so intricate and real, and almost impossible to distinguish from waking life. The dreams were addictive because in them, everything was a better version of itself.

For example, I had the same Mamma and Papa but they behaved differently. Papa was still a winemaker, but he was rich and Mamma wasn’t sick, no, she was beautiful and smart and cooked delicious dinners and had banquets for all her friends. We had a shiny black Chrysler that Papa drove me to school in every day. Signorina Greco adored me because of my cleverness, and the boys always played football with me, and visited me on the farm on weekends. Every lunchtime, I sat under the Jerusalem tree with Mariko and she held my hand. And every day, I was allowed to do something mean to Darlo Gallo. I pulled her hair and called her names because she was so ugly, not beautiful as she is in real life, and she cried mostly and I danced around her and all the boys joined me, and Signorina Greco clapped her hands in time to our music. In my dreams, I was so happy I could cry and when I woke, I felt so sad I could cry because my life when I was sleeping was so superior to my life when I woke up.

Volatile was really listening now, or so I thought, and she sat down beside me as I continued. “But there is one thing that I am happy about when I wake up. You see, when Orlando Khan first saved me, my dreams began to include him too.  But there, I hate him. His skin is dark like oil and he smells strange and the curved slippers he wears makes him look a fool. And he stares at me from behind his school books with his eyes narrowed like a tiger and he doesn’t have hands, just black claws. So I am happy that when I wake, he is still my friend, and none of the things he is in my dreams.”

“But something else confuses me, Volatile. I dream about everyone I know, each person in Orvieto. If it is Sunday, in my dreams it is Sunday too. If I have a geometry test on Monday, I will have the same test in my dreams that night too. If Mamma has a fit one day, then that night, she will do something extra special, like dance in the ballroom our house has in the other world. If Sweet Vittoria snubs me, then she will be nice and listen to me and lie on my bed. When I met Orlando Khan, that night I dreamed that I found him under the Jerusalem tree and he disgusted me so that I fought him and won. But since I found you, you have never appeared in my dreams. It’s like in that world, you don’t exist, and I don’t know why.”

Volatile shifted away from me, and averted her eyes, probably because she had lost interest in my long soliloquy. I sighed. And then I said, in a very small voice, “I wish they were real. And sometimes I get confused. I never remember that it’s only a dream when I am in it, only when I wake and recall everything. But I know this; this moment now has to be reality, because I am unhappy here. And I know more than anything that I was never meant to be happy.”