Gabriel and the Swallows (The Volatile Duology #1) (9 page)

“Oh,” I said, not wishing to show my surprise. “You’re welcome.”

I looked up at the sky and there they were again, the flight of swallows that followed Orlando wherever he went. There was a very large one amongst them. It was black and menacing and I couldn’t look at it for very long. It stared at me like it knew me, and had hated me all its life.

M
y dreams continued as normal, a beautiful life and a beautiful lie. I excelled at all that I did, had adventures and forged relationships that I couldn’t conceive of in my waking hours. At school I would daydream and relive my visions from the night, and at times would get so befuddled that I would confuse the two. Oh, how I lived for night. How I lived for sleep.

However, upon waking, I would often recall a kind of bewilderment that existed in my dreams. I would recollect that in my dreams I was looking for someone. In fact, several times that week I found my dream self journeying to St Patrizio’s Well for no reason but to sit there. I would sit and be very still, holding my head in my hands and willing myself to remember, remember. And once, a breakthrough: I stood up and cried out, “Come back to me,” and had an image of a lovely woman with swallow’s wings. But no one would come. In the morning, I knew I was summoning Volatile, that in reality I missed her terribly and was consumed with guilt, and that was so strong it permeated my perfect dream life.

Winter came and went, and in the spring Papa attended to the vineyard and the olive grove, detracting old brittle branches. In April, when spring was promising to fully bloom, the swallows returned to Orvieto. “They spent their winter in the Sahara and Arabia,” Papa said, consulting his
Oxford Guide to Birds
. “I’m sure happy they’re back.”

“Why, Papa?” I said.

“Because they eat all the insects that want to eat our grapes,” my father responded. One strict regulation the DOC – the Italian wine board – had in making the
Dolce Fantasia
wine was that very limited pesticides were permitted in the vineyards, and our farm relied mainly on nature to keep us afloat.

“Oh,” I said, and Papa laced his arm over my shoulders, and we watched a flock of swallows descend upon an olive tree. I wanted to say something about Volatile then, but I couldn’t. My parents hadn’t mentioned her to me since the morning she disappeared, nine months ago.

Orlando was a brilliant student and even though he acted otherwise, I knew he secretly liked school. He excelled at mathematics and languages, and Signorina Greco once mentioned that he could go all the way to Cambridge, his English was so fluent. He also spoke another language at home, something grating yet earthy, like fine cigar ash ground out in a glass bowl.  So when Orlando stayed bedridden for a week with influenza, I was forlorn: lonely and fearful that one of the strong boys would notice his absence and it would begin again.

They did not notice. And if they did, very little was done about it. Once, I caught Darlo Gallo glaring at me with her cat-like eyes, and she whispered something to Christopher Esposito who shared her desk, and he turned around and looked at me in a way that made my stomach crawl. All during the lesson he would look at me this way, and often when he was sure I wouldn’t notice.

It was during cursive writing class – the stupidest and most pointless of all classes, and to this I hold to this day – that I excused myself to go to the bathroom, more out of tedium than necessity. There were no mirrors in the small, whitewashed lavatory, and as I stood at the cistern, with my pants around my ankles and my undershorts supported by my left hand, I heard the door close quietly behind me. A chill ran up my spine as I heard soft, labored breathing. I willed my urine to stop its flow, told myself there was hardly any left, but it trickled out of me in what seemed to be a slow, never ending stream. Footsteps closer. My right hand began to shake and the flow began to deviate onto the wall. There was a sigh, and Christopher Esposito’s clammy hand cupping my buttock.

I did not scream. I could not look at him in the eye. In a flash, I had whipped up my pants and buttoned them, ducked under his arm, and ran out of the lavatory as fast as my feet could carry me. Aware that there was a growing stain on my trousers – Goddammit, was I
still pissing
? I fled past the classroom door and down the hall, through the front doors and down the steps onto the street of Piazza Marconi and the two Jerusalem trees. What if he comes back for more? I hesitated, and ran. I thought I heard Darlo Gallo’s voice calling my name.

I don’t know why I didn’t run toward home or to my only friend, perhaps a fear of discovery and a terrible shame that began to overcome me, a notion that I had become dirty. Christopher Esposito’s face kept returning to my mind’s eye, and even though I checked that I wasn’t being followed, I could not trust my own eyes. All along the city wall I ran, on the path that had no name, the enormous volcanic tuff barrier rising and falling, the valley and vineyards far below.

I noticed a little cavern in the yellow umber wall, the entrance mostly concealed by white-tipped vines. I thought it would be enough to hide me for a moment. No, I didn’t want concealment; I just wanted to be in a small, dark, cramped space for a moment, for a lifetime, just to think. I crawled in and to my surprise, the hole opened marginally, and I saw a little path of descending steps carved out of the tuff. Cautiously, with one hand upon the wall to keep my balance, I walked down. There the steps turned right as they fell into darkness. I inhaled sharply the scent of birds’ nests, old eggs and feces before I found myself in an enormous cavern, perhaps fifteen feet below the ground.

Awe brushed every thought of the lavatory incident from my mind. I had heard of these places. Ancient Etruscan caves that riddled the bowels of Orvieto, huge enclosures that once housed cattle and goats, olive oil mills, entire wine cellars, fugitive popes and their wayward cardinals. I was beneath Orvieto.

The air was dusty and it was cold, and I noticed several precise squares carved into the back wall, as my eyes adjusted, perhaps fifty or so. Pigeon holes, of course. Where the birds once flew with the sun through the one window and returned in the eve to roost in these notches before they were slain for supper. The three layered water troughs, the first designed to spill over into the second and third, which the pigeons were trained to drink from. All empty now, save for dry mint-green lichen that sprouted like clouds. And a mass of something. A mass of a quivering, dusky, shadowy something, covered with a substance dark and dense, like hair.

I couldn’t help it. I screamed.

The mass jolted and became alive, a heavy blur of blackness. It happened so fast, but I can still see it in my memory to this day: the shadow took form, white skin caught the sunlight and glimmered, wings unfurled, and a face I recalled with glittering green eyes and waving light brown hair.

“Volatile?” I whispered.

The swallow-girl jumped out of the water trough, hovered in the air for a moment, her wings stretched to their full capacity, reminding me of one of the frescos in Signorelli’s Duomo. When she landed on her feet, the wings immediately folded around her body, to protect it from my sight. She was taller, and her back was straighter. Her face had become sharper, more angular.

“Hello, Gabriel,” she said softly.

I felt shy all of a sudden. “What are you doing in here?” I demanded, my voice sterner than it should have been.

“Sleeping,” she said, and did I imagine it, or was there a bite of sarcasm to her words? Did bird-girls even know of sarcasm?

“Underground?” I looked around distastefully. “But it’s all wet and smelly…”

“It smells fine to me.”

“But it’s so dark.”

“It keeps me hidden from predators and hunters.”

“How long have you been here?”

“We’ve been here for three weeks now.”

“
We
?”

It was then that
it
emerged from the shadows.

This is how he appeared to me then, when I was a child and knew no better. A tall, monstrous being. I remember his arms, muscular and powerful, skin as pale as marble and riddled with veins like blue cheese. I recall his wings: oil-spill black and so enormous they seemed like a cape that engulfed him. His eye fixed on me: I believed they were blue at the time. But one thing I recall, and I dare anyone who has met him to defy me: that his pupils were shaped like crucifixes. And it dawned on my childish mind that he was the shadow of death, the Grim Reaper, Hades – and I would meet him again one day, when he came to collect for the underworld. Suddenly, there was a sound like a hurricane, and then he was gone.

When I returned to my senses, I saw a single black feather, still quivering from the speed of the creature’s movement. I deftly rescued it and pocketed it. “Who was that?” I demanded.

But Volatile would not answer. Instead, she watched the window, as if she could see him fly away.

It was getting dark. I was hungry and increasingly aware of the smell of drying urine from my pants. I could hear the birds in the valley, crying out to each other, preparing to come home. Soon swallows would invade the chamber, and I did not want to be present when they arrived.

“Mamma misses you,” I said. “Won’t you come and see her?”

“I will stay with my own kind.”

“You were happy with us, remember?”

“I have tasted the human life, but it did not like me,” Volatile replied.

“Just for tonight,” I said in my most reassuring tone, and suddenly it was a year ago, when Papa asked me to speak to a swallow-girl as he attended her wound.

In response, Volatile unfurled her wings, forgetting about her nakedness, and flew away.

Defeat engulfed me as I trudged home wearily. Stars hung in the sky as I cut through the olive groves, and all I could think about was Volatile and with a shudder, the enormous winged man. I kept my hands in my pockets, and fingered the spine of the black feather gently. It shivered. As I shuffled up the steps, reality hit me, and I wondered how to explain my lack of book bag and lunch pail to my mother.

But as the door swung open, my worries dissolved. There was Volatile, apparently freshly bathed with hair neatly combed and a new dress made from some sort of bedding, and Mamma fussing with more energy than I had seen the past months. With her wings folded against her back, I noticed how they had either shrunken, or she had grown to accommodate their size.

Papa was heaping potatoes grilled with sage and Roman artichoke onto her plate, and they both looked up with joy as I entered. Volatile would not meet my eyes, and her cheeks were scarlet.

“Look who it is!” gushed Mamma, as if I didn’t know.

“She’s come back!” added my father helpfully, looking more happy than I ever saw in my life.

“She’s come back to stay,” said my mother hopefully, and I saw tears shining in her eyes and realized she had loved the girl all along.

We ate dinner in sheer joy that night, no one saying much. I didn’t want anyone to notice how much I was staring at Volatile, but I couldn’t help it. She used a fork like a native, and she was different somehow. I felt a stab of jealousy when I contemplated the possibility of her joining another family all those months. I was so engrossed in her return that only later I was struck by my parents’ seeming nonchalance to her speech.

“So, she can speak,” I said after a while, hoping to startle my parents a little with my knowledge.

Mamma screwed up her face. “Well, of course she can speak,” she exclaimed.

“Where have you been all this time, Gabriel?” queried my father, as he cleaned the horn-rimmed spectacles.

“Not listening properly, I guess,” I muttered, narrowing my eyes indignantly at Volatile, who ignored me.