The Demon Catchers of Milan (5 page)

“Mia, so long as I keep hold of your hand he cannot come in. Stay here. Breathe, Mia. Breathe. No, ma’am, she’s fine,” he said to the flight attendant.

I remembered Giuliano speaking to me while I lay on my bed:
Ascolti il campanello, Mia
.

“She’s no danger. Really. You don’t have to restrain her. Please: I will be responsible. I understand,” he repeated, and he must have persuaded them. I was learning that all Emilio really has to do to persuade most women is to exist.

I seemed only able to breathe in gasps. People were staring at me, and I realized the hacking sound I was hearing came from my own throat. All the way back to my seat, I looked straight down at the nasty airplane carpet, grateful for Emilio’s firm grip on my arm as he walked behind me.

“Is she all right?” asked an American woman sitting across
the aisle. She hadn’t seen me at the exit door, apparently, because she didn’t give me the “you are obviously a terrorist” look the people by the door had.

Maybe embarrassment is a good tool in the fight against demons. I got control of my lungs and my brain and smiled my best fake smile.

“Yeah, I’m fine, thanks. I just get a little freaked out by flying, you know? But I’m fine.”

She grinned and said, “I know exactly what you mean. I get freaked out by flying, too. At least you’re with your boyfriend.”

“Cousin, cousin,” Emilio and I corrected her at the same time, and then the three of us laughed. This embarrassed me even more, but at least I was free of the terror for a moment. Whenever I am swimming in the seas of horror, even the island of shame looks pretty good.

After a moment, when the woman went back to playing cards with her kid, and everybody else stopped glancing over and whispering, Emilio reached down into his satchel. I’d never seen a man with a bag like that, with chocolate-smooth leather and brass fittings. All the men I knew carried toolboxes, except for my uncle, a salesman, who owned a hard-sided briefcase. I wasn’t sure men were supposed to have something so soft looking. I thought he was going to pull out another fancy novel, but instead he brought out two boxes and handed them to me.

“Presents for you,” he told me. “Grandfather thinks they’re a good idea.”

Apparently Grandfather did, because he leaned across and gave me a little wave.

I looked down and saw a cheap Walkman and a package entitled
Teach Yourself Italian
, which held a book and CDs.

I had forgotten the problem of language. Coming on top of everything else, it made me want to cry, but I wasn’t going to cry in front of these men who had already seen me pee my bed. Besides, I still imagined traveling with these mysterious people to a magical city far from my smelly backyard, and this Walkman and language kit seemed so prosaic, so unmagical.

“Thanks,” I said as politely as I could.

Emilio raised his eyebrows.

“You’re welcome,” he replied. I couldn’t tell what he had been expecting, but I knew this wasn’t it. “I had a look at them in the store,” he said, “and they will get you a good start. They teach very proper Italian, which is important. Not like in America, where everything is slang. You will learn the slang from speaking, anyway.

“Why not get started now?” he added. “We’re not going to run out of Atlantic anytime soon. I can help you with anything that seems difficult.”

I stuck a CD in the player, slipped on the headphones, and made my first real attempts to understand the language Giuliano spoke.

I took a break for the in-flight movies, I admit. I had never been on a flight so long that there was time for more than one movie. Giuliano watched them both, too, with the Italian channel turned up on his headphones so that I could hear what sounded like a lot of tiny people chattering inside a tin can. I tried changing channels myself, to see if I could learn Italian
that way, but gave up after about five minutes. Everyone talked too fast, rudely ignoring the fact that there was a foreigner listening. When I went back to the lessons, though, I forgot where I was and spoke out loud, asking the invisible person on the CD how their day was going. Emilio and Giuliano both turned to me.

“Good, good! Keep working on the pronunciation,” Emilio said and, still grinning, turned back to his fancy novel, this one in Italian with some artsy photograph on the cover.

“A kilo of tomatoes, not too ripe, please,” I intoned to myself. “Where is the bank?”

Learning one word made me want to learn another, and another, and stringing them together made me want to string more.

“Emilio,” I said. He raised his eyes out of his book. “How do I ask what the word for something is, like, ‘How do you say
book
?’ ”

“
Come si dice …?
So,
come si dice
‘book’? Do you see?”

“I see.” I smiled. “Wow. Wow.”

He looked at me and then went back to his book with a shrug and a smile. Eventually I fell asleep with the lesson still playing on my headphones, so I made my entrance into Italy with my hair sticking up and my shirt and face both rumpled.

Once we made it through customs, and my passport and papers had been scowled at, turned upside down, argued over, and finally stamped, I was introduced to a small crowd of people, all of whom crammed (with me) into a tiny car and bobbed
away down the highway. My first bleary-eyed glimpses of Italy were disappointing: the long, completely un-scenic highway, filled with crazed drivers who played the traffic lanes like a video game, and then, what seemed hours later, the city, with its steep-walled, dirty streets, filled with more crazed drivers.

Eventually we started bouncing over cobblestones, and I will always remember the first time I heard that sound, the sound of a foreign street. Then I was led up into a dark apartment walled with books. Somebody steered me into a small room, filled with more books, and pointed me to a soft, white bed.

I tried to remember what to say. At last it came.
“Grazie mille,”
I said to the blurry face, and fell down and went to sleep.

FIVE

The Candle Shop

I
couldn’t tell what time it was when I woke up. The light that filtered from behind the long, heavy curtains looked gray. I stretched and slid out of bed, blinking down at myself. I was still wearing the clothes I had arrived in. When my feet touched the floor, I got a surprise: the floor was perfectly smooth and silken, cool, a wonderful place to put bare feet. It was tiled in some kind of stone, with little pebbles set in it that had been polished flat.

I rubbed my eyes and took a good look at the room. It was narrow and small, but with high ceilings. Tall, dark shelves full of books lined one wall, with a small gap for a desk with one drawer. A leather armchair stood by the one tall window, which turned out to be a door to a balcony, propped slightly open to let in the warm air of September. I stepped outside.

It was late morning, and the sun was shining, which I would not have guessed from the light that had managed to make it past the curtains. My first real view of Milan consisted of a small courtyard, built of yellowing stone and lined with balconies like my own, as well as a maze of back stairs and ground-floor archways. Almost every balcony was crowded with something—pots of geraniums and basil, big jugs of water, laundry frames with washing swinging slightly in the breeze, weather-beaten chairs and rusting tables with full ashtrays on top. The floor of the courtyard was paved with a pattern of flat cobblestones and edged with round ones, and had stone gutters that ran across it to a drain in the middle. It also had dog poop.

A herd of mopeds stood parked on one side, next to three cars, none of them larger than the car I had come in from the airport. A guy was underneath one of the cars, his legs sticking out. Two more guys stood nearby, smoking cigarettes and agreeing with everything the pair of legs said. They looked up when I emerged onto the balcony, and one said something to the others. I wanted to step back inside, but they soon looked away. I felt relieved and annoyed at the same time. What, a car was more interesting?

After a moment, I lost interest in them, too, because I needed a bathroom and had no idea where to find one. I went back inside to explore the apartment. My door opened onto a long hall, and the room I needed was two doors down on the right. I thought about how everything looked the same as in the United States and yet completely different. Every door, for example, had a lever instead of a doorknob, as if this were
a library or a post office. Then there was the language I had heard all around me last night. Sometimes I had thought they were speaking English, because sounds had emerged that made sense, even if the sentences didn’t, but when I listened more carefully, I couldn’t understand a word.

Suddenly I wanted to cry. Sitting on the toilet, I bent my head and stuck my face in my hands. I wanted to go outside that door and find Mom and Dad and Gina at breakfast. I wanted to sit with them and eat my mother’s horrible oatmeal and hear my dad growl at the radio news while he nursed a last mug of coffee before leaving for work.

I sat up again, remembering the reason I was here. Where was everyone? I didn’t like being alone in this silent house. And how could I go about getting something to eat? After working out the hot and cold water faucets (I found out that
C
stood for
calda
, “hot”), I stepped back into the hall and looked around. I couldn’t hear anyone moving about. I found the kitchen, full of more things that looked completely the same and totally different. It was much cleaner than our kitchen, with newly washed dishes neatly stacked on a drying rack and the counters wiped. I found the living room, lined with more books and some old-looking couches with wooden legs and clawed feet. I finally heard voices coming from below.

I found an open door that led to a narrow, wooden stairwell. A door stood partly open at the bottom, leading into a tiny room, full of files and leather-bound books and boxes, the small, remaining space taken up by a table covered in papers. It
looked like the back room of a shop, and so it was, as I found when I stepped through the door.

I saw Giuliano first, and then a small woman whom I knew to be Laura, his wife, and then the shop.

I loved it from that first moment. I loved the paneled walls and wooden shelves full of candles; the scent of wood and wax and varnish; the faint, sharp hint of sulfur from matches; and above all the warm smell of flame. The whole shop felt completely foreign, yet precisely like home.

Giuliano and Laura looked at me. Then they both smiled.

“Buon giorno,”
they said.

“Uh,” I said. “Uh.
Buon
, uh.
Buon giorno
.”

They both laughed. They started speaking quickly, and I tried to answer, which meant I got tied up in all kinds of mental knots while I tried to follow their hands and make sense of a blur of Italian at the same time. Eventually we all laughed, and Laura beckoned me upstairs. In the kitchen, I could tell she was trying to ask me what I wanted for breakfast, and I remembered words from the airplane. “
Pane … e caffé?
—Bread and coffee?”

Bread and coffee was what I knew how to say, but ten eggs and a pan full of bacon was what I really wanted. I wondered if they had eggs and bacon in Italy. I have since heard that lots of people learn how to speak a new language because they want to meet guys, or girls, or because they fall in love with someone from another country. I learned to speak a new language because I wanted breakfast.

Fortunately Laura was an experienced grandmother, so I got
more than bread and coffee. She set out freshly baked rolls and butter, and fruit, and little pots of yogurt in several flavors. I realize now that she must’ve thought this was a feast. When she heard, at last, what Americans eat for breakfast, she said it only confirmed her theory that all Americans are mad.

I felt guilty when she gave me coffee. What would my parents say? She served it to me in a big bowl, with sugar and hot milk, so much that I could only tell it was coffee by the smell. I know it sounds stupid, when they were so far away, but I felt bad breaking my parents’ rule—right up until I took my first sip.

I spent the day trying to get over jet lag. Sometimes I would catch myself staring at a wall, or a shelf of books, or a photograph. I tried to study some Italian, because I could tell I was going to need it. So far only Emilio had spoken any English to me, and besides the family, there was an entire city full of Italians outside my balcony. At first my brain didn’t want to face verbs and nouns, but then I pulled out
Teach Yourself Italian
and started naming things in the room I had slept in. I began to dance around the room to keep things interesting. I twirled around and pointed my finger at random objects—book,
libro
! Bed,
letto
! Desk,
scrivania
! Laura came and stood in the doorway, grinning, then took my arm and led me over the whole house. Kitchen,
cucina
. Sink,
lavandino
. No, no, not
lavanda
(pointing to the lavender on the windowsill),
lavandino
. Table,
tavola
. Living room,
soggiorno
. Sofa,
divano
. She fed me an amazing mushroom ravioli dish for lunch as a reward, and
laughed her head off when I asked her to pass the Pope (
papa
) instead of the pepper (
pepe
). Then she remembered herself and reminded us both sternly that it wasn’t all that funny (at least I think that’s what she was saying).

Emilio stopped by my room in the evening to see how I was doing. He looked at me, taking in what I had already seen in the mirror—my skin even paler and sallower than usual, deep violet shadows under my eyes, and my cheeks and lips feverishly red. Laura had cheered me up so much that I had forgotten, for a while, why I was here, but my face in the mirror had reminded me, even before Emilio’s close examination.