Lecce
The woman was looking down at me from above, one of those balconies that seemed made for leering. Wore a long skirt, her hair loose around her face. The landlord was still fiddling with his keys.
“How do you know him?” she asked.
“What?”
“How do you know him?”
“I’m his son,” I replied.
She nodded, held a cigarette between two fingers. I imagined him brushing up against her in the hallway, the quickening of her pace on the stairs. Maybe he made jokes that would make her laugh and sweat and grip her girlfriend’s hand tight.
I waited for her to say something else but she was staring off down the street. Two nuns stood on the corner to let a taxi pass. A bit of ash fell on my shoulder and then the door opened, up the stairs we went. The apartment and its contents had been left to me. Pairs of loafers and a piano, newspapers that sat in stacks on the windowsills and blocked out much of the sunlight. A terrier who was addicted to eating cigarette butts. A bottle of Campari soda sat on the counter top, open but unfinished. The landlord said his son could sell most of it, if I wanted. Maybe not the terrier. I thanked him.
The train down from Rome that afternoon had been fine, the countryside washed out and sky blue. I sat beside men who dressed like him, smelled of him too. I’d always imagined that the end of my father’s life would prove a turning point in my own. Something to provide it with a new heading. But when they’d called a week or so ago I had only said okay, asked if they needed anything else.
After leaving the flat I walked through the old city, the terrier at my heels. Hawkers extended flowers of plastic and silicon. I’d shake my head, hands raised. There was a little cafe across from the basilica that had burgers on the menu. I looped the terrier’s leash around a chair leg and ordered one medium, let the dog lick the grease from my fingers. The hawkers came again and I waved them on.
During those rare occasions when we’d talk on the phone, my father would describe the town as romantic–with its men and their rosaries, the little red-hooded taxis. “And you’re all about the romance, aren’t you?” I’d reply. He would laugh and I would think of my mother.
She hadn’t said much when I told her I was coming, only wished me luck. “ — and hopefully you won’t encounter whatever it was that made him the way he is.”
“Right, thanks.”
She’d dropped me at the airport but hadn’t called since.
In giving his reasons for the late-in-life move back to Lecce, my father would often cite his boyhood. Cans kicked down narrow streets, cats chased until they found shelter atop church walls. That aunt whom he longed to reconnect with, the one who could shuck clams with her fingers. Other times it was Italian women, a reason my mother more readily accepted–if not promoted among her social circle–with their wide-hips and muscular tongues.
“You just know from the way they talk,” he’d wink. “All those rolled Rs.”
Whatever it was, I hoped he’d gotten it. Nostalgia or women or whatever. In his billfold I found receipts from museums even though I only knew him as a philistine. But there were things that stayed the same, too. A Yankees poster on his bedroom wall. Women’s clothing in a laundry basket beside his window, still anticipating being hung on a line.
I speculated about who she was, who owned those clothes, and figured my mother would be pleased to know she was right. Wondered if she’d attended the funeral service, and for the first time felt an ache about not going. It’d been small, the landlord had said, just a few friends and the like. For some reason I’d apologized to him, explained I just hadn’t been able to get away from work until the weekend.
“He said you not come at all,” he replied. “Sembra che lui sia contento che ci stai.”
Back at my hotel that night I tried to hide the terrier in my jacket but was caught before entering the elevator. “No pets, signore,” the woman said.
“But what if he is, like, an emotional support animal?”
She just looked at me and I sighed, set the dog down on the ground. Outside the streets were nearly empty aside from a group of girls. Tourists, it seemed, maybe college-age.. They had that fizzy kind of laughter that comes after a few vodka sodas, spoke of reinvention and rebirth.
“It’s never too late to be what you might have been,” one said, blowing cigarette smoke in ovular puffs.
“That George Bernard Shaw?”
Another girl poked a finger into the smoke circle. “Can’t let it die a virgin.”
“George Elliot.”
“Right, Elliot.”
I crossed to the other side.
After some wandering I found myself back outside his apartment, ready to wake the landlord and abandon the dog in the flat for the evening. Then a hand was on my shoulder- the woman from the balcony.
“You okay?”
“Yes– yeah. I just, my albergo no allow cane.”
“I can take him,” she replied, “for the night, if you need.”
“Oh, okay. Yeah I’d appreciate that, molto bene.”
“You will come get him in the morning?”
“Sure– and you should know, he likes to eat– ”
“Cigarette butts, yes. Your father liked to smoke and he’d get them out of the trash. Come at nine.”
That next morning I woke early and went to a cafe. The coffee was made wrong but I sipped it anyways, showed up to her apartment fifteen minutes early and loitered outside. Then she called to me again from the balcony, said she would buzz me in.
Her place looked much like his. Small but cleaner, perhaps. The terrier lay sleeping on an ottoman, and I could hear her moving about in the kitchen, porcelain placed on porcelain.
“Can I get you anything? Sorry I am- how do you say, all over the place?”
“No worries at all,” I replied, knelt to pick up the dog only for him to nip at my fingers. “Your English is molto bene, by the way.”
“Thank you. I learned it in school, but your father helped me get fluent.”
“Oh yeah?”
When she came back around the corner there was a baby in her arms. A girl with white cheeks, white legs that dangled. “Mind holding her, please?”
“For sure.”
I held it under the armpits as the woman went back into the kitchen. And, among the other things, I thought about what could break if she slipped from my grasp. So I took a seat on the sofa, the girl in my lap. Her name was Chiara, her mother said. How pretty, I replied.
“I’ll miss your father very much,” she said quietly as she came back in. “Would you mind letting me into his apartment? I think I left some things there.”
“For sure.”
Again, I had to get the key from the landlord, and as we waited I watched her rock the baby back and forth, one hand under her and the other caressing her back. The woman– Flo, as she introduced herself, short for Florence– wore no wedding ring.
And when she came inside and began picking clothes out of that laundry basket I could feel my stomach fold. White cotton t-shirts, a pair of underwear. Chiara began to gnaw at a chair leg, marks I’d initially attributed to the dog. At least my mother would get a kick out of this, wouldn’t she? Or maybe it all would feel too familiar. I wasn’t laughing and didn’t think she would, either.
That evening I missed my train back to Rome and the one after that, too. The dog needed some paperwork to get into the States and in emails to my colleagues I blamed that for the delay. Paid a busboy at the hotel to take it home for the night, feed it and let it out and the like. I walked around the city some more. An amphitheater stood in the old part of town. Roman, the plaque said. They’d put on performances and gladiator fights here. In the pit, a father and son played with a toy from a hawker, the kind that would shoot up into the sky and land amongst the theater aisles. I watched the boy clamber up and over, laughing and clutching at the stones as he went.
Years ago, when I was still in high school, my father skipped out on a woman he’d been seeing. In the weeks after she’d called me, asked to meet for lunch. Like other girlfriends of his, Sheila was pretty and younger. Paid for my deli sandwich and we ate on a bench in the parking lot. She asked whether I’d heard from him much, and I kind of shrugged. She began crying after that, and I went back into the deli to get her napkins, another canned Arnold Palmer. The loss was compounded, I learned, by the fact that she was still paying for their lease, with several months to go. I nodded like I knew what a lease was, excused myself to the bathroom where I called my mother and asked her to pick me up. In the years after I did my best not to think about all that. But in quiet moments I’d remember the texture of those napkins I’d handed to her–ribbed and brown.
When Flo let me in that night she had a finger raised to her lips. I stepped as quietly as I could, said a silent prayer that she wouldn’t smell the gin and tonics.
“All okay?” she mouthed.
I cleared my throat and just started talking. The slippers she wore were the shade of ballet shoes. Said I wanted to do right by her, under the circumstances, if she would let me. That I didn’t know the particulars and didn’t want to, either. What I did know was that he was an ass, and I’d make sure they were looked after just fine.
I was impressed with how it was coming out, to be quite honest. Perhaps I was a little tipsy but it felt raw, right even. But then she was laughing.
“You think we were together?”
“I– I don’t know. I guess I just assumed.”
“What’s that phrase– makes an ass out of you and me? He’d always say that,” she murmured, tucking her feet under her on the couch. “Thought it was the funniest. You’re very funny, like him.”
“I’m not being funny. I’m being serious.”
“Me too. We were friends. Just friends.”
The next morning Flo met me outside an old church. Chiara in a stroller, tugging at her own feet. They’d gone their first few months living in the same building and not speaking, besides for the occasional greeting in the hallway. She’d thought my father the typical American expat, full of self-loathing. “It wasn’t until I got pregnant and needed more help that we got close. I was prideful about it but he was prideful, too. So I think I respected that in him. Insisted he didn’t need help lifting his groceries when really we both did.”
I had mumbled that that sounded like him. The rest of it didn’t, though. Chiara held against his chest as he made dinner, watching her while Flo went to work during the day. How she would come home to them watching Italian comedies, my father folding laundry while rocking Chiara’s crib with his foot.
“I never knew him to really have a girlfriend. Lived like a hermit.”
“Maybe he was in love with you.”
She tsk’d her tongue. “No, it wasn’t that. I think he was just tired of all that maybe. Wanted to try to do things in a different gear.”
“He ever talk about me?”
“No. I cannot say he did.”
Across the street a red awning of a cafe flapped, the host waving us over with an open hand.
“I did think maybe something was going on. He’s not speaking of it. No one has no family, no past. If they do, they are straight about it. He just refuse to say anything.”
We stood there for a moment, watching people cross the courtyard. Chiara began to cry, and Flo knelt to adjust her straps, shaking her head. “It is funny. Sometimes he’d be so good to her, to us. I would think he was making up for something else.”
That evening I took the train back to Rome. I called my mother, too, and listened to the line ring with my head against the window. Felt the tremor of the tracks and indulged her, relaying fictitious anecdotes that weren’t all that difficult to come up with. How the landlord found him passed out in a fountain one morning, head cradled by a statue of the Virgin Mary. Stories like that, referencing the bad lungs and the bad liver, too. My mother laughed a little, then began to cry. Then she stopped and didn’t say anything at all for a few minutes.
His estate was left to me. I was making arrangements, though, to transfer his savings and any money from the sale to my mother. It was a sizable amount, like he’d been frugal in his final years. Flo had seemingly affirmed this, suggested that perhaps it was because he wanted to give me a real inheritance, amends of some kind. I’d shrugged. Maybe he was just stingy– had crocodile arms and couldn’t reach his wallet. Flo didn’t laugh. The snack cart came through the aisle and I thought again of those deli napkins, wrote a note to look Sheila up. By my feet the terrier threw up in its carrier case. I asked the gentleman next to me if he had any cigarettes.
