11.  Pozzo di San Marco, 1515

 

“…il pozzo e’ legato alla storia della contradea di San Marco: nel 1888, in un momento di ira per la perdita del palio, I chiocciolini vi gettarono una maiolica raffigurante sant’Antonio Abate, protettore degli animali e quindi anche dei cavalli.  Da quell’anno la Chiocciola rimase a lungo digiuna di vittorie, ma nel 1910 le donne della contrada, convinte che vi fosse una stretta relazione tra la sfortuna nel palio e il cattivo trattamento riservato al Santo, ripescarono dal pozzo l’immagine sacra…Forse per caso, forse per volunta’ divina, la Chiocciola riporto la vittoria nel palio immediatamente successivo…”

                        M. Assunta Ceppari Ridolfi e Patrizia Turrini, Siena e l’acqua, pg 174.

 

The well is connected to the story of the Contrada of San Marco:  in 1888, in a moment of ire due to the loss of the palio, the members of the Snail Contrada threw in…of Sain Anthony Abate, protector of animals and thus also of horses.  From that year on, the contrada of the chiocciola remained at a …from victory, but in 1910 the women of the contrada, convinced that there might be a direct relationship between the ..unfortune in the palio and the nasty treatment reserved for the Saint, fished the sacred image out of the well…perhaps by chance, perhaps by divine will, the Snail Contrada took the victory in the next palio…

 

I was stunned as I walked down the steps from the second floor of the University per Stranieri.  I had just finished the final history lesson.  We had enjoyed a stupendous tour of Santa Maria della Scala, and then retired to the classroom for a lecture regarding some of the highlights.  Our projects were due in a mere few weeks, to be followed by a traumatising oral final.  And, most importantly, in the meantime there was no class.  Latin class was also nearly over, and the exam for that wasn’t until the very beginning of June. 

I had an idea that Italian students studied a little bit differently than I.  There had never been more than about fifteen students in the class at a time, and I wasn’t convinced they were the same fifteen.  So my guess was that every student sat down with the great tome entitled “The complete works of Homer,” and read the entire thing cover to cover between May and June.  And that, to them, was equivalent to being in the class for the past five months, and they passed the exam with flying colours.

            I felt a pang of sadness as I felt the breeze and realised that it was warm.  Partly because even a raincoat would be too hot soon, and I would have to give it back to Federico and I would feel much less sophisticated, less Ariele than a return to boring, drab old Cole.  And because time was passing, melting away into irretrievable pools of memory.  I was only getting used to the idea of being here, and now I had to conceive of being somewhere else entirely.

            I dawdled across the piazza, thinking of where to go.  I figured that the bar was a good place to start.  I could give a hand to Federico if there was some mid afternoon rush, and think forlorn thoughts of how this was the last day I would work in the bar with him.  Tomorrow Caterina would be back.  I was glad for her, of course, and curious what might have happened in Ireland, but I would miss feeling that I was a part of the fabric of daily life here in Siena.

            Not to mention, a little voice said in a sneaky whisper, you won’t have an excuse to see Fede every day! 

            Hmph, I thought back to the little voice, sinking my hands in my pockets and enjoying the feel of the coat around me.

            I entered the bar to find it packed with people.  Some days, I thought, shaking my head with surprise.  Then, listening carefully I realised that they were a tour group.  Has tourist season already started?  I felt a jolt of surprise as I listened to them gabbling together in germanic gutturals.  Summer?  Already?  A trickle of icy fear slid down my spine. 

Fede was alone behind the bar and without even saying hello I ran to the back to drop my stuff, and came out to help.  He rolled his eyes and breathed a theatrical sigh of relief as I came out, tying a short apron across my jeans.  As I tamped the coffee bean powder in the scoop, I thought of the first time I had done this, only three weeks before.  Or was it less? I considered, wrinkling my brow.  It seemed like I had always been here, making espresso for hundreds of caffeine hungry Italians, smiling and bantering and the constant, recurring panic as the Sienese muttered things I didn’t understand.

            The herd of Germans exited together, and I finally turned to Fede and said, “Ciao.  Come stai?”

            He laughed.  “Stanco.”  Tired.  I nodded in sympathy, then turned to follow his gaze as the bell over the door tinkled.

            It was Marco di Gaspari who had arrived, also looking rather tired.  I hadn’t seen him since our post dinner excursion the previous week, even though I had been in the bar nearly every day.  “Ciao, Ariele e Federico,”  he said to us, leaning on the bar top.

            Fede turned to make him an espresso, not needing to ask.

            “Come va?”  I asked, genuinely curious.

            “Insomma,”  he responded.  Not great.  Then he perked up a little bit.

            “Ariele?”  he asked.  “Would you be interested in doing me a favour?”

            I frowned.  “What sort of favour?”  I asked with suspicion.

            “The bank is holding a benefit for historical preservation.  Things like your fountains,”  he added, as though it weren’t clear.  “Would you be willing to perform in the benefit?”

            “Where is it?  When is it?  What kind of performance?”

            Marco cleared his throat, and I realised I no longer had trouble thinking of him as Marco instead of Signore di Gaspari.  He didn’t seem as old, as unreachable as before.  He wasn’t, I thought, that much older than me, really.  Ten years. 

            “It’s in the middle of June.  You’re still here in June, aren’t you?  You could do a dance, it would be no problem to arrange the music and everything.”  I noticed that he had neglected to respond to one of my questions. 

            “Where is it, Marco?”  I asked, pulling out a saucer and a spoon for his espresso cup, and setting the coffee in front of him.

            “Ehe,”  he sort of cleared his throat, slowly stirring a spoonful of sugar into his coffee, and then sipped it down in a single smooth gulp.

            “But you are a professional performer, Ariele!  It should not be a problem for you to perform in front of a lot of people.”  I cocked my head at him, and took the coffee cup away to be washed.  “Why don’t you want to tell me, Marco?  Where is this benefit?”

            “Er, well, in the Piazza, of course.”

            I had sudden visions of doing great tour jetes across the enormous shell shaped piazza, a small huddle of rich people watching me to clap politely afterwards. 

            “But where do people perform?  What other performers are there?”

            Marco laughed, seeing my confusion.  “They put up a temporary stage, Ari, in the front of the piazza.  There are some singers, a string quartet and a dance troup.  And a mime.  That’s so far, at least.”

            The idea of dancing again, really dancing, was glorious.  But here, I wasn’t prepared.  I couldn’t possibly dance now.  I didn’t trust my responses – what if I heard a sudden ambulance siren across the piazza, or what if I suddenly thought of something that cracked my concentration?  I was shaking my head.  “I can’t do it, Marco.”

            He looked sad.  “Are you sure?  There’s still time to change your mind.  Until the middle of May the program isn’t certain.  But we would need to know, for the floor.  You would have to have a special floor to dance on.  So, think about it Ariele.  You would be doing good for your fountains.”

            I winced as he called them ‘my fountains’ again.  “Since when are they mine?”  I asked a bit crossly.  He shrugged.  “You care about them so much, Ari.”

            And about that, I had little else to say.  I suddenly wanted Marco to drop the topic.  Or go away.  Or both.  He was prying into things that didn’t have to do with him, I thought angrily.  He seemed to get the hint because he sighed a bit heavily and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow,”  and looked for a minute almost lovelorn.  I eyed him, wondering why he was so downtrodden today, but he turned to leave before I had figured out how to formulate the question in Italian.

            I busied myself washing dishes and cleaning the bar.  Fede came out from the back room bearing juice to put into the fridge, which we did in a companionable silence.

            “When do your classes end?”  he asked inquisitively after a few trays of orange juice.  I paused in the middle of ripping open the plastic cover on the next tray.  “Some of them are already done,”  I said.  “But there is another week of Italian class.  Then at the end of May we have the exams.  The entire month free to study!”

            He repeated, trying to get it straight, “But your exams are all by the end of May?”

            I thought for a second, trying to be certain.  “Yes,”  I said finally, “Because a semester of college in the US should end by the middle of May.  They need to keep it more or less the same.”

            “Do you have a lot to study?”

            I snorted, transferring the grapefruit juices one by one into the cold of the fridge.  The glass felt hard and slick under my hands.  “Not really,”  I said.  “I have to finish my history assignment.”

            “The one about the fountains?” 

            “Yeah, that.  And there’s a history oral.  I’m scared of that.  The Italian test will be super easy.  And then there’s the Latin test.  But that’s later.”

            Then I realised, “Actually, Fede, the Latin test is the 6th of June.  So I do actually have one exam in June, but it’s because it’s in the Faculty of Classics, it’s not a class for foreigners.”

            I grabbed the cardboard trays off the floor and went to shove them in the trash.  As usual I felt a sudden pang of anger that Siena couldn’t manage to recycle properly.  It was depressing to throw away all that cardboard.  Now, I thought, it could have lived again, and instead, it’s going to be buried, sunken underground.  An image of Madri flickered with an image of the sunken fountain.  I felt a great weight drop onto my mood as I walked back to the bar.  It was nearly cleaned up, anyway, and was just about time to go.  I wondered why Fede was giving the third degree on my exams, but I didn’t bother asking.  It didn’t seem worth it; after all, in a month and a half, I would be gone for good.  Why should I bother with people here? 

            I felt like I had been doing it all wrong.  I should have danced more and slithered out of this insidious embrace, these friendships flung on me without warning.  Now, I thought dully, I am leaving these people, and Ilaria and Isabella and everyone; I would have been so much better off if I had not gotten to know them at all.  There would be nothing to miss.

            “Che c’e?”  My head jolted up at the sudden interruption of my maudlin thoughts.  What’s wrong, he’d asked.  Damn Fede, for being so perceptive.  I stared at him as though he were the culprit of all the friends I had made in the chilly months since January.  His gaze softened as he looked at me.  “Come here, Ari.  Nothing’s that bad after all, don’t let life get you down.”  Federico enveloped me into a hug, and although I could hear the alien, a mosquito whine in my ear, my arms rose of their own accord to circle him, entwined one above and one below, as though somehow he could teach me to live with the dead people in my head.

            “Come home with me,” he suddenly whispered, and I stiffened, not sure I understood.  He laughed, understanding my response, and I felt his laugh through our still connected bodies.  “Ari, don’t be afraid of me!  I don’t want you to go home and be so depressed all night.  You should stay with somebody.”

            I thought, almost detached from reality, that at least I knew his clothing fit me.

            “Where do you live?”  I asked, realising that I had no idea.

            “In San Marco,”  he replied, and I furrowed my brow, considering.  “Do you rent a room or something?  You and Caterina?”

            Federico hesitated.  “Cati doesn’t live with me.  I live at home with our father, but she’s moved out.”

            “Why?”  I pulled back to look at him.  “That seems strange, she’s not that old, is she?  She’s younger than you.”

            He responded obliquely.  “But Caterina owns this bar, she and a friend of hers.  It’s their joint project.  I am only an employee; I’m a student so I can’t work that much.”  I thought that he sure seemed to work a lot.  Was he one of those students who never went to lectures?

            “Did you tell me once what you were studying?”  I asked, trying to remember.  And then I was confused.  “If Caterina is younger than you, why isn’t she still in University too?”

            Fede looked at me quizzically.  “She didn’t want to go to University.  She’s done studying.”

            This didn’t make sense to me.  Someone cheerful and intelligent, deciding not to go to college?  I needed a Madri sort of perspective to understand.  She would have known lots of offbeat people like that, I thought, my mood returning to its overcast state.  But I didn’t understand how they fit into my nice, middle class view of the world.

            Fede interrupted my meanderings.  “I study Architecture.  I’m in the last year, after these exams I have to start my thesis, and then after getting my degree I have to do a ….”  He said something I didn’t understand. 

            “A what?”

            “I have to go and work for a company, like a practice job, for awhile, to learn how to do the stuff.  It’s called a tirocinio.”  He stretched behind us to the wall and handed me the telephone.  For a second I looked at him, confused, and then realised what he wanted me to do.  I dialled the number, feeling the buttons slick and greasy under my fingers.

            Isabella answered.

            “Listen, Bella, I’m not coming home tonight, okay?  Can you tell Dinah that I’m staying with friends?”

            She snorted, not entirely friendly, and I wondered when the last time was that we had really talked to each other.  Probably not in the last few years, I realised drily, thinking of my new talent for avoiding deep conversation.  After a silence, she said tightly, “Fine. Enjoy yourself,”  and hung up.

            I felt thwarted.  I looked in disbelief at the phone, but it stared slipperily back at me, and finally I reached over to return it to the cradle.

            We locked up in silence, and started walking down the main street to the south end of town.  San Marco, I thought, trying to place it.  I must have wandered there at some point.

            “So Caterina’s coming home tomorrow?”  I asked into the silence as we climbed up a hill.

            “Yeah.  Dad’s going to pick her up in Rome and bring her home, probably mid afternoon,”  Fede responded.

            I felt a sudden crystal of fear in my gut.  “Won’t your father mind you bringing me home?”  I asked.

            “Nah,”  he responded, “it’s no big deal.”  And I thought despondently that I knew so little of his life and what happened in it, and whether he brought numerous girls home on a regular basis.  We walked down the hill and turned a corner to the right.

            “What time is it?”  Fede suddenly asked me, sounding distressed.  I looked at my watch.  “7.15,”  I said.

            “Hum,”  he made an indistinct sound.  “You like pasta?”

            “Yeah,”  I said, “Usually.”

            “With tomato sauce?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Pancetta?”  I hesitated.  “Less,” I said, thinking of the sort of nasty processed pig product.

            Federico digested this information in silence for a moment.  “But you like salad.”

            “Yeah.” 

            “Mozzarella?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Okay,”  he finally sounded satisfied.  we proceeded around a curve and through an arch.  Aha!  I thought.  An arch in the old wall around Siena.  I peered to the left down the street, realising that Fontanella was down that way, at the next old arch, and through my gloom I felt a grudging sense of success, that I was managing at least to connect the dots in this impossible puzzle.

            Federico brightened up.  “We’re in my contrada,”  he said.  “Look.”  He showed me a tiny white plaque on the wall, under the arch.  “Confini della contrada della chiocciola,” it said.  Underneath this, there was a little drawing of a snail.  It was very cute, and I was charmed.  “Your contrada is the snail!?”  I said, disbelieving.  “Doesn’t that mean you are the slowest in the Palio?”  I knew a little about the famous horse race that took place every summer, even though I wasn’t going to be around to see it.

            “No!”  Fede looked almost affronted.  “It’s because historically someone in this contrada had a carriage that was covered with a top that looked like a snail.  So it became the contrada of the snail, instead of just the contrada of San Marco.”

            “Do all the contrade have similar reasons for becoming animals?”  I queried, trying to understand this medieval remnant.  Why should I be surprised?  All of Siena was medieval, why not have medieval neighborhoods as well?

            “No.  Well, for example, the caterpillar is called that because in that area they were the silkweavers.  But they don’t all make the same amount of sense.”

            I tucked the coat around me, feeling a sudden evening chill.  Almost May!  I thought with joy.  Time to be light and free, and tour jete like a lilting butterfly.  But my mood thundered overhead, and I subsided.  Fede put his arm around me as we walked down the street.  All of a sudden a few guys exited an open door on the left, raucous and laughing.  “Eh Fede!”  they hollered as they saw us passing.  We were momentarily surrounded as they came to punch him, and one said something with a question at the end.

Fede looked at me for a second, then said, “Si,” short and certain.  I wondered what he had agreed to, and whether it had to do with me.  Then I felt grimly ashamed.  Why do I think that I have any importance to his real life?  I wondered dully.

We passed a bar – closed.  then on the right, a church front, shining with pastel colours in the evening light.  I stopped, feeling touristy, to look at it.

            “What is it?”  I said with wonder, and Federico considered it as though he’d never looked at it before.  “Our horse’s stall,”  he finally said abruptly.

            “Horse’s stall?”

            “Right.  When it’s time for the Palio, we bring the horse here and keep it inside, in the stall.  Every contrada has one.”

            “But…”  I gazed around this piece of street.  There was an open door on the left side of the road, with a glass panel above it that proclaimed “Societa’ di San Marco” in arched letters, and underneath it ‘Contrada della chiocciola’.  Then my attention snagged on a great round well in front of the church/stall, slightly down the hill and in the middle of the road.  “A…a well?”  I asked, saying the word in English because I didn’t have one in Italian.

            “Yes,”  Federico said, the single precise syllable being the only English I had ever heard him utter. “Pozzo,” he translated.  “ There’s even water to drink, it comes from below.  Come on, let’s go get dinner, I’m hungry.”  Fede dragged me down the street, a wide street lined with cars, with a slight curve to it at the bottom.  His apartment was more than halfway down, on the left.  A wooden door, like all the others, which opened with a snick of the lock and a heavy creak. 

            We stepped inside, into an anteroom that was cool and dark.  Federico hit a light panel on the wall, and I saw a staircase that ascended into the darkness above.  We climbed the stairs, slippery white marble with a dent in the middle, and I wondered how old these apartments were.  We arrived at a door, and opened it to enter a narrow hallway.

            My backpack fell to the ground with a book filled thud, and Fede escorted me to the front room, where windows looked down onto the street, and his father was sitting in a chair at the table, smoking and watching television.

            I believed that I succeeded in being introduced without blushing too much.  Fede’s father, introduced as Giuseppe, said little, shook my hand solemnly, and sat back down.

            Fede then escorted me back down the hallway, up a staircase, into a bedroom (Mine, he pronounced, and I tried to get a good look around,) and then out a terrace door into a balcony overlooking a garden.  “The garden is downstairs,”  he explained.  “The terrace is mine, Dad does the gardening though.”  I recognised a row of basil plants on the terrace sill.  There was a small table, and two lawn chairs, and lots of space.  It was quite stupendous.  Past the garden you could see the street below, and other gardens, and other terraces, all at different levels, as though there wasn’t a standard storey height in these houses.  Everything was a gentle green in the twilight, not yet bright, violent flourishing green, but the baby, starting out sort of green.

            These buildings must be really old, I decided.  Fede stood behind me, seeming to watch me as I took stock of the area.  “What do you think?”  he asked gently, and slowly twined his arms around me, my back to his chest.  I closed my eyes, wishing that things could be simple.  I suddenly wanted desperately to be held, to have someone tell me that I was wrong, and that I wasn’t that bad of a person after all.  I leaned against him and wrapped my arms over his, sucking up the hug.

            “You’re lucky,”  I finally said.  “It’s gorgeous.”

            “You can stay out here if you want, while I make dinner,”  he told me.  “I know you don’t like cigarette smoke very much.  There’s a light, you can study or whatever.  Come down when you feel like it.”  I could feel his words as they rumbled up and out of his chest.  All of a sudden he put his hands on my shoulders and craned his neck at me, his sensitive meter dinging.  “Actually, Ariele, why don’t you come into the kitchen.  You can cut the tomato.”

            He put me to work, and I was absurdly grateful.  It was rude of me but I never did much at the Partini household.  Dinah and Riccardo cooked, and were so gracious about kicking me out of the kitchen, that it had become an easy habit to make – never offer help.  Now, I chopped tomatoes and mozzarella and put them in a bowl together, mixed with precise measurements of oil and salt.  This was done by Fede, not by me.

            I chopped zucchini and he stuck them on a burner to fry.  The pasta water boiled and he stirred a red sauce on the stove.  His father, ghostlike, passed into the kitchen on a wave of cigarette smoke, and then passed out, into the garden and away.

            I opened all the windows and turned off the television, set the table for two and arranged the silverware.  I was enjoying this, wondering if I was one of those people who, after a fabulous dancing career, would become a frumpy housewife at 30 years old.  And would be totally suited for it.

            I grimaced.  No post college thoughts, I advised, setting the plates down gently.

            “Wine?”  Fede asked, and I nodded.  Why not?  It might put a shimmery silver lining in my thunderous clouds.  Chemicals, when reality isn’t good enough.

            Suddenly I sat down in the creaky wooden chair, my head in my hands.  Chemicals, I thought, when reality isn’t good enough.  We’re all a little bit the same, aren’t we, Madri?  Did you understand this even when I didn’t?  That even I had a piece of your misery in me, that we give different names to our drugs, but we all have drugs of choice?

            I thought of Karen, who was lucky not to have gained weight in our dreadful fall semester.  She was addicted to chocolate in her misery.  Madri was addicted to…was addicted…I couldn’t say it.  And I, I just didn’t understand anything.  I was addicted to dancing.  Or maybe to simplicity.  Or adrenalin.  Other EMTs called themselves “adrenaline junkies.”  Maybe that was what I hungered after.  Even dancing in a performance brought that jumpy, adrenaline surge along with it.  I rubbed my hands along my cheeks, feeling the bones under my skin and the chill of my clammy fingers.

            “I knew I shouldn’t leave you alone tonight,”  Fede said as he came out of the kitchen and kneeled in front of me.  I found myself, almost without transition, balanced on his lap instead of the cold wood of the chair, my face in his chest and my arms around his neck, and I wondered rather surreally how Ariele found herself in the middle of a fifteenth century house, in the middle of the contrada of the snail, in the middle of someone’s lap, when I, Cole, was so certain that I didn’t deserve anyone’s care at all. 

            Fede’s voice was husky when he reminded me that the pasta was done, and we should eat.  I jumped off his lap, shocked and horrified that I had ever been there in the first place.  He was looking at me with a strange amusement as I tried to banish the heat the steamed its way up my neck and into my forehead.

            After dinner, Federico cleared his throat and said, “We can leave the dishes, Dad always does them.  I sort of promised some friends that we would go in the Contrada tonight.  Do you mind?”

            I shook my head, having no clue what he meant.  We were going out?  Now?  On a weeknight at the very tippy end of May?  I hoped that I didn’t regret being here instead of at home.

            Fede handed me a sweater, commenting that we would be outside most of the time, and led me out of the apartment and down the medieval staircases.  He was almost too tall to fit, I noticed with amusement as he ducked out the front door.

            We went back up the street, back to the well, back to the ‘Societa di San Marco,’  whose doors were now wide open.  We walked inside, down a dark hallway to a bar.

            “What do you want to drink?”  Fede asked, and I wrinkled my nose.  “Juice,”  I said, and Federico conveyed the request to the bartender.  We took our drinks out past the bar to a giant terrace, strung with lights and seething with people at plastic lawn tables.  A group of about ten people of our age was sitting at the far end, almost hidden by some bushery, and it was to them that we went.

            The two of us grabbed chairs and sat at the table, a number of the guys greeting Fede as he sat down with a large bottle of beer.  It was clear that he was sharing it around, as the table was littered with empty bottles alrready.  I clutched my juice and wondered at how thoroughly I was ignored.  No one even spared me a glance.  So, I took the chance to watch Federico interact with his peers.

            He was one of them, and somehow it surprised me.  I had been involved in a side of his existence that had nothing to do with the contrada, so it was shocking to suddenly see him so at home with something I couldn’t have imagined.  I listened to their discussion and realised they were talking about the palio, Fede’s dark, curly hair glinting red in the overhead lights as he chatted with two dark haired boys and a curly blond.

            My history class background on the palio wasn’t enough to understand why they were getting so uptight.  I understood when the blond suddenly said ‘tartuga,’ in a nasty voice, turning red.  I got that – he was angry about the enemy contrada, the turtle.  But why?  And why were the others agreeing?

            Fede waxed eloquent on something to do with the horses for the palio, getting emotional despite constant interruptions and comments from the others.  I watched, and sipped my orange juice.  On my other side, a girl with long, extremely permed brown hair was giggling in a low voice with a blond next to her, but I didn’t want to stare.

            I looked around, letting the conversation flow over me.  A sudden, sharp snap in the breeze created a wrinkle in conversation, which then picked up back to normal.  I looked around for the source of the sound, and finally saw it – a large red and yellow banner writhing in the wind.  When it finally calmed, I stared at the banner with fascination.  It was a checkerboard of red and yellow, with a blue outline.  In the center was a white patch and in the center of that –a great big snail.  I knew that this was the contrada of the snail, but I hadn’t quite believed until now that an entire neighborhood could be so proud of such an unlikely creature.

*

I stood at the end of his bed, eyeing the bookshelf with the gaze of a famished slave, trying not to feel awkward.  His bed loomed in front of me, seeming to take up the entire room with its enormous, blue and red quilted silence.  I worried about what Fede expected of me – he was Italian, after all, at least in part.  Maybe I had misunderstood, and was going to have to beat him off with a stick in the middle of the night.  Fede dug into his closet and pulled out some clothing, as I prowled nearer to the bookshelf, afraid to ask anything.  I looked at him and I saw that he was a different person to me than he was to his friends in the snail contrada, and I resented it.  With them he had become passionate and full of fire and I was jealous, because the Federico that I saw was calm and controlled and thus oddly less interesting.

            I snorted, wondering if this was new.  Had I learned something from Madri after all?  The alien started gibbering, but it was low and dull.  A voice to keep me tense, but not to make me run.  I didn’t know if it was because of my thoughts, or because of what I was about to do.

            “This should fit you,”  Fede announced to me, pulling out a pair of jeans and a standard sort of rugby shirt.  “You can sleep in this,”  a long tshirt.  “Here’s the bathroom.”

            And oddly enough, the bustle of getting ready for bed, after the bustle of doing the dinner dishes, filled my head with white noise until the alien was forced away and with warm arms around me, I felt, lying in a half drowsy state under the red and blue cover, like maybe there was a tiny hollow of safety in the world, and I had found it.  The storm clouds dispelled, just a bit, lining themselves up in preparation on the distant horizon.

 

I woke because the light shone from an unusual direction, and thought uncharacteristically that I was too comfortable and didn’t want to get up.  Usually I didn’t want to get up because the day was too dreadful and too unwieldy to handle. Now, though, I became aware of myself coccooned in warmth and tried to remember where I was.  I turned, and there was Federico, his skin pale and sleepy and marked with three freckles that were invisible during the day.  I leaned over, woozy, to plant a kiss on them.

            Two emerald eyes threw themselves open, shocked.  I woke a bit further and was alarmed at what I had done.  The eyes considered me for a second in silence.  Fede flipped onto his side and looked me over thoroughly.

            I wondered if Ariele looked any different than Cole.  Then I became aware of a buzzing tension in the air, and I scrambled out of bed on a dash for the bathroom.

            Showered and dressed, I felt safer.  The world was still an unknown, and my curiosity kept the creepy melancholy feelings on the sidelines.  What was going to happen now, in the house with the terrace in San Marco?  It was barely seven in the morning, but I felt vibrant and filled with some impending drama.

            I lurked in the kitchen until Fede came to find me.  He put his arms around me from behind, almost casual as he leaned down to plant a kiss on my neck.

            I inhaled sharply, shocked.

            “Good morning, sunshine,” he said in English, and I turned to survey him with my eyes wide and confused.

            “Buon giorno,”  I responded cautiously.  Fede had already turned to put coffee on to boil, and was pulling biscuits and jam out of a cupboard.  We took the food to the table in the living room, and sat down for a quick breakfast.  Outside, I could hear people chatting together – people familiar with each other in this close knit neighborhood, and I contemplated the chiocciola as a concept.

            How odd to know everyone in your neighborhood.  In Seattle, we had lived in the same house for 30 years ( the family, not myself), and knew about three neighbors.  People changed, and they never introduced themselves.  When I was a kid, we knew all the old people nearby, because on hot days they would feed us sweets and invite us over.  But by high school they were dead or had been shipped off to nursing homes, and the houses sold to random, unfamiliar strangers.

            Here, instead, was a neighborhood that had been passed down by generation after generation of the same people.  Fede had said himself – there were some last names that belonged to a certain contrada, just as certain as the location of street names in Siena.  The children were known by name to everyone and played in the streets together, just like the three year old wandering dervish, driving his stroller from table to crowded table yesterday evening, with a whole neighborhood of caring uncles watching him.

            On the other hand, I realised, you couldn’t join the contrada.  They were satisfied with themselves, and with their internal culture, and they wouldn’t be apt to share it.  I had thought yesterday night that it was classically Sienese behaviour that no one bothered to introduce themselves to me, and that no one had seemed to notice as Fede brought a stranger into their midst – but now I thought it was because as a non chiocciolina, I was nobody.  To them, I had no relevance.  I didn’t exist.

            I sipped the last bit of my coffee with a piece of biscuit, and Fede said, “Come on, let’s go for a walk.”  I looked at my watch, puzzled.  It was quarter to eight.

            “What time do you have to be at the bar, Federico?”  I asked, my voice sounding odd to me in the middle of this foreign dining room.

            “I should be there at 8.30 or so.  Earlier is better, but…”  Fede shrugged philosophically.  He seemed to have great faith in Giuseppe, the other barista.

            We walked outside and down the street.  Fede greeted an old lady going in the opposite direction, and she eyed me hairily.

            We passed out the great, tall gate of San Marco, and then Fede said, “Look!  This is the park where we practiced flag-waving.”  I didn’t understand the word at first, until he mimed out the waving of a large flag.  I thought of the great big red and yellow flag that hung in the terrace of the contrada, and tried to imagine young boys flinging them about with great skill.  I figured it was best when actually seen.

            Then he took me across the street.  “Look at this, here’s one of the fountains.”

            At first I didn’t understand.  A fountain?  Where?  We were more or less in a little parking lot.  Then I looked straight ahead and I saw another one of the hexagonal pillars with a wolf head on it.  “When we played here, we used to always come and drink this water, but now this one is dry.”  Fede stepped forward and turned the handle, but the only thing that came was a few dry clanging noises deep inside the pillar.  “The well is better, there’s always water there.”

            “But Fede, why do they have these fountain things everywhere?  What are they good for?”  It didn’t make sense to me. 

            “Well, they’re drinking water.”

            “But don’t you have drinking water in the house?”

            “We do now, but Ariele, these were built decades ago, when there wasn’t water in all the houses.  So it was important to be able to get water on the street somewhere.  There is one of these fountains in every contrada.”

            “But who uses them?”

            “Oh, tourists I suppose.  We kids.  They are a lot of fun to play with when it gets hot out.  But look, this one doesn’t even have water, because no one cares enough to fix it.  So it’s not all of them that still work, Ariele.  We have the well in our contrada, so this fountain matters less.”

            We turned back the way we had come, up the hill to his apartment to get our belongings and enter the day.  One week left of Italian class, I reminded myself.  One more infernal chapter and then I would be free.

            Did that mean I had just about finished an entire semester of college?  Was my junior year nearly over?  It couldn’t be.  How could I be passing out of my junior year, when Madri was supposed to be challenging the skateboard championships this April in Philly?  How could I be moving on and doing other things?  I had no great talents like her.  I had no expectations for medals or rewards for my sports or skills.  Madri was the one who wanted to go to the X games (and despite her talking about them, I still wasn’t totally sure what they were, just that she was going to win a skateboarding medal or golden cup or something).  She was the one who did mind bending moves on her skateboard, flying down staircases and other bits of urban architecture, twisting and turning and flipping on the half moon skateboard ramp.

            I had gone once with her into Philly, to the park near South Street where she often practiced.  There were great bits of urban architecture to play on, she explained – staircases, planters, and hills, and nearby was the legal skateboard park, with a ramp and some faked up chunks of cement sitting around.  I had watched for hours, nearly the entire day as she flew back and forth on the ramp, a yellow and black blur in her hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants, first like a pendulum, back and forth, back and forth, then with a twist, a turn, a flip.  I couldn’t believe that she didn’t fall off.  She took turns with other skateboarders, who nodded at me but didn’t come to introduce themselves.  They recognised me as a spectator only, sitting with a book by my side for moments I might find to study.

            There, the first time I saw her skate, I started to understand her passion.  Madrigal wanted to fly, she wanted to move and to feel the breeze as it passed under her.  I understood, I corrected myself now, the clean part of her passion.  I didn’t understand that she would take it to the limit, I didn’t understand that it wouldn’t be enough to feel yourself defy gravity, and then swing on wheels up and away to turn and flip again.  It was already the limit of my understanding to see Madri needing to fly.

            My bitterness was back as we scaled the stairs and I collected my belongings.  The day felt long and drab, full only of uncertain pleasures.  Madri, who had had real passion for life and for living, is not alive, I thought, and I, who am precise and correct, who fly only in the middle of a tour jete, when my legs are at precisely the right angles, it is I who remain to remind the world who you were.

            I felt suddenly the weight of Madri’s passion upon me, and I thought, I don’t have any passion.  I don’t know how to be passionate.  Why did she leave it to me?  Why did I have to be her friend, and not someone else, someone light and fluttery and open to adventure?

            We gathered everything quickly and left, Fede’s step lengthening as we passed out of the chiocciola and into the neighboring contrada.  I was only now starting to realise that the entire town was patchworked this way, that every Sienese knew 1/17th of all the people in Siena (more or less, I averaged) and probably recognised a good number more.  I wished I could be here to see the Palio, and the boys waving the banners, and the colour of the city in full summer.

            I had left the coat at Fede’s house, and now I was chilly.  I knew the day would warm up, sooner or later, but I wished I had more than a long sleeved shirt to wear.  I felt strange in Federico’s clothing, oddly sexy and then strange.  I wasn’t a type of person to feel sexy, I thought.  Dancing is not about sexy, it is about grace.  I had confidence in my grace, but I didn’t understand entirely why someone else’s jeans and someone else’s shirt should suddenly make me feel much more Ariele and much less Cole.

            I was losing Cole, I thought.  I didn’t know who she was, and I was tired of her limits.

            “Your bad mood is back already.”  Fede looked at me, almost upset.  We turned to go up the street, and I shrugged.  “I just thought of something.”  He caressed my jaw, almost an offhand gesture.  “What are these thoughts that upset you so much?  For awhile they have been fading away, and now they are returning.”

            I shrugged again.  “I’ll miss working in the bar,”  I said.  Fede looked at me.  We turned again, to go down a hill, nearing the piazza.  “I forgot to ask last night,”  he said.  “I asked about your exams but not anything else.  I have exams, I have to study.  I wanted to know if you can keep working with Caterina so that I can take time off and study for my exams.”

            “What exams do you have?”  I asked, although that wasn’t really what I wondered.  I thought about working in the bar without Federico.  It would be sad.  It wouldn’t be the same at all. I felt let down.  He was going to vanish from my life into his exams, and then I would leave, and the world would close without a wrinkle behind me.

            “Weight bearing elements,”  he said moodily.  “And design.”  I could tell that he liked that one more.  “The first is the 16th of June, and the second is the 12th of July.”

            “I leave on June 24th,” I said into the silence.

            “You’re leaving so soon?”  he asked, stunned.  He stopped, and leaned against the pitted grey stones of a wall, near the entrance to the piazza.  I nodded, afraid at the idea of leaving.

            “Where are you going?  Home?”

            “I don’t know,”  I said, and turned to barrel down the steep entrance to the piazza, and on to class.  I wanted him to follow me, but he didn’t, and I felt bitter anger in my gut, that I was leaving, and that he wouldn’t notice the difference when I was gone.  And where am I going, anyway?  I wondered as I crossed the piazza, threading my way through the now established herds of tourists.

           

            It was Ilaria this time who raised her eyebrows as I entered class in borrowed clothing, shivering slightly now that I wasn’t moving.  I smiled serenely at her and opened my textbook, pleased that I had arrived at the last minute and she couldn’t fish any gossip out of me.  Ilaria had patience, though, and she caught me after class. 

            “Where are you going?”  she asked. 

            “To the bar,”  I said patiently.  “I always go there to work.”  I had told her this to explain why I was suddenly so busy, weeks ago.  She couldn’t have forgotten.

            “When do you finish?”  she asked, almost urgently. 

            I shrugged.  “Usually at seven, when we close.  Why?”

            “Can you leave early?  We need to go shopping.”  There was a fine, sharp steel determination in her voice.  I was immediately troubled.

            “Shopping?”  I asked with worry.  “But Ilaria, I don’t need anything.”  I shivered in the cool sunshine despite myself.  Today was a cooler of the early May days, it seemed.  I could have used a jacket.  “And besides, I don’t have money to spend on clothing!”

            “I don’t care,”  Ilaria said.  “We have to go shopping, it’s time to get you wearing something more suitable.”  Under her breath she added, “Especially if you have a fidanzato,” sing-singing enough to make me blush and widen my eyes.

            “He’s not a fidanzato!”  I insisted hotly, blushing harder, feeling sixteen.  Twenty, I thought ironically, wasn’t really that far off from sixteen -- in the face of boy gossip, I was still clumsy and blushing.

            “So what time can you leave?” 

            I sighed, knowing this was one of those losing wars.  “Probably around five.  Is that early enough for you?”

            Ilaria thought for a second, probably considering what quantity of shopping could be done in the allotted time slot.  Finally she nodded.  “It’ll do,”  she said.  “But we might have to do some more later, if we don’t finish.”  This had a sinister undertone, I thought, wishing I could get out of the shopping trip altogether.

            I looked down at myself, and then as a final stab I said, “But Ilaria, why do I need to go shopping with you?  Look, Federico’s jeans fit me better than mine do!  There’s no problem!”

            She huffed the disgusted sigh of a true sophisticate, her blue eyes widening with exasperation.  “Gaia!  You can’t wear someone else’s clothing forever!  And besides, have you ever thought of wearing something other than a long sleeved shirt with ratty cuffs, or a baggy sweatshirt?  You might like it, for a change!”

            I grimaced.  This sounded much, much worse than I had assumed.  I waved goodbye with a glum thought that the hours were going to pass far too quickly, and I headed off to the bar.

 

            When I arrived, I swung my stuff quickly away and got to work.  Fede was uptight, I could tell.  His conversations were stilted, his smiles a bit forced.

            “What’s wrong?”  I asked him as I shook up some juice for a girl with a backpack hanging off one shoulder.  I poured the juice into a cup and turned, waiting for the response.

            “Just waiting for Caterina to come home,”  he said.  “They should be here any minute now.”

            “Aren’t you rushing things a little?”  I said.  “The trip to Rome takes three hours!  Unless her plane came in at the crack of dawn, it’s going to be awhile.”

            Fede shrugged, and I looked at him, wondrous that I had seen him this morning before work.  I had a sudden impulse to do something rash, like kiss him passionately in the middle of the bar, but I reminded myself that it was a passing Ariele-influence and I shouldn’t be too shocked.

            “Oh, Fede?  I have to leave early.”

            Federico looked at me inquisitively, and then suddenly started laughing.  “You look so different in my clothing!”  he chortled.

            I stood there, glaring at him, wishing people would stop analysing my dressing habits.

            “Different how?  I wear the same things as this!”  I motioned to the rugby shirt, which, it’s true, clung rather differently than my usual long sleeved shirts, and the jeans which, it’s true, hugged my thighs differently than my own jeans, which skimmed over the hint of thigh and fell more or less straight down to ratty cuffs.

            “So, Ari, why do you have to leave early?” he asked, trying to retain a modicum of composure.  I put my hands on my hips, and glared at him.

            “Ilaria wants to find me new clothing,”  I said, glaring hard.  Fede immediately sunk into paroxysms of laughter.  “Should I tell her where I shop?”  he asked, his green eyes electric with amusement.

            I sniffed, and turned my back to him to clean something.  Unfortunately, everything was clean, it was the four pm lull.  I walked to the other side of the bar, but everything was in place.  I looked at the juices, hoping that I could refill the fridge, but it was full.  I eyed the espresso machine, but it was sparkly clean.  The counter was clean, the dishes were already in the washer.

            Fede was still giggling.  I realised suddenly that it was partly tension that did it.  Tension because Cati was coming home and he didn’t know what to expect.  Tension between us.  I felt my stomach knotting, low and tight, and a sudden lump in my throat.  I hated this tension.  I suddenly wished that I had the abandon to kiss him in the middle of this empty bar, or to say the right things that would dispel the tension between us.

            Madri’s odd silence regarding men suddenly came to mind.  I vaguely knew some of the people in her circle of friends, and they weren’t all female.  She had, nonetheless, an androgynous quality notwithstanding her girly skirts and glittery makeup.  Maybe it was the fact that she succeeded in looking 12 most of the time, I guessed.  I had never really asked her about men, because it was a topic sure to clam her up, or have her decide she was too tired to do anything, and send me away wishing I had stayed silent.

            Madri, I thought, should have had a fabulous future with some skateboarder.  Instead, she didn’t.  My thoughts thudded to a stop.  Madri didn’t.  Madri had no loves, no great passion.  Except for skateboarding, I thought, but my stomach was full of a great heavy rock.  I had my head in my hands on the bar counter before I was even aware of it.  How could I ever imagine doing things Madri hadn’t done?  She was the adventurous one.  Who was I to think I could succeed if she hadn’t been able to?

            I felt sudden arms around my middle, a head tucking itself into my shoulder, the warmth curling around me from behind.  In a low voice, Fede said, “Sometimes it’s better to forget everything and let the future come.”

            How did he know?  I wondered.  And more importantly, how could I forget?  Would I be betraying Madri if I forgot her, for one single second?

            There was a continued silence in the bar in front of me.  Without thinking, without even breathing, I turned, my hand going to Fede’s shoulder, drawing him towards me as though I knew what I were doing.  The moment before my lips met his felt like an age, full of ice cold fear as Cole struggled to tell Ariele that she was breaking the rules.

            And then we were coiled together, like the stringy trunks of an old silvery olive tree, and I thought maybe he was right, that the goal was to forget, not to remember.

            We were interruped by the bell over the door, and broke apart with, at least on my side, a certain embarrassment.  It grew only greater as I saw that Caterina had entered the bar, followed by Marco.  Caterina was looking at us suspiciously, and raised her eyebrows when she saw my clothing.  Marco looked like he wanted to laugh.  His previously stormy mood was gone, and he was wearing casual clothing for the first time I could remember.

            He still looked like he worked in a bank, even in black pants and a polo shirt.  The shirt had one of those damn little alligators on it.  Over it he had a short sort of rain jacket, which I approved of instantly.  It had loads of pockets and a reflective belt.  That, I thought, would be worth a shopping trip.  Comfortable, warm – I could see that it had a nice, plaid lining, and not too flashy.  I rolled my eyes.  Ilaria was definitely getting to me.

            “So,”  Marco said looking at us, “do you still serve coffee, or are you too busy for that?”

            I turned, trying to hide my fiery blush, and made two coffees.  Fede was laughing behind me, almost with relief.  “Not you, also!”  he said, and I turned and almost dropped the coffee.

            Before I could compute the meaning of Marco and Caterina liplocked in a passionate embrace (and before my blush could fade, as I realised I had recently been in a similar position), Ilaria entered the bar with a dinging of the door and a harried air.  She raised her eyebrows, and tilted her head at me.

            “Ooooh,”  I groaned as Federico eyed his sibling with a careful eye, perhaps looking for damage inflicted by their dastardly mother, “I have to go shopping.”  I made a hideous face.

            “Go,”  Fede said, nudging me on the back and kissing my cheek with an easy confidence, as though suddenly something were decided.  I fled to the back room for my backpack, my hands cold and clammy.  At least shopping was a nice, simple waste of time, I thought.  Not like this great, horrific unsolvable confusion.

            On the way out I said to Ilaria, “That coat, the one Marco was wearing.  That’s a decent jacket.  For example.  If I were going to buy a jacket, which I’m not.”  I pushed the door open, but Ilaria had vanished.  She reappeared as a blue eyed sprite, leaning on Marco’s shoulder and no doubt asking him all the secrets of his wardrobe.  She nodded at his response, said something, and then turned to follow me out the door. 

            I sent a help-me expression to Federico, but he just smiled.

            As we walked, Ilaria started to tell her story, and I realised that shopping wasn’t about buying things, it was about talking to each other.  I hadn’t been listening to Ilaria for a long time.

            (Ever, the alien said snidely,) and I frowned. Whose side are you on now?  I asked, feeling betrayed.  If even the alien started switching sides, then where would I be?

            Only silence. 

            “You were right about Aldo,”  she said almost without a preamble.  I looked at Ilaria, worried about where this was going, remembering a crooked smile and eyes that tried to unclothe me.  We went into a store, where Ilaria made me try on a shirt with a low cut neckline that made me almost look busty.

            “It’s nice,”  I said dubiously, fingering the green fabric on my arms.  “But Ilaria!  I told you, I can’t afford clothing, even if I wanted to look Italian.  I’m not stupid!  I know I could use a raincoat, but even if I could afford one, there’s no way I could get anything else!”  I said this in a low hiss, almost upset that she was tempting me with unachievable sophistication. 

            Sure, I wanted to look like Ilaria, I thought.  But I have to pay for college!  I thought with worry at the small piece of summer that July and August would provide, and what sort of job I might get to pay my chunk of expensive small private college tuition, along with a dreadful number of new toe shoes, sure to be necessary in my senior year.

            I suddenly realised that I was going to have to perform a lot, and I shivered.  The world of Wallingford College seemed hazy and unreal.  I eyed her blue eyed, blond haired perfection.  Ilaria now wore jeans in some expensive brand name, Italian, leather shoes, and a fitted top in many layered gauze, highlighting her own pastel colouring and the curve of her slender waist.  Her leather purse was different than her winter bag and I had a suspicion that it was from Siena.  Ilaria’s stunning outfit was topped by a jean jacket which did not, as it would on me, make her look shapeless and drab.  Instead, it accentuated every curve.

            I tugged off the shirt with a sigh, returning it to its hanger.  I had almost gotten attached to the idea of changing my clothing style, with the help of my fabulous, raccoon eyed sophisticate friend from London.

            Then all of a sudden I looked at her again, and realised that I had been supremely lacking in attention.   The raccoon eyes were gone, perhaps in honour of a softer season, and her eyes were now outlined in a shimmery grey.  Naturally, her eyes looked almost purple, and larger than ever.  I wondered when the change had taken place, but I couldn’t ask.  I wished that I had managed to spare Ilaria more attention in the past few months.  Where have I been?  I wondered, remembering that soon I would be leaving Siena behind forever.

            Ilaria’s eyes were glittering as we left the dressing room.  She took the hanger from me and walked decisively to the cash register, and I followed her with worry.  “Ilaria!” I said, embarrassed to be speaking English in public, “What are you doing?”

            “I’m getting you this shirt,”  she said, and proceeded to do so. 

            “How can you get me clothing, Ilaria?!”  I whispered in a ragged undertone as we passed out of the shop, a plastic bag containing green shirt in my hand. 

            “You need stuff, don’t you, Gaia?”  she asked, as though that was an answer.

            “Well…I mean, I have things to wear every morning.”  I answered sort of uncertainly.

            “You mean, yes, you haven’t bought a new shirt in three years,”  she translated with no hesitation.  “Well, I have money and I want you to have some new clothing.  So there.  Objections?” 

            I was worried where this was going.  And why Ilaria had money, and from where.  She did, I mused, act sort of rich.  But weren’t rich people horridly snobbish?  Ilaria was far too fragile under her delicate snail shell to be rich.  Rich people wouldn’t choose me to be their best friend, I concluded.

            “It was sort of my fault,”  she said.  “I mean, it’s not rape if you sort of let it happen, is it?  He didn’t force me.”  I could hear the tears in Ilaria’s voice, and if I were in control I would have steered her into a bar to discuss this properly.  It was clear that my friend duties had been shirked for too long, and Ilaria had been breaking.

            Instead, she steered me into a series of terrifying shops, in which she found me a pair of black and white striped pants and I almost fainted at the price, another shirt of a rather more revealing nature than my usual style, two tank tops (ditto, with her saying, “soon it’ll be too warm and no way are you allowed to wear ratty t shirts all summer!”)  I felt almost guilty, as though she knew about the four ratty tshirts that were waiting for summer, folded in a corner of my dresser.  This was followed by a pair of jeans that fitted rather like Federico’s.  In the dressing room I was not surprised to see that they were the same brand.

            “Okay, Ilaria, stop!”  It was seven pm, and I was exhausted.  “The jacket, Gaia, the jacket!  It’s right up here.  Then we can stop.”  I followed her, wishing that somehow I had been able to extricate myself from this horror.  Or the indignity, I thought, wondering how on earth Ilaria could spend this much money without blinking an eye. 

            She was right.  The jacket, the exact one I had seen on Marco, was to be found in the next shop I was steered into.  “Ilaria,”  I insisted, “let me pay for it, at least.  I do need a jacket.”

            Then I looked at the price and grimaced.  “Uh…”  Even working in Fede’s bar, I wasn’t tempted to pay so much for a jacket.  Ilaria pulled out her magic credit card and I shrivelled with embarrassment.

            “Ilaria!”  I hissed as we left the store.  “How can you afford this?”  We went into the next bar that I found, and settled ourselves at a table in the back, eyeing the blue art deco walls with scepticism.  The music was low and there were few people, for which I was relieved.  I settled a handful of bags at my feet, and sipped my fruit juice as I tried to relax my exhausted arms and legs.

            “Next time,” Ilaria said thoughtfully, “We need to find you new shoes and a new bag.  Any ideas?  These take more time,”  she added.  “We shouldn’t rush the purchase of a new bag.”

            “Ilaria, no more!”  I insisted.  She looked up at me from her cappuccino, almost teary eyed.  “Don’t you want to remember me when we’re far away from each other?”  she asked, and I nodded, frowning.  “of course,”  I said, “but I don’t want to make you broke!”

            “But there’s nothing else I have,”  Ilaria insisted.  “I don’t have hobbies I can share with you, except history.”  she smiled.  “I don’t have a loveable family, although the house is nice.  You can come visit whenever you want.” 

            I sipped the juice.

            “All I have is money, Gaia.”  I was confused, realising how little I knew about Ilaria.  She was great at talking about history, and I did know everything about her roommates, but her family?  Not a clue.  Even very little information about Cambridge, where she studied.

            “What is it that happened with Aldo?”  I asked, deciding to start with the most recent trauma.

            “Well you know about my boys,”  she said, and I did know about them, just not how many there were, or exactly what she did with them.  I nodded uncertainly.

            “I, well…”  she paused, and I realised that this wasn’t easy for Ilaria.  “I keep thinking that if I sleep with them then they’ll love me, and I know it’s not true, I know that I’m just fooling myself!  But I can’t stop believing that the next one will be real, that he’ll care about me and not just my, you know…”  she motioned to her body as a whole.  She was teary, sniffling into her cappuccino, and I eyed her foam mustache and decided not to say anything about it.

            “And with Aldo, I dunno.  Somehow it was worse.  I really thought he was nice, he was Susanna’s boyfriend for awhile, you know,”  I vaguely remembered that she had told me about Susanna, one of the roommates, and some wild and rather noisy sex that transpired while Ilaria was trying to sleep.

            I tried not to blush at the idea of sex happening near me.  I really am an innocent, I admitted to myself, sipping the juice.

            “He would tease me in the kitchen, when I was sitting to write in my diary every night, he’d be there.”  I had no clue that Ilaria kept a diary.  “And then one night I guess I had drunk a little, I was out with Marco and Stefano – you know, Stefano from class, and some of his friends,”  she sniffled again and wiped away the mustache with a napkin.  Of her shimmery lipstick remained only the vaguest trace.

            “So I came home and we started making out in the kitchen.  And I guess I’d sort of written in my diary that I thought he was cute, and flirting – we were just flirting!  I let him read that part, and he got, I mean, I didn’t know this,”  if we’d been alone, she would be wailing, but the fact that we were in public meant that she wailed in a low, broken voice, catching the occasional tear with her cappuccino mug, stirring the tears into the foamy dregs.

            Her eyes were surrounded by silvery rings, large and mysterious but they changed her overall mien frighteningly, turning Ilaria into a battered woman, gaunt and frightened.

            “He got all egotistical.  The next night we made out more, and you know, I thought, ‘he really likes me, he knows something about me that no one else does,’ and it was sort of exciting.”

            “Then a week later I was sort of drunk again,”  I wondered if Ilaria was ever more than ‘sort of drunk,’ “and no one else was home, he was there hanging out in Susanna’s room, and we had sex, and it was horrible!  I felt like a prostitute, like he was just laughing at how easy I could be manipulated.”  She grabbed my juice and drank a large sip to keep herself from crying great hyperventilated gasps.  I collected all of our purchases and shuffled her out of the bar as fast as I could, leading us down a giant hill and back to the fountain we had once seen together.  In the evening air I was cold, and I rolled my eyes at the irony as I fished the jacket out of its bag and pulled the tags off one handed.

            Ilaria was smiling.  “I told you that it would be worth it,”  she said with satisfaction.  “Now you’ll remember me even months from now, because I helped you buy your new wardrobe.”  I thought sharply of the box Jessica had brought over, which I had stored in an unused corner of the Station 33 attic together with one box of my most precious belongings.  Hidden in the dust behind latex gloves and spare sharps bins, it was much safer than in dormitory storage.  I had only a vague idea of what was that box, other than the skateboard.

            I laughed sadly.  “I’ll remember you, Ilaria.  I don’t forget anybody that easily.”  There was a catch in my own voice too, as we sat on the stairs that led down to the fountain and I put my arm around her.  This wasn’t my turn to moan, though.  I rested my head on Ilaria’s shoulder, holding her tight as she cried into the front of Federico’s shirt.

            “I think,”  I said slowly, “that love is something you can’t go looking for.  I think that when you’re looking for something, you are too desperate to recognise it when it arrives.”  I listened to the calming splash of water into the fountain and the damp brick smell that emanated out from its pointed arches in the evening chill.  “Ilaria,”  I continued, “If you right now met some British guy, some totally normal guy from home, you wouldn’t think twice about him.  But what if he were the one that really cared about you, when all these Italians just want an exotic and beautiful foreigner?”

            Her breathing was still ragged, but had slowed a little.  “Besides, love can’t happen all the time to everyone.  Maybe now isn’t the right time for you.  I love you, I care about you.  Maybe one friend at a time is all you can hope for.”  I started petting her long blond hair, as though Ilaria were a cat.  “Besides, if you fell in love here, what would you do?  You’d have to come back!  You’d be stuck halfway between Italy and home.”

            “Like you,”  she said softly, and I sighed and hugged her tighter.  “But I can’t love,”  I said obliquely, “so it doesn’t matter.”

            Ilaria turned up to me.  “When will you tell me what’s wrong?”  she asked in the twilight, the fountain lit from below and shining aquamarine below us.

            “I don’t know,”  I said, her blue eyes shining into my grey ones, as we hugged each other among the crackling of shopping bags, as the sky passed through twilight into darkness.

 

 

Excerpt from A History of Siena through the Fountains, by Cole (Gaia) Ostrovsky.

 

Siena was overwhelmed by water when the Vivo arrived, in the 20’s.  However, in this modern age less interested in architectural feats of majesty, it was enough to provide little tubes in the street, which later turned into the octagonal fountains found everywhere..  They served the immediate need of providing new, cleaner and fresher water to everyone, as well as filling the fountains which had been in decay and falling out of use for centuries.  That was when there was still no running water in the houses.  by the time the Ugo arrived in Siena to replenish the water of the Vivo, this was no longer true.  Thus, the octagonal fountains themselves have begun to fall out of use.  It no longer matters all that much whether or not they all work.  They are a silent testimony to the many centuries long battle for water, and the fact that with modern engineering, it is now available to everyone without the need to even open your front door.

 

The well of San Marco was originally excavated by a great personage in Siena, the Cardinal Raffaello Petrucci.  He was not well liked.  His idea was to water his gardens with it, but he had seemingly overlooked the fact that the gardens didn’t lack water.  The well quickly became the centerpiece of the Contrada of the Snail, and they built their first oratory in front of it, at the Y of the streets of Forcone and Fondaco, now the Via della Diana and the Via San Marco.  The water from this well is still potable, and can be gotten from a rusty bit of metal tubing that hangs out one side of the well.