Nathaniel Rich - The Mayor's Tongue

"I come from a town up there myself. But it's very small, you wouldn't have heard of it," said Stasia, with a laughing voice. "Hey, I'm looking for someone too. He's a young man, about my age. He looks like a local who spends all his time on his parents' boat deck: skinny like a mountain goat, funny little ears, black curly hair, and big squishy cheeks. Have you seen anyone like that on the streets tonight? I've been wanting to ask you this."

Agata didn't think she had seen him. Judging from her acquaintance's reaction, she thought it best to change the subject. "I wonder when this tram will come."

"Oh it won't," said Stasia, rubbing her arms as if they had been bruised.

"Sorry?"

"The tram won't come. This line doesn't run during the summer. See?" She pointed to a cardboard sign that hung by a string from the streetlamp. Someone had scrawled in red marker the number of the bus line and the words "fuori servizio," underlined twice.

"I thought you just wanted to talk to somebody," said Stasia, by way of explanation.

Agata wasn't sure she was telling the truth. There was no other tramway in Trieste that went up the Carso. Was it possible that no trams ran up to the mountains all summer?

"Can I show you something you want to see?" said Stasia. Agata nodded absently.

The woman walked into the street, several yards from the curb, and pointed down at a black patch on the road that Agata could not quite make out through the darkness.

"Help me lift this."

Agata approached like a sleepwalker, leaving her duffel bag on the curb by the streetlamp. When her eyes adjusted she saw that the woman had her fingers curled around the bars of an iron grate, and was straining to lift it out of the ground. The grate appeared to cover a sewage pipe.

Agata put her fingers through the grating, which was slick with a greasy, levigate guck that stained her hands black. They pried it off and it dropped to the pavement with a loud clang.

"Boom bang!" said Stasia.

Agata looked around, but not a single light came on in any of the windows above the piazza. Stasia wiped her soiled hands on the lap of her skirt. The two women squatted down by the hole and peered into it. It was a deep well, with glistening walls that slanted outward, so that it grew wider and wider as it went down. Some twenty feet below, a pool shone silver in the starlight.

"Sometimes I think I hear my friend down there." ' said Stasia. "Maybe yours will be there too."

Several round objects bobbed and floated in the glimmering pool. Agata hunched over farther to try to get a better glimpse. Her silhouette passed over the pool's surface. But Stasia's silhouette was gone. Agata looked up in time to see her rush around the corner. Agata ran in pursuit, but when she reached the end of the block, Stasia had disappeared.

Agata nudged the heavy grate back into place with her shoe and wiped her hands off on the streetlamp as best she could. Why, she wondered, had that odd girl wanted to show her the inside of the Trieste sewer system?

She peered up to the Carso, where lights flickered intermittently behind screens of plane trees, and realized the lunacy of her plan. Looking at her mud-stained sneakers and hands and jeans, she remembered how she had been covered in mud before, only one week earlier, with Eugene. Though he had managed to get covered even more completely. Somehow, he had sealed his ears with the gunk. She was surprised to feel a sudden, painful stab of homesickness.

Out of the murk behind her there came a breathless scampering. It was Stasia. She was winded and her face was flushed the color of violets.

"I'm sorry," she said, huffing. "I thought I heard him— My boy. I didn't mean to abandon you like that."

"That's fine. I think I'm just going to go home now."

"No, wait, I'lltake you. I know how to go. Besides, these cliffs are powerful. You can't go up alone. We're each looking for someone. It's better we go together. Maybe they'llbe in the same place."

Agata picked up her bag and, without thought or calculation, followed Stasia. Soon the road tilted upward toward the barren Carso. The plane trees engulfed them and they lost sight of the Adriatic gaping behind them. Agata was cold and disoriented.

To distract herself, she tried to make conversation with Stasia, asking her where she was from.

"I'd love to tell you," said Stasia. "But some of the facts are fuzzy."

"Oh, you don't have to get every detail right." Agata realized that even if she wanted to turn back now, she wouldn't know how.

"Well, I'm pretty sure my parents were farmers in the foothills of the Alps," said Stasia, wincing as if the memory pained her. "But my early life with them was so dull that I can hardly remember it. I know we had a cow I had to milk and that, one day when it got fat, I slaughtered it. . or perhaps my mother did. And my father, he was happy and friendly. But blank. I can't make out his face anymore. I might have had a brother or two, or a sister perhaps. It's all so vague until the day I met— Ooh! You can't see it but I'm blushing just to say his name. It's funny, but — I can't!"

"Whisper it."

She said it fast, with a thrill.

"What a nice name," said Agata. "Very Italian. A happy little name."

"My whole life began that day. Everything before that was wiped right away, swept off a table, and in its place there he was. I had to fight over him with this other girl, a real witch, but he took to me. And the remarkable thing was, we never even had to speak."

"You never spoke? But you won him over anyway?"

"Actually, we still haven't spoken," replied Stasia nonchalantly. "I haven't seen him after that day, you see. But I've been looking for him ever since."

"Where did he go?"

"He just disappeared. Just as neatly as he appeared. Boom bang."

"How did that happen exactly?"

"We were walking away, down the street, and just as I was being filled with this incredible happiness, a darkness like death swooped over me. I didn't remember, I didn't think, I didn't feel a thing. It was like I had entered a coma. When I woke up, sprawled on the floor of an unfamiliar empty room, I sensed that a long period of time had passed. Though when I saw myself in a mirror, I didn't look any different at all. I still had on the same ugly gray dress I had been wearing when I met him. My hair was still plaited and the sweat from his palm was still damp on mine."

Agata noted that Stasia's hair was still plaited and she still seemed to be wearing the dress — a lopsided, thin, yellow-gray affair.

"I realized that I was not in a hospital or a homeless ward but a small ramshackle house in a town I'd never seen before. The town was filled with shacks like this one, painted red with yellow windowsills and high gables. There was a single rocking chair on the porch, and a little plot of dirt in the back — a yard — surrounded by a wire fence. The houses stood along a single main street. The air in the town had a faint anesthetic quality to it — it smelled like turpentine."

At this point the two girls had wound their way up a rocky path through the shrubs and to a limestone cliff that towered over the city. Their trail ended at a two-lane highway, which boomeranged out of a tunnel and bent around the cliff several hundred yards farther down the road. The yellow lane-divider hash marks, spaced at regular intervals, jigged like a trail of fireflies.

"Don't worry," whispered Stasia, which only worried Agata more — who could be listening that she had to whisper? Stasia extended her tiny, clammy hand and Agata squeezed tight as they skipped over the hash marks and darted into the woods beyond the highway. After some stumbling through high brush, they reached an overgrown dirt path that ran parallel to the highway, around the side of the cliff. The diminishing city below them grew indistinct and the streetlamps grouped together into blurry pockets of light.