Jonathan Levi - Septimania

“The Nurses and the Bomb Squad?” Malory repeated, suddenly struck with a terrible thought. “You aren’t one of? You haven’t become?”

“A Nurse-in-Training?” Ottavia laughed again, but the laugh wasn’t quite as melodic as before, and Malory immediately wished he could undo the question and tune away the pain he detected behind the dissonance. “Never. No,” she said, leading Malory up the blue staircase at the side of the house.

And before she left him, another hug. No matter what, Malory thought, I am glad.

Malory’s room was simple. An iron bed stood at the far end, a mosquito net draped from a serrated crown above its center. Malory wasn’t certain whether there were curtains for the windows. But there was a Shaker hook rug on the painted blue floor, and a bathroom whose fixtures were so intricately designed that Malory, while ignorant of their function, understood that they were of the same high quality as the hair creams and skin emulsifiers and loofahs and face cloths and bathrobes and even the tarantula-shaped juicer that shared the bathroom with him.

“I’m giving you fifteen minutes to wash your face,” Ottavia said, as the Driver set Malory’s suitcase on the wicker bed stand, “then I’m coming to get you. Cristina’s so excited she’ll kill both of us if it’s any longer.”

“Ottavia …” Malory called to her.

“Yes?”

“Promise me you’ll come back? To Septimania?”

“Only if you promise to read me another bedtime story and tuck me in.” A final peck on Malory’s cheek and she was gone.

The air was appreciably cooler when Malory opened his eyes and realized that the peck had carried a charm. Somehow, he had showered and climbed into a bathrobe before navigating the mosquito netting into an hour of dreamless sleep.

“Feel better?” the girl asked. She was nestled into the cracked leather of a Morris chair in a still-sunny corner of the room, legs folded beneath her. She smiled, and the mole at the top of her left cheekbone reached towards heaven. Malory blinked. “Coffee?”

“Actually,” Malory said, “just some water would be lovely.” Were there two heads he saw through the curtain? He hadn’t remembered the mole on the girl’s cheek.

“I found him.” The two heads separated.

“Cristina?” Malory pulled himself up on the bed and adjusted his robe.

“You did. You found him.” Cristina leaned down and brushed Ottavia’s forehead with her lips. “Why don’t you get the Driver a cupcake and a Cosmo and let me have Malory to myself for just one minute?” Ottavia smiled and hopscotched out the door. “I love that girl,” Cristina said to Malory. “She makes me happy.”

Truth be told, very little made Cristina happy any more. She would be happy, more than happy if all the Nurses went away. And the Bomb Squad. And the celebrities and the interviews with presidents and ministers and actresses and dictators and flying to Libya and flying to Chile and flying to Ascot on the private helicopter of someone who wanted to be richer and more famous than he was and thought that Cristina’s presence in a hat — no matter how gorgeous it was — in his private box, within four feet of the Queen would further that ambition. What she wanted was an old story, but one that still made her cry when she stayed up alone late at night wrapped in her shawl, drinking still water from a blue bottle and watching any one of a number of movies that celebrated the days of innocence when apples were still black-and-white.

She wanted Tibor back. Back to before, before the flight to Rome, before the flight to Fatebenefratelli, the flight to America. There were things Tibor knew. He knew her blind father, her Jewish grandmother, the way her parents’ apartment smelled when Tibor bartered a few smuggled strands of copper wire for two kilos of bacon and a dozen eggs, the school where she was the top student from age eight to seventeen, and the way she looked in a bikini the summer after she graduated. He knew about the abortion and he knew about the birth. And although they slept in separate rooms more often than they slept in separate countries; and sometimes in his separate room there were separate girls and separate sounds and separate activities that he sometimes insisted, awash in a haze of vodka and creation, that she enter and join; he was the only one who knew how to stop her from shaking when she saw things in the dark that threatened to separate her from sanity. In spite of everything, more times than not, she wanted Tibor back. And the curious man in the bathrobe on the bed, the curious man she hadn’t seen in twenty years, who had been avoiding her and Tibor for who knew what imagined or unimagined slight — and there were slights that Tibor had inflicted on Cristina that were worse than unimaginable — might make that happen. Malory had brought Tibor to her in Rome. Malory might be the only one now who could bring Tibor back.

“Hello, Cristina.” Malory tried to maneuver himself off the bed without dropping the robe or ripping the netting. But at the sound of his voice, all of what Cristina had built to make Cristina Cristina gave way and she ran to the bed and grabbed Malory in a hug that was anything but controlled and photogenic. “Are you all right?”

Malory’s voice was unchanged from the first night she met him in Fatebenefratelli, when all she had wanted was to crawl onto Tibor’s lap in their claw-footed bath and have Tibor soap away all the longing while she scrubbed away all the guilt. She held Malory’s shoulders and looked past her own reflection at her old friend. There was something more formed about Malory, not exactly chiseled, but defined nonetheless. The universe had cooled in the past twenty years, and the softness of the young Malory had hardened into someone Cristina felt she could grab onto, small as he was, and not fall over.

“I’m happy you invited me,” Malory said, looking out the window for a moment towards the pasture. But her hand on his cheek was too present, the scent of Cristina — he hadn’t remembered it over the years, or it had changed, or his nose had simply gone into hibernation for two decades — too strong. It was the same scent, he was sure of it, that Isolde dabbed behind her Celtic ears when Tristan rowed over to Ireland and lost his mind. The smock she was wearing was of the same unbleached linen as Ottavia’s blouse and trousers, but softened and rounded in the places where Cristina softened and rounded, and led his eyes forgivably down to the breasts that sloped as gently as her nose and her chin, as dark and warm and inviting as the Pyrenees of Malory’s childhood. Malory was well aware of the vows of Perceval, Galahad, Roland, and all the other neo-Arthurian virgins who had, literally, lost their lives in just such a pass. But at this moment, with her hand on his cheek and his eyes deep within her cleavage, Malory was powerless to refuse her anything.

“Tibor couldn’t turn fifty without you,” Cristina said. But it was obvious — wasn’t it? — that Malory didn’t know the first thing about Tibor. About Tibor’s public successes, his public performances, maybe he did. But about Tibor’s private disasters, it was clear that Malory knew nothing. And she was glad. Not because she could still feel shame, but because, in some way, she wanted to protect the innocence in this strange Englishman who had brought Tibor back to her on that terrible day when she had the baby. The baby. The baby.

“It’s six o’fuck!” The shout came from outside, through the wall of the Blue House. “Is Sleeping Beauty awake?” Malory knew the voice, gone badly out of tune.

“Take your time getting dressed,” Cristina said. “Tibor can wait.” And Cristina was gone.

When he’d pulled on the trousers, shirt, and vest that Settimio had packed for him, Malory opened the door at the top of the outside stairs. Tibor was at the bottom, turned away, smoking. From the rear, he looked well-dressed at least, in a loose cashmere sweater the color of horse chestnuts, tight-fitting jeans, and kid-glove moccasins that Malory reckoned meant Cristina had burned the rest of his clothes. But as he turned, and the two looked at one another for the first time in twenty-three years, the view was different. Malory wasn’t surprised that Tibor had lost his hair, or at least enough of it to give him a vaguely Capuchin look at the crown, while the rest ran as long and gray as the Tevere after a bad rain, when plastic bags and bottles gargle in the eddies below the Isola Tiberina. It was the absence of Tibor’s beard that confused Malory. When had Tibor shaved? It was a face as smooth and round and devoid of life as any of the holy fools Malory had seen in the badly smoked portraits of saints beneath the organ lofts of Rome. It was the face of a man who had discovered either infinity or zero, when neither was an enviable choice — spooked, desperate, untuned.