BY PATTY SOMLO
Copyright is held by the author.
THE MORNING had dawned uncharacteristically sunny. Lucio hated to admit that the dazzling sunlight made him sad.
“You must try and be happy, Lucio,” Sofia said.
Lucio wanted to tell Sofia the only thing that made him happy was reminiscing. But he knew he shouldn’t talk to Sofia, years past her death from cancer. At least, not here.
“You have to stop living in the past.” Sofia lectured Lucio. “The past is gone and it’s not gonna come back.”
Lucio stopped to catch his breath. He watched the old Chinese people across the street in the park, paddling their arms and legs in the dreamy movements of Tai Chi. Their dark polyester pants rode high above their ankles, the skin bared until hidden within the blue and white Nikes. Instead of Chinese, Lucio pictured the green wooden benches crowded with Italian men, who would have been in the park on a sunny day like this when he was young. Though he knew he shouldn’t, he glanced over at the clean white cathedral. His head back, he raised his eyes, following the gleaming cross to the top, as it reached frantically into that astonishingly cobalt sky.
“If we’d had children,” Sofia began, but thankfully she didn’t go on.
Lucio shook his head. He hadn’t intended it to happen. But out of the dustbin of the past, a memory of that long-ago evening with Sofia emerged.
He could see everything now, as if it hadn’t happened decades ago. Huddled in their coats, he and Sofia hurried toward Columbus Avenue. The fog was so thick they couldn’t see the cross atop the cathedral of St. Peter and Paul.
I will tell her tonight, Lucio thought.
Sofia shivered each time the wind blew. Lucio felt her trembling as his fingers rested lightly on her arm.
Sofia was talking quietly but Lucio had stopped listening. He was mesmerized by the fog dancing in front of the streetlight. An artist, Lucio studied the damp air, trying to figure out how to get that effect.
There is nothing wrong with you, Lucio would tell Sofia. It’s me. It’s my fault.
If she wanted more of an explanation, he would say, Something’s missing. I don’t know what.
Lucio shook his head, silently chiding himself back to the present moment. He waited for the traffic light to change from red to green. As soon as the little man lightened from red to white, Lucio started to make his way across. If he dawdled, the traffic would start moving before he reached the other side.
He stepped onto the sidewalk, letting his gaze linger on Dianda’s wide window. Seeing the pastries he’d always loved, the Sfogliatelle, Pasticiotti and Cannoli on glass plates and shelves, made him smile.
Then he eyed his reflection. Instead of the young handsome guy he wanted to see, an old man looked back at him.
Too old, Lucio whispered, and spat.
Though his face was lined, Lucio still had a head of wavy white hair. He kept it long, brushing the thick strands behind his ears and letting the hair fall to his shoulders. He had on a beige fisherman’s knit sweater with a high neck and worn black pants, shiny in the knees. Even at his age, Lucio liked to impress. Before leaving the apartment, he’d thrown a black and silver scarf rakishly around his neck.
Dabbing his eyes with the back of his right hand, Lucio turned away from the window. He needed to paint, he told himself. Painting would make him stop dwelling on the past and old age.
That long-ago foggy night, Lucio and Sofia took their favourite booth in the back of Carmine’s Italian Restaurant. The low light had once seemed romantic to Lucio but not tonight. The table was covered with a thin piece of clear plastic under which a red and white checked cloth had been smoothed. The waiter, Carmelo, brought over a carafe of Chianti and lit the candle that sat in a wine bottle covered with wax.
Uncharacteristically nervous in Sofia’s presence, Lucio grabbed the carafe, poured deep red wine into his glass and guzzled. When he reached for the carafe a moment later, he saw that Sofia was crying.
“What’s wrong?” Lucio asked. His fingers rested against the smooth glass, as he held the carafe above the table.
Sofia’s upper lip trembled. Tears caused black lines of mascara to run down her face. The words came out in a whisper.
“What did you say?” Lucio asked, his hand resting on Sofia’s forearm.
“I’m pregnant,” Sofia whispered, loud enough for Lucio to have no doubt what his girlfriend Sofia had just revealed.
After all these years, they still made espresso in the old-fashioned way at Lucio’s favourite café on the corner of Columbus and Green Streets. When Lucio was a boy, his father and uncles used to hang out there. You could no longer smoke inside but the espresso remained sweet and strong, and bitter enough without being overly sour.
“Morning, Lucio,” the owner, Tony, said, when Lucio stepped in the door. “How’s it going?”
“Not dead yet,” Lucio replied.
Tony made Lucio’s double espresso behind the old wooden counter without Lucio ordering. After Tony passed the dark steaming coffee over the counter, Lucio balanced the tiny white saucer in his right palm and headed for his favourite table. He took a sip of the dark bitter brew and watched people hurry past the front window.
In what felt like another life, Lucio used to set his easel there, on warm sunny afternoons when the windows were thrown open. Old men puffing cigars and hitting billiard balls in the back joked that Lucio wasn’t there to paint but to stare at girls and flirt. Lucio argued, “That’s not true.” Yet before leaving home for the café, he made sure to place his black beret just so, on the left side of his head.
“You painting, Lucio?” Tony asked, breaking into Lucio’s thoughts.
“I have some things in the works,” Lucio said, knowing the lie didn’t matter.
“You know, you’re welcome to come here and paint any time, like in the old days,” Tony said. “I mean, if you want to.”
Lucio nodded and smiled.
“Thank you. That might be nice.”
Three months after Lucio and Sofia married in a small ceremony attended by their parents and siblings, Sofia lost the baby. Though Lucio never said the words to Sofia, he felt betrayed. He had never told her what he’d planned to say that night at Carmine’s. I don’t love you, Sofia. Not in that way.
For weeks after losing the baby, Sofia refused to get out of bed. Her grief seeped under Lucio’s skin. He thought her sorrow would drown him.
At the start of the second week, Lucio began leaving the apartment just after dawn. He stayed out long past midnight.
He began to drink too much red wine. Sometimes, he got in fights. One time, he was even arrested.
His mother sat him down.
“You must ask God for help,” she said, pushing a thick strand of her son’s jet black hair away from his eye. “For you and for Sofia.”
The following Sunday, while nursing a raging hangover, Lucio climbed the worn marble steps of St. Peter and Paul. He was perspiring and breathing hard when he reached the top. His skin and breath smelled of stale wine.
Stepping into the cathedral, Lucio stopped to catch his breath. As soon as he was breathing normally again, he looked up. As always, the beauty of the painted ceiling left him awestruck.
His gaze still focused on the red, gold and royal blue murals overhead, Lucio slid down onto the pew.
“It’s very beautiful,” Lucio heard a soft female voice say.
Reluctantly, he pulled his gaze from the ceiling and steered it in the direction of the voice. Sitting to his left was a girl in a white beret. Her raven hair tumbled down in fat curls, stopping a few inches above her breasts.
“Yes it is,” Lucio said, speaking as much about the face that looked at him as the cathedral’s ceiling.
The young woman had large green eyes flecked with amber, high cheekbones and full lips stained red. Lucio was caught off-guard, being so taken by a woman. He feared that his desire was smeared across his face.
A voice warned him to turn away. He was a married man.
Against his better judgment, Lucio asked her name. From that first question came more.
Her name was Maria, and she studied art at the Institute atop Russian Hill. Before he’d had time to reconsider, Lucio invited Maria to come to his studio the following day.
The next afternoon, a little after two o’clock, Maria arrived. Lucio blurted out a question he hadn’t even considered before.
“Would you like to be my model?”
The first time Maria took off her clothes, Lucio almost forgot how to sketch. She laughed, flicking her hair back off her shoulders and shaking her head. Lucio’s eyes were married to her breasts.
Lucio sipped his espresso slowly, as he stared out the window. If only he could find another woman like Maria. Then he would set up his easel and paint again. He didn’t so much miss being young or even that the neighborhood had changed and people he knew were long gone. What he missed was desire, the feelings Maria had stirred in him, and afterwards furiously painting to get those feelings onto the canvas before they disappeared.
Lucio set up a small cot in his studio. In between jobs, creating decorative plaster and painted walls for people rich enough to pay, Lucio sometimes painted for days.
He never invited Sofia to the studio. She wasn’t interested in Lucio’s art anyway. For that reason, she didn’t know that Lucio painted the naked body of a beautiful young woman over and over again, wearing nothing but a pure white wool beret.
Lucio and Maria swigged Chianti straight from the bottle and made love on the narrow cot. Lucio promised Maria he would leave Sofia and marry her. He painted Maria lying down and standing up, her arms over her head or hands on hips. Sometimes he painted her only from the waist up. Once in a while, he painted her portrait. In every painting, he made her wear the white beret.
“When we get married,” he said to her, on the one-year anniversary of their first meeting, “you will wear this beret.”
“And when will that be?” she asked, frowning, as she pulled a long black turtleneck over her bare breasts.
“Don’t get dressed,” Lucio said, his hand on the sleeve of her sweater.
“I need to go,” she said, surprising Lucio, who’d expected that they would make love again.
He slid his fingers up her bare thigh, walking the second and third fingers, trying to push her legs apart.
Maria jerked away.
“I said I need to go.”
Lucio looked down into the bottom of the small white cup. Only dregs of coffee remained. He was tempted to order another espresso but the coins he fingered in his pocket weren’t enough. He would have preferred a shot of grappa or a glass of Chianti. But after the initial euphoria, the alcohol would only make him melancholy.
He hated that women barely looked at him anymore. Not like in the old days when they smiled and stopped, adopted a pose, thrust one hip out, and asked, “Don’t you want to paint me?”
For a time, he had painted the passing crowds, mostly sketching the women, madly hoping one of them would turn into Maria. Occasionally, he took a woman back to his studio.
“Who is she?” the women would ask, seeing Maria propped up on canvases big and small around the large high-ceilinged room.
Lucio would only say, “She was my model for a time.”
One woman dared ask, “Did you love her?”
Lucio needed to think.
“I suppose I did. Yes.”
Lucio went to Maria’s apartment, a basement studio in a building full of old Chinese at the edge of Chinatown. But she was no longer there. When he exhibited the paintings at a downtown gallery under the title, “The Girl in the White Beret,” he expected to see her walk in the door and hear a collective whisper from the crowd, “There she is.”
Instead of Maria, the night of the opening Sofia showed up. Lucio hadn’t expected her but smiled when he saw her and waved. He watched as she slowly made her way around the gallery, taking in one image of Maria after the next.
Later, she came to stand beside him.
“You are good,” was all Sofia said.
Lucio got up from his seat at the window and slowly walked toward the door.
“See you tomorrow, Lucio,” Tony yelled from the back.
“Okay,” Lucio answered, before stepping out onto the sidewalk.
Six months after the opening, Sofia was diagnosed with cancer. Stage Four, the doctor said.
Lucio watched Sofia lose her hair. Then the soft curves around her waist and hips melted away. By that time, Lucio had grown not exactly to love her but something close. When she looked at him, her dark eyes appeared huge in that narrow face.
One evening after he’d fed Sofia spoonfuls of chicken soup, she whispered, “Tell me about her, Lucio.”
“Who?”
“The girl,” she whispered, her voice raspy and harsh. “The one in your paintings.”
“There is nothing to tell,” Lucio said, his hand caressing the side of Sofia’s face.
“I just want to know one thing,” Sofia said. “Did you love her?”
Lucio considered the face of the woman he’d been married to for decades by then. She had grown so frail. With her hair gone, she resembled a child. He had cared for her these months, as she had nurtured him, back when he loved someone else.
He wondered what the right answer might be. For a long time, he had thought what he felt for Maria was love. But gazing at Sofia and reflecting on his life, Lucio realized he had been wrong.
“No,” he said. “I thought I loved her once. But I didn’t know what loving someone felt like.
“She was my muse,” he went on. “That’s all.”
Lucio climbed the steps of the cathedral and pulled open the heavy carved wooden door. As he stepped inside the darkened interior, he made the sign of the cross. He wasn’t sure why he had come. Surely not to wait for the girl anymore.
He took a seat near the door and leaned back. The paintings covering the ceiling panels shimmered, as vibrant and beautiful as they had appeared to him all those years before.
Lucio let the pleasure of gazing at such marvelous work enter him, as he had once opened himself to that girl’s charms.
“It’s so beautiful,” he heard a female voice say.
Lucio brought his head forward and turned to his right. A young woman with large, amber-flecked green eyes and raven hair gave him a quiet, sad smile.
“Yes,” Lucio said. “It’s more beautiful than I ever realized.”
Lucio couldn’t be sure if the woman was real or if she only existed in his mind. At that moment, someone’s fingers gently pressed his right arm.
He turned, his heart suddenly racing.
“Nice to see you, Lucio. It’s been a long time.”
Lucio blinked to clear his vision in the low light. He inhaled slowly, in an attempt to calm himself down.
“Hello,” Lucio said and smiled. He realized then that he was very glad to see his old priest, Father Anthony, after such a long time.
***
Patty Somlo’s most recent book, Hairway to Heaven Stories (Cherry Castle Publishing), was a finalist in the American Fiction Awards and Best Book Awards. Previous books, The First to Disappear (Spuyten Duyvil) and Even When Trapped Behind Clouds: A Memoir of Quiet Grace (WiDo Publishing), were finalists in several contests. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Delmarva Review, Under the Sun, the Los Angeles Review, and over 40 anthologies. She received honourable mention for fiction in the Women’s National Book Association Contest, was a Finalist in the J.F. Powers Short Fiction Contest, had an essay selected as notable for Best American Essays, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net multiple times.