AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Giusy looked over me at the piece of paper, resting her chin on my shoulder like we were already good friends. “He is a wonderful artist, yes?”
“I love it. I feel like I should pay him.”
“I promise he does not need it,” Giusy insisted.
Nicolo was already back in his chair, a blank canvas in front of him as he studied the scene in the piazza once again, and started something new. I thanked him one more time and clutched the drawing to my chest. I wanted to take it back to the hotel to keep it safe before we stopped to eat but Giusy was already walking in the opposite direction.
We took a left on the other side of the square and finally stopped in front of a rough wooden door with a bold brass knocker in the shape of a dragon’s head.
A tricolor Italian flag shuddered in the breeze from a pole above the door, but a much larger Sicilian flag eclipsed it. I gazed up at the billowing yellow and red fabric.
Giusy smirked. “I love that the head of Medusa is on our flag. Don’t you?”
“She was a monster.”
“Was she? Or was she a brilliant woman with the ability to turn men to stone when they abused her or tried to take everything away from her?”
“I never thought about it like that.”
“Life is all about perspective, American.”
Giusy placed both palms flat on the door and pushed. The waiter standing just beyond the entryway was so handsome I stumbled a little as I followed him through the crowded room to the one empty table. Giusy caught me and pinched my hip.
“I get it. It is hard to look at him,” she whispered. “He is a beautiful, sexy boy. You’d think he’d leave this town already, but he has a sick mamma and a slutty sister and nieces and nephews with no papas. They need the money and a man to stay with them.”
The beautiful, sexy boy pulled out both of our chairs and whisked away the centerpiece, a bowl holding absurdly large plastic fruit.
“What do you want to drink?” he asked.
“A cappuccino?” I replied.
“No!” Giusy exclaimed sharply, horrified. Then in a lower voice that only I could hear, “Cappuccino is only a breakfast drink.”
“Espresso?” I tried.
“We will have wine,” she said, shooing the waiter away. “There is no menu. He’ll bring things.” Giusy placed her elbows on the wood in front of her so she could lean closer to me. “You are from Philadelphia. I have seen things on the Internet and in movies about your city. You have Rocky Balboa, who runs through the market with the garbage cans on fire. Your sports mascot is called Gritty. Your fans throw frozen batteries. It is certainly sunny there like the TV show claims.”
Her sarcasm made me like her right away. Giusy was the town gossip and travel guide you always wanted to meet on a trip. With her everything was either insanely beautiful or a terrible disaster. Sicily’s beaches were the most gorgeous in all the world but too crowded with fat tourists and trash washing down from the filthy mainland. They also had the most magnificent beach clubs if you didn’t mind dancing with a bunch of coked-up Brits. I absolutely had to visit the cursed village ten miles to the north. A priest recently performed an exorcism by helicopter to save all ten thousand souls who lived there from their utter depravity. She claimed that the ruins at Agrigento were better than the ones at Segesta because there were fewer stray dogs and therefore less dog shit in the temples. Her transitions were sudden and unexpected and I struggled to keep up. The island of Sicily is “God’s kitchen,” she insisted, but I should only eat in the restaurants that write their menus on the chalkboard on the wall each day. A printed menu meant they were buying frozen food from the supermarket to cut costs. I should also always ask where a restaurant got their tomatoes. If they came from Naples they were probably poisonous because the Camorra, the Napolitano Mafia, got a government contract to bury waste in the foothills of Mount Vesuvius, which made the produce grown there toxic, but not too toxic to export. She told me their own small village was the most gorgeous village in all of Sicily, but also rotting from within like a neglected corpse. Then she got up to go to the bathroom.
While she was gone the lights dimmed and the restaurant went silent. Suddenly our beautiful waiter was illuminated by what looked like a large flashlight being held by a child. He began to sing. Opera?
Before I knew it, Giusy had returned. She stepped on top of our table with the same ease she’d used to leap on the edge of the fountain, carefully planting her feet between the dishes. She finished his aria with a great flourish. The room exploded in applause.
“Wow. That was incredible,” I told her when she was back in her seat. “Was that Verdi?”
“Pah. No. Bellini. Vincenzo Bellini, the Swan of Catania. A genius. Sang his first solo at eighteen months old, composed an opera at six. A real Sicilian. Verdi was a second-rate Italian bastard from the north.”
“Don’t mince words.”
“I never do.” She snapped her fingers in the air and a carafe of house wine appeared. The beautiful, sexy waiter winked at Giusy when he poured it into her glass.
“He likes you.”
“I am very finished with men,” Giusy declared. “I was married to one once. That was enough.”
“Are you divorced now?” I couldn’t help asking. I enjoy women who have more problems than I do. I was also enjoying our easy rapport, how quickly we seemed to have fallen into an amiable rhythm. I’d been terrible at cultivating female friendships in my adult life. My two best friends were my sister and my dead aunt.
Giusy didn’t mind my question. “Might as well be divorced. My husband is gone. Who knows where. What about you?” she asked me.
