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Her Carnival fever has broken.
I take her hand and raise it to my lips. I kiss the knuckles and the back of her hand. I can smell the sweet feminine smell of her sex on my own hand, and my broken heart tries to rise. It tries to believe.
“No,” I say in sadness. I turn her hand over and kiss the palm of it, with all the passion and love I feel for her. “Addio, imhabba tieghi,” I say to her, Goodbye, my love, and then I let her hand go. I let her go.
I make it all the way home before I let go and feel the despair. I find a bottle of wine and drink it all. I block her number so I won’t drunk-dial her the way I so desperately want to, and I fall into my lonely bed and sleep a lonely sleep. I do not rise early to watch her leave me; she has already left me. I will not witness more.
I haven’t kept Lent faithfully since I was a teenager living in my parents’ house, but I keep it now. I eat no meat. I work. At night, when there is no more work, I run. Once or twice, when I am too weak to resist, I think of her as I find a physical release that makes my chest ache with loss.
Ommi and Nunna worry for me, I know. I know that’s what’s behind Nunna’s insistence that I escort her in the traditional procession to the church on the Friday before Palm Sunday, the procession of Our Lady of Sorrows. That’s what’s behind Nunna’s sudden exclamation that she’s turned her ankle, and she’ll have to limp to the side of the road and follow slowly. Nunna’s worry is behind her turning to the pretty young lady beside her and saying, “Oh! My grandson will walk with you, Elizabetta. No need to hold my hand like I’m feeble, Alessio—I’m old, not dead!”
Elizabetta, who might be all of twenty years old, is lovely. Her hair is long and black and curly, a wealth of it over her shoulders under the lace circlet on her head for modesty. Her young body is shapely. Her shy eyes look at me and then down, and her rosy full lips tremble.
I want Maren, I think.
I want my lively, bold Maren, whose body was made for mine, and whose soul fits mine even closer than that.
“Right, Nunna, it’s not on,” I say to her even as she retreats from the procession. I look into pretty Elizabetta’s eyes and say, “I’m sorry,” and then I go find my grandmother and escort her firmly in the procession. “No more setting me up with girls from church, Nunna. I’m still getting over Maren.”
“That Marena,” Nunna says sadly. “She would not stay? And you would not go to her, but you are grieving for her?”
“I can’t leave here,” I explain. “My business. My family.”
But even I can hear the uncertainty in my voice. If Maren would not stay for me, then I should have gone to her.
“You should go to her,” Nunna says. “Where the heart loves is where the legs walk.”
I’ve heard this saying practically all my life, but right now, it hits me like a punch to the gut.
Nunna is right. (She is, in fact, nearly always right, but I can’t tell her that.)
I do have to go to Maren. I cannot demand she stay with me and not be willing to go to her. There is an obstacle, but it is only one of time.
That is what Maren, my sweetheart, qalb ta 'qalbi, this is what she said to me. Only wait, she said to me, I have obligations. I was so wrong to take that as rejection!
I take a deep breath. “I need time,” I explain. “The business, we are in the middle of this proposal; it is big and it involves more than me, and I cannot go yet. A month, and then I will go.”
My grandmother looks at me and stops walking. “I know you, qalbi. If you love this woman, this Marena, you will go to her. And that will be the right thing.” She wipes tears from under her eyes. “Invite me to the wedding. Now take me home, hanini.”
It takes a month to prepare the proposal, everyone on the project working nonstop (or as nonstop as Maltese ever work). Easter comes and goes. Everything goes well; the proposal is accepted; I appoint my best employee to go ahead with the plans. I tell Silvia, my plump and motherly assistant, that I’m off and unreachable except in the direst emergency, as I head out the door.
“But sir,” she says, getting up from her desk with a concerned look, “you have a message…three calls from this one number, no message except to please ring back—”
“If it’s not an emergency, Silvia, it can wait.”
Because I can’t wait, not any longer. I drive straight to my house, intending to have a solitary meal and buy an airline ticket to Virginia, in America.
But someone is at my door, sitting on my step next to a suitcase.
Maren.
