SCORCHED
After the accident, Carla
wanted a menial task in a place she’d never lived before; to be left alone and
surrounded by people who didn’t expect too much of her. This is what you want
when something terrible happens, Carla thought, because the accident that took
Geoff away had taken everything from her, except for an odd kind of
recklessness.
So when her friend
Fiammetta, who worked for a small opera company in Florence, suggested a job
ironing and altering costumes, nothing could stop her from taking the chance.
She caught a train from Brussels Gare du Nord.
There were rooms near the theatre she could use for a few months, overlooking a
courtyard with a lemon tree. Schoolgirls in the courtyard below her window
played hopscotch. Their voices rose up with the soothing illusion of eternity.
As for the ironing, there was, quite
literally, loads of it. There was something reassuring in a never-ending task,
standing at the window pressing out the creases of other people’s lives. There
was also an art to the collar and cuffs of a ruffled shirt, the band across the
shoulders, the wide skirted pleats of a satin dress.
Carla discovered
another peculiar truth. Nobody bothers you when you are ironing. She could
unravel and ravel up again those last moments in the car with Geoff, when the
driver hit them on the Chaussee
de Waterloo. Geoff in a split second change: a crunch of metal and glass, semi
conscious moments in a crumpled car; paramedics shining flashlights into
windows and police waving on a never-ending procession of traffic, as if there
could be a destination beyond this. But there was a destination, because sure
enough, here she was.
Some days she did
nothing but watch Italian soap operas. The exaggerated stories took her out of
herself. Afterwards, gazing down at the children in the courtyard, she found
herself startled, almost appreciative.
She walked into
shops on the Ponte Vecchio on her way to a wine bar. The streets had a faintly
botanical smell, mingled with the aroma of garlic and coffee. People drove up
on scooters and kissed the air at the side of each other’s faces.
She sat at the
counter. Next to her a young man ordered a plate of cheese and sliced prosciutto. And when she ordered the
same, he turned towards her. “Where are you from?” he asked in English.
His name was
Hamid, and he came from Palestine. He was in a summer art program, three weeks
remaining. She told him about her work
at the opera company – how lucky she was to have such a job, and then he said
he had an extra ticket to see the Boboli Gardens. “Perhaps you would like to
join me.”
His English was precise and pleasing. He had
refined features and a straight narrow nose and the shaven skin of his face was
the texture of fine sandpaper.
So they walked to
the Medici palace and strolled in the Boboli Gardens, and sat underneath the
orange blossoms between hedges. Conversation was stilted, until they walked
back to the theatre. She showed him the collection of paper masks she’d found
on a dusty shelf in the prop room. She tried them on, one after the other – the
Marshall, the Prioress, King Ludwig and the Professor. They had tiny eyeholes
and Hamid laughed freely before tucking his smile away, with what she thought
of as charming and forced sobriety.
The following day
at the Uffizi they stood together in front of a triptych of Adam and Eve,
depicted like two spoiled courtiers, with childish, inexperienced faces.
“You see,” he
said, “Their life was not perfect. It’s better to live by the sweat of your
brow.”
They went to a
rooftop café, with its view of the Duomo. Hamid reached for her hand, and
before she could pull away she noticed the skin of his hand was very soft,
nothing at all like Geoff’s. “I still cannot understand the full beauty of this
town,” he continued. “It is all too squashed together. This cathedral, for
example. It doesn’t have breathing room. It needs the space to breathe.”
A few days later,
they took a bus to Fiesole in the shimmering heat. He wanted to see the ruins.
Carla took off her shoes and felt the grass on the soles of her feet while
Hamid stood by himself, looking at the view. “Here I feel more comfortable,” he
said.
“Do the hills remind you of home?”
“They remind me of
the Palestine I carry in my soul.”
“In your soul?”
she repeated, smiling. Then she realized he was serious.
“Many of our
villages are gone forever,” he explained. “Now they exist only in memory. So we tell the stories of our villages over
and over again. And thus, Palestine, for the next generation, has become not a
memory but a wish. A dream, perhaps. A story that we tell.”
They got onto
politics, and his view of suicide bombers, and an experience that altered him
forever: how he’d locked eyes with a suicide bomber seconds before he blew
himself up. “That is how we live,” he said. “I am not a religious person. And I don’t agree in principle, with
violence. But I’ve heard it said that the suicides are cowardly. What is cowardly
about dying for your beliefs?” he asked. “Only a lover would do such a thing.
‘I would die for you.’ Only a lover could utter such a phrase.”
Carla thought of telling about Geoff. Then she
changed her mind.
“So,” he said. “How long did Adam and Eve
stare at that apple before they took a bite?”
He leaned towards her, looking at her mouth.
Her room was flooded with the odor of
honeysuckle. She felt nothing so much as
gratitude, sliding across the sheets. He knelt before her, proudly as a god. It
had been such a very long time. He held her ankles to one of his shoulders,
pressing, pressing as she drew him further in. She shifted position, wrapping
her legs around his waist. She looked at the lattice of the windows, at the
vines of honeysuckle clinging and blooming at once. Is this what you want, closing her eyes.
Until, at last he fell onto the sheets, laughing, exhausted.
He pulled on a
pair of boxer shorts and she watched the shadow of her naked legs against the
wall. How strange the distance between chaste and chastened. She was chastened by his fervor, doused by
it.
He sat at her table smoking a cigarette,
watching her wisely. “Come,” he said. “Let’s go out for dinner.”
The banister rail smelled of furniture polish.
The particles of dust spun in shafts of golden light, streaming between the
window slats. The dust of Florence felt suddenly terminal, and the scooters
outside were too noisy.
They wasted time
looking for a restaurant she couldn’t find. “I’m sure it was here,” as they walked the narrow streets. “Fiammetta
brought me. And it was here. I know it was.”
At last they
settled for a different cafe. A man played guitar, and for reasons she couldn’t
explain Carla couldn’t stop laughing. She decided she must be happy, shockingly
and amazingly happy.
The following
afternoon, she spent time ironing costumes and then delivered them to the
theatre. Hamid went down to the courtyard where boys were filling surgical
gloves with water, and exploding them against a wall. He sat on a wrought iron
chair, smoking. When Carla came back with another bag of wrinkled costumes,
most of the children were gone. Hamid was helping a little boy make a funnel
from paper. They were pouring sand into a rubber glove. She stood at the door
watching, and something slipped inside her.
The sand-filled glove was heavy, a dead hand made of dust. They had several already, piled like sandbags
at the foot of his chair. Hamid looked
up and smiled, all his features softening.
She turned. The corners of her consciousness, plastered over with
harmony, seemed to be flaking, lifting up from the surface of her mind.
They sat in the
courtyard with a bottle of wine, as evening came down. The courtyard was empty
and they ran out of words. Hamid walked across the terrace underneath the lemon
tree, and looked back to where Carla sat in the twilight with her feet up.
Their gaze strung between them like a ribbon of birds. “We are a danger to each
other,” he said. “Now I have this image
of you I can’t get out of my mind. I play it in my mind, over and over again.”
He must have a
woman, she thought to herself, another story, something like mine, that he
never tells.
On their final
night, Hamid lay with Carla scooped inside him, hollow and withdrawn. When they
made love she cried. “I don’t know this one,” he said, stroking away her tears.
“This weepy one,” as he held her close. She turned and touched the scar on his
chest, a scar like an assault, thicker and creamier than the rest of his
skin. “Barbed wire,” he told her. “Once
in Tel Aviv, several years ago, there was a barbed wire fence. I was crazy
then. I could have died,” he said. “They were hunting me down like an animal.
But fortunately, I escaped.”
They fell asleep.
Carla woke to see him, without any pants on, in the thin light ironing his
shirt. “I only wanted to try it,” he said, trying to press out wrinkles.
His buttocks had a
map shaped birthmark – a darkness under the skin. He was peaceful ironing his
shirt. “This is a good iron,” he said. “It is very light, but it does the job.”
She prepared
coffee, then sat on a divan with her cup, underneath the window. His skin was
brown and his bones were beautiful. She looked at his birthmark, his
distinguishing characteristic, realizing she could make him hers if she wanted.
I know his birthmark, she’d tell his woman. If there was a woman. If she really
wanted him.
They
walked to the train station. A distance and withdrawal sprouted between them.
“Thank you,” he said, and when he kissed her she became a stranger. Then she returned, to iron costumes and sew a
few buttons. The smell of his aftershave lingered in the sheets of her bed. The
courtyard below filled with the din of children let out from school. She
finished a collar, pushing with her arm angrily backwards and forwards.
She crossed the
room and turned on the television intending to watch an Italian soap opera but
instead it was the news. Confused people
were running from the rubble with bloody hands covering their faces. The ruins
of a pizza shop loomed in the background where someone had purposely blown
himself up. “In diretta da Gerusalemme,” the caption said. Live from Jerusalem.
Carla sunk to the
bed. Everything plummeted. All the resolve erected inside her crumbled like
sand, leaving nothing but heaviness and a huge great emptiness above it. She
wrapped her arms around her belly and rocked herself, sobbing as if she’d never
stop. Then from beneath the abandoned iron behind her, the stench of scorching
fabric filled the room.
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