(Cruise)

[madscenes]

Title: Cruise
Comment: From a collection of stories about Naples.
__________

This time and this text belong to Nina Manganiello, it is written in squiggle-writing on the back of a notebook and a woman's thigh.






∞






Piazza N. Amore splits Via Duomo into two, pieces, and she often thinks, love severs, love breaks apart, just as she had a sister once who travelled to the States, because they were United, perhaps, and now she sees her unknown features in the faces of all the married, American ladies when they stroll past, tossing coins in her shawl, giving her something for which to live.

In the square, Nina sings arias to the tourists who never wonder why their wine glasses are left untouched in the wake of her soprano C's, since the drinks from Peppo only come in plastic cups and everybody knows plastic doesn't splinter even at the most well-kept note, the highest octaves, the greatest delivery. You have to extend beyond and drop lower than what her light voice can manage, you won't get any further up.






She remembers her sister as faceless, because she was only three years old when Luggrezia was eighteen and disappearing, gone. Nina has put the only picture she owns of her face at the bottom of her drawer, underneath socks and panties and the unopened pack of condoms with which she was welcomed by their mother into the world of adulthood after her confirmation; it's a school photograph, Luggrezia is about seventeen and her expression never changes, as if this ninth grader got paralyzed and two-dimensional by time, once the flash went off. How is Nina ever supposed to find her again, when the picture shows the only Luggrezia Manganiello she knows, no one stays seventeen forever, always, perpetually, do they?

She must be thirty-eight years now.

Thirty-eight years and six months.

A couple of days in addition.

Beryl's head is a mess of short, black curls traced in silver, as if to emphasise her wealth, in the same way there's gold in her voice when she moans, she makes for a rich acquaintance, Nina licks a bead of sweat off her thigh, readies her canvas before painting words onto it with the tip of her tongue. Come, I will crown your brow with roses, come, come, she writes, citing freely from Susanna's aria, from a wedding opera, although Beryl and she will never marry, although Beryl is already married and spoken for, their relationship is a heated, but short-lived affair. They fit these Italian nights, quiet midnight at the heart of Naples.

Come.






Especially in the summer, Naples is multi-cultural and brimming with the impressions of an entire world, feeling an entire world's entry into their harbour. Asian tour groups in matching caps and cameras swinging from around their necks, Scandinavians that are either pasty white like the snowfall over their native soil or they appear the colour of lobsters, depending on how long they've been this far south and then, of course, Americans, the Americans... Everybody pays a visit to Piazza N. Amore, where she is standing in front of the lemonade stall, entertaining, so the tourists can down the chill with the sound of song, she prefers to sing the peculiar melodies from The Brother in Love, but nothing truly sells the way Mozart does. Late in the afternoon, when only the Italian girls are left and Nina knows, they won't pay a dime for her echoing notes, her shawl is overflowing with the currencies of an entire world and a threaded button in the jumble, a lonely piece of paper on which is written call me, followed by a phone number to contact.

It feels like a sign, Nina thinks, it could be Luggrezia's handwriting, the sloping L's, the number five leaning at a similar angle to a tower in some other Italian city, but even so she walks all the way home before making the call, she's in no hurry.






The police tracked her sister as far as to New York, after that she turned into a shadow, an undead, but also an unthere. Nina keeps expecting her to speak in an American accent now, instead of the Neapolitan dialect of her childhood, a dialect Nina only remembers, because she speaks it herself, she expects Luggrezia's voice to be light like her own, if not contrastingly dark, she expects her to return someday, naturally, some fine day, some late summer day, sometime...

Nina always reaches the highest of her notes in the hope that they will travel to New York and turn her shadowy sister substantial again.






They lie entangled in a pile afterwards, a jumble of legs and arms halfway involved with each other. Beryl smells like something fresh and tempting, an invitation to bite into, edible, her taste fills Nina's mouth, as if it were the nectar of flowers, as if she were a butterfly with all the softness and the wetness on the tip of her tongue.

Beryl tells her about her best friend who, rumour has it, is having an affair with her husband, while she speaks, she sounds endlessly unaffected, everyone is happy, after all - I with you, she says and runs her hand through Nina's hair, he with Lucrezia, who could possibly be more fortunate than us?

Good luck and fortune happen to be such everyday entities, the most tangible of concepts for those who have everything already, Nina knows, but people aren't equals. Others earn their daily bread on street level.






The aria Deh vieni, non tardar... from Mozart's masterpiece has become her star turn, her own musical signature, it plays at least once an hour from her ghetto blaster, come, don't hold yourself back, oh, sweet delight, come, where love calls you to pleasure. The melody is for the woodwinds to do away with, to maintain, accompanied by the strings until the final stanza, when Susanna at long last directs her words at her beloved and a violinistic voice takes over - the phrasing of notturna face is so dark that Nina can't deliver it in full, correctly, she can't reach so low, she has too light a voice, a tone, a timber, an expression, too light a spirit she has.

The first time they met, after Nina's call to the secret number with which she had been left, Beryl pointed out this fact to her, beyond that she doesn't think anyone feels poorer or robbed for that reason and Beryl lays claim to so many other things already that it must have been pushed to the back of her mind, stored away among all her designer shoes, this little displeasure that brought them together in the end.






From the beginning the other woman would gladly speak of Lucrezia, spelled with a C rather than a double G and it's only one more note that Nina can't quite strike, can't reach, she doesn't know anything else about Lucrezia with a C than what Beryl readily shares, along with the unwilling secrets she doesn't mention with a word, although it's so very clear, so clear that the other woman is in love with her girlfriend back home, in New York City, the Big Apple and she's free to be so, Nina isn't jealous, she would rather imagine that Lucrezia is in fact her sister in the drop shadow of a name change, that she has meanwhile become rich, has earned appreciation and an invitation into the circles where Beryl unfolds - and she thinks, Luggrezia with two G's is probably still saving money for her grand return trip, she's eyeing one of the luxury apartments, surely, the ones by the harbour with a view of the water, only three streets from here, a stone's throw, an eye catcher, it will require a little more time, but she'll come, she'll return home.

She'll find Nina again, as soon as Beryl mentions the name to her, Manganiello, both Lucrezia (and Luggrezia just on the other side) will know that she is missed, that they both are.

That's why, let her be well, yes, but also let her hear Nina's call, singing as it does.






After another week, Beryl's thighs tremble around Nina's head one last time, vacation is over, her husband misses the country as it lies on the other side of the Atlantic or perhaps he misses being loved by Lucrezia, Nina sympathises if he does. Beryl has covered up her now tanned legs in a pair of jeans, prepares for a more chilling reception and embraces Nina as a way of thanks. All around them Piazza N. Amore lies cut up and disassembled, the square is nothing but blind spots around their hazily quivering shapes, but neither of them makes excuses, they both knew this parting was inevitable, only the neapolitans stay in Naples on a yearly basis, always.

Give Luggrezia my love, Nina says at last, but she knows Beryl is going to forget during their Atlantic crossing, she is going to forget Nina, this entire summer. It is over now, it's gone.






∞






The notebook she rolls into a tube and puts inside a bottle and the bottle she gives to the ocean, so that it can deliver the words to her sister, without them getting washed away by the sway of the Atlantic's seaweed fields.

The woman's thigh, on the other hand, she releases and watches disappear around the corner, farewell.