The Truth About Death (6 page)

Hildi was afraid it would run in her nostrils but Maddelena always caught it just in time with the palette knife. Hildi could feel the knife smoothing and scraping. She experienced some panic but kept it under control.

What she didn’t like was waiting for the plaster to set. She couldn’t see, couldn’t open her eyes, couldn’t open her mouth to speak, but she could hear Maddelena and Checco talking in Italian. Were they talking about her? Was her face too round? Not round enough? She couldn’t understand. Or was Maddelena asking Checco about his intentions? Or was she recalling the times they’d made love? Was she touching him? Were they going to kill her? Was she going crazy?

She couldn’t open her eyes, but she could see the masks staring at her. Unfinished masks in the workshop. Not the beautifully finished ones in the shop. Unpainted. Corpselike. Looking down at her. Demons, elves, clowns, bird heads, the plague doctor, Dante Alighieri. Maddelena’s face was everywhere, crowned with leaves or fruit, shining like the moon, sporting a clown nose, kissing, winking, laughing. She imagined them in bed and started to get aroused. She
could
move her hand,
wanted
to move it to her crotch. She had to
struggle
to keep it at her side, to ignore this arousal and also the itch that was starting to burn her neck like a single fresh mosquito bite. She tried to think about the horses, Stormy and Salty, but they galloped away, carrying Maddelena and Checco on their backs. She let them go, and the itch resolved itself into a drop of warm oil and then disappeared entirely.

She was startled by Maddelena’s hand on her shoulder. She’d been asleep. “Just lie still,” Maddelena said. “I’m going to ease the cast off your face. You’ll feel it pull on your eyebrows, but it won’t pull them off.”

In five minutes she was able to open her eyes, and when she did, she was almost blinded by the light. She was on the edge of tears.

“What were you talking about?”

Maddelena and Checco looked at each other.

“When I had the plaster on my face.”

“I was saying how beautiful you are,” Maddelena said, brushing her face, scraping off bits of plaster. “I was asking him if he took you to his school where he checks all the little children for head lice.”

“No, but I’d like to go.”

“I told you he takes all his girlfriends there. To show them what a good person he is.”

“He is a good person.”

“How about flying? Has he taken you flying yet?”

“We’re going to go on Saturday—”

“Maddelena finds goodness offensive,” Checco interrupted.

“That’s only because I’m jealous. Bad people are always jealous of good people, don’t you think? They always are wanting to bring them down. But now I’m going to stop all that nonsense and just be happy for you.”

On Saturday they drove out to a little airport in Ostia, near Fiumicino. Checco was going to take her up in his father’s Stearman.

“Did you take Maddelena flying?” she asked.

“In another life,” he said.

They were going to meet Checco’s father, Enzo, and his girlfriend, Chiara, in the flight club, and Checco’s sister too. The narrow city streets, crowded with restaurants and bars, apartment buildings, and small shops, gave way to flat, open spaces. The sky was gray, closed. Checco was driving sensibly,
but she took a deep breath as they passed an isolated Lottomatica, where you could buy lottery tickets or bet on a horse race or buy minutes for your cell phone.

“You’re not driving like a real Italian,” Hildi said.

“Sorry. You want me to speed up?”

“Yes,” she said. “Sort of. You know, you don’t have to take me flying just to get me to go to bed with you.”

“What do I have to do?”

“You could just ask.”

“What about your rules?”

“The rule is that I’m not going to tell you I love you.”

He laughed. “You’re being a bad girl now.”

“I know I’m being a bad girl,” she said. “If I had a cigarette I’d light it now. But I can’t help myself. A girl doesn’t like to be alone all the time. No one touching her. I feel like I’ve been here before. It’s all familiar. Desire. Loneliness. Need. All the things I was going to put behind me.”

“Why do you want to put them behind you?”

“I don’t like feeling that I’ve disappointed everyone, that I’ve deceived myself and everyone else. I didn’t finish college. I didn’t finish my marriage.”

He looked at her.

“Watch where you’re going.”

“I am watching.”

The flight club, a little building at the end of the runway, reminded Hildi of the little airport in Galesburg. Nondescript. It had started to sprinkle, and they got wet walking from the car. Checco’s sister, Marina, was there too in the flight club lounge, wearing dark glasses. And with her dog, Bruno. They’d gone to hear her twice at Club Dante, near the piazza, where the dog had sat on the stage with her. A cello player—the
same one who sometimes played in the piazza—put a floor under her rich alto voice, warm and bluesy. She’d finished the first set with a couple of songs in English—“Summertime” and Elton John’s “Georgia”—without a trace of an accent, though she didn’t speak English.

“You sing beautifully,” Hildi said, sitting down next to Marina on an old sofa. She waited for Checco to translate. It was awkward, having to ask someone to translate, but Hildi didn’t care.

“ ‘My manager told me I have to sing without hunching my shoulders,’ ” Checco translated for Marina.

“Pensi che incurvo le spalle quando canto?”
she asked, turning to Hildi, and Hildi could almost understand her without waiting for Checco to translate.

“I don’t think you hunch your shoulders at all,” Hildi said. She felt comfortable right away in the flight club lounge. “You sing beautifully,” she said again, and Checco translated.

“Oh, va’ avanti,”
Marina said, and laughed.

“She says you can pet the dog,” Checco said.

Hildi kissed Bruno on the top of his head and inhaled his nice rich doggy smell. She passed Marina a plate of the sandwiches—prosciutto and rucola—that Chiara had brought. Checco was edgy because of the weather and didn’t want anything. He stood at the window.

It wasn’t exactly a rich man’s club, but a club for men of a certain class who understood how to wear expensive old clothes. The tables were covered with flight magazines, books, and calendars, and taped on one wall was the front page of the
Galesburg Register-Mail
, with a picture of Enzo and Chiara at the airport. An antique rug on the floor had seen better days and so had the comfortable chairs that were arranged around it, but everyone was beautiful: Checco’s father, Chiara, Marina, Bruno.

“So you really did go to Galesburg,” Hildi said to Enzo. “All the way from Rome.”

“Just like you come all the way to Rome from Galesburg. In Galesburg we’re eating at the Landmark and Chez Willy’s,” he said, “and the Coney Island. Now will you believe me?”

“Did you fly over in your Stearman?”

He shook his head in disbelief. “There are only four Stearmans in Lazio,” he said, “the area around Rome. And there are lots in England. But you don’t fly a Stearman across the Atlantic Ocean.”

“How did they get them to Italy?”

“By ship.”

The blue-and-yellow Stearman, visible on the runway through a large window, was beautiful too. At two o’clock Checco went out and walked around the plane, looking up at the sky. When he came back in he wasn’t happy.

“You can’t fly today,” his father said. “It’s already raining. I want you to take a look at this mole.”

“I want to show Hildi the plane first.”

“Okay, but then I want you to take a look.”

It had been a U.S. Army plane. Built in 1942. Then a mail plane, then converted for crop dusting, and then converted again to a sports plane. Checco showed her the welds where the plane had been refitted with a larger engine.

They couldn’t fly because of the weather, but they climbed up into the two cockpits anyway. Hildi stepped onto the large lower wing, reached up and grabbed hold of the handles on the trailing edge of the top wing, stepped in to the rear cockpit, and took her seat. Checco strapped her into a four-way harness and put on her headset before climbing into the forward cockpit.

They sat on the runway and talked to each other through
the headsets, and after a while it seemed to Hildi, as she listened to Checco talking, as if they
were
flying—flying in the old way with a compass and charts only, climbing to three thousand meters to clear a mountain, shuddering as they exceeded the stall angle, picking up a low wing with the rudder, and coming in for a full-stall landing. It was as if she were inside him, seeing what he saw, and she liked this.

No planes were going in and out at the small airport, but they could see the big planes from Leonardo da Vinci disappearing into the cloud cover. Afterward, as they stood next to each other, she wanted him to touch her the way he was touching the plane, as if it were a spirited horse that needed calming.

“You could stay here, you know,” he said. “At least till Christmas. At least till Maddelena finishes the mask. I could help you find a room. Or you could live with Marina. We could—we could go flying. When the weather’s better.”

She had trouble saying no. She didn’t want to surrender to this feeling, not because it was strange, but because it was familiar. She’d been down this road before.

“It’s hard for me to say no,” she said. “I’ve always been a yes kind of girl. It’s been a problem.” But she said no.

Back inside they talked more about Galesburg with his father and his girlfriend. Everyone was so friendly. Marina was beautiful too, and she loved to fly. “ ‘With my brother, of course. Sometimes he lets me take the controls!’ ” Checco translated.

“You can do that?”

“ ‘With Checco there, yes.’ ”

“What about the dog?”

“ ‘He stays with
Papà
.’ ”

Hildi couldn’t keep her hands off Bruno.

Enzo kept mentioning names, people he’d met in Galesburg, till they finally found a mutual acquaintance—a woman who worked at the Civic Art Center and who brought a little dog to the center with her. Enzo and Chiara hardly knew her—Hildi hardly knew her—but it was a link.

Enzo asked Checco something which Ceccho didn’t translate. “
Papà
, not here,” he said.

“He wants Checco to look at a mole on his back,” Chiara explained to Hildi.

“It’s swollen,” Enzo said, starting to take off his shirt.

“Look,” Chiara said; “you make Hildi blush.” She looked at Hildi. “It’s nothing. Just Italian men.”

It was raining harder, and according to the weather radio there was no letting up in sight.

Checco checked the mole. “
Papà
,” he said, “it’s no different from the last time I looked.”

“Should I have a biopsy?”

“Is it sore?”

“No, but I think it’s inflamed.”

“I’m telling you—” Checco switched from English to Italian.

“I’m going to put this on film,” Chiara said, but by the time she got her camera, Enzo was already buttoning his shirt.

“My son, the doctor,” he said, “won’t order a biopsy.”

Checco tried to explain. He wasn’t that kind of doctor. He did scientific research … But his father just shook his head and put his arm around Hildi.

“Not that kind of doctor,” he said.
“Mamma mia.”

It was the first time Hildi had heard anyone in Italy say “
Mamma mia.
”

Hildi almost stumbled on the steps outside Checco’s apartment. She waited for him to unlock the door—a single-key
lock for the front door, three locks for the apartment itself. One long key and two short ones. She had a similar long key and a similar key holder.

“Can I get you something?” he asked when they were inside. “An espresso? Chocolate? Campari?”

She picked up a peach from the bowl of fruit on the table, and he washed it for her. He brought her a plate, and she ate the peach, as she’d learned to do, with a knife and fork.

His apartment was not a rich man’s apartment, but it made her think of the flight club, and of Oblonsky in
Anna Karenina
, who knew just what clothes to wear when he went hunting or fishing. Not the latest thing, but old clothes with some depth to them. She’d just read this passage to Nana.

“I’ve been waiting for something to happen,” she said, “and I guess this is it.”

“Accidenti!”
Checco said.

Checco sat down next to her. He didn’t push her at all, just the opposite, and Hildi understood that this too was a strategy. But she also understood that she was the one driving, the one flying the plane, the one deciding to bank left or bank right. Or just keep on going straight ahead. Which is what she’d wanted to do all along. From the beginning. The rest was all talk. It was time to shut up.

“Look me in the eye,” she said.

He looked her in the eye, one eye at a time.

“What do you see?”

“I see myself swimming.”

“Damn,” she said, “that’s just what Maddelena said you’d see. How did she know?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She started undressing, sitting on the edge of the sofa and pulling her sandals off with her toes. She stood up and pointed at Checco, her wrist limp. “You. Checco,” she said. “Follow me.”

“Subito,”
he said.

“I’ve been trying to live in the present moment,” she said. “That’s what you’re supposed to do, right? But what is the present moment if it isn’t a sackful of memories and thoughts about the future? If you had no memory—nothing but the present moment—you wouldn’t understand anything that was going on.”

“Maybe you don’t want to narrow the present moment down quite that far. Maybe it just means not to worry too much about the past or about the future.”

“Okay. I’m going to focus on what’s happening right now. My whole body is focusing on that. But I’m still thinking about your father’s mole and about going to Mexico with my ex-husband. Well, he wasn’t ‘ex’ at the time. I feel like I’m inside a musical instrument—a big one—a piano or a cello like the one at Club Dante. It’s so loud I can’t hear the music. Or inside a painting, and it’s so dark I can’t see what the painter has painted.” And then she shifted gears: “Is your father’s mole okay?”