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If Not Later, When?

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“Later!” The word, the voice, the attitude.

I’d never heard anyone use “later” to say goodbye before. It sounded

harsh, curt, and dismissive, spoken with the veiled indifference of people who may not care to see or hear from you again.

It is the first thing I remember about him, and I can hear it still today.

Later!

I shut my eyes, say the word, and I’m back in Italy, so many years ago,

walking down the tree-lined driveway, watching him step out of the cab,

billowy blue shirt, wide-open collar, sunglasses, straw hat, skin everywhere.

Suddenly he’s shaking my hand, handing me his backpack, removing his

suitcase from the trunk of the cab, asking if my father is home.

It might have started right there and then: the shirt, the rolled-up

sleeves, the rounded balls of his heels slipping in and out of his frayed

espadrilles, eager to test the hot gravel path that led to our house, every

stride already asking, Which way to the beach?

This summer’s houseguest. Another bore.

Then, almost without thinking, and with his back already turned to the

car, he waves the back of his free hand and utters a careless Later! to

another passenger in the car who has probably split the fare from the

station. No name added, no jest to smooth out the ruffled leave-taking,

nothing. His one-word send-off: brisk, bold, and blunted—take your pick,

he couldn’t be bothered which.

You watch, I thought, this is how he’ll say goodbye to us when the time

comes. With a gruff, slapdash Later!

Meanwhile, we’d have to put up with him for six long weeks.

I was thoroughly intimidated. The unapproachable sort.

I could grow to like him, though. From rounded chin to rounded heel.

Then, within days, I would learn to hate him.

This, the very person whose photo on the application form months

earlier had leapt out with promises of instant affinities.

Taking in summer guests was my parents’ way of helping young

academics revise a manuscript before publication. For six weeks each

summer I’d have to vacate my bedroom and move one room down the

corridor into a much smaller room that had once belonged to my

grandfather. During the winter months, when we were away in the city, it

became a part-time toolshed, storage room, and attic where rumor had it my

grandfather, my namesake, still ground his teeth in his eternal sleep.

Summer residents didn’t have to pay anything, were given the full run of

the house, and could basically do anything they pleased, provided they

spent an hour or so a day helping my father with his correspondence and

assorted paperwork. They became part of the family, and after about fifteen

years of doing this, we had gotten used to a shower of postcards and gift

packages not only around Christmastime but all year long from people who

were now totally devoted to our family and would go out of their way when

they were in Europe to drop by B. for a day or two with their family and

take a nostalgic tour of their old digs.

At meals there were frequently two or three other guests, sometimes

neighbors or relatives, sometimes colleagues, lawyers, doctors, the rich and

famous who’d drop by to see my father on their way to their own summer

houses. Sometimes we’d even open our dining room to the occasional

tourist couple who’d heard of the old villa and simply wanted to come by

and take a peek and were totally enchanted when asked to eat with us and

tell us all about themselves, while Mafalda, informed at the last minute,

dished out her usual fare. My father, who was reserved and shy in private,

loved nothing better than to have some precocious rising expert in a field

keep the conversation going in a few languages while the hot summer sun,

after a few glasses of rosatello, ushered in the unavoidable afternoon torpor.

We named the task dinner drudgery—and, after a while, so did most of our

six-week guests.

Maybe it started soon after his arrival during one of those grinding

lunches when he sat next to me and it finally dawned on me that, despite a

light tan acquired during his brief stay in Sicily earlier that summer, the

color on the palms of his hands was the same as the pale, soft skin of his soles, of his throat, of the bottom of his forearms, which hadn’t really been

exposed to much sun. Almost a light pink, as glistening and smooth as the

underside of a lizard’s belly. Private, chaste, unfledged, like a blush on an

athlete’s face or an instance of dawn on a stormy night. It told me things

about him I never knew to ask

It may have started during those endless hours after lunch when

everybody lounged about in bathing suits inside and outside the house,

bodies sprawled everywhere, killing time before someone finally suggested

we head down to the rocks for a swim. Relatives, cousins, neighbors,

friends, friends of friends, colleagues, or just about anyone who cared to

knock at our gate and ask if they could use our tennis court—everyone was

welcome to lounge and swim and eat and, if they stayed long enough, use

the guesthouse.

Or perhaps it started on the beach. Or at the tennis court. Or during our

first walk together on his very first day when I was asked to show him the

house and its surrounding area and, one thing leading to the other, managed

to take him past the very old forged-iron metal gate as far back as the

endless empty lot in the hinterland toward the abandoned train tracks that

used to connect B. to N. “Is there an abandoned station house somewhere?”

he asked, looking through the trees under the scalding sun, probably trying

to ask the right question of the owner’s son

to be continued

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