Lucia

I haven’t seen my wife since I moved here, to our new apartment in a building so old that plants have grown through it like death through the bowels of an old tramp, and when it rains at night all the window panes sing with it, as though in the swollen pressure of their poor make it may some day pour in and through and all over the dour, reeking damp of the room.

I can’t blame my wife for not coming here, for telling her mother to pretend that she hasn’t seen her when I call, her mother who has always hated me since the day I ringed her daughter’s hand in gold, and maybe before, though she never said so; mothers have always hated me, with their woman’s sense that I am no good for their daughters, that I will bring them down, shaking and sobbing to their knees for some small thing that I will forget, and that they will cringe and remember, though they always come back, my women, they always come back.

But not my Lucia— I pace the flat that stinks like all the whores in Italy are buried beneath it, and I wash my face again and again in a sink rusted all the way round like the edges of a bitten fingernail, and I telephone her mother until she screams, “I know you’ve done something, you scum, you’ve done something, you’ve done something” so that I hear her even after I hang up, like a tool through the skull of a pharaoh, digging all the thoughts out of it but the ones she’s given me in her cursing.

I can’t think where my wife would go— not back to the old boyfriends, who are all as scared of me as a knife-man in an underpass, dreaming of my footsteps through their rooms at night; not back to the friends that fell away, one by one, when they saw she would not leave me to their arms and their scorn for the man gone mad in his love for her; she has no-one left to her but I.

She is a girl made soft and wincing by my ardor, my pretty wife that wears a pearl and a bruise just the same in her trembling beauty, my Lucia— she reads poetry by dead women, and kneels to the saints with beads between her little hands, and sits all night, dozing, with the cat in her lap, and my arm about her shoulder, and is content with it—

But she hasn’t come home, and it is dark now, the rain washing the leaves and the wine bottles and the rat bones alike down all the gutters of the city, and if my wife is out there then she is cold, so thin, and dark-eyed, soaked through, and wind-stung, in her belted coat; I imagine her standing under the streetlights, beyond the block, looking up at the window of the apartment just as I gaze down below, and I feel that she’s afraid of me, and of how I will bend her narrow body against that very glass until she is sorry she ran.

But I won’t touch her, I tell myself, as I smoke cigarettes to ash ends, and roll up my sleeves to paper the walls— I can’t sleep, and the decorating is half done, in need of a second pair of hands; I do it alone, my back aching from pasting scraps of thick lining to the plaster without a ladder, only a lame old chair I think might break if I ever stand on it like this again.

I won’t touch my wife the way she’s afraid of, not if she slips back to me in the night, smelling only of petrichor, and not of some stranger’s house, made a waif on her own doorstep, woeful and wanting me; I’ll brush her hair back from the blood-black at her temple, and owe to her the gentility that is every night my promise to Lucia.

I’ll take her to bed, and we’ll fuck in the room whose unpainted walls are mold-marbled in a rorschach of some indefinite colour, and in the morning she’ll drink coffee from one of my cups and watch autumn move down the streets beyond the building in its blown leaves, and umber weather, and the cat will crawl out from where it hides from me to warm her feet again.

But the night is grinding the hours through its teeth, and I’m aching so deeply from my work that when I get down off the wounded chair and sit on it I’m shaking like a horse has kicked me in the head, like I’ll never speak again, and my wife is not yet home, and I can’t guess where she where could go that I wouldn’t think of it, before her.

Then there’s someone knocking on the door to the apartment, and as I glance up at the walls I remember calling the building’s custodian to ask if he’d help me with the place, in my wife’s absence; I’d seen him about with a brush and bucket, muttering to himself, built square, like a farmhand— if there had to be another man in the flat, let it be one working beneath me, I’d thought, so I get up, and wipe my hands on my dusty jeans, and I go to the door in a work-drunken haze, ready to be grinning, and grateful, whatever he needs to do the job for me.

But there are four men in the hallway, unfamiliar, and in uniform— ‘Polizia, Polizia’ I hear, or perhaps it’s ‘Lucia’, who they’re looking for, on her mother’s command, in the one place she will not be found; they’re around me, all questions and cuffs on my hands, and as they look past me, at my work, one of them crosses himself as if the devil himself has slunk in with leaf-stuck boots across the hall with them.

The men say my name, and the name of my wife, and they bring me to the mess of the walls, and they ask if it is me who has done it, that has so badly put up paper and paste so slick that it won’t dry down for hours, that is, in fact, slipping back in a copper slough, in a colour that Lucia would have chosen, had she been here to help me, could she still use her hands.

I see her face there, looking down at me, from the wall, upon the rot, as though she is all that holds the apartment from falling in on itself, and on us all, and when the strange men shake me like a fool in their arms I know that they see her there too, in her smeared beauty, spread so thin.

“That is your wife’s skin on the walls, Signore?” the men ask of me. “And where is her body, Signore? Where are her bones?”