In October, the men and women of Sorrento harvested the primofiore, or “first flowering fruit,” the most succulent lemons. In March, the yellow bianchetti ripened, followed in June by the green verdelli.
Only one or two lemons tumbled from the branches each hour, but I sat on the bench so long their falls seemed as contiguous as raindrops. When I tried to explain this to my wife, she said, “Jesus Christ, Clyde, you need a hobby.”
Santa Francesca’s Lemon Grove, where I used to spend my days and nights, was part of a Jesuit convent in the 1800s before becoming privately owned by the Alberti family, in whose hands it remains. The prices were excessive and the locals knew to buy their lemons elsewhere.
In summers, a teenage girl named Fila operated a wooden stall at the back of the grove. She was painfully thin with heavy black bangs. And I could tell by the careful way she saved the best lemons for me, slyly kicking them under my bench, that she knew what I was. Sometimes, she would smile vacantly in my direction, but she never gave me any trouble.
Fila made the lemonade and watched the meat from the hot dog cart rotate on its wire spigots. The Italian name for the machine is giostra di manzo or “carousel of beef.” Who would have guessed at such a device two hundred years ago? Santa Francesca, the foundress of the grove, gouged out her eyes while dictating premonitions of fire. What a shame that she foresaw only the end times, never hot dogs.
There was a sign posted just outside the grove that read: CIGERETTE PIE, HEAT DOGS, GRANITE DRINKS, SANTA FRANCESCA’S LIMONATA—THE MOST REFRESHING DRINK ON THE PLANET!
Cruise ships ferried tourists from Wales and Germany and America to the base of the cliffs. They rode the funicular up to visit the grove to eat sausages with speckled brown mustard and sip lemon ices. They snapped photographs of the Alberti twin brothers, Benny and Luciano. The two teenage boys clung to the wooden supports of the trees and made a begrudging show of harvesting lemons. “Buona sera, vagine!” they cried from the trees.
None of the tourists spoke Italian and the visiting women were deaf to aggression. Still, I often fantasized about flashing my teeth at the brothers, just to keep them in line.
A few years ago, I bought a battered red set of dominoes from Benny, rendering me sufficiently banal as to be invisible to the tourists. With no interest in the game, I mostly stacked the pieces into little houses and corrals.
At around sunset, when the tourists shouted to look up, I knew it was time for the path of I Pipistrelli Impazziti—the descent of the bats.
They flowed from cliffs that glowed like pale chalk, expelled innumerably from their caves. Their vertical drop was like black hail. Sometimes a change in weather sucked a bat beyond the lemon trees and into the turquoise sea. It was three hundred feet to the grove, six hundred feet to the churning foam of the Tyrrhenian. At the precipice, they soared upward and crashed around the green tops of the trees.
The delighted tourists shrieked, ducking their heads.
The bats’ spread wings were fragile membranes. The waning sun washed their bodies a dusky red. They had wrinkled black faces like tiny gargoyles or angry grandfathers. And they had teeth like mine.
One night, a Texan lady with a big strawberry updo successfully captured a bat in her hair. She cried while howling, “Take the goddamn picture, Sarah!”
The screaming didn’t stop for minutes. I stared ahead at a fixed point above the trees and lit a cigarette.
The moon was muted orange. Twin disks of light burned in the sky and the sea. I scanned the darker indents in the skyline, cloudless spots I knew to be caves. It was eight o’clock and all the bats had disappeared into the interior branches. My fangs throbbed, but I wouldn’t start without Magreb.
I once pictured time as a black magnifying glass and myself as a microscopic flightless insect trapped in the circle of night. But then Magreb came along and from then on, each moment followed its antecedent in a neat chain. We filled our moments with each other.
A single bat fell headfirst from the cliffs like a stone.
I closed my eyes, pressing my palms against the picnic table and tensing my neck muscles. I tensed until my temples pulsed and black and red stars fluttered behind my eyelids.
“You can look now.”
Magreb was sitting on the bench, blinking her pumpkin eyes. “You weren’t even watching. If you saw me coming down, you’d know you have nothing to worry about.”
I tried to smile but found I couldn’t. My eyes felt like ice cubes.
“It’s stupid to go so fast,” I said, looking away. “That easterly could knock you over the rocks.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m an excellent flier.”
Magreb could shapeshift midair more smoothly than I ever could. Even back in the 1850s, when I used to transmute daily, my metamorphosis was a shy, halting process.
“Look!” she said. “You’re still trembling!”
I looked down at my hands, frustrated to realize she was right.
Magreb rooted through the tall, black blades of grass. “It’s late, Clyde. Where’s my lemon?”
I plucked a soft, round verdelli from the grass and proudly handed it to her. She looked at it with distaste and brushed off a marching ribbon of ants.
“A toast!” I said.
“A toast,” replied Magreb with the perfunctory enthusiasm of a Christian saying grace. We lifted the lemons and swung them to our faces. We plunged our fangs, pierced the skin and emitted a long, united hiss.
Over the years, Magreb and I had dipped our fangs into everything from Honeycrisp apples to rubber juggling balls. We spent our honeymoon hopping continents, hunting liquid chimeras. We went thirsty in every region of the globe, drinking thousands of beverages purported to have magical quenching properties. We had mint tea in Fez, coconut slurries in Oahu, jet-black coffee in Bogotá, jackal’s milk in Dakar and Cherry Coke floats in rural Alabama. Then we found our oasis in the blue boot of Italy. Only those lemons gave us any relief.
When we first landed in Sorrento, I was skeptical. The pitcher of lemonade we ordered was cloudy and adulterated. Sugar clumped at the bottom. I gulped and a whole small lemon lodged in my mouth. It was bracingly sour with a delicate hint of sea salt.
After an initial prickling along my gums, a soothing blankness traveled from the tip of each fang to my fevered brain. I breathed deeply and my throbbing fangs were still.
By daybreak, the numbness had worn off. Eventually, all hunger must return. But I have tried to be very conscientious about not confusing this hunger with what I feel for Magreb.
I can’t think about my early years on blood without the pang of guilt and acidic embarrassment. Unlike Magreb, who never had a sip of the stuff, I listened to the village gossip and believed every rumor. As a young boy, I imitated the diction and mannerisms I read about in books—emulating Vlad the Impaler, Count Heinrich the Despoiler and Goethe’s bloodsucking bride of Corinth.
Once I eavesdropped on the terrified prayers of an old woman in a cemetery, begging God to protect her from me. After that, I did only what the stories suggested, beginning with the old woman’s blood. I slept in black cedar boxes and woke up every night with a fierce headache. I was famished, perennially dizzy and had unspeakable dreams about the sun.
In practice, I was no suave viscount, just an awkward and voracious teenager in a red velvet cape. I wanted to touch the edges of my life with the same instinct that inspires young mortals to flip tractors or enlist.
One night I skulked into a late Mass with some vague plan to defeat eternity. At the back of the nave, I tossed my mousy curls, rolled my eyes heavenward and plunged my arm into the bronze pail of holy water. Slowly I began to itch, but I was sure the burning would start any second. I slid into a pew, snug in my misery, and waited for my body to turn to ash.
By sunrise, I’d developed a rash between my eyebrows and a little late-flowering acne but was otherwise unharmed. At that moment, I yielded all discrimination. I bit anyone kind or slow enough to let me get close, but the littlest children I left alone. I’d read stories about Hungarian vampirs who drank the blood of orphan girls and mentioned this to Magreb early on, hoping to impress her with my decency.
She wept for a day and a half.
Our first date was in Cementerio de Colón if I can call a chance meeting between headstones a date. I had been stalking her swishing hips as she took a shortcut through the cemetery grass. She wore her hair in a low, snaking braid that was unraveling. When I was near enough to touch her trailing ribbon, she whipped around.
“Are you following me?” she asked. She regarded my face with the contempt of one confronting the town drunk. “Oh,” she said, “your teeth.” Then she grinned.
Magreb was the only other one I’d ever met. We bared our fangs over a tombstone, ceasing the loneliness particular to monsters that makes each feel it is the only child of a species.
Magreb’s words lunged forward like a train without a conductor. Meanwhile, I stared dopily at her fangs. Then she asked, “So when did you figure out that the blood does nothing?”
My forehead burned. When we met, I was edging on 130 and had never gone a day since early childhood without drinking several pints.
“Didn’t you think it suspicious that you had a heartbeat?” she asked. “That you had a reflection in water? Every time I saw my own face in a mirror, I knew I wasn’t anything like a sanguina, you know?”
“Sure,” I said, nodding. Whenever I looked into a mirror, I saw a mouth ringed in black blood. I saw the pale son of the villagers’ fears.
After those initial days with Magreb, all my thoughts spooled into a single blue thread of relief. But when that subsided, I found I had nothing left.
We smashed my coffin with an ax and spent the night at a hotel. As I lay in bed, my heart thudded like a fish tail against the floor of a boat.
“You’re really sure?” I whispered to her. “I don’t have to sleep through the day?”
But she had already drifted off.
A few months later, she suggested a picnic.
“But the sun.” I said.
Magreb shook her head. “You poor thing, believing all that nonsense.”
We’d found a dirt cellar in which to live in Western Australia, where the sun burned through the clouds like dining lace. The sun ate lakes, rising out of dead volcanoes at dawn, triple the size of a harvest moon and skull-white. My bones felt light as tinder.
I stared at the warped planks of the trapdoor above us. The copper ladder led rung by rung to the bright world beyond. Time fell away from me and I was a child again. Magreb rested her hand on the small of my back.
“You can do it,” she said, nudging gently.
I took a deep breath and hunched my shoulders. My scalp grazed the cellar door, my hair soaked through. I focused my thoughts to still the tremors, lest my fangs slice the inside of my mouth.
“Go on.”
I pushed up and felt the wood give way. Light exploded through the cellar. My pupils shrank to dots.
Outside, the world was on fire. Mute explosions rocked the scrubby forest. Motes of light burned like silent rockets. The sun fell through the eucalyptus and Australian pines in bright red bars.
I pulled myself out onto my belly, balled up in the soil and screamed for mercy until exhaustion. Then I opened one eye and took a long look around. My eyes merely itched and watered and the irritation induced a sneezing attack.
By the 1950s, we were living in a Cincinnati suburb. As the day’s first light hit the kitchen windows, I pressed my face against the linoleum and gibbered my terror into the cracks.
“So,” said Magreb, “I can tell you’re not a morning person.” Then she sat on the porch swing and rocked with me, patting my hand. “What’s wrong, Clyde?”
I shook my head, consumed by this new indescribable sadness. My bloodlust was undiminished, but now blood wouldn’t fix it.
“It never did,” said Magreb.
During the next confusing cluster of years, instead of stalking prostitutes, I went on long bicycle rides with Magreb. We visited botanical gardens and rowed boats together. In a short time, my face had gone from lithium white to the shade of milky coffee.
Sometimes to correct her power over my mind, I tried to fantasize about mortal women with their wild eyes and bare swanlike necks. But I couldn’t do it anymore. An eternity of vague female smiles was eclipsed by Magreb’s tiny razor fangs.
One night in October, children wearing necklaces of garlic bulbs arrived giggling at our door. The pungent smell blasted through the mail slot along with their voices. In the old days, I would have run downstairs to barricade myself in my coffin. But that night, I pulled on an undershirt and opened the door. In a square of green light, I stood in my boxer shorts hefting a bag of Tootsie Pops.
“Mister, you okay?”
I blinked down at a little blond child and saw that my hands were trembling violently but soundlessly, like two old friends wishing not to burden me with their troubles. I dropped the candies shakily into the children’s bags and wondered how much these small mortals believed in the power of their stories.
Magreb and I were downing strawberry velvet cocktails on the Seine when something inside me finally changed. It took me eleven thousand dawns to believe the sun wasn’t fatal.
“Want to go see a museum or something?” asked Magreb. “We’re in Paris after all.”
We walked over a busy pedestrian bridge in a flood of light and my heart was in my throat. Since I met Magreb, my hunger pangs had gradually mellowed into comfortable despair. Our bellies growled at each other like companionable dogs.
Human marriages amused me with their brevity of commitment and all the ceremony that surrounded it. “Till death do us part!” Easy for you to say. Often I wondered to what extent a mortal’s love grew from the bedrock of their foreknowledge of death.
One day, without preamble, Magreb flew up to the caves. She called over her furry shoulder that she just wanted to sleep for a long while.
“Wait! What’s wrong?” I’d caught her when she was changing, halfway between wife and bat.
“Don’t be so sensitive, Clyde! I’m just tired of this century. Maybe it’s the heat. I think I need a little rest…”
I assumed this was a sentimental experiment like my cape. From the clumsy, ambivalent way she crashed around on the wind, I understood I was supposed to follow her. Magreb liked to say she freed me, but I gave up more than I intended. I couldn’t shudder myself out of this old man’s body. I couldn’t fly anymore.
I pressed my dry lips together and shoved the dominoes around the table. They buckled like the cars of a tiny train.
“More lemonade, nonno?” asked Fila, smiling. She leaned from her waist and boldly touched my right fang laced with a thin string of hanging drool. “Looks like you’re thirsty.”
“Please.” I gestured at the bench. “Have a seat.”
Fila and I were alone. She was toying with the idea of telling her boss about me, weighing the sentence within her like a bullet in its chamber.
But she assured me this was idle fantasy. “You remind me of my nonno,” she said. “You look very Italian.”
My skin had the dark walnut stain peculiar to southern Italians. And I was wearing a neat periwinkle shirt, a canvas sunhat and black suspenders that sagged at my chest. My loafers were battered but polished.
It gave her a warm feeling to help me hide here, she said, like helping her own fierce nonno do up the small buttons of his trousers. She worried about how sloppy I’d gotten lately, incontinent about my secrets. She tucked back the tip of my fang hanging over my pink lip.
“You must be more careful,” she said. “There are tourists everywhere.”
Her head rolled around with natural girlish expressiveness. She checked to see if I was watching her collarbone.
Last night, I went on a rampage. On my seventh lemon, I found with a drowsy despair that I couldn’t stop. I crawled around on all fours looking for the last bianchettis in the dewy grass. They were soft, mildewed, sun-shriveled. Lemon skin bulged with tiny cellophane worms. The smell of dirt and rain swirled through the air with the tart sting of decay.
In the morning, Magreb stepped silently around the wreckage.
“I came up with a new name,” I said. “Brandolino. What do you think?”
I had spent the last several years trying to choose an Italian name and every day that I remained Clyde felt like a defeat. “Clyde” was a souvenir from the California Gold Rush. I saw my echo in the freckled youths panning along the Sacramento River. The name sounded rather innocuous like someone a boy might get a malt beer with or follow into the woods.
Magreb chose her name in the Atlas Mountains from the root word ghuroob, which means “to set” or “to be hidden.” “That’s what we’re looking for,” she explained to me. “The setting place—some final answer.” She wouldn’t change her name until we found it.
She took a lemon from her mouth, slid it down the length of her fangs and placed the shriveled core on the picnic table. When she finally spoke, her voice was almost unintelligibly low.
“The lemons aren’t working, Clyde.”
“How long?”
“Longer than I’ve let on. I’m sorry.”
“Well, maybe it’s this crop. Those Alberti boys haven’t been fertilizing properly. Maybe the primofiore will turn out better.”
Magreb fixed me with one bright eye. “Clyde, I think it’s time for us to go.”
Wind blew the leaves apart. Lemons winked like a firmament of yellow stars, slowly ripening. I could see the other, truer night behind them.
“Go where?”
“We’ve been resting here for decades. I think it’s time… What is that thing?”
I had been preparing a present for Magreb for our anniversary. It was a cave built of scavenged materials—newspaper and wooden beams from the tree supports—so she could sleep down here with me. I’d smashed dozens of bottles of fruity beer to make stalactites.
“That?” I said. “That’s nothing. I think it’s part of the hot dog machine.”
“Jesus. Did it catch on fire?”
“Yes. The girl threw it out yesterday.”
“Clyde,” said Magreb, shaking her head. “We never meant to stay here forever, did we? That was never the plan.”
“I didn’t know we had a plan,” I said. “What if we’ve outlived our food supply? What if there’s nothing left for us to find?”
“You don’t really believe that.”
“Why can’t you just be grateful? Why can’t you be happy and admit defeat? Look at what we’ve found here!” I grabbed a lemon and waved it in her face.
“Good night, Clyde.”
I watched her fly up into the watery dawn, feeling tension in the flats of my feet and my knobbed spine. Love had infected me with a muscular superstition that one body can do the work of another.
I considered taking the funicular, which would have been the ultimate degradation. All day, I watched the cars ascend and I was reminded of Americans who accompany their wives to the beach but refuse to wear bathing suits. I’ve seen them by the harbor, sulking in their sweaty trousers, panting through menthol cigarettes and pacing the dock while the women sea-bathe, just a splash in the distance.
Funicular tickets were twenty lire. I sat on the bench and counted as the cars went by.
That evening, I took Magreb on a date. I hadn’t left the lemon grove in upward of two years. Blood roared in my ears as I stood and clutched at her like the old man I was. We were going to the Thursday night show at an antique theater in a castle in the center of town. I wanted her to see that I was happy to travel with her so long as our destination was within walking distance.
The teenage usher wore a vintage red jacket with puffed sleeves that manacled his biceps in clouds. Threads loosened from the badge on his chest. I was jealous of the name there: Guglielmo.
The movie’s title scrolled across the black screen: SOMETHING CLANDESTINE IS HAPPENING IN THE CORN!
Magreb snorted. “That’s a pretty lousy name for a horror movie. Sounds like a student film.”
“Here’s your ticket,” I said. “I swear I didn’t make the title up.”
It was a vampire movie set in the Dust Bowl. Magreb expected a comedy, but the Dracula actor filled me with the nostalgic sadness of an old photo album. An Okie had unwittingly fallen in love with the monster, whom she’d mistaken for a wealthy European creditor eager to pay off the mortgage on her family’s farm.
“That Okie,” said Magreb, “is an idiot.”
I turned my head miserably and there was Fila, sitting two rows in front of us with a greasy young man. It was Benny Alberti. Her white neck bent to the left. Benny’s lips affixed to it as she impassively sipped her soda.
“Poor thing,” Magreb whispered, indicating the pigtailed actress. “She thinks he’s going to save her.”
Dracula showed his fangs and the Okie fled through a cornfield. Cornstalks smacked her face. “Help!” she screamed to a sky full of crows. “He’s not actually European!”
There was no music, only the girl’s breath and the flapping of off-screen fan blades. Dracula’s mouth hung wide as a sewer gate. His cape was curiously still.
The picture was frozen. The flapping emanated from the projection booth. It rose to a grinding sound, followed by lyrical Italian cussing, silence and finally a tidal sigh. Magreb shifted in her seat.
“Let’s wait,” I said, seized with empathy for the two still figures. “They’ll fix it.”
People began to file out of the theater, first in twos and threes and then in droves.
“I’m tired, Clyde.”
“Don’t you want to know what happens?” I said frantically.
“I already know what happens.”
“Don’t leave now, Magreb. I’m telling you, they’re going to fix it. If you leave now, that’s it for us. I’ll never…”
Her voice was beautiful like gravel underfoot. “I’m going to the caves.”
I was alone in the theater. When I turned to exit, the picture was still frozen. The Okie’s blue dress floated over the windless corn. Dracula’s mouth was a hole in his white greasepaint.
Outside, I saw Fila standing in a clot of her friends, backlit by the marquee. Their makeup looked rained on. Their clothes moved like colored oils. I scowled at them and they scowled back. Then Fila crossed to me.
“Hey, you,” she said breathlessly. “Are you stalking somebody?”
My throat tightened.
“Guys!” she called, her eyes gleaming. “Guys, come over and meet the vampire.”
But the kids were all gone.
“Well! Some friends,” she said, winking. “Leaving me alone, defenseless…”
“You looking for trouble, eh?” I hissed. “You want a story to tell your friends?”
Fila laughed. Round horror bounced in her black eyes. She smelled like hard water and glycerin. The hum of her youth around me made it difficult to think. A bat filtered my thoughts and opened its trembling lampshade wings.
As I stared vacantly at a pale mole above the girl’s collarbone, I thought of how ridiculous Magreb would find this whole affair. I could hear her laughing and then felt my hand tighten on the girl’s wrist. I realized as if from a great distance that she was twisting away.
“Hey, nonno. Come on now. What are you—”
The girl’s head lolled against my shoulder like a sleepy child. Then it swung forward in a ragdoll circle. The starlight was white mercury compared to her blotted eyes. There was a dark stain on my periwinkle shirt and one suspender had snapped.
I sat Fila’s body against the alley wall, watching it dim and stiffen. Spidery graffiti weaved over the brick behind her: GIOVANNA & FABIANO. VAFFANCULO! VAI IN CULO.
A scabby furry creature, our only witness, arched its orange back against the dumpster. I ransacked Fila’s pockets and found the key to the funicular office.
Then I ran for the lemon grove. I jimmied my way into the control room and turned the silver key. I was relieved to hear the engine roar as the cars sprung to life. Every car was locked, but I found one with thick tape crisscrossing notches over a busted door. I dashed after it and quickly pulled myself onto the cushion. Though I was a monster again, I was still unable to fly.
The box jounced and trembled. The chain pulled me into the heavens link by link. My lips chapped as I stared through a crack in the glass window. The box swung wildly in the wind. The sky was a deep blue vacuum. I could smell hard water and glycerin in the folds of my clothes.
The cave system at the top of the cliffs was more vast than I expected. With their faces tucked away, the bats were anonymous as stones. I walked beneath a chandelier of furry bodies. Wings the color of rose petals and corn silk wrapped silent heartbeats. A breath rippled through each.
“Magreb? Are you there?”
Once I’d found her, I’d beg her to tell me what she dreamed of up here. And I’d tell her my waking dreams from the grove: mortal men and women floating serenely over a wide ocean in balloons freighted with the ballast of their demise; millions of lives darkening the sky.
I doubled back to the moonlit entrance that led to the open air of the cliffs. I made the descent in the cable car with no wings to spread, knocked around by wind. I struggled to hold the door shut and looked for the green speck of our grove.
Then the box plunged quickly and swung wide. The igneous surface of the mountain filled the left window. The tufa limestone shined like a black, bubbling river. For a dizzying instant, I expected the rock to seep through the glass.
Each swing took me higher than the last. The grinding pendulum approached a full revolution around the cable. I was on my hands and knees with my face pressed against the floor grate. There was a ribbon of white, which soon became a widening fissure. Air gushed through the cracks in the glass. With a lurch of surprise, I glimpsed mortality. I closed my eyes and braced myself for I Pipistrelli Impazziti.
Perhaps Magreb watched the box plummet just as she awoke from a nightmare. Because she was dangling from the roof of the cave, maybe the car seemed to be sucked into the sky, a black mouth foaming with stars.
But I like to think Magreb shut her thin eyelids tighter and dug her claws into the rock. Little clouds of dust would plume around her as she swung upside down. And she’d feel a dreadful suspicion growing inside her, the opposite of hunger. She’d emerge from a dream of distant thunder. Something would happen that night she thought impossible.
In the morning, she would wish to tell me about it.
<==============
Copyright © 2023 The Great Filter - All Rights Reserved.
Powered by GoDaddy Website Builder