Christmas in Naples is a Sport — I don’t remember who I am, Carmine doesn’t know who he is
AS I WAS UNPACKING, I caught a “butterfly” on a haunting guitar line across the hall. It sounded like a carriage of some kind in a late-night, acid-yellow atmosphere. I didn’t know Carmine could play like that. I changed my attire. I was known to do that. I was now in white slacks and a mustard checkered button-down; transparent. I had always felt that way. “la, la, la, la…”
ADJUSTING HIS GLASSES, Carmine sat on the edge of a duvet, a darker shade of blue in a sizable room of a dusty blue. Simple blond wood furnishings, no decorations, practical. They had moved three single beds for the boys so I could have my own room. I felt bad about it.
There was a sliding glass door to the balcony that looked like a deep tub of terracotta and beige tiles, white paint. A dusty dark blue façade across the way had the same squiggly diamond gates across their windows. What a shade of light.
Carmine created a brume with his hand and resumed his ghostly tale on his guitar strings by “Domenico Modugno. Vecchio Frac,” he specified.
“It’s about a man…”
“I see yellow…”
“Si, si.”
Carmine turned on the street-lamps.
“…The streets at midnight in a,” he made a suit jacket.
“It’s dark, nothing, niente,” he strummed.
“The streets are deserted, silent, one last carriage, wheels crack, disappears — crash, into the night. He wears a top hat, two diamonds as…a cane…crystal, a flower…and…on top of his white waistcoat.”
“…Does he really say all that?’’
“Si, si,” he assured me and played on.
“Sing with me…un papillon…un papillon di seta blu…”
“A butterfly…of?”
He made it, across his neck, a blue bowtie.
“Oh really?” It’s called that?
“Si, si,” he nodded. And we made the gesture for “imagination,” yes.
I had a taxidermy electric blue butterfly in a black case from the Amazon that I had gotten as a present for my thirtieth birthday. I had barely opened it — a brilliant, impossible color — and my friends told me that the salesperson said that they didn’t want this one because it was missing an antenna.
“It’s perfect,” they said.
Many teased me that I was a little “special.” I always got warmhearted about it, somehow comforted when people saw that I was different, but why was I missing something? Oh, but it’s what we love about you. I was beginning not to love this. I didn’t know what to do with that because it was…not exactly true.
“Who was this invisible guy?”
I said in-between French and Italian.
“No one knows,” Carmine continued his song.
“A window yawns on the silent river and in the white light, a top hat, a flower, and a tailcoat float away…” He mostly painted with his hands his brows raised and his eyes owl, all-seeing.
“You,” I said. “Bello,” he had real talent and skill.
He wanted me to sing with him. I refused. No, I didn’t want to. Carmine looked at me as if I weren’t me though he was understated. That’s all I did. They didn’t know what to do with me. It was as if another person had come back.
“You sang me a silly song…”
He said.
“What was it…from a cartoon…Disney…what was it? It was funny…”
He remembered. Affecting.
I looked at him. He looked side to side.
“I write, Carmine. I sing everyday…sono chill, do you know this word?”
He took the bait with the “chill” word.
I was laughing. He got cold quizzically. By the time I translated it, we were off the topic of my singing. He was playing again with his longer nails. I couldn’t get over how well he played.
“Ma, tu, wow, I hope… you…continue this.”
Picking up his head, he asked, “wasn’t it a Disney song?”
“No lo so!” I didn’t remember.
“You translated it,” he smiled at the song coming back to him.
“Something about not knowing each other…but we were,” and I interrupted him.
“Vero, tu,” I pointed to my head. He remembered this?
“Si, si,” and he made “the journey” we were on of some kind.
He pushed up his glasses.
“Maria, it’s a girl who was a princess but forgot? Love is a river…?”
I was floored.
“Anastasia?”
“Love is a river, no?”
He wanted me to sing a little so he could figure out the chords quickly on the guitar.
“You can do this?!”
“Fare,” he corrected my Italian, pinching two fingers at me.
“Si, si,” he said. It wasn’t “wow.”
“Remember the song in the car, Sciummo? It also speaks to this: river, river, river…love is a river that’s lost in the sea…who would it be,” he sang the last of Modugno.
I was trying to pull back the lyrics from Anastasia.
“I wanna keep flowing,” I hazily said.
“Who could it be that man in a tailcoat? Adieu, adieu, buona notte…farewell world.”
“Did you understand?”
On a tall desk were stacks of medical textbooks, pages stapled, and highlighters with a night light clipped to the side of the shelf. I snapped at him. He gave me owl eyes. I got up, threw my finger at this nonsense.
“Dottor?”
“Dottore, Maria, dottore…”
“I might be…going to medical school…”
“You’re a MUSCHI…”
“MUSCI…”
“MUSCHISHITA.”
“Musicita…”
“And the group of music?”
He didn’t laugh at my broken Italian. His brows could raise though; he took me very seriously with owl eyes. He didn’t know.
“Medicin?” I asked him. “You want to do this…?”
“I don’t know.”
He paused. I paused. And what, without words, was he supposed to do? Carmine with his brows raised, could live in a state of suspense.
DOWN THE STEPS we flew.
“You have EP?”
“Si, Maria, we’ve released songs…”
“Radio?”
He looked at me.
“You want to walk in the dark?”
I snapped — si.
“Bello, la luce cosi…”
I had no interest in overhead lighting.
He wanted to know my opinions on their music?
I was the one who had studied professionally — what?
“What?”
He respected my point of view. Will I tell him…what I think…?
“Of their songs, si si,” in the shadows of the freezing stairwell.
He pursued music because of me…yeah, kinda.
“Me?”
I couldn’t believe this. Any of this.
THROWING OPEN the door, a race car skidding on television…forget me, what about him? I was headed straight for Franco. The camera cut to the members of his team perhaps, I didn’t know this sport, staring deadpan and still. His mirrored door slid open, “tell me about the business,” I turned to Carmine, “of the music.”
