You see, to them, I didn’t remember who I was. I didn’t catch that but I did catch a line on guitar strings across the hall, his voice soft.
“La la la la…”
I opened the door, didn’t make a sound, didn’t want to disturb anybody.
“Un papillon…un papillon di seta blu…”
Approaching the door, I got an electric blue butterfly from the Amazon for my thirtieth birthday. In a black case, it was impossible, this shade of blue, almost unnatural, just like Joy. I had barely opened it and my friends told me that the salesperson said that they didn’t want it 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 that’s what we love about you. I was beginning not to. I didn’t know what to do with that because it wasn’t exactly…true…It was the most beautiful gift I had ever received… My life was a gift…
*
Um, into the room, on a duvet a darker shade of blue, he strummed his guitar.
“A butterfly…of?”
Across his neck, he made it: a blue bowtie.
It’s called that?
I sat down.
They moved three beds into this room so I could have my own. I felt bad.
“Si, si,” he nodded in a cool clean light.
We made the gesture for “imagination,” yes.
“Bello…”
He strummed his guitar, gave it to me with an okay sign.
“Vecchio Frac.”
“It’s about a man…”
“I see yellow…”
“Si, si.”
He turned on the street lamps.
“The streets at midnight…”
“It’s dark, nothing, niente…”
“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?’’
The bowtie, in suspension…
“Si, si,” he reassured me, played on.
“A window yawns on the silent river and in the white light, a hat, flower, and tailcoat float away…”
“Who IS this person invisible?”
In French.
“No one knows...”
*
Legend goes that Naples vowed to rise a city of music when their siren failed to lure Odysseus and washed ashore. Naples traces its roots back to this moment weaved in myth and mystery and music just like my beginnings. We gave gifts to this creature for her song, in no imminent danger, but she gained the reputation of being an evil songstress when she might have been gifted even a healer. A story can travel so far away from its origins in other words that it can end up meaning something else entirely. We think we know the story but we may discover that we were wrong, didn’t have the full picture, even about ourselves.
*
He wanted me to sing with him. I didn’t want to.
He looked at me as if I wasn’t Maria.
I didn’t understand his reaction.
He didn’t understand mine.
That’s all “you” did.
“I did?”
“Si.”
I searched through the light, I always did that.
Out the sliding glass door, took in the tub for a balcony, a cool clean light that day.
“Write, sono chill, okay? You know this…?”
I didn’t have the word for word so I snapped, underlined it, shrugged, held myself up as Totò would in these circumstances, dignified. Cracked up. I love Naples. “I can exprimarmi,” with a fist, positive.
Carmine took the bait, getting cold quizzically.
“No, no,” I cracked up.
“Calm.”
I was anything but.
A race car skidding fast around a curve on TV, Franco swept me away.
“YOU? YOU stopped singing?”
Flora appeared in the kitchen threshold, a warm glow.
Carmine pushed up his glasses. Apparently.
Flora rang, above, like are you there?
“Maria..?”
Maybe I wasn’t understanding…
They pursued me; this was strange. Meaning, my demeanor the second…I came back.
I cracked up.
You’re joking? Why was I laughing? Why is she laughing? Are you trying to be funny? It’s not a funny joke. Franco.
“What the fuck do you do then …?”
“She writes,” Carmine said.
Franco judged me.
“TU,” I said, because he kept saying “you.”
“IO?”
“Si…”
Flora floated.
“YOU DON’T SING ANYMORE?”
Why did he keep on saying it?
“Si, si” Flora nudged me to say the obvious.
She shrugged “si” slightly in front of Franco.
“Sing…”
How could I not crack up?
Franco gave her a boyish “you see” palm.
“Eh,” Flora was tight, uncomfortable.
I could only crack up sometimes…
With my story, I could only crack up, sometimes, just like Joy.
But this, I wasn’t expecting.
Like Carmine with his guitar.
Hey, you know, “you sang me a silly song…”
They just didn’t stop.
“Oh?”
I got mad, felt bad. I hid it but not.
“Si,” he paused.
“What was it…from a cartoon… what was it? It was funny…”
“Non remember…”
“Yes you do…”
“No, I don’t…”
“You sang it,” he said flatly, turned his hand, and in his eyes, again and again…
“When we were kids…”
“Tu,” I pointed to my temple and to this man, my eyes wide, blank.
“Ricordar.”
“Si,” he said simply, reaching into my eyes — what was that song? You know it.
A walnut tree ancient and towering…sunlight flickering through its leaves…yellow on the pavement…calla lilies rippling through the air like paper airplanes alongside cacti and agave….wispy vines crawling over a black fence…I remembered when I first arrived at Angela and Vico’s house at nine years old, the creaking of their front door…opening…to his eyes sparkling like the sea at high noon. He shot me like a sniper — direct in the French— with a song. And no sooner did I shut the gate all these years later did he open his front door and launch the same lyric over a wall of jasmines, camelias, fleche like feathers, and crawling vines and hook me as a child back in time, my mouth agape, and pulled.
“Sento—”
I feel.
The beginning of everything.
Affecting, Carmine described it.
“Touching.”
So were they.
He looked to the side…this was always your quality.
“Io?”
He shrugged, his eyes owl.
“Wasn’t it a Disney song?”
“No lo so!”
“You translated it…”
“I did?”
“Si.”
“A princess…”
“Oh?”
“Doesn’t know that though…”
“Love is…like a river…?”
In my eyes he pulled it back…
*
A song is a real hook, Vico knew it well, so when he launched the same line over the vines, I gasped at what I could barely grasp.
*
“Anastasia!!”
I turned to Carmine.
He sort of snapped at me, is that it? Yeah…
“Love is a river, no?”
“There are roads…”
He let me laugh.
A song about a girl who doesn’t remember who she is.
*
But Vico hooked me long ago! Before I even crossed the threshold. A ghost of a line that tugged from time to time, but it never let me go. He never called me by name — only by song, this song, my song. I could never forget it. I couldn’t believe it then and now. He’s a siren.
“Vico!!”
I took off down the white-stone path, oranges hanging above me. Dorothea crawlers rushed over the roof of the pink and grey house. Trees rose tall against clouds thick and periwinkle: palms like daggers, Augusta paddles huge and floppy, olives, and oranges, oranges, oranges.
You know, Franco got on my case about my “everything is wow” attitude — car racing around a curve: crash. Not Vico. He’d erupt through the plum trees, his dark curls tight, his apron hanging loose, through the apricots too.
“Sento!”
I feel!
We frolicked through a farm truly speaking.
“La la la!”
I had never been so happy.
I was a kid once.
I forgot that.
*
Into a room a darker shade of blue, remembering my nature, “at the beginning…”
Carmine. “Si.” Remembered. He could never forget Anastasia. That’s how much I sang it.
“We’re on a journey of some kind, no?
I stuck my thumb in the past.
“To the passate.”
“Ah, si si, she’s going back, in a sense, to remember…”
*
I stopped short at a lemon tree, a thick bed of rosemary at my feet, thirty-four. I could never forget this song, that’s how much he sang it, and how he’d arrive in a fit of volcanic dust with his arms outstretched on a fertile bit of Earth…
“This was this!”
I feel, I felt it.
“The hot sandwich!”
I said instead of “song.”
Too many emotions.
I turned to receive him as if we were on a stage because that’s what Naples is.
A Christmas wreath on his front door, Vico held the scene in his hands as if it spoke for itself across the white patio, still chic in navy. Just as he was. A wall of glass reflected the garden as if it were the real masterpiece of leaves that he made, a Christmas tree glowing inside the living room.
“I feel a sweet song in my heart when I think about MARIA…”
He clapped.
“A song of love!”
He came at me an electric vine, with the most dizzyingly sparkly blue eyes, spellbinding. Shooting lines into my eyes, he ripped me back through time, my smile wide. A song was real, rooted me here. Music comes from the soil. So does mythology and medicine. Vico’s a retired doctor, a farmer first, you see, a siren. It comes from somewhere. We all come from somewhere. I was home, I had a song.
He brought a great weight onto himself.
“MY SONG for Maria.”
“Did I remember?”
I didn’t have the words.
I looked up lost and found.
“Si!”
I seemed to have forgotten a lot about myself by the time I came back but the song, the song, even if it had thinned to a ghost of line with time, I knew it, I knew it, coming back to life in a garden.
Bravo!
But the song wasn’t just for me. It wasn’t just about me.
Carmine opened the door, finger in pinches up his breastplate at his father. Women screaming Neptune, a black shaggy puppy came straight for me, and I learned long ago that Lucio Battisti’s “My Song for Maria” was for two women.
In the past, Vico shunned my suitcase aside! He led me through the casa to his youngest daughter hiding behind a plant at four, her green eyes like darts.
“My song for Rosa.”
The big surprise. For me. And Angela’s voice broke through time.
“TWO MERI!” She had tooted. “Two.”
Rosa ran for me with baby elephant feet, “Meri,” that name, that name I had forgotten, and just like that, grabbing the leash all these years later, hurling “NOH” as she had a different relationship to his showmanship, she became a curvaceous babe in cashmere and pearls, sharp-featured like her father, sensual like her mother.
“La mia canzone per Maria, la mia canzone per Rosa.”
She yelled his name like a bull as if he really were a God in a puppy.
“NE-TTU-NO!”
We cheered.
“HEY!”
He had sealed the bond between us long ago, instructional. He flipped the two names, cheeky, down low. They even had weight, turning them over. Maria and Rosa. Rosa and Maria.
“Remember?”
“Bravo!”
He bonded us in song, it’s as fundamental as family is here: music. It’s a real thing, ties, it hooks on, never lets go, it’s somewhat unbreakable. Impossible to forget. And Rosa was the most moved to see me, I felt that, bending in her knees, whining even, Nettuno barking like mad!! I didn’t know what to do with that. I spent the most time with her next to Carmine. Nettuno did not grasp a leash, conceptually, yelling “Nettuno” only meant keep going, you want me to jump on you? Food? He flung himself over there, everywhere he heard Neptune. Vico kept singing. He wanted my attention. So did a chorus, provided for. This is Vico: in a state of abundance for you. He ignored the chorus, they served their function. He opened his hands…
*
Before I tuck in, this is where I’m at with this section — “we’re on a journey of some kind, la la la,” coming back to Anastasia…I think it works there…it was really like that. Carmine. I’ll keep finding the right order for this, it’s more just — keeping my narrative going — and I like this idea, at least for this beginning: they welcomed me back in song, in a celebration. It was like remembering my nature though that took some time. I sing again now. To them, music was my true beginning.
I ended up somewhere else entirely.
“We were on a journey of some kind” — me coming back into the room with Carmine before arriving at the musical celebration — maybe it would be more appropriate to put that later and/or add that “we can begin a story at many angles,” somewhere, “we can end up somewhere else entirely.” I didn’t know, I wasn’t expecting that, to them, music was my true beginning as it is for Naples, but it was unnatural, even, that I stopped singing. As if a different person came back, not like we don’t grow up and change, change our minds, but to them, it didn’t make sense. I never really had that…people who were in tune with me like that or believe they were…they acted like they knew me. They were the last thread to my childhood that I had left. They’re going to come after me. About everything.
Carmine dipping a pinch — family, hm, trying to explain it, honestly, with no inflection.
“Family does this.”
I couldn’t even believe that they cared as much as they did — that I was back, that I stopped singing, especially…it was more Franco, to be honest, and Flora by proxy, since Franzese is coming for me this Christmas. But his son can’t do it…opening up the door in this scene — the conflict is on the rise, escalating, over the band between him and his father. We’re not at that section yet. The song wasn’t just mine — it’s a family thing, and there are many notes that make up the whole. His band conflict, my conflict, though we’re not there yet. That’s fine.
I’m just trying to work out the beats right now for me…find the flow through this.
I’m in touch with my feelings now. That’s the other thing — I feel. It was amazing to me how perfect these songs were. “I feel!” Vico calling me. Not “Maria.” “Sento!” There’s a deep message there, a deep siren message, somehow. Vico — to me — really is a siren. And I love that he’s a guy.
I don’t know what Vico, a farmer, singing my song, would say about nature vs nurture — (this part isn’t in it yet). But this is what this beginning is about for me. I’m getting in touch with my roots. I mean, Vico doesn’t give a shit if I sing or I don’t. At least. Besides that: music was my nature to them. My parents — they were big big problems. I couldn’t become them. I didn’t want the same story to repeat itself. That’s…what I learned…nurture? Was I nurtured?
A touch too far, probably, but just to think out loud.
DIED? He DIED? Your father? Lol. Punch. Celebration. I just wanted to stay here. I wasn’t used to starting on this foot either. Again, you can start a story at many angles — this is not where I typically started. We were on a journey of some kind — I can come back around to that —my father used to say I sounded like a broken record sometimes and he had denied Alzheimer’s.
I’ll post the beginning soon, at least what it is right now – I walked through the door with Alzheimer’s. Now I might have been not connecting all this at the time…but you know that by now. I’m going to get hit with doubt soon. The beginning doesn’t have to be the beginning but I walked through the door with that. So that’s out — for you. That he had Alzheimer’s, I have to check what I’m revealing and not. You might not know yet that he didn’t tell anyone though I said it in real life. But again, a language I don’t know. This is what I mean — you might actually miss stuff, on purpose, to give you the sense of…what it was like. Like you think you got the information but you might not have.
Some thoughts this evening to try and help me keep moving through this section…it’s fine to have Vico — which he did — begin giving me Neapolitan language lessons. It’s not really the point of this section, though, I can throw a little in. I’m just figuring out — even the chorus — I just put them in at the end there — in that — it’s not just that they welcome me back in song, it’s Christmas, it’s a party. That’s the emotional scope.
All that is beginning to communicate itself more clearly. To swerve into Christmas, trying to warn them by telling them I told some women to get out of my way at four — to then get “My Way” by Frank Sinatra — another celebration. “BRAVO!” Then, BAM — doubt! That did not happen — it’s a sport. Your story did NOT happen MARY. Meri. But show us how you did it, show us how you told this woman to get out of your way. Then concern. So happy you’re back.
I’ll let that float this evening. That helped me work a bit of that out. I was thinking, I mean, that Lucio Battisti song is a great hook, and I think you’d want something that has to do with my character — kicking invisible doors open. Getting into gear. Charging through the farm with Vico yelling SIREN at nine with a mushroom cut. I had no idea what to do with my femininity at that point — between this Brazilian woman and Dr. J? Nature versus nurture. That feels a bit more visual, doesn’t it? It’s still the same idea though. You’re not hearing the song. That song is so, how to describe that, it’s such a strong debut, fast guitar. I had to learn fast. Charge through space. I’m not a human — I’m a horse — I used to run very fast, was very athletic. I didn’t “jog.”
Anyway, you can really tell so many stories from one.
Besides, the race car swerving around the track to that Lucio Battisti song, I think is good.
And that song does come back. Later, I’ll go back to Rosa running at me when she was the age that I was when I left for these four years…when she appears in Naples…just coming out of these years, now that they are out, at eight, nine…which is going to change that song, no? Another note. She runs to her mother. This is a totally foreign concept. We’re linked yet we have nothing in common on a basic level. I love Rosa, it’s not that.
I’ll re-read this tomorrow. I like that — the notes that make up a song. That’s family too. Nature versus nurture. Just figuring out this first section.
I have a section where I begin to “get it,” family has one result — crash, into the night, up in smoke, with baking bread smoking in the air…it’s not in it yet. But it’s like a puzzle, this one, how does it fit together? My song filling the air with it, that too, fundamental. Our daily bread. That’s music. I like that beginning — what they felt was step one for me. I just haven’t put that in yet. I “drifted” quite far, putting together the ghost in Domenico Modugno too, that first song, in a sharp costume, diamonds for cufflinks. A princess, too, they saw the sparkles around me. As if I walked out of a fairytale. “Un po’ magical,” which is just how these songs ended up interplaying…that’s what I ended up with.
That’s where I am. Again, I’ll figure out the order of all this — or the best way to tell it, organize this information. I thought maybe I should just keep the scene with Carmine as its own thing with this thought process in mind since it involves two songs and move on from there…I’m just putting it together. I might try that tomorrow.
Someone in this digital nomad hotel busted out a puzzle and not an easy one — so much gusto the first night, sort of abandoned, which has been funny for me. It’s taking some time.
The whole thing is a party, not the same note, not the same thing — but there’s nothing but opportunity to “get into gear,” play up my character, which, you know, I got a note about “do they see through the show,” and I don’t know if that was the most positive note. But then, my enthusiasm could get me into trouble, it seemed, I didn’t really understand. I had to adjust something, ground that, something. It’s not that there isn’t a truth behind it since — like the “oh Maria is a little special” comment, hmmmmm. Not really. You see? I’m not missing an antenna, but I had to adjust something in my life approach which is…nurture, I think, more so than nature. Or fearing my nature, my mother, I mean, Jesus. She was a lunatic. My father is kooky, checked out, sick, I mean. At four, I’m in some weird psychological drama that I had to unlearn. It’s always interesting how a story continues to reveal itself to you. Getting at what it’s about. But stunning, beautiful, rare, even. No? This butterfly. Nature. What the hell? How did I, me, end up with that comment? Hard, a little, that was hard for me, coming out of the last couple of years. What the hell was I doing? That will get its own section. Not true. Done. That’s very done.
My character, me, complicated…actually. Love actually. It’s Christmas on top of it.
Thanks for reading. That’s it.
Ah, late.
I’ll set myself up this weekend so I can share this — put it in its appropriate blog, section, something. Put up a scene. Write something about it, something. Use social media channels for their intended purpose. I don’t need more than one. I just ended up, accidentally, with two. I have plenty to share.