A walnut tree rose high into the sky. Turning beneath it, an ancient tree, given how tall it was, you see, to them, I didn’t remember who I was. I didn’t catch that, Giggino remarking me, taking plastic bags out of the trunk with Flora, his wife.
But I did catch a line on a string on Carmine’s guitar across the hall while I was unpacking in one of his son’s rooms earlier like a ghost of memory… somewhere out there. His voice soft.
“La la la…
Turning under a tree…
*
Carmine gave me the name of the song in an adjacent room, a darker shade of blue. “Vecchio Frac.”
“It’s about a man…”
“I see yellow…”
*
Turning under a tree…
*
Carmine gave me the title in the adjacent room. It was blue. “Vecchio Frac.”
“It’s about a man…”
“I see yellow…”
*
Like the leaves on the tree rising high into a sky…the color of my mother’s eyes: Joy.
*
“He wears a top hat,” Carmine strummed his guitar, “the character in the song.” He mimed putting the elegant chapeau on his head. He drew his hands down the lapels of his suit coat. “He is elegant…” He said without inflecting his voice just like his mother Flora speaks, flat-toned, nasal. “He wears two diamonds…” he honked, gestured, to his wrist. He didn’t know the word in English, but he mimed the tuxedo shirt, a stylish ghost was floating through a deserted city in a tux, his diamonds cufflinks sparkling under the yellow lamplight at midnight. One last carriage — “cracks,” he said, “into the night.” You see, to my cousins, Carmine being one of them, I didn’t remember who I was, in glamorous attire, though they didn’t make these connections. “He’s holding…” he was speaking Italian, so I could miss some of words. “Cane, crystal, a flower…and on top of his coat…”
“Un papillon di seta blu…”
“A blue butterfly…?”
He mimed the bow tie.
“Does he really say all that?’’ I asked.
“Si, si,” he uh, reassured me and played on.
On my thirtieth birthday, I received an electric blue butterfly from the Amazon as a gift from a couple of friends. In a black case, it was impossible, this shade of blue, almost unnatural, just like Joy. No sooner had I opened, however, did my friends tell me that the salesperson suggested that they didn’t purchase it, as it was missing an antenna. “It’s perfect.” I had barely opened it. 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? 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 because it wasn’t true…
“A window opens,” he yawned at a new dawn, “in the white light, a hat, flower, tailcoat float away on silent river…”
“Who is this person invisible person?”
“No one knows…”
*
Along the coast of Sorrento, GIGGINO BARKED AT ME TO SPEAK —SPEAK! In his gold Audi without leather seat an unnecessary expense. “Where have I been? Why was I someone else?” We turned around rugged cliffs that rose from pure rage, volcanic explosions, the sea sparkling out my window…
Legend goes that Parthenope vowed to rise a city of music after their siren failed to lure Odysseus and washed ashore. Naples traces its lineage back to this moment in history weaved in myth and mystery and music just like my beginnings.
The city of Naples, on the southwest of Europe’s boot, traces its origins back to Parthenope, a Greek commune that existed at the era of Sparta — we, too, were a Greek city-state that vowed to rise a city of music around the siren’s dead body, and we did. Parthenope almost broke Odysseus, but that was just music to us—so we settled around her because she was talented. She even invented a ricotta cake…in other words, we gave her eggs, sugar, GIFTS, for her song, in no danger, but she gained the reputation of being an evil songstress when she might have been gifted even a healer (and a university). A story can travel so far away from its origins in other words that it can end up meaning something else entirely depending on who is telling it at. We think we know what the story is but we may discover many years later that we were wrong or didn’t have the full picture even about ourselves.
*
“Sing with me,” Carmine said.
“No.”
*
Turning under the walnut tree, you see, to them, I didn’t remember who I was. But the leaves of calla lilies rippling through the air, vines rushing over the gate towards the house, I could never forget the first time I arrived at Angela and Vico’s house. I remembered the creaking of their front door as it opened. I was nine, and I came to Naples Italy for the first time after a mysterious disappearance. Vico’s eyes sparkled over the threshold fiercely like the sea at high noon. He shot me with a line from a song like a sniper. “Sento!” I feel!
*
And in a burst of color, I remembered, the sunlight flickering through the plums, Vico’s figure appearing between the trunks —between rows and rows and rows. “Sento!” He called to me galloping alongside me on the other side of the farm in silhouette at full speed.
*
“Fast” Flora remembered, Angela too, “Maria fast, fast fast fast.”
*
“Marathon!” Vico cried, his arms flying, “marathon was a man!!” I ran faster towards the long country table in front of the house covered in 3,000 tomatoes — a rainbow of colors — I jumped onto the table and flew — laughing —because Vico burst into song, my song, this song, and we were frolicking through a farm — He’s our family siren. It was the first word that came to mind when the door opened to his house and he shot me, “sento!” and welcomed me in song upon arrival. I hadn’t even stepped inside his house yet. I couldn’t believe they were real.
*
As we curved around the coast in Giggino’s gold Audi that day, on the way to Vico’s house, the blue bay the color of his eyes sparkled outside my window. I remembered his spellbinding eyes, Vico, they were mesmerizing, Vesuvius always there, looming across the bay of Naples. The song had dissipated to nothing but a ghost of a line that tugged from time to time, but I had laughed with my cousins, that “Vico is a siren.”
*
And no sooner did I shut the gate all these years later did he open his front door and launch the same line over jasmines, roses, and feathers and hook me back in time, my mouth agape.
“Sento.”
I feel.
The beginning of everything.
*
I stood there with my luggage. I gasped. He cast my suitcase aside, with his arms, told me to cast it ASIDE! In song. Angela laughed in the kitchen. “Meri!”
*
Vico launched the line across the garden, older now, “sento.” I couldn’t even see him yet — that’s Naples. He never called me by name, only by this song. To them I didn’t remember who I was, but Vico hooked me long ago with a song and it never let me go, a ghost of line, barely a memory…all this language came to mind as I stood there…
*
“Affecting,” Carmine described it, the song. It was. He pushed up his glasses, held his guitar, having left the ghost of a man behind but wanting me to sing with him, “but no,” “what do you mean no?” He brought up a song that I apparently used to sing.
“Come on Maria, you remember…”
“The song you sang to me.” he said. “It was touching…”
He continued. “Wasn’t it a Disney song?”
“No lo so!” I didn’t know.
“Yes you do…”
“No I don’t…”
I said I didn’t sing anymore, and he regarded me like an owl with his unblinking eyes, “you are not yourself.”
“I don’t remember…”
“You translated it…” he pressed.
“Oh?”
“Si.” He reached into my eyes… “you remember…”
“Something about not knowing each other…but we were…”
“…on a journey of some kind…”
*
That’s the thing, a song is a real hook. Vico knew it well, so when he stepped out the door and launched the same line over the vines and caught me as a child back in time, I burst into my mother’s smile: Joy.
I took off like I used down a path, a garden swallowing me whole and green.
*
“A princess…” Carmine trailed off…
“A princess?”
“Disney…”
“DISney?”
“What else would it be?” He turned his finger around, shrugged as if to say, if it’s a princess, what else would it be but Disney…?
“No lo so…”
“Doesn’t know that though…”
“It’s a girl who was like a princess but she forgot or something…”
*
But Vico hooked me long ago! Before I even crossed the threshold. A ghost of a line that tugged from time to time, it never let me go! “Vico!” I cried all these years later. He did it! He hooked me long ago! The metaphor was real. A song was real.
I hung a left at the wall of plants.
*
Through the apricots, now, 15 kind, we frolicked, truly speaking to “la la la…” towards the chestnuts…
“La la la!”
*
Into a room, a darker shade of blue, remembering my nature, “la la la…”
“We were on a journey of some kind…”
*
I stopped short at a lemon tree and gasped, a thick bed of rosemary at my feet. “My song!”
*
Bringing it back, the next track, the song I used to sing, Carmine snapped, for he remembered. His arm slivered.
“Love is a river…no?”
*
Across the patio Vico held the scene as if it spoke for itself with his arms outstretched, still chic in navy.
*
“Si, si,” it was coming back to him. “To remember…” Carmine looked off. “She has to go somewhere to remember who she is but where, it wasn’t…” His thumb pointing back, his thumb, I recognized it, ”the past!” I cried. “Yes,” he said, with our thumbs in the past, “yes,” we were kids once, Carmine nodded. “Si si, on the farm, yes. You sang this song to me…”
“Love is…water…”
“What?”
He slithered with his arm. “Love is a form of water, no? An ocean? A river?
I gasped. “Si,” he sat back. “Anatasia!”
A girl who doesn’t remember who she is.
*
Vico came at me — an electric vine shooting lines into my eyes with the most dizzyingly sparkly blue eyes, my smile wide: Joy.
*
“Doesn’t she have to take a trip…?”
*
Vico GRABBED life by the REIGNS, bursting into song, a chorus behind him laughing, interjecting, commenting, singing, and eating snacks. They welcomed me in a cry, a cheer. “Bravo!” Whirlpools for eyes, he shot conjugations at me.“Io sento, tu senti, lei lui sente, sentiam, senteet, sentono.” Boom! Just like he did I was nine, it was lesson time through song. Feel, feel, feel, in every which way. Remember, remember? Carmine’s owl eyes and thumb, “on this journey to the past,” back to the beginning. What it means to grow, you know. Where you end up.”Bravo!”
“MY SONG for Maria, remember?” His finger instructional.
“I feel a sweet song in my heart when I think about Maria…”
*
“Si si,” Carmine nodded, resting his guitar, “we’re going on a journey no?”
I gestured, he understood. “Si.”
“Literally and metaphorically…”
“To remember who she is…?”
*
I was home. I had a song.
But what we can’t catch, you know, for a long long time.
*
“At the beginning with you.”
“Si si,” Carmine said, “we’re at the beginning of a journey…”
Bravo.