diciassette
‘Actually, twenty of him sent me a message.’ Francesco reached across to take hold of Lucia’s free right hand, noting how cold she was from the walk back to the school. ‘Let’s get you upstairs.’
Once in Lucia’s apartment, they sat close together on the window seat overlooking the calle , with Foscari in Lucia’s lap.
‘There are how many messages?’ she asked a second time, shaking her head incredulously.
‘Around twenty.’ He opened his DMs. ‘Maybe thirty now. I’ve avoided it since lessons started this morning.’
‘This is just madness.’
‘It’s your choice, Lucia. I can just block them all, and we can close this chapter, or . . .’
‘Or I can break the cycle.’
‘ Cycle ?’
‘Of my life.’ Her green eyes seemed to glow anew. ‘The reason I accepted your invitation to the ball was to let loose and have some fun. For once! I wanted to take my mind off all the drama with the school and Gatti. No . I’m curious. I owe it to myself.’
He looked to his inbox. ‘No pressure, Lucia.’
‘Show me.’
With a patience still laced with his lingering guilt, Francesco opened each message one by one, and they read them together. It was confronting, but they went slowly and methodically.
Most messages were replies to the post from fraudulent would-be suitors. Others were blatant clickbait. Some Lucia immediately vetoed for their inaccurate commentary on the events of the evening in question.
‘Is that a penis?!’ Lucia suddenly erupted, and Francesco quickly deleted it.
‘There will be more of those, I guarantee.’
‘One of the many reasons I don’t have, don’t want, and don’t engage with social media.’
There were messages, however, that indeed had potential, and this further ignited Lucia’s curiosity. Francesco emptied his inbox except for a final curated list of four.
‘What would you like to do?’
Lucia closed her eyes.
Edoardo’s papers. The school dilemma. Vittorio Gatti’s surveillance. Tiziano’s promise. Benedetta’s offer. La Commedia’s night-time mystery show. Francesco’s mishap. Her accident.
She could control none of it.
It was all tangled in a mess of loose ends and hanging on words. She wanted to believe people and their good intentions, let alone their promises, but nothing was for certain. Really, this opportunity was much the same.
If she could somehow manage to cope under that cascading torrent of issues in her life, how would adding this to the mix change anything? Perhaps, despite appearances, this might help Lucia forge a new path forward. Towards love.
She shook her head to clear it. ‘ Va bene . Help me do this.’
Francesco’s eyes widened. ‘Really? Are you sure?’
‘ Sì . But only if you—’
‘Of course I will.’
Foscari shifted in Lucia’s lap and pawed his way up her chest to rest his chin on her shoulder. Then Lucia felt his little body suddenly tense as he let out a series of short yaps in the direction of La Commedia.
Both Francesco and Lucia turned to look at it, but La Commedia remained dark within.
‘Where do we begin?’
Francesco scrolled to the first of the four remaining messages in his inbox. ‘Famously, at the beginning.’ Scanning his eyes over the Instagram handles, he laughed. ‘Fifteen-year-olds are more creative than these men.’
Lucia rose, collected a pad and pen from her desk, and returned to the window. She quickly flipped the pages containing her notes about loans and financial planners until she came to the first blank page. She drew up a rudimentary table on the pad, and Francesco listed the names of her potential kissers. ‘Davide. Claudio. Paolo. Nicolò.’
‘Start with Davide? Chi è ?’ she asked, curiously peering over his arm at the screen.
Francesco swatted her away. ‘ No . If we are going to do this properly, it must be based in fact, first and foremost. Add three columns to your table. Mask. Physical appearance. Situational knowledge.’
Lucia obeyed. ‘What if they don’t give all the information?’
Opening the first message, incidentally from Davide, he said, ‘We demand it.’
Lucia and Francesco managed to laugh their way through the table filling, and sent a few return messages to ask about missing clues. Davide was immediately scratched from the list for his follow-up comment about Lucia having looked so beautiful in her red dress, which it most certainly wasn’t.
‘Claudio. Paolo. Nicolò. It might be one of you,’ Lucia said, pursing her lips tightly as she ran her eyes over the patchworked table. ‘Can I see a photo of them, now?’
Francesco hesitated. ‘All three profiles are set to private. But this is what you can see.’ He clicked on Paolo, whose message was now first in his inbox. His bio was a collection of emojis. ‘Aries . . .’
Lucia scowled. ‘The Zodiac? Not a good start.’
‘This is why I wanted to stick to the facts.’
Lucia mimed zipping her lips.
Paolo’s bio continued with the weightlifting, cycling and motorbike emojis.
The sensation of the man’s rough hands returned to Lucia’s mind. ‘It could be him . . . if weightlifting could give your palms calluses.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because the man I kissed had very dry, rough hands. As if he did repetitive manual labour.’
Francesco clicked Paolo’s profile pic, and it enlarged slightly on the screen. ‘This man?’
All Lucia had seen that night was the man’s chin, mouth and eyes. But even then, the circles around his eyes, including his lids, had been painted black to better disguise him behind the mask. Lucia squinted as Francesco, unable to enlarge the picture any further, took a screenshot of Paolo.
The slightly blurry image was of a man sitting atop his motorbike, wearing sunglasses.
‘I don’t know,’ she sighed. ‘Ask him about the mask he was wearing that night.’
Francesco nodded, and pinged back a message. ‘In the meantime, Claudio.’ Francesco tapped Claudio’s entries on the table. ‘Says he’s tall.’
‘Exactly, says .’
Opening Claudio’s profile, they leaned over the phone in unison. Foscari, for good measure, also poked his snout between them for a look. A smiling bright face came up on the screen. Lucia seemed to soften next to Francesco.
‘He’s handsome, that’s for sure,’ Francesco said. ‘Write handsome in the table.’
‘Checco!’ Lucia managed a laugh. ‘You wanted facts.’
‘It is a fact.’
She shook her head fondly and added the note to Claudio’s table entries.
‘Claudio Rota, it’s your turn.’
Lucia again noted a collection of emojis. ‘Are words no longer in fashion?’
‘It’s the language of social media.’ He patted her thigh. ‘It’s you , Lucia, who chooses not to speak it.’
‘You got a double-mask emoji in my ball invitation text. That’s as far as I stretch.’
‘It was noted and very much appreciated.’ Francesco read aloud, ‘Crucifix. Father and daughter. Pasta. Wine. Tennis ball—’
‘That sounds promising. Do you think he’s a father?’ Lucia pondered that a moment.
‘Would you date someone with a child?’
The thought had never crossed Lucia’s mind. ‘I guess so. It wouldn’t be a no .’
‘There’s a love heart, here. “Matilde”, it says.’
Lucia looked again. The man’s eyes were definitively blue. ‘The man I kissed didn’t have blue eyes. They were brown.’ A little bubble seemed to burst in her resolve. Perhaps the pasta-loving, tennis-playing father to Matilde could have been something ?
‘He may have been wearing costume lenses.’
‘Perhaps,’ she sighed.
Noting her disappointment, Francesco said, ‘It’s not a bad thing.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the final two emojis are the peach and the eggplant.’
‘So, he likes to cook?’
‘Not quite. Never mind. What can I ask him?’
‘Ask him where we kissed that night.’
Francesco shot back the message, and almost immediately, the bouncing ellipses signalled an impending reply.
Francesco fell quiet as he read the message that had appeared. ‘ San Marco .’
Lucia’s eyes widened. ‘But the kiss happened in the piazzetta. Not the piazza.’ She gnawed on her lower lip a moment. ‘And his mask?’
Francesco typed, and they both waited with bated breath.
‘ Black .’
‘Yes. It was black.’
At that moment, Paolo replied to Francesco’s message. He read, ‘ An Arlecchino mask, of course .’ Paolo had attached a photo.
‘Absolutely not him, then,’ said Lucia firmly, and with a flourish of the wrist, she drew a thick line through Paolo’s name.
‘Claudio, pending, despite the eye colour issue. That leaves us with Nicolò.’ Francesco opened the profile. ‘ Call me Nic , very original. And no emojis. Just VE–MI .’
‘Venezia to Milano. Maybe he’s no longer in Venice.’ Lucia pulled the phone closer and clicked on Nicolò’s photo – a dark male silhouette, sitting at the end of Piazzetta San Marco, watching the sun set over Lido. Something in her heart tightened like a vice. ‘Wow . . .’
‘Before you get ahead of yourself,’ Francesco interrupted, ‘let’s stick to the facts. What did he say in his original message?’ He tapped on Lucia’s table.
She tracked back to Nicolò’s DMs. ‘ I was at the masked ball in one of the palazzi off Piazza San Marco .’ Her skin grew hot.
‘Ok.’ Francesco’s tongue caught in the inside of his cheek while he thought about this. Taking back the phone, he furiously typed, Describe yourself. Are you in Venice? What kind of mask did you wear to the ball? Satisfied with this, Francesco leaned back into the window frame. ‘We will get to the bottom of this, Lucia. I know we will. We can keep looking at both Nicolò and Claudio until we have answers.’
Lucia rested against Francesco, the image of the dark silhouette framed by the water and sunset caught in her mind’s eye. Her love life had been disastrous to date. Only a few men had come and gone over the years, with her longest relationship lasting just six months. He’d been scared away by the public interest their union caused. And yet, despite her protests to Francesco over the years, she did want to find someone. Of course she did.
But that someone would have to first earn Lucia’s trust. And in turn, Lucia would have to learn to let her guard down – a process that had burned her in the past and left her alone and perpetually single.
Francesco wrapped his arms around her, and even Foscari enjoyed nuzzling between the two of them. Their friendship had been reset, and despite the many loose ends in her life, Lucia was happy that they had tied a knot in this one. And now, in addition to their mission to buy out the school, they had an elusive man to catch.
Francesco refreshed Instagram, and a red 1 appeared over his inbox. ‘A reply,’ he said, and they both readjusted themselves to read. Tall, athletic. Originally from VE, Santa Croce. Working in MI. This was the mask . . .
Lucia didn’t dare breathe. Her heart paused, waiting for what she assumed would be the arrival of a photo. Then suddenly, all the text in the conversation jumped upward to make room for the image.
Lucia snatched the phone from Francesco’s grip, clicked and enlarged the photo. Her hands quivered as she pointed to the mask on the screen. ‘That’s the one.’
Alex watched as the pair that were cosied up in the window seat together began to gesticulate wildly, seemingly in celebration of something, totally consumed by whatever it was they were doing on the phone. It was the same man who came and went from the school, and who often stayed the night, and over weekends. The man who had left the pink flowers.
Despite it all, Alex was happy to see the woman smiling again after yesterday’s accident involving the paparazzi at the school. That was the one consolation he could find in his inexplicable sense of defeat. Hers was the kind of smile one couldn’t help but mirror. The way it bloomed first from the left corner of her lips and eventually stretched across her whole face. He thought for a moment, reflecting on how she always seemed happiest at the front door by the bougainvillea, greeting and welcoming the students. That’s where she seemed most at ease. Her most vibrant.
Alex shook his head, trying to clear her from his mind. But that was easier said than done. Seeing her wrapped up intimately with her partner ignited a melancholy deep in his chest.
There was something about the dark-haired woman that had certainly toyed with his imagination for the past few weeks. Quietly watching her, he couldn’t put a finger on it, let alone label it. Whatever it was, and whatever it was she shared with that man, it made him feel ever lonelier.
He looked to the sliver of night sky visible from his window. He had just woken up, and had a long night of work ahead of him.
Just as the woman’s dog started to yap again, Alex retreated from the window, collected his latest sketches and designs from his side table, and made his way downstairs to his studio.
Carnevale would wait for no one, and it was always Alex’s busiest time of year.