Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Positano
T he fact that Alessandra was going back to chemotherapy felt monstrous.
Already she’d gone through three rounds—three!
Since her diagnosis two years ago, she’d thrown up everything she could throw up, she’d lost every ounce of her beautiful, dark hair, and she’d slept through what felt like the better part of the past couple of years.
She’d missed so much of living that she wasn’t sure what it was she was trying to live for.
Not that she wanted to bring it up, but she and Federico hadn’t had sex in forever, it felt like.
And despite all that pain, all that “fighting,” Alessandra couldn’t get rid of her cancer.
No, she didn’t like to put it like that.
She didn’t like to think of it as her fault, like she just hadn’t vacuumed her cancerous cells hard enough, hadn’t scrubbed her insides well enough to get rid of it.
This cancer wasn’t her fault. (Wasn’t it? She was beginning to feel unsure.)
The Saturday before Monday’s first chemotherapy session (first of the third round), Alessandra and Federico were invited to a wedding in downtown Positano, at the white catholic church overlooking the glorious ocean.
Alessandra, who’d grown back a tight black haircut and grown stronger this summer, despite the cancer that was eating her from the inside, looked pretty good in her dark green dress, if she said so herself.
As they entered the church for the ceremony, Federico, in his suit, heads turned, and family members and old friends smiled.
Alessandra wanted to believe that they were smiling about her outfit, about how cute she looked.
But a sinking feeling in her gut told her that wasn’t true—that in fact they were smiling because they thought she would die soon.
She scowled back at them and sat down. Cancer didn’t make anyone nicer.
The wedding was between Alessandra’s little cousin Maria and a handsome American man who’d been vacationing here two years ago and never left.
This made Alessandra roll her eyes. But the fact that Zane, as he was called, had learned Italian so quickly and had converted to Catholicism for Maria, forced Alessandra to cut him some slack.
He was a good guy. Everyone in the family liked him.
The reception was held at a restaurant not far from Alessandra’s first mural, which she’d made three weeks ago, and before she’d learned that the cancer was still here, that it had never really left.
It made it feel like the mural had another artist, someone braver and stronger than she.
From the railing overlooking the water, she could almost see all of it, almost make out the drama of the lines and the big CAT written in the corner.
She knew that it had caused a stir, both in Positano and online, and that people were tagging themselves in photographs next to it.
There had been a few articles by various news sites, asking who CAT was, what her deal was, and who she might be.
A few people called her the “next Banksy.” A few others said, “Is this Banksy doing a different style?” It felt typical that they were trying to give more credit to a man.
Alessandra’s grandfather Tomasso approached with a glass of red wine and a kind smile. Together, they hovered over the railing and talked about the bride, the American groom, the food, which her grandfather thought “could be better.” Alessandra found herself giggling, if only for a moment.
And then her grandfather’s eyes found the mural across the way. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he asked, sounding mystical.
Alessandra was surprised. She hadn’t heard any of her family members bring up the mural, and she’d been so swept up in her new (old) diagnosis to care what others in Positano were saying.
“Is it?” she asked.
“Oh yes. That person is brave,” her grandfather said. “You know, there is too much tourism. There is too much of the other here. We have lost our identity. We have given it away.”
Alessandra filled her lungs. “Who do you think did it?”
“A true artist,” her grandfather said. But nothing in his tone suggested he knew it was her.
Alessandra took the opportunity of this night to dance as hard and as fast as she could.
Through the night, she jumped up and down, she threw her hands in the air, and she took many more sips of alcohol than she should, given the fact that it usually exhausted her to the point of needing to sleep for many days at a time.
When sunlight draped its way across the water, her heart pounded in her throat, and she kissed Federico hard.
“Baby, it’s going to be okay,” he told her, his eyes unfocused, his lips soft. “I love you so much. You’re going to get through this.”
“Stop saying that!” Alessandra cried. “You don’t know that!” But she didn’t want to lose the adrenaline of the night, so she kissed him again.
They took a taxi home and collapsed onto the bed, where they rolled around before falling asleep.
It had been ages since Alessandra had let herself sleep, fully sleep, next to her love, and it felt incredible to wake up beside him a few hours later, still exhausted but with a heart full of gladness.
He kissed her and got up to prepare things for the morning: coffee and running down the street for cornettos.
She knew he wanted to have a beautiful last day, that he wanted everything to be perfect for this final day before round three of chemo.
But by four that afternoon, she’d begun to hate how false it felt, how fake his smiles seemed, how performative it all was.
By the time Federico collapsed in bed around ten thirty, she knew she had to do something else with her final day—something entirely for herself.
She remembered what her grandfather had said about CAT.
This time, Alessandra had less time to prepare.
In a notepad, she collected a few sketches before throwing her stuff in a bag and hurrying into the night.
Since it was later in the season, there were even more tourists, people clinging to the last bits of summer, and she again had to wait till all the foot traffic had died to stake her claim on a wall near the church where her cousin Maria had just gotten married.
(It wasn’t the church itself, of course.
Alessandra would never graffiti a church.
It was nothing her grandfather would have approved of.)
Again, Alessandra decided to create a mural of something that felt deeply personal to her.
It was a mural that hinted at how little time we had as humans and how we tended to waste it on trivial things.
As she worked into the morning, her eyes filled with tears as she imagined how little time she might have left, how she’d fought and struggled through every stage of chemo, how she had to be willing to keep fighting, for the sake of her family.
How much strength did she really have left? She didn’t know.
This second mural was smaller and took a little less time than the last, which meant she was back in bed by six in the morning, before Federico got up.
She managed to sleep for a few hours before Federico kissed her forehead and woke her up for their big day ahead.
By ten, they were in the car, heading for the chemo clinic, and by the end of that evening, she was throwing up. Here we go again , she thought.
Alessandra’s only relief over the next few days was the articles about the brand-new CAT mural.
She read them voraciously, eager to hear what people thought about her art, about her messages.
It seemed that people were excited to speculate about who she was, more than anything, even more than guessing what she meant by what she’d painted.
Tourists around Positano were taking photographs of random Italian women and writing in posts: “Is this CAT? Is this her?” She laughed when one of the photographs was of her great-aunt Tatiana, who was half Russian and eighty-five and sweeping a broom over the cobblestones near the shop she owned with her great-uncle Leo.
“It’s good to hear you laughing,” Federico said from the other side of the sofa, smiling at her. “What are you reading?”
“Just a comedy thing,” she lied, then kept swiping.
When Alessandra had a little more energy that weekend, her mother and father came over with an enormous feast, which she struggled to eat despite her mother's urging. It wasn’t like an Italian not to eat, of course.
“I know it’s delicious,” Alessandra told her mother over and over again.
“It’s just that my stomach isn’t up for it.
It isn’t an insult to you, Mama!” This was hard for her mother to fathom, and it was also heartbreaking.
Alessandra wanted to take her mother in her arms and console her, but it felt odd since her mother was technically here to do the consoling.
Her father had a few things to say about the muralist that weren’t exactly nice. “We run businesses here. We need everything to look clean, like an Italian dream or a postcard from Italy. Not like a graffiti artist can do whatever he wants.”
But her mother said, “We can’t paint over them. And darling, the tourists love them. You’ve seen how they take photographs.”
“And CAT is famous now,” Federico said. “There’s no denying that. If we get rid of CAT’s murals, the tourists may get angry with Positano.”
“We don’t want that,” her father said, his eyes on his pasta.
Alessandra had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing.
It all felt so ridiculous. At least she still had a horse in the race of life , she thought.
At least people were still paying attention to her, beyond feeling sorry for her.
It was often hard for her to gauge how long she would still be alive, especially when she felt so tired of fighting.
But this was enough for now. She swirled a bit of pasta onto her fork and forced herself to take a bite, watching her mother’s eyes shine with joy.