Chapter 46
FRANCESCA AND I HAD AGREED that I would come to her apartment on Tuesday mornings at ten.
Between now and the following Tuesday, I was to go to the stationer’s, which she called the cartoleria, and acquire two notebooks—one for the vocabulary words she’d already begun to feed me and another for written assignments.
The first of those assignments was to conjugate the verbs essere, avere, and vivere, and to write a dozen short sentences using the handful of words she’d taught me.
I am a woman. I have a husband. I live in La Maddalena.
I was so eager to get started that I walked directly from her apartment to the cartoleria, where there was a small selection of notebooks with pretty paper covers.
I picked out two, along with a fancy ink pen, then made my way to the counter, where a young guy, maybe a few years older than I was, was trying to make a marionette move.
He was saying something in Italian to the woman behind the counter, then turned to me and asked me the same thing.
“Sorry,” I said, before remembering that my English was going to get me nowhere. “Non parlo italiano.”
“But it sounds like you do,” he said with a wide smile.
I laughed, then admitted that Non parlo italiano was the only phrase I knew.
“I was asking if you think this is a good gift for my niece.”
I eyed the marionette, which was maybe a foot high and bore a striking resemblance to Pinocchio.
This made sense, since Pinocchio was an Italian fairy tale.
I was interested in the marionette—I’d never seen one in real life—but I was as interested in this man, who spoke better English than I did and reminded me of Al Pacino, if Pacino had gotten his big break playing a librarian and not the youngest son of the Corleone family.
He had wiry hair that looked like it rarely saw a comb, and gold-rimmed glasses, which had to come with a strong prescription, judging by how thick the lenses were.
He wasn’t tall—I could look him directly in the eyes—and he was skinny as a rail, the type who didn’t lift weights and also forgot to eat, or considered four cigarettes and a handful of cashews a meal.
Still, he made great eye contact and had warm chocolate-brown eyes that twinkled when he laughed.
“How old is your niece?” I asked.
“Five,” he said. “Do you think she’s old enough to manage this?”
It seemed like it might be a headache, keeping the strings from getting tangled, but I didn’t think it was my place to tell him that. “I don’t see why not.”
He said something to the woman behind the counter, who obviously did not share my opinion, then he handed the marionette to me. “Try it.”
It was harder than I expected, getting the doll’s joints to move at the right time.
I’d bob the head and inadvertently wiggle the butt, kick a leg out and accidentally thrust an arm in the air.
My new friend showed me how to wrap the marionette strings around my fingers for extra control, and soon I had the thing sauntering past a rack of magazines.
“You’re very good,” he said, encouragingly.
I had the marionette do a little bow, then handed it back to him. “That was fun.”
“I’m Teo,” he said.
“Eileen.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Eileen.”
I felt something, standing there in the cartoleria with him.
I don’t think I’d have called it attraction.
Not yet, anyway. But there was a feeling I couldn’t shake.
Maybe the sense that I’d met him before.
Or that I would meet him again. That in some other world, I’d have seen this niece of his remove the marionette from its box and dance it across her parents’ apartment.
“So, you think she’ll like it?” he asked.
I gave him a wistful sort of smile. “How could she not?”