A NIGHT AT THE OPERA
QUATTRO STAGIONI IN QUATTRO CITTA
Stagioni 1: Primaverile (spring), Napoli
NOTES: SPRING in the "Four Seasons in Four Cities" Project. This is divided into five parts, which aren't meant to follow each other in direct chronological order (i.e., exactly a year each, etc).
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I. The burial of the dead
(or, Easy come, easy go )
Memories to Gokudera occur in brilliant flashes of scenery, as if a powerful spotlight from somewhere turned its beam light years back, focusing on an instant or a smell, a sound or a mnemonic trigger. Smells and sound, in particular, are vivid markers and he didn't like to admit that these overcame him in a staggering wave when he encountered them. Everything as he sees it is preserved; he can even mouth the words spoken or enact the motions as if he had rehearsed them all his life.
Sundays are hyacinths and rainwater for Gokudera. The Camorra manor is sprawling and beautiful, all white Corinthian pillars and Mediterranean façade, overlooking the church and the town square. If it had not been the headquarters of the mafia family of its namesake, it would have already been a part of the city's famous sites (and the city had many of these), and it was the envy of all the interior designers and architects that came to visit. Some short yards away from the property, the smell was the first to greet the welcome visitor: the lilies of the field, growing in tall verdant stalks, nodding always towards the direction of the house.
She was always waiting for him in the music room. After the stuffy warmth of morning mass (being pressed between all the old people and his bossy fratello maggiore, the bodyguard his father assigned for him) he would storm into the house and ascend the staircase to the east wing, and he always seemed to know she was there.
"My little tempest," she would greet, resplendent against the pale window light, and he would run to her, ruining his Sunday shirt as he clung, breathing in her scent of a thousand hyacinths. "You're rumpling your shirt," she would reprimand softly (for some reason he remembers the key of E in one of the upper octaves), or "you forgot to brush your teeth again, didn't you?", but he would drown it out with his inane babble of stories about his doddard of a home tutor, or the new strategic game he beat his bodyguard at. He would tell her how he'd hurt his head, how he knew Shamal was sneaking up on him because he could smell the man around the corner, how he loved the fireworks that frothed in the sky above the opera house.
She would sit and listen to him and when he was quite done (when he had either run out of steam or forgotten what his point was), when he had spent himself in fury or excitement or whatever passion his story drove him into, she would take his hands. She would take his small boy-hands in hers, and for some minutes (which probably was only a few seconds but which, even to his older self felt like an eternity) there would only be silence.
Her scent filled the room and there was always a place for him beside her on the piano bench. He didn't know back then the names of the light little sonatas they played together––she reaching for the black keys that were then very difficult to press––but he knew this was her music, and even when she translated the Japanese titles to Italian, he still wanted to know how to say them the way she did.
"It sounds funny when I say it," he would pout, when years later he would be speaking the same language with startling ease. "Teach me how to say it properly!"
"You'll learn how to say it," she had replied, reaching over to correct his fingering. "Bee-bo-no-a-ohh-zoh-ra." One note for each syllable.
She would bend over him, and her long hair fell on either side, and it seemed to Gokudera a subtle curtain from which only light could pass through.
Another Sunday. A cold front had moved in from the coastal area, and the entire landscape was a wash of grey. Weak but persistent rainfall drifted to and fro on heavy grey clouds. The smell of grass pervaded his senses, and it continues to do so when he walks across the Namimori grounds after a downpour, closing his eyes and gathering the fragments of that day on the hill.
He does not remember how long he sat at the piano, only that the song was playing again and again, the only thing he could hear. It was humid and any second soon, there would have been rain. The sheet music lay open in front of him, from which he was going to surprise her; he had picked up the melody from memory and had played it "his way"; that is, he had improvised by playing completely with the white keys, foregoing the black (he hated half-notes) which he could not reach properly yet.
The Turkish doctor was at the door, stark white against the black wood.
"Come now. It's time."
White gravestones pointing upwards from the dead green of the grass. Years later he would find that they had buried her immediately, barely even piecing her together and without the dignity of last rites. He would find out that there was no blaming the rain-streaked roads that hugged the cliffs, that it had been his father's people who had done it, displeased with what she let slip in the media about her "family in Posillipo". Nobody would question the public disappearance of the up-and-coming half-Japanese pianist; the city had many of them.
The doctor brought white lilies in a bouquet and laid them down on the crude white marker that was supposed to be her (years later he would know that there wasn't a body under the headstone). Already the city was forgetting her; no sign of clear skies or the white heat of high noon, clouds clustered so tight that no sun could have squeaked through. The sweet, sickening smell of so many hyacinths and so many of the dead under the grass made him gag. He wanted to ask the doctor why he couldn't even see her before she'd gone, but he forgot the words.
"A-o-zo-ra." One finger for each syllable, just as she had taught him.
The doctor had looked at him, puzzled.
But the smell of the flowers blocked everything else, while the song he would have played for her exploded in a furious crash of keys in his head.