Author's Forward (Chapter 12): 07-25-2011
So far, this chapter has taken the longest to construct. As I have never been to Italy, I had to rely on travel books, Google Earth and numerous websites for most of my research so as to form a setting which would satisfy the plot. I wanted to be as accurate in my descriptions as possible, of the autostrada (highway), the opportunism of its drivers, the New Yorker, monochrome dress of those at the airport, and even down to the fuelling-up experience at an Italian petrol station.
Damon is brutally honest in his philosophical diatribes here and Elena is further disillusioned by it. I think in order for these two to establish a more substantial and believable 'romantic' relationship, there needs to be a mutual attempt at coming to a middle ground. Damon is clearly the more experienced but he has formed quite a nihilistic opinion on life and it will take further evolution in Elena's character to make him realize what he has been overlooking all this time. I feel she needs to be put into a situation which is equally, if not more dangerous, than being with Damon. It's interesting to me that she doesn't choose the 'known evil' in this instance (Damon), but rather she chooses freedom, which, in her circumstance, means that she'll have to fend for herself now, whereas before, Elena was under the shelter of his 'protection.' This to me, impulsive as it is, shows an amazing resolve in Elena to decide for herself and follow her own true will, without having her identity overshadowed by such a beast of character. She will return to Damon of course, but when this takes place, it will be of her own volition. Meanwhile...I think a growing up of sorts is in store for her :D
For those of you who are interested...the songs that are aired over the radio during their drive are "Europe's Skies" by Alexander Rybak and "No Rest" by Dry the River. As for Damon's violin affection...hah, I had to (probably stemming from my grandfather making violins all throughout his life...kind of a subtle tribute, I guess). Music motivates me. I imagine a soundtrack as I write this story, much like the scores and selections of a movie, and I hope that it filters through in the same way that I have experienced it in my mind.
Anyhow, enough with the rambling...please enjoy!
P.S. I've updated all chapters with translations featured at the bottom.
A voice came, born outside of dreamlessness.
"Hey...hey, lightweight. Come on, up and at 'em..."
The onslaught of sound was accompanied by a full orchestra, scratching, plucking, pounding at her ear drums as Elena awoke. The slits of her eyes remained tight, while within them the blackness turned like a ferris-wheel, whirling round her corneas repeatedly.
Damon shook her by the shoulder, yet even these light ministrations were swept up into her nerves, causing a dull, feverish ache to pass along her arm. Elena scooped at her pillow, curling her knees to her chest and pressing her weight deeper into the mattress. Her lips moved.
"U-uuugh."
"Yeah, I know. You feel like shit...Can't imagine what that must be like," Damon said, releasing his hold on her shoulder.
Elena opened her eyes only marginally, peeking through a striation of lashes and grey, circling haze. She watched as the shape before her redressed, turning its back, flexing a fan of muscle, and snatching up a white button-down strung over the edge of a chair. Elena blinked several times, trying to clear her vision, but the details of Damon's features were as obscured as a reflection having passed through murky water, opaque and shivering. She saw him in profile, fitting each arm into a sleeve and fastening his shirt three-quarters of the way.
"What...time is it?" Elena mumbled, judging by her presiding stupor, that she couldn't have been asleep for more than a few hours.
"It's seven...Central European Time. Which would make it...twelve in Virginia. And we're about to land, so I need you to get dressed," Damon answered, tucking his used clothing into the side pouch of a suitcase, one of several now situated in the room. Then, unzipping Elena's luggage piece, he sorted through an assemblage of items, eventually selecting two of the worthier garments - a smock-waist camisole with a front placket and for practicality's sake, a black denim set, which he quickly tossed across the mattress.
"Put these on."
"God, I don't think...that'sss-" Elena slurred, managing to prop herself up on her elbows but failing to support her head as it slumped forward. Her stomach seized momentarily and she reigned in the overwhelming need to disgorge its contents.
Damon shot her a withering glance. Elena's once olive complexion was painted in the sallowest of yellows and she moaned sickly as she fell back against the mattress. He sighed, her condition obviously warranting some greater cure beyond the conventional Aspirin and a glass of water. Damon swore in low tones, castigating himself for his negligence in offering her alcohol and inviting this onerous predicament on both of them, which would only prove more inconvenient if airport security intercepted them at the gate. Not in any way preferable, he decided as he approached the head of the mattress.
"That bad off, eh? Alright..."
As she lay on her side, eyes unaware, Elena felt a moist bead trickle across her upper lip. Perspiration perhaps - yet another symptom of the hangover. Elena flinched uncomfortably, riding high on a nauseous wave as her stomach churned up another bowl full of suffering. A second bead made contact with her teeth, slipping over their ridge and entering her mouth. Bitter as an aged penny, liquid as iron drawn from a forge, the drop collided with her tongue. She identified it immediately, Elena's eyes snapping open, focusing on the shape that hung over her - blood, not even her own blood but Damon's.
"What?" she burst out.
"Giving us both a gift here. Now, stop talking and open your mouth," Damon ordered as he thrust his wrist between Elena's lips, preventing her speech.
With a furtive head-shaking, Elena's tongue thrashed over a clean site of flesh, wiping off the residue of blood, but Damon lodged his wrist more firmly, so that her jaw was locked around its circumference. Several thick beads collected in the reservoir of her tongue, yet Elena refused to swallow.
"Drink!" he spat harshly, canines partially descended, his patience with her fully breached.
With his arm positioned as it was, bearing down and prying apart her teeth like a jack to a car, Elena held the mouthful until she could hold it no longer, giving in to the reflex of swallowing. His blood, swimming like a thick, red brine, eased down her throat with unbearable slowness. Unpleasant as it was, Elena found that it was not caustic like the wine she had consumed earlier and with its displacement, its gradual dissolving into tissue, Elena felt a new sensation cresting over her nausea. Seconds passed and a glorious relief hit her, abating the pain, returning coherency, and as the throbbing in her temples and forehead diminished, she ceased her struggling, relaxing her lips and letting the stem of blood issue between them. This vitriol, this harsh, salted drink was a balm to every hardship she could sense and Elena fought past her swallowings, knowing what he had known all along, knowing that it would restore her.
Damon relinquished pressure on seeing this, feeling some essence of himself depleted. He watched her, honing in on her life force as the color in Elena's cheeks renewed, her eyes opening into quiet gems, pupils dilating in the light. But this was not an ecstasy, as it would have been for him, merely necessity. She would tolerate it only so much as it serviced her, as any other human would have.
Damon retracted his wrist in solemnity, observing the wound as it closed, forming an invisible scar over those that were innumerable. He picked up the garments formerly set aside and offered them to Elena, who lay with her palm covering her mouth, concealing its stain and erasing this with the lengths of her fingers.
"Get dressed. Clean yourself up and...rinse your mouth out," he said brusquely.
Elena took the items, perplexed by the sudden attunement of her every joint, tendon and muscle as she stood, gauging their strength and flexibility. Many of her former thoughts had been estranged by this and she stared at Damon acutely, wonderingly, but her would-be escort maintained such a firm look of reservation that Elena held her tongue, balling up her clothes in corresponding silence, and made her way towards the door.
There was little conversation as they dragged their traveller's armaments through a typical airport scene at Malpensa, which was all very ordinary to Elena, having been under the assumption that even the arrival terminal would be marked with an atmosphere that was definitively 'Italian.' She refrained from saying so however, not wanting to appear like some Appalachian hillbilly who's only exposure to the world entailed a monthly jaunt to the nearest Wal-Mart.
Bombarded by a multi-cultural throng of escaping passengers, they slid through the cracks, filtering between families pushing luggage carts and strollers, and the business-savvy, clamouring away on ear-piece, chicly attired and self-importantly thrusting their bodies forward into a sea of textiles - dark leather and nautical sports coats, pale knit cardigans, lightweight tunics falling over black leggings, all layered to perfection.
Damon himself was not eclipsed by the severity of these fashions, dawning a chocolate leather blazer and a paper straw fedora, which he drew further down his forehead as they proceeded towards the exit.
Passing through the first terminal's sliding doors, Damon scoured the line of taxies and miscellaneous parked cars, until he sighted the vehicle he had been searching for - a black Aston Martin Volante, an exotic looking convertible with a sleek hood and a gun-metal grill.
Elena saw the direction in which his eyes had ventured and glared at the car's immaculate exterior, buffed and polished to a brilliant shine and superseding her expectations once again.
Of course, she thought contemptibly, he couldn't rent us something practical...like one of those little electric cars or a Mini. Nope, it has to be the most stupidly expensive thing he could think of. And he'll probably say he wanted the leg room or the frickin' trunk space.
A service driver stood beside the vehicle, waiting. He possessed many of the features of a local: deep set eyes, a long, straight nose and compressed lips even without a smile. Damon hailed the driver with a slight wave and the man issued back a friendly 'buongiorno.'
"Stai Signore Salvatore?" he asked officially.
"Si," responded Damon, reaching into the chest pocket of his blazer and producing a passport which he held out to the man for inspection.
The driver nodded, passing off his set of keys and speaking enthusiastically, "Excellente! Ho appena messo in un serbatoio pieno. Corre come un sogno!"
Then, without missing a beat, he ran through a mandatory spiel on vehicle policy and insurance, safety features and rental return. Sadly, his hurried rhetoric fell on deaf ears with Elena, whose only insights into the conversation were a few conjunctive words and a noun or two, and she was very glad when, after assisting in the loading of their baggage, the driver bid them a fond 'arrivederci' and returned to his company car.
"Well, that was enlightening. I swear, if he'd talked any faster, he would have given himself whiplash," Elena quipped when the man was finally out of earshot.
"I think that was the salesman in him, though...you're going to find a lot of people speed-talk around here. That's just because you're new to the language," he responded with an arrant laugh.
As both bodies moved for the right hand side of the vehicle, Damon offered her the usual wagging eyebrow, ushering her in the opposite direction and cracking open her door.
"Passengers sit on the left. Drivers on the right."
"Ri-iight. Right. Sorry," she said with an equal dose of acerbity.
In the time it took Elena to fasten her seatbelt, Damon had already climbed inside the Volante, thrown aside his hat and struck up the car's ignition.
They headed south, the landscape imperceptibly shifting, beginning to move into gentle slopes clustered by hamlets, their alabaster, stone and terracotta coloured houses roofed with Roman pan and barrel tiles, some with high arched windows and sills festooned by flowers, others plainer. It seemed to Elena that these buildings, strung together between wide pleats of hillside and hanging below the curve-swept jaw of their horizon, would one day be lost to a slowly encroaching wilderness. It lingered and slunk into the villages, overcoming even the tallest of structures; cypress trees, vines and creepers coexisting alongside walls and terraces, young roots sprouting up from planters, hemming doorways as naturally as if they were apart of the residences themselves.
In a number of areas, the houses were newer, already succumbing to symptoms of neglect and suffering from the harried, modern-age lifestyle of their occupants. Mini-Vetts, small-bedded trucks, and Autobianchis, painted in the brightest, most vibrant of shades imaginable, dotted the roads and stooped driveways as they passed through the region's smaller districts.
Elena thought it all wildly surreal and it was not with a sense of unwillingness that she allowed herself to be captivated, filling up the stores of her memory box until it swelled over with pastoral imagery - a lifetime's worth, she hoped. Damon, however, had remained coolly distant throughout most of the drive, preferring to keep his eyes fixed on the road, unaffected by the Tuscan splendour which plastered itself across the windshield. He switched on the car's satellite radio, channelled through a few of the local stations and finally settled on something international, one with a folkie sounding, upbeat fiddle.
Ever since he'd first set sail on the Atlantic, with a new aesthetic to welcome him, Damon had eagerly trawled across the European continent, partly maddened, partly intoxicated by its unfamiliarity. In sober moments, he found himself acquiring a taste for more than just the blood of foreign women, prostitute and aristocrat lovelies alike. Fresher, sweeter sounds had awakened to him on every street corner, peddled in bars, played in the illustrious halls of the Bourgeoisie, escaping from the simple setting of a farmhouse on days of celebration, and even struck out at sea. What he'd come to love the most in those days, was the sour melody of a flat-bridge violin, the double and triple-stops sung out of Ireland and Scotland, where there'd been no shortage of entertainment or crudity, and Damon, in his recently won freedom, could indulge himself in whatever, whomever he wished.
He sighed as a preposterously love-sick vocalist interrupted what might have been half-way decent listening and switched to another station.
"You didn't have to change it. I thought it was pretty good..." Elena ventured, frowning a little in disappointment.
"Please. It was Euro-pop trash. People have written better Hallmark cards," he retorted.
"So jaded," she snipped back with a roll of her eyes.
"Always. Besides, what is it with all this sugary, melt your heart out, I'll-die-if-I-can't-have-you crap anyways?"
"Residual from the eighties," Elena answered with small chuckle.
"Trust me, it's been residual for a lot longer than that. Ever since the beginning of time, our little hominoid friends were scratching out love notes in the dirt. You take a guy like Shakespeare or Tennyson, two men with a bit of cultivated sense, but no political backbone whatsoever. They pull out a few good lines but mostly, what are they remembered for? The martyrdom of star-crossed lovers, the iambic pentameter of weak-kneed fence-sitters, commiserating over their own feelings."
How was it possible, Elena asked herself, that anyone could cut down the works of men so genuinely appreciable? It was far too cynical an argument for her liking and so she prepared her response carefully.
"We studied Tennyson in my writing class. He was a Liberalist, totally game for social reform...and you're also completely overlooking all of Shakespeare's political satire," she said very seriously, pleased that her high-school education was paying off in some department. Damon merely scoffed.
"And you're missing my point entirely. What I'm trying to say is that there's nothing useful or profound in talking about posies or fairy queens or comparing your love to a summer's day when it's all dead in the water anyways," he returned in mocking emphasis.
"The fact is...we're all beasts, Elena, whether we see it that way or not. Love? Goodness? Moralism? None of those exist except to satisfy our own selfishness. Life is selfish. That's just the way it is. And the sooner humans start accepting this and stop being such hypocrites to their own desires, the better off they'll be."
She stared at the lines which pressed themselves into the bridge of his nose unforgivingly. It was as though he had always existed this way, a tall, hyperborean, steel plated half-god looking down on civilization as though he knew its inner clock and had seen into its deepest sanctum of secrets. Perhaps he was out to prove its cruelty because this was what it meant for him to live, to provide for his body, to ensure that he kept on living. Elena didn't know which way to take him.
"So...you're saying that nothing can truly be selfless or good? That everything a person does or feels is just a by-product of some self-gratifying instinct?" she asked finally.
"That's exactly what I'm saying," was his only reply.
"Then why did you to try to save your friend, that soldier? Why did you try to drag him to the barricade? You didn't have anything to gain by it. In fact...you could have been killed right along with him."
"It wasn't in my best interest to watch him die," Damon answered, the sun overtaking his eyes as he concentrated on the painted lines before them.
"And that's not useful...or profound?" she persisted, not wholly believing that Damon could have sequestered all feeling towards the events of that day, no matter how distant.
"I'm not that man, Elena. I am very far from being that man and that one useful act - it's obsolete against a million others."
Elena watched his head turn, his fingers stiffly roped around either side the steering wheel as though he were channelling all of his agitation into his hands. His eyes were an unconvincing facade, waxed over, trying for the absence of something as Damon switched on the radio again and filtered through several more stations.
A sadness touched her as Elena observed him. She hated to acknowledge his words as truth, needed to believe that there were motivations beyond the selfishness of ego - a higher, more universal principle, concerning virtue. She had always assumed that a basic goodness was present within everyone, that even the most tarnished heart was capable of redeeming itself. It was the source; the source of an emotion would always dictate its end. Lust would breed lust. Hate would breed hate. Fear would breed fear. Composites to the contradiction of living, they would elevate or pull apart the best of intentions...but those honourable acts memorialized throughout the textbooks of history, of men in service to other men, beyond any impassivity of will, well, if goodness was to come from anywhere, then surely it had come from these.
Elena swallowed down her lump of melancholy and gazed over at the mounds of earth rising and falling around them. The red had drawn her, its brightness chasing her down and demanding she look. An opiate weed of Bologna, the poppy, bordered the roadsides leading away from Sasso Marconi, arranging themselves like the droppings of a bloody rain, while in between their spacings, an intermittent dandelion cast up its spiky head to the sky.
"I used to be a king alone,
Like Solomon or Rehoboam..."
Winds whistled, the convertible's purr feeding into the sound as the radio played out a choir-air, British single, its layered voices strangely ascending, soft and sombre.
"And in this, a corvée day
Did jealous keep my picture frames
And everything did oxidate in place..."
Damon shifted his eyes a little, catching sight of Elena's posture as she sunk low in her seat, head tilted towards the eastern hillside in silent contemplation. He hesitated, reluctant to break peace with her, but a thought pile of words had already formed and were asphyxiating him by their muteness.
"In Goro...I killed a man...a captain and shipping commissioner. He ran a cargo business off the west coast of Italy. It was eighteen-sixty-six and he'd agreed to take me back to Europe with him, in exchange for a few favours. We were at sea for almost thirteen months...thirteen vile, fucking months. I was a clumsy and inexperienced, and finding a meal was a bit of a problem. Even more so on a ship. I couldn't kill any of the crew, so...like any ignoramus, I seized up every rat I could get my hands on, subsisted on them, filled the void, you could say. But I was raw on the inside when we docked, more raw than I could stand..." Damon paused, large creases settling into his brow, the slit sides of his irises boiling over with heat.
"You don't know, you can't think...all you can feel is your wasted insides coming apart. The rigger has his hands on the ropes, and he's splicing them. The sun is coming up and that work-horse, acrid sweat is sitting on his shoulders...but you don't care. All you know is the sound of that pulse, ready to blow straight out of his neck..." he halted himself in the darkness of his retelling,
"Well, like I said, we anchored and unloaded most of the ship's freight, took up a few provisions afterwards and made our way to nearest bar. Our good ol' captain plastered himself with Menabrea - such a dried up husk, a bristly old man on his last leg. Still, he'd been close with my father, working to move out items from our family's estate and bringing them back to the colony."
"I listened to him rattle on for hours about his days at sea, about trips to Africa and South America, how no destination had ever resembled anything like the markers on his maps..."
Elena never broke her gaze throughout his speech, while Damon, who's own eyes never touched her, changed in and out of the left lane. Though his hands maintained their casual assertion over the wheel as he glanced at the traffic behind them, it was clear that Damon was somewhere else, not beside her, not present to the noise around him but somewhere inside the wrenches of a memory, its blackness trickling over his countenance. With breath suspended and fingers anxiously twitching, she waited for him to continue.
"We finished our drinks, stumbled our way into some random alley, and that's when it hit me, hard like those gales over the Atlantic, harder even. That old man's gristly neck was the sweetest fix I'd had in months but when he finally crumpled, his bones knocking on the street, his mouth open in the widest grimace I'd ever seen, I could have swore he'd stolen something from me...the same way I'd taken his life. I tried to settle the whole affair and make things right between us, so I took his packet...dragged him right out to port and left him to the Adriatic. The sea swallowed him up, carried him away, and I thought maybe, if he hadn't made that bargain with me, maybe one year, five years from then, he might have died in the very same spot."
"After that, things changed. Life lost its rosy, peachy glow and suddenly I knew - I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that what the world had to offer me and what I offered it were the same thing. And there wasn't any sense left in pretending."
Damon fell into silence then, finding something in his explanations to be inadequate, perhaps even improvident. By rights, he should have said nothing on the subject. He shouldn't have felt any need to justify his left-handed approach to anyone. He should have kept her in the dark. Elena had no business knowing any aspect of his past, particularly those of the sordid variety. But to be liberated, even in speaking of it, had he been drawn by this prospect? To be free of the suffrage of that mask, to be himself, if only for a little while, and be seen by eyes that hadn't been compelled into seeing him.
"Why are you telling me all of this?" Elena asked. Her voice was disconcerted, nervously edged, though she was trying her best to hide it.
"If we're going to be spending any length of time together, then you need to understand my position on things. I'm not -" Damon stopped himself, glancing in his rear-view mirror for the near-hundredth time at the bronze Mercedes pressing a mere car's width behind them.
The Autostrada Del Sol was built to accommodate one to three lanes, a two-way road travelling north and south through the provinces, and for several miles now, Damon had taken note of the car as it slowly advanced on the line of traffic in front of it, cautiously darting into the second lane only when its concentration of vehicles dwindled. It wasn't uncommon for tourists to travel long distances by rental, though most would opt for taking the train, rather than unnecessarily suffer the cost of mileage. The operator of the Mercedes however, bore a native driving influence, a subtle mastery that no foreigner could have picked up without spending more than a few hours on the high-speed motorways of Italy.
Damon gradually released his step on the gas, the convertible slowing to a moderate cruise as he waited for the vehicle behind them to pass. Instead, the Mercedes slowed along with them, maintaining its distance and prompting a few choice words from Damon.
"Oh, for Christ's sake, get on with it!" he shot out temperamentally and Elena, giving him a speculative eye, turned her head round to watch as the Mercedes withdrew further back, allowing for more room between the two cars.
Scowling at his centre rear-view mirror, Damon reapplied pressure to the gas, the engine toiling away discordantly and bringing them up to speed with the rest of traffic. Yet just as he did so, the driver of the Mercedes closed the gap, badgering the space between the convertible's tailgate and its own front bumper.
"You've got to be kidding me. There's another lane! Move!"
This time Damon gestured at the driver, swinging his arm out and making his message apparent. The car refused to back off, however, purposefully asserting its course and stirring up questions in Damon's mind as to what its objective might be. This was not a Civetta, the secret vehicle of a law enforcement officer, and neither was it any that he might have recognized. He squinted to see the driver, who wore a thick set of shades, half concealed by a visor that deterred him from making out the stranger's upper half of head. Something about this made Damon very anxious. Surely it wasn't coincidental, he thought, despite having informed no one, with the minor exception being his travel agent, of his intentions on leaving the country. Damon treated this thought with the usual dose of scepticism and opted for a different means with which to extricate them from the path of the Mercedes.
He saw a road-sign marking the next town at five-hundred meters. Rioveggio, a touristy village of the commune of Monzuno, was nothing so peculiar or interesting, but as the convertible needed refuelling, its meter having dipped below the quarter tank line, Damon would settle on it as a detour, if only for its expedience.
He gave no mention of this to Elena, simply waited, kept the vehicle straight until the very last moment when he swerved tightly into the exit lane, the rear end of the car losing traction briefly as it spun in its former direction. A strangled cry echoed shrilly from Elena's throat and the Mercedes responded quick enough to jerk its wheels left, missing the rear end of the convertible by a near yard as it continued down the roadway, unable to make the same turn.
"Jesus! You could have told me you were going to do that!" The words fired from her mouth like missile.
Feigning the intrepid look of a stuntman, Damon paid her anger no mind as they headed towards a toll booth, his one hand gripping the steering wheel, his other reaching into the back pocket of his jeans, lifting his hips as he retrieved the plastic card, a Telepass, which would pay their way without necessitating a stop.
"How else was I going to get that asshole off our tail? he responded, shimmying back into his seat and deferring from any explanation involving the nature of the driver's aggressive and suspicious following. He hadn't understood it himself but he had listened to instinct, an instinct which told him that, if it wasn't a cop and it wasn't simply an instance of indiscriminate road rage, then perhaps there was some deeper motive, something as calculated as his own reason for returning to Florence. Perhaps there was even a correlation. Again, he sloughed off his paranoia, making the turn for Rioveggio and laying on the brakes as they made their short decent into a sprawl of three-storied buildings coming together in a mixture of stucco and cemented stonework.
"We need to gas up. There's an Esso up ahead...and I'm guessing you probably need the washroom," he offered.
"Yeah...sure," Elena returned absently, pretending to be engrossed by the stream of bistros and cafes competing for business on either side of the street, though none of these did she scrutinize with any manner of sincere attention.
She had begun to recognize with greater regularity those moments when Damon turned evasive and yet it seemed that she could barely gain entrance into the twisted, labyrinthine workings of his brain. His guards were manifold and his actions, though never arbitrary, were always far from predictable and even more impossible to figure out.
She gave up on the attempt as Damon pulled into the Esso, parking in front of a self-service pump and affording the station's gas attendant a little respite during his one hour lunch period.
"Two minutes," he said as they both climbed out of the vehicle. Elena nodded, giving her limbs a long stretch before wandering to the open doors of the petrol station.
On entering, the scent of coffee grounds so branded the store's air that Elena felt it seeping into her nerves from sheer exposure. After a sweeping examination of the area, eyes making contact with those of the store clerk and praying that she wouldn't be drawn into a one-sided conversation with the man, Elena found the washrooms by their plaques, displaying the same white stick-figures that she had long grown accustomed to seeing in America.
Damon had taken his time in following her from the vehicle and just as she had slipped through the appropriate door, Elena heard him speaking casually with the clerk, his accent slick and steady. She tucked herself away, listening as he paid for the gas, hearing the obligatory 'grazi,' and the crisp sound of his shoes as they moved across the floor's fresh wax. Then, after she'd made use of the facilities, she stood before the washroom's mirror, appraising her reflection and sighing.
Thoughts seized her as Elena turned on the faucet and ran her hands through a stream of cold water. She smoothed her dripping palms across the sides of her face and vigorously scrubbed at her mouth, usurped by a stronger recall this time, a taste arisen along the inner side of her tongue. She bent under its return, the sense of that slow-creeping, bitter restorative washing away her miseries and aches. For it wasn't solely Damon's blood, not his alone, she told herself, remembering the story of the ship master sent out to sea, but the essence of every man and woman, every vessel that had filled him, their veins shrivelling into extinction. Elena had consumed a portion of this now. It belonged to her, severing her from good.
Yet even then, in her lamentation, she remembered the coolness, the stone-smooth satisfaction of Damon's arms carrying her to a mattress, how she had pulled them against her unconscionably, selfishly clinging to the ease which they'd brought her. And he had lain there, a murderer, a cynical horror, locking his icy hand on her side and issuing her into sleep.
She had known what he was long before he had told her of these memories...but perhaps it was in the details of them, the precise climate and circumstances which had afforded Damon the reason to abandon all his inner principle, casting off the used skins of his humanity and devouring the world one body at a time.
Elena touched her lips, staring at herself in the blue florescent-lit mirror. That wide-eyed girl so tenderized by fear, once shepherded by a town and family now miles from reach, she was moving out of sight, an orphan beating her fists from within the glass, waiting to be recognized by the stranger who observed her. Who would save that girl and for that matter, what was she to be saved from?
An impulse grew, a cortical aurora breaking over the gloom of her thoughts. She saw herself running, feet flying somewhere past the Esso, down the cement roads of their modern hamlet, to anywhere, away from the one who had stolen her. But was she really so desperate? To escape so unpreparedly from the Stockholm syndrome that had reduced her to nothing but an accomplice, a secondary participant to her own life. Her life. So self-assured, so confidant she'd been once, not a genuine risk taker but a pragmatist, an optimist surely, someone she used to admire but couldn't now.
Fear still had its place, accompanying the natural worries that struck a person who's window had come, a time for entrance into the wide and frightening world with only herself to rely on. She couldn't imagine getting back, making her way out of Italy alone. Still, she had her passport, her translator and her wallet which held a debit card that would give her access to bit of cash, though not nearly enough for a return trip.
Shaking, Elena pulled open the door to the washroom and glanced around for Damon. He was still pumping gas, his back turned, his shirt ballooning out like a canvas sail in a sharp wind, tufts of black hair held aloft and glossy in the afternoon sun. He would spare her another moment, a few at best, before coming to look for her. He would know her options of exit...but could he follow? Perhaps he wouldn't bother. Perhaps he would decide that she wasn't worth the trouble, that she was to him an expendable appendage which evolution had dictated no need of. She hoped for this somehow, and yet she pitied the solitary, uninhabitable island of flesh on which she gazed. He was the wild thing roaming those places where humans like herself feared to tread, a lost boy grown within agelessness, a lizard-tongued other, while she remained the product of her generation, like the failed heroine of so many novels, disparaged of her prized yet unobtainable ideals.
Truly, this ideology had fallen and so to salvage its remains, to salvage herself, Elena watched as the preoccupied store clerk restocked a commodity of paper cups, lids, and stir sticks in service to the espresso machine, along with the store's numerous price-gouging coffees, eyes never lifting from his task. She darted past the cash counter and through an unmarked door leading into the storage room which housed a mashing of the petrol station's inventory. Cases of tobacco, dry goods and beverages lay on tall stacked pallets, making the path to an exit door unobvious. Nevertheless, she located it, clutching the silver bar that ran across the door's width as tightly as though she dreaded what was on the other side. Then she drew it open, letting out the stale warehouse air, unsettling all its dust and debris, and burst into unknown freedom.
Translations:
"Buongiorno." - Good morning.
"Excellente! Ho appena messo in un serbatoio pieno. Corre come un sogno." - Excellent! I just put in a full tank. She runs like a dream.
"Grazi." - Thank you.