19
Will You Say It Forever, Signor?
There is a boy staring at another boy.
They are in a schoolroom, listening to a teacher tell them about the Spanish Inquisition but not quite paying attention. They have been staring at each other for a while now. The boy, the one from Sicily who is sixteen years old and very lonely, feels very determined to not break eye contact. He wants to stare at the other, the pure blood Spaniard, until his eyes are dry from the mere sight of him.
The boy from Sicily doesn't have many friends—he has celebrated every birthday here since his fourteenth alone. He talks to people, certainly, but his accent and mannerisms and strange aversion to being touched or walked near have made it difficult to find people willing to stay around him long enough. They seem to get easily fed up with his antics. The way he cringes and pushes people away, even when they lightly touch his arm. The way he blurts insults and hurls them at people. The way he gazes with a constant pout and sits with his notebook even when others invite him out. The way he only seems to move or respond when they offer him cigarettes or something to drink.
But this boy he's staring at is different. He had told him, openly and with no reservations, that he didn't mind him. If he wanted a friend, he had one, the boy had said, handing a cigarette to him. Not anything that would warrant the boy from Sicily seeing a friend or partner for life, but it was enough to put a feeling of fire in his stomach and make him thirst so much for affection—or, rather, realize this thirst for affection that had been building inside of him and was close to drowning him alive.
So now he stares.
They have agreed to go to lunch after class. The Spanish boy has a movie he's been wanting to watch—would the Sicilian boy like to come?
Of course.
If it means you tell me that I am something to you—as long as you show me some semblance of affection, as twisted or distorted as it may be—then I would like very much to come.
This isn't the first time the lonely boy from Sicily has done this. There have been other boys before this Spanish one. A French one. A British one. Another Spanish one, but from the north. One after the other...
It helps him miss his brother less. Helps him miss Rome less. Helps him miss the streets of Sicily he has come to think of as "home" less. Helps him forget about the fact that he has never truly had innocence, has he?
Romano convinced Toni to let him deal with dinner that night. He had scoured the cabinets of President Eyebrow's kitchens and found all the ingredients he would need for a simple spaghetti dish, complete with tomatoes and eggplants and basil and ricotta cheese. Filled with the taste of his home in the Sicilian streets. So now he stood in the kitchen, slicing tomatoes and eggplants, his eyes moving naturally toward the living room every few moments. To the spot where Toni sat, legs crossed, glasses askew, writing like a madman. His back was to Romano, but he didn't need to see his face to know his expression. It was his writing expression—furrowed brows, tight lips, hard and shimmering eyes. Writing, writing, writing, stopping every few moments to fiddle with the unsuspecting hairs of his eyebrows or turn his neck and look at Romano. Smile a stupidly genuine smile that could have made a cynical, senile old man laugh. Then turn back to his notebook.
He hasn't let me read any of the things he's written about me.
What if they're about how terrible and annoying I am?
Romano chuckled to himself and kept cooking. Moving his hands instinctively to the beat of the Frank Sinatra wafting from the gramophone. The smell of eggplant, tomatoes, and basil filled the cottage.
"Oi, Toni! Open a window, would you?"
It seemed that Toni didn't hear, because he didn't even turn around. With a roll of his eyes, Romano left his station and cracked one of the windows open. Still Toni didn't move, except to fiddle with his eyebrows. Though Romano had to admit, he liked that image of him. Sitting and writing like that. Not being able to hear even the voice of his lover. He paused at the window and stared at his profile for a moment. His face exactly as Romano had imagined it. Then, perhaps tingling with the feeling of someone watching him, Toni finally looked up, gazing into Romano's face over his glasses.
"Now you look like a professor," Romano mocked.
"I do, don't I?" he winked. Romano gave an exaggerated wink back and returned to the kitchen. He continued to cook, unbelievably happy. But always with that nagging in the back of his head. The voices telling him that it wasn't real—or, if it was, that it wouldn't last.
He'll grow tired of you.
Even if he does love you.
But...do you think he actually does?
Has anyone ever told the truth about that before?
Are you worth loving?
As they were sitting down to eat, Toni snapped his fingers.
"Ai, I forgot! I brought a nice bottle of wine."
"Don't worry, I'll get it. You start eating."
"It's in my duffel bag."
"No shit."
As Romano walked by to the bedroom, Toni pinched his ass lightly, making him red in the face and quivering in the skin. In the room, Romano put Toni's duffel bag on the bed and began to ruffle through it. The clothes and the books and the random knick-knacks—why did he bother bringing all this?—in search of the bottle of wine, for which he had become unknowingly desperate. As he felt his hand close around its neck, something else caught his eye. A small blue box in the very corner of the bag, hidden away. Romano put the bottle of wine on the bed and pulled out the box. He opened it and the scent was aggressive to his unsuspecting nose. It made his heart jump as a dormant desire awakened. He moved to the doorframe, blue box in hand.
"Toni! You didn't tell me you brought this!" he cried. Toni, pasta hanging from his lips, turned over his shoulder.
"Roma, you smoke?"
"You should've told me you had some!"
"I didn't know you smoked, querido."
"Well then why'd you bring it?!"
Toni shrugged and slurped up his pasta.
"Habit, maybe?" Then he cracked a smile. "You want to smoke it after dinner?"
"Yes."
"Vale. Pues, trae el vino, Romanito. Después de la cena."
So they ate their dinner and they drank their wine and they talked. About Wales, about their campus, about recent literature that they'd read. Toni throwing unwarranted compliments and Romano unable to respond to them. With no choice but to stare, feeling as if he were stargazing, into Toni's eyes. Pushing away the voices in his head and the repetition of when Toni had said to his wife on the phone, Te amo.
"You're a great cook!"
"Lo sé."
"What is this dish called?"
"Pasta alla norma."
"Tan rica."
"My uncle taught me how to make it."
"Is it the only thing you know how to cook?"
"No! What kind of Sicilian do you take me for?"
They laughed, their minds growing happily hazy from the alcohol. The music was sweeter in their ears and the pasta was richer on their tongues. When they were finished, Romano took the dishes to the sink. As he washed them, swaying to the music, Toni came up behind him and wrapped his arms around his waist. He kissed his neck and set Romano on fire.
"Te quiero," he whispered into his ear. Romano closed his eyes and his hand stopped scrubbing for a moment. Lost in Toni's breath, in his voice engulfing him, in the feeling of his fingers squeezing his slender waist.
"Let me at least finish the dishes, bastard," he said. With so little conviction that he wouldn't have been able to convince a child. Toni, Romano had discovered, loved to tease, though. He kissed Romano's neck one more time and went back to his spot on the floor of the living room.
He closed his notebook and grabbed the little blue box and began to roll a spliff. The last time Romano had smoked a spliff had been in Granada, just before he came to England. He had always preferred them to cigarettes—being high was a very luxurious and helpful feeling for him, he had found. And it was so popular in Spain that it had been nearly impossible to avoid. He was very excited, more than he would have liked to admit, to get high again.
When he was finally finished, he changed into his pajamas and set the fire in the fireplace and curled up on the floor beside Toni. He had dragged with him from the bedroom one of the large quilts. He could imagine President Eyebrow's grandmother, with equally grandiose eyebrows, sitting and quilting it herself here in the Welsh countryside. The idea made him smile. They wrapped it around their shoulders and squeezed very close together. Before Toni could say anything, Romano sat himself between Toni's legs and leaned back against his chest. Toni laughed against his hair and hugged him tight, tight, tight, before finishing the spliff.
"You know what you're doing, old man?"
"Claro, soy Madrileño."
Romano couldn't argue with that.
They lit up and got high. Not so high that they were unaware of their surroundings and unaware of each other, but high enough that they were lost, wandering, soaring and singing in the sensations of one another. Romano felt that there was nothing better, no better feeling at all, than being held like this by Antonio Fernández Carriedo. So tightly that he might have suffocated. Feeling his warm, marijuana-poisoned breaths on the back of his neck as his lips kissed the spot just above the center of his shoulder blades. Romano leaned back against him and held his fingers and could have stayed like that forever. Staring into those flames. High and drowning and not able to hear even a peep from the voices in his head.
As he kissed the back of Romano's neck, letting his tongue draw secret tunnels from Madrid to Sicily, Romano thought about his mother for some reason. He wondered if the warmth he felt now, in Toni's arms, was anything like the warmth he had felt in his mother's arms. As he wondered, Toni lowered the back of Romano's shirt and kissed the center of his shoulder blades. Where the bone of his spine protruded. And he moved lower.
But then he stopped. Brought his finger to Romano's back and stroked it.
"I wonder why I never noticed," he said, his words slow. "You have scars on your back."
"Yeah."
"Why didn't I notice?"
Romano shrugged.
"Do you have others?"
"Yeah. But not many. They're mostly on my back."
"Why?"
"Because Papá didn't want anybody to notice them."
Toni froze. Romano leaned back further against him until they brushed cheeks.
"They're from when I lived with Papá and Feli in Rome. Before he shipped me off to Sicily so I couldn't bother him anymore." Now Romano was talking and he wasn't sure why but he couldn't stop. "How old was I the first time...Four? Five? I don't know. He did it the first time because he was really angry at me for breaking an old vase. I had chorea—you know, uncontrollable muscle movements. I ended up growing out of it. But not before I fucked up pretty much everything."
"Roma..."
"But I think after the first time, he realized that hitting me made him feel better about hating me. You know? I guess I represented my mother to him. Or...I don't know, maybe he saw some twisted image of himself in me. His little bastard child. Anyway, after the first time, he couldn't get enough. A lot of the time I couldn't go out anywhere because I had a black eye or a bloody lip and he didn't want anybody to notice."
Toni held Romano more tightly, but was silent.
"His excuse was that I needed to be more like my genius baby brother. Like little Feliciano. Look at him, so fair and so talented. Listen to him play the piano. Look at his painting. Watch him dance. Admire how he smiles and is bright and is absolutely nothing like you. You're so dark and useless. Bambino spregevole. Why can't you be more like him? Why can't you stop fucking up everything, Lovino?! Mi rovina, mi rovina."
Now Romano was thinking about his father.
"Whenever he took me to his office I knew what was coming and sometimes I pissed myself I was so scared. He would sit me down and yell at me. You are stupid, you are worthless, control yourself. Then he would hit me. Sometimes until I saw stars. As I grew older he learned that my back was the best place because nobody could see the bruises. Other times he wouldn't speak to me for weeks, and he would tell all the maids and butlers to ignore me, too. He would come home and kiss Feliciano on the forehead as we ran to the door to greet him, and then he would walk to his room without so much as a glance in my direction. Can you imagine what that's like? Being treated as a dirty, irritating speck of dust to be cleaned up by somebody else by your own father?"
"No."
"Of course not! Of course not." Romano paused, distracted by the way Toni's fingers looked in the light of the fire. They were very graceful and beautiful. "I didn't cry very often, though, because I didn't want Feli to know. He was the only thing that kept me going. The only thing that kept me strong. Nonno, too. He used to tell me stories about my mother and he took me to get medicine for my chorea and he brought Feliciano to visit me in Sicily after Papá shipped me off when I was seven. Maybe I shouldn't call him Papá? He disowned me...how many years ago? I forget. But he disowned me. I'm not really part of the Vargas family anymore, but I don't have another name to go by so I use that one."
Romano chuckled to himself.
"I'm pretty fucked up now. I don't think it's because of my father, though. I don't blame him. I think it's because I'm just fucked up. I hear voices in my head and sometimes I don't know how to get out of bed because I can't figure out why I would even bother. It's hard to eat because I don't have an appetite a lot of the time. Writing helps."
"You're very good at it."
"I know. I can do it in a lot of languages, too."
"Que eres impresionante, hijo."
"Spanish, Italian, English, Arabic..."
"Muy, muy impresionante."
"But in the end they were right. Feli is much more talented than I am. He's a real genius. And you know the worst part? He's not even an asshole about it. He's humble and he's kind. He makes me feel all warm—I love him a lot. Sometimes I wish that I hated him so I could finally be free from that family, but I love him so much that I would never dream of it."
"He loves you, too."
"How the fuck do you know?"
"He told me."
"Yeah?"
"Mhmm."
"He told me, too. Actually, he tells me all the time. I don't believe him. Why would I? I made his childhood more difficult than it needed to be, you know? It's not fair to make a kid feel bad about being good at things. Sometimes he refused to draw or play anything on the piano because 'Lovi feels bad and I don't like that!' He's too nice for his own good."
"Do you believe me?"
"Eh?"
"When I tell you I love you, do you believe me?"
"I don't know. Probably not."
"Te quiero," he murmured. Drew the words with his breath onto Romano's burning skin. Romano closed his eyes and leaned his head back. Let his muscles relax. "Te quiero, Lovino Vargas. Te quiero. Te quiero." Drawing them on different parts of his bruised back. Moving along the paths he had traced with his tongue, down through the secret tunnels from Madrid to Sicily.
"Why do you keep repeating it?" he whispered.
"To make sure you believe it," Toni said. "Te quiero. Te quiero. Te quiero. Te quiero."
"I don't think just saying it is going to help."
"Te quiero. Te quiero. Te quiero."
Don't stop.
"Te quiero. Te quiero. Te quiero."
Don't ever stop.
"Bésame."
Will you say it forever?
¿Lo dirás para siempre, Toni?
"Te quiero."
I don't believe you.
BOOM TITLE DROP
*throws confetti*
in other news i love pasta alla norma
Translations:
Pues, trae el vino (Spanish)=well, bring the wine
Después de la cena=after dinner
lo sé=I know it
tan rica=how delicious
soy Madrileño=I'm from Madrid
mi rovina (Italian)=you ruin me
Que eres impresionante (Spanish)=you're so impressive