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Back The Scent of Your Breath Save as PDF
Chapters (45)
  1. Cover Page
  2. The Scent of Your Breath
  3. Dedication
  4. ONE
  5. TWO
  6. THREE
  7. FOUR
  8. FIVE
  9. SIX
  10. SEVEN
  11. EIGHT
  12. NINE
  13. TEN
  14. ELEVEN
  15. TWELVE
  16. THIRTEEN
  17. FOURTEEN
  18. FIFTEEN
  19. SIXTEEN
  20. SEVENTEEN
  21. EIGHTEEN
  22. NINETEEN
  23. TWENTY
  24. TWENTY-ONE
  25. TWENTY-TWO
  26. TWENTY-THREE
  27. TWENTY-FOUR
  28. TWENTY-FIVE
  29. TWENTY-SIX
  30. TWENTY-SEVEN
  31. TWENTY-EIGHT
  32. TWENTY-NINE
  33. THIRTY
  34. THIRTY-ONE
  35. THIRTY-TWO
  36. THIRTY-THREE
  37. THIRTY-FOUR
  38. THIRTY-FIVE
  39. THIRTY-SIX
  40. THIRTY-SEVEN
  41. THIRTY-EIGHT
  42. THIRTY-NINE
  43. FORTY
  44. FORTY-ONE
  45. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Then, down came Dad and my uncles with their own gear: cameras and movie cameras. They said they wanted to photograph us children, but in fact their lenses were always trained on the bottoms of the women in the sea. You got furious, but still you took the sun, mumbling, “What’s so lovely about that bum, what do they see in it? It’s flabby, sagging …”

Every weekend the band came and set up in the central courtyard surrounded by the villagers’ houses. I watched it all, sitting on the concrete step, letting my legs dangle because I couldn’t touch the ground with my feet. There was Signor Sibilla, who, when his wife went away, flirted with his neighbor, a fat, vulgar woman who gave off a strong, rancid smell. Then there was the Witch, who came down covered in sequins, her eyes surrounded by gleaming, green eye shadow, her black, black hair down to her shoulders, always wearing tight, fluorescent clothes. She sat down next to the band’s keyboard player and tried to follow the music so she could play the songs on her pianola the next day. She was our band for the rest of the week.

Grandma’s thighs, on these occasions, were sublime, especially as she danced. “Put your hands in the air, shake them all about … Do it when Simon says, and you will never be out.”

They were sublime both to me and to Signor Loy, the Sardinian who looked like a tarantula. Every weekend the band had to leave earlier than planned because Granddad started punching Signor Loy, who, undaunted, went on slobbering over Grandma.

Queen of the summer, she was more radiant than the rest. She gleamed, and her brilliance was more powerful than the sun’s reflection. More glittering than the Witch’s sequins.

FIFTEEN

Sometimes I think about you. No, that’s not true, not sometimes: I think about you all the time. And every time I do a tear slips out, from only one eye. If Thomas asks me why I’m crying, I reply that it’s nothing, that I’ve focused my eye on a point on the horizon and that’s why my iris is stinging. I’m thinking about you and your unbroken solitude.

The pizza has just turned up and you’ve been searching through the money box to find coins because the boy has no change. When he (and his pimples) have disappeared, you laugh and say, in Sicilian dialect, “Che scemu carusu”—“What a stupid boy.”