Everything Beautiful Began After Part 36

She pretends not to hear.

She is wearing eyegla.s.ses and h.e.l.lo kitty earrings.

Her shoes have glitter in the straps. She is here for the summer in the place where her father was a boy. Her doll will be given new clothes by a grandmother in black. She'll try certain foods for the first time and like them. Everyone will clap because it's the food of her people. She looks at you without smiling and tries to guess which suitcase is yours.

Without speaking you have become friends. You are talking with your eyes. You will never get to know one another. You will never even share a coffee or a fire or a book about the sea or any other moment, except the one right now that is this moment.

And then you realize that you are thinking the way you used to.

When you were Valeria's age, you had the flint in your hands.

Your mind is unreeling all the history you can fathom.

Dinosaurs pull leaves from the tree above the shed. The sky echoes with the leathery snap of pterodactyl.

You run toward the house.

Your parents are watching television.

The excitement is pouring from you.

Your pants are wet because you waited to pee.

You hold up the rock.

It's the greatest moment of your life. You smile at the little girl and her father.

Dreamers conquered the world long ago.

Chapter Sixty-One.

You are in a small Sicilian taxi. The interior is dusty-a bag of flour burst open.

The past is a mess of lines, like a sketch seen from afar.

Our perception of the future is the past in disguise.

The driver is taking you to Noto.

The driver taps the steering wheel and whistles softly through his teeth.

Our greatest power in subtle, momentary gestures.

For a land of rolling yellow fields, clear seas, and heavy baked rock-Sicily's human history is a violent one. Myths of dismemberment, towns growing from slits where limbs were swallowed by the earth, countless invaders, earthquakes, volcanoes, and battles-those early lessons in human anatomy.

You see water in the distance, a blue unblinking eye peeking over the hills.

To Sicilians you are another invader. You have come to learn-to take away knowledge. Like Odysseus, you are a single soul with the burden of ages.

Sicily was a gateway to the underworld. It was where Orpheus came to find Eurydice.

You have been dropped in the main square.

There are trees everywhere.

People huddle in their shadows.

We see in others what we want and what we fear.

Close to the square there is a fountain of many streams. A cage of water. To get there, you must perish in the heat.

People wander through the park. There are stone heads on blocks. Their features have worn away. But even the faceless dead of these stone men have shadows as real as anyone living. Like the Sicilian people themselves, the statues defy their historical disfigurement with a dignity foreigners will never understand.

You will one day dissolve in the earth or in fire.

And the trees are bursting with life, but their leaves are frayed at the edges.

You are sitting on a bench in Sicily, in the town of Noto, where George lives.

Once destroyed by an earthquake and then rebuilt.

After every chapter of devastation, there is rebuilding.

It happens without thought.

It happens even when there is no guarantee it won't happen again.

Humans may come and go-but the thread of hope is like a rope we pull ourselves up with.

And the sky is an open mouth. The streets of Noto are busy. People drain into the piazzas from the alleys-they negotiate their town in measured steps like hands on a clock. Their lives are the same but always different.

In a square cornered by a baroque church and a gelateria, you can see someone you know sitting on a bench and your body breaks with joy. He has been waiting for you.

He is wearing the clothes you last remember him in: linen trousers and a white shirt with a tie in a Windsor knot. Blue blazer, despite the heat.

He sees you and rushes over.

You both stand and look-two people separated only by the girth of everything they have to say.

Then he is upon you, all arms.

He is the first person you have hugged in years. Sicilians may not be particularly welcoming-but public shows of emotion are met with pa.s.sionate approval.

You hold one another and recreate an ancient tableaux.

You look for shadows but see only the stone beneath, worn by centuries of footfall, centuries of pursuit and aspiration, centuries of worry that came to nothing.

He is certainly more handsome. His face is in two halves now, darker and more chiseled. When your bodies separate, you sit down on a bench.

There is a resolve in his voice you have never heard before. And then bells of the church come to life and shower you with hollow tones.

Three hours later you are sitting in his kitchen. The table is light blue. His cafe-style chairs are bright red. He is stuffing two fish-spigola-with dried oregano and salt. The fish in his hand is a silver muscle, a flash of life.

You start telling him about all the flights you took. The fish makes a wet sound when he sets it on the wooden cutting board. There is blood on his hand.

You are drinking fizzy water from a tall gla.s.s with white lines. There is a pair of scales on the fridge. There is also a calendar on the wall. There are several cats in the apartment. They are thin and their fur is coa.r.s.e and uneven. They are the strays of the town. George tells you that he feeds them regularly.

On the walk back to his apartment from the square, you asked about the professor and his work in Turkey. You listened attentively. You can't wait to see him. George carried your case and gave every beggar a coin. And he moved with the air of someone who is happy.

"Sicily is the gateway to the underworld," he said.

You know he can sense the emotional void inside you-for his new love echoes in your abandoned house.

He is working now as a professor. He teaches American exchange students. He has aged, you can see that, and he is still sober-which is a relief.

George tells you more about his wife. She is not here tonight, he says. She is with her mother. But tomorrow her brothers will bring her home from her village of Francofonte. She is excited to meet you. He can't stop telling you how beautiful she is.

He has fallen too, but in the opposite way.

Chapter Sixty-Two.

Like the armies that once landed here in wooden ships, you had been prepared to invade George's world with the endless narrative of journey.

But when you feel the lines of words poised and ready to fall in breathlike blows from you mouth, you feel only the soothing emptiness of this hot island, this "hollow ball of fire," and the words age in your mouth and turn to crumbs and then ash.

Perhaps in dreams these words will come to life again-once they are splashed with sleep.

George leaves the table once during dinner to get a plate for bones.

After you have eaten, you wipe your hands with the halves of lemons. On a tall wooden sideboard with gla.s.s doors, there is a photo of a sad old man. George sees you looking.

"My father remarried."

"Your father?"

"To a woman from Nigeria. They were just here-my mother came too with her boyfriend, same one she's had for years."

George has become everything that he was capable of, while you have been ravaged.

Later you wander the streets outside his apartment talking.

You tell him everything.

George asks where the journal is.

"It's in my case."

He wants to see it.

"You don't think the child should have it?" he says.

"No. Do you?"

"No. What good would it do?"

"I was going to burn it, but I thought we could leave it in the sea."

"We can," George says. "If that's what you want."

Then you eat granita di caffe from plastic cups.

He orders two bottles of water. Sobriety suits him. There is an effortless elegance in him the locals admire. He tells you he's building a library for his department. He asks if you can help fill it, if you can find things to go in it. He tells you he wants knowledge to be given to others. You think he will soon become a father.

He is full of the breath that brings life to empty places.

You are hatching from the past.

Glimpses of light, of feelings, thoughts, and ideas, wait to be discovered again.

No . . . not discovered, but appreciated.

The time of discovery has finished for you.

Your life now is the appreciation of all that is good-all that is worth living for. And you embrace life and its inevitable end like hands joined in prayer.

Your stillness is no longer despair but patience.

Your grief is something to be admired-the pain of severance. A scar where something used to be.

To love again, you must not discard what has happened to you, but take from it the strength you'll need to carry on.

END OF BOOK THREE.