Nonfiction by Aldo Giovannitti
Bruno does his business by the bench by the parish, then he pulls. This is station two of our morning circuit. The road climbs and then levels, and you trudge along, as we crawl arm in arm, the leash in my other hand. Going back, you murmur, I would try not to escape all the time from myself. Then you disengage, and let your eyes be carried by the asphalt flowing below us.
You sit on the couch, hands on your knees, your robes hung on whatever is left of you. I notice your hump for the first time, then I look at my watch. Still one hour to the next round of pills; after that there’s lunch. She bends to lay a towel on your chest, so we won’t need to clean your shirt when you’ll wake up. She knows that in the wait you’ll let your eyelids go, bring your lips apart, and abandon your head to its weight.
Your attention span has contracted to a handful of seconds, and we need to pull words out of you quick before they are gone, before they drag with them your blurred intentions. Have I run away from here searching for what was closest to you? You made it, you said seventeen years ago standing on this very rug, holding my visa in both hands, staring at my portrait superimposed on the filigreed page.
Now you can speak only a tenth of what you used to, but each word is made of rock; the unessential has fled you. I’ve never paid as much attention to what you say as I do now—mumble, in truth—and the more I listen, the more I see you too had an entire life of your own. You too have wandered the lands, swum the seas, spun through the clouds I believed were mine alone. Your world, infinite as mine; I have finally surrendered not to comprehend it.
After dinner comes the fourth and last round. You lay the pills on the tablecloth, lining them up as you did with most things in your life. This is a ritual, and we follow its steps with devotion. You unscrew the plastic bottle, tilt it together with your chest, and pour the water onto the tablecloth, beside the glass, for the time it would have taken to fill it. We let you do that without intervening, watching the water spread on the double-folded cotton, because that is the least respect we can pay. And when you set the bottle aside you find out the glass is empty. You jerk back. Fooled again. Then we fill the glass for you.
We’ve spent the last day of this rare visit, before I fly away, at the beach house you both returned to for the past fifty-two years. A silent drive got us here. And by now an entire day has passed, and Bruno has run along the water’s edge to exhaustion. We sat you on a chair in the sand, but you didn’t like the wind and turned your gaze away from the sea.
The sun has set, and I walk past your bedroom heading to mine. I see you sleep in a fetal position, hiding into the wall, holding onto the orthopedic pillow she has bought to you both. I didn’t know you slept this way now, and that she let your bedside lamp burn through the night.
The lamp is recycled from my childhood; it diffuses a dim red light. And the light fills your heart more than it fills the room, while you dream of a decades old, Italian summer.
Aldo Giovannitti writes about shifting perception, moral ambiguity, and transformation. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Open Journal of Arts & Letters, The Bookends Review, and Corvus Review, alongside essays in The Diplomat and South China Morning Post. He is a member of The Poetry Society and PEN America and is based in London.
