The Glassblower of Murano - Marina Fiorato [48]
`What?'
`You eat with such ... not appetite, not hunger, not lust, but a bit of all three.'
Gusto?'
`Yes, exactly! It means all those things and more. I guess we don't have an equivalent word in English.'
`The English don't need one,' he said, including her again. And then he smiled.
And that was that.
Gusto. The word stayed in her head for the rest of the night.
Gusto, she thought, as he kissed her hungrily on the Ponte San Barnaba.
Gusto, she thought as they drank Valpolicella straight from the bottle on the balustrade of her roof garden, their feet dangling perilously over the canal far below.
Gusto, she thought as he took her by the wrist and led her, unprotesting, to her bed.
Gusto, she thought, as he took her loudly in the darkness.
In her dream they were in bed; Leonora's blonde hair tumbled on Alessandro's chest. But when she woke he was gone. Light from the canal played on the ceiling of her apartment, and illuminated the icon above her bed, with the heart burning still. Brighter today.
Leonora smelled coffee and padded through to the kitchen. The pot was on the stove, still warm, with plenty left. She poured herself a cup, concentrating hard on not feeling hurt.
He owes me nothing, has promised me nothing, why should he stay?
When she went to the fridge for milk she saw it. A postcard stuck under her fridge magnet. She recognized the style of Titian; a picture of a cardinal flanked by two young men. The man on the right, also in priests' robes, was the image of Alessandro. Leonora read the back; Tiziano Vecelli, portrait of Pope Clement X with his nephews, Niccolo and - surely not! - Alessandro. 1546. Beside the legend there was something else too. A hasty scrawl which read: `Ciao bella.'
Leonora sat heavily at the table, heart thumping. What did it mean? Was the postcard something he carried around with him, a device for susceptible foreign girls? What did `Ciao bella' mean? It had a terrible ring to it, the tacky sign-off of a lothario from a hundred movies. Even `bella' in this context held no weight. It was all of a piece with the offhand phrase - it did not denote beauty. She tortured herself over the semantics of the phrase. She knew that Ciao came from `ci vediamo'. The same meaning as the French `Au revoir' - I'll see you again. She did not know the Italian for `Adieu'.
Leonora shook her head. She did not want to plan, or flagellate herself with these thoughts. She did not know what Alessandro wanted from her, if anything. She watched the water on the ceiling, listened to the cries of children playing outside and two old men having a shouted conversation with each other across the campo. Sunday stretched ahead, yawning empty. She must busy herself; find something to do, something to think about, before it was too late.
It's already too late. I'm in love.
CHAPTER 14
A Rival
It was Monday. Leonora was on the roof, leaning on the balustrade, looking over to the lagoon and wishing she were on the boat to Murano. But today Adelino had insisted that she stay at home, to be interviewed by a journalist from Il Gazzettino, the foremost newspaper of the Veneto region. She had dressed carefully in a white linen dress she had found on the Rialto, and bound her abundant hair with lace ribbons. She knew that today there was to be no photographer, but she was under instruction from the Milanese advertisers to appear as feminine as possible at all times. They didn't want to sell their campaign on the back of a tomboy - the whole point of Leonora's appeal, apparently, was that she was a girl in a man's job. Oh well. If she could project an image of womanly vulnerability she might appeal to the journalist's better instincts.
If he has any.
What she really wanted to do was don her usual uniform of old jeans, vest and ancient army jacket, put up her hair and take the number 41 to work. She was sick of being primped and posed - the last few weeks had been