Outside Bar Duelle in the light Spoletini rain, Luca clasps a hand to the peak of his head and balances a Marlborough between his fingers like the pigeon last night, holing up in one of those nonsensical perches St. Francis preached for them, a birdhouse cut into stone, the square brick house of Spoleto's indecipherable bells, a gutter hanging form weed-drenched terracotta. Una demanda, Yesmoke? I ask, the only Italian cigarettes I know as Spoleto taps its rain on my bare shoulders. "Marlborough" is a beautiful gurgle turning Luca into the fanged lion of the fountain in Piazza del Libertad. We talk price, I use the numbers I remember, cinque, I say, five chinks in a fresco where Mary's hands ar ewearing down to white and white. If she had blood to begin with, it has all dissolved into the stucco, painted, I suspect, for the pleasure of seeing it flake in sun, bubble in rain. "All same price," he says after I explain the difference between farmacia and supermercato.
Romanian under the torch of Hotel Clitunno at midnight, he
tells me, Don’t speak Italian, it ruins your charm. With the tip of his
cigarette tapping the tray, he asks me to remove my third, and fourth, eye, invoking
Lucrezia Borgia, the prostitute of the Medici. You are the perfect stereotype
of the mean bitch journalist girl, he says. I know what he means. We’re only
giving each other want we want. For me, the pleasure of the flat stone walls
here, which the rain brushes and beats down to ruin. For him, the American
framed in twin black rectangles, refusing to touch.
I really enjoy the sort of heightened approach you take to this rather matter of fact moment, and I appreciate the incorporation of Italian imagery into your narrative. There's a wonderful dreaminess to this entry and I think the challenge here is finding a balance between the vivid and the concrete. There are moments when my understanding falters. Also, before I unpack these moments, is the spelling of Marlboro as Marlborough intentional? I see it as a sort of play on Luca's accent, his tongue's understand of English, and I like it a lot but I feel like that needs to be either pointed out or played out more. Now, going back to what I said earlier, let's take St. Francis for instance. There seems to be a lot of comparisons going on in that first sentence. The cigarette in his (Luca's) hand is like a pigeon in a hole--which is quirky and I like it. But then we talk about nonsensical perches, and St. Francis preaching--is he preaching holes? Is he preaching to the pigeons? I get a little lost there. And again in the wonderful image of the Mary fresco, where I get lost in the exact details but I enjoy the idea of the fading life in her, where the artwork is supposed to represent this eternalness. In fact, I would say that of the two similes, the Mary one works best. Also, at the end you write that you and Luca are both getting what you want—I’d like to see a connection formed between how you are both getting what you want in that moment and how that ties in to the idea of art, in which what you take out of it is what you want to take out of it kind of thing.
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