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  Ceffo

  by Jonathan Carroll

  “Beneath my sorrows, I hold a city.”

  Nizar Qabbani

  She quickly realized they should never have come back. Because she was in a town she loved with a man she no longer loved and was beginning to hate. This time everything about the place was only loud plaintive ghosts of what might have been and now-stained lovely memories of their last visits here. All kinds of sadness and regret in stark bitter contrast to the ancient city’s heartbreaking beauty.

  “Where do you want to eat tonight?”

  She was standing in front of a mirror fixing her hair when he spoke from the other side of the room. Seeing him reflected in the mirror she looked away, not wanting to make eye contact. Her hands stopped moving at the thought of spending another hour at a table with him, studying the menu for too long to avoid conversation. Smoothing out the napkin in her lap again and again while sneaking glances to see where he was looking, checking the expression on his face. Usually if there was talk now between them it was almost always stilted, loaded with silences which led to sentences or sometimes even single words that could and frequently did explode into accusations, denials, blatant lies, and hurtful exaggerations … Too many battles had been fought over white tablecloths, empty wineglasses, and delicious half-eaten desserts ruined by words that should never have been said but now were, with increasing frequency.

  Sometimes she felt she was suffocating inside her own life; as if it were one of those plastic bags dry cleaners put over clothes. When she breathed, she inhaled herself and her failure. There was no more air.

  The trip had been his idea. At first she thought it would be good to get away from home, where there was so much silence, tension, and gloom. He was very adept at using silence, had honed it to a killing edge and used it expertly on her for hours and even days, sometimes from morning till night. She realized how effective it was the day she was suddenly aware she’d been unconsciously mumbling to herself under her breath, something she’d never done before in her life. Was she going mad or only desperately hungry for the sound of a human voice, even her own?

  Her sister came to visit and was appalled at the way he behaved. “You have to get out of here. You can’t let him go on treating you this way!”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “What’s complicated about it? He treats you like shit. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  She knew it was true but hearing it from her sister only made it worse. Hearing the grim truth from someone else’s mouth, especially someone who you know loves you in all the right ways, is brutal.

  “I have no money, no job. I have nowhere to go. I’m completely dependent on him.”

  “Then go home. Stay with Mom and Dad till you figure things out and come up with a plan. They’ll love having you there.”

  “They’re both old and sick. I wouldn’t want to burden them. You know how they’d worry. Dad might even do something crazy like get on the phone and call him an asshole.”

  “Which he is! So instead you’re going to stay here and let the man slowly eat you alive?”

  The two sisters stared at each other with a swirling mixture of anger, love, pity, and shame.

  “Has he— Has he ever hit you?”

  “No, but sometimes when things get really heated between us I wouldn’t put it past him.”

  * * *

  The restaurant was a ten-minute walk from the hotel. Part of the way there was along the harbor and both of them loved the familiar scenery. One of the yellowing city walls was madly festooned with graffiti and tagging.

  He stopped to look at it and shook his head. “I hate fucking graffiti, tagging especially. It’s not like they even try to do it well—always just childish scribbles. They make no sense to anyone but the person who did it.”

  What he said didn’t interest her, nor did the frantic jumble and splash of words, pictures, letters, and numbers covering the wall—today’s hieroglyphics. But she looked at it anyway because he was watching to see what her reaction would be to his comment. She wanted to have a nice dinner with no drama. She knew it was best to just pretend to agree with him now and hopefully move on. Then she saw the word on the wall and smiled.

  She said it out loud. “Ceffo.”

  “What?”

  She pointed to a word scrawled large in black, high on the wall. “Ceffo. I know what it means. A bad guy or a creep.” She smiled even more and said the word again quietly, as if to herself.

  “What, suddenly you speak Italian?” His voice was all sneer.

  It wasn’t so much what he said as how he said it—his tone of voice and the snide, condescending inflection. His “question” very clearly came across as: You of all people speak Italian? No way.

  Why did he have to be like this? Why had things between them ended up in this black hole dead end poisonous swamp of two people drowning each other when not so very long ago both of them truly believed they had found the one?

  Now she only wanted to lash out at him but knew it would just lead to further unpleasantness. Lips pressed tightly together, she shook her head, gave him a furious look, and walked away. He called out to her. She ignored him. Even with her back turned, from past experience she was certain she knew what the expression on his face would look like now: smug, self-congratulatory, sure that what he’d just said had struck somewhere close to her heart. Increasingly these days he seemed to actually enjoy making her feel stupid, inept, useless, or hysterical even when she knew she was right about something.

  She kept walking without looking back at him. Then she heard another man’s voice behind her. “Hey motherfucker! Yeah you, Mr. Englishman.”

  She heard the voice say in heavily accented English, “You Englishman, hey? I heard you talk to her. She don’t like what you say. I saw her.”

  “Go away.”

  She turned and saw two young men facing him a few feet away. One was short and thick but obviously muscular beneath a tight-fitting blue, gold, and white T-shirt with S. S. Lazio emblazoned on the front. The most striking thing was how unattractive he was. Even at a distance she could see his head was much too small in proportion to his body. It looked like a coconut on top of a tree trunk. Very short crew cut hair, a large nose below beady reptilian eyes.

  “What do you want?” her man demanded. A demand, not a question.

  Alarmed, she sucked in her breath. As soon as he spoke to them she knew it was wrong. Wrong words, wrong tone of voice, wrong stance to take with these tough guys obviously looking for trouble.

  He always had to be macho, even in a menacing situation like this. Always. Always had to be the dominant force, the big man in charge of things. When they were first going out she’d found the trait attractive. At the time it had made her feel safe when they were together. Not anymore.

  Her sister detested this “macho man” pose and made fun of it to his face, more than once calling him “Weekend Rambo.” He didn’t like it. Didn’t like it when anyone clapped back at him or his view on things. One time when her sister was visiting, she even told him to fuck off after they got into a heated argument about politics and he spoke down to her like she was a dumb child.

  Right now this alpha dog part of him had stupidly snarled at these two creeps who were goading him.

  Lazio said, “What do I want? I want your wife, man! I want your car. I want your house. I want your money.” He laughed and looked over a shoulder at his grinning friend who was enjoying the show, thickly tattooed arms crossed over his chest.

  “Just go away, huh? You and your buddy. No more. Go away.”

  Without warning, Lazio punched him hard in the stomach.

  Bent over from the blow, her man staggered backward, tripped, and fell.

  “Stay down. Don’t get up. I don’t like your fucking face, Mr. English.” Lazio turned to her and smiled. She couldn’t help noticing his teeth were beautifully white and perfect. A mouth that could have been in a toothpaste ad.

  Raising his right arm, he patted his chest over his heart while looking straight at her and continuing to smile. He said something but she didn’t understand. She shook her head, shrugged her shoulders. He nodded and said it again, loud: “I’m Ceffo.”

  * * *

  Despite having been punched and humiliated, her man insisted they still go to dinner. She said if he wanted to go back to the room to rest it was fine—they’d get something to eat later. He flashed her an angry glance, as if she was somehow guilty for what had just happened. But she knew him well enough that she was sure the hostile look came from the fact that she’d witnessed the confrontation and the fact that her “Weekend Rambo” had done nothing after being hit—just stayed on the ground watching Ceffo and his friend walk away.

  “No. Come on—let’s just go.”

  The last time they were in the town they’d discovered a great little trattoria, totally unassuming yet still atmospheric; they served the most wonderful food there. Right before arriving now, they passed a closed shop also splattered with graffiti. In the middle of the chaotic word and picture spew was the word diarrea. Frowning then smiling at the oddness, she assumed the word meant the same thing in Italian as it did in English. What on earth would compel someone to spray-paint that word on the front of a lingerie store?

  At another time she might have brought it to his attention as an interesting observation, but she knew he was in no mood for chit chat at the moment. By insisting they go to dinner after the assault, she knew he was trying to pretend it had been no big deal—a blip in their plans, a few jarring minutes that deserved only an indifferent shrug.

  She assumed this was why, when they sat at the restaurant table looking over the menus, he was chatty and actually quite charming. She hadn’t seen that side of him in ages when they were alone together. In public or with friends it was a role he played. Generally speaking, the world loved the guy. But she hadn’t seen him like this just for her in months. These days he often blamed her for his bad moods and overall unhappiness. She wasn’t having it. From the beginning she had tried so hard to be a positive, supportive partner. But on a day-to-day basis he turned out to be one of those people never satisfied with their lot, their share, their partner, their life in general.

  “I’m going to have the spaghetti with clams,” he said.

  She wanted the vongole too, but knew he didn’t like it when they ordered the same thing. He liked to sample whatever she ordered. Quietly sighing, she said she’d have the risotto with mushrooms.

  While taking their orders the waitress, who was the wife of the owner, noticed the sadness in the woman’s eyes. She remembered this good-looking couple from the last time they were in town and how much they had enjoyed her restaurant. Plus they were big tippers.

  So why did the woman now look like her cat had just died? Was her handsome man to blame? He did have an air about him the waitress didn’t like. The way he tried to sound cool while mispronouncing most of the Italian words when he gave his order. The self-important expression on his face when he sampled the cheap house wine. The two-second fake smile he gave her. Yes, he was definitely cretino material.

  When their food came, before she could move, he reached a fork across the table and scooped up some of her risotto without asking or making eye contact. With heavy irony, she asked him, how it was?

  “Good, but tonight it’s clams for me.”

  During the meal she was curious to see if he would bring up what had just happened with the two men. He didn’t, which she took as a hopefully good sign he was just going to ignore the scary confrontation and not let it ruin the evening or the rest of their stay in this wonderful town.

  * * *

  Two hours later, back at the hotel, he was locked in the bathroom groaning and shitting his brains out.

  “Fucking clams! Fucking clams! Why did I eat those fucking clams?”

  She sat on the large bed, hands unmoving in her lap, thinking about the two words she’d seen written on the city walls earlier that had forecast the exact scenario of the evening’s events. How could it be? It could not possibly have been just some weird coincidence. How many men are named Ceffo? Why would anyone want to paint diarrea in big fat letters on a storefront? Why had she seen those two words just before they happened?

  The only thing tying the words together was that both “happened” to her fiancé, not her: Ceffo’s punch and now this diarrhea. Even what they ate for dinner—originally she had been planning to order the clams but had deferred to him.

  “Are you still out there?”

  “Yes, of course.” She shook her head at the silliness of his question. Where else was she supposed to be?

  “Go down to the desk and ask if there’s an all-night pharmacy around here. I really need some Imodium. If so, please go get me some. This is killing me. I keep thinking I’m done and there’s nothing left inside. But then I get hit by another wave …”

  Too much information. She stopped listening, stood up, and went for her coat. “You’ll be all right alone here?”

  “Are you trying to be funny? Just go down and ask,” he ordered nastily.

  She made an unhappy face at the bathroom, at him in there, and walked out, closing the door to the room a little too loudly.

  A nice young man at the reception desk directed her to a twenty-four-hour farmacia several blocks away. The receptionist watched as the statuesque woman in a long whiskey-colored coat—she looked like a 1940s movie actress—walked out of the hotel. What could she want at a farmacia at this late hour?

  * * *

  “You are English?” The night pharmacist was delighted to have a chic customer and was embarrassed for her when she asked for Imodium. He could not imagine her sitting suffering on a toilet seat.

  “South African.”

  “South Africa! You come from so far. Is this your first time here?”

  “No, I’ve—we’ve—been here several times before.”

  “You and your husband?”

  She started to say fiancé but boyfriend came out instead. It was not the first time she’d referred to him that way. The thought of actually marrying the man had become more and more remote recently. Spend the rest of her life being demeaned and belittled, nitpicked for every little mistake he believed she made? No. But she needed to gather strength and courage to walk away. Living with him had bled her of both.

  “May I suggest you something?” He handed over the medicine and smiled crookedly, as if he might have been too bold in asking her the question.

  “Of course. Please do.”

  “Have you been to Café Fellini yet?”

  She shook her head.

  “It is just down the street from here.” He gestured off to the right. “The oldest café in the city. It used to be called Café Monopoli, but the famous film director Federico Fellini once went there years ago and they changed the name to honor him. It is very atmospheric. Very romantic. You and your boyfriend will enjoy it for sure. They stay open very late at night too. It is open now.”

  “Sounds wonderful! Thank you. We’ll be sure to go there.” She paid for the medicine and, hesitating a moment, stuck out her hand to the man to shake as a sign of gratitude for his recommendation. Pleased, he took her hand and bowed his head a moment in deference. She thought the gesture charmingly old-fashioned.

  Out on the sidewalk again, she should have turned left to return to the hotel. But she thought, I don’t want to go back there yet. He doesn’t know how long it took me to find an all-night pharmacy, go there, get this stuff, and return. What am I going to do back in our room, sit on the bed listening to him groan and flush?

  No, she needed down time from him. She turned right instead of left and set off in search of Café Fellini. Take a quick look at the place. If it was as great as the pharmacist said, maybe have a quick nightcap alone. Blissfully alone, without having to be on the kind of constant psychic edge she almost always was whenever they were together these days.

  In the past when they were in the town, the couple spent a lot of time at a small wine bar enoteca named Da Bel Cane (Beautiful Dog). The owner of the place was an intriguing man named Mauro. In his early 50s, he had once been an award-winning sommelier at a leading restaurant in Bologna. But eventually he gave up the prestigious job to pursue his great love, mountain climbing. After intense training he became a certified mountain guide in the Dolomites. The job lasted a few good years until he fell a great distance and permanently damaged his back. Doctors forbade him to ever climb again. At the time he was married to a fabulous cook. While he recuperated, she taught him how to make a small number of delicious dishes perfectly, which he later served at his enoteca. His wife died of covid when it scythed its deadly path through Bergamo, where they were living at the time.

 

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