Read Online Objects of Worship by Claude Lalumiere - Free Book Online Page A

English or
Italian. Perhaps it was better to let emotions permeate
us without needing to name or fix them. It let them live.
Mario felt in short supply of living, lasting emotions. He
was hoping this trip would change that.
    The only other time he’d visited Bari was twenty-five
years ago — the summer he turned five. For his birthday,
his grandparents had thrown a party, inviting a bunch of
Italian children who could not speak English. Mario’s Italian
was limited, but he had fun with the other kids anyway. For
dinner they’d all eaten cheeseless pizza — at the time, it had
struck him as very odd, this absence of cheese.
    Much odder, though, were the events that transpired
that night. The dream. The hallucination. Yet, he’d travelled
from Toronto to Rome to Bari in search of this phantasm.
    His flight had landed in Rome — there were no direct
flights to Bari from Canada — and he’d decided to spend
a few days in the legendary capital. He soon tired of the
ubiquitous tourists and the pandering, crass tackiness. All
that history turned into a theme park for bored vacationers
desperately searching for something to pass the time. There
was beauty in Rome — the cityscape as seen from atop the
Castel Sant’Angelo; the lush majesty of the Villa Borghese;
the piazzas of the historic centre and their boldly opulent
fountains; the cats lounging among the ruins of the Area
Sacra di Largo Argentina — and, more strikingly, some
sort of simmering primal paganism that infected even
the Catholic Church, whose Roman expression bespoke a
fleshly, breathing, essentially present god rather than the
more theoretical deity of Canadian Catholicism. The urgent
demeanour and portentous voices of the monks, priests,
nuns, and God knows what other orders of robed Catholics
wandering through Rome’s streets implied an impatient
divinity who did not tolerate laxness from his servants.
    The first-class, nonsmoking coach from Rome to Bari
smelled like the bedroom of a bedridden chain-smoker
whose sheets hadn’t been changed since she’d died in her
sleep, peeing herself as she expired. A permanent stench
of stale tobacco permeated everything in Rome and, Mario
suspected, throughout Italy. The heavy odour had hit Mario
as soon as he entered the airport lounge in Rome following
his transcontinental flight.
    Despite the malodour, his train seat was comfortable
and the service courteous. In front of him sat a strikingly
attractive twenty-something Italian, with creamy skin,
large expressive brown eyes, and dark wavy hair that
stopped at the shoulder. Her beauty was not the bland,
sterile look of cover models; her features composed a fascinating landscape of subtle asymmetries. She spent the
trip sinuously swinging her head to the music of her iPod.
Her face was turned at an angle that let him appreciate
her beauty for almost the entire five and a half hours it
took to reach the port city from the capital. He suspected
that she was conscious of being admired and chose that
position to facilitate their unspoken arrangement: letting
him get an eyeful while she feigned unawareness and
avoided any compromising eye contact. She disembarked
at Giovinazzo, one stop before Bari, and let slip a subtle,
knowing smile in his direction as she got up from her seat.
The headphones never left her ears, though.
    As Mario emerged from Bari Centrale station, a pungent
yet pleasant fragrance overwhelmed the by now too familiar
tobacco stench: the briny smell of the sea, an odour he’d
never forgotten. It instantly transported him back to that
fateful summer spent with his now-deceased maternal
grandparents. Despite what had happened here, Mario’s
mind often wandered back to that fifth birthday, to that
delicious pizza, and to a memory of telling himself, as he
lay in bed that night waiting for sleep, that he was having
the happiest summer ever with the best grandparents any
boy could ever have. He couldn’t remember the emotion
itself, but he yearned to.