Chapter Text
The shutters, warped from their years withstanding the burden of salt the sea-wind carried and pale from the glare of the baking sun, creaked as he opened them, the hinges streaking rust and flecks of iron filings onto the stucco with the pain of its arthritis. He leaned forward until he was just out of the narrow frame of the window and could watch the pedestrians disappear under the weathered terra-cotta tiles of Libeccio’s awning down below. It was all to keep from being too aware of the groan from the uneven floorboards as the other man waddled next to him.
“I'd like you to listen carefully, Signore...”
It took him a moment to understand that it was a question.
“Abbacchio,” he grunted.
Polpo waved a pudgy hand, the answer to his own question inconsequential. He reached into his pocket, removed a lighter and flashed a yellowed smile, the type meant only to be condescending.
“You seem like a man who could use a cigar.”
He waved half a Toscano in front of him like a dog biscuit, began lighting it even before Abbacchio grumbled his “No,” the sweetened fragrance of the tobacco already clinging to the stagnant air. As if the echo of smoke on his clothes and heavy breath wasn’t suffocation enough.
“You know,” Polpo began again after a moment of humming and puffing, “I’ve had quite a nasty few years of tenants for this apartment.”
Abbacchio didn’t respond. The other man was so close that his nose nearly brushed against his shoulder as he leaned in, letting out an obnoxious bellow of laughter and waving the glowing end of his cigar like a sage cleansing. He imagined Polpo as one of Geppetto’s rejects, a Pinocchio whose nose couldn’t grow any longer and who demanded to be carried in a sedan chair instead of on strings.
The laughter stopped abruptly.
“You don’t speak much, Signore.” His frown carved deep into his round face and he tutted before continuing.
“Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly. It is insulting when I so generously provide a home and a tenant doesn’t even have the decency to pay what is owed.”
Polpo cleared his throat, hummed some more as he took his time with the cigar. He held a key out for him within reach, pinched in the grip of two thick fingers. The smoke was cloying and Abbacchio took a step away from the window.
“Are you a decent man, Signore?”
“I will pay on time,” was his only reply.
Polpo’s laugh held a disturbing crackle of bass, a tone deepened by his weight and the years of smoking that showed in his nails and the grey wash of his skin. His smile had the quality of a wax figure: tight-lipped, fake, something vaguely transparent. Abbacchio took the key.
“I’ll expect nothing else, Signor Abbacchio.”
***
Expectation was a kind of hope for the future, a faith that everything would turn out and the world would right itself.
Abbacchio could recall back to high school when he’d taken a compulsory English course. He’d been so full of expectation then, both his own and his Padre’s. It had swelled within him as a perpetual excitement, an overbrimming enthusiasm. For the longest time he’d let it fuel him, propelling him through high school and the Academy before it evaporated, leaving a carbon-husk and a trail of soot. And it was only much later— long after the last of Signora Marta’s tedious translation assignments— that he remembered bitterly one line from a list of Pope’s idioms:
Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.
Abbacchio found he wasn’t often disappointed. Not anymore.
***
For a man of low expectations, the forecast of his days seemed much the same as the last: cloudy, a chance of thunderstorms. It seemed routine was his deviation from the rule— the one faith he’d been dulled into allowing.
7:00 sharp was when he woke, alarm or not, a habit carried over from his youth. Breakfast: the strongest black tea he could afford and frittatas with whatever vegetables were leftover in the fridge. 7:30 to 8:00 was the space allotted for his morning run past the other dilapidated apartments and store-fronts of Via Passione, until the street ended abruptly at Piero’s Jewelry and Loan and he'd turn to run back to the bronze plaque on the brick of Libeccio’s. By 9:00 he’d finish his shower and makeup, review his clients for the day’s work ahead. He'd take his time to pack up his camera: it was the one expensive thing he owned.
By 10:00 he’d become a shadow. Flicker of a man that disappeared in the light and took shape only in the transitions between, the thin line of grey that morphed radiance into the deep black of absence.
Today’s adulterer was an attorney named Lorenzo. Or was it Laureano? Abbacchio had discovered his penchant for long lunch breaks with his secretary, the subtle touches he gave her across the booth of a ristorante where the flowers dappled shadow across his face. But today he was much bolder, keeping a hand low on her hip as they walked to a cafe— it was all as if he was daring to be caught, posing for a casual photoshoot, a tasteful advertisement for his Prada shoes or Bvlgari watch. As if the way he brushed a lock of her hair was meant to be captured by Abbacchio’s camera from across the street, a single moment paused forever in subtle, tasteful damnation.
They all wanted to be caught. Abbacchio had seen enough in his near half-decade of work to surmise the following: secrets were thrilling, but keeping them eventually became a chore. Like a junkie looking for the feel of the initial high, more and more desperate and reckless for any taste of excitement to lay claim over the mundanity of stability. Not that Abbacchio was complaining. It was excellent for business.
22:30 was the earliest he’d get back to his apartment. Twilight, after all, was the best time for such photographs and some days he needed to stay up through the night to capture that special someone else, the play of light and shadow that he could develop glossy and as high a resolution as he could manage. The money he’d get would be crinkled and wet from the fury of tears (the chance of thunderstorms), and he’d slip back into the not-light and not-shadow. His camera was always heavy and smooth with the images that replayed so many lives, all the moments of disappointment. A magpie with his collection.
He would forgo his dinner, as usual, for a glass of Greco di Tufo, let the black-dark of his eyelids overtake the remnants of his photographs until he could sink into the depths of oblivion, Vespro della Beata Vergine on his second-hand record player. He had a habit of waiting until the end of Psalm 70:1 before taking his first sip: hardly breathing during the versicle, lips moving along with the response.
“Deus in adjutorium meum intende,” in a heavenly tenor. It filled the empty screaming cup of his migraine like water.
(Make haste, O God, to deliver me.)
“Domine ad adjuvandum me festina,” he would drown, a silent baritone dispersed in the vibrations of the liquid.
(Make haste to help me, O Lord.)
***
It is within the first week of moving into his new apartment that he comes to realize even the expectation of routine is unrealistic.
23:02. Abbacchio sits motionless, the wine glass poised to his lips with only a single stain of black on the rim. It is the beginning of Laudate pueri Dominum when the apartment below him erupts into percussion that shatters the careful ease of his migraine, bounding footsteps punctuated so often by distinct crashes hitting the thin walls. He places his glass down with a scowl, a twist of lips that he finds too well. He clenches his jaw as he watches the second hand’s orbit around the clock, lets it circumvent eight times before his sharply decreasing patience leaves him completely at the sound of a fucking child whooping and hollering beneath his feet.
It is 23:10. He finds that he breaks his life down into easily-manageable moments. At this particular moment Abbacchio realized why he despised his job so much. He loathed excitement, the reckless disrespect others had for their own precious stability, for the peace of others around them. He couldn’t stand that some of the ire in his client’s eyes as he passed them the snapshots of their own failing relationships was meant for him. It was a disgust that he’d grown tired of, an accusation: How can anyone do this for a living?
Abbacchio reached out a fist to pound on the door to the second-floor apartment, sought to be heard over the internal chaos.
Instead:
The door flings open of its own accord, lets the dim light of the hallway sconce flood the dark apartment for the glimpse of a mess of jet hair and flailing limbs before impact onto his chest, the mad dash accumulating in a scramble to climb up Abbacchio's body like the geometric bars of a playground jungle-gym.
“Buccellati!” it squeaked before Abbacchio could do much of anything. “Fugo thinks I cheated again!”
23:11. Abbacchio had reflexes enough to grab hold of the fork sailing through the air in a clenched fist, his second impact a murderous blur of strawberry-blond hair. The first brat still squirmed against him, climbing practically up against his chest to get away from the bite of the tines. 23:11 is also about the same moment that they both realize he is not Buccellati.
“Whoa!” the rat attached to him says, falling off and stumbling back with wild eyes and an annoying laugh. “You’re not Buccellati.”
Brilliant.
The blond— presumably Fugo— tears viciously away from his grip, though Abbacchio had already been letting go. He even had the gall to glare up at him, face pale under the scrutiny of the fluorescent tube-light. Behind him on the grainy TV the words “PRESS START OR X BUTTON” blinked for attention under the orange and yellow logo of Street Fighter Collection, quite the complement to the fire-and-brimstone that flickered behind the dampened coal of the kid's pupils.
As if Abbacchio wanted nothing more than to be standing awkwardly at the threshold of his neighbor’s apartment at 23:15, breaking up an attempted homicide instead of losing himself to Monteverdi's composition.
“What the hell are you two doing? I can hear you both from the entrance.”
A man’s voice, barely raised, sends the two kids scrambling in a futile attempt at placation. The steps that come up behind him in the hall are soft with exhaustion. It is a gait he knows well, but the tone the man carries with him holds onto its authority such that even Abbacchio stands straighter and steps back.
He’d likely be pouring another glass of wine by now, Abbacchio thinks. The man— presumably Buccellati— hides his surprise and confusion at him standing there well enough, comes to a stop at the threshold with his arms crossed before proclaiming that the two mangy-looking brats lost their Playstation privileges for the disturbance. He hears something about fighting, an exaggerated groan from the rat and an eloquent apology from Fugo before Abbacchio slips completely away. A shadow.
The wine is warm when he sits back down. It is 23:17. ‘Praise the Lord, ye children,’ he thinks bitterly to the full note of lukewarm peach he catches in the wine.
Abbacchio didn’t often have expectations. But often wasn’t the same as never.