Chapter Text
“So I’ve officially been banned from the café.”
On the other end of the phone, Luca groans. “Alberto. How?”
Alberto bites back a grin.
It’s Thursday, which means there is no astronomy class, which means it’s Luca and Giulia’s night to call home to Portorosso. Alberto cleans fish at the table, using his shoulder to cradle the phone to his ear. He pictures Luca in a similar position in Genova, idly flipping through the textbook he’d be studying if Alberto weren’t distracting him.
He’s been in this position for a while, and his shoulder is cramping. But he’s been dying to tell Luca this story all week.
“You know, I still don’t get it myself. I don’t think I did anything wrong—”
“Ragazzo,” says Massimo. Washing dishes at the sink, he can’t help but overhear Alberto’s half of the conversation. Alberto is fully aware of this and is only slightly baiting him. “Do you expect Luca to believe you didn’t know you weren’t supposed to dance on top of the jukebox?”
Judging by the wet snort on the other end of the phone, Luca had most unfortunately chosen that moment to take a sip of water. Behind his sputtering, Alberto hears Giulia’s voice call out, “Santa Pecorino, what did he do now?”
Audience now fully secured, Alberto launches into his story: How Signore Greco had recently moved a jukebox into the café, and how Ciccio and Guido (cautiously friendly, now that Ercole had left for a gap year in an epic sulk) had shown Alberto how it worked. And how Alberto, predictably, became obsessed.
After his deliveries, Alberto got into the habit of strolling to the café with a pocketful of coins for a snack and a song. And inevitably, some of the children he watched during his weekend lifeguard shift followed him in like a giggling school of guppies. Alberto let them pick the songs after he put the coins in, and he couldn’t not dance when “Fatti Mandara Della Mamma” was playing, and that made the little ones laugh and dance too, and one thing led to another—
“And, look, there were like six kids jumping around in there. It was crowded—”
“So you climbed up on the jukebox?” Giulia shouts.
“Well—okay, in his defense, I wouldn’t have known that wasn’t allowed.” Luca can just barely talk through his giggles. “It’s not like there are signs for that kind of thing—”
“Oh, there is definitely a sign now,” says Alberto proudly, and Luca absolutely loses it.
Massimo shakes his head and wipes his hand dry on a towel. “Alright, ragazzi, time to wind down. We have an early morning here.” He plucks the phone from Alberto’s hand. “Buona notte, Giulietta.”
“Buona notte, papa.”
Massimo hands the phone back to Alberto and raises his eyebrows in a silent message. Make it quick. Alberto nods. Months ago, he might have interpreted Massimo’s gruffness as annoyance, but Alberto knows better now. It had been Massimo, after all, who’d been called to extract a loudly protesting Alberto when Signore Greco finally lost his temper. Alberto had thought he was in very deep trouble until he’d noticed Massimo’s mustache bristling as he tried not to laugh.
Giulia wishes him a quick goodnight before retreating as well, leaving just him and Luca on the phone. Alberto leans his elbow on the table, enjoying the sound of Luca’s helpless laughter on the other end.
“Do you think you’re banished forever?” Luca asks once he can form sentences again.
“Me? Nah. Signore Greco loves me.” Well, that might be a stretch, but Alberto is already scheming ways to bribe himself back into the café owner’s good graces. “I’ll be back in no time.”
“Let me know how that goes,” Luca snickers. “In the meantime, I guess you’ll just have to dance to your gramophone.”
“My…what?”
“The magic singing lady machine.”
“Oh.” Alberto stands up, carefully maneuvering around the phone cord so he can wash the knife he’s been using to clean fish. Massimo is particular about his knives. “I don’t really have that anymore.”
“What happened to it?”
“Nothing, that I know of.” Alberto dries the knife and places it carefully in the block. “It’s probably still on the island.”
There’s a long silence on the other end of the line. His stomach twists uncomfortably.
“You haven’t been back?” Luca asks at last.
“I mean. No?” Alberto begins wiping down the table with a cloth. “There’s not really a reason to go back, is there?”
“There’s the gramophone.”
“Singing lady machine.”
“Beto, it’s called a gramophone.”
“Luca, it’s called a singing lady machine.”
Luca ignores the bait. “And other stuff. You had a whole collection.”
“Luca. It’s fine.” Alberto balls up the rag and tosses it into the laundry hamper. “There’s nothing there that I want.”
“It was your hideout.”
Alberto pauses. On the other side of the table, Machiavelli stares at him with lamplike eyes as he waits for scraps. The silence drags on, heavy with all the things Luca knows Alberto isn’t saying.
It had been home, once. A home forced on him, true; a home he was left in. But through hungry days and cold nights and determined, defiant acts of survival, he’d made it his. A place where he made his own happiness. A place he’d been delighted to share with Luca, during those first golden weeks of their friendship.
A place he hasn’t been back to in five months, one week and three days. Counting is a hard habit to break.
“Are you afraid?” Luca asks.
“Psh.” Alberto scoffs, riled. “Of what? An empty tower? No. I don’t get afraid.”
“Yeah you do,” Luca says softly. “You just don’t let it stop you.”
And Alberto has absolutely no idea what to say to that.
When they finally say goodnight and Alberto moves the fish to the icebox, Massimo returns to the kitchen. He chuckles as Alberto scoops some of the fish cleanings into Machiavelli’s bowl. The cat lets out a chirrup as though annoyed at having had to wait.
“You are spoiling him,” Massimo observes. Alberto can’t help but smile. He goes to the sink to wash his hands.
“It’s hard not to. I never had a pet before.” He frowns. “Well. I kind of had a turtle, once.”
There must be something in his voice he didn’t mean to put there, because the next thing he feels is Massimo’s hand on his shoulder, heavy and warm.
“Everything alright, ragazzo?”
“Yeah.” Alberto watches the scales on his hands fade back into skin. “Just great.”
Alberto has gotten pretty good at not staring at Isola del Mare when he’s out and about. But after the call with Luca, he finds it impossible to ignore.
He sees it when he gets up after napping in Giulia’s tree hideout. It’s there in the mornings as they cast out their nets for the day. It winks in and out of view as he rounds curves on his bicycle during afternoon deliveries. When he’s sitting at his lifeguard chair, staring out at the sunset, dreaming of summer—the island is right there, its dark silhouette like a poking finger demanding his attention.
Alberto hasn’t told Massimo anything about the island other than that he lived there for a time, and Massimo hasn’t pried. But the third time he catches Alberto staring at the island, after Alberto has hauled himself and a snagged net back into the boat, the fisherman raises his eyebrows.
“Alberto, is there—”
Alberto shakes his head violently and dives back into the water before Massimo can finish the question. He’s not ready to talk about it with anyone else. He’s barely ready to talk about it with himself, and he’s annoyed as hell that Luca put his finger right on the problem before Alberto did.
Because now that he knows, it’s like the island is taunting him. Daring him. Looking at it gives him the same feeling he had in the days before he worked up the nerve to cliff-jump for the first time, or when he finally decided to steal from a boat, or when he sold the Vespa and gave Luca a ticket to leave him.
Well, pesciolino? it seems to ask. How long will you stay afraid?
Shut up, he thinks, and turns his back on the island again.
The weather warms. Massimo asks him when his birthday is, and he and Alberto do some complicated calendar-math to figure out how sea folk seasons align with human months, and in March Massimo surprises Alberto with a party. After the Paguros have eaten their weight in trenette al pesto, and Concetta and Pinuccia have started back up the hill with admonishments to Alberto for not visiting them more, Massimo surprises him again with a small pile of presents. His very own knife. A new set of drawing pencils from Giulia. And a square, flat package from Luca.
When he tears open the paper, Alberto finds a vinyl Gianni Morandi record. The track list includes the song he’d liked to dance to at Signore Greco’s. A birthday card wishes him a Buon Compleanno! On the back, Luca has written a short message.
You can do it. Silenzio, Bruno.
“You’re the worst, you know that?” Alberto tells him on Thursday.
“Yeah, I know.” He can almost hear Luca’s smile through the phone. Alberto doesn’t know if he wants to punch him or hug him. “Now go get your dumb singing lady machine.”