I would shrug at her amazement while Q collected money from the crowd in one of her hats and arranged portrait commissions at half price with some of the locals. The money we earned was better than nothing, though not a lot better.
Q suggested we collect the money before the show, but that didn’t seem sporting.
For the most part, we slept out of doors or in somebody’s barn, using the others’ proximity to keep warm.
We kept our spirits up by makings plans to return to the Villa under different identities, but of course we knew it was just idle talk. They warned us on leaving that we could never return no matter what we did to redeem ourselves, no matter how much time passed.
In the early days on the road, Q and I seemed pretty much of one mind about everything. But after awhile, we began to squabble about where to go and what to do and how to spend the little money we had between us. After one of our fights, I took the sock with the money and left Q in the deserted ramshackle barn we had been using as residence.
Four or five drinks later, when I returned to our temporary residence, she was gone and her small suitcase with her. She had left me one of her paintings — the blackest of the nightscapes, the one I professed to admire — as a parting gift.
I didn’t miss her for the first few hours of our separation, wrote an abbreviated version of our tragic love story in the ratty notebook I’d been carrying with me.
The last line was: “He expected to miss her after awhile, after a week or so, but as it turned out the expectation sufficed for the feeling itself.”
When the story was finished, when the last line that had been playing through my head got itself down on paper, I couldn’t imagine how I would get on another day without her.
40th Night
You could see it was an all day rain, but since I was low on funds, I went on to the next village with the idea of doing my strong man performance in the town square. As usual, particularly since I started drinking again, I was short of cash.
I put up signs in the usual places, but when the time came to begin, there was no one in the audience. Eventually, a carabinieri showed up carrying one of my signs and waving it at me as if it were a weapon.
I assumed he was ordering me to leave and I packed up my chains, but on the contrary he was insisting that I perform for him even though he was the only spectator.
He had a folding chair and an umbrella and he opened them both and made himself comfortable.
I tied the chains rather awkwardly — it was generally Q’s job to tie the supposedly unbreakable knot — while the carabinieri watched intently.
I went through the motions of failing, which was part of the act and my audience laughed and clapped his hands. “He can’t do it,” he said to no one in particular.
His skepticism provoked me. I took a deep breath and expanded my chest, expecting the chains to come apart as they always did.
I panicked at first when nothing happened, but then I thought I hadn’t tried hard enough. So I took a deeper breath, expanding my chest to the breaking point, but the chains resisted me. It then struck me that these were not the chains I had been using. Someone, no friend of mine, had made the switch.
The small crowd in attendance — I hadn’t noticed them assemble — started throwing things, fruit for the most part. There was also the occasional puh-ching of flying lead and I fled the stage, leaving my equipment behind.
I ran without looking back until, several miles down the road, I tripped on a loose sixteenth century cobblestone and I fell in a sprawl by the side of the road. The passing thought that held sway was, Whatever else happens, Jack, you can’t get much lower than this.
41st Night
I ran into Q (or L) again at the airport in Milan. She seemed to have forgotten that we had separated on bad terms and gave me a hug and told how she had made all this money selling paintings, some of them commissioned portraits, to Americans returning home. She only needed twenty-one more dollars to afford her own ticket back to the states. On the other hand I was sixty-nine dollars short. My Visa card, which I assumed was good, was rejected repeatedly.
It was almost like old times. Q had a set of chains in her carry-on bag and after a couple of drinks of red-eye for courage I performed for the captive crowd on the tarmac, a glass window separating us.
That I still had it or had regained what I had lost or was drunk enough not to notice how tacky my act was improved my shaky self-esteem.
We made a killing, though most of the bills Q collected in her hat were in unrecognizable foreign currency.
The exchange booth was closed so we had to live in the airport for a while, plying our respective trades.
To get rid of us, the authorities put us on a plane going back to the states but because of weather or perhaps faulty navigation we ended up in Newfoundland for refueling purposes.
We made the mistake of getting off the plane with the others during what they told us would be a seventy minute stopover. But as we had no tickets, when we tried to reboard the plane, the woman at the gate denied us entry.
When Q argued, they arrested her, and when I protested her arrest, they arrested me and though we had American passports, after a week’s imprisonment in a makeshift cage adjoining the food preparation room in the local MacDonald’s, they deported us back to Italy.
The Italian authorities refused to accept us — there was a fraud charge on the books against us — and we found ourselves once again on a plane going back to the states.
We fought continually on the plane ride back, and by the time we reached Boston — the destination of this particular flight — we were no longer on speaking terms.
Q’s passport had expired during the delay and under duress I had left mine in Newfoundland so we were detained together, as it turned out, while the authorities reviewed our situation.
I made an effort to be polite, though it was unfelt, while Q (or L) — they addressed her as Leonora — remain sulkily tight-lipped.
They searched our luggage for clues. My chains were seized as undetermined evidence against me. Two bottles of pills were commandeered from Leonora’s case as well as one of her lesser nightscapes.
While we were detained, we couldn’t help but overhear the following conversation.
“I’m for going by the book but it’s not clear to me how the book reads on this case,” said official one. “You know what I’m saying?”
“I’ve seen the new regulations — you’re going to love them when you see them, lots more freedom of initiative, they just ask for creativity — though they don’t actually go into effect until 3:00 this afternoon.”
“Bummer. What time do you have?”
“We could always push the clock ahead if we have to, if time in this case is of the essence.”
“For argument’s sake, let’s say time is of the essence.”
While this conversation was going on in the next room, Leonora and I shared the occasional desperate glance. We were sitting next to each other at this point, our hands meeting as if inadvertently on the bench between us. The guards were talking in whispers now and it became increasingly difficult to pick up more than an idle word.
“We’re in this together, whatever it is,” she said, “and I’m not going to be afraid.”