“Good, va bene.”
Catalina disappeared inside. I was torn between anxious and angry, and Lucas was clearly amused to see me in such a state.
“Are you seriously going to get all these people together to meet me?”
“I told you, we’re like a big family.”
“I didn’t think you meant that literally.”
“That’s how it goes here,” he said.
“And you like that?” I asked as we walked toward the car.
I don’t know why, but the idea of meeting all those people weirded me out. I’d always thought of myself as sociable, friendly. But now I felt deeply insecure. Maybe it was the circumstances, or maybe it was a little voice in my head making me feel like a delinquent getting ready for her next caper.
Lucas lowered his sunglasses and put his hands on my shoulders.
“Maya… Look around you. Do you see how pretty all this is? Can you feel the sun and breeze on your skin? Can you taste the salt from the sea on your tongue? All that is telling you something: you’re here. And from what you’ve told me, I think this is the best place you could be. A place to get away from everything and forget. So pay attention to someone who came here for similar reasons: Don’t think, just let things happen.”
He was leaning in close as he said this, and his aroma encircled me. I nodded over and over, and his voice drowned out the rest of the world. As we looked at each other in the ensuing silence, a moment passed, a moment that didn’t need to be anything else.
And yet it was.
It had turned us, without our knowing it, into something like two drops of water on a pane of glass playing hide-and-seek. Pretending to be two things when already we were mixing and melting into one. We didn’t know because there are some things you can only see when you close your eyes, and we couldn’t stop looking at each other.
18
Getting to know the town with Lucas made it so much lovelier than I could have imagined at first. He told me there were two ways you could live in Sorrento. One was as a tourist. The other was the way the locals did it. And that was how he liked it. So he showed me the stores where the locals shopped, which were cheaper and cozier, and the restaurants and bars where the locals ate and drank, and the feeling was almost intimate. Away from the tourists, you could breathe freely, getting lost for hours in little corners of the city where the multitudes never bothered you.
As we did that, we talked about everything and nothing, sharing ice creams, laughter, and jokes. Filling in at random the blank sheet of paper that was our lives. Writing a next chapter that neither of us imagined.
“Land of mermaids… Are you serious?”
“Yeah,” Lucas said, “there are many legends about them from around here. This is where Homer had the meeting between Odysseus and the sirens take place when he was returning to Ithaca. I love places like this, places you can breathe art, culture, and history. Lord Byron, Dickens, Goethe, Nietzsche, all of them were here. Is itnot just fucking incredible to know you’re walking the same streets they walked down so long ago?”
I didn’t know much about those poets and writers apart from their names, but seeing him so inspired brought a smile to my lips.
“I’ve never read any of them,” I said, shrugging when he seemed surprised. “Honestly, I haven’t read anything in forever.”
“Don’t you like reading?”
“I used to love it, but for so many years, ballet just sucked up every free moment. I barely even had time to sleep. Now that all I have is time, though, maybe I should pick it up again.”
I looked at the ground as we walked down a narrow alley with shops and homes with colorful awnings. I had seen understanding in Lucas’s eyes a moment ago, but now I saw something else: curiosity, the same curiosity I felt for him. I wondered what had brought him here and why he’d decided to stay. How he could go from a place as different as Madrid to Sorrento.
“Lucas,” I asked, “what did you do before?”
He turned around and started walking backward in front of me.
“Want to guess?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I could imagine all sorts of things, but it sort of depends on how old you are.”
“I’m twenty-seven.”
I’d been wondering that all day. “All right, then. I think you used to be a high school teacher. You taught history, or maybe philosophy. You used to ride a bike to school and you had black-framed glasses and wore V-neck sweaters and carried a shoulder bag full of books. Like Robin Williams inDead Poets Society. The cool teacher, you know.”
“Cool?” he repeated timidly.
