Page 27 of Deadly Confessions
I look at his hands too. The scar on his left forearm. The ink at his wrists. Not the hands of a restorer.
"Do you miss it?"
"I miss the possibility of it." He sets the glass down. "There's a difference between missing a thing and missing who you were when you thought it was possible."
I understand this. I understand it more precisely than I can explain in a restaurant on a Saturday night.
The food comes. We eat. He's not performing enjoyment: he's eating the pasta because it's good, occasionally watching the room with the same quality of attention I use in rooms, the cataloguing that people who spend their lives in threat environments develop whether they want to or not. I notice him watching the exits.
We talk through the meal. He asks about Ortese. I ask about Caravaggio, because he made a reference to the painter in my uncle's church on the first day and I've been waiting to see if it was casual or genuine. It's genuine. He talks about the Calling of Saint Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel, the specific way Caravaggio painted the light as if it's a decision, not a phenomenon, and I listen to him talk about a painting with the same attention I'd give to anything I need to understand.
He's not performing this either.
I find this, specifically, the most difficult thing about him. I've sat across the table from people who were performing. Hiding behind a smile and polite topics. Niccolo is doing neither. He's a man who had an opinion about a seventeenth-century painting and is sharing it, and the opinion is interesting, and I'm interested, and there's no tangle of strategy underneath it that I can find.
Which doesn't mean there isn't one. I know better than that.
"You said art history," I say. "At university."
"Naples, then Bologna."
"Why Bologna?"
"Because I needed to be somewhere my father's name meant nothing." He looks at me. "It didn't work. But I needed to try."
I understand needing to try things you already know won't work. I've done it every time I've opened the Ortese hoping the ending changes.
The candles on the table are small and half-burned. They don't move.
I'm aware of every inch of the space between us. The specific combination of cologne and the evening and the wine that means his presence has a physical signature I could identify in a dark room, which is something I notice about everyone as a matter of survival and about him as a matter of something else entirely, something I'm not examining too closely on a Saturday night in Vomero.
After dinner he pays. I let him. This is not the restaurant, I'm not working, there's no principle at stake.
Outside the air is cool for October. The street is narrow, the kind of Naples side street that feels like it was built at a different scale, for smaller people or a different understanding of space. We stand on the steps a moment.
"I'll walk you to your bus," he says.
"It's two streets."
"I know."
We walk two streets. He doesn't take my arm or position himself close enough to require comment. He walks next to me, slightly wider than the street demands, at a pace that matches mine without effort.
At the bus stop he stands next to me looking as if he has something to say.
The bus is four minutes away. I know the schedule. I've timed buses in half the neighborhoods of this city, though not usually for the same reasons as tonight.
"Buonanotte, Valentina," he says.
That's it. That's what he decided.
Buonanotte.Just my name after it, the way you'd say it to someone you’re familiar with. Notsignorina. Not a title thatkeeps distance in it. The way my uncle says it. The way Giulia says it when she's trying to get my attention from across the restaurant floor.
The way people say the name of someone they know.
"Buonanotte," I say.
He waits. The bus comes. I get on.
