JESSICA WAKES UP to noise outside. The curtains drawn across the French balcony blow lazily. The first night of August is excruciatingly hot.
The racket carrying from the street turns out to be drunk British tourists singing out of tune. It echoes for a moment, then fades around the corner.
Jessica rises to a sitting position and realizes the other side of the bed is empty. Colombano told her not to wait up for him, that the last concert of the summer season always ends with the musicians dining together on one of the northern islands of the old town.
Three and a half weeks have passed since Jessica met Colombano at the cemetery at San Michele. According to her original plan, she should have returned to Helsinki yesterday. And yet she is still in Venice, where her trip began, without seeing those numerous cities and beaches she had planned on visiting. But she has gotten something else in their place. She has gotten to know a man, a real man in the true meaning of the word. A man whose incredible talent and self-confidence are like something from a different world. Jessica has fallen in love with Colombano’s direct way of approaching her. Touching. Kissing. There’s no tentative probing to his movements, no touches unsure if they have permission, no sweaty adolescent fingertips fumbling for the right to take hold of her arm. With Colombano, Jessica feels desirable and safe.
However, in some moments, Colombano is overcome by some inexplicable darkness, like a thundercloud suddenly blowing into a sunny sky. At such times, his behavior becomes unpredictable and impulsive. Light touches become a sudden gripping at the nape, nails dig into her downy neck, fingers wrap around her chin so hard that Jessica is afraid her jaw will pop out of joint. Colombano is handsome, muscular; he could have anyone. But he wants Jessica. That’s why, when this happens, they do whatever Colombano wants. It’s the least Jessica can do: accept his primitive, unshackled desire as is, as evolution meant it to be. Jessica has learned to read Colombano from nothing more than the look in his brown eyes. They reveal what is coming, but only an instant before the tranquility bursts into a full-scale tempest.
What in Jessica’s mind was stimulating and exciting twenty-four days ago has now transformed into something else. It has transformed into love and affection. What initially aroused her desires now appeals to completely different instincts. She wants to please Colombano, give him the opportunity to express the frustration and stress inevitable in the life of an artist. She knows that those who expect perfection unavoidably end up alone, because they are hoping for the moon from the sky. Jessica wants to see Colombano through his fits of rage; she wants to tame his unpredictable nature.
And above all, she wants to understand him.
JESSICA HOLDS HER back as she gets up. The only thing she misses from her home in Töölö is the wide bed with the thick spring mattress that doesn’t smell of dried sweat and oily hair. The narrow, creaking iron frame and lumpy mattress in Colombano’s apartment aren’t doing her damaged spine any favors.
She walks over to the balcony doors, cracks the curtain just enough to see the narrow canal and the windows of the pink building opposite, which are so close that one could easily fly a paper airplane from one window to another. She wraps her fingers around the iron railing, feels the sloughing paint prickle underneath. Then she makes her way to the bureau, the photographs that tell the story of Colombano’s life. One of the pictures disappeared weeks ago: the one where two smiling faces, a man’s and a woman’s, are looking into the camera. Colombano and that beautiful brunette whose features Jessica can no longer recall. She looked at it closely only once, and that same night it disappeared. When she noticed, Jessica’s thought was it had been done out of consideration for her feelings, that Colombano didn’t want to broadcast his past in front of his new lover. And that when their relationship deepened, he would tell her about that woman, about who she had been, about how she had died.
From time to time Jessica feels a bottomless longing for home that is, in the end, more of an itch for nostalgia, one that doesn’t culminate in any certain place or time. After her adoptive parents died, there was no one left in Helsinki to rely on. Just the forced smiles of lawyers, bankers, and former guardians, and the securities accounts at a private bank that hold so much inherited wealth she could buy Colombano’s entire building and the surrounding historical structures.
And Tina, of course. Mom’s sister, who after all of these years is trying to slither back into Jessica’s life. Jessica doesn’t want to see Tina, who had a habit of putting Mom down. Maybe it was sibling rivalry; maybe Tina is simply so petty that she didn’t want to believe in her sister’s abilities, her shot at launching a spectacular Hollywood career.
Jessica thinks about Los Angeles. Her memories of the city are strongly colored by what she has seen in the movies and on television; after all, when the accident happened, she was only six years old. Even so, she remembers the palms reaching for the heavens, the warm desert wind, the mild winters smelling of suntan lotion. She thinks of the gradually falling dusk in West Hollywood, the red sun dropping over the Pacific Ocean off Santa Monica. She remembers Mom and Dad fighting, the vein at Dad’s temple squirming like a fat worm, Mom’s white knuckles as she gripped the leather steering wheel. How everything felt like it was over, even before the accident. Her squeezing her brother’s hand; they were tired of the shouting and the arguing. Looking at her brother, who is two years younger and, at that moment, scared to death. As if deep down inside intuition told him that the car would drive into the oncoming lane at any instant.
A tear rolls down her cheek. Loneliness and rootlessness have spurred Jessica to tour Europe on her own. Without anyone knowing where she is. At the age of nineteen, Jessica is no longer answerable to anyone. She isn’t anyone’s property, not even Colombano’s, even though, based on his behavior over the past few days, one might think she is.
THE DOOR OPENS. Jessica jumps and moves away from the bureau, the only place in the flat Colombano does not want her to see.
“Zesika,” Colombano says, then starts speaking Italian. He is clearly drunk. And he isn’t alone.
“I’m sleeping,” Jessica says in a hoarse voice, then jumps into bed and quickly burrows between the sheets.
“Not anymore,” Colombano says, and from the door Jessica can hear liquid tilting in a bottle. “Have you met Matteo?”
Colombano is now standing at the bedroom door, his tuxedo shirt on, his undone tie dangling at his neck, and an unlabeled bottle of red wine in his hand.
“What?” Jessica stammers, and Colombano erupts into a soft laugh. A bald man with a mustache, shorter but stouter than Colombano, walks up behind him.
“Ciao,” the stranger says, taking the bottle Colombano offers him expressionlessly.
Then Colombano undoes his cuff links and sits on the edge of the bed. “Princess. I’m good to you, aren’t I?”
Jessica feels a lump in her chest. “I want to sleep, Colo.”
“Matteo here . . . he’s my brother. Not in the traditional sense of the word—we don’t have the same mother—but . . . you know. Like the friend I love most in this world.”
The bald man nods proudly, taps a cigarette out of a pack, and places it between his lips.
“I want you to do me a favor.”
“No,” Jessica says, and pulls her hand away before Colombano can grab it.
“Princess. You don’t even know what I’m going to ask you to do.”
“I want to sleep. Let’s talk tomorrow.”
“Matteo wants to watch us make love.” Colombano rolls his sleeves up to his elbows. Jessica turns her gaze to the window. She hears the man introduced to her as Matteo, Colombano’s brother and best friend, pull the chair out from under the bureau. Its legs scrape against the uneven plank floor.
Jessica wants to shout, scream. Pound on the wall. But she doesn’t so much as bat an eye. She is perfectly numb.
“No,” Jessica says hollowly. She feels dead inside. She knows the darkness gaping within Colombano, that burned part of his soul she thought she could heal. But she also knows no words or actions will do any good now that he’s stone drunk.
Colombano lies down next to her. “Matteo won’t touch you. I promise. As long as you do what I say.”
“Colombano. No,” Jessica whispers, but she already feels the coarse fingers behind her neck. She smells his breath: red wine and cigarettes. She hears Matteo’s lighter click open. Then shut. The smell of cigarette smoke wafts through the room. Colombano’s tongue on her throat, teeth at her earlobe. Just like an eternity ago. How the same thing can be so different under different circumstances, like night and day. Heaven and hell. Colombano’s fingers between her legs. Jessica’s eyes are nailed to the ceiling, the peeling paint there.
She will leave tomorrow, at dawn.