Rains swept the island from the north one night in early August, with a rumbling of thunder that broke over the slopes of Mount Solaro and seemed to collect in the inlet below the Villa Clio. My cottage was damp and uncomfortable, the walls sweating, caught in the occasional gleam of lightning. I felt ill from having drunk too much wine the night before with Patrice, who’d been having a bad few weeks because Giovanni was under pressure from his family to marry the daughter of Capri’s longtime sindaco, Luigi Mancini, who governed in the usual haphazard way of Italian politicians. “It is only the marriage of convenience,” said Patrice, with mournful disgust. “There would be no sex here, and no love.”
I was about to crawl into bed when I heard footsteps outside the door. I guessed it was Marisa by the urgency of her approach.
“Lorenzo! Is raining!” She rapped at the screen, her voice strained. “I am wet!”
That she waited for my invitation to enter surprised me. It was not like her.
“You are welcome,” she said, incongruously, stepping into the room. Her T-shirt was soaked through, and the cotton material clung to her breasts like skin. “It is thunder, too,” she added.
I had pleaded with her not to visit me again. While I enjoyed the sex, I found the relationship unsatisfying. It was, I believed, good for neither of us. Plucking up my courage, I explained in the gentlest terms that I didn’t love her, so there was no point in continuing to sleep together. I said, without conviction, that I hoped we could remain friends.
We hunched at opposite sides of my three-legged table, like poker players, keeping our hands to ourselves. Her dark hair was tangled and damp.
“He is awful, your Rupert Grant,” she said, with anger in her voice.
“So what’s happened?”
“He told me I am stupid. Stupido!”
I couldn’t imagine what Grant might have said to her, but it seemed unlikely that he’d called her stupid. His insults were usually indirect.
“I’m feeling too bad,” she said. “I feel like killing myself.”
Her melodramatic turn annoyed me, seeming operatic in a southern Italian way. “I’m sure he doesn’t think you’re stupid,” I said, as thunder rumbled in the middle distance.
“Let me stay with you tonight. I have made nice love to you, Lorenzo. What is wrong with me?”
“I don’t want that, Marisa,” I said.
“You think I am stupid, too.”
“I don’t. You’re very intelligent.”
“You say so?”
“I do. But you should go home. To Naples. There is no point in hanging on.”
“My father, he is worst than Rupert.”
This was, from what I’d learned, an understatement. Vera had told me that her father had broken her jaw when she was eighteen—because she had spent the night with a boyfriend. I didn’t even want to think about what that meant.
“There must be somewhere else you could go? Some relative? A friend?”
“I am nowhere,” she said, her English dissolving fast.
“You will go nowhere?”
“My days are not so happy anymore. I was glad here, but that isn’t true.” I didn’t like her expression, so lost, wild, and sad at the same time.
“You’re going to be fine,” I said, without confidence.
“I say good-bye to you, Lorenzo.”
“We can talk tomorrow,” I said. “You need some sleep.”
“Maybe I will kill Rupert Grant.”
I touched her forearm. “You shouldn’t say things like that, Marisa.”
“He doesn’t deserve it.”
I didn’t know what “it” referred to, but I let the statement pass. The rain began to fall heavily outside my cottage, and I closed the big window overlooking the sea.
“You will give me a drink, no?”
I could hardly refuse her, and pulled a fresh bottle of grappa from the cupboard.
“I am always like your grappa,” she said.
“Thank you.”
She gulped her drink, then helped herself to a second. That, too, disappeared quickly. I told her to steady herself. “Your nerves are bad,” I said, “I can tell.”
“I am leaving you now,” she said, rising on wobbly knees. She moved around the table and kissed me on the forehead. “I have like you so much. You are not the same as Rupert.”
I heard her footsteps on the path, and the rain falling. For some reason, I kept thinking about her comment. I was certainly not like Rupert Grant. Nor did I want to be like him, not any longer.