My ears were ringing, and my feet hurt from standing so long. The skin on my knuckles was rubbed raw, and it felt like the bones of my skull were still vibrating. And that feel kept on going all the way home, on my moonless walk along the canals, back to the Angelus.
The city at that hour was closed up tight: shuttered, locked, and dark as the cathedral crypts. Another night, I might’ve enjoyed being out alone, sneaking through the shadows. But my mind kept swinging back to the Maxima.
On the way home, I barely saw the dim streets and alleyways where I walked. I kept thinking, of course, about the show. About the girl, the band, and Django. But how much, I wondered, had been real, and how much had I imagined? Everything about Django was unreal, which doesn’t mean it was fake or stupido or a bore. Just the opposite: Django was unreal the way lightning is—amazing, loud, dangerous, freaky. He was unreal like the best dream I ever had, or that picture of Earth that the Apollonauts sent back when they walked on the Moon, or the feeling you get when somebody looks you right in the eyes, and it’s like she can see all the way through you, or down deep into the deepest part of who you are.
He was—as the kids with the rhinestones had said—like a god. He’d come down to earth and then gone back to the heavenly realms of stars. But the girl, I kept telling myself, was more like me. We had at least one thing in common—fan-madness. And she might not have come from out of town for the show. I might, somehow, find her.
Up ahead the Angelus loomed. It had slender spires like a medieval church, massive turrets like a fortress, and a thousand windows. At that hour, most were dark. But in a hotel that vast—and it was the biggest in the city—someone is always awake. The Angelus took up an entire block, on one side the balconies hanging over the Great Canal, and on the other, hundreds of rooms facing the grandest boulevard in the city. The main entrance would’ve served well at a baron’s or prince’s palace. I went around the side, not wanting the desk staff to see me come in that late.
The buzzing, dreamy concert feel kept going as I snuck through the southwest servants’ entrance and into the main kitchen.
“What are you doing up this late, Davi?” Maria-Claire’s voice was soft and low. She was sitting in the shadow, waiting I supposed, for an important late night order to come in on the hotel intercom. I wouldn’t call her pretty, and her hair had a few streaks of gray. Still, she was the most graceful person I knew. She served food day and night, night and day, yet there was a charm, almost an elegance about her.
“I was hungry. I thought I’d get some…” I didn’t bother finishing my lie.
She knew me too well to be fooled. I could trust her though, and that night she didn’t press me for the truth. She’d been a maid, then a waitress, and now worked room service for the most costly suites in the northwest wing. The guest rooms there were the best in the hotel and so, usually, were the tips that Maria-Claire got. She’d worked there since before I was born and, of all the staff at the Angelus, was the one person I could count on the most.
So we sat a little while, picking at a slice of cold pizza caccia nanza. We didn’t say much that night. We never did, really. And that was one of the reasons I liked being with her. No gossip, no small talk. She was sort of like a mother to me, but without the prying questions and annoying suggestions. I suppose that made her the best mother in the world: giving me great food, covering for me when I got in trouble, and never once giving me a look of disapproval.
“It’s late,” I said. “I really should be in bed.”
“That’s for sure. It’s almost two,” she said. “Good night, Davi.” I’m not sure why, but there was always a little sadness in her voice.
I went up three stories on the staff elevator then got off and climbed a spiral stairway to the seventh floor. Mine was a long corridor with threadbare carpets. Once, long before, the pattern had shown tangled vines, palm trees, flowers of paradise, and birds with human faces. Now the carpets were so thin the wooden floor underneath showed through, and the pattern was barely visible, like figures seen in a fog.
The knobs sticking up from the banister posts were carved in the shape of spiky fruit. The light fixtures, too, had forms from nature: finger-like leaves, pine cones, swollen branches. There was an elevator in the old days, but the shaft had been empty for years. When I was little, I would sometimes look into the shaft, through the pebbled glass of the door, through the crisscross folding metal screen, and see the dim daylight falling like drizzle from above.