Bespoke Shorts

Kisses of wax

The best season commenced in September, and October was the best of them all. Its beginning smelt of relief, of fog and mothballs. Old jumpers came out of the trunks just in time for making the wine. Grapes and spiders squirting through their toes - some of the old would finally smile. Widows in black aprons came out a few weeks later to help with the corn: they stripped the last harvests of many lifetimes by hand.
Aurelia, Cinta and Ginota sat on low stools. Coarse hands and knees apart -in my Grandfather’s yard- they peeled away as they talked. Every year it would be the same story and that’s why it sank in.

It was the story of Cinta, the one of the three who had never lived in France. Fiery and ginger-haired, she had fallen in love with Raffaele in her teens. And now she was in her eighties -and by all means very old- in love with him she still was.

Raffaele had died some thirty years earlier, but never mind. Soon after they had met he had brought her to heaven where she fell pregnant and, for her, not much had happened since. Raffaele instead migrated to America where he had met his first wife. For four years he did not write and her letters were returned. Then he started sending money to little Raffaela who, by then, had been soaked in her mother’s sweat for -the story went- “Cinta In The Fields” bled more than other women but worked harder than the men. And then, at night, she moonlighted in the byres squeezing buckets in between her legs and udders in her hands.

Eventually he started spending his summers with her. Every fourth of July he would take a boat to her womb of no regrets. This went on for a few years. Maybe four or five until he too went to France and met his second wife.

Whatever the number of wives is as irrelevant to this story as it was to Cinta’s cob peeling mates. Surprisingly enough within this context, even the fact that he stopped sending money is just the detail. What mattered was that he always returned for their timely burning of candles at both ends. Master and mistress Cinta was both. Having saved more than enough to buy her own land, she provided her flame with the alibi of seasonal work. So that in summer -two donkeys at dawn on her estate- they would expiate the freedom few others had had. No cows pulling the plough of the woman who hadn’t been turned into a housewife abroad: just a man and no saint. Her Raffaele, the one and only who made her tremble in bed.

For my Grandfather’s yard, this type of language was strong. Yet, undisturbed, we all sank into the well of wrinkles radiating her joy. “Kisses of wax” is what she said of other men, making it plain clear that their lips were cold. For her darned socks and hard work had brought many suitors her way, in the course of her life unlit candles had rubbed against her to no avail. “Cold wax” that’s what they were.

Cinta has long gone but, in Caravino, the expression “kisses of wax” lives on. Young girls utter it plenty, probably not knowing where it comes from.

Simona Florio
Simona was born in Italy, in the Caravino province of Turin.
She now resides in London.


THE BIGGER PICTURE

“Tell me why, Colin,” said the Site Supervisor, over The Observer, “My hay fever plays up the minute you turn up for work? Eh? Why is that? Something not right with you.”

Colin shrugged helplessly, and tried to distract himself with work. The least favourite part of Colin’s job was making public announcements. He stuttered, and knew it; often his voice cracked on important words, and his supervisor would look through his half-moon glasses at Colin pointedly and make little sniffing noises. So it was, as from his little glass room Colin requested a cleaner attend a cappuccino spillage on the Northern Line, platform 4; his finger pressed hard down on the PA button, twelve black and white television screens reflected in his spectacles. He stumbled on all of the important words, just as he’d known he would. And, as expected, the supervisor looked and sniffed. And finally Colin watched as a passenger dropped her cappuccino on Platform 4, and he realised he’d gotten ahead of himself again.

The problem with second sight, Colin had long known, one of the many problems with second sight, was its indistinguishability from the other sort of sight, the sight that seemed to do for everybody else. If only it were to come in the vivacious visions of Joseph, or Scrooge or Carlos Castenada, that would be manageable, Colin reflected as he changed in the locker room, in front of the smeared tall mirror which would get smashed accidentally next year. Second sight, actually, was a constant, a confusion of present and past and future, all always tumbling together, and it made watching television very complicated indeed, what with all these shows on at once, and it wrecked Countdown. His infuriating habit of identifying the £250,000 box during the first five seconds of each Deal Or No Deal was one of the sins cited by his wife’s solicitors in a very long letter which also featured his bloody-minded insistence that she was going to have an affair with a man called Brad Winklestein. She’d never met anyone of that name, she’d pleaded over the course of several years, but it had dissuaded him not at all. Eventually there was nothing for it but to file for divorce from Colin, and the man at the solicitors office was helpful and in fact really very charming. A Mr Winklestein, as coincidence would have it. That, Colin had observed, appeared to be another significant problem with second sight.

However, the Winkelstein situation was a mere triviality, when set against the real issue. What his wife hadn’t known was that she was not to be the only person who would marry Colin. Colin had known, of course, for years. He knew exactly what his second wife looked like (she was quite a dish), that they would live happily in a home full of flowers, and have handsome children – he saw it all. What he could not see, however, was how he would ever meet her in his little glass control room, hundreds of feet underground.

CCTV monitors followed Colin’s progress as the escalators wretched him up to ground level, and the ticket barriers spat him out. On CCTV, he was an unremarkable man, with a shiny head. Out in the nondescript grey afternoon, which could just as easily have been a noon or a morning or nearly-time-for-tea, a camera suspended under a supermarket’s eves panned but lost Colin in foot-traffic on the Charing Cross Road; its time-stamp said four. At five-thirty, Colin emerged with unconcealed triumph from a TV-lit branch of William Hill. Second sight, he reminded himself, had its plusses, too.

And now it was six, and the florist had a bouquet ready, just like every other day (excepting Sundays, when she closed early and Colin had to make do with Saturday’s posy). He stowed it carefully in the rucksack alongside his sandwiches and vacuum flask, just as always.

His observation point, on the corner of Glazer Street, gave a great vantage of the Vision Express across the road, and there was some street furniture to offer partial concealment – one of those odd metal cabinets which serve the important municipal duties of giving hoodlums something to kick the doors off, and Starbucks patrons somewhere to pretend to forget their empty cups. He would watch from there until

“Nine p.m.,” the big, bearded Vision Express man had told him, many months ago. “We close at nine. Can I help with anything? An eye test maybe…?”

“No, no,” Colin had said, pushing his glasses up his nose, “It’s just that in my vision you were open. So she must come by before nine.”

“I see…” said the man, who didn’t.

“Sorry. My sight is 20/20. I see too well, if anything,” explained Colin. “These I just wear for the look.”

What he’d seen, he’d seen the first time he’d used Glazer Street for a cut-through home. It had been this tableau: the sightless Evening Standard guy selling papers, holding his white stick and feeling by instinct for change, outside the busy Vision Express as dusk drew around London and commuters swarmed blindly homeward. A perfectly ordinary evening, in other words. But then, seeming somehow to walk in a bubble all her own, had come the most beautiful woman Colin had ever seen: a real vision. Her. And she’d glanced his way, directly at him – she’d seen him – and smiled… and then vanished. Not in the way so many almost-lovers vanish, snatched into crowds, sucked into doorways, or going down instead of up. Not the way individuals vanished into crowds on CCTV. Just vanished. And, stranded alone again in Glazer Street, Colin realised that, she’d been a moment from the future. Someday, his second sight told him, she’d walk past the blind paper vendor, past the store, smile at him… He’d waited patiently in Glazer Street, that night, just in case; he’d asked the guy in the spectacle store about closing times; he’d even bought a bunch of flowers, but when nine o’clock came and the store turned out its lights, and its thousand pairs of glasses were left in darkness, he’d slunk ruefully home.

The flowers needed water, Colin had reflected. In his home, among the belongings left him by Brad Winklestein, he shared the flowers between two pint-glasses of water (his wife had taken all the vases) and wistfully admired the slender stalks, the luscious petals; the blooms like perfectly mascara-d eyes. From their bunch, they watched him. There were so many of them, it seemed. Colin double-took; suddenly, the room was full of flowers, on every surface: dozen upon dozen of little bouquets in pint-mugs, jam-jars, teapots… The room seemed feathered with petals, and sharp with the heady perfume. And then they reduced in number to the original two glasses, alone, watching him.

In his armchair, Colin had smiled to himself: a smile only he could see. So it was going to be a little while before she came, he saw. That was OK. He had time. He took off his watch, and contentedly closed his eyes.

N. Quentin Woolf

lit@nquentinwoolf.co.uk

www.nquentinwoolf.com