A story of infatuation that cannot be given in to. Read an excerpt from “Błahostka”

I’ve been here again. The 18th century house still looked as stunning as ever. A two-story stone building, surrounded by sun-baked Mediterranean greenery. French balconies, green shutters on the windows. The garden seemed well-kept. The slender branches of the lemon trees were bending under the weight of fruit. The grass is trimmed evenly. Pink and yellow flowers peeked out of clay pots placed at the entrance. This is how real rich people spend their holidays. They lock themselves in houses like this and rest, and now I will do that, I will lock myself here, even though it is not my home.

The owner was Marco, a friend of my father’s since college. Today, he is a respected architect and lecturer. When I was a child, he showed more interest in me than other adults and often asked for my opinion. He showed me his brutalist sketches and laughed loudly when I said something looked hideous. Everyone here always admired him and talked about his designs, even though they probably had no idea about contemporary architecture. In the late 1990s, Marco gave several interviews to the local press. Then a photographer came and took a photo of him in front of the house. I remember these newspaper clippings. Marco kept them in a special gray briefcase fastened with an elastic band. “You know, they may become valuable someday,” he said when I asked him why he collects them, since they write about him in much more prestigious titles. He didn’t like it when he missed something. He wanted to have everything under control.

Marco lived in Rome, in an expensive apartment near the Vatican, but he grew up in Naples, near Piazza Bellini. The house in Perdifumo belonged to his grandparents. After their death, he became the only heir. He always felt good here, like at home. He repeated that when he was old, he would move to the seaside and take care of the garden. Only Marina, his wife, did not want to hear about moving away from the big city. She liked to come to the countryside, but not too often and not for long, which is why Marco invited his friends to his summer house every August to reminisce with them about old times and have someone to talk to. My parents and I were among the chosen ones.

In the evening, our friends from Poland were to join us in Perdifumo. Paweł insisted on going on holiday together because he thought they were witty, and they had children our age, and it was so important that our daughters weren’t bored. Paweł was a truly great father. He always thought about everything. I told everyone that he was such a good dad, as if I didn’t want to leave any room for discussion about my motherhood.

The girls were running up and down the driveway, throwing gravel at each other. I told them not to do it, I was afraid that one of them would get hit in the eye with a stone, but they didn’t listen to me. Paweł started taking out the luggage: three suitcases, two backpacks, my handbag and some plastic nets from the duty-free shop. He called the house a villa and said it looked better than in the old photos I once showed him. The last time I was here was fifteen years ago. A little has actually changed. I saw it mostly around the garden. Everything grew, drowned under a layer of greenery.

I walked to the car to grab my phone. I wanted to take a photo. I asked Paweł if it is normal for the fan in the engine to be so loud. He said yes, it’s hot. The girls ran to me and grabbed my leg. They were scared because an elderly man with a closely cropped gray beard came out from behind the house. He was wearing gray work clothes. He waved at us from a distance, the way you wave to people you know well. I waved back in a similar way.

– Who is this? Does he have keys for us? – Paul asked. Yes, he had the keys for us.

– Ciao, signorina Chiara! – the old man shouted with emotion in his voice.

Pasquale lived at the end of the town, somewhere near the monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, and he must have been close to eighty years old. He has always helped the Danielli family in tidying up their house. I remember years ago when I would sit on the grass and he would come to me with a plant atlas and show me what was what, and then he would start complaining about the walnut, that it had grown poorly again or that it had grown too much and I didn’t know what to do with it now. . His wife helped in the kitchen. When I was a child, I loved her homemade lemonade and her tiny cavatelli macarons, resembling little boats. She died five years ago. An unfortunate accident, she fell off a ladder and hit her head on a stone. Her death was even written about in the local newspaper, and a large entry with a color photo and a short biographical note about her appeared on the town’s Facebook page. Marco sent a screenshot to my father.

Pasquale hugged me like before, and I kissed his balding head. He smelled of something familiar to me. The girls kept holding my legs. Pasquale held out his hands to them. He said they had my eyes and if they wanted, he would show them the pool in a moment. I translated to them what he said. They were happy.

Paweł came to us with the suitcases and shook Pasquale’s hand. He was counting on me to present him in some special way. Of course, I introduced him, but I only told him his name and who he was to me. I don’t know what more I could add.

– You could have expanded on the topic a bit and not limited it to just two words, as if I were your friend from primary school – he reminded me later. Maybe so, maybe I wasn’t good at introducing people.

Pasquale grabbed some of our luggage. He walked towards the house and didn’t even want to listen when I tried to admonish him not to carry such burdens.

“I have bones of steel,” he laughed, although I knew that after his wife’s death his health began to decline.

We followed him, carefully placing our feet on the gravel path that led straight to the door. As we entered, a pleasant coolness enveloped me. Cold floor, twilight. Everything seemed familiar. Only the smell was different than before. Then, during the day, guests were greeted by aromas from the kitchen. The food was everywhere, as was the rose-colored fabric softener for the sheets and towels. In the evening, when each of us sat on the sofas in the living room, the summer wind, smelling of wild herbs, blew through the entire house, and when it rained, the smell of parched earth turned into the cool breath of the night garden.

Now it smelled completely different: chlorine. In the bathroom downstairs, under the sink, I saw eight different floor cleaning liquids and one universal preparation for cleaning everything. We probably smelled it from the entrance. Paweł said that they needed to take these bottles somewhere and hide them so that the children wouldn’t play with them; he knew what might be going through their minds when adults weren’t looking. He was right, it was good that he was alert. He always made us feel safe. He liked to brag about it and I took advantage of it.

As I entered further, I saw that the furniture in the house had also changed. Rattan seats were replaced by new peach sofas with lilac cushions and two fluffy armchairs. On the chest of drawers, under a thick-framed mirror, there was a large porcelain bowl with cracked shells. There were new paintings hanging on the walls. Abstraction dominated over figurative art.

I closed my eyes. I took a deep breath and for a moment I felt like many years ago again, filled with the euphoria of the ongoing holidays. It’s still a long way to autumn.

Pasquale walked across the large room and opened all the blinds. He opened the door to the terrace. He went outside and after a while he called us. He opened the orange-yellow remote-controlled awning and turned to me with a broad smile on his face.

“Technology,” he said, and then he began to admire the view of the bay stretching before our eyes. That hasn’t changed at all.

The girls took off their shoes and ran onto the grass. After a while, in the shade of the oleanders, they discovered the pool that Pasquale had told them about. The flowers were pink, the calyxes were beautiful, ripe, and had a sweet scent. I felt happy that I could show my daughters the place I recalled so often.

Pasquale took my arm. He laughed that I was half a head taller than him, as if he had forgotten that the last time we saw each other I was half a head taller too. The sun was still quite high.

“Wait,” he whispered, running up the stone steps into the house. He returned a moment later with a carafe of lemonade and five glasses. He handed me one of them.

– Do you remember? – He asked.

I turned the glass over in my hands. I drank from it when I was a child. It had daisies engraved on the bottom. I smiled. She was still here. It was hidden on one of the shelves in the kitchen, as if waiting for me to return. The girls grabbed it out of my hands. They started arguing about which of them would get their mother’s glass. They finally came to an agreement that they would share it democratically.

Pasquale said it was time for him to go. He gathered his things and made sure we knew where the spare keys were and that we could handle the broken lock on the front door. Sometimes there were problems with it, but there was nothing that could be done about it now, because the local locksmith was going on vacation in August. I put my hand on Pasquali’s shoulder. He smiled at me. Additionally, he instructed us what to do in case the lights went out in the area, as it happened, and where we could find fresh bedding. We said goodbye. He was supposed to come by once a day to water the garden or clean the pool if necessary.

I walked him to the exit. He got on his modern bike with gears.

– It’s a gift from my grandson! – he shouted from a distance, anticipating my question as to what happened to his immortal folder.

Good Pasquale. He disappeared in a cloud of beige dust. The ground was terribly dry. We could use some rain.