Desdemona, Tag Cavello [classic literature list TXT] 📗

or London or Sewell;

My mind rather goes with the gentle lead,

Of my heart when I see you at school.

 

When I see you at noon I cannot eat,

For these feelings profusely strewn,

I gather resigned become replete,

In my heart when I see you at noon.

 

Leave me awake; leave me asleep;

For what is a dream without you?

Test letters in red—go bend, go break!

What more can a dreamer do?

 

When I see you at home I cannot find,

Such meaningful lines for a poem,

May with my love become entwined,

In my heart when I see you at home.

 

And when I see you at night I am freed,

And by countless stars softness light,

I redress the pain and confess the need,

Of my heart when I see you at night.

 

He went to school the following Monday after telling a number of lies to his parents over the weekend. A dentist appointment was made for his broken tooth. Meaning to ask Maris about Sunny’s ring, he looked for her in the halls. That turned out not to be necessary, for she found him.

During lunch with Sunny’s girls (the queen herself was absent, at the insistence of her parents), Maris wordlessly passed by the table. Her hand reached out, dropped the ring next to Dante’s plate, and was gone.

∞

Things were quiet over the following days. Sunny returned to school. Her minions had questions, but they were few, and almost painfully tactful. In the middle of the week Dante made a discreet visit to Miss Cross’s home ec room. He asked her who won the baking contest.

“Maris,” she said, in a rather self-satisfied tone.

Dante cursed at her, and just like that, got himself suspended.

He used the free time to check up on Donati. He walked to number 114 on a windy, rainy morning, while all the other kids were at school. Spring was in the air. Scents of flowers in bloom swirled through the sky, happy for the coming warmer days.

FOR SALE the sign told Dante again, once he’d reached the house. Ignoring it, he went to the door, knocked as hard as he could. When no one answered he thought about breaking inside, but common sense, having failed him once during the week already, this time came to the rescue, and he decided to call the number on the realtor’s sign instead.

Number 114’s agent had the voice of an old woman. Wrinkled yet pleasant. Eager to sell. Having no idea Dante was only thirteen, she invited him for a meet-up at the house. Dante thanked her and said that he was really only interested in the home’s previous owner, Horatio Donati.

Here the woman’s tone became confused. She told him no man by that name had ever owned the house or, as far as she knew, ever lived there at all. From here she returned to her sales pitch. The Wooster-Boalt house, as it was known, had actually been unoccupied for five years, and though the interior could be described as something close to dilapidated, its foundation was solid. Restoration would require work, and time, and money, but it was all worth it. Absolutely worth it. Would Dante please pause to reconsider a meet-up?

Dante thanked her again, and promised to talk things over with his dad. Then he went to the public library, which was but a stone’s throw from his house. He delved through several books on opera singers and their careers. On occasion the name Horatio would pop up, but none with the last name of Donati. Furthermore, upon studying a shelf of books about Italy, he could find no mention of a Nascosto Villagio, past or present.

Frustrated, he walked back to number 114. This time, after knocking on the door again, he peeked through the lower windows. No one peeked back. Every room he could see looked empty. Buried under years of dust. Or in other words, exactly as they had always looked to Dante. The one real difference was this: The table where he’d often breakfasted with Donati was gone.

That night, after a cold, quiet dinner with his parents (both had been deeply puzzled by his outburst at school, to the point were they weren’t certain how to discipline him), he sat with Dukey in the kitchen. The little schi-tzu was smiling. He had a squeaky toy in his mouth.

“Well come here!” Dante said playfully.

The puppy jumped into his lap. He barked, licked Dante’s face, barked some more.

“Are you a good puppy? Huh? Are you?”

Dukey barked that he was indeed a good puppy. Maybe the best puppy in the whole wide world.

“You are,” Dante told him. “You are.”

He put some ice in Dukey’s water dish, and then filled the dish with clean water. The schi-tzu drank.

“See you in the morning, little guy,” Dante said. “Don’t worry. I’ll be here.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: In Memoriam

He is but a memory, and the road behind covered with leaves, and his shine is faint, through far away trees.

 

Many years later Dante went on a business trip to Florence, Italy. Among his peers he was envied, for the business in question took only half a day, and his booking at one of that city’s finest hotels lasted a week. He returned to the hotel when his work was done. Here his wife eagerly stripped him of his suit and tie and, upon adorning him in more casual attire, dragged him back to the cobbled streets.

They ate lunch at one café, drank coffee at another. Both of these stood in Florence’s Oltrarno District, a place of many narrow, secret streets where craftsmen lived behind recessed doors, peddling their creations. Dante and his wife strolled these streets with no particular destination in mind. Signs swayed on an afternoon breeze. An old woman swept dry leaves from her doorstep. She smiled.

“Ciao,” Dante and Sunny told her.

“Buon pomeriggio,” she replied.

A smell of cut flowers hovered at the next corner. Dante bought a bouquet for Sunny, while behind them a group of girls played Strega Ghiaccio. The girls all had scabbed knees and scraped elbows. Delirious smiles.

Piano music lilted from an upper window. Someone—a man—was singing. At the end of the street came an unexpected courtyard. It seemed hidden. Tucked away in a rain of flower petals. The petals gathered at an old stone fountain. Dante led his wife to the fountain’s ledge. They sat for awhile, holding hands.

Across the way was a wall with writing on it. Graffiti. It looked arranged, however. Structured in lines like a book. Curious, he asked Sunny to join him for a closer inspection. The wall was high—about twenty feet—and old. Ancient even. Its huge, flat stones were cracked and faded, as were the words written upon them. Dante’s Italian was rough, but it was an easy job to see the words were, in fact, obituaries. Names, some carved, others simply written in chalk, sprawled over the stones. Beneath them were years. Numbers signifying a birth and a death. Some of the names had poems written next to them. Others were decorated with hearts and professions of love.

Here Dante also discovered where all the petals were coming from. Flowers lay strewn at their feet. Old and dry, new and fresh. Dante searched them in hope of finding something to write with. An old piece of stone would do.

At first there was nothing of the sort. A few melted candles snoozed on charred saucers, but Dante didn’t feel he could get any of them lit for long enough to burn his own message into the wall. He asked Sunny for some lipstick. She looked at him, puzzled. When he explained she told him there was no way she would allow him to dirty up her cosmetics in such fashion. And besides, it wouldn’t work. Both the wall and her lipstick were dark. He needed something lighter, like chalk.

Deciding that she was right, he went back to searching the flowers. As he was about to give up something caught his eye—a shard of rock, painted white. Doubtless it had come loose from a corner and been kicked, or perhaps delivered here by current one rainy night. At any rate, it looked perfect. Pushing a flower aside, Dante retrieved it. He put its broken point to a blank space on the wall. Then he tried to write.

Horatio Donati.

“Well what do you know?” he said to Sunny. “It works.”

“What made you think of him after all these years?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Being in Italy I guess. Seeing those happy kids. Hearing that man sing.”

“Anything else you want to write?”

“Indeed.”

Using his best guess, Dante wrote the year of Donati’s birth, along with that of his death. He needed the local language for what came next. Three words.

Cantare. Ridere. Amore.

Carefully then, he placed the stone back in its previous place. Sunny put her head on his shoulder. A lock of her red hair blew in front of his eyes, fell, came back again.

“Everything okay?” she asked

“Oh yes,” Dante told her after a moment. “I’m happy. Very happy.”

“Me too, Dante,” Sunny said, with deepest affection in her tone. “Me too.”

 

August 2017-October 2018

 

Fine

 

Thank you for reading. Please leave a review of this book at your place of download. You can’t think what it does for an author to know that people care.

 

Tag Cavello was born in Norwalk, Ohio in 1971. Today he lives in Manila, Philippines with his wife and two daughters.

(Photo courtesy of Tronix Imaging Center, Festival SuperMall, Manila, Philippines)

Here are some other places you can find this author:

 

Twitter: TagCavello

 

Blog: coffeewithzombies.wordpress.com

 

Instagram: tagcavello

 

DeviantArt: TagCavello

 

Other books by this author include:

 

Double Dutch and Other Stories

 

Regions Of Passion

 

Crystal Grader

 

Splattered

 

Secluded Worlds: 24 Short Poems by Tag Cavello

 

All works are available at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/dammyl1971

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Desdemona by Tag Cavello (1971--)

This book is a work of fiction. All events that occur within come from the author’s imagination. Any non-fictional relation to characters or events within, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

 

Cover art by Tag Cavello

Imprint

Publication Date: 10-09-2018

All Rights Reserved

Dedication:
For all the ones we’ve lost, and all the ones we have, and will have, with love in every world.