Milady Filacia

2: The Animals

My sexuality permeated my senses as soon as the village celebrated my thirteenth birthday. The flames of the candles reminded me of the fire that lit the tiddly nerves of my organs when Silver and I were together, and mum's sweet voice of song dripped like warm milk down my pelvis. The cake was made of ice cream, it's façade twinkling with drops of sun-induced excretion. The sickly scent of it inflated Silver like my birthday balloons, until he was finally able to lick the flat of a square-shaped slice with a salivating tongue. 

"You're thirteen now, Vendi," my dad said, as I stared across the kitchen at the dark curls and whitewashed tongue of Silver. "You know what that means. Boys who are thirteen are on their way to becoming men. Your shoulders will grow broader, your voice will become deeper, your thoughts will wander off.... The part about growing up that's the hardest to discover is yourself. But you will do so, through trial and error. Trial and error."

That was the year everyone tried to forget about the chopping of Orlando. It was also the year a fat rasta man named Edger entered the village with a heard of plump pigs and a gluttonous wallet. He came in riding an impoverished donkey that later died beneath his bottom, and then bought a French car from the nearest city and drove it down and up the warm wooded hills with terrifying speed. He hosted party after party, bringing with him ambiance lights, flashing lights, boom-boxes, DJ hardware, and a crate of foreign liquor that disappeared nearly as soon as it appeared. The village girls entertained themselves by touching and braiding his dreadlocks, and he even let them take a plastic lighter to the dark, brittle tips while Andrew Hound attempted to elbow his way through the flippant throng. 

Andrew and Edger soon became pals. "Thank God," mum said when she saw them drinking wine under the pavilion, "I was beginning to think he'd die lonesome."

Edger laughed hearty, bubbling laughs at the jokes Andrew cracked, like raw eggs over an oversized head. "I come from England," Andrew kept repeating, whenever I entered his vicinity. "What's the probability of these Italians knowing what a quadratic function is? Or even a bloody dish that doesn't involve a slice of tomato?"

Edger guffawed and chugged the dregs of a fine red. "I'm only hear to entertain the stick-ups," he confessed. "And have a few barrels of my own. It's only a matter of time before I continue my rolling-out of Europe."

"Rolling out, you call it?" said Andrew. "I'm sure glad England's not a part of Europe anymore - I, for one, wouldn't want you rolling all over my country! Brexit was one of those smarter decisions my nation had made..."

"England's on my bucket list, man. I'll step in quietly, for your sake."

"Oh, do come. You'll love the atmosphere; they all do."

Edger's parties became the habitual necessity of Agathina the moment the flyers went up on the pig sties and stucco barns. He hosted one every week, letting the inhabitants of the village get down and dirty for the first time in years. Smoke and spirit fumes filled the air of the community, while the thump-thumping of Western music drew away the blackbirds that nested in the olive trees around the river. The commoners got high on the essence of Edger's life, chewing away their credibility with every smoked joint until the blood stain on the veranda truthfully became a wine stain after all. 

On an autumn night I stopped my bicycle outside the fence that kept Petra's goats intact. The thump-thumping of what the villagers called 'Mr. Worldwide' blew ominously through the trees, like a distant chanting of sacrifice. The breeze light and cool, I watched the goats butt and kick and prowl until I couldn't take it anymore, and slid beneath the fence. 

I had to walk my bike home, slowly, my entire front covered in mud and goat shit and my backside throbbing. The shower I took was so long our kitchen maid roved into the toilet and scolded me until I stopped the hot water. Breathing evenly, I slipped on my pyjamas and tucked myself into bed, the thump-thumping permeating my brain with every slowing breath I took.

"Andrew's still making the greatest mathematical discovery the world has ever known," Silver told me during winter, as we lounged in frozen hay piles in the yard behind Petra's barn. "'What's the probability that I wipe my ass properly this morning?'" 

We laughed. Silver packed snow into his gloved hand and bit at it until it was gone, melted through his intestines. "I've never seen snow like this," he said. 

"This is nothing," I said. "You should see Switzerland. We went skiing there a few years ago, in a place called Lucerne. The snow there can reach my knees. Can we make out, now?"

"My lips are frozen," Silver said. 

"If you didn't eat snow all the time maybe they wouldn't be."

"If you kissed me maybe they wouldn't be."

"Then let me kiss you!"

"No."

I didn't know why Silver was acting so strange. Thirteen was a year of Edger's parties and Andrew's lingering shadow and goats and Silver's strangeness. When I tried to touch him he made me take my hand back, and when he tried to touch me he'd never finish the job. Winter did to me and Silver what it did to the river, until he found a girlfriend named Martina, who made fun of his name and tried to cut his hair. She let him see her naked and cooked hot gnocchi for him, and she smelled like roasted chestnuts. They always spent time together in secret, either in a cove by the river or in the hay piles behind Petra's barn. But beneath the cork oak tree in the forest, that belonged to me and Silver, and just us. 

Martina left school when she was eleven, Silver told me. She spent four months playing with her friends until her father sold her to a man named Joaquin, who died of cancer not too long after. Martina had her first child at the age of twelve, but it died after three weeks of life, and she married again that same year. This time the man's name was Paulo, and he put four babies into his wife, all of whom died as fetuses. That is why he beat her. 

"But this all happened years ago," Silver assured me. "Things have changed in Agathina, Martina tells me. If she had been lucky enough to have given birth to a healthy girl, she never would have been sold to a man six times her age."

"Why are you her boyfriend?" I asked him. 

"Because her husband isn't much of a husband," he said. 

Up until then, I hadn't known thirty year old women fancied thirteen year old boys. Maybe Silver had the luck of the draw. "He's got himself in unreplaceable business," my dad would say. "Don't you ever get lured into a trap like that, Vendi. Silver is weak, and Martina is taking advantage of him. That's the way the world works, if you aren't strong enough to counter it."

My dad seemed to know everything. He knew about Silver and Martina the week it happened. He also knew about me and Silver, and called the village priest to live with us during springtime, well after Silver had been taken under the broken wing of his new girlfriend. "This would have had to happen eventually, Vendi," dad assured me, as he closed the door and locked it. The priest used handcuffs and electronics to shock my brain until I passed out. He'd continue the next day, this time showing me videos of men having sex on a laptop screen while he shocked my torso. There were a variety of methods Father Jacopo used on me - electrocuting, icing, burning, cutting my toenails off, sticking needles into my arms, and depriving me of sleep to listen to the pleasured moans of men throughout four consecutive nights. I never learned how to stop wanting Silver, even when he became a phantom of smoke wisps and ice cream wrappers stacked up in the butcher's rubbish bin. I assumed he was having fun, running around with Martina until they grew exhausted of running. Until he got her pregnant and received a kind of torture of his own. 

He endured for nearly half a year, but Silver's body was found in the river towards the end of summer. They wrapped him up quickly, chucked him in a wooden box and called it suicide, and for once mum didn't develop opinionated conspiracies of her own. "Silver didn't even know what suicide was," his kitchen maid mum cried after hearing the news, "he was so sweet and so innocent!" They burned him on a stone slab and swept his ashes into the scraps, which Edger's pigs ate and defecated out. I pocketed a piece of pig shit and buried it beneath the cork oak in the woods, then carved Silver's name into the bare trunk. 

In the wake of Silver's suicide came another, less tragic loss. My own kitchen maid passed out one night and never woke up - the lung cancer had punched its final blow. She was given a short funeral and was buried in the cemetery beside the church, her name inscribed in cheap stone. The search was on for a new kitchen maid, and out of charity, mum and dad brought in the daughter of a foreign pauper named Filacia. She was beautiful.