Milady Filacia

3: Pain and No Glory

It took me half a summer to enlist Filacia in my affairs. She was young, as young a kitchen maid as we'd ever had, but I'd soon realized that she was also smart and adept. Filacia set our tables and cooked us meals that were sometimes watery or bland, but mum always smiled at her and told her she did a lovely job. I think Filacia knew she wasn't that great of a cook, but she didn't beat herself up over it, nor did she pride herself on it. Filacia took herself in strides.

"How poor are they," cooed mum over breakfast. "I wonder what would have happened to her had we not taken her in."

"The girl knows how to cook, she can look after herself," dad said, untucking a serviette from his collar. "It is a good thing we're doing here, anyways. Just until she can get back on her feet."

"Then we can get a proper maid." Mum snickered secretively, her eyes gleaming. "And have some spiced Bolognese for the first time in months!"

With Silver gone I'd decided that between appointments with Father Jacopo I'd read American literature. Dad had told me that it was the Americans who dreamed, not the English, not the German, not the Italian - the Americans. To best understand how Silver thought, I first wanted to understand how to dream, because that was what he was known for. So I spent one week reading To Kill A Mockingbird. 

"What did you think?" my dad asked, sitting on the side of my bed. 

"It was boring," I admitted. "I thought the Americans were supposed to be more interesting."

"Is it not interesting? A battle of races in a time when the Africans were oppressed by every means, told from the point of view of a young girl? It should bring about every question of innocence and evil."

"It brought about no question," I said. "Can I have my computer now?"

Dad patted my knee from above the covers. "No. Go downstairs and meet Father Jacopo."

The hallways smelled of singing meat and boiling eggs. Filacia was behind the kitchen counters, rinsing our silver. We locked eyes in the midday gloom as I passed, her spiraling mass of red curls frizzy with humidity. She knit her thin eyebrows together and scrutinized me up until the moment I disappeared behind the door to the basement. 

This happened several times after that, on my way down to Father Jacopo. I felt a growing sense of being delved into every time I passed the kitchen, and eventually had to jump out of the living room window, walk around the house and climb into a hallway window in order to avoid the bulk of Filacia's subjective stare. Her light blue eyes unnerved me, the way her red hair and her sullen silence did. She held herself the way royalty do, but she was the daughter of a pauper. That was all she was. 

In the weeks after my fourteenth birthday I started passing the kitchen again. 

"What do you do down in that basement?" Filacia asked. 

"I play videogames," I said, giving her an innocent smile. "Would you like to come play with me sometime?"

"I work for you," she said, rubbing a dish with a towel. "I don't play with you."

"Well alright." I opened the door to the stairwell, and a gust of cool air wafted around my face, loosening my tone. "Your call."

In the basement, Father Jacopo was in a state of subdued anger. He nearly broke the laptop in his efforts to turn it on, dropping it on the slate floor. "Che palle..." the broad, black-haired man muttered, shoving the battery back into its bottom. "Bastardo bastardo bastardo bastardo bastardo bastardo...." I sat on the medical bed and began unbuttoning my shirt.

"At least you aren't like Edger and Andrew," Father Jacopo confessed, beads of sweat lining his forehead. "They sit around and do nothing for the whole day. They are completely useless animals, getting my people drunk and making them listen to that foreign crap." He struck a match against the wooden table and a tiny curl of smoke rose into nonexistence. "It's been going on for months," he exclaimed, oiling the legs of the medical bed down, wiping them with a rag and tossing the rag onto my belly. He lowered the bed, so I was lying with my face turned to the dusty ceiling. "Months! My deepest condolences - your mamma and papa should have expelled them long ago. And they brought those filthy pigs with them. The church smells like a barn!" Jacopo lit a wine-red candle with the match and held it over my abdomen as he readjusted his position. Just before the first drop of wax could fall to my skin, the entire candle let loose from his hand and lit the oily rag that was on my belly on fire. I fell from the medical table screaming.