Milady Filacia

11: Dieter

8 YEARS LATER

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The third banishing came without a chopping.

I wasn't sure if this was to do with my status, with Benicio's death, or with my parents' unconditional love for me. Perhaps I'd signed a contract at birth which excused me from my worst crimes, without truly excusing me. There needed to be a demonstration, to teach the village a lesson, but the genital mutilation of their son was maybe too much for mum and dad to handle. Thus I left at dawn, with a pack on my back and a case in my left hand, scouring the uneasy eyes of the few people who'd came to watch. 

Mum had tried to disguise it as a "mother bird kicking the baby bird out of the nest" scenario. She'd came to my room, late at night. Visibly, she'd kept her hands to herself. "You're getting old now, Vendolius. It's time you leave."

"I thought nobody left," I said.

Her hand jerked strangely in her lap, as if she was going to rub it in circles on my back but shot down the urge. "Why is that what you think? Of course people leave. Orlando had to go. And then Arturo after him." she thought she'd made a mistake with her words. "But you aren't like them. It's not the same. We just want you to experience the world on your own."

I do experience the world on my own, I thought.

It'd been years since Father Jacopo became too ill to strap me to his machines, and years since the websites I usually visited late at night were blocked. But Edger had a son called Nolan who came from an American military base in Pisa, sporting shoulder-length dreadlocks and a bright, uncanny smile. The sort that left you charmed but apprehensive in the same beat. I was seventeen at the time, and Nolan had a wife, and a kid who was still in the States. His wife Sandra was a woman the likes of which I'd never seen before; short hair, small hips and dark creamy skin, with an inky tattoo running up her arm. His kid - who was about my age - wasn't from Sandra, Nolan had told me. He was from a past of crime and teenaged mistakes, you must know all about it. "I must," I said.

Him and I lasted four months. We hadn't snuck around. Sandra was in the kitchen, in Edger's house where they were staying, when Nolan and I came in.

"Edger's at Andrew's," she told us.

"How long?" asked Nolan. 

"Whole night, I think. But I wouldn't stay in the morning, Vendi."

I never had stayed the morning, and Sandra had never came in asking for her side of the bed. She slept on the pull-out couch in the office, I noticed one night on my way to the bathroom. I was worried I'd been inserting myself where I wasn't welcome, until Nolan told me that's where Sander - is what he called her - always slept, even in Pisa, even in Cleveland. "It's the only way," he'd told me.

I was worried that it might have been. So when Nolan and his wife disappeared from Agathina, similar to the way Anselmo had, I began looking for a Sandra of my own. And as spring came, I'd thought I'd found her. I remembered her from middle school, a woman with a lopsided nose and symmetrical eyes, with a face and head of hair that hailed from Turkey. She'd been my seventh grade geography teacher. 

I'd caught up with her at an Edger-themed cocktail party, where she'd admired how much I'd grown. "I'm seventeen now," I'd told her. "That's nice," she'd said, "I'm thirty-nine." "Aren't you married?" She looked at me as if I was trying something mischievous. "Why, are you thinking of proposing?" In a panic, I'd shook my head. 

I had still went with her to her apartment, in a tiny square house near the edge of the village. She had a little too much to drink, she'd told me while kicking her shoes off. I'd followed her into her bedroom and waited while she brushed her teeth. She emerged from the bathroom with nothing on. "Does this excite you, Vendi?"