By Renee Agatep
Like the scientists, Angelo once believed the Sicilian volcanic spit of land was victim to pressure shifts—that pulses of electrical energy plagued the village of Canneto di Caronia with spontaneous fires. He told me he believed that until the day the cable car outside his bedroom window burst into flames.
Angelo held a wine glass to the light. It was, of course, without a single spot. The restaurant teemed around us.
“Still,” Angelo considered, “it could be the volcano.”
He told me of officials and scientists from around the world who made pilgrimages to Canneto. NASA brought Geiger counters, geophysicists, and volcanologists concerned with rogue electromagnetic fields. The scientists had no answers, and Angelo’s village became increasingly superstitious.
A waiter appeared from behind the bar to draw Angelo’s attention away from me. The dinner crowd had rushed in, shoulder to shoulder now at the front of the restaurant.
“It seems I am needed.” Angelo held back the smile from his lips and shrugged, but he couldn’t turn to go.
Anxious to clear the table, the waiter fidgeted where he stood before twisting his frustrated hips and shoulders back through the crowd. Angelo stood fast over me. He looked at me as though I might launch a thousand ships, but men’s eyes are worth no more than the echoes of fortunes thrown down wishing wells.
“Please stay, then I will tell you the rest.”
Ours was the kind of love affair I will miss the rest of my days. The kind where he hoped each day I would appear in his restaurant. The kind where, on most days, I didn’t. The kind where I could come in from the rain and settle by the hearth of his aching looks on dark, lonely evenings.
On slow nights, Angelo stepped from behind the butcher table and sat across from me. He had the sense to look away when we stared too long. He told me of the village’s food and wine. Then he told me, little by little, of a string of mysterious events that began with his sister’s wedding. The wedding party drinking their Nero d’Avola in the hall, an entire room of wedding gifts engulfed by an inexplicable spark. It was rumored to be the work of the dark forces.
Letting your thoughts swim in Nero d’Avola can be a dangerous thing. Nights that ended at Angelo’s led to lonesome mornings missing the firm, plum grip of the wine. I longed for the grape’s tobacco tones washing over me—the warm flicker of pepper, a black cherry finish that clutched and held me, rocking me to a dead sleep.
But that night it was busy, so I waited for the crowds to have their meals, to see their empty dishes of caponata lingering with aubergine skins cleared from the tables. From behind the butcher’s counter Angelo stole glances—looking for my pen in my mouth, my chin in my palms. When he was chopping or cleaving or pouring, I looked to the wedding ring under his transparent glove.
The restaurant finally emptied, and a waiter locked the front door. Angelo removed his gloves and apron, took off his chef’s hat. Two stemless globes of glass had waited all evening to be filled. And it started as quietly as ever—the glasses filling and refilling until our sipfuls ignited and carried us to Canneto.
The fires continued and the villagers turned to visions of poltergeists and demons. Those led to exorcisms in Angelo’s parish. Italy’s national utility went so far as to cut power to the village, but the fires didn’t stop. The town replaced its wires. Ripped them up, changed them, grounded them all.
One night, just beyond the window of Angelo’s home, an abandoned cable car exploded. Not connected to a single pulse of electricity, it burst into flames for no reason.
“I saw what happened,” Angelo said in a hush. “And I ran, I came to America.”
“What happened then?”
“Nothing, not one fire since I left.”
Angelo and I had forgotten to blink, forgotten to lean back in our bentwood chairs. The polarity of our hands had pulled themselves to the center of the table. The wine numbed my lips where I held my breath, and I could only feel the radiating warmth of his fingers a millimeter, a moment from mine, burning me in a frenzy.
Angelo jolted to his feet, and I grasped at my own hands to stop myself from reaching for him. Smoke poured from the kitchen into the restaurant. At first, I mistook the sounds for deep, bone-chilling laughter, then yes, screaming. Men screaming.
But I must have reached for him. I must have followed, I must have chased him inside the kitchen. Flames. Throwing water at the pan. Splashing. Heat from all sides. Covering the pan, lifting it. The flames burst through the room.
A waiter was on fire.
Angelo knocked me down with a fire extinguisher and fought his way to the waiter. He released a flurry of snow, and the fire stopped.
Something was still wrong, but I couldn’t look away from the waiter. He was standing there, shaking like a lost child, staring into the cloud in front of him. It got hotter and hotter until Angelo turned to me in a gust of fumes and powder.
Angelo lifted me from the ground, cradling me in his arms. He sat me on the butcher’s counter. His eyes darted about me, up and down, searching the smoke that poured from my body as though I’d swallowed a torch. He handled me like a doll made of ash, looking for embers beneath the soot. His hands slid gently up my legs until he found where my dress was molten, black, and smoldering.
“Call the ambulanza.”
As my dress melted to my flesh, he wrapped me in a cold, wet towel. My ears rung and alarms blared while Angelo’s mouth confessed inaudibly through stern and hopeless tears.
“I can’t hear you,” I cried. “I can’t hear you!”
And he was there when I woke in my hospital bed, twisting that ring uncomfortably about his finger. When our eyes met for the last time, he stood to go with a nod and a painful smile.
I want to find Angelo and ask, “All those years ago, what was it you said?”
Maybe he’d tell me, in his gentle way, not to spoil perfectly good and simple things. And he would be right not to say—for fear the both of us would end in conflagration, in spontaneous combustion, burned to the ground.
This story was originally published in Capsule Stories: Autumn 2020 Edition. You can find the full issue at Barnes and Noble.
Renee Agatep 