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Overview
"La Signora", by Bruce McAllister, is a dark fantasy about a teenage American living in an ancient Italian fishing village with his parents. He's invited by his friends to go night-fishing on one special night, and although he knows his parents would disapprove, he goes anyway.
"The strength of this work is in its portrayal of the everyday, in the author’s intimate understanding of what it is to be a boy of that age, of that time."--Locus
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466874589 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 08/13/2014 |
| Series: | Tor.Com Original Series |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 32 |
| File size: | 683 KB |
About the Author
Bruce McAllister, born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1946, is a writer of fantasy and science fiction known primarily for his short fiction. Over the years his short stories have appeared in the major fantasy and science fiction magazines, theme anthologies, college readers and “year’s best” anthologies, including Best American Short Stories 2007, guest-edited by Stephen King. His first novel was Humanity Prime, published by Ace Books in Terry Carr’s “Ace Specials” series. His second novel, Dream Baby (Tor, 1988), was based on the Hugo, Nebula and Locus-finalist novelette of the same name. He was away from writing in the 90’s, and returned to the field in 2003. His short story “Kin” was a 2006 Hugo finalist; in 2007 Golden Gryphon Press published a career-spanning collection of his short science fiction, The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories. He lives in Costa Mesa, California with his wife, choreographer Amelie Hunter.
Read an Excerpt
La Signora
By Bruce McAllister, Tran Nguyen
Tom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 2014 Bruce McAllisterAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7458-9
CHAPTER 1
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think they will sing to me.
— T. S. Eliot
As a boy of thirteen, bookish but very American, I lived for two years in an ancient fishing village on the Ligurian Sea, a village of myths and superstitions that had no intention of dying. It was the Cold War. My father, a naval officer, had been assigned to a submarine-warfare research center twenty minutes north, in the big port there. My mother, a teacher and a lover of other cultures, was not going to have me attend school on the American navy base to the south. She wanted me to get to know the people of Lerici, and so (she announced one day) I would need to attend the village school. You don't argue with a teacher. "Sure," I said. Besides, I didn't want to attend school with the crew-cut, tackle-football sons of navy enlisted men.
I studied Italian hard the summer we arrived, helped by a tutor the research center had recommended — a little man, Dottore Stoi, who held his cigarettes oddly and came down to the village on a bus from the port. With his oversight I learned enough to be admitted to the middle school that fall and to survive it. Studying in my room all day, I made no friends that first summer; but when school started, I found them quickly. I wanted to learn soccer, and they wanted to learn basketball, which I played well enough for a book lover. When you're young, you make friends even if you have no more in common than a gray classroom with a single light bulb and an old iron heater that barely works in winter. But we had more than that: We had ball games, the olive groves' bright green lizards that were fun to catch, and fishing.
They were the sons of fishermen, my friends. And I — navy kid that I was — arrived in the village already loving fish. In the ports we'd lived in, on the bases there, I'd caught black sea bass, yellowtail, and big halibut — huge fish by local standards; but the fish here, smaller, were brand-new and charming: the branzino,cernia,ricciola, and sometimes, yes, a huge tonno. You couldn't catch these from the wharf or jetty; but the fishing boats, the old lamparas and a small paranza or two, would bring them in to the wharf, to the fish stands run by the wives of the fishermen. My friends wanted, of course, to be with their fathers on the brightly painted boats; but except for the weekends, they had to be in class, which got out just as the boats returned.
To catch our own fish after school — the big-eyed occhiata and the silver paraghino — we would sit, the four of us, on the rocks of the jetty that ran from the foot of the old fourteenth-century castle out into the Gulf of the Poets. We would fish there with our hunchback teacher, Professore Rigola, who loved the water and its creatures as much as my friends' fathers did. He'd never be able to go out in their boats with those men, given his curved back and unsure legs, but he managed to take us all to sea when he taught us geography, Roman history, and literature ... especially Homer. Both The Iliad and The Odyssey:Cantami o diva del pelide Achille! Sing to me, o goddess! and Pass these Sirens by, Odysseus — listen not to their songs!
You could tell by how he taught us Odysseus and that sailor's fantastic adventures that he loved Homer's wine-dark sea as much as any poet or seaman did. Sometimes, in his excitement, our teacher would shake, make funny sounds, and have to hold himself up at the edge of his desk. My friends — and not without affection (because our teacher did have a kind heart) — would titter, saying, "It's the Signora. She makes him like that."
I had no idea know what they meant. He was a hunchback and also had a lisp; and if he should shake and make funny sounds when he recited great stories that excited his nerves, why not?
I had no idea who the Signora was, or why, if I understood my friends' tittering, she would make a man shake, get weak, or make funny sounds. No explanation would have made sense to me. My father was an officer, my mother a teacher — one with a master's degree in psychology, in fact. Their world was one of civilization, science, and reason, not legend and myth. They would not have condemned the villagers for their beliefs — they would not have held them in contempt for such things — but they would not have entertained superstitions. And I was their son.
* * *
Fishing from the jetty wasn't enough for my friends, and it wasn't enough for me. But they were the sons of pescatori. They could go out on the boats on Saturdays. They needed to learn their fathers' trade, and they needed to help with the fishing if their families were to make enough money. But what could I do? They had invited me more than once to go with them, leaving at first light. They wanted to share with me the waves and changing light and devious nets and glorious fish as they were pulled from the sea. I'd always said no. I knew my parents wouldn't let me go.
It was not because either of them was afraid of the sea. In an irrational sense, I mean. My father had served on a famous battleship in Hawaii during World War II, during the bombing there, and my mother had grown up in Long Beach, California, and learned to swim at six. It was simply (they explained) that things could happen on small boats given the moodiness of the sea, rocks and reefs, unreliable motors, and sudden swells; and that though I was a decent swimmer, I was no Olympian. It was not (they said) that I would drown. It was that I might be injured, and the fathers would feel terrible. That, as my mother put it, would be "no gift" to them ... or, she added, looking at my father, a good thing for "relations between the two countries" either. "Better safe than sorry," my father said. "If you want to go out into the little bay, that's one thing. We'll get a ten-footer — put an engine on it — from the navy club in Spezia if you can find a mooring for it here; but out in the Ligurian Sea, where storms can come up with no warning, we just don't think it's a good idea."
"You could take your friends out in the little boat," my mother added brightly. "They'd enjoy it, wouldn't they?"
I didn't answer. I just nodded.
* * *
So I fished from the jetty. My father put in a requisition for a dinghy with a ten-horsepower motor; but it would take time, and I kept thinking how embarrassing it would be: inviting my friends to ride in such a tiny thing, in a tiny bay, when they'd grown up with vessels that could handle, if the men were skillful, the big swells and violent storms of the Ligurian Sea and travel so far — boats they would inherit themselves if they chose their fathers' trade, which most would.
My father had once sailed on ships, but not since I was little. I remembered those ships, how huge they were — steel and rivets and thick paint, towering above the wharfs — and how the sea, which smelled like a wet animal, kept them floating somehow by magic.
I missed those ships and I knew my father did too. He dreamed of them — and the sea — almost every night, he'd told me once.
* * *
It was in the cove just south of the great castle, a minute or two from it, that the women dyed the fishing nets in big iron pots. They dyed them with the ink from three kinds of sea snails that crawled across the floor of the bay and that their husbands, fishing in deeper waters, brought up in their nets by the thousands. I'd watched the women coloring the nets more than once. I'd seen how dark the liquid was in the pots, and how they stirred the nets with great sticks, and how, after a day's boil, they dragged the nets out onto sand to dry them in the sun for days before washing them in the sea. The water of the cove would turn red — a dark red that was almost purple — and I thought of Homer's seas.
It was the ink from those snails that the Etruscans, Greeks, Romans, and Phoenicians had used for their "royal purple" dye — their royal robes, which had, like Homer's seas, been red, not purple at all. Or so Rigola explained to us one day in our little classroom. Looking at me for some reason, he added that in Ligurian villages like this one, the dye was often used for the fishing nets because, people believed, the Woman of the Sea — frightening though she was — could bring a fisherman good luck if she liked your nets. And she did like that color, he insisted — the wine-dark red that made the cove look as if some beast had been butchered there long ago. And so in every fishing village in this province three women — the streghe — the witches — blessed the nets, hoping to receive La Signora's blessings.
I had seen the three women. I'd stood in the cove with two of my friends, skinny Maurizio and wide-eyed Gianlucca, that first winter, watching the women in their black peasant dresses move from net to net, muttering and blessing each with a gesture that looked both Christian and not. The nets had been arranged on the sand for the three, under a dim sun, and looked like ropy hair, the dye bleeding into the sand. At one point the three women turned as one and stared at us, but then went back to their business. For a week I dreamed of blood-red seas that churned in the night with endless schools of fish, and of a presence — a presence in the darkness — that filled me with both a terrible love and a sweet terror.
* * *
The next time my friends — not just Maurizio and Gianlucca, but Perosso, whose father was considered the best fisherman in the village — invited me to go with them in the boats, it was not for a Saturday fishing adventure, back before dusk. It was for a nighttime trip — something I'd never heard of.
A few weeks earlier, my father, who was never moody — who was what a military officer should be like — strong and calm and even-tempered — had started crying (yes, crying) after he returned from work in the big port. He would come home, eat dinner, and then go to his bedroom, where we would hear him weeping. It made no sense. I didn't even know that's what the sound was at first. It wasn't one I knew from our family life.
"Does he miss the sea?" I asked my mother. Twice the previous summer he and I had gone down to the wharf together and stared at the bay. I didn't know why we were staring. "Do you ever wish you could live in the sea — just swim there, not caring whether you could breathe or not?" he finally asked me the second time.
It scared me a little. I didn't know what to say, so I said, "I guess so." The week before, I remembered, he'd eaten a fish from the market and gotten sick. Not my mother or me, just him. The way he talked on the wharf, I thought he was still sick. It didn't sound like my dad.
"Does he miss the big ships?" I added.
"I think he does, Brad, but he's missed them for a long time. You don't say no to the navy when it asks you to work on land and help run research stations, but a man doesn't cry over that. I don't know why he's crying, Brad."
"Is he still sick from the fish?"
"Oh, no. You don't stay sick for months from that ..."
"Oh."
I would stand by the bedroom door listening to it. He was trying to be as quiet as possible, but it was a small house, so you could hear it.
I kept trying to understand. If he wasn't missing something — and, by missing it, feeling sad — what would make a grown man cry?
Sometimes when I stood there I thought I could hear singing. There was no radio on in the house, and the Lido far below us in its own little cove wasn't playing music.
There were no houses in the olive groves with loud radios.
Maybe I was imagining it. Maybe I was listening so hard to his crying that I was imagining singing.
One night I heard my parents, in their bedroom, talking.
"Can you ask Dr. Lupi for medication?"
"I'll talk to him about it."
"I thought you were going to two weeks ago."
"I haven't had a chance. I thought it would pass ..."
My mother's voice softened. "Of course. I'm just worried about you, Jimmy."
"I know."
I was worried, too, but what could I do? I couldn't ask him about it. I'd be too embarrassed. All I could do was stand by the door listening, because that way at least I was near him and could try to feel what he was feeling.
Sometimes I thought, standing there, that something was calling to him. The sea, sure, but something else, too. And that because he couldn't go to it — couldn't leave the land and go at night to the bay to find it, which it wanted him to do — he was filled with terrible sadness.
I could almost hear its words as it called to him. You don't love me, James. I thought you did.
That's what I told myself anyway, and when I did, I felt it too: that something was calling to me as well. Not enough to make me cry, but enough to make me feel what my father was feeling, a sadness, a longing ... and enough to make me want to answer it.
* * *
"We think you should come fishing Wednesday night with us, Brad. It is a special night." It was Maurizio talking, and it was after school, the four of us together on the sidewalk that led to the passeggiata and the sea. "It happens rarely, Brad, at the proper phase of the moon and the planet-star Venus. Disegno sacro. The best fishing is that night, so you should come. Our fathers' boats meet down the coast, only four coves away, where the water is deep and all of the boats can make a sacred circle with their nets. The light of the moon helps the fish come, but other things come too."
I'm not sure I believed everything Maurizio was saying, but I so wanted to do it. I wanted it more than anything. I wanted to steal away on that special night with my friends, on their fathers' boats. But I knew my parents would say no, and I felt I shouldn't leave them, leave my father, with his crying. It was selfish of me to want to go, wasn't it? It was selfish when my father was so sad. A son should stay, even if he didn't know how to help, even if there wasn't anything he could really do.
Then Perosso — who was tall and dark and had kinky hair because, he said, his mother's people were from Sicily — spoke:
"If your father is crying, you should come. He ate a fish she touched, people say — that is why he got sick, why he hears her and still suffers — and he needs another fish, one prepared the right way, to set him free, my father says."
I stared in astonishment.
Had I told him about my father? I'd told Gianlucca, but I hadn't told anyone else. And yet everyone seemed to know. All three of my friends knew — it was clear from their faces — and they all wanted me to come with them Wednesday night because my father was crying.
"You can stay overnight with my family," Perosso said. My other friends were looking at him, then me, then him again, and nodding. Perosso lived in Vecchia Lerici, the ancient part of the village, with its dark alleys and ghostly cats. "You can tell your parents that my family wants you to stay the night so that we can go night fishing from the jetty with lights. You can tell them that my parents will make sure we all go to school the next morning."
"Will we?" I asked.
Perosso smiled "No. Professore Rigola — and the administrators — know what that night is, so they will not be expecting us to be at school."
"Won't my parents hear about it?"
"These are not things," Gianlucca broke in, always serious, "that teachers and administrators talk about. There will be nothing for your parents to hear ..."
"Is that true?" I asked the others.
"Yes," Maurizio said.
"Va bene," I said at last with a sigh, and headed home to lie to my parents.
* * *
When Wednesday came, I packed some clothes, my toothbrush, toothpaste, and comb, and took them in a bag to school with me. My father hadn't cried the night before, which made me feel better about going. My mother, still worried about him, said, "Yes, you may spend the night with Perosso's family, but be sure to thank them for their hospitality and to help with any fish cleaning. Be a good guest and a good friend." She said all of this looking distracted, her eyes on my father at dinner. My father, distracted too, was staring out the dining room window at the night. I looked for tears, found none, but could tell from his eyes that he was hearing something.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from La Signora by Bruce McAllister, Tran Nguyen. Copyright © 2014 Bruce McAllister. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
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