Free The Four Corners of Palermo by Giuseppe Di Piazza

Paolo lay down, belly up, making a V with their bodies. Sophie and I imitated them, and we wound up composing an imaginary star; four heads touching: Paolo’s dark, bristly head, Elena’s neat and glistening black hair, Sophie’s blonde locks, and then me, with my tousled dark hair, my tangled beard, my look somewhere between Che Guevara and the Italian actor Massimo Ciavarro.
    A starry silence fell over us. I pointed out Ursa Minor to her, sketched it out in the air; she appreciated the gesture even if I didn’t know how to say “Ursa Minor” in her language. I tried with various complicated loops of words, which made her laugh. The atmosphere was charged with trust and faith. We were in our twenties and Death, that night, at the exact moment when Sophie turned toward me, had decided to forget about me. She looked straight into my eyes: my memory, my five senses were suddenly recalibrated. It was as if a cat abandoned by the side of a road built only for dogs had suddenly come straight toward me in search of protection.
    I once read about Lancelot syndrome, which drives men of all ages to rush to the rescue of any Guinevere who seems to be in danger, whether real or imagined. I didn’t know what kind of Guinevere Sophie might be, and I never even had time to ask: we’d been stretched out on that wharf for less than fifteen minutes, and I knew I had to rush to her rescue. Immediately and for the rest of our lives.
    Elena and Paolo destroyed our star.
    “Let’s go smoke a joint on the
Madonna del Lume
.”
    It was a fifty-foot boat hauled up on the beach, its hull painted by craftsmen who’d cunningly combined the dark-blue enamels with the yellows, the reds, the greens, the whites, and the blacks. The
Madonna del Lume
seemed like a piece of avant-garde art. And it was the highest point around, if you left out the villa of the
tonnara
, where you could smoke a joint.
    “Are you coming?
On y va?
” asked Elena, straightening her blouse.
    Paolo pulled a pack of blue Rizla rolling papers out of his jeans pockets. My senses were still switched to
off
.
    I shook my head imperceptibly; only Sophie noticed that movement, and she, like me, had said nothing. We were staring up at the sky.
    “Well?”
    “We’ll stay here,” I said, with that “we” constituting an enormous risk.
    “Yes, we’ll stay here,” said Sophie.
    She smiled sweetly at Elena, seeking understanding, and moved her body closer to mine, transforming our star into a pair of chopsticks—she and I, parallel, two pieces of the same wood, bound together on that wharf by a connection thatcouldn’t be broken by the simple force of a pair of hands. We stayed there, watching the other stars. I explained to her that in late July you can see the constellation of Leo, a shape that is impossible to recognize unless you have a book with a star chart within reach, a sort of guidebook to the sky in which, along with the shapes of the stars and planets, you could find the best restaurants on Neptune, the better addresses on Mars, the monuments not to miss on Andromeda—in short, all the best places in the cosmos to spend a romantic weekend.
    “Of course, every address is rated, depending on the quality of the service, with a variable number of stars,” I added.
    Sophie smiled, gave me a light slap on the arm with the back of her hand, and then let it rest there, in a contact that became the light switch governing my senses. They had all just flipped to
on
.
    I brushed my fingers, intentionally, shamelessly, against her tapered hand, the hand of a Russian pianist. I felt the elastic consistency of her skin, the long bones, the delicacy of a palm that I could imagine pressed against my chest, in a caress that I was yearning for but that instead was only a dream. Time stopped and took a rest. She shifted her hips to get closer still: the wait was over. I intertwined my fingers with hers, and she turned over on her side to look at me, looking me in the eye with