Page 223 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

hand like a magician to his audience after the rabbit has materialized from the

top hat.
Scattered around us, among the mussed sheets, are the pictures I have shown
Gianna, photos of my trips over the past year and a half. Belfast, Montevideo,
Tangier, Marseille, Lima, Tehran. I show her photos of the commune I had
joined briefly in Copenhagen, living alongside ripped-T-shirt-and-beanie-hat-
wearing Danish beatniks who had built a self-governing community on a former
military base.
Where are you? Gianna asks. You are not in the photographs.
I like being behind the lens better, I say. It’s true. I have taken hundreds of

pictures, and you won’t find me in any. I always order two sets of prints when I
drop off the film. I keep one set, mail the other to Thalia back home.
Gianna asks how I finance my trips and I explain I pay for them with
inheritance money. This is partially true, because the inheritance is Thalia’s, not
mine. Unlike Madaline, who for obvious reasons was never mentioned in
Andreas’s will, Thalia was. She gave me half her money. I am supposed to be
putting myself through university with it.

Eight … nine … ten …
Gianna props herself up on her elbows and leans across the bed, over me, her
small breasts brushing my skin. She fetches her pack, lights a cigarette. I’d met
her the day before at Piazza di Spagna. I was sitting on the stone steps that
connect the square below to the church on the hill. She walked up and said
something to me in Italian. She looked like so many of the pretty, seemingly
aimless girls I’d seen slinking around Rome’s churches and piazzas. They
smoked and talked loudly and laughed a lot. I shook my head and said, Sorry?
She smiled, went Ah, and then, in heavily accented English, said, Lighter?
Cigarette. I shook my head and told her in my own heavily accented English that
I didn’t smoke. She grinned. Her eyes were bright and jumping. The late-
morning sun made a nimbus around her diamond-shaped face.

I doze off briefly and wake up to her poking my ribs.
La tua ragazza? she says. She has found the picture of Thalia on the beach,
the one I had taken years before with our homemade pinhole camera. Your
girlfriend?
No, I say.

Your sister?
No.
La tua cugina? Your cousin, si?
I shake my head.