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Description
Every time I saw her – at the butcher’s, at church, anywhere – I forgot how to breathe.  Every week for years, when I went into Sunday Mass at Saint Leonard’s, I’d instinctively look around for her, and when I saw where she was, I made sure to find a pew as far away from there as I could.  I’d sit through the sermon, not hearing a word of it, and searching for her out of the corner of my eyes.  I didn’t dare move my head at all, in case somebody saw.  My grandmother used to tell me when I was little, “Always be a little bit in love.”  True love is torture.  I’d sit for hours in a cramped pew, the drone of the sermon in the back of my head, and all the time be thinking about the exact location of Perpetua Antonioni, what she was wearing, how important it was that she not see me.  Whenever I look at a painting by Salvador Dali, I feel guilty.  It’s the same when she walks by, but for the opposite reason.  With Dali, I feel as though he has dredged up some part of my past, exposed my heart of darkness, and said, “Look!  Carmine!  It is useless going around, trying to pretend to be good, when what lies within you is rotten to the core, rotten like these images I paint.”  Perpetua always wears white to church.  She looks like the bride I will never marry.  I sit there, not deserving to be in her presence.  I know many men who do not think she is beautiful. Women are a frequent topic of discussion in the mornings, when I am at my busiest.  “Blondes are more beautiful,” they say.  “Her nose is too large, and her breasts are not large enough.  Now you take that Maria Zappoli…”  I know very well she isn’t perfect, not by a long shot.  The absence of perfection doesn’t mean angels do not exist.  And this was how I knew she could never love me.  I wanted her to, and still, if she had, nothing could have made me unhappier.  Carmine and Perpetua.  The very thought seemed obscene.  Just sitting in the church, I felt as though a lightning bolt should incinerate me for even daring to step in there.  I was a blight, God’s mistake.  If I didn’t deserve to be in the house of God, how much more undeserving I was to even think about Perpetua.  Yet somehow, if I stopped going to church, if I never saw her again, it would mean I’d given up hope.  So I stepped through those chapel doors every Sunday morning and sat down voluntarily to the worst kind of torture.  I knew I deserved it.
I’d been obsessed with Perpetua for at least two years, maybe more.  It went to back to before I’d killed that dog, back to when I was just seventeen.  I thought it would never end – that I was doomed to love her from afar for the rest of my days.  My life, however, had just altered its course in the most dramatic way possible.
After Donatello died, I became ill and began wasting away.  I came down with a horrible bout of pneumonia the same night the old man breathed his last, and Frankie had to take over the barbershop for a couple of weeks while I recovered.  His efforts with the scissors, alas, were more artistic than what the regulars wanted.  I worried endlessly over the shop, but the truth was, my life was in much more dire straits than I realized at the time.  I lost twenty-five pounds in a week, and by the time I was reasonably recovered, I was little more than a skeleton.  For a few days they’d worried about whether I would live or not.  I wish I had died then, but God had other plans.
The days I was sick surface every now and then, like a fever dream or a hallucination, which I guess is suitable for the stage in between life and death. The pneumonia was so bad I couldn’t move from my bed, I couldn’t get food down, and the cruelest part was that I couldn’t sleep. I was afraid to sleep, and at the same time I wanted nothing more than respite, shelter from the storm – no matter how temporary.  I felt as if I were being crucified, every moment of every day.  I never stopped asking myself, did I do the right thing?  Was he in his right mind?  Should I have trusted him?  Should I have waited?  But that would be putting him through more misery.  What if, during his final breath, he’d changed his mind?  I knew that wasn’t a possibility – I had been there.  What if, what if.  Murder is a sin.  I’ve killed an old man.  Did I kill him, or did he kill himself?  I was his friend.  I was his only friend.  I vaguely remember Prima sponging my forehead every now and then, and arranging me so that I could sit up.  When darkness fell, I would feign slumber so that my sister and mother would go to sleep.  I’d stare for hours out of the window that led to the balcony.  In the middle of the night.  It was so hard to breathe, I didn’t think I could keep on going, but back then I always second-guessed myself.  I pulled through, finally, after all those tortuous, hellish hours.
One night, I decided to see if I could move from the bed.  Every movement I made sent pain sharp as knives shooting through my chest, but eventually I managed to sit up and swing my feet over the edge.  From there, I stood up – I was almost too weak to stand, and I wobbled and almost fell over as I succumbed to a coughing fit, which I muffled in my shirt to prevent my family hearing.  Eventually it subsided, and I made it to the window.  I sat down on the iron balcony ledge outside.  It seemed I’d forgotten what fresh air was like.  I knew at that moment, looking out on the deserted street illuminated by the moonlight, that I was going to live.
Maybe it was only a few minutes that I sat there, staring down at the streets I’d known all my life turned suddenly beautiful and clean and white; maybe it was more like an hour.  I saw Perpetua coming down the street too late; I couldn’t get away before she saw me.
“Carmine, hi!” she called up to me.  She was wearing one of her father’s shirts and an old skirt, her hair was uncombed as if she had just gotten out of bed, and she looked like a vision.  I was suddenly sapped of any strength I’d managed to muster up, and could only manage a wave and a weak hello.
“I heard you were sick,” she said to me, “I was really worried. I wanted to see you, but Prima said you weren’t well enough for any visitors.”  This puzzled me.  We’d barely spoken in the last few years.  Why would she want to visit me?
“Thanks for your concern.  I’m feeling a lot better now.”  Was I in a dream?  This had to be in.  Such a strange scenario would never occur in real life.  I’d wake up – maybe I’d be dead.  Maybe I was dying now.  It all made sense now – Perpetua had been the Angel of Death all along, and finally it was all coming to an end.
“I’m gonna let myself up, okay?  I’ll go in through the back,” she called up, her forehead wrinkling as she looked up at me, and disappeared before I could say anything.  It was too outlandish, too unlikely to be real, and I decided once and for all it wasn’t happening.  I closed my eyes, and tried to calm my beating heart.
I didn’t hear her come up the stairs behind me until she put a warm hand on my shoulder.
“How come you’re at the window?” she asked.  “It’s not gonna be good for your chest.”  She brought me a blanket from the bed.
“Why are you up at this ungodly hour?” I managed to reply.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.  “Sometimes I just like taking walks by myself, when nobody else is around.  The street is kinda spooky ‘cause it’s all deserted, you know.  But it’s beautiful.  If you walk far enough in that direction you come to the bay.”  She was silent for a moment.  “What’s the matter, anyway?  Can’t you sleep either?”  I told her I couldn’t and she clicked her tongue disapprovingly but said nothing more.
“Good of you to come up,” I ventured after a while.  I couldn’t really think of anything else to say.
“You should get back to bed,” she murmured.  So I did.  If she’d told me I should dive off the ledge and fly to the moon, I would have done that also.  I lay down and she put a cool hand on my forehead, and some of the pain melted away.
“I never see you at church,” she said resentfully.
“Strange.  Sometimes I see you.  Must be coincidence.”
“You really don’t like me, do you?”
“What?”
“You’re always avoiding me.  I can’t even remember the last time I talked to you.  I don’t even know why I came up here.”
“Please don’t say you like me,” I said, before I could stop myself.
“But I do.  I wish you didn’t hate me so much.”  Oh Jesus, she looked like she was just about to cry.  Please don’t cry.
“Please don’t cry.  Believe me, I don’t hate you.  The reason I can’t be around you is because I’m not a good person.  Believe me, you don’t want to be around me.  I love…”  Here she looked up.  I swallowed nervously.  I just wanted everything to disappear, but I owed it to her.  I knew this would end it all forever, but it was better to get the whole matter cleared up as soon as possible.  “I love you, Perpetua.  But…I gotta avoid you.  Believe me, I don’t want to.  You’re not for me.”
“Oh, but I am!”  Tears were running down her cheeks now.  She was so beautiful.  I turned down my eyes.
“Carmine, look at me.  Look at me!”  I did, and her face was very close to mine.  She smelled like biscotti – and, strangely enough, roses.  Why would she smell like roses?  Because she’s so beautiful.
“Beauty is truth, and truth beauty.  That is all you know on Earth, and all you need to know,” I said to her, quoting Keats without meaning to.
She closed her eyes and she kissed me, and for a brief moment that I thought might last forever we were in Eliot’s rose-garden, and it was beautiful.  And I remember thinking to myself, maybe, just maybe, I could rise again, like Lazarus from the grave, and this time everything would really be okay.

Description
Every time I saw her – at the butcher’s, at church, anywhere – I forgot how to breathe.  Every week for years, when I went into Sunday Mass at Saint Leonard’s, I’d instinctively look around for her, and when I saw where she was, I made sure to find a pew as far away from there as I could.  I’d sit through the sermon, not hearing a word of it, and searching for her out of the corner of my eyes.  I didn’t dare move my head at all, in case somebody saw.  My grandmother used to tell me when I was little, “Always be a little bit in love.”  True love is torture.  I’d sit for hours in a cramped pew, the drone of the sermon in the back of my head, and all the time be thinking about the exact location of Perpetua Antonioni, what she was wearing, how important it was that she not see me.  Whenever I look at a painting by Salvador Dali, I feel guilty.  It’s the same when she walks by, but for the opposite reason.  With Dali, I feel as though he has dredged up some part of my past, exposed my heart of darkness, and said, “Look!  Carmine!  It is useless going around, trying to pretend to be good, when what lies within you is rotten to the core, rotten like these images I paint.”  Perpetua always wears white to church.  She looks like the bride I will never marry.  I sit there, not deserving to be in her presence.  I know many men who do not think she is beautiful. Women are a frequent topic of discussion in the mornings, when I am at my busiest.  “Blondes are more beautiful,” they say.  “Her nose is too large, and her breasts are not large enough.  Now you take that Maria Zappoli…”  I know very well she isn’t perfect, not by a long shot.  The absence of perfection doesn’t mean angels do not exist.  And this was how I knew she could never love me.  I wanted her to, and still, if she had, nothing could have made me unhappier.  Carmine and Perpetua.  The very thought seemed obscene.  Just sitting in the church, I felt as though a lightning bolt should incinerate me for even daring to step in there.  I was a blight, God’s mistake.  If I didn’t deserve to be in the house of God, how much more undeserving I was to even think about Perpetua.  Yet somehow, if I stopped going to church, if I never saw her again, it would mean I’d given up hope.  So I stepped through those chapel doors every Sunday morning and sat down voluntarily to the worst kind of torture.  I knew I deserved it.
I’d been obsessed with Perpetua for at least two years, maybe more.  It went to back to before I’d killed that dog, back to when I was just seventeen.  I thought it would never end – that I was doomed to love her from afar for the rest of my days.  My life, however, had just altered its course in the most dramatic way possible.
After Donatello died, I became ill and began wasting away.  I came down with a horrible bout of pneumonia the same night the old man breathed his last, and Frankie had to take over the barbershop for a couple of weeks while I recovered.  His efforts with the scissors, alas, were more artistic than what the regulars wanted.  I worried endlessly over the shop, but the truth was, my life was in much more dire straits than I realized at the time.  I lost twenty-five pounds in a week, and by the time I was reasonably recovered, I was little more than a skeleton.  For a few days they’d worried about whether I would live or not.  I wish I had died then, but God had other plans.
The days I was sick surface every now and then, like a fever dream or a hallucination, which I guess is suitable for the stage in between life and death. The pneumonia was so bad I couldn’t move from my bed, I couldn’t get food down, and the cruelest part was that I couldn’t sleep. I was afraid to sleep, and at the same time I wanted nothing more than respite, shelter from the storm – no matter how temporary.  I felt as if I were being crucified, every moment of every day.  I never stopped asking myself, did I do the right thing?  Was he in his right mind?  Should I have trusted him?  Should I have waited?  But that would be putting him through more misery.  What if, during his final breath, he’d changed his mind?  I knew that wasn’t a possibility – I had been there.  What if, what if.  Murder is a sin.  I’ve killed an old man.  Did I kill him, or did he kill himself?  I was his friend.  I was his only friend.  I vaguely remember Prima sponging my forehead every now and then, and arranging me so that I could sit up.  When darkness fell, I would feign slumber so that my sister and mother would go to sleep.  I’d stare for hours out of the window that led to the balcony.  In the middle of the night.  It was so hard to breathe, I didn’t think I could keep on going, but back then I always second-guessed myself.  I pulled through, finally, after all those tortuous, hellish hours.
One night, I decided to see if I could move from the bed.  Every movement I made sent pain sharp as knives shooting through my chest, but eventually I managed to sit up and swing my feet over the edge.  From there, I stood up – I was almost too weak to stand, and I wobbled and almost fell over as I succumbed to a coughing fit, which I muffled in my shirt to prevent my family hearing.  Eventually it subsided, and I made it to the window.  I sat down on the iron balcony ledge outside.  It seemed I’d forgotten what fresh air was like.  I knew at that moment, looking out on the deserted street illuminated by the moonlight, that I was going to live.
Maybe it was only a few minutes that I sat there, staring down at the streets I’d known all my life turned suddenly beautiful and clean and white; maybe it was more like an hour.  I saw Perpetua coming down the street too late; I couldn’t get away before she saw me.
“Carmine, hi!” she called up to me.  She was wearing one of her father’s shirts and an old skirt, her hair was uncombed as if she had just gotten out of bed, and she looked like a vision.  I was suddenly sapped of any strength I’d managed to muster up, and could only manage a wave and a weak hello.
“I heard you were sick,” she said to me, “I was really worried. I wanted to see you, but Prima said you weren’t well enough for any visitors.”  This puzzled me.  We’d barely spoken in the last few years.  Why would she want to visit me?
“Thanks for your concern.  I’m feeling a lot better now.”  Was I in a dream?  This had to be in.  Such a strange scenario would never occur in real life.  I’d wake up – maybe I’d be dead.  Maybe I was dying now.  It all made sense now – Perpetua had been the Angel of Death all along, and finally it was all coming to an end.
“I’m gonna let myself up, okay?  I’ll go in through the back,” she called up, her forehead wrinkling as she looked up at me, and disappeared before I could say anything.  It was too outlandish, too unlikely to be real, and I decided once and for all it wasn’t happening.  I closed my eyes, and tried to calm my beating heart.
I didn’t hear her come up the stairs behind me until she put a warm hand on my shoulder.
“How come you’re at the window?” she asked.  “It’s not gonna be good for your chest.”  She brought me a blanket from the bed.
“Why are you up at this ungodly hour?” I managed to reply.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.  “Sometimes I just like taking walks by myself, when nobody else is around.  The street is kinda spooky ‘cause it’s all deserted, you know.  But it’s beautiful.  If you walk far enough in that direction you come to the bay.”  She was silent for a moment.  “What’s the matter, anyway?  Can’t you sleep either?”  I told her I couldn’t and she clicked her tongue disapprovingly but said nothing more.
“Good of you to come up,” I ventured after a while.  I couldn’t really think of anything else to say.
“You should get back to bed,” she murmured.  So I did.  If she’d told me I should dive off the ledge and fly to the moon, I would have done that also.  I lay down and she put a cool hand on my forehead, and some of the pain melted away.
“I never see you at church,” she said resentfully.
“Strange.  Sometimes I see you.  Must be coincidence.”
“You really don’t like me, do you?”
“What?”
“You’re always avoiding me.  I can’t even remember the last time I talked to you.  I don’t even know why I came up here.”
“Please don’t say you like me,” I said, before I could stop myself.
“But I do.  I wish you didn’t hate me so much.”  Oh Jesus, she looked like she was just about to cry.  Please don’t cry.
“Please don’t cry.  Believe me, I don’t hate you.  The reason I can’t be around you is because I’m not a good person.  Believe me, you don’t want to be around me.  I love…”  Here she looked up.  I swallowed nervously.  I just wanted everything to disappear, but I owed it to her.  I knew this would end it all forever, but it was better to get the whole matter cleared up as soon as possible.  “I love you, Perpetua.  But…I gotta avoid you.  Believe me, I don’t want to.  You’re not for me.”
“Oh, but I am!”  Tears were running down her cheeks now.  She was so beautiful.  I turned down my eyes.
“Carmine, look at me.  Look at me!”  I did, and her face was very close to mine.  She smelled like biscotti – and, strangely enough, roses.  Why would she smell like roses?  Because she’s so beautiful.
“Beauty is truth, and truth beauty.  That is all you know on Earth, and all you need to know,” I said to her, quoting Keats without meaning to.
She closed her eyes and she kissed me, and for a brief moment that I thought might last forever we were in Eliot’s rose-garden, and it was beautiful.  And I remember thinking to myself, maybe, just maybe, I could rise again, like Lazarus from the grave, and this time everything would really be okay.