Signs

By Mark Saba

Signs is a magical story in which two young adults who had known one another in childhood are reunited, accidentally, during their sojourns in Italy and Poland. It follows their separate journeys and the extent to which their lives are unfulfilled, then their accidental reunion and how imagination and creativity play into their sudden feelings. Throughout the book both characters notice objects around them that communicate their own thoughts and feelings back to them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Saba
• Release date: Jan 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311169150

Mark Saba

Mark Saba grew up in Pittsburgh, but has lived in Connecticut for the last twenty-seven years. He attended the University of Pittsburgh's pharmacy school before deciding pharmacy was not for him and transferring to Wesleyan University (CT), where he began writing. Eventually he made his way to Hollins College for graduate school, where he won several writing awards for his fiction and poetry. His work has appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies around the U.S. and abroad. He is the author of both printed and ebooks of fiction and poetry. Also a painter, his work can be viewed at his web site. He has worked at Yale University as an illustrator and graphic designer for many years.

Book preview

Signs

by Mark Saba

Published by Mark Saba

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Mark Saba

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Part One

Part Two

About Mark Saba

Other Books by Mark Saba

Excerpt from Tipping Points

Connect with Mark Saba

PART ONE

(Florence, Italy, 1986)

(1)

Jude woke up with a sore throat. He did not want to get out of bed. Maybe it was the air, he half-thought, hoping he could relax enough to throw himself back into sleep. Was there a dream to remember? And did his throat feel tight because of the dream?

He opened his eyes: light. Not the occluded morning gray of his own bedroom, but a full, whitish light; a light that told him there would be no more dreams. Even when he closed his eyes again to forget this evil brightness, the light shone through his eyelids in pink and orange. There would be no choosing this morning, no mixing of the morning-life and dreams. On this day, this bright morning, there was only the world: a foreign world, a place beyond dreams.

So Jude sat up and swallowed. The soreness was still there. He swallowed again, forcefully, and the pain left for a moment, just to return when he took his next breath. Where was he? In what bright place did he find himself sick in July?

Light fell in from the window: a straight beam marking a rectangle on the bed. He turned to face its source, and a chill overcame him. But instead of falling back under the covers, he quickly rose, and stood in the beam. There were no curtains; the tall square window had been ajar all night.

He opened the window wide, and a warm wind blew in. Jude did not look out to the patchwork of rippled, red clay rooftops; instead he looked down to a dark morning alley, where a boy stood bouncing a ball. That was the only sound.

Jude was thirty-four, and sore from carrying his backpack these last few days. He had once planned to exercise to prepare for this trip, but, as often happened with Jude's plans, he never found time to carry it out. Often he could not even remember what his plan had been. Now he wondered if he could have caught a cold from over-exhaustion, or from waiting in the rain for a bus on Monday. What would he do in Florence, in the summertime, with a cold?

He might go to a pharmacy. He'd heard that pharmacists in Italy could give drugs over-the-counter which would normally require a prescription in the United States. Jude felt his forehead: not very warm, in fact cool. So he spun around to find his clothes and dress for a walk down the street. After taking two steps, however, he turned around and headed back to the bed. The plan had changed. His eyes felt like lead weights when he moved them, and the chill came back (or, he decided, it had never gone away). He could not go to the pharmacy.

Signore! Signore!

The matron rapped his door and shrilled:

Lei s'è alzato, Signore? Sono già le dieci. Prego!

Yes, yes. I'm awake.

But she kept on, so loudly that Jude had to get up and open the door.

Buon giorno. Sta bene il signore?

"Yes, yes. I'm staying another night. Un’altra notte."

Eh, un'altra notte! Ma mi sembra che il signore non stia bene...

She led him back to the bed and wrapped her heavy hands around his forehead, neck, and cheeks, continuing with a soliloquy that Jude could barely make out. When he tried to rise she held his shoulder down, and when he coughed lightly once her arms went up in the air. Then she left.

So he waited, half-clothed, in the beam of light that had strengthened with the morning's run. When footsteps returned he looked up, and there in the doorway was not the signora, but her son, Benedetto. He held the ball he had been bouncing under Jude's window. The boy said nothing, making his visit seem a mere stopping point on his way down the hall: he stared, but did not linger. Jude opened his mouth to say hello, but the boy was gone. He knew he would remember that face, though, a face that seemed to know something about Jude, something Jude was waiting to discover.

In came the clucking matron with a cup of tea. She pushed it into Jude's hand and would not leave until he had drunk it all.

When she closed the door behind her (rather loudly) he fell back and stretched under the covers, feeling the warm tea spread out inside him. Then he closed his eyes.

When he awakened the beam was gone. It was two-thirty, and Jude felt better. He left the cool pensione with a sweater tied around his shoulders, and walked, so he thought, in the direction of the Pitti Palace.

It was his third day in Florence. Having arrived on a Sunday, he had missed seeing most of the museums; they were closed on Mondays too. This Tuesday morning, however, he had no particular interest in museums. The sun felt too good on his back; the chill he had felt was not as strong. He would take a long walk, moving slowly, stopping to sit on a step when he had to. And after only a few steps he found himself in a square—full of noise and sculpture, pigeons, merchants, and fruit. He had left his camera in his room; nothing seemed to strike him lately as a reason to lug it around. One thing he did notice in the square was a long-haired woman, probably still in her twenties, who did not seem to belong with the others, or who did belong but chose to disregard others. He could tell by her dress: a long, untucked blouse over a soft, faded skirt; no earrings, no bag, and her hair—no style, but long, highlighted, and falling back and forth over her shoulders as she walked. A man riding a bicycle nearly grazed Jude's back. Jude turned around and the man swerved out of sight. The pigeons descended; someone exhaled a line of expletives, and the woman was gone.

And so Jude walked on, not looking up to the Renaissance tower, completely missing an outdoor reproduction of David, and nearly oblivious to the steady stream of hecklers presenting their wares to him. He stopped at a urinating statue and considered taking a drink to soothe his fickle throat, but a couple of boys laughed, and explained that he shouldn't do that; the water was not potabile.

This was Florence. The same as Paris, as Rome, as Munich. The same market square crowds, same stalking kids. Statues, fountains, statues, pictures, bridges, statues, and fountains. Sun. Rain. A cool step; a warm walk. But he walked with a soreness in his throat this time instead of a lightness in his chest. He needed this trip, he told himself; he needed the change of scenery. And what does a change of scenery bring; what had he expected?

A sparrow flew by him and landed on the statue's raised right hand, looking thoughtfully at the water issuing below. Jude sat on the fountain's wide concrete rim; he too was stilled by contemplation. Why, he thought, had he come here? What made this place different, or not so different, from his home? He thought of how he felt: a feeling that it could have been winter in Connecticut, with his annual flu coming on.

Feelings are void when you don't want them.

Is there, then, the absence of feeling. Yet at times I feel excited; I know something is right. What I am doing is right; I know this from a feeling. But today I have a sore throat, and I don't care much about anything.

Then fly off; keep going. You never know, do you, what might give you that feeling.

Nothing in the museums interests me.

It could be a Botticelli, a woman's hair, or a bird. I've seen you looking at me.

The sparrow took his drink and flew off, in great sputters, toward the sunny sky that Jude could not look at.

The image of the sitting, drinking, then rising sparrow did not stay with him. He crossed the Ponte Vecchio and tried to interest himself in buying something made of gold, maybe a pair of earrings for the woman he'd had an eye on back home. But no, she was too distant; he had always felt she was too distant. You should buy something in Florence, he told himself; and with his next step, he forgot.

He spent the rest of the afternoon at the Palazzo Pitti, where he stumbled upon the last act of an outdoor ballet: a small orchestra kept pace with those quiet pink dancers, their wood-tipped shoes gently reminding him that this was in fact a human, not heavenly, production. When it was over Jude had forgotten where he was. The sky behind the stage had paled to gray; the audience was all in the Palace shadow, and every voice around him rose to a discordant noise.

Jude had never seen a ballet, never having lived in a city big enough to offer one. As the melting feeling he'd had while watching it faded, Jude was overcome by another feeling: one of tension, embarrassment, or remorse. Yet none of those belonging to the jarring voices seemed to notice. Few even glanced at him. Of course, he knew he was nothing very interesting to look at; a slender man, rather tall, with drooping ears and vacant greenish eyes; but he feared anyone acknowledging him. He had to find the way out.

As he passed under the warm-colored portico the feeling left. He faced the busy, cobbled street with his usual emptiness. Gone too were considerations of filling himself; he would go where his feet led, which happened to be back to the bridge.

The emptiness spread out to the streets around him, to the stuccoed buildings and their interiors; to the faces filled with emotion walking near him, but as distant to him as the sun. And then, looking up, he saw not the sky, but a flickering ceiling. He stood at the entrance to the Ponte Vecchio again, watching the shadows of pigeons and shoppers float above him.

Signore, Lei serve vedere la più bella roba sul Ponte?

Qualcosa per la signorina? Basta arrivare qui.

Jude walked near the open trays of gold earrings, necklaces, pendants, and rings. The man who had just called to him was busy with another customer, but a young woman, tall and dark, plucked a heavy gold chain from the tray and held it up to Jude:

Settantadue mila.

He gave no reaction, so she pulled out a pad from her apron and scribbled the number: 72,000.

No, he said, looking intently over the other jewelry on the tray. At first they had all looked familiar, or similar, to him. Now each piece stood out in a completely new character: he liked the twisting, thin bracelet; the six chains at the top were too bright; the one near a pair of lava-shaped earrings intrigued him. In the lower left corner a garnet ring flashed as someone walked by. Jude became filled with the need to own one of these pieces; he wanted to scan every case and tray on the bridge. Already he knew what he wanted: a plain gold ring with a solid flat surface, for himself. He would wear it during the rest of his trip and at home, and it would fill him with something when he looked at it.

Yes, he