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105 5 Raffaella’s Rusty Mustang The narrative currents are gathering on the coast of Ladispoli, and I can feel the winds of storytelling in my sails. I’m ready to describe my adventures with Raffaella. She belonged to the group of Italian students I met in Ladispoli that summer—Leonardo, Sylvio, Tomasso, Bianca Marini, and others. Behind her back, the Italians, men especially , called her “Sarda,” and in their attitude toward Raffaella I sensed admiration for her strikingly good looks, an admiration that was laced with prejudice. Raffaella’s family had moved from Sardinia when she was eight, and she had grown up in Ladispoli. Yet, even to me, a Soviet refugee uninitiated into the nuances of Italian national identity, Raffaella seemed different—in appearance, in temperament, in style. She stood out from that bunch of Italian friends. Raffaella’s parents owned a flower shop on Ladispoli’s main commercial street, which ran from the train station to the sea. She had a younger sister, still in high school, and also an older one, who was married to a navy man and living near Brindisi. Raffaella was studying psychology at Urbino, and for the summer she was back home working at the family shop, where her younger sister also helped out. Her family lived a couple of kilometers west of Ladispoli’s central quarter; they grew most of the flowers they sold at the shop. Although I knew her for about two of the two and a half months we stayed in Ladispoli, I was never introduced to her family and only saw them through the windows of the shop as I passed it on the way to and from the train station . Like Raffaella herself, her father, mother, and younger sister had dark complexions and expressive, dolorous faces. Once, and this was after we started dating, I broke a promise to Raffaella and went inside her flower shop to say “hello.” It was a late morning in July, and I rode 106 Ladispoli from the beach on a bicycle Tomasso had lent me for a couple of weeks, a trusty old Velossinant to assist me on my quixotic pursuits. I was taking a chance. Luckily, her younger sister wasn’t there; Raffaella’s father must still have been out making morning deliveries, and her mother was fussing over a flower arrangement in the back of the store. I swaggered in, pretending never to have met Raffaella, and asked for a red rose. A tall one, I indicated with the span of my arms, knowing by the furious flashing of her Moorish eyes that she had no choice but to play along and pretend we weren’t acquainted. I waited for her to wrap the thorny flower, then paid for the rose, uttered an unconcerned “Grazie, buona giornata,” and motioned toward the door, but then I quickly turned around and handed the rose to Raffaella. “Per Lei, signora,” I said, using the formal pronoun, and ran out of the store before she could say or do anything. For about a week after that she missed our late-night secret rendezvous, although that same evening I saw her among a group of friends, wearing a red rose in her long, loose hair. Something stylized and overwrought in Raffaella’s appearance now bleeds through the sheets of memory, but I certainly didn’t make much of it when I knew her in Ladispoli that summer. Light sandals with straps woven up and around her slender ankles and calves, long billowy skirts, and low-cut blouses with long, drooping sleeves. That was her fashion. There was a muddy creaminess to her face, a dark glow that enhanced the coral whiteness of her perfect teeth. Like myself, Raffaella was a true Gemini, with two conflicting personalities. She was pensive and subdued, even sulky, or else almost mad with sensual energy. And I have no idea why, for almost a month, she kept me as her nighttime companion. I certainly would have chosen her—who wouldn’t? Raffaella was the most dazzling girl I met that whole summer in Italy. But why did she choose me? Was it because she, too, felt like something of a foreigner? Her English was the best of all the Italians in the group, better than that of Bianca Marini, who was studying to be an English teacher, and with Raffaella I felt I could express myself more adequately. I didn’t find myself alone with her until the...

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