Racing the Sun(63)

“Holy shit.” I breathe out. “This is beautiful.”

Derio takes out his phone with his other hand. “This time I will take all the photos. You just enjoy the view, the moment. Do you want to go closer?”

Normally, I would say no and stay as far back from the edge as possible but the whole motorbike ride plus the chairlift has left me with a sense of fearlessness. I’m not about to run to the edge but the terror no longer feels quite as real. Maybe it’s the man whose hand I’m holding.

“Yes,” I tell him. “Let’s go closer.”

We make our way through the people and then it’s all there in front of me. Unlike the stunning views I’ve seen before, this one makes you think you’re God himself with the whole world at your feet. From here, Capri town and the Faraglioni Rocks lay beneath you like a postcard, like something you can hold in your hand and hang on your wall. The water and sky meld together into a smooth plane of cerulean blue, and white clouds hang like accents. The island itself is sharp and distinct, even in the summer haze, and you can almost count every white house, every green tree, every ecru-colored slab of rock.

It’s sobering. Not just the fact that I’m able to stand near the edge and not feel sick but because this view makes me realize how small the island is. Somewhere down there, Alfonso and Annabella are with their new church group. Somewhere down there—and if I had binoculars I could probably see where—the house of the sad lemons sits along the promenade. So many sorrows and tragedies and small triumphs contained in the history of one place, hidden from most people’s eyes. I wonder how many other stories of heartbreak and hope are attached to each of these houses.

“No wonder your mother was a writer,” I blurt out.

Derio looks at me sharply. “What do you mean?” Though he looks wary, as he always does when the subject of his parents comes up, his voice is gentle. I know he’s not going to fly off the handle this time.

I gesture to the miniature island below us. “Look at that. Look at all those people, all those lives containing all those stories that we have no idea about. Your mother, she must have come here sometimes and wondered these same things. She gave those people the lives she imagined for them.”

He nods slowly, chewing on his lip for a moment. “Yes, she came here sometimes.” He glances at me. “But, you know, not all of her books were set on Capri. Only one was. Well, two, technically.”

“House of the Sad Lemons,” I say and then catch myself. “I mean Villa dei Limoni Tristi.”

“Correct.”

“And what is the other?”

He looks around us at all the sunburned, baseball-cap-wearing tourists clamoring for the best shot and then guides me away from the viewpoint. When we’re far enough away, he says, “Correre il Sole. Racing the Sun.”

“That’s the book I saw on your desk.” He flinches at that. I stop walking and look up at him, holding on to his arm. “I told you I didn’t read it and I meant it. I just saw the title and your mother’s name. You know I can’t read a lick of Italian anyway.”

“Yes,” he says carefully. “Well, the book was never published. She . . . died before she could finish it.”

“Is that what you’re doing in the library all day? Are you reading it?”

He exhales sharply out of his nose and looks at the ground before straightening his shoulders. “I was reading it. For a year, it’s all I would read. I thought that if I kept reading it, I would know how it would end. If I knew how it ended, she wouldn’t really be gone. I wanted answers, any kind.” I hold on to him tighter, my heart bleeding for him. He goes on, though I can tell it’s difficult for him. “But there never were any answers. Not in the book. So I started reading all of her books. She has so many, you know, over thirty. And in my whole life I had only read one of them, Villa dei Limoni Tristi, the one that made her famous, successful. I wanted to keep her alive by reading her work. She would often say that immortality was the writer’s gift and the writer’s curse. I believe her now. She’s always haunting me but she’s never here.”

I pull him over to a low, flat stone beneath a cypress tree and we sit down. “You were close with her, I gather.”

He smiles to himself, scratching at his sideburns. “All Italian boys love their mamas, or at least that’s what they say. And it is true. But I really did love her. She sacrificed so much for me. When I said I wanted to race, she was the one who convinced my father that it was something I had to do, something I would be good at. Of course, I loved my father, too. He was a good man, very smart, and he worked very hard. But he wasn’t as open as she was. His love was harder to earn. Her love was so free.” He pauses and places his hand on top of mine, bronze against white. “You remind me of her in a way. You’re both free and looking for something. My mother was always looking for it in her books. I don’t know if she ever found it.”