Gavino

This thought caught me off guard. It’s not that it’s rare to have random facts from my previous life unexpectedly pop into my head, it’s quite common actually, it’s that this particular fact stirred a heavy emotional response in me. Where most thoughts are light as air, this thought felt heavy as steel. Did I feel… sad? Not quite, though it was undoubtedly something like sadness. Without thought, I stood up from my desk and made my way to the easel standing in the corner of my room, leaving the opened history textbook about this world behind. I grabbed both one of the many canvases I had laying around my room as well as my collection of various paints and brushes. I began sketching the outline of the painting. It would be a composition consisting of two segments: one was a cave wall, scattered with paintings of hands and lit up by a small fire, the other the star filled night sky as seen from the cave’s entrance. Most of this was not difficult. Environments and lighting were my areas of expertise. The only part of the process that presented a real challenge was painting the hands. While much easier to draw than if they were attached to a complete person, their proportions still did not look quite correct even after a half-hour period of trial and error. As I was busy carefully correcting my mistakes, the sound of my room’s door slamming open startled me. I turned around and saw my father standing in the doorframe, a well-built man with a thick brown beard and a twirly mustache that would feel at home under the nose of a saturday-morning cartoon supervillain.

“Gavino!” He said, “I have some additional books for you to rea-”

He stopped for a moment.

“What is that painting?”

“I- It’s nothing,” I stutter, already reaching for the white paint, “I was just practicing-”

My father slammed his fist on my nearby desk.

“Not your history apparently!” He shouted, “Nor your painting, actually! So much artistic talent, yet you waste it on pointless shit like this! You think any of the ‘Uomo Universale’ paint this way? You think you’ll pass your art test if you ignore the rules? Or the history test if you don’t study?”

“No,” I said, “Of course not, father.”

“Give me that!” He said, pointing to the container of white paint. I reached out my right arm to hand it to him to which he responded by violently pulling it out of my hands. He inspected my brush-collection for a moment before choosing the largest brush and drenching it in white paint. With aggressive strokes he erased the painting until his anger started to subside and only a blank canvas was left.

“I’m sorry,” I said, looking into his eyes with an empty stare, “I promise it won’t happen again.”

He sighed.

“Tell me why,” he said, “I’ve given you the best education in all of Magranpoli. Your brothers are dying to be old enough to try the tests themselves and work on the council with your mother. And yet, you don’t even have the focus to study for more than half an hour. Why? What did I do wrong in raising you?”

I answered with silence. Only after about five minutes of not being able to look him in the eyes did I speak up:

“I think I’ll go study in the library.”

“Fine.” He answered as he walked away, “Do what you want.”

I sat in silence for about a minute after that.

Finally, I tucked my textbooks under my arm and made my way out of the front door. In spite of what I’d told my father, I did not go to the library. Instead, I weaved through a number of small alleys and passageways before arriving at my destination: a large house, beautifully decorated but in serious disrepair, that one might easily assume to be abandoned if not for a small candlelight being visible through a window. I opened the front door which let out a painful creak in response.

“Hello?” I said, “Are you home, old man?”

“Don’t call me ‘old man’,” a voice further into the house answered, “call me by my proper name!”

“Alright, ‘Paolo’.”

"That's better! Ya here to study again?”

“mmm-hhh”

I followed the voice further into the building, leading me to a studio only lit by a scattering of small candles. A large number of easels with canvases leaning on them, some blank and some painted, had been placed around the room.

“Somethin’ happened at home again?” He asked.

“Nothing.”

A hunched, wrinkly figure peeked out from behind one of the easels. The top of his head was concealed by a beret, but two tufts of white hair could be seen protruding from his temples. His eyes, protected by a thick set of spectacles, peered intensely at me.

“Don’t lie to me ‘bout these kinda banal things,” he said, “I don’t like liars. ‘Specially if they don’t have any good reason to lie.”

“It’s nothing, really.” I said, “I just had an argument with my dad.”

“If it was nothin’ ya wouldn've come here.”

“Somebody needs to keep lonely elders company. If you keep pushing like this, I might not come back! And then you’ll be aaaaaaall alone again.”

The old man scoffed.

“Maybe that was true a week ago, but yesterday I met her.”

“Her?”

His eyes pointed behind me. I turned around and saw what I’d missed walking in: in the corner was a young lady, in her early twenties, about my age, focused on reading a book at a candle-lit wooden table. Her flowing dark hair was longer on her left side than her right. It took about a minute of me and the old man standing in silence for her to be snapped out of her trance and look back at me. She smiled and waved. I awkwardly waved back.

“She came in yesterday lookin’ for shelter from the rain,” Paolo said, “She had some books with her from the library. She can read those books and understand what I’m sayin’, but it doesn’t seem like she can actually speak our language.”

I walked up to her and reached out my hand.

“Hi, I’m Gavino. Nice to meet you.”

“Gika.” She said, pointing to herself with her left hand and accepting my handshake with the other.

She looked me in the eyes, and at that moment, I felt something I couldn’t quite explain. Despite having only just met her, I knew she understood me better than anyone else in this world.