From Milan Jude traveled to a small lake at the foot of the Alps, just north of Venice, near the Italian‑speaking part of Switzerland. The lake had no standard name, or so Jude thought after having been told three different names in response to his "Ma come si chiama questo lago?" Many of the people he met spoke a strange dialect of Italian that seemed to be sprinkled with German and Latin.

The village was called Chimera, though even the pronunciation of their hometown was not agreed upon by its inhabitants. There was one pensione which, except for Jude, was empty.

Jude didn't really know how he had ended up at this place; the last thing he remembered was following an amicable group of Trentinesi from Milano to Lago di Garda, drinking Campari and grappa the whole way, until the train arrived at Trento and suddenly everyone (but Jude) got off. One excitable young man, with great bloodshot eyes and a head full of brown curls, scratched the town's name on a scrap of paper for Jude, adding­ "Ma devi andarci, è un paese bellissimo!"

A few hours later Jude found himself in Chimera, the end of the long train line, with the conductors all busy shooing the last passengers from their cars. On examining Jude's ticket (which had only been good to Trento) they made him pay several hundred more lire.

 

It was early. As the air grew brighter and mist burned away Jude saw an empty line of mountains filling the sky across the small lake: a shadowy mass unchanged from its rag‑torn summit to its long, even base. It would be hours before the town were freed from its shade.

Jude looked away from the dark mountains and the sky purely brilliant behind them; it was too much for his tired eyes. They would have trouble adjusting to the intermediate world of color and gray during the rest of the day ahead.

 

There was a hillside in Naugatuck, Connecticut that obstructed the skyview from his bedroom window. On snowy mornings he would sit by the window and watch the dimmed shadow of the hill melt and then re‑emerge when the snow fell lightly. In those days of junior high he felt his interior reflected in things like the weather: changeable things, things he could not control. Things he liked for their mystery.

He wanted those things to come back.

This Chimera was a place too defined, a sky too blue with a golden sun. The grasses there were made of steel. Steel colors spread over the worn roads; hillsides fell full of huge rocks with the strength of steel. Even the tiniest flowers seemed to be pinned in place, reminding him that everything here was in its place. And he?

He walked down one of those perfect streets with his hands in his pockets, and met a rooster sitting on the wall. He turned his new ring around on its weightless finger, hidden deep in his pocket.

Jude! Ju‑Jude! Ju‑Jude!

The rooster's red eye held its place like a dead fish's; his head cocked sideways, and one yellow foot stomped on the warming stone. His wings widened, and small brown feathers flew out at his neck, then collapsed with the goldenrod wing feathers.

"Aren't you pretty," Jude said spontaneously. The rooster ruffled again; his eye blinked. Then he began turning in a wide circle, his chipped beak open and wings held back.

"So, you're an Italian bird, huh? E perchè tutta questa pompa?"

The bird settled again, and took one long breath. Jude walked away.

You know what you need.

“No, I don't.”

You'll wither away unless you have it. I know your type.

“A bit cocky, aren't you?”

That's my name. (The bird followed Jude down the road, keeping a jerky pace atop the wall.)

“I don't, I don't know what I need! I know what you're thinking, of course. It's what you're alive for—all those horny hens.

I didn't say it.

“Well, I've had my share of horny hens too (he thought of Elissa). They don't change anything.”

Jude, Ju‑Jude, Ju‑Jude!

“I'm not listening. Call all you want. I won't listen.”

Jude Ju‑Jude Ju‑Jude! At least you get a chance. Ju‑Jude Ju‑Jude!

He turned down an alley and left the rooster standing behind him, clucking:  an ordinary rooster.

Then it occurred to Jude that he hadn't spoken to anyone yet that morning. And funny, it didn't matter. There was a good walk ahead of him, and that was all he needed.

 

A chance. A fat chance. The frozen hillsides were made by chance; sledriding was not. This Chimera must be a good place for skiing, snowballs, and sledriding. A happy place. He has been sledriding, regardless of the dead hillside's bumps and hillocks, regardless of his mother's late calls, regardless of everything there was to regard.

So why should he be regarding this sun‑soaked town? Why feel the sun if it has no purpose, nothing for him? Why gaze thoughtfully at the hills; why the flowers, the emptiness of foreign land. What should he happen to look at, to notice?

At his feet a lizard crossed the road. The lizard is a newt, and he owns it in a five‑gallon bared aquarium. Glass. A metal screen roof. But he owns more. Along with the pet newt he owns a certain summer day, a game he and his cousin made up in which snakeskins make ancient, powerful necklaces. When you put them on you can wish for anything: a long black snake to cross the little perfect neighbor girl's path, for instance, or a pet rooster. You can wish for anything. He owns that necklace, and he owns the certain smells of his newt‑ridden bedroom, the hamster bedroom, the green‑turtle bedroom, the tropical jungle bedroom.

All of this for a lizard crossing his path.

Jude, the wanderer. If wandering has been his path, what fuels the reason? Where does he feel he's found what he's wandering for?

Someone has planted a garden of red poppies, or do poppies just grow here, at the tip of Italy and foot of the Alps? The poppies’ heads bow to one another, their fern‑leaves curling gently, like waving arms. They fill a ballroom with color:  a garden‑patch of dancers performing for one another. They are actors in the Delta Psi fraternity dance, wearing their long dresses and suits; with the girls' latest bobbed haircuts, and the boys floating from drink. Jude sees an old friend there in the middle, holding her head high up, and sure of her steps.

A wind blows, but lightly enough that the flowers give resistence. Enough that the dancers spring back with keener steps:  the whole room filled with polished, pink‑faced bodies moving mid‑tempo to a decade-old song. And then the daylight comes down strong again; the poppies stiffen. They are made of steel.

It is Chimera again, and Jude is there alone.

The shepherds have skirted him;the women have stayed indoors. But sometimes following him, and pretending not to, is a gypsy boy of nearly ten. He wears a faded red shirt, baggy shorts, a gray, embroidered vest. His feet are bare and gray with fine brown dust. Jude catches his black eyes for a moment, hesitatingly looks away, then glimpses back again, as if sensing danger.

But there is only the boy, with blondish hair, drawing curses in the gravel with a stick. Jude leans against a low stone wall; the wall is coming to an end. Soon the boy drags his stick through the gravel all the way up to Jude, a good thirty meters, making a sound like hail hitting tin. Jude does not like the sound, but as soon as it stops, and the boy looks up to him, he has forgotton it.

"Ciao."

The boy nods slowly, twice, as if he were old enough to have seen the world.

"Cosa fai?"

"Niente. Tu?"

“Also nothing,” Jude replies.

The boy nods again, not as slowly, this time folding his arms and pursing his lips. He begins a long explanation about the real inhabitants of Chimera, pointing to his tracks and others down the dry road. He is speaking that strange Northern dialect, and Jude is only able to catch a handful of phrases.

"There are three‑footed geese with mouse heads living just under that rock over there (he points to the immense solid hillside) and I was just being chased by a flock of humming ants—they're bloodsuckers, you know. But we're okay now. I said the curse."

He spat. All the excitement of finally being able to tell these secrets had filled his mouth with loose saliva. It landed on his dusty leg and he wiped it away. Jude managed to sneak into the boy's monologue:

"Where are you from?"

The boy looked puzzled, but waved strongly three times in the direction of town, where they had both started.

"Up there, way way up the first cobblestone road. And I have a horse there with a yellow collar. He's black all over too! Unco Zinzo’s washing him down right now. What color is your horse?"

"I don't have one."

"But what! How do you get around in your village? A car won't do. No, no, no. Not for a path like this one. And don't lean too much on that wall. The Anziano Cibore lives there, and he's quite a devil. Get away from there and rub some of this on your rump.”

He handed Jude a few of the miniscule leaves he had been holding.

"Don't look like that. There are all kinds of devils around here that might get ahold of you when you look like that." Now he was busy kicking up a mound of stones between his feet. "Hey, you ever been to Roma? I have. I mean, I lived there."

"I was just there last wee—no, two, no three weeks ago, I think," said Jude.

"Oh, well you didn't see anything if you were just traveling through. Are you with the circus?"

"No. "

"Too bad. You missed the best part about Roma—the circus people. They live in the trailors along la Via Appia Antica. Hey, too bad, signore. You missed it!"

"I saw the Colosseum, and the Forum," said Jude.

"Ah‑ha‑ha‑ha! Do you like cats? They're okay with onions, but I wouldn't say I like them. Now that Foroma, it's all full of cats. The skinny, mean kind. Did you know that here in Chimera we have cats that feed on dead people?"

"No."

"You just missed them. They go back to the hills when the sun comes up. But I saw them once…"

"Now wait a minute. There's no such thing. Cats do not eat dead pepple. And where are these dead people?"

The boy thought for a second before condescending to answer:  "In the cemetery, of course!"

"And how do they get to the dead people?"

"Easy. They climb right through the gates and hop up on the shelves to where the coffins are. Two or three will start scratching away at some new once while the rest take their fill of the last—"

"Mausoleums," Jude mumbled.

"Come?"

"In America we call them mausoleums."

"Ah…americano. So that's why you have that look on your face. Just like all Americans. They don't believe in anything."

"But what about…" Jude began, and then stopped, while noticing the boy's eyes again. They did not go with his sun‑washed hair. They did not smile, did not move. They had come from somewhere else; they did not belong. But they were the most certain thing the boy possessed:  everything he said was transposed by them, interpreted and checked by them. They rendered everything he said thoughtless or true.

As they both stood quiet for this eternal moment, a shadow passed over the boy's face, quickly, like a leaping flame. The boy looked up, bewildered, and pointed to the sky.

"Civetta," he drawled.

Jude thought; he had never heard the word. But ahead of him now, disappearing into the cliffs, was a squarish bird with long broad wings, disappearing without a sound.

"Civetta," the boy repeated. Then he took up his stick and ran off.

 

As soon as Jude returned to his small pensione that morning he looked up the word in his pocket dictionary: Civetta, owl.

And what else? The dictionary, so small, stopped short. But there must be something else, Jude thought, something that made the boy run. What about the Civetta? What did it really mean? If it meant something else to the gypsy boy here in Chimera, was that not part of its meaning too? Should Jude supply the meaning? Should he?

He threw the book down in disgust and left the tiny room with all its secrets. Everything in Chimera, it seemed, was a secret.