La Bellissima by Isabella Sarnoff

ISABELLA SARNOFF

MAYA SIBUL

DE&REA ST&ING

LA BELLISSIMA

“YOU SHOULDN’T love things that don’t love you back,” I say as I stare at the back of my naked hand. Earlier, my gold ring slipped to the bottom of the pool and I muse over it all afternoon.

I splash in a mosaic pool surrounded by the four tangerine stucco walls of La Posada Doña Lala, a hotel whose name sounds like lyrics. It reminds me of my great aunt, La Bellissima Anna Moffo, an American coloratura soprano, though I never met her. Sometimes, I rummage online for archival footage of her opera performances, because my father’s memories are slim bones to pick, and she truly was magnificent. He once told me that she left

for Mexico City on his eighth birthday.

“You should have listened to the way everyone sang for me that night,” my father says. “Nobody wanted me to notice she was missing. But boy, could I tell by the chorus.”

On the Christmas before that, La Bellissima descended her fanned staircase in an emerald gown so slowly that my father fainted in anticipation. I imagine her undulating upwards after each step down like a duck bobbing in a lake.

At night I dream that I, myself, collapse waiting for La Bellissima, that she kneels to hoist me onto my small feet, that I grasp the base of her chin with four fingers, and with my thumbs I knead her lips into her mouth like sweet dough, upholstering her teeth while she sings from Madama Butterfly. In another, she asks me who I am.

“Do you see it,” I ask, “the ring.” He laughs. “I’m sorry. I know,” I say. “I just – help,” my voice squeaks, and then we laugh together. I swim breast stroke towards the shallow end of the pool, holding a sparkling Corona above the water and I look at him for a response. Normally, fruity cocktails or lemonades or teas interest me more, but these felt like laborious favors to ask the kind hotel staff on a viciously hot day. So, I continue to have beers. Anna Moffo, I think to myself, wouldn’t particularly like beer, but then again, what do I know?

He stands on the concrete perimeter, in remnant water splashed up from a little girl who swam before us, peering in for my missing ring.

Last night, stumbling back from our dinner in the summer heat, we resuscitated the dinner conversation up the stairs to our room. From the balcony, I saw the girl’s baby doll abandoned in the water. I twisted my long hair off my neck as I stopped to watch its pale plastic limbs float, its green skirt writhing in the water, happily forgotten.

“I’ll keep looking,” he says. “But I don’t see it.” Only a sliver of the pool still has sunlight left, and I calculate how long we must have spent inside it.

“It’s over by you, I think. Or it’s gone. It’s okay,” I say. You shouldn’t love things that don’t love you back. I gathered these words, also lyrical to me, from my mother who lives in a big house on a canyon that sets ablaze nearly each summer. I think about how my mother loves music, too. And gifts like rings from sweet boys. And humid evenings.

“I would offer to get you a new one, but you’re telling me you won’t love it, and that you didn’t love this one, so,” he says. I laugh. “I shouldn’t love it,” I say. “But I do, I love this one, I think. Or I wouldn’t have to keep telling myself not to love it, right?”

He walks over to our belongings hung neatly over a lounge chair and returns to the pool edge with an outstretched towel for me.

“Let’s go,” he says. “The sun is setting, you’re a little drunk, and I’m losing you emotionally to a ring.”

Months later, in New York City, a black bird sits on a telephone pole in front of a bus. Out from its beak, a green beetle falls onto the windshield. I laugh as the bird flies on because, for a brief moment, I want to pin down its wings like a butterfly.

DE&REA ST&ING

MAYA SIBUL