Giulia casually pretends to scan the loose pages of a day-old newspaper spread out across her slender figure. Her deep brown eyes peer over the round metal frames of her eyeglasses and focus on a gaunt famliar figure taking some modest note of the boisterous Punch and Judy show entertaining a throng of writhing children. The brisk breeze taps the hem of his long woolen coat which occasionally succumbs to the wintery bluster, flapping open just long enough to reveal the severe green of his military uniform. Colonello Marcello Vitali, party official, war criminal, ex-lover; her target.
In 1931, Giulia Malatesta became a Communist. With increasing fervor, she exausted each fresh Lenin translation like the slightly salty lemonade of her childhood on the Dalmation Coast. She lost her voice in the Gramsci rallies, lost her friends in the odd police massacre, and found the closest thing she would ever know to God in fiery lectures delivered in the smokey corners of the dark leftist cafes. By 1936, Giulia had already spent several weeks of her life in prison and shaken many an angry rifle over her head in defiant marches against the blatant brutality of Benito Mussolini. The crow's feet branching out from her bright and vibrant eyes belied her youth yet betrayed the wisdom of a century of socialist theory. Now, on this park bench in the uncommonly chilly January of 37', Giulia is a partisan and Giulia has a mission.
"Marcello? Is that you?" with all the artifice and theater of Capra heroine, she calls to him from her banal facade. He turns in bewilderment and she watches with distant satisfaction as the slow look of recognition creeps across his face and transforms itself into a nervous blush. Colonello Vitali knocks the heat from his cheeks with a hastily summoned drop of his chin; an almost satirical reference to a gentler age.
"Giulia, it's been a while hasn't it?"
"Yes it has Marcello, I see you've been doing quite well for yourself." She playfully toys with the cold medalion dangling above his breast pocket, "A general I see!"
"Colonel, actually, and yes, I'd say I'm doing alright." His hand grips her shoulder, the familiar pressure, like a trigger, quickins the tempo of a heart which, since they split-up so many years ago, had been dormant but for the rhythme of marching boots and rifle fire. "And you, still wasting your youth with Marx and Engles?"
She chuckles and rolls her eyes, "I've grown up, Marcellino. I don't read fairy tales anymore." Giulia lets her index finger wander down the trim of his coat, letting it dip into his pocket. She takes a step forward and looks up into eyes, allowing herself a quick glance at his lips. He self-conciously runs the tip of his tongue briefly over them, suddenly aware of their rough winter chap.
"Marcello...", she breaths at his heart, a hand on each collar, surprised at the musicality of her own entreaties.
"Yes?" he whispers with bemused expectancy.
"Come home with me."
She ignites the stove in her modest bicameral apartment and lets the heat soak through her thin cotton gloves. Colonello Marcello Vitali has plopped awkwardly down upon her busted couch and was now adjusting his position to a more dignified, yet casual, yet interested, yet confident pose. Her back still to him, Giulia can feel the sting of his eyes piercing her sweater. She lets slip a passive, lazy sigh, angles her neck to face him, and pulls the sweater over her head. Flashing a brief mischevious smile, Giulia marches into her bedroom, tossing her blouse out the door behind her.
Il Colonello rises from the couch like Bella Lugosi and drifts in behind her. She is stretched out across her bed, naked but for sinuey bedsheets running up between her legs and barely covering her breasts. He stands before her, his bars and medals gleaming in orange glow of the setting sun. His coat flares open over his shoulders and drops lifelessly to the floor. The buttons of his military uniform slip through their holes and his tall, angular Colonel's hat wanders to the foot of the bed revealing the familiar curly black locks through which a sixteen-year old Giulia Malatesta once let her fingers run, once tickled her bottom lip as his sleeping head stirred upon her youthful breast.
His shirt meets the floorboards, making a heavy metallic thud. Soon, he is naked. Where stood a murderous, powerful colonel now stands, exposed and apprehensive, just a boy.
"Mio Marcello," the words slip from between her lips unordered and automatic, like the hands which pull her body forward and plant themselves on the backs of his. Partisan Giulia Malatesta watches as her flesh contorts to a will not of her own, but of a teenaged girl in Palermo, dormant and imprisoned behind bars of books and blood-red flags since 1931. This girl, once so florid and gentile, now pulls Marcello briskly onto the mattress with all the vengeful energy of an captured predator denied its customary bloodletting. She strains her neck upwards to bury her mouth in his. Marcello's instincts finally overcome his stiff militaristc formality and his body lurches ahead with the dancing sparks of muscle memory. Giulia grips his right hand and presses his palm against her flushed skin, pushing it down her stomach and between her thighs. Her eyes boldy confront his in an unspoken question, "Remember?"
They make love to sounds of traffic below the window. The ex-lovers renegotiate each others curves and gasps. Old friends; il riunione. As her tounge brazenly searches his mouth, her body heavy against his, her hand slips under the pillow to pull his mouth deeper into her own when the cool edge of the kitchen knife she had planted there teases her trembling fingers. It nags her, "remember why you're here". She opens her eyes and he, dolce Marcello, her bello ragazzo, is gone once again. In his stead pants the red sweaty face of Colonello Vitali, Fasist, murderer, her target. As the familiar rythmic tightening begins to travel up her spine Giulia pulls his gasping lips to her own in a final earth-trembling embrace and runs the jagged blade accross his pulsing jugular. She closes her eyes against the warm torrents that jet across her face and rush into her convulsing body.