I did not sleep that night.
Nor the night after.
It had been two days since I last saw Joseph, and yet the man had lodged himself somewhere inside my thoughts like a splinter that refuses to come out. Every attempt to push him away only seemed to drive him deeper.
There are encounters that pass through you like ordinary weather — a conversation, a handshake, a face that dissolves by morning.
Joseph was not like that.
Joseph lingered.
It was not merely curiosity. It was something stranger, something that had no proper name. A feeling that somewhere inside that man there existed a version of the world I had not yet seen — and once you glimpse such a possibility, even briefly, ordinary life begins to feel intolerably small.
The problem was simple.
I had no way of finding him again.
No number.
No address.
Not even the certainty that the encounter had been anything more than an accident.
So I lay awake turning from one side of the bed to the other, staring into the darkness, replaying fragments of conversation like a gambler obsessing over a hand already lost.
My visit to Pedro's castle had not gone the way I expected.
But as my grandmother used to say:
Non tutte le ciambelle riescono col buco.
Not every doughnut comes out with a hole.
Morning arrived reluctantly.
Nonna sent me to the market for tomatoes, which in Sicily is less a task and more a small pilgrimage through the rituals of the town — past the bakery, the cafés, the shopkeepers sweeping yesterday's dust from their doorsteps.
I was walking past Biaggio's bakery when I saw the car.
A Ferrari 250 California Spyder.
Black.
Even someone who knows nothing about cars can recognise a machine like that. It doesn't sit on the street like a vehicle — it rests there like a sculpture that somehow wandered into traffic.
The curves alone could make a man stop walking.
She wasn't a car.
She was a piece of art that happened to move.
At first I noticed only a hand.
It hung lazily from the open window, holding a thin cigar between two fingers with the casual elegance of someone who has never once in his life been in a hurry.
The cuff of the shirt was immaculate.
Gold cufflinks caught the sun.
Engraved initials.
J. Santis.
Men approached the car slowly, almost ceremonially.
Older men.
Men whose posture suggested the long habits of respect.
One by one they took the hand and kissed it.
Not theatrically.
Not like something performed for attention.
The gesture had the quiet familiarity of an old ritual.
Some pressed the hand briefly to their foreheads afterward.
Others stepped aside quickly, as if they had already taken more time than they were entitled to.
A boy no older than ten approached carrying a wooden box. His mother stood several steps behind him, encouraging him forward with small nods.
The boy opened the box.
Inside were cigars.
The man in the car accepted one without speaking.
Another merchant sent forward a jar of white truffles wrapped in cloth. Someone else delivered a bottle of Burgundy whose label I recognised only because the owner of the wine shop had once lectured me about it for nearly an hour.
A Ruchottes-Chambertin.
The sort of bottle that people describe in poetry rather than in sentences.
The hand disappeared briefly.
Then returned.
The cigar glowed again.
The ash had grown long and delicate, balanced with impossible precision until the man flicked it away with the slightest movement of his finger.
Only then did I step close enough to see the face.
Joseph.
He sat behind the wheel with the calm composure of someone who had never needed to prove himself to anyone. The linen suit he wore seemed less like clothing and more like a second skin — pale, light, impossibly precise in its tailoring.
The jacket moved when he breathed.
Nothing else.
The shirt was a shade of blue that refused to settle on a name.
His hair curled naturally around the temples, dark and slightly unruly, as if the Mediterranean wind had arranged it moments earlier.
His skin carried the quiet bronze of someone who had grown up under sun rather than lamps.
And his eyes —
I hesitate to describe them because descriptions always reduce things.
But the closest comparison I can offer is the sea you see from the cliffs above the Aegean on certain mornings when the light strikes the water in a way that makes it look deeper than the sky itself.
Standing there among the crowd I became suddenly aware of something strange.
No one was speaking to him.
Not really.
People approached.
Offered gifts.
Kissed the hand.
Then drifted away again.
Joseph acknowledged them with the smallest gestures.
A nod.
A glance.
Once or twice a faint smile.
The entire scene had the atmosphere of a ceremony whose meaning everyone understood except me.
La classe.
That was the phrase that came to mind.
Not wealth.
Not power.
Class.
The kind that cannot be learned.
You could give a thousand men the same suit, the same watch, the same car — and none of them would look like Joseph Vanni DeSantino.
Some men wear expensive things.
Joseph made them look natural.
Watching him I experienced an odd realisation.
If that man ever struck you, it would probably break your face.
Not because he was violent.
But because he seemed built with the quiet physical confidence of someone who had never once doubted his place in the world.
And yet the strangest part was something else entirely.
Standing there in the crowd, staring at him, I suddenly had the uncomfortable sensation that Joseph had known I would be there.
That the meeting was not accidental.
That perhaps it had never been accidental.
For a moment — only a moment — he lifted his eyes from the cigar.
And looked directly at me.
Not with surprise.
Not with recognition.
But with the faint, patient expression of a man waiting for someone to finally notice him.
As if he had been there all along.