Short Story: Marco's Lion

Standing in the queue for the Museo del’Opera, Marco had considered storming off on his own, but he didn’t have any money. He was sweaty and felt slightly sick from all the cheese he’d eaten at lunchtime. He didn’t want to see any museum about Opera and he didn’t want to spend any more time with his parents. Besides, they were obviously as fed up with him as he was with the whole of his horrible life.

“I don’t want to go in here” he moaned.

“Honestly Marco. Sienna is one of Italy’s most beautiful cities. You’re being very ungrateful” said his mother, turning her back to him and fanning herself with a pamphlet.

“Oh well we’ve got you a ticket now, you might as well come in and see. You might enjoy it” Dad said hopefully, patting his shoulder.

Marco shuffled his feet miserably. “There better be air conditioning” he muttered.

So far Marco had not enjoyed his holiday. His two best friends were at camp, at home, without him and he was being dragged around a bunch of hot boring towns in Italy with his parents. Dad kept rambling on about the Italian Renaissance or something and dragging him into museums filled with old paintings. He also insisted on speaking Italian everywhere which was incredibly embarrassing. Mum wasn’t any better. She insisted on wearing the worst sunhat and putting so much sun cream on him that he looked twice as pale as normal. She, like Dad, kept pointing things out as if he should care. Marco thought that if he heard her say “Look, Marco, how beautiful” once more then he might scream.

To avoid any screaming, his strategy was to put on his headphones and stolidly look at the floor, waiting for the so-called holiday to be over. Even so, they had all argued several times. Marco was even sick of pizza but he didn’t dare try anything else from the menu, no matter how much Dad suggested it in his cringy Italian.

As they filed through the doors with a jostling crowd of other tourists, the family found themselves in a cool dark maze of small rooms, overlooked by tall stone statues and ancient fragments of masonry.

“Museo del’Opera means Museum of Works” said Dad in a teacherly tone. “When they restore the Cathedral next door they put the old parts here so you can see them more closely.”

Marco was relieved that the museum was not about Opera Music as he had thought, but didn’t pretend to have any interest in colossal figures of obscure saints either, so he trailed after his gesticulating father, listening to music on his phone. After a little while though, the battery ran out and he was forced to listen to the echoing footsteps and history lectures from his father.

He dragged his feet and slouched sadly onto every ledge he found. The building was as cold as the marble it was constructed from, endless corridors shining with polished stone floors and walls of red, grey and black. Long passages ended unexpectedly in niches, stairwells led to more corridors. In every silent corner oak benches hunched, waiting through the ages for weary travellers to come and rest. Eventually he realised that he had lost both his mother and father.

He wandered into a long rectangular room with dark pink walls, and one large window at the other end. All along each of the walls were lines of statues. If Dad were here, Marco thought, he’d be busy explaining who all the different saints were and why they were carrying this or that. It was usually the thing they died on, he thought. If he died in here, would they carve a statue of him holding a model of the museum? He let out a heavy sigh.

Marco stopped. He was facing a gargantuan statue of a winged lion, carved from white marble, but he could have sworn for a second, it looked like, the lion had winked at him.

Looking about in confusion, Marco saw only one other person in the room. However, he, a portly museum guard, had dozed off in his post. He was slumped on a stool, leaning against the wall with his mouth open and eyes firmly shut. No use. Apart from his nasal breaths, the museum was tranquil, sibilant with the far away bustle of the streets below.

Patting himself to check he was not asleep too, Marco watched as the huge lion deliberately yawned and stretched and flexed its front paws as if it were not a hunk of stone sitting on a museum pedestal. Marco rubbed his face helplessly, shook himself and was just on the verge of running away when something even more surprising happened.

“Buongiorno Marco” the lion said in a rumbling tone that seemed to come up from the floor.

Marco stuttered something indistinct and raised his hand in greeting.

“Don’t be afraid Marco” the lion purred “I am very friendly. In fact I am almost your pet…..” He chuckled indulgently “because I only wake up at special times”.

Marco couldn’t help asking “and what’s so special about now?”. He felt silly. Boys his age didn’t go about talking to statues. It just wasn’t something you could do.

“It is you that is especial”, the lion jabbed at him with an enormous shining pad. “Only can a Marco who is neither a man nor a boy may see me awaken.” The lion winked at him. “How old are you eh?”

“Thirteen” said Marco proudly. He didn’t like this ‘not a man’ business.

“Yes, si, not a boy but not yet a man” the lion rumbled. Marco didn’t know where to look as the stone eyes peered down at him like curious marbles.

“Well now I’m awake, how about we go on a little aventura,” the lion whispered. “We only have so long before Guiseppe will wake himself up.”

He waved his paw in the direction of the slumbering guard and ruffled the feathers of his wings.

“Come on now and hurry. Get on my back”.

“On your back?” stammered Marco. The lion nodded. He spread out his shining grey white wings impressively, brushing against the neighbouring statues with a clink.

Marco bit his lip. Getting on the back of an animated stone lion was obviously a very bad idea, but it was also the most unexpected thing that had ever happened to him. His friend Stewart’s catch phrase ‘YOLO’ floated into his thoughts. You Only Live Once. This definitely fell into the category of things you won’t get to do any other time.

He slipped off his rucksack and hid it behind the pedestal, climbed up onto the plinth that said DO NOT TOUCH THE EXHIBITS and firmly gripped the lion’s back. Although the stone was as cold as expected, the lion’s snowy fur was soft and he found it much easier to hold on than he had expected.

“Here we go!” roared the great beast with a flourish of his tail, and in one single shake of his enormous dorsal feathers they jumped from the high plinth, out of the window and into the searing bright sunshine.

Marco’s throat was dry and his heart hammered as they soared out into the astonishing blue. Light cut through everything. He saw clearly the crowds of tourists in the piazza below, milling around, queuing, talking, eating ice creams. As they became smaller and smaller, Marco thought how much like ants they seemed, so busy and yet so aimless.

“What about this then?” laughed the lion gleefully as he hauled Marco upwards towards the heavens, passing by the great pointed spires of the old Cathedral. Then, without warning, he folded his wings, turned and began to drop. Marco clutched harder at the fur, everything clenched. “We’re falling!” he yelled.

“No, no, only landing” the lion replied, arriving at an empty area at the very top of the cathedral roof with a graceful leaping motion.

“Ahh how nice to visit my old spot again” purred the lion, hunkering down like a housecat on a wall. “I sat here for four hundred years looking down on everything. The King of the Siennese Cathedral Roof”

“You’re in the museum now though” Marco said lying on the lion’s back and trying not to look down at the long drop on the either side. He was over 1000 meters from the ground, he recalled. Dad’s information didn’t seem so boring now. More a matter of life and death, in fact.

“Progress,” the lion tutted. “A new Cathedral architect thought that it was too dangerous in high winds to have me here. Dangerous for me, or for them, I can’t say”. He purred a little malevolently, Marco thought.

“A few more wing stretches then we go back,” the lion said and before Marco could speak, he sprang back on his great haunches and leapt from the roof’s apex out into that brilliant sunlit void in the front of the building.

Marco forced himself to look as the wind whistled past his cheek. At first he saw the giant stone saints, standing in the Cathedral facade like guardians of the city. Then banking in the warm air, he took in the hundreds of tiny red tiled rooves of the city beyond. He noticed the many coloured houses, countless washing lines, cats running across window ledges, people living their everyday lives. They flew over the cities famous landmarks, that his parents had tried unsuccessfully to show him, past the red bricks of the Palazzo Pubblico. Marco noticed that here tiny doves were nesting in holes in the masonry, and they came out and flew around the ancient lion as he circled their tower. Far, far away in the distance rose the soft misty blue of hills. Marco strained his eyes seeking the vineyards and country roads of Tuscany as they stretched out in front of him, the blues against the oranges of the city like a painting. He drank it in as they soared, the air was thin, intoxicating. He felt a little dizzy. Suddenly a word that his Dad must have taught him came to mind.

“Belissima,” he breathed.

“Ah my friend, you have seen it!” said the lion, beating his wings for joy. “And speaking Italian too!”

“Yes I suppose I am” Marco said in bemusement. “My father is half Italian but, well, I have never felt very into it.”

“What about now?” the lion replied, sliding his eyes in Marco’s direction. The air rippled past them like a warm breath.

“Maybe I never gave Italy a chance” Marco admitted. Up here, everything seemed somehow obvious.

“Italy will always be here,” the lion said “she never forgets her children.”

Suddenly they were at a familiar window and Marco felt a rush of sadness that his marvellous adventure was over so soon. As the lion slipped onto his empty plinth he whispered to Marco, “In 1462 I was carved by a master stonemason called Beppo for the roof of the Duomo.” The animal gave a long sigh and looked out of the window with a wistful expression.

Marco slid off his back but stopped to bury his face in the soft shining strands of the lions mane. “Every day his son Marco would come to watch me emerge from the block of stone they carved. He was fascinated, he would come without fail, and talk to me, and polish me with a little cloth until I was ready to put placed up there so high. So they nicknamed me Marco’s Lion. Even stone remembers such love. So I always wait. Sometimes, I find myself a Marco, and just for a few moments, I can work a little magic of my own”.

The boy put his hand on the lions back and thought of all the other Italian boys, called Marco, that might have sat there, since 1462.

“Goodbye Lion” he said, and jumped down from the plinth. When he looked back, the statue was as hard and impassive as all the others that lined the room, and the Guard was stirring, wiping his face with the back of his hand and glaring at Marco suspiciously.

Marco smiled to himself, slid his rucksack back on and went to look for Mum and Dad.

WRITTEN BY LAYLA OATES

PHOTOGRAPHY FROM UNSPLASH.COM