The Italian Lover

by Robert Hellenga

  “Mamma,” she said, “you should be ashamed of yourself.”

  They watched the end crawl till they saw Guido’s name listed with the principal macchinisti—and then they went to dinner at Casa Farnesina, which was only two streets away from the Graziano palazzo. They sat at a long table, and Miranda ordered the risotto ai frutti di mare. While they were eating bread and drinking wine and waiting for their primi, she tried to explain how Esther had ruined the story, but no one shared her indignation, and she soon forgot it herself. The risotto was so good. She’d eaten squid before, but had never realized what it’s supposed to taste like. It was supposed to taste like this.

  “It’s just a movie,” Guido’s father said. “What do you expect?”

  There were ten of them around the table, nine prominent Roman noses and Miranda’s small button nose, ten opinions about happy endings. Guido’s mother was the only one who agreed with Miranda. “In real life,” she said, “you want a happy ending, but in a movie a sad ending would be nice.”

  In the morning, waiting for the light at Ponte Garibaldi on her way to work, Miranda saw a young man, who was leaning against the column at the head of the bridge, lift up his head, put his thumb under his cheekbone and twist it, and make kissy faces at her. “Non me ne frega niente,” she yelled in her broad Roman accent. She stroked the tops of her fingers under her chin. The light changed. She revved up the Vespa. She’d been living in Rome for over a year now. She still wasn’t sure who she was, but she knew she was who she wanted to be.

  A DARK WOOD

  Margot didn’t go to see the film when it opened at the Astra II in Florence in February. She walked by the theater in Piazza Beccaria several times. She’d wanted the film to validate her life in Italy, not to turn it into a comedy. But she stayed up late to watch Esther, who’d come to Italy to plug the film on the Costanza show in Rome, and who was described in La Repubblica as instancabile, tireless.

  Woody’s letter was waiting for her one evening when she got home from her studio. She’d had a lot of trouble letting go of Woody. Eight months he’d been gone, and she was still uneasy. Finally, at the end of February, she drove to Severiano. To see Rabbi Kors. She wanted a get.

  “Are you Jewish?” Rabbi Kors asked, his face registering surprise. “Were you married to a Jewish man? If it wasn’t a Jewish ceremony, then you don’t need a get if you want to get married again.”

  Margot explained. She still had her soul wrapped around a man, she said, the man who’d come with her when she brought Esther to the Seder, and she couldn’t get it free. The man had been an irresistible force, but she’d been an immovable object. “It would be a real mitzvah,” she said, remembering Esther’s words, “if you would give me a get.”

  Legally, it was impossible, Rabbi Kors said. Nonetheless he thought he could let her do the last part of the ceremony— striking the floor five times with the willow branches; throwing the willow branches over the partition. That would be a good solution.

  In his study the rabbi improvised a brief ceremony. “You shall be divorced from this man,” he said, “from this very moment. And you are permissible to anyone. After ninety-two days. Now for the five sweetened severities.” The rabbi handed her a bundle of willow switches that looked as if they’d been used before.

  Margot got down on her knees and struck the floor five times; she threw the willow branches over the partition. She started to cry, and the rabbi comforted her, as if he were her father, and he asked the Lord to bless her, to open for her His bounteous treasures, the heavens, rain for her land in season, and to bless all the work of her hands.

  It wasn’t till the following November, when The Sixteen Pleasures was shown at the Casa del Popolo in Fiesole, where they showed a film every Thursday evening, that Margot broke down and went to see it. She still hadn’t answered Woody’s letter.

  Her first reaction to the film, which had been dubbed into Italian, was, what a lot of work went into this! It was amazing. She hadn’t really anticipated the beautiful shots of Florence. And Zanni was wonderful. He called her once to get Woody’s phone number, which she didn’t have, and then again to invite her to a performance of Machiavelli’s Mandragola at the Teatro Goldoni in Venice in which he was going to play Callimaco. Miranda was beautiful and wonderful too, and now she had a baby—Margot was the godmother—and was still working for Luigi Melozzo in Rome. What Margot dreaded was the ending, when the lovers come together so that they can live happily ever after. She closed her eyes. But then she opened them. Sandro was waiting for Margot after the auction. Outside Sotheby’s. Via Capponi dressed to look like Sotheby’s on New Bond Street in London. She informs him that she’s giving the money to the convent. He’s happy. He proposes. They’ll be poor but happy together.

  And her heart melted. Margot’s heart. All her resistance gave way, and she started to cry. This was the right ending after all. Esther’s instincts had been right. Art heals the wound of individuality. After her cry, she was happy. Happy for the lovers. Happy their story ended this way. She didn’t think she could have been happy in English, but she was happy in Italian, because everything is different in Italian.

  She drank a glass of wine at the bar in the Casa del Popolo. People were talking about the movie. Mostly what they liked was to see Florence and Fiesole in the film. She was bursting at the seams. That was me, she wanted to shout. But she didn’t, because it wasn’t.

  She thought she might go back to her studio. She’d put in five months of solid bench time to finish the Galileo codex, pressing the two-hundred-odd folios individually in a low-humidity environment to smooth out the cockling, scraping away the glue deposits left by the boy in the eighteenth century, mending tears, reconstructing the binding. But the codex had already been returned to the Biblioteca Nazionale, and she’d gone on to the next thing, and then the thing after that.

  The treatment of the codex had ended as it had begun—with a flourish of trumpets. Sterling Pears liked publicity and the codex was news. A team from Harvard University wanted to reproduce the codex electronically. Old Professor Steckley from I Tatti had been at the press conference, along with reporters from La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera. Even La Nazione sent someone to cover the story. Not everyone was happy. “Why was it,” Carlo Malagodi asked in La Repubblica, “that the restoration of one of Italy’s national treasures had been entrusted to a woman from the American Middle West?”

  Leaving the Casa del Popolo, the woman from the American Middle West headed toward the piazza to wait for the bus. But then she changed her mind and turned around and followed the road up toward Borgunto, past the Casa del Popolo, which was now closed. She followed the road till she got to the garbage containers and the Dumpster that sat at the beginning of the path to Settignano. She hesitated, but only for a moment, before setting off. In the middle of life’s way—well, a little past the middle—she found herself in a dark wood. But the moon was full and she wasn’t lost and she wasn’t afraid. And she wasn’t alone. Her mother was with her, at her side, and her father too. And Sandro and Francesca, and Esther. And Miranda. And Woody. She could hear their laughter, see their smiles, feel the warmth of the love they’d shared, as sure and familiar as the path beneath her feet.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my first three readers for their support and encouragement: my wife, Virginia; my agent, Henry Dunow; and my editor, Pat Strachan.

  Thanks to Bob Misiorowski, for reading the manuscript and answering questions about everything from movie finances to production schedules. And to Amy Barnes and Duilio Ringressi, for movie help in Florence; to Julie Lindstrom and Ed Niehus, for movie help in Galesburg; and to Eric Graham, for solving a crane problem from Texas.

  More thanks to John Mottishaw of Classic Fountain Pens, for help with the fountain-pen scene; to Rita Severi, Paolo Bolognesi, Janet Smith, Paola Polselli, and Luca Cataldi, for help with Italy; to Cheryl Porter and Jana Dambrogio, for help with book conservation; to Bill and Syd Brady, for the
ir fund of general knowledge; to Dr. Thomas Patterson, for help with Michael’s prostate cancer; and, to the Cipriani, Lodovici, and Broccoli families, for their hospitality in Florence and Bologna.

  Robert Hellenga received his BA from the University of Michigan and studied at Queen’s University in Belfast and at the University of North Carolina before completing a PhD in English Literature at Princeton University. He teaches at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and is the author of four previous novels, The Sixteen Pleasures, The Fall of a Sparrow, Blues Lessons, and Philosophy Made Simple.