“This house is bad luck,” Jean said before she moved out. And I wanted to believe it. It was what we both wanted. We needed to blame ourselves on something. All the pain and meanness within us—blame it on something else.
Difficult Thoughts
I met them in Florence, where a halfhearted research proposal had won me six months to translate the work of some fifteenth-century nuns. I’d been through a rough time and would have gone anywhere, really. Though the grant was meager, I felt grateful and worked hard.
I was taking a break at a café not far from the library, reading through my notes and sipping my habitual herb tea. The only caffeine-free kind there was chamomile, and Italians were always assuming I was sick. It didn’t occur to me that I in fact looked sick. I’d always been skinny and in the past few months had become even more so; an unexpected trauma before leaving for Italy had left me especially drained. I ate one meal a day, stayed up late squinting into dictionaries, and spent far too much time in an unheated stone library. But when Marcello, smoking at the next table, leaned over and said gleefully, “You’re ill?” I blamed the chamomile. I told him and his older brother, Massi, about the dank library, about the poor circulation in my hands, about trying to avoid caffeine. They looked at me with intense interest, the way people do foreigners; in truth it was not my nationality but the notebook, the library, the worrying about caffeine that they found so fascinatingly alien.
We would meet for drinks and outings. Massi and I held hands surreptitiously in the back seat of a Fiat while Marcello drove us on doleful excursions to medieval towns. Marcello’s girlfriend had recently left him, and the brothers’ impromptu vacation, taken even though classes at their university had resumed, was meant to be therapeutic.
Marcello was overweight and usually suffering from some unnoticeable ailment. The slope of his shoulders gave him a look of perpetual surrender. He sat on the hood of the car pouting into a cigarette while Massi and I climbed hilly trails or crooked stone towers together. One afternoon Marcello looked up from a coffee he was limply stirring and announced that he was scheduled to take an exam at his school—two and a half hours away— that evening. “I really should go,” he said, “or this will be the third year in a row I fail the course.” The brothers put the top back on the convertible, invited me to come visit them in La Spezia, and drove away.
It would have been easy to never see them again. But even in their absence I would see them, when I should have been concentrating on things like fifteenth-century nuns. I would be thumbing through a musty book of religious verse and Massi would appear, tall and tired, with a gaunt, unimpressed face. His teeth were stained from coffee and tobacco, and his eyes already had little wrinkles around them that made him look pensive. I decided that was what had attracted me—the idea of him having strained his mind over difficult thoughts. Marcello’s face was round and soft, with dimpled cheeks that, to me, indicated less serious contemplation.
Too many cigarettes and late nights had aged their skin, though really they were both younger than me. As winter overtook Tuscany, I missed their company. The radiator in my apartment began to rattle violently, and the nuns’ poems had taken on a humorous quality that I knew shouldn’t have been there. Then I really did get sick. It was just a cold, but chamomile tea could do nothing more for me. I convinced myself that the weather was warmer and brighter everywhere else. I remembered Massi’s hand on my right thigh in the back seat of the Fiat. When it had rained for eight days straight and my cold showed no sign of waning, I bought a ticket to visit the brothers.
La Spezia turned out to be a naval port, lined by orange trees that bore inedible fruit, and square gray buildings built by fascists. The structures sulked over their chipped paint and cracked cement. Grizzled cats lurked in doorways and sills. The rain spat sideways. On the side of a main roadway, across from the shuddering ocean, sat Massi and Marcello’s apartment, rooted like a grim, oversized Lego piece. The building looked dirty, until I went inside. Its lobby held an elevator as beautiful as anything I’d seen in Florence—velvet carpet, gold-framed mirror, door of gold-plated bars that swirled into vines and nests of flowers. Lifting me to the top floor, its cables heaved with a raspy, incomprehensible whisper.
“Your timing is perfect,” Massi kept saying. We were sitting on a black leather sofa, consciously refraining from showing affection in front of Marcello; he was still (like me, I supposed) in emotional recovery. “This may be my last weekend home. It looks as though I start my military duty on Wednesday.”
“It’s mandatory, you know,” Marcello put in, surprisingly energetic. My fatigue and congestion had brightened his spirits. He was rifling through a cardboard chest, extracting unlabeled pillboxes and little colored vials. “But there are ways out of it,” he said. “Technically, all men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-seven must do ten months of military or civil service, so I have two years to figure out how to avoid it.”
Massi shook his head like a veteran. “It’s not so easy.”
“I’ve been making some phone calls,” Marcello said mysteriously, and dissolved an aspirin into his bourbon. He propped my legs up on the couch and handed me a bright red lozenge. “One every two hours. I’m going to prepare a hot-water bottle for your feet.” He placed the medicine box on the ebony coffee table, and someone’s forgotten wine rippled in its glass.
Massi took advantage of his brother’s absence to stroke my shoulder for a minute. I held his other hand and noted its smooth, uncallused palm. It was a rich man’s hand. A hand that didn’t know work. Even my own hands had faint signs of toil: paper cuts from research, blisters from the strap of my travel bag, chapped skin thanks to my angry radiator. I waited for Massi to say something forthright or candid, or at least about me. Instead he lit a cigarette. Through the balcony window I could see a thick night sky. “It’s nice here,” I said, for conversation. “Is this where you grew up?”
“We moved to this apartment about ten years ago. My father bought it to please my mother. Then he went off with his girlfriend. They live in Martinique. His company has business there. He sends us a check every month.”
It wasn’t what I’d had in mind, but it was probably the most revealing thing he had said to me. I heard Marcello returning and let go of Massi’s hand, wondering when I would feel it next. Marcello presented me with a hot-water bottle and a blanket, and I lay on the couch like a spoiled invalid. My attendants stood above me smoking cigarettes and telling me how nice it was to see me.
Still on my workingman’s schedule, I awoke early the next morning. I followed sounds coming from the kitchen to find a dark-skinned woman shelling tiny green peas. She looked only slightly surprised to find me standing there in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms. “I’m Rhea,” I told her.
In a Portuguese accent she introduced herself as Alba. “I cook for the boys.” She smiled but then turned back to her work in a way that made me suspect I was intruding. I returned to my room and wondered how long I would have to wait for Massi to awake. Through the window I could see the ocean, where slow waves hunched and tumbled. Restless, I opened a notebook full of messily copied religious verse.
Precious and beautiful flowers we are, virgins solitary for the love of the Savior.
And our celibate brothers, married penitents, remain saintly in this world, to serve the Creator.
It had sounded much better in Italian. Only two months had gone by since I’d begun the project, and already I was forgetting what had drawn me to it in the first place: poetry based on something as pure—and, for me, elusive—as faith. I tried to recall the misty spires and echoing church bells that I had held in mind back when I wrote my proposal. Raised without religion, I had always romanticized the life of the devout. I couldn’t abandon them now, these nuns who had spent their lives in pursuit of something so intangible and—to me—uncertain. I looked at a scrawled stanza in my notebook:
Let each of us humble her heart at the sight of high majesty washing the feet of fi
shermen.
In God’s name, we witness humility: the most honored one is the most humble of all.
The words lay flat and meaningless on the page. I lifted my head in frustration and saw someone passing my door—a woman with silver hair, clothed in a silk dressing gown. When she turned her face toward me, her eyes stood out like bright chips of blue stone. Taken by surprise, I was unable to speak. Instead I managed a smile, but the woman was already turning away, passing my door slowly but seamlessly, as if propelled by the exhale of a whisper.
It was their mother, I decided, and felt my heart fight between the urge to sink and the will to pound furiously at such insult. How could they not have introduced us, or even mentioned me to her, or her to me? I understood there being no mention of Alba, since she probably didn’t live here, but their mother was different. Was I that unimportant to Massi? I decided that I would ignore it and not say anything. Perhaps Massi meant to introduce us today. I would be patient and wait. I looked back at my notebook and read to myself.
The brothers slept until eleven-forty-five and then acted annoyed that by the time we were dressed, fed, and ready to start on the day’s excursion it was already afternoon and we would have just a few hours before changing for cocktails and then dinner; we were to meet their friends at a restaurant that night. Now the brothers stood in the foyer trying to decide just which sight they had so wanted to show me. Alba, dragging a vacuum cleaner into the living room, asked where we were going.
Marcello said, “We haven’t quite decided,” and lit a cigarette to indicate that it was not a question to be easily resolved.
“It’s so cold out,” Alba said. “Why don’t you just stay in and relax.”
Marcello’s ears seemed to perk at the word “relax.” He said, “We could look at photographs.”
“Don’t be boring,” Massi said, and then seemed at a loss. It was then that I noticed a movement out on the balcony, where a drizzle coated the few plants still living. Their mother, in her silk robe and holding a pair of gardening shears, approached a few drooping leaves. Her movements were as slow and smooth as the clouds that moped across the sky beyond her.
I waited for one of the brothers to say something, to wave at her through the glass balcony door, but they had already headed out to the corridor, where Massi was opening the cage of the antique elevator. I stepped into the ornate cubicle and stood there flanked by Marcello and Massi, who appeared worn out by the morning’s events. In the mirror beside us was a twenty-eight-year-old woman with a runny nose and two bored bodyguards.
We spent the afternoon shivering at a few deserted ports, the brothers pointing out pleasant views and arguing with each other over who had lost more money at the track. I tried to commit to memory the brightly painted shutters against the white, stifled sky and waited patiently for Massi to secretly stroke my hand or rub my back. I waited for some revelation—of touch, of a whisper. Back in town, we walked silently under the arcades, lowering our heads to the cold air.
At the restaurant, it became evident that I was supposed to be with Marcello. Not that anyone actually said as much, but it was silently understood, the way that the people I met glanced at him with smiles, sent him winks of approval, and left room for me next to him at the bar. After all, here I was, a lone americana; it was assumed that I had been procured by one of the brothers, and Massi, I discovered, already had Vittoria. She was a big, bronze girl of about twenty, with violet eyes and straight, shiny brown hair she wore in a bandeau. She sat chain-smoking at the bar and tended to glare at Massi, but with Marcello her gaze was soft. They whispered jokes to each other, Marcello’s head falling onto her shoulder, while Vittoria tossed her head back and laughed.
However long Vittoria had been Massi’s partner, it was long enough for him to comfortably ignore her. The resigned silence made their relationship seem all the more permanent. I decided to take the same—silent—approach toward Vittoria, but when we sat down to our meal at the long wooden table, I found myself beside her. Marcello, on my left, kept reaching over my plate to poke her with the cutlery.
At Vittoria’s right, Massi and some friends discussed the walnut sauce and ways to avoid military service. There were wars going on, just a few borders away, but the conversation suggested no relation between this fact and one’s civil duty. Enlistment appeared to be not so much a risk or obligation as an unpleasant waste of time.
I suppose you could say I felt similarly about my abrupt coupledom with Marcello. I remembered Massi’s smooth hands in the back seat of the Fiat. It seemed years ago. Now I watched him, oblivious to me, engaged in conversation. A man named Ivo was recounting how he had escaped the military on grounds of poor health.
“That’s what I’m going to do,” Marcello piped in. “Tell them about my back problem.”
Massi looked only slightly concerned. “You have a back problem?”
“I have a pain.”
“But, Massi,” Ivo cut in, “I don’t understand why they want you in Milan. Can’t you just join the La Spezia marines? We’re practically across the street. You could probably even sleep and eat at home. It would be just the way it always is.”
“Well, of course; that’s what I’ve been trying to do. But I have trouble swimming—heavy bones or something—so they’re sending me to Milan instead. I told them, though, that I don’t need a job where I’m on the water. I have a friend who when he did his military service just washed dishes in the mess hall. I suggested I would be good at that.” Massi squinted his eyes to take a drag on his cigarette. “I’m waiting to hear if they’re able to change my assignment.”
I looked to see if Vittoria’s face might reveal more regarding the situation. Perhaps Massi wanted to get away from her. Or did he truly hope to be posted right here, in town? What was it about Vittoria that could keep him wanting her, besides her violet eyes and prudish hairband? Perhaps I would never know. She reached behind me to pinch Marcello, but he was listening to a joke being told across the table. Dejectedly, Vittoria squeezed a bit of lemon over her fillet. In a moment of solidarity, I turned to her and asked, “What do you think of Massi and Marcello’s mother?”
“She never liked me,” Vittoria said flatly. “But, then, she never liked anyone.”
“But she likes you now?” I asked.
“She’s dead,” Vittoria said.
“But—” I stopped myself from speaking. “Oh,” I said, slowly understanding that the woman I had seen in the apartment was not their mother. She was yet another one of this collection Massi appeared to have, women popping up everywhere, in kitchens, on balconies, in restaurants. I supposed I was one, too. “When did she die?” I asked.
“About two years ago,” said Vittoria. “I guess they still don’t talk about it much.”
“They must miss her,” I suggested.
Vittoria raised her brows slightly. “She was an impatient woman, and yet she put up with too much. She didn’t know how to handle her husband. She let herself be ignored, and so he pushed her aside until there was nothing left of her.” Vittoria poured herself some more wine. “I know how to handle men,” she said. “I would never let myself become like that. Still, you have to be patient.”
I eyed Massi, who was listening to a curly-haired woman I couldn’t remember meeting—yet another one of the menagerie, I guessed. “Or perhaps you could play in the marching band,” the woman was saying. “My cousin played the clarinet, and he never had to do any combat drills at all. Do you play an instrument?”
Massi paused thoughtfully before saying, “I used to play the cymbals.”
The woman’s eyes lit up, and she said, “Well, there you go. They’re sure to need a cymbal player.”
The conversation continued along these lines until late. By 2 a.m. the restaurant had emptied, and it was just the four of us. Marcello popped the top from a bottle of Bailey’s and poured himself a low glass. In what appeared to be a usual pattern, he then said that he wasn’t feeling quite well and should like to re
turn home, and Massi decided to stay over at Vittoria’s. I looked at Massi’s tired face and Vittoria’s bright eyes and realized that my one real reason for being in La Spezia no longer existed.
“I have to leave tomorrow,” I told Marcello as we walked into the damp night air. All we could hear were the splashes of waves on rock and the click of my heels on stone. “I’m feeling guilty about my work,” I explained. “I’ll need to take the early train. Please tell Massi I said goodbye.”
I boarded the train through the morning’s frigid mist, my bag heavy with books and translated texts. To guilt myself into working, I imagined the cloistered nuns, their life’s work abandoned, never to be more than a pile of illegibly bilingual note-cards. Settling into a seat, I opened my notebook and read:
I have sinned and have offended my Lord. Thus, for His love, that He may pardon me, Joyously I scourge my shoulders and belly To escape the serpent who wants to devour me.
About five miles out of the station, the conductor decided to fare sciopero. He stopped the train in a misty field, made a brief speech about workers’ rights, and ran away. Through the window I watched him flee across plots of some tall, dead, unharvested grain. We waited for a replacement conductor until it became clear that none was coming. I knew I ought to find a hotel, or camp out at the station. All around me businessmen made calls on cellular phones. They had places to be, people to miss them, family to wonder where they were. Borrowing a phone, I dialed the brothers’ number.
Marcello managed to look pleased at being stuck with a guest he had just gotten rid of. “It means you’re one of the family,” he said. “You should stay awhile.”
“I can’t,” I said, aware of a note of panic in my voice. “You don’t understand. I’m on a grant. I have to do my work.”
“What work?” said Marcello innocently. “The nuns? Come here; let’s have a look.” I peevishly handed him my notebook. “Here we go,” he said as he opened it. “ ‘O sorrowful sisters, now give a black mantle / to her who cared neither for beautiful silk nor good veil / For I am so abandoned and widowed by my son.’ ” Marcello slammed the book shut. “Sounds good to me.”
Calamity and Other Stories Page 12