The Apprentice Lover

by Jay Parini

  Although I hadn’t written much prose yet, the idea of historical fiction appealed to me, and I looked forward to discussing the subject with Grant, who had already written a dozen historical novels that had changed the nature of a genre once dismissed by critics as the domain of second-rate writers. Fearless and wildly erudite, Grant had roamed the corridors of history from ancient Greece to Elizabethan England and, most recently, had published Dying Above His Means, a novel about the twilight years of Oscar Wilde, that period when (after the prison years in Reading) he retreated to the Continent with Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, his impossible young lover (and the original cause of his imprisonment).

  “There are two harbors, but only one really,” Patrice explained as we rounded the Punta del Capo, heading straight into the wide-flung arms of the Marina Grande, whose docks were crammed with sailing yachts and cruisers. “This is the big harbor,” he announced, gesturing to signify bigness. “She is the north side. The small harbor is on the other side. Nobody ever arrives there, in Marina Piccola, though Lenin did, when he visited Capri—before the revolution, of course. In 1908, I think. He came to see his friend, Maxim Gorky, another revolutionist. Lenin was used to arriving in unexpected ways.”

  When I asked Patrice how he happened to know so much about Capri, he waved dismissively. “I have read the guidebooks. You understand, my memory is wonderful. She is my chief asset.” He sighed, as if suddenly recalling something, then added: “I have suffered much pain from this asset, I admit to you. One must forget to be happy. I have too much inside that is unforgotten, and the load feels so heavy on me.”

  It was easier to trust Patrice than to question what he said, so I put myself temporarily into his hands. He rhapsodized in fractured English about the heights of Anacapri, the windswept, dolomitic presence of Mount Solaro, the haunting aura of the Matromania Cave, and the peculiar light show known as the Blue Grotto. “You will see this for yourself,” he said, “these things I describe.” That he had never actually been to Capri himself was passed over lightly.

  My pulse quickened as the ferry approached the Marina Grande, with its winter forest of sailboat masts visible in the docks on one side. A dozen or so smaller vessels crossed our path like water-spiders, and there was a general din of seagulls, who flocked and fed lustily on scraps that seemed to pour from a range of vessels. Our ferry struck the concrete landing forcibly, then settled into an eerie stillness, followed by cries of Ecco! Finalmente!

  Patrice hugged me, as though by arrival in Capri we’d accomplished something. “I am so happy here,” he said.

  “Me, too,” I replied. And it was true. For the first time in what felt like months of unease, despair, and disaffection, I felt something akin to happiness.

  two

  We shared a taxi ride from the Marina Grande in a snub-nosed Fiat convertible painted a color never found in nature, a gaudy chartreuse. Ignazio, the driver, gave Patrice the name of a boardinghouse in the via Sopramonte where the mere mention of his name would produce a sizable sconto. “You pay less than half with my name,” Ignazio boasted. As I soon learned, everyone on the island had a cousin in business somewhere and was eager to secure for you what they called a “special price.” Apparently nothing on Capri was ever sold at retail except to naive day-trippers, who poured onto the island in vulgar quantities in July and August, but in late April formed only a steady trickle—the human equivalent of a light spring rain.

  Patrice asked me to meet him for a drink that evening at the Bar Tiberio, a small café-bar in the Piazza Umberto I, known by its candy-striped awnings and glass-and-bamboo tables. Its interior had been carved from the crypt of the handsome baroque church, Santo Stefano, that rose above a small flight of steps and gave obliquely onto the square. I assumed that whatever happened at the Grants, I could slip away briefly, and Patrice was eager to have an account of my first meeting with lo scrittore, as the Capresi called Rupert Grant.

  It was not hard to find the Villa Clio, but I had acquired the self-defeating habit of ignoring directions. Guarding against myself, I bought a map from a vendor in the piazzetta, then followed a winding footpath toward the Villa Jovis, the finest of the twelve imperial villas on Capri. Along the way, I passed a patchwork of barrel-roofed houses, most of them bleached blue or faded Pompeiian red, the typical colors of southern Italy. At an unsigned crossroads, I veered off sharply toward the via Tragara—a footpath with a distant view of the Marina Piccola below, with steep terraces ledging above it. The whitewashed houses tumbled like dice, split a hundred ways as they scattered down the hillside.

  Following instructions, I turned right at a small chapel, the Santa Maria de la Croce, then right again at an unmarked stone path leading to the sea. Medlars, mulberries, and almond trees caught my attention, although I wasn’t yet aware of their names. I would only slowly learn them, and that was part of my education on Capri. It was also something I owed to Grant, who insisted on naming all botanical things with absolute specificity. “Never say tree,” he told me, “say lemon tree, carob tree, mimosa.” The air, stirred by a light breeze, smelled of eucalyptus, familiar from a visit I’d made to California the previous year (in futile pursuit of a Barnard coed with long blond hair and a guitar). The breeze itself, so fresh and warm, gave me a good feeling about Capri. I felt easy there, however far from home in reality.

  A wrought iron gate marked the Villa Clio. (The name of the villa had been removed to keep away tourists, who might hesitate to ring an anonymous bell in the idle hope of rousing Rupert Grant.) I pressed the button just below a speaker in the white stucco wall. “Avanti!” crackled a female voice in the steel mesh. A buzzer sounded, and I pushed the gate. It opened with a groan onto a dirt path, which I followed past beds of unfamiliar yellow flowers. I paused briefly to shelter from the sun in a small loggia, then continued down a path toward the villa: a whitewashed structure that was smaller than I had imagined, although it was built into the cliff and seemed to exist on several levels. Like most houses on Capri, it affected a rustic, ancient look—simple and secure, with clean curves and fresh lines, an architectural style pioneered by Edwin Cerio, a local entrepreneur and architect, in the twenties.

  I approached the house slowly, savoring my first view. I knew that, in the weeks and months ahead, familiarity would make the house invisible; one takes the most beautiful visions for granted, after a while. The green wooden shutters that hung on all windows were closed—not uncommon in the early afternoons of southern Italy, when the Mediterranean sun commands the scene with blunt, obliterating power.

  My knock was answered by a solid, fresh, and chestnut-eyed young Capresa with straight black hair cut across her forehead like a crow’s black wing; she opened the door slowly and bowed, calling me professore as her eyes dipped to the floor. The black, downy hair on her arms and upper lip gave her a distinctly Moorish aspect. Her name was Maria Pia, and she came from a family whose women had, for generations, been servants to foreign residents. In a few decades, she would grow amply into the role of massàia, one of those diligent, earthy Capresi women who live close to the island, with its indistinct shifting seasons, attentive to the parish gossip, committed to agricultural routines that people much like her family and friends had taken for granted for centuries.

  “Venga qui, professore,” she said, urging me to follow.

  I was not a professor, of course, but I nodded gratefully, following her into the large front hall. As I soon discovered, any foreigner in southern Italy with the slightest claims upon gentility and education was called professore or dottore.

  “Molti italiani abitano in America, professore,” she said, her dialect so extreme I could only guess at what she meant. Something about Italians living in America.

  I nodded and said, rather stupidly, “Sì, sì.”

  She led me into a long and narrow room with vaulted ceilings, whitewashed walls, and sofas that hovered in place under their white cotton dust wraps. The floor shone with luminous white tiles, known local
ly as le riggiole; common in Neapolitan homes and public buildings, they were fired individually, two inches thick, with a faint roseate glow that made them appear translucent, as though the soil below were leaking through. Borders of green foliage crept around the margins of each tile, so that the effect was not monolithic against the whitewashed walls, where vaguely modern paintings were hung. They were obviously by the same artist, with nude figures (mostly male) grappling in various sexual positions, late Picasso in manner (but not content), unabashedly imitative. I was left to stare at the largest of these, which hung over a sofa. The figure in this painting—an androgynous creature with three eyes and two navels—was being attacked (or fondled) by several grotesque, equally androgynous figures who were noticeably smaller.

  I found myself uneasy amidst these paintings. Were they meant to suggest something about the household I was soon to join?

  “Do you like Picasso?”

  I turned to see a tall, gaunt woman in her early forties. “This is a Picasso?”

  “They’re by a friend here, Peter Duncan-Jones. Quite a brilliant painter, in my view. Rupert doesn’t agree, but he knows nothing about art. Peter thinks he’s Picasso, so I call him Picky. Why not? Everything is make-believe on Capri.”

  I held out my hand. “I’m Alex.”

  “I assumed as much,” she said, kissing me politely on either cheek.

  She was beautiful in her way, extremely thin, breastless and boyish, her cheeks gathering a mass of shadows. Her voice was what the British call “plummy,” the words neatly clipped at the margins, like an Oxford quad. Her brittleness, mingling with a sophisticated air, was deeply in contrast to Maria Pia’s aura of peasant innocence.

  “It’s lovely here,” I said, glancing around the room, my eye resting on a clay sculpture of an erect penis that adorned the coffee table. Another product from the imagination of Peter Duncan-Jones, as I later learned.

  “We like our little house,” she said. The word “house” as she pronounced it vaguely rhymed with the word “nice.”

  The house was not, as I learned, so little. The exterior of the Villa Clio was deceptive, suggesting compactness and limit where neither quality was inherent. It had been built in the late twenties by a wealthy English lord in pursuit of la dolce vita. Every decade had seen additions or modifications, and seven bedrooms were tucked away. Connected to the house by a cyprus allée of some thirty yards was Grant’s study, which had been fashioned from the remains of an old stone barn.

  “You are quite attractive,” Vera said, lighting a cigarette and raising her fine, penciled eyebrows. “Rupert will enjoy that.”

  Exactly why Rupert should care about my looks puzzled me, but I was mostly flattered. In truth, I was not conspicuously attractive. Just shy of six feet, with a scholar’s tendency to stoop, I considered myself average in appearance. My brown hair—which I had taken to parting in the middle—was fairly long and straight; I had dark brown eyes and a nose that arched slightly: a faint tribute to my paternal grandparents where that nasal arch could still be found in abundance. Acne had never been a problem, and I was blessed with smooth skin that tanned easily and acquired, by summer’s end, a kind of nut-brown tint. Having played a good deal of tennis and basketball in the past decade, I was not unfit, but the glimmering physique that follows from regular, strenuous exercise had never seemed worth the effort.

  Vera Grant, however, had bestowed on me one of her highest forms of praise, though I wasn’t aware of this until later. She took me instantly into her graces, accepting me as a person of equal sophistication, although this was far from the reality. From my view, I had never met anyone quite like her. An edge of irony sharpened every remark that fell from her lips, making her seem dangerous. Her eyes were catlike: gray, with flecks of green and amber. Her fineness appealed to me—the wrists twiglike, the narrowness of her chest making her seem more fragile than she was, as if a hard wind might snap her in two. But her character was such that the delicate frame served as a decoy; she was not easily bruised, emotionally or physically. Her stamina, as everyone on the island knew, inspired awe in those around her. She could drink most guests under the table at dinner, then hike to the top of Mount Solaro the next morning without flinching. Empires were built by women like her.

  “Is Mr. Grant here?” I asked.

  “Darling, you must call us by our Christian names, Rupert and Vera. Capri is very informal.” She crossed her legs to reveal her thighs. “He’s swimming,” she said. “He always swims after lunch. The rest of the island goes to bed, but he goes swimming.”

  “Mad dogs and Englishmen?” I said.

  “Indeed, though he’s a Scot.”

  I soon discovered that Rupert was no slouch when it came to siestas. He was a master of the sonnolino, which he considered the secret of his legendary endurance, reflected in a ceaseless flow of poems, translations, novels, and essays. His work schedule did not vary, except when he traveled: he worked every morning from seven until midday, taking naps—ten-or twenty-minute naps—whenever he came to an impasse in composition that would not yield to his usual headlong thrust.

  “My real work is done when I’m asleep,” he told me. By checking out of his conscious existence, he could get the “little elves,” as he called them, to work for him again. “I like the Buddhist notion about work,” he said, “the idea that if you hit a log in the appropriate place, it splits easily. You must not work against the grain.” I would fill my notebook with these aphorisms (which ranged from the brilliant to the mundane) in the coming months, and they would inform my own work—and work habits—for decades. My friends in later years would mock me for beginning sentences with, “As Rupert Grant once said…”

  Vera asked Maria Pia to bring us tea and commanded me to sit beside her on the largest sofa, clasping a huge pillow to her breast as though it were a life raft. For what seemed an uncomfortably long period, she just stared at me, studying my features.

  “How long have you lived here, Vera?”

  She started a fresh cigarette, though the previous one was barely finished. After taking a long draw, she blew the smoke away from my face, settling in for an explanation. “We began coming here—to Italy, not Capri—in the fifties. The nineteen fifties. You won’t remember them, as you were just a lad. It was a marvelous time to live in Rome. Rupert used to have an apartment near the Piazza Navona. He knew everyone: Moravia, Pasolini, Elsa Morante, Fellini. But everyone died on him, or left the city, or got bored. He got bored, too, I suppose. This villa came on the market nine years ago. It was something of a ruin, so we could afford it.” (With more than a little help from her father, as I was told by several of their gossipy friends.)

  “It must have been a good place to raise children,” I said. Grant had mentioned in his second letter confirming my appointment that he had two children, Nigel and Nicola, both in their mid-teens.

  Vera brightened. “My little darlings,” she said. “They were born in Rome, but this is home.” She looked into the distance. “They’re at school in England. Nigel’s at Charterhouse. Nicola’s at Cheltenham. She fancies herself a painter.” She looked at her nails, which needed attention. “You’ll meet them in July, if you stay.” She handed me a photograph in which the children appeared quite young, perhaps ten and twelve. “They’re larger now, but just as beautiful. We’ve been lucky. Adolescence has a way of killing beautiful children, doesn’t it? They come up all spots and big noses.”

  I was still trying to digest her remark about my staying. Was it meant to warn me? To threaten? Perhaps she was merely being realistic. Grant had said nothing about the length of my tenure, but I assumed that both sides would have to assent for the position to continue beyond a certain point. Just now, I wanted nothing more than to live there forever, in a place where everything I’d been through up to this day simply didn’t matter. On Capri, I was free of Pittston, of my parents, of the social and academic pressures that had soured me on Columbia. Although I couldn’t have verbalized this at t
he time, I planned to reinvent myself at the Villa Clio, to become a worldly and cultured person. To start over again, on my own terms.

  I studied the room, its physical details, like a student preparing for exams. The dark wooden tables were crammed with family pictures in silver frames. I could see half a dozen transformations of Vera from childhood through the present; in one, she was a young girl in a bathing suit on the beach somewhere—the French or Italian Riviera, I guessed. Elsewhere, she was bowing before Queen Elizabeth, a debutante of about sixteen in a long formal gown. In another, she was half hidden in a crowd where all the women wore huge, preposterous hats of the kind that English women of a certain class wear at weddings. In yet another, she sat on a large horse, dressed impeccably for the hunt. Her wedding photo with Rupert was prominently positioned: a county wedding, probably in Surrey or Sussex or some such place. One could hear the bong of ancient bells in the church tower, which (according to Vera, on another day) “had been built by the Normans.” Grant was in tails, wearing a top hat, and Vera looked improbably young. I recognized W. H. Auden among the crowd of well wishers and felt a slight chill. Auden was, of all living poets, the one I most admired, having memorized perhaps a dozen of his poems. I had read, and heavily underlined, his essays in The Dyer’s Hand.

  I wanted to know exactly what these people knew, expecting everything around me—the bric-a-brac, the wall coverings and gilt-framed mirrors, the faux-modern art—to become a part of my own mental furniture. My own ignorance and lack of worldliness felt unacceptable to me. But I could certainly overcome them. I didn’t have to remain ignorant, naive, and gauche—all traits that seemed, at this moment, to describe me to myself.