by Jay Parini
On the way, she told me about Curzio Malaparte, whose name was unfamiliar to me. The son of a wealthy Milanese mother and a German manufacturer, he had changed his name from Kurt Erik Suckert to Curzio Malaparte as a young man in his late twenties, in 1925. As a soldier in the First World War, he had proved himself as a warrior, winning a Croix de Guerre from the French government. He became a journalist, a newspaper editor, and a famous novelist, author of Kaputt and La Pelle. During the thirties, he formed a close friendship with Mussolini’s daughter, Galeazzo, who spent a good deal of time on Capri. While visiting her, he discovered the Punta di Massullo, a harshly beautiful promontory overlooking a small inlet. Malaparte bought the land from a farmer for the equivalent of a week’s stay at the Quisisana, and used the influence of Il Duce’s daughter to get permission to build there, despite local opposition. He commissioned the modernist architect, Adalberto Libera to build the villa, but it was not completed until 1949, by which time the shape-shifting and opportunistic Malaparte had switched his allegiance from fascism to socialism, with a distinctly Maoist tinge.
We followed an obscure byway from the main path around the Pizzalungo to the Punta di Massullo, at times climbing on all fours over steep rocks to get to the point itself. I was afraid of heights, and the sheer drop-off to the sea made me dizzy. I paused, leaning against a large oak.
“Are you all right?” Holly asked.
I liked her concern—a lot. “Yes,” I said. “A little dizzy.”
“Look,” she said, pointing.
The bizarre villa, with its sharp, futuristic angles, was suddenly visible, large and unlike anything else on Capri. Steps swirled to a rooftop solarium with a white, saillike curve of brick. The villa was said, by its owner, to be “sad, harsh, and severe,” like himself; it seemed wholly incongruous there, a piece of ultra-modernist sculpture dropped from the heavens and snagged on this ledge at a precarious angle. Its severity was thrilling and revolting at the same time.
“It’s pure Malaparte,” said Holly. “Un po matto, would you say?”
“I rather like it,” I said. “Another of the sons of Tiberius.”
“Worse, from what I’ve heard.”
We approached the villa respectfully, as one might a pyramid, then climbed the steep stairs to the door. It opened with a slight push, the lock having obviously been broken.
“Maybe Curzio’s home,” I said.
Holly shivered. “Don’t say things like that.”
Inside, the bare living room (it had been stripped by looters at least a decade before we arrived) swept toward the southeast, with the Faraglioni visible through binocularlike windows. The sea below had by now acquired a coppery tint in the late afternoon light, which shone on the concrete floors. The walls glowed with a silvery hue, and there was green mold growing in vertical lines from floor to ceiling. The ceilings themselves were high, mottled with broken plaster. I could not imagine living in such a space.
Holly told me that guests at the Villa Malaparte included Jean Cocteau and Albert Camus, both of whom admired Malaparte’s fiction. “Nobody lives here,” she explained, “because of the will. When Malaparte died, in the late fifties, he left the house to the Chinese government. It was to become a retreat for Maoist writers. But the Italians contested the will, and it’s still in limbo.”
“I feel him,” I said. “Malaparte’s ghost. And it’s not alien. He wasn’t a bad man.” Weirdly, I felt quite sure of that. Malaparte had been through many incarnations in one life, eventually finding his balance. The spirit of the house was calming.
“He died a Catholic,” she said, “and a socialist.”
I grunted approval. This information confirmed my sense of Malaparte. I could not have felt at ease with the ghost of a fascist. Then again, I wondered if it was Malaparte’s opportunism that appealed to me. He apparently seized what opportunities lay before him, and shifted to accommodate himself to his surroundings, however threatening or complex.
Holly and I stood for a while at the round windows, watching a tanker in the distance as it cruised southward. I was startled by her hand, which had unobstrusively moved around my lower back. Her right thumb wedged in the back pocket of my jeans. In response, I let my left arm rise around her shoulder, tipping my head toward her. But this gesture only seemed to spook her, and she quickly removed her thumb, turning away from me awkwardly.
Ora pro nobis, Malaparte, I whispered to myself. Ora pro nobis.
four
Nigel and Nicola arrived on a blinding-bright morning on the ferry from Naples, a girl of sixteen and a boy of fifteen who looked shockingly alike. They were not twins, but nobody could doubt they were products of the same union. Lanky as their parents, with sharp blue-gray eyes, they were indistinguishable from a distance. Nicola seemed not to have the slightest trace of female sexuality, although close inspection revealed small breasts and slightly enlarged hips. Nigel was like an arrow, straight and fledged with thick yellow hair like that of his sister, worn long and parted in the middle. They both wore khaki shorts, white shirts, and sandals without socks.
“Isn’t it darling? They wish they were twins,” said Vera, as they approached. “But they’re rather hard work.”
More hard work, I thought. It relieved me to hear they would be gone from the island in five weeks or so. Back to the Hundred Acre Wood.
The children were eager to see Grant, but they would have to wait until lunch. As they understood, he would never break from his writing until just before one. This was a boundary he kept resolutely in place, though he hadn’t seen his children for several months. I remarked on the oddity of this to Vera, but she dismissed the idea that anything was strange about it. “It’s important for them to remember who he is,” she said. “It’s part of who they are.”
The fact that Nigel and Nicola looked alike faded quickly, since their affects were entirely opposite. He was moody and ironic, casting his scorn in random directions. Nicola radiated energy and optimism, and had brought a thick portfolio of art work recently completed, which she laid out for everyone to see—a dozen pastel watercolors of damp English gardens. There seemed always to be a cathedral spire in the distance.
Nicola’s portfolio was discussed over lunch. Vera and Holly enthused over the pictures, while Nigel maintained that “nothing serious was ever conceived in watercolors.” He admitted to a “certain restraint” in the pictures that he admired, but recommended that she “lose the spires.” Grant—who hadn’t seen the portfolio yet—merely grunted, although one could see that he adored Nicola when she kissed his broad forehead and called him Daddy. Marisa put in a rare appearance, sitting gloomily through lunch, then disappearing to her room afterward. (“On the bloody rag?” wondered Nigel.) Holly, who had befriended Nicola during their last school holiday, chatted amiably about the latest exhibition at the Tate, a retrospective on the career of Henry Moore. “I adore Moore,” she said.
“I used to see a lot of Moore,” said Grant. “What an unpleasant fellow.”
This set the table aflame, and soon the conversation swirled around the question of what part character played in the quality of an artist’s work. Holly was quite firm, saying that a painter’s moral stature was evident in each brush stroke. Vera sided with her. I, impulsively, took the opposite side, arguing that Caravaggio, Titian, and Picasso were no paragons of personal virtue. I said that, where writers were concerned, there was less connection between the quality of the work and the artist. Joyce, for example, was self-centered and inconsiderate.
“Joyce was a minor figure,” said Grant. “Were it not for American academics, he would have disappeared from sight ages ago.”
“Oh, Daddy,” said Nicola, with a scorn that reeked of admiration.
“Pater is right,” said Nigel. “The Irish are always overrated.”
Grant nevertheless approved of my argument. “The life and the work are not related,” he said. “Or if they’re related, it’s in ways no critic could ever fathom.”
Nicola interrupted
him: “I think one sees the personality of an artist in the line itself, the firmness of character. That’s why I think Michelangelo must have been a lovely man.”
Nigel acquired a mocking expression. “A lovely man? I can’t believe I’ve come all the way from England to listen to this pseudy shit,” he said, the word “shit” rhyming with “kite.” It was a peculiar affectation of his, the distortion of certain key words so that he sounded hip. “Tell us the local gossip, Mummy. Who is bonking who?”
“Whom, darling,” said Vera. “Who is bonking whom?”
“Bonk?” I asked. The word was unfamiliar to me.
“It means fuck in your bloody language,” said Nigel.
“Lorenzo is a civilized American,” Grant explained.
“Is it possible?” wondered Nigel.
“You must ignore my son,” Vera said to me. “He puts great store by his sophistication, but he’s just a schoolboy.”
“Good for Mummy,” Nicola said.
With a mildly scolding air, Vera cautioned: “Be nice to Alex, both of you. We consider him part of the family.”
“I’m always nice, Mater,” said Nigel.
I had never experienced anything quite like the Grant children, with their adult mannerisms and glorious looks. Young Nigel, in particular, was ethereal, with classic English features, although his straight teeth were anomalous in an English mouth. His nose was long and straight. His voice had recently lowered, hovering uncertainly on the brink of maturity, and occasionally squeaking. He slouched a bit, forcing his shoulder blades to poke through his T-shirt. His sandals exposed large toes, which he tended to wiggle whenever he spoke.
Nicola was also straight-toothed and straight-nosed. Like her mother, she was desperately thin, but strong. Without intention, she was sexy in a boyish, innocent way. There was something preternaturally wise in her steady gaze: a sense of balance that, as I soon learned, was a kind of emotional falsework put up, like scaffolding, while the building itself was under construction. It could not have been easy for a young girl, on the cusp of full sexual maturity, to have a father like Grant, who slept casually with girls who could easily be his own daughters, although I could not be sure exactly how much the children knew about their father’s intimate arrangements.
“Who are you sleeping with around here,” Nigel suddenly asked me, over coffee.
“Be still, Niggy,” his mother said.
“Infy! Infy!” he bellowed, pounding the table. This was apparently a bit of school slang that nobody else understood.
“He’s very rude,” Nicola said, “but his friends at Charterhouse are worse. That whole Carthusian lot should be taken into the woods and shot.”
“I simply want to know who is bonking whom,” Nigel said.
“I’m bonking nobody in this room,” I said. “It’s unpleasant, but true.”
Holly looked at me briefly, then dipped her eyes. I detected a faint smile on her lips.
“Jolly well said, Lorenzo,” Grant observed.
“I’m writing poems, Pater,” Nigel said.
“Not homoerotic love poems, I hope? Carthusian speciality, that,” Grant said. He was himself an Old Carthusian, and in Play the Game—a memoir of his schooldays—he’d confessed to a homoerotic attachment to a boy called Aleric, two years his junior. (“Now a cabinet minister,” as he liked to say.)
“I’m hetero to the hilt, Pater,” said Nigel. “It’s an affliction, as you know.”
“Good chap,” he said.
Vera clapped her hands over her ears. “I don’t need to listen to this. You’re all mad, the lot of you.”
Indeed, they were. I realized that the entire Grant clan, including Vera, was mad.
Now Maria Pia came into the dining room with an urgent expression. She whispered in Vera’s ear, looking in my direction. There was apparently a telephone call for me from America, where by my calculations it was early in the morning, well before breakfast.
“Take it in the library,” said Vera.
This was a peculiar time for anyone to attempt to reach me by phone, and I knew something was wrong. As yet, I had not received a single call from home, and it was unlike my parents to attempt such a thing unless there was an emergency.
five
“Hello?”
“Is that you, Alex?”
“Dad! Is anything wrong?”
“How ya doin’ over there, in Italy?”
“I’m fine. I just didn’t expect to hear from you. Is something the matter?” “I was trying to get through for some time. The operator, she didn’t know from squat.”
“The Italian phone company is terrible. And Capri is an island—it’s like another country. The wires have to go under water from Naples.”
“You don’t sound too far away.”
“Really?”
“Well, you do. There’s like an echo or something. I keep hearing you twice.”
“I am far away.”
“Hey, tell me about it. I been there, remember? But that was a long time ago, thank God. I guess it’s changed in the meantime. That’s what they say.”
“So what’s going on, Dad?”
“I don’t want to worry you or anything, being a long way from home like this.”
“Just tell me what’s going on, okay? Is Mom all right?”
“Not too bad, given the situation. It’s her heart, Alex. The doctors aren’t too happy about it.”
“What’s happened?”
“She hasn’t been good these past couple weeks. This isn’t like a sudden situation or anything. Don’t jump the gun on me.”
“Did she have a heart attack?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“You can tell me the truth, Dad. Is she dead or something?”
“Alex, please. Don’t say that.”
“You’re making me nervous. It’s like you never come to the point.”
“She’s not dead, I swear. That’s not the problem.”
“But she had a heart attack?”
“They think so.”
“Who does?”
“The doctors. It’s not so easy to tell.”
“Where is she? In the hospital?”
“Intensity unit.”
“Jesus. Should I fly home?”
“I asked Dr. Ciongoli. He said no. Tell him not to worry, he’s a long way from home over there. It’s just the arteries. I guess they ought to be pumping better or something. She has chest pain—runs right up her arms and down her fingers. And her breath is kind of short. As long as she don’t get up…”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“But she’s definitely alive, Alex. They have medicine for that.”
“I’m worried, Dad. This sounds dangerous.”
“I didn’t mean to call. But your mother thought…”
“She asked you to call, right?”
“She said, whatever you do, don’t tell Alex.”
“So you called?”
“You know Mom. She probably would have called herself, but they got tubes in her throat. She never complains, it’s amazing. She’s a good woman.”
“Maybe I should come home, Dad.”
“Don’t be nuts. It’s a long way, and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. She’s got more doctors around her bed than I got bills to pay.”
“I’m glad you called.”
“Hey, I wanted you to know. Your mother and you are pretty close. You always were.”
“Dad, I think I should come home.”
“I said don’t bother, and I meant it. If there’s a serious problem, I’ll call back.”
“So it’s under control? Is that what you’re saying?”
“To tell you the truth, Alex, she looks pretty good. I mean, for a woman in intensity. I spoke to her on the phone a little while ago. She was hungry.”
“That’s a good sign.”
“I agree. It’s always better to be hungry. Especially in these situations.”
“Yeah.”
/>
“So what about you? You eating okay? I mean, there’s a lot of spicy food over there, I guess. I remember it from the war. I never had such heartburn.”
“I’m eating fine, Dad. How are you?”
“Good, Alex. I’m good.”
“That’s great, Dad. So tell Mom I’m worried about her. I’ll come home in a minute if there’s any need. I could get a flight from Rome. They leave twice a day.”
“Hey, no need. She said the same thing herself. Tell him to stay there, she said.”
“She said that?”
“Yeah. He’s learning a lot of stuff. That’s what your mother said, Alex.”
“She’s right, Dad.”
“Good, Alex. That’s good, good. I hope you’re doing your work for that guy, the writer.”
“Rupert Grant. Yes, I’m working hard.”
“Terrific. We want you to finish your degree, as you know. Not to bring up a sore subject.”
“Sometime. Not right away.”
“I know, I know. I don’t understand what you did, Alex. The way you quit, with only a couple months before graduation. But hey, what do I know?”
“I love you, Dad.”
“Yeah. Me, too. We love you.”
“Thanks. So you’ll let me know if anything changes. Either way.”
“Sure, Alex. I’ll let you know. So long.”
“Yeah, so long. And thanks for the call.”
“Bye, Alex.”
“Bye, Dad. Bye.”
six
Dear Asshole,
Weather is here, wish you were beautiful.
How are things in the Ivy League? You thought I’d forgotten you, didn’t you, sweetheart? Well, it’s me. Up to my hips in elephant grass and flies like B-52s.
Let me tell you a story. Last week I was assigned to your basic listening-post operation, with half a dozen other bastards, all of us loaded for bear but hoping we don’t find any. The idea behind this kind of operation is simple: hang around with your mouth shut, your radio turned on, just listening. Find out what kind of crap is going down up there, the captain told us. Captain Francis Fogg. That’s not made up. Captain Francis Fucking Fogg.