by Jay Parini
“I knew Mackenzie,” said Grant, with a memorial sigh. “Met him in Edinburgh. He lived to be very old and mellow, but his fame had slipped away by then. Odd, how one can be among the most popular novelists in the world at forty, then invisible at eighty. Sinister Street was the one novel that every student in the twenties could be counted on to have read.”
I sensed his discomfort, and said (the sentence after three decades still makes me cringe), “But you write for posterity.”
“I write for myself, dear boy,” he said. “Posterity isn’t listening.”
I often thought about the collection of characters who had made their home on Capri, many of whom were finding their way into the pages of Grant’s latest book. Sexual outlaws, revolutionaries, artists, wealthy pleasure seekers. The population had, according to Mackenzie himself (whose books Grant had put in my hands), become less interesting after the Second World War, when it filled with “French artists who have won traveling scholarships, Dutch intellectuals, Scandinavian eccentrics, central Europeans flushed with self-determination, and of course pederasts and pathics of every nationality.” That was the postwar harvest.
Things had apparently changed even more in the past decade. I had not, as yet, met any Dutch intellectuals or Scandinavian eccentrics, although the “pederasts and pathics” remained in force. The residents were mostly English, it seemed, with a few Germans dotted about the island—mostly in Anacapri. Patrice was the closest thing to a French artist on a traveling scholarship I’d encountered, although he lacked the artistic side as well as the scholarship.
Wealthy Italians from the mainland had also invaded Capri in recent years, building large and ugly villas on the opposite shore of the Marina Piccola from the Tragara. “They are mostly Milanese,” Grant explained, with an air of mild contempt. “Just look at their houses. Their sense of beauty does not extend beyond the notion of a fat woman in bed.” He claimed to have seen them pulling down old, wisteria-covered walls along the via Murlo and putting up iron railings “in the convulsive Munich style.”
Over lunch with Toni in the piazzetta, I had repeated without attribution the remark about the fat woman, and she instantly detected its source. “You’ve picked up Grant’s manner,” she said. “He’s always putting down the Milanese.” That was the first I’d been aware of Grant’s visible effect on me. It was, perhaps, inevitable that I would respond to such a strong personality, taking on his coloration. But I had fallen too heavily under his spell, and could see how many of his attitudes had become mine, for good or ill.
Now I ran by myself, savoring the isolation. I didn’t want to be wholly absorbed by Capri and its crowd of “characters.” Their frequently dismissive attitudes annoyed me, as did much else. Since the phone call from my father, I’d become sleepless and uncertain again—not much better than I’d been during the months after Nicky’s death. I lay awake, thinking of my parents and their future without children. Family life, as they had grown accustomed to its shape and feel, had evaporated. Nicky was dead, and I was gone. For them, this meant a different sort of daily life from a continuation of their life together as just a couple—a phase of their life that my father occasionally referred to as “Life B.C.—Before Children.” Like all children, I regarded this period in my parents’ lives as a mythic age, when gods and monsters roamed the earth.
I could not imagine the existence that lay ahead for them, and I knew they couldn’t either. My mother had no real work, having devoted herself to me and (less happily) Nicky. It seemed unlikely that she would now find a job: her weight made that impossible. And her bad heart didn’t help. My father might give her a part-time desk job in the office of Massolini Construction, but even that seemed unlikely. She couldn’t type, and the idea of her answering a phone boggled the mind.
My own future troubled me as well. Death—a subject I had managed to shove out of my head for several months, ever since arriving on Capri—began to loom strangely before me as I ran, a palpable, dark shadow that fell from every bright object on my path. If there was a God, he was surely demented, populating the world with creatures who could so clearly anticipate their own demise. (“The nice thing about death,” my grandfather once said to me, paraphrasing a Neapolitan aphorism, “is that you only do it once.”) With effort, I pushed these thoughts away. I was alive and healthy, strong and young. So be it, I told myself. There would be plenty of time for death.
At the end of my run, I stopped at Father Aurelio’s chapel in the eucalyptus grove for early mass. I had done this several times in the past week, arriving in my sweat-drenched T-shirt, my skin glistening. I joined half a dozen prune-faced widows, in their black dresses and head-scarves—the usual crowd. They sat impassively in different pews, hunched forward, fingering their rosaries, crossing themselves at the wrong times, but frequently, in perpetual mourning for Emilio or Ignazio or Luigi. After mass, they would stare at me as I left the chapel, crossing myself on the way out.
“It’s not that they don’t want you here,” Father Aurelio told me one day. “It’s that they’ve never seen before a young man who would come to mass in his underwear.”
I felt cleansed and free, walking from the chapel’s cool darkness into the blinding sun. Something like the grace of God seemed to alter my weight, and I ran home lighter on my feet, a spirit gliding on the world, aware of the vast kingdom of eternity represented, however obliquely, by the myriad forms of nature. By the time I rounded the point again, looking toward the Marina Piccola, the sun was too hot to bear, its brightness multiplied beyond calculation by the sea’s million facets. But I turned my face upward, letting my cheeks and forehead burn.
As I ran, I thought of Nicky’s words: “Vision is like that, right? I mean, you see something, and it’s fucking fantastic—scary, beautiful, damned, whatever—and you don’t dare tell anybody else about it. You keep it to yourself, because that’s where it lives best. Down and fresh, the dearest thing you know.”
When I stepped into my cottage, the room was black and cool. My eyes would need several minutes to adjust, I realized, as I groped my way toward the bed. I would lie there for a while, letting lines of poetry gather in my head. Later, I might take a swim and sit on the beach with my journal. That was as good a place to write as any on Capri.
“Don’t be so sweaty!”
“Marisa!” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“You have leave your door open, so I come in. You are not so happy that I am come?”
I couldn’t believe that, once again, Marisa had found her way into my cottage, uninvited. She stood in a dark corner, almost invisible.
“I wasn’t expecting you,” I said.
“Don’t be angry with me,” she said, stepping toward me.
“I’m not,” I said. “It’s just that you startled me.”
She came close, reaching for my face. “Your head, there is this mark, a scar. What has happened?”
“A long time ago,” I said, “my brother hit me with a rock.”
She seemed pensive, considering.
“I have no brother and no sister,” she said, her eyes losing focus. The subject had touched some buried nerve. She kissed my lips, lightly.
A sexual encounter with Marisa was the last thing on my mind right now. I’d been running on the Pizzalungo, had been to mass, and the beginnings of a poem had begun to push its tendrilous shoulders through the soil of my unconscious. I wanted to water and care for that poem this morning, perhaps all day.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” I asked.
She sat on the bed and unbuttoned her blouse, exposing her breasts. “Forget this tea. Come to me, please, you Lorenzo. I am insisting.”
Despite my disinclination, I could not easily resist the commands of a woman: that pattern had been established in early childhood. I moved beside her, onto the edge of the bed, inwardly determined to ignore her overtures. I must find some middle ground here, get into a genuine conversation. Perhaps we could go to the beach for a swim? Or ha
ve coffee in the piazzetta? Anything to ease myself over this hump.
“I don’t mind you sweat,” she said, reaching toward me and under my damp T-shirt. Her hand played lightly over the skin of my back, climbing the stairs of my vertebral column. Then she kneaded the soft skin just below my shoulder blades. “How do you like my rub?”
“It feels good,” I said.
“You will make love,” Marisa said. Her voice was husky and complex.
“I was going to write some poetry this morning,” I said halfheartedly.
“I am your muse, then. Let me do this for you.”
I had heard Rupert Grant on the subject of the female muse once too many times to find her suggestion in the least amusing. It was the loudest bee in Grant’s bonnet. A crackpot theory of his that Vera lost no opportunity to deride. “He has left no idiotic stone unturned,” she recently said as we washed clams in the kitchen, “and believes in moon goddesses and sun goddesses and God knows what else. Bloody wood nymphs and fuck-fairies. Anything to justify his randy streak, and to make it seem less juvenile.”
Marisa put her tongue into my ear, but I jerked away. “You don’t find me beautiful anymore,” she said, rather mournfully. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “You’re as beautiful as ever. Even more so.”
“You don’t want me,” she said.
“No, I really do.”
As I said this, I realized it was true. The first time I’d seen Marisa, when she had leaped into Grant’s lap and acted like a spoiled little girl, I had found her pretty enough, but her behavior made it difficult to appreciate her real beauty. (Girls who acted like kittens had always turned me off—I remembered such a girl at Columbia, during my freshman year, who would curl into my lap at parties. I ended the relationship before it ever began.) Marisa’s style had never appealed to me. In the Italian manner, she used heavy layers of eye makeup and dowsed herself in cologne. Her earrings were too big and bright, and her jeans were excessively tight, as though applied with a spray gun. These superficial aspects of her presentation, though commonplace in Italy, grated on me. I preferred the wholesome simplicity of Holly, who wore neither makeup nor jewelry, not even earrings. She had no scent but her own, which I’d come to crave: a clean womanly smell that mingled with the faint aromas of shampoo. But this morning, Marisa seemed freer of makeup than usual, her hair gleaming. The only scent I could detect was definitely hers—a dark, thrilling odor that I recalled from the single night we’d spent together.
“I will leave you, Lorenzo,” she said, rising, buttoning her blouse. “I have not come to annoy you, as I do. If you don’t want me, I understand. I don’t prefer this to happen if you are not pleased.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
Her face turned toward me, with tears glistening on her cheeks. Her lower lip trembled slightly.
“Don’t cry,” I said, reaching toward her.
Her head fell against my shoulder, and she seemed about to sob.
Unable to resist, I touched her chin with my fingertips, and she raised her face to mine. Her lips parted. And soon my tongue found her mouth, and her jaws loosened, and her tongue met mine in the deep waters of her mouth.
“Lie with me,” I said.
“Are you sure?” Her voice was small and hesitant. “I don’t want to. Not if you don’t.”
“I want to,” I said, stripping off my shirt and lowering my gym shorts and underpants.
“Take off your shoes,” she said, lying on her back to slip off her jeans. “I don’t like to make love with the shoes on.”
I obeyed. And within minutes, I was tangled on the bed with her, a swirl of sheets and wetness.
PART FIVE
vita brevis
one
Rains swept the island from the north one night in early August, with a rumbling of thunder that broke over the slopes of Mount Solaro and seemed to collect in the inlet below the Villa Clio. My cottage was damp and uncomfortable, the walls sweating, caught in the occasional gleam of lightning. I felt ill from having drunk too much wine the night before with Patrice, who’d been having a bad few weeks because Giovanni was under pressure from his family to marry the daughter of Capri’s longtime sindaco, Luigi Mancini, who governed in the usual haphazard way of Italian politicians. “It is only the marriage of convenience,” said Patrice, with mournful disgust. “There would be no sex here, and no love.”
I was about to crawl into bed when I heard footsteps outside the door. I guessed it was Marisa by the urgency of her approach.
“Lorenzo! Is raining!” She rapped at the screen, her voice strained. “I am wet!”
That she waited for my invitation to enter surprised me. It was not like her.
“You are welcome,” she said, incongruously, stepping into the room. Her T-shirt was soaked through, and the cotton material clung to her breasts like skin. “It is thunder, too,” she added.
I had pleaded with her not to visit me again. While I enjoyed the sex, I found the relationship unsatisfying. It was, I believed, good for neither of us. Plucking up my courage, I explained in the gentlest terms that I didn’t love her, so there was no point in continuing to sleep together. I said, without conviction, that I hoped we could remain friends.
We hunched at opposite sides of my three-legged table, like poker players, keeping our hands to ourselves. Her dark hair was tangled and damp.
“He is awful, your Rupert Grant,” she said, with anger in her voice.
“So what’s happened?”
“He told me I am stupid. Stupido!”
I couldn’t imagine what Grant might have said to her, but it seemed unlikely that he’d called her stupid. His insults were usually indirect.
“I’m feeling too bad,” she said. “I feel like killing myself.”
Her melodramatic turn annoyed me, seeming operatic in a southern Italian way. “I’m sure he doesn’t think you’re stupid,” I said, as thunder rumbled in the middle distance.
“Let me stay with you tonight. I have made nice love to you, Lorenzo. What is wrong with me?”
“I don’t want that, Marisa,” I said.
“You think I am stupid, too.”
“I don’t. You’re very intelligent.”
“You say so?”
“I do. But you should go home. To Naples. There is no point in hanging on.”
“My father, he is worst than Rupert.”
This was, from what I’d learned, an understatement. Vera had told me that her father had broken her jaw when she was eighteen—because she had spent the night with a boyfriend. I didn’t even want to think about what that meant.
“There must be somewhere else you could go? Some relative? A friend?”
“I am nowhere,” she said, her English dissolving fast.
“You will go nowhere?”
“My days are not so happy anymore. I was glad here, but that isn’t true.” I didn’t like her expression, so lost, wild, and sad at the same time.
“You’re going to be fine,” I said, without confidence.
“I say good-bye to you, Lorenzo.”
“We can talk tomorrow,” I said. “You need some sleep.”
“Maybe I will kill Rupert Grant.”
I touched her forearm. “You shouldn’t say things like that, Marisa.”
“He doesn’t deserve it.”
I didn’t know what “it” referred to, but I let the statement pass. The rain began to fall heavily outside my cottage, and I closed the big window overlooking the sea.
“You will give me a drink, no?”
I could hardly refuse her, and pulled a fresh bottle of grappa from the cupboard.
“I am always like your grappa,” she said.
“Thank you.”
She gulped her drink, then helped herself to a second. That, too, disappeared quickly. I told her to steady herself. “Your nerves are bad,” I said, “I can tell.”
“I am leaving you now
,” she said, rising on wobbly knees. She moved around the table and kissed me on the forehead. “I have like you so much. You are not the same as Rupert.”
I heard her footsteps on the path, and the rain falling. For some reason, I kept thinking about her comment. I was certainly not like Rupert Grant. Nor did I want to be like him, not any longer.
two
I took Nigel with me one afternoon in early August to visit the house of Axel Munthe, the famous Swedish physician and author, who had made his presence felt on Capri for six decades, until his death in 1949. For much of his life, Munthe had a fashionable medical practice in Rome, where he lived in the Piazza di Spagna, in a house where Keats had once lived. But he had fallen in love with Capri in 1885, while recovering from exhaustion that was the result of his work in Naples during a devastating cholera epidemic. In 1890, he bought San Michele, a ruin built on the remains of a Roman villa in Anacapri. He restored it gradually, furnishing it with local antiques and ancient artifacts, among them a gleaming mask of white marble that was the handiwork of Phidias himself, the famous Athenian sculptor.
I loved San Michele, having been there twice before, once with Vera and another time with Toni Bonano. It was a memorable spot, still haunted by Dr. Munthe, who had left a print on every surface. His garden was a fine spot for a picnic, with steep views of the northern side of the island and Mount Solaro. As expected, Nigel was unimpressed.
“I don’t see the point about San Michele,” he said, shaking his head as he spoke, sweeping his hair into place. He was a beautiful boy, for sure. Patrice had found him “so ravishing” that he could hardly speak.
“It’s a lovely house,” I argued, “with lots of artwork inside. There’s nothing like it on Capri.”
“Our house is nicer.”
“By modern standards,” I said.