by Bill Barich
I am about to give up the search when I bump into a friend. It’s Gregor, of course. He is also on a mission, same as mine. We laugh about this and order espressos at a bar, where old men in fedoras are playing cards for money. Gregor takes off the beret he bought in Lisbon and wrings it out. Water splashes on the counter, forms a tiny lake on the worn linoleum floor. You wouldn’t think a swatch of wool could hold so much liquid.
Then we spot them, two hookers on their rounds. Miracolo! They are dressed alike, in tight red sweaters and short black skirts, and they carry shiny little purses of patent leather. Their stiletto heels click on the paving stones. Our mouths must be agape, because they pause by the bar and stare at us. The petite one is attractive in a hard-bitten way, but her partner is huge, built like a professional wrestler.
We have a problem, obviously. Gregor, being a man of the world, will solve it, I assume. He’ll do me a favor and award me the petite one. But no, he wants her, too! We stand in the rain and debate the issue until he has a bright idea. How about a coin toss? OK, I agree. I flip a lira coin. I lose.
I’m sick at heart, reeling with envy. I watch Gregor disappear with my beloved, wishing I had a knife to stick in his back. The hooker has become immensely desirable in the moment, a prize, a trophy. Yes, I would gladly kill on her behalf.
The wrestler chews her gum and waits with her arms crossed, but I send her away. “I’m sorry, signorina,” I tell her, adopting a forlorn expression and gripping my belly to show I’m indisposed. I keep an eye on her purse. For once, I’m lucky. She doesn’t hit me with it.
* * *
Our bus the next morning is a drab Mercedes. It rattles and belches as we motor along the coast. Suitcases are strapped to the roof, and the driver appears to be hung over. Firenze, it says on a little destination card above his head. Florence, the city of flowers, kingdom of the Medici, where we’ll live with local families for the next few months and my new freedom will surely be compromised.
We follow a road that overlooks the Ligurian Sea. Fishing boats can be seen in the distance. The view is dramatic and inspiring, but I’m still upset. Gregor sits up front, his beret at a jaunty angle, as dry now as an autumn leaf. He even has the nerve to whistle, unconsciously celebrating his victory.
Portofino, a fishing village, is lovely. Houses in subtle tones of gold and rose-red, their window shutters closed against the heat. Balconies hung with laundry, a good clean scent of soap on the wind. America is all primary colors, a giant kindergarten. I prefer the softness of the Italian palette, the flaking paint, the disrepair, the palpable presence of the past.
The bus chugs up a hill, and a suitcase slips from its binding and lands in the road. The latch springs. Clothes go blowing about. Underwear, socks. Che peccato! What a pity! It’s among the few phrases I know, having skipped the shipboard language lessons to stare at the sea. Mi chiamo Bill. Hello, I am a kindergartner from America.
We stop for lunch in Portovenere, on the Gulf of la Spezia. It’s called Golfo dei Poeti, because so many poets have sung its praises, including Dante and Petrarch. Lord Byron once swam from Portovenere to San Terenzo, across the Bay of Lerici, to visit Percy Shelley at his rented digs. An incredible swim, really, for a wastrel.
Shelley’s house, Casa Magni, still stands. It has an open ground floor and seven arches in a sort of loggia. The sea washes up almost to the front door. Shelley was mad as a hatter at the end, tortured by horrible visions. He died in a sailing accident at 29. His boat, a schooner, had lounge chairs and bookshelves built into it.
Casa Magni has a plaque to commemorate Shelley’s stay. The plaque says, “Sailing on a fragile bark he was landed by an unforeseen chance to the silence of the Elysian Fields.” Shelley did not write those words himself.
I’m touched, anyhow. I’ve never been to a village where poetry matters, where it has worked its way into the fabric of everyday life. Those British romantics lived like bohos, strumming their guitars and fathering children out of wedlock. I’m all for them. Am I not slightly Byronic myself? I believe there might be a poem or two in me, if I can just get them out.
Portovenere marches up a mountain slope, toward a fortress wall. There are olive trees, dark-green pines, and a bell tower with a clock. Tables are reserved for us at a trattoria by the harbor, on a vine-covered patio. We dine on pasta and roast chicken. The white wine comes in liter carafes and helps me to forgive Gregor. After two glasses, he’s my bosom pal again, and we decide to chat up two women in our group, Jessica and Cynthia.
Jessica has the severe but compelling manner of a campus intellectual. She uses words like “deliquesce” and “ramification” and bites her nails. Her clothes are often black. She scares me a little, but Cynthia has the opposite effect. Blond and guileless, she will be barefoot on Haight Street in a few years, her locks threaded with wildflowers and a curly-haired cherub on her hip.
We talk about literature, of course. Gregor quotes a line he swears is from The Divine Comedy. I think he’s about to sing, but he doesn’t. The wine goes around. Is it Jessica who mentions the famous grotto? The place where Byron launched his epic swim? We must visit this grotto, and right away.
Into the hills we go, without a clue where the grotto might be. Jessica speaks the best Italian, so we elect her as our leader. Byron, she asks? The swimmer? Heads shake, people give us strange looks. A big silence hangs over Portovenere. Most shops are closed. Lunch is over, the peasants are bedded down for a siesta.
The grotto remains elusive, but we don’t care after a while. Our search loses importance as the wine wears off. The afternoon is bright and warm, and the bay is sparkling, so we tumble to earth on a grassy hillside, where Gregor promptly falls asleep.
Time passes. A lot of time, actually. We roust ourselves at last and stroll to the harbor, but everthing seems different. There are shadows where the sun once shone. The village is awake again, the citizens bustling about. The waiters at the trattoria have moved the tables from the patio, and it’s as if we’ve never been there. We’d been erased.
“The bus is gone,” Jessica says.
This is true. We’ve been left behind. We won’t be in Florence when our families come to claim us. We’re orphans and will have to pay a hideous price. Cynthia is crying. She worries that she’ll be sent home to Delaware. What could be worse?
Gregor swings into action. We’ll pool our money, he says, and hire a taxi. I throw in the ten-spot I hide in my wallet’s secret compartment. There go dozens of espressi, bottles of Chianti, books of poetry and fateful assignations. We find a taxi stand and negotiate a fare. Thirty bucks, plus tip. The cabbie’s a scoundrel, but there’s nothing we can do.
In his little Fiat, we turn inland from the bountiful sea and race toward Florence on the autostrada. Cynthia has stopped crying and sits on my lap. That would be wonderful if we didn’t have so far to travel. I feel her weight on my thighs. My feet are getting numb, and I’m tired and mourning the loss of my ten dollars. The literary life can be costly.
* * *
Our taxi speeds toward the city center and the piazza where our college is located. We are late arrivals, bad students who have missed the school bus. The director rolls his eyes at the sight of us. A fleshy, operatic man, he wears an ascot, leans on a walking stick, and affects a British accent. Probably he has read too much Henry James.
Cynthia is still nervous, thinking she might be expelled, but there’s no way. The college has already banked our tuition. Instead, the director reprimands us—irresponsible behavior, detrimental to the group, blah blah blah. It’s silly. In fact, my free-form education on the Continent is progressing nicely. In the last week, I’ve almost danced with a sailor in drag and almost made it with a hooker in Genoa. Who knows what I’ll learn next?
In another room, Italian families are waiting. They will be our hosts, taking us in as boarders. They’re dressed formally and look uneasy about the deal they’ve struck. To invite an uncultured young American into your home is no laughing ma
tter. It’s best to lock up the jewelry and the majolica.
Cynthia is claimed, and so are Gregor and Jessica. Finally, the director summons me and introduces me to an elderly woman with bright blue eyes—eyes that men must have fallen into, swooning, when she was younger. This is the marchesa. She has on a black dress shiny from wear, and her white hair is in a tight bun held fast with an elegant tortoise-shell comb. Her cheeks are round and rosy. She smiles at me in a serenely accepting way.
I am drawn to her immediately. Some people age with a special grace, without any bitterness, and the marchesa is among them. It’s her smile that gets me. She can see right into my soul. Absurd, yes, but I’m certain of it. It can happen like that at a first meeting—no barriers, no sense of opposition, a kind of purity. She knows I’m up to no good in Italy, but it doesn’t faze her. What’s youth for, if not for adventure?
I will bring her a dozen roses one day, and she will weep.
At twilight, we set out on foot for her flat. The marchesa limps a bit, favoring her left side. Still, she’s cheerful. The walking is tough on me with a heavy suitcase. My feet are sore from the long taxi ride. Cynthia sat on my lap for hours, and she cut off the blood flow to my legs. How unfair! I’ve often wished for a woman on my lap, and when I get one it hurts.
It turns out the marchesa has fallen on hard times. Her flat occupies the ground floor of an old palazzo, where she has six cold, dark rooms hung with sun-bleached tapestries. Touch an armchair and you raise a cloud of dust. Ancestors in antique gilt frames loom large. They are brooding presences, distant and unfathomable. I can hear them whispering.
The marchesa calls for her family. They assemble in the parlor. Here’s her son Aldo, a 40ish bureaucrat, who lives in the flat, too, along with his shy wife, Lucretia, and their son Giorgio, who’s 13 and—incredibly—a baseball fan. He says to me, in perfect English, “Hello, sir. You are from New York. Tell me, please, how are the New York Yankees?”
I am thrown off-stride. The few responses I’ve mastered in Italian will not suffice. “Well, they need a starting pitcher if they hope to win the pennant next year,” I say, also in English.
“And Mickey Mantle?”
“He’s been injured. It’s been a rough year for him.”
Giorgio dashes to his bedroom and returns with his baseball glove, scuffed and ragged. He keeps the pocket soft by rubbing it with olive oil. It could be a sacred icon, by his tender caress.
We sit down to supper. The marchesa serves thin vegetable soup, chewy bread and a stringy piece of boiled beef, but not a drop of wine. Hardly anyone speaks, mostly because of Aldo. Frankly, he’s a pain. He imposes order. He reminds me of the hawk-nosed Florentine merchants you see in paintings, bent over a pile of coins. My soul is a blank to him and always will be.
For dessert, there is a special chestnut pudding. It tastes awful to me, but I don’t let on. Instead, I kiss my fingertips and sing its praises, a gesture for which I pay dearly. Soon chestnut pudding shows up on the table almost nightly, until the stuff is coming out my ears. Only Gregor suffers a worse fate. He lands in a house with a family that worships fennel, and they feed him endless plates of it over pasta, sauteed, deep-fried, or raw in salads. By the end of the semester, he stinks of anise.
Classes start. It is a torture. Every morning around 7, the marchesa raps on my door and asks, “Permesso?” Sometimes I am awake and dressed, but more often my head is buried under a pillow. She sets a plastic tray on my bureau, always the same—a hard roll, butter, marmalade and a pot of strong coffee. Always, too, she is smiling. I envy her, really. I crave such equanimity myself, such a perfect balance on earth, but I fear I’ll never gain it.
The streets teem with children in school uniforms. They tote books, they run in packs, they are adored by passing adults, who chuck them under the chin and pat them on the head. Kids are the true royalty in Florence, little princes and princesses whose every whim must be indulged. Childhood flies, after all. The madonna’s glow? It comes from the glowing infant she clasps to her breast.
The traffic is intense. Diesel fumes, belching old buses, motorscooters that buzz like mosquitoes. I am forever dodging hellbent drivers and also soccer balls. The kids kick them back and forth, bouncing them off walls, cathedrals, monuments, and cars. No surface is spared from serving as a temporary goal, even the statues in the piazza across from my college.
Our school building has many windows, and that’s too bad. I spend my classroom time staring at the piazza and wishing I were out there, where real life is going on. I watch the ancients seated on benches, their bodies bundled in overcoats despite the autumn warmth. Leathery faces, a white stubble of whiskers, intricate debates over who remembers what, and why. The sun shines on bambini playing in the dirt. All the young mothers are beautiful, even when they’re ugly.
The professors drone on. They have an amazing capacity to block out our snoring. It’s tedious to listen to a packaged lecture on the Renaissance, when the Renaissance is alive outside. I touch it almost daily. San Marco is near my flat, and I go there and sit in awe before Fra Angelico’s frescoes. “The Mocking of Christ,” “The Annunciation.” He painted them from 1438 to 1445, but they could have been done yesterday. The frescoes are rich in emotion, in spirit, in longing—a longing I am beginning to share.
What do I long for? I want to be part of a civilized world, not the kindergarten of America. A world where art, literature, and music matter, where history is present and palpable. The old palaces in Florence, they alert me to how every human endeavor ends—chipped, battered, in debris. It’s not so bad. I can accept it. That’s what I think at the moment, but I am still young and not yet on familiar terms with grief.
Daydreaming again. There’s a song running through my head, one by Rita Pavone, a pint-sized belter from Torino, who’s a teen sensation. She rules every jukebox in town and will be mentioned in a Pink Floyd lyric someday and even perform on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” We hear Rita when we escape into a café after class—un bicchiere di vino rosso, maybe a game of 8-ball if we can find a pool table.
In the cafés, we talk with astonishing energy. We cook up new theories about the nature of existence and advance arguments to celebrate our own brilliance. It’s no use, though. The Italian guys put us to shame.
How sophisticated they are as they linger for an eternity over a single aperitif, their sport coats draped over their shoulders and their manicured hands free to punctuate their words. The only thing that disrupts their weary languor is a pretty woman passing by. Then they pant like dogs in heat.
I’ve concluded that cigarettes are essential to the pose. Sartre, he’s always pictured smoking, isn’t he? It must be imperative for a continental intellectual to be addicted to nicotine, so I spring for a 10-pack of Nazionale con filtro and fire up a couple every day. My eyes water at first, and my throat gets raw. I have coughing fits, but I stick to the program. Gradually, I do begin to feel smarter, although there’s no objective evidence to support the claim.
A month goes by. The grapes are harvested, the Tuscan landscape flames with color. I buy a cheap bicycle and ride into the countryside. I ride along the turbid brown Arno and watch the fishermen with their long poles. The rains come in November, but the days are often still sunny, if bitingly cold. I go to the Mercato Nuovo for a new wool sweater and rub the snout of Il Porcellino, the famous bronze boar, for good luck.
But things are changing, the semester’s winding down. Cynthia has an Italian boyfriend, for instance. It was inevitable, really, since those guys will pursue an American blonde to the ends of the earth. Guido isn’t a bad sort despite his enameled hair and open-necked shirts. He’s a pacifist guitar player, who lives in a ruined villa in the hills of Fiesole with his mother and two brothers, one a Marxist and the other subtly and sweetly loony.
We all take the bus up to visit one Saturday. Gregor sings to the other passengers. He’s stoned as usual, on the last of the weed he bought in Tangier. Guido’s mother is in her garde
n, plucking bugs from plants and polishing off a huge glass of Chianti. Blowsy yet seductive, the signora shows us around the villa.
I’ve never seen such wreckage, but she doesn’t seem to mind. At an old cistern, she pushes a few rocks into the water. She knocks stones from a retaining wall with a backhand swipe. Let it collapse, she appears to be saying. Collapsing is our fate.
She serves lunch on a patio. Prosciutto and cheese, more wine, fruit in a wicker basket. Guido strums Joan Baez folk songs, while his Marxist brother offers criticism and correction. Politics in Italy are hopeless, a form of entertainment at best. Florentines care about the basics, good bread and olive oil, the closeness of family, the soul’s ardor. Even the peasants know a little Dante.
After our meal, the loony boy excuses himself to chase small birds through the ruins. He loves the game. Here’s happiness on the wing! His laughter echoes as he dashes down a hill, vanishing into a grove of olive trees.
I go for a walk with Jessica. I’m still awkward around her. She is intelligent, academic, and forceful in her opinions. Also clever and witty. I’m attracted to her mind, and that’s a first for me. Thinking was not required of my high school girlfriends (or of me), but now I’ve entered an epoch of discovery and am eager to share my epiphanies. Jessica is the designated muse, whether or not she wants to be.
I light a Nazionale, cough, and tell her how lately I’ve been sitting on the loggia in Piazza della Signoria and writing in a notebook. It’s pleasant there with the tourists gone. She doesn’t blink, so I confess that I might want to be a writer someday. I realize she could slash me to bits at any instant, but she doesn’t. Instead she’s sympathetic. She listens. Soon we will be lovers.