My heart always beats harder when I get near Torre Gentile, passing through the beautiful valley with its gray olive trees—most of them replanted by the government after the exodus from the farms. The fields are a mass of yellow mustard flowers and there is an orange moss on the next door roof. The colors modulate nicely—an impressionist’s dream. The house itself is gray stone with a massive base from the time when it still had its tower, first line of defense for the little town. Slits cut in the walls for the archers to shoot from are now widened and filled with glass, and a big glass window has been cut into the stone facing the fields of olive trees.
I know that it was built in the fourteen hundreds, but I can’t recall when it lost its tower and became our summer home.
Hannah was right. The rain became a fine mist and we lay on fur rugs in front of the fire and looked at the flames or up at the huge beams. I used to cut the logs myself, but now our custodian does it and there are firesticks to make it catch.
We hear doves cooing in the trees. Hannah puts her arms around me and hugs me tight. Then she unpacks the picnic basket. The food—foie gras, my favorite cheeses, fresh bread, peaches—and Hannah’s warmth carries away my angry thoughts. When the fire sinks down, she puts on a fresh log, spreads pâté on the bread for me, tucks a napkin under my chin—these days I tend to dribble a little—caring for me the way I used to for her. Why do we have to grow old? Each day losing more ground, walking less far, limbs shaky, slipping and sliding, losing the very qualities that made us attractive. I’m beginning to see why some people kill themselves to avoid this.
May 1, the day when the workers of Italy celebrate. We are back in town. The stores will be closed all day, some longer because of other holidays added on. I can’t believe I used to be moved by the tricolor, the planes swooping by, leaving behind a trail of red, white and green. I could see it all from the terrace, vibrant against the blue of the sky. Now the Italian Left is no better than anyone else, almost as lifeless as the American. I think of poor Lucian, exiled to Mexico for ten years, cutting wood with George. All the time sustained by his belief in father Stalin.
The last time I saw him alive his wife was saying, “We’ve lived too long.” They outlived both their bodies and their friends. Poor Gabriella. She got terribly depressed. But at least she could still get out with help. Lucian was reduced to a crawl, using the walker as extra legs, that plastic bag clearly visible inside his robe, having to work so hard just to keep himself together—pulling the tie of his purple robe closed was just too much to ask.
“I’m going to pieces,” he said, “my hearing, my eyes.”
I thought then that they had made a bargain. He had the physical pain, she the mental. Lucian fought off his own depression by living in his memories. You just had to mention the blacklist, and he’d be off telling his story of how when he had come back from Mexico he was hired under a false name by Harry Cohn the head of Columbia Pictures. Cohn was the only one in Hollywood who met him in person, everyone else insisted on not seeing him, so if they were investigated they could say they didn’t know him. Cohn kept Kim Novak as a sex slave, and she used to crawl under his desk and give him blow jobs. Lucian and a pal worked for a whole year on the film with the actors and a whole crew, but then Columbia dropped it. No one wanted to get in trouble.
It didn’t matter how many times Lucian had told this story, it always brought a faint glow to his cheeks and brightened his eyes. Rita Hayworth was Cohn’s star too but she wouldn’t sleep with him.
“Keep it in your pants, Harry,” she famously said. “I’m having lunch with your wife tomorrow.” And here Lucian always laughed.
Nietzsche used to say that memory was overrated: one should live in the present. That would be good if I could do it without anger! Personally, I like the Jungian idea of a world soul, a flowing together of memories. Already I see that happening, my memories merging with Hannah’s, my brother’s, Lucian’s. When one dies the others carry on. That’s probably why people are so determined to have children. To carry on. There is a nugget of truth in memories and maybe it won’t matter who experienced them first. No best or final. I picture it as a warm cloud filled with images, very beautiful.
But doesn’t this flowing together of memories go against the historians who are always trying to dig out details of the past? And didn’t someone say the individual is always struggling not to be overwhelmed by the tribe? I am soothed by the collective soul flowering tangibly in the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages. No one pointed to a particularly expressive figure with his pants down or a devil with a long penis and admitted, “Those things are mine.” No, they are ours, our sinful thoughts.
It strikes me like an ache in my chest how much I still want recognition, praise. I go out on the terrace and wait for the lift in my spirits when I step into the dappled sunshine cast by the leaves of a blooming tree whose name escapes me. I let it go. The delicate flowers are reflected in the glass tabletop along with the dark green pine, its base surrounded by fragments of Roman sculpture, a present from an archaeologist friend. The variety of greens and tender flowering plants soothes like a salve. I walk to the edge and look for the young gulls. There are three, one more than last year. I notice for the first time that the parent who is sitting placidly to one side, has black-and-white tail feathers. I hear the chicks squeaking plaintively for food, but they’ll have to wait until their foraging parent comes back. One looks distinctly weaker and I wonder if he’ll die.
After a few minutes the parent returns and the little ones peck frantically at her beak until she releases the food. I notice with relief that even the weaker one gets something. When their parent moves away, they follow her, stumbling over the red tiles, up the red side and down into the browner trough that matches their feathers. She leads them like a Pied Piper down to the very edge of the roof. Is she considering leading them like lemmings into the void? Is she already tired of mothering? You see, I assume she is female. The weaker chick takes a few steps inside the nest, lacking the courage to hasten after his siblings. The mother pauses a moment to see if the shaky one will join them. She stands right on the edge with the others. I worry that a strong gust of wind could blow the chicks down. My attention is riveted. I feel totally involved in what could be the survival of the fittest.
Hannah comes to the terrace door and asks if I had done the stretches the physical therapist had recommended for my hip. Yes, I said, annoyed to be reminded of my body. It was true I had done them, desultorily. I look away from her. She can always read my expression and see that I am lying by a slight wrinkle in my forehead or fear in my eyes that change their color from blue to gray. My bocca della verita, I call her, after the big stone sculpture of an open-mouthed river god who bites the fingers of liars.
I look furtively into the terrace next door to see if my little boy is there, but he isn’t. I notice that I’m coming to think of him as mine, realizing how much I miss not having a grandchild, someone with my genes. Hannah sighs and looks for a moment as if she is going to tell me something important; but she only sighs again and goes back to her desk. I give her a few minutes and then go inside. I walk casually to the bathroom and on the way back go over and kiss her on the neck.
She is staring at something that she covers hastily but not before I see the letter announcing that she has won a prestigious prize. She has leaned the announcement against a photo so she can see it better. The photo is of me. “Lifetime achievement award,” she says smiling up at me. She waits for a response.
“You deserve it,” I say, nuzzling her neck.
As though she senses the grudging nature of my acknowledgment, she moves away.
“I have to write a letter now sweetheart, then I’ll go and get us something nice for lunch al fresco,” she says. “I hope the elevator doesn’t act up. The signora next door told me it had gone dead twice. She told me that I should wait until I hear the door click before pressing the floor button.”
I hardly listen. The main poin
t that enters my awareness is that she is going out soon. It strikes me that I’d feel better if she were depressed. Her cheerfulness makes me more unhappy. She takes my ailments in stride, as long as she has that old typewriter of hers and can pound away on it.
I walk back to the terrace, feeling like an old lion pacing in its cage. How can I feel so ungenerous towards Hannah when I spent years building her up, showing her how to make use of the terrible things that happened to her, turn them into art? And now that she has succeeded, how can I begrudge this, especially as she continues to acknowledge what I gave her? And she seems almost glad of my weaknesses so she can show her willingness to care. I shake myself. Stop it! I go out to the terrace and sit with eyes closed, listening to the sound of my little wall fountain. It makes the space magical, a fourth dimension away from any care. I can imagine being beside a gentle brook—the kind that sings over small stones, and bubbles. There was a brook like that at the edge of our vineyards up in Todi. It came from a deep spring and I used to go “fishing” there with a string on a stick. I can’t remember catching anything. Probably there were no fish, though the word catfish keeps coming to my mind.
While I am refreshing myself with memories of the deep green of the trees surrounding the spring, I hear Roberto saying hello. He is on the other side of the lattice, of course, and he says ciao so softly that it could almost be the voice of my fountain, but when I open my eyes there he is.
“Would you like to come and visit?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says, “I would.”
So I get the key off the top of my armàdio just inside the door and I open the lattice. The signora had put out the wash earlier, and the shirts and jeans and underwear are waving in the breeze. She must have hung them very quietly. I wasn’t aware of her doing it.
“I see you didn’t bring your book,” I say. “Would you like to have more Oz? I’d be glad to read to you.”
He looks down at his feet.
“Mama took my book for the day as a punishment for teasing the baby.”
“What were you doing?” I ask him.
“I was only playing,” he answers. “I’d put out a finger and he’d try to catch it.”
“Maybe he’s a little young for that,” I said.
“He tried but he couldn’t—then he started to cry. If she had left us alone I would have let him…” He paused, looking unhappy.
“I’m sure you would have,” I said, somewhat insincerely, remembering my brother’s taunts and petty cruelties.
“I’d like to go out,” he said all of a sudden, “and get an ice cream. You know, downstairs to the bar.”
They had a particularly nice selection—all homemade with pure natural ingredients. Before I could think of any reason not to undertake this adventure, I took him by the hand. What better way to soothe an unhappy child? Eating ice cream was one of the best memories of my childhood—the mouth still longing for the breast, placated by the cool semiliquid, the licking and sucking.
“What a good idea,” I said looking down at him. The signora might not like it—my mind skittered away from her possible disapproval—but we could be there and back in a jiffy. No reason why she had to know.
A few minutes later Roberto and I stood in front of the trays, drinking in the sight of the mounds: raspberry and mixed fruit, chocolate truffle, chocolate with orange, chocolate chip, cookies and cream, sorbets in bright colors.
“Maybe I should bring some back for Mama,” he said, “and the baby.” His handsome face took on a worried expression as though he was trying to work out a puzzle that was too hard for his age.
“Let’s have ours first,” I said. “Then we’ll think about what to get them.” He shuffled from foot to foot. “In fact it might be better if we kept our little outing a secret between us two.”
“I wish you had a magic spell to make us invisible or a belt like Dorothy’s that could zip us home in a flash.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll take some back with us. Just relax now and enjoy your cone. You’d better lick around the other side. It’s going to drip.” I stopped short of saying, “you’ll really make Mama mad.” What was the matter with me? My thoughts kept turning to times when I’d had the best intentions but things turned out badly, like making a birthday cake for my mother and putting in salt instead of sugar. I shouldn’t have even been in the kitchen and the cook, one of the few servants I really liked, got fired.
“Pick two flavors for them. Don’t worry. I’ll explain.”
He looked dubious. We took wild berry and chocolate and I carried the bag for him while he licked slowly around his cone’s volcanic tip.
Our elevator is uncertain in the best of times, a green metal box with faux-wood trim. As we got in I tried to remember what Hannah had said about its newest glitch, something about waiting, but it seemed to be working all right. Roberto was dancing from one foot to another. Either he was excited at the thought of giving ice cream to his new Mama or he had to pee. The elevator crawled slowly up to the fifth floor and stopped. Roberto threw open the inner door. Too late. I remembered we should have waited to hear a click as the mechanism released. I felt a chill, my hand trembled as I tried the door myself. It wouldn’t open. Roberto looked stricken.
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “One of the neighbors will come by and I bet they can open the doors from the outside. While we wait maybe you could tell me what you were up to in The Magic of Oz book. Or more about how the characters from all the books come to you at night and you imagine adventures for them before you go to sleep.”
“I was up to where Captain Bill nails the Beast to the ground with a stake. He doesn’t die because nothing dies in Oz.”
“But he can be kept from harming anyone.”
“Yes,” sighs Roberto.
I seem to remember being reassured as a child by the absence of death in the Oz stories—did I write about that before? It was clearly a comfort to Roberto. Who knows? He may even imagined going to find his dead parents. Though of course he may not have imagined anything of the kind.
Just then I heard the heavy front door bang shut and what sounded like our downstairs neighbor, a loud-voiced blond whose parents owned the fruttivendolo down the block, talking to her dog. Then I heard her cursing to herself, “Porco madonna. Porco miseria,” as she tried to get a response from the elevator, gave up, and slowly climbed up the stairs. When I thought she had gotten to her floor, I called out to her that we were stuck. Could she help? She climbed the extra floor with still more curses and tried our elevator door. No luck.
“Is there someone else who could help? A repair man?”
She pulled out her cell phone—I could see her though the grill—and called.
“He won’t be back until tomorrow morning,” she flipped her phone shut.
“What! We have to stay here overnight? That’s impossible. I have a child here with me.”
Roberto who had been listening intently, started to cry.
“I have to pee,” he moaned, “I really have to pee.”
Just then the blond’s elderly mother appeared, with a second sausage-shaped dog on a leash. It was getting to be like a Becket play.
“Don’t worry poverino, don’t piànge. Poor little thing,” she said. “You can pee through the grate.”
Just then the sausage dog started to bark.
“Zitta, quiet,” she yelled at him. “Your neighbor next door might have a wire,” she said, “Signora Bussola. I’ll ask her.”
Signora Bussola was Roberto’s new Mama. He moaned.
“The ice cream we got for her is melting,” he sobbed. “It’s coming right through the box.”
“Here, I’ll take it,” I said. I took out my pocket handkerchief and made a show of wrapping it around the bottom of the container, though I knew it would soak through in a few minutes. Still, it quieted Roberto.
A more serious problem was that I was having to pee as well. It happened regularly whenever I got close to home. These day
s, usually by the time I got to the front door, there’d be a terrible urgency. I’d have to rush for the bathroom. I could feel the urgency growing as the blond’s father joined the group outside the elevator. Then when I was thinking this couldn’t get any worse, I saw a new pair of legs outside the grill, and I heard Roberto’s new Mama’s voice.
“What in the world is going on,” she asked. “Roberto are you in there?” she barked. I wondered how I’d ever been entranced by her nurturing qualities—how nice she was with her baby.
“Yes,” Roberto rubbed his nose with his sleeve. “And I have to pee.”
“I’ll get my wire,” she said, and I could hear a collective sigh from outside. “Just hold on, Roberto.” But it is already too late. I can see the pale lemon liquid trickling down his leg beneath his shorts. He crouches in a corner of the elevator and puts his hands over his head as though that would make him invisible. I know how he feels. My bladder is clamoring to let go. I know in a few minutes it will start to leak and then…
I hear someone say in the high pitched voice Italians use when something dramatic is going on, “Move, give the signora some space.”
There is the chink chink of metal against metal while she inserts her wire. I was too distressed to see exactly how it worked. But the door opened.
The signora walked into the elevator and took Roberto by the arm, pulled him outside, all the while peppering me with questions.
“How could you take him out without checking with me?” she asked in that operatic voice. “What sort of way is that to behave? I was about to call the police.” She shook Roberto’s arm. “Did he hurt you?” she asked. Roberto wouldn’t look at her, he just kept crying.
“I got you ice cream,” he whimpered. She softened slightly.
“You’re just a child,” she said pulling the container out of my hand and throwing it into a plastic container the blond held out to her. “He’s just a child but you, Renzo.” It suddenly hit me that she might think I was a pervert.
After Auschwitz: A Love Story Page 15