A Place I've Never Been

by David Leavitt

  Wartime Romance

  Rome Boy Marries Rome Girl

  Private Wayne Arthur Smith, 20, son of Mr. and Mrs. Ludlow J. Smith of Ellsworth Street, Rome, Kansas, was married yesterday to Rosa Signorelli, 19, of Rome, Italy. The bride and bridegroom met in Italy, where Private Smith was stationed.

  Private Smith, who is employed at Sam’s Service Station on Mott Avenue, is a graduate of Rome Regional High School. He and his bride plan to make their home in the new development on Warren Drive.

  The bride’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Luigi Signorelli of the Appian Way, Rome, Italy, did not attend the nuptials.

  So Rosa ended up living in a blue asbestos-shingled house near a wheat field. Every day Wayne got up near dawn and drove his pickup truck to the garage. Rosa played bridge with his mother and sisters, made elaborate torte for the church bake sales, which, because they were not frosted pink, no one wanted, and searched futilely for foods that would at least approximate the tastes she’d grown up with—good, green olive oil, fresh pecorino cheese, ripe tomatoes. But the oil was like soap scum, the tomatoes pale orange and mealy, the cheese the consistency of pencil erasers. Rome, Kansas, the late 1940s: It might seem a strange place for a sophisticated Roman girl, the child of intellectual leftists, to end up. And yet, how many more couples like them did the war produce? Differences become detectable much more slowly when there’s a language barrier; also, in the flummox of the aftermath, the joyous, wrecked catharsis that marked the end of the war, such differences might have seemed romantic, exciting, there might have appeared something deeply challenging about the prospect of crossing such barriers and thereby—in a small, private way—healing the broken world. They went off to America, in love, got married, in love; it took Rosa nearly a year to realize what a mistake she’d made.

  Fortunately, she was not the kind of girl who digs her grave and lies in it. The first time Wayne blackened her eye she was gone. It wasn’t hard; she didn’t feel settled; the whole marriage had seemed like a dream, a sojourn, some sort of penance for the war. She was young, she healed easily; as soon as she got back to Rome—the real Rome—she would just start afresh, it would all seem distant and quick and nothing to be regretted. These days, she remembers with visceral clarity that windy afternoon she stood at the bus depot in Rome, Kansas, make-up covering her blackened eye. Wayne was at the garage; he didn’t even know she was leaving. She had just enough money to get her to New York; once there, she planned to wire Fulvia, who’d just married a rich industrialist from Milan and would certainly provide fare for the boat. There is an illusory calm about this memory; a sensation of peace and clarity, of having finally come to her senses, which cannot be accurate, since, looking back forty years on the incident, Rosa realizes she must have been panicked and terrified that somehow he’d find her and drag her home. The bus glides down the long, straight road, its headlights seeming to warble and shimmer in the gasoline fumes. It pulls up to the depot, enveloping her in dust and the smell of diesel fuel. She lifts her little suitcase to the driver, steps up. Light, free, young. On the bus there is only one other passenger, an old woman with a back stiffened by church chairs. The woman is wearing a high, elaborate hat covered with flowers in candy tones of yellow and red. Rosa looks at the hat and she finds she can’t help but laugh. She laughs and laughs. The woman looks at her, surprised, then enraged. Rosa can’t stop laughing.

  By six o’clock, they’re in another state; she can see Wayne stepping into the house in Rome, Kansas, calling for her. Of course she’s left no note.

  Three weeks later she was back in Italy.

  Fulvia had a party for her, with champagne. At the party were a number of men Rosa decided she would like to go to bed with. She forgot about Wayne Smith, forgot about him completely, until the letter came to her parent’s house, inquiring as to her whereabouts. She tore it up. There were no communications, then, for a long time, and Rosa, who was in love again, decided to pretend the marriage hadn’t really happened—after all, it was an American marriage, it had never been officially registered in Italy, therefore it didn’t really count. She married her second husband, Paolo, without even mentioning the first to him, without a thought as to the consequences, and they stayed married for almost twenty years without hearing a word from Wayne Smith. Then one day in the early seventies—they were living in Rome, Marco was fifteen and Alba ten—Rosa received an official communication from a lawyer in Salina, Kansas. She remembers standing by her mailbox, staring at the unfamiliar, foreign-looking envelope, pulled back, suddenly, over decades, as if a bill she’d once neglected to pay, and assumed she had evaded, had just found her, hugely multiplied by interest into an astronomical fee. She opened the letter. After considerable effort—several years’, it seemed—Wayne Smith had finally tracked her down. And suddenly in her mind she was dragged back to Rome, Kansas, strung up while Wayne’s mother and sisters laughed and applauded, whipped by the woman in the high flowered hat, before being taken back to Wayne’s blue-shingled house. What was the dream and what the reality? Perhaps all of this—her marriage to Paolo, her children—was the dream. Perhaps she was about to wake up and find herself back there, in Rome, Kansas, scrubbing potatoes, while Wayne, in the living room, drank beer and polished his fist.

  But in fact, all Wayne wanted was a legal divorce. He was now the president of a company that manufactured spare parts for tractors, the lawyer wrote, lived in Dallas, and was eager to remarry. Naturally this put Rosa in a rather sticky situation: Which husband, she wondered, would take priority?

  Fortunately, Fulvia knew people in the right offices who owed her favors. A number of bribes were paid; certain documents were rewritten so that the marriage between Rosa and Paolo had never happened, and thus the marriage between Rosa and Wayne could be discreetly dissolved. Rosa assumed that she and Paolo would then remarry, but it turned out Paolo had a girlfriend he’d been planning to move in with for a while now and just hadn’t known how to tell Rosa about. So that was that. Rosa, vowing she’d never marry again, started spending more and more time at Fulvia’s house near Saturnia, less and less in Rome. She visited the waterfall sometimes, and thought about Wayne Smith, and felt guilty for having just abandoned him like that. Finally she wrote to him in care of the lawyer in Salina, Kansas; it was a long letter, one she spent days on. In it she tried to explain to him why she’d left him; they were both so young, after all, and so traumatized by the war, she said, and then it had just seemed like a dream—hadn’t it seemed like a dream to him? Anyway, she wrote, she was sorry she hadn’t bothered to formalize the divorce. She hoped it hadn’t caused him too much inconvenience. She hoped he and his new wife were very happy. She told him about her life in Italy, included snapshots of her children and Fulvia’s children. She told him how famous Fulvia was, how they went to the waterfall frequently, these days, and reminisced. Did he have any news of Nelson Perkins, who’d called Fulvia “La Glamorosa” and given her chewing gum?

  But Wayne Smith never wrote back.

  Fulvia, who had just divorced her third husband, felt little sympathy. “You were stupid to marry him,” she said. “I told you then.”

  “I wish,” Rosa said, “you had more gentleness, Fulvia. Yes, it was a mistake, yes, I shouldn’t have done it. But even so, when I think back now to the girl I was then, the thrill I felt, getting on that boat with Wayne, or the thrill I felt coming back to Rome, for that matter—I don’t know if I’ll ever feel anything like that again. It was my adventure, my madness of youth, and I’m glad I had it.”

  “If you want to call spending a dreary year in the middle of nowhere your madness of youth, that’s your choice,” Fulvia said. “To me it was madness plain and simple.” Then she went out to meet a politician for an illicit rendezvous. Rosa, as often happened in those days, was left to take care of the children.

  Later that afternoon, after she got back from the market, Rosa found Dario in her bedroom. He was wearing a pink chenille evening gown which she herself hadn’t been able
to fit into for years, and was admiring himself in the mirror. He was just sixteen. He looked good. “La Glamorosa,” he said, and smiled.

  She stayed in the doorway, didn’t let him know she’d seen him. She thought, So Fulvia isn’t as all-knowing as she thinks she is, then tiptoed away, storing the discovery for rumination and future use.

  What she didn’t know was that the “politician” Fulvia had gone off to have an illicit rendezvous with was Marco.

  This afternoon, Grazia takes Nicholas on a walk along a decaying cobblestone path which begins at the crumbling village wall in Saturnia, on top of the hill, and passes by Fulvia’s house. It’s an ancient Roman road, dating from the time of Nero. The bumpy, herniated path narrows and widens and occasionally disappears altogether under the weeds and grasses which are choking it, but Grazia seems to know it well, and they never lose the trail. “But does it really go all the way to Rome?” Nicholas asks, and Grazia nods. “If you kept walking and walking through these hills, eventually you’d end up at Fulvia’s apartment.” She laughs, shielding her eyes with her hand. The sun is huge now, the same red-orange as the yolks of the eggs Rosa picks up every morning from a chicken farm outside the village. It gives the dry grasses which cover the hills the golden cast of wheat ready to be threshed.

  “It’s beautiful here, no?” Grazia says. “Fulvia and Rosa talk about Saturnia like it’s their place, but they’re Romans, they don’t really know. I grew up near Grossetto, on a farm. We had olive groves. My father used to drive me when he took the olive oil to Rome. I know everything of this countryside.”

  “Yes?”

  “Maremma, it’s called. The swamp. It used to be a swamp, in the fourteenth century. Now it is a wild land, full of cinghiali. Our dogs, the Maremmani, are the fiercest in Italy, and white as snow.”

  They continue their downward trek. Nicholas has to make a conscious effort to slow himself down in order to avoid getting too far ahead of Grazia, who takes tiny steps, and studies the misshapen cobblestones cautiously, as if in fear of tripping over pebbles.

  “I wanted to talk to you more about Dario,” she says after a few minutes. “Fulvia paints such an ugly picture. And I thought you should know more.”

  “She must suffer a lot, otherwise she wouldn’t have to act so callous.”

  “But you make a mistake. You assume Fulvia has a heart. Fulvia has no heart. In the old days, she always acted hard, but underneath she was soft. Now she’s hard even underneath. Marco will tell you it’s jealousy, that she went mad because he chose Dario instead of her. But the truth is, Fulvia didn’t care about Marco after he married me. No, the only reason Fulvia is jealous is because Dario’s genius was something she couldn’t take credit for. Imagine! Fulvia Bellini, the great cultural critic, the maker and breaker of reputations, has a son who is suddenly famous all over Italy, and she’s had nothing to do with it! In fact, she’s discouraged him! She couldn’t stand that. Even now, she wants to punish Dario’s memory.” They stop for a moment, and Grazia turns to face Nicholas. “I’ll tell you a secret. Dario’s writings, the things he read during the performances? I’ve saved them all. I keep them in a safety-deposit box in Milano. They are works of brilliance, as the world will someday know. Well, just after Dario died—he’d entrusted his papers to me—I tried to get them published. I approached every publisher in Italy, and one by one, they refused me. And you know why? Because of her. Because they were afraid of her. Believe Fulvia when she tells you how much power she has. It’s all true. She kept those writings from being published because she couldn’t stand the idea that someday her son would be more famous than she was. But he will. In a few years’ time, no one in the world will remember who Fulvia Bellini was. But Dario—he will be one of the great ones.” Grazia smiles. “Have you seen a picture of him?”

  “No.”

  She opens her purse and pulls from it a snapshot of a young man with dark-blond hair, freckles, bright green eyes. “Such eyes!” she says. “He used to recite in the performance a poem Fulvia said to him when he was small, something she made up:

  Verdi come le acque di Saturnia, gli occhi del mio bambino.

  Caldo come le acque di Saturnia, il cuore del mio bambino.

  Fragrante come le acque di Saturnia, la cacca del mio bambino.

  “What that means is: ‘As green as the waters of Saturnia, my little son’s eyes. As hot’—hot? No, ‘As warm as the waters of Saturnia, my little son’s heart. As fragrant as the waters of Saturnia, my little son’s shit.’ ”

  Grazia is, for a moment, triumphantly silent.

  “He couldn’t resist that. He found that so funny. If she had any idea of the future, singing that little poem, can you imagine? But now you see the truth. Fulvia loved him best of all. It’s true, she couldn’t say anything loving to him without making it a joke in the end, even when he was just a bimbo. But she loved him anyway. And Dario was the only man who broke with her instead of the other way around. I’ll tell you something else.” Again Grazia stops, leans close. “The night Dario killed himself, Marco was with him. Marco had been trying to leave him for months. And Dario said to him, ‘If you leave me tonight, Marco, I’ll kill myself.’ And Marco walked right out the door.”

  Nicholas looks down into Grazia’s face as she tells him this. Her face is pale and fat and looks like the face of one of those very innocent Madonnas, as chubby and unknowing as the babies they hold in their arms.

  “I’m telling you this for your own good,” she says. “I’m telling you this so you’ll understand. Marco was my husband. I know him better than Fulvia, better than Dario.”

  “Thank you,” Nicholas says uneasily.

  There is, in the distance, the sound of engines. The ancient road has met up with the new road, the road for cars.

  “It’s why Marco left, you see. He couldn’t stand the guilt.”

  A car rounds the bend, slows. It is Alberto, with one arm around Alba. Grazia seems hardly to notice.

  “Did someone call a taxi?” Alberto calls to them in English, across the little field. And Alba laughs.

  In the late afternoon, Fulvia naps. The house shuts up, quiets down, in deference to her. Most everyone is down at the spa, lounging in the waters, or having mud baths, or themselves napping. Only in the kitchen is there activity, where Rosa, assisted by a girl from the village, has started preparations for the evening supper. The wine bottles are yet to be uncorked, the tablecloth is yet to be spread, a heady odor of garlic and olive oil wafts from the stove, where Rosa is making a soffrito.

  “Understand, Nicholas,” she is saying, “we’re all fools. But none of us so much as Grazia.”

  Then it’s time for the dinner, which, like every meal in this household, is a messy, complicated affair, starting at ten and lasting until one, with a crowd of people whose names Nicholas can’t keep straight gathered around the huge operatic table, and big bowls of pasta and risotto making the rounds, and prosciutto and cheeses and bollito misto, and of course, gallons of wine—expensive bottles from Montalcino and Montepulciano as well as casks of the locally produced, pale yellow vino dei contadini. By the end of the evening the table is strewn with walnut shells, and the peels of clementines, and wineglasses in which cigarette butts have been snuffed out. “Dio,” Rosa mutters, surveying the huge pile of dishes to be done. “Mai più. Never again.”

  “But Mamma, Simonetta’s coming in the morning,” Alba reminds her. “She’ll take care of it. Go to bed, Mamma.”

  Rosa shakes her head. “You know that Simonetta’s been threatening to quit. She says there’s just too much work to be done here, when she could get the same money washing a plate and a glass for Signora Favetta down the road. No, I must start now. I must get some of this cleared away.”

  In the end, only Nicholas volunteers to help her—Nicholas, the American, raised to believe you can never do too much for people who are putting you up for free.

  They are just starting the ritual business of plunging plates into steaming wa
ter when Fulvia calls from the sofa, “I want to go to the waterfall!”

  “Absolutely not,” Rosa says. “You’re a sick woman, Fulvia, you can’t just go out swimming at one in the morning.”

  “Don’t treat me like an old lady,” Fulvia says. “I do what I want. Marco! Take me to the waterfall!”

  “But you’ve got to think of your health!”

  “I’ve got to think of my sanity! Really, Rosa, every night this week, I’ve sat through dinner, then watched as everyone went off to the cascata except for you and me, the two vecchie. Enough of that!”

  “Do what you want then,” says Rosa, turning from the sink to face her. “Kill yourself. I have dishes to wash.”

  “You always have dishes to wash! Leave the dishes! I forbid you to do the dishes!”

  “Simonetta—”

  “Forget Simonetta, you’re as much a fool as she! Now get my swimming suit.”

  Rosa turns again from the sink, marches into the living room, stands over her friend. It seems, for a moment, as if she’s going to say something terrible, unforgivable; indeed, even Fulvia looks as if she wonders if this time she’s gone too far. But whatever it is Rosa is about to say she apparently chooses to keep to herself. Her shoulders sink. “Marco, help Fulvia into her bedroom,” she says. Then she leaves the room.

  “I think we’ll go down now and you can join us later,” Alberto says. “Alba and I. Anyone else want to come?”

  “Go ahead,” says Grazia. She doesn’t look at them.

  “Fine. Ciao, then,” Alberto says, and before anyone else has a chance to ask for a ride, he and Alba are out the door. Laura goes to put the children to bed, and then only Nicholas and Grazia are left at the table. He watches while with small and vicious fingers she tears the peel of a clementine into tiny pieces.

  At the falls, lowering Fulvia into the water proves to be an even more complicated business than it was at the pool. “Careful, you caproni!” she chastises, as they ease her in. “Slowly! Ah, yes, that feels wonderful.” Immersed, she leans her head back, her body wraithlike in the dark water. “Stay with me, Nicholas,” she says.