In the meantime I read Domenico’s older manuscripts, and though they were wonderful artefacts of his mind, each in its own way was strange and confused and . . . oddly meaningless. It struck me they were academic exercises, not the products of living. All of them except for one, which was connected to his last halting conversation with me about women and sex.
It was a mistake . . . I should have found a way. Don’t be as cold as me, Cesare . . . the coldness turns in on itself . . .
Domenico must have reflected on this coldness his entire adult life. It was in these pages. So I started work on A Life of Disappearances, the tale of a young man who has no great love for himself and even less for others, and those to suffer most from his emptiness are of course the women he beds. His complete rejection of social conventions is reflected in a lack of concern for anything but his own pleasure, which is by no means great.
What I thought elevated the book was a less realised political theme: the efficient brutality of the Italian state and the increasing disregard of the needs of individuals and communities in exchange for easy economic deals and catchphrases. Newspapers Rosa accumulated daily were full of simplifications and expediencies in political thought and action. In a way the perfect foil for this trend was my late master’s young nihilist, ‘Donato Alberti’.
When Rosa finished her typing on the first book, she told me she would only send the manuscript to the most reputable publishers in Italy. After some time, polite letters of refusal started to return: ‘Dear Signora Bortolotti, would you please inform your Signor Montenero that unfortunately . . .’
We settled into a comfortable rhythm of life in her house, and I noticed that Rosa gradually relaxed with me, though it came with some effort. She was warm-hearted but had lived with secrets for so long that being cautious, being silent about certain topics, was now simply a part of the way she was.
One night with glasses of port and special dolce set out for a group of her friends who hadn’t arrived because of an unseasonal thunderstorm, she drank more than she normally did and became positively talkative. She told me that in the weeks following the destruction of the Amati facility, officials had twice come to this house and had combed through it carefully, taking anything and everything that might be a link to the project. They helped themselves to all her husband’s papers and records; he’d been a colleague of Kristof Vliegan’s and had once been his direct supervisor at the university in Bologna, where ancillary research for the Amati project was carried out quietly.
So Doctor Bortolotti had been yet another element in the Amati’s endeavour. His specialty area: genetics and the mutations of species. His published work had achieved such distinction that in 1919 he was invited to Russia to work with a scientist named Vavilov in helping to set up the Laboratory of Applied Botany in the then Petrograd, later renamed Leningrad. This facility proved to foster a vast growth of research into plant breeding. Later he was invited to present at the International Congress of Genetics in Berlin, but it was his extended sojourns in Russia that reflected the Soviet interest, instigated by Lenin and Trotsky, to marry science and socialism.
‘Those two things go together?’
‘When a country’s wracked by famine, yes, I think so.’
‘But how did this have anything to do with the Amatis?’
‘All new ideas are like a jigsaw puzzle, aren’t they? Findings here, research there, beliefs overlaid with opinions and scientific data . . . I remember my husband was most excited by two events in Russia. A man he helped to train, Karpetchenko, crossed two plant species. It was the first time it had been successful. Then an old friend of his named Koltsov developed a theory about inheritance within species that has to do with chemicals and templates.’
‘Chemicals and templates.’ I tried to make sense of this information, but in reality I was more interested in the reaches of this research, which countries had contributed. ‘So the Soviets were involved with the Amati family?’
‘In the early part of the century. The revolutionary government sent scientists all over the world to learn and to collaborate with others in their field . . . but the Amati plan goes back well before any of that. The Soviets were latecomers.’
‘But important.’
‘Very.’
I thought it over. The most apparent truth was that none of this information helped me in the least; I was no better or worse off for knowing these small, disparate facts. But I did put the small pieces together to form a larger truth.
‘Then if so many others were involved in the project, it’s not right to think that the destruction of one facility would stop something so —’
I tried to find the correct word.
‘Important, Cesare?’
It came to me: ‘World-changing.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘World-changing.’
A big word and a bigger concept – so how could I be the sad result?
The officials scouring her house had been at pains to ensure that Rosa had no personal diaries or letters that gave accounts of her involvement. They even took a vast majority of her family photographs – all the ones that incorporated Domenico as a member of the Bortolottis. She now had no pictures of him as a young boy, and all his school books, writings, drawings, toys and clothes had been gathered up and destroyed as well. Rosa signed papers that forbade her from speaking about her husband’s research and either of their involvement. In return she received an ex gratia payment large enough to buy a lifetime’s silence. Several lifetimes’ silence. Her three natural sons profited with access to the best education money could buy. When it came time to set up their own lives and homes, there were ample funds.
I looked into Rosa’s eyes. They held the tears an old woman was practised at holding back. For all these benefits there was also a life of lies, and I was certain that in her soul, as must have been the case with many, many other innocents such as herself, she wished she’d never heard of the Amatis.
Halfway through my work on Domenico’s A Life of Disappearances, an unexpected event occurred, something that stepped straight out of the pages in my hands.
I was out in the afternoon looking at well-stocked storefront windows and had stopped at a bar, first for coffee then for a glass of Cynar, the aperitif made from artichoke essence and other herbs and plants. This was an ordinary outing for me – I couldn’t stay indoors twenty-four hours a day – and despite my reticence, sometimes I did try to be in places where there were women. To look at their faces and clothes, to be close enough to smell perfumes and soaps, to try and understand the attractions between men and women. If a female ever looked in my direction I dropped my eyes immediately. I knew that I blushed all over too.
When the writing was difficult and I couldn’t find my way through a certain problem, some days I’d take the train from the east side of the island to the west, and watch the young girls and women of the chaotic former capital and adjacent wealthy resort towns. The power and beauty of different countries were written in all the faces and accents: Germany, Sweden, France, even the Americas. Still, I walked among these women, but never with them.
This particular afternoon I sipped my Cynar and read the last pages of Italo Svevo’s fine novel, As a Man Grows Older. I closed the book, finishing the aperitif. There was Rosa’s dinner to go home to, but I’d also developed an affection for the movie theatre in town and thought I might go see what was playing. Exactly as I put down my empty glass, though, the waiter stopped at my table and gave me another shot glass of Cynar. He moved away before I could tell him he’d made a mistake. A couple then passed my table and the female partner dropped a folded note almost into my hands. The man left the establishment first, and the woman stopped in the doorway to glance back at me. She had the lightest eyes I’d ever seen – they reminded me of a cat’s. The wisps of hair that showed under her hat were the colour of honey. Then she was gone.
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Curious, I opened the note.
It was a street address with an apartment number and a single word that wasn’t part of the Italian language: Now. What did this note mean? Maybe this strange ‘Now’ was an acronym for something. Or a foreign name. I drank the Cynar and put the note into my book, thinking I would forget it immediately. I didn’t. What would Donato, the no-good protagonist of Disappearances have done?
Paying my bill, I asked the bar owner if he understood the meaning of this three-letter foreign word. He didn’t, but called over a waiter, who also didn’t have a clue. As I was putting on my coat and hat the waiter came to find me, having worked it out with the assistance of one of the more worldly cooks.
‘It means “Ora”. “Il presente”. “Now”. “The present moment”. You understand?’
It wasn’t a difficult equation: a word, an address, a glance.
Domenico’s book was meant to be full of this spirit: sexual liaisons out of nowhere, passions quenched with absolute strangers. He must have imagined, or perhaps had even wanted, these things, even though he hadn’t possessed the will to gratify himself. My hands, inexplicably, had gone cold with nerves. What an adventurer I was. Rosa’s dinner, the movie theatre, or this address? I knew the hotel and I knew how to get there; it was a few street corners away. But what would I actually do when I was there?
And what about the man with her? It could be the case that I was comically misinterpreting the note’s intention and the woman meant to procure a boy for him. Or what if they both wanted me? In Domenico’s book was the real answer: it told me I had much to learn.
Three street corners. The hotel, a busy porter, carpeted stairs, wandering guests, the door with the correct number. The corridor was so gently lit and silent there might not have been anyone at home in any of the rooms, however the door in question wasn’t fully shut. I was about to turn on my heel and run but the man was there, and he tried to smile. I could see he was tense though probably not so much as I was. The woman stood in the room behind him and her hair was down, and she was drinking something. The man spoke. When he saw that I didn’t comprehend, he opened the door wider and motioned me in, saying three times, ‘Permesso’, which was the wrong polite Italian word to use, but at least this time I understood what he meant.
I left late that evening knowing a little more about myself and the unseen currents running so mercilessly through people’s lives. The couple, they’d shown me by way of a world map, were from Great Britain. The woman had been drinking tea that she’d made from English leaves brought with her in a travel case. They’d offered me a freshly brewed cup as we attempted to converse without understanding one another’s words, resorting instead to broad, comical sign language. At first I was so nervous I could barely bring my cup to my lips. Then as I gradually understood I wasn’t the only one suffering this way, my hands steadied and I began to relax into the situation.
In fact, I felt myself taking command.
His anxiety revealed itself in the jittery way he smoked. She was much more reticent, as if she wasn’t even present – but when she lay across the bed and opened herself, and with unexpected tenderness drew my face down over hers, nothing in her manner was reticent any more. I was transfixed by the movements of her eyes, her mouth, by the way she lightly bit her bottom lip.
Her name, they told me, was Veronica. His name, they said, was James. They had both smiled at my own name and repeated it together. They made me understand that his participation in the war had perpetrated something terrible upon James, but it wouldn’t be allowed to ruin their devotion to one another. He waited in the main room with cigarettes and port. When I was done, Veronica lay in my arms, satisfied and unsatisfied at the same time. She slowly used her elegant fingers to bring herself to orgasm.
I had no clue about what I’d done. Was this lovemaking? Was this pleasure I experienced the centre of the lives of those around me?
When I stopped kissing her cheeks, her forehead and her mouth I saw a tear run down the side of her face. We emerged from the bedroom. I let the green-eyed Veronica go first, having watched the way she stood naked by the window and slowly pulled up her nylons. I saw how much she longed to be back with her husband. She’d never know that she was the first woman whose body I’d seen and held. If she ever thought about me again it might only be to remember a particularly inept young man in the quaint Sicilian city of Catania.
Veronica and James embraced. There was something both very happy and sad in the way they held one another. James offered me a glass of port but I shook my head and straightened my tie.
‘Buona fortuna,’ I told them, and James’s brow creased with incomprehension, just as it had done through all our attempts at conversation.
‘Fortune?’ he asked in his language. Veronica took up their phrase book and found the expression. She showed it to him on the page. ‘Ah, “good luck”! Well, bor-nah for-tuna to you too young Caesar,’ and that was how we parted, with his faltering smile following me, and his wife’s green eyes already turning away.
I stopped on the way home, and sat in a booth with a glass of wine, liking the way Veronica’s perfume remained on my hands, on my neck and face, and of course under my clothes. I’d bathe once I was at Rosa’s but for now it was if I was alone in a meadow, letting its scents seep into my skin. Jasmine, that was it, jasmine from her hair. I glanced at all the others in this bar without making eye contact. There were couples, groups of friends. I wondered how many of them had made love today or would make love later tonight, enjoying the complicity of tenderness and pleasure.
Domenico’s book was wrong. It was too harsh in its summation of the currents inside people. In the people of the world there were cruelties and there were selfish needs but there could be such gentleness too.
One day, I thought, I’d write something of my own – and it would say things the right way.
Rosa was awake and waiting for me, which was not her usual way. There must be bad news, I thought, but it was the opposite. A light shone in her eyes. She didn’t want to come straight to the matter and so I played along.
‘Come and sit down,’ she said, ‘it’s late and it’s time to eat.’
I kissed her hand. ‘Tomorrow I cook for you.’
‘You do that, but for now enjoy this.’
Rosa always respected my desire not to eat meat and tonight she’d saved me lentil and potato soup with hard cheese cut into it. Simple and delicious. We made small talk while I ate slowly, Rosa sitting across the table from me. I pretended not to notice her mischievous gleam, and thought that if this was going to be the first time she told me she had a great friend with a delightful daughter, then I was ready, I’d gladly meet any angel.
When I was finished she reached into her blouse and withdrew a letter.
‘My Dear and Gracious Signora Bortolotti,’ it read. ‘Would you please advise your Signor Montenero that he has written an Important Book and one which Deserves to be Published and Published Well. I humbly offer my Services, and the Services of my Firm, in the Cause of achieving this Aim. We are a Family Company with a proud History, and among our Esteemed Authors we number . . .’
Not only were the words and what they meant extraordinary, but I recognised the names of three-quarters of the authors mentioned. I could have reeled off their works without thinking. The writer of the letter was a man named Bruno Pasqua and he said he was the son-in-law of the company’s founder, a well-known patron of the arts who’d passed away ten years earlier. Signor Pasqua and his company were based in the great textile and manufacturing city of Milano. However, his letter pointed out, Pasqua’s parents were from no less than the wonderful province of Catania, which was such an agreeable coincidence, and he would be journeying to their seaside town, Riposto-Giarre, within the month. He would very much like to pass by and meet Signor Cesare Montenero – that is, as long as Signora Bortolotti di
dn’t think a short visit would cause too much intrusion or interfere with the good sir’s writing schedule.
With absolute delight, Rosa asked, ‘And would it cause too much intrusion to the good sir’s busy schedule?’
‘This belongs to Domenico,’ I told her. ‘Success belongs to him. Now that he’s gone it won’t hurt that the correct name goes on the book. I’ll write to this man and let him know the facts.’
Rosa took the letter, looked at it, then looked at me.
‘You don’t know anything about business, Cesare. First, let me write to our Bruno Pasqua on your behalf. His terms may not be favourable and if you have an intermediary it will be easier to handle negotiations. Second is something more important. Domenico didn’t want his name on this book. The Amati name cannot be on this book. There should be nothing in this world that provokes public interest in either him or his background.’
I hung my head. I could understand, even though I didn’t want to.
‘Domenico did want your name on it. He wanted you to have this future, and now that he’s not with us anymore it’s even more certain.’
‘But —’ I started. It made me sick to profit from the dead, more so because it was Domenico.
‘But what? But you know better than Domenico? Listen. He spoke to me about you. He told me that if it ever came to it I was to help you find your way in life. Why else do you think I was trying so hard to track you down after I heard he passed away? There’s no last will and testament, men always think they’ll live forever. The state’s gobbled up just about everything, but you need your own income.’
‘That’s true, but I’ve got no right to anything of Domenico’s.’
‘This book isn’t Domenico’s. You made it your own. It’s what he wanted, and it’s always been your story anyway, Cesare. The small boy sold into slavery who makes his escape, was that Domenico’s life?’
I looked at my empty bowl and rearranged my cutlery this way, that way.
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