Advice for Italian Boys

by Anne Giardini

  The main character was a woman, a professor who taught poetry. Her specialty was the work of a long-dead poet named John Donne. She was brave and archly clever, but she was told early in the first act that she was dying of cancer and she spent the rest of the play getting the dying done. The professor told a story about a poem that Nicolo remembered from his last year of high school, in which death was compared to sleep. He remembered as he heard it again the trick at the end, how it mocked death, defining it as only a brief interlude before an eternal afterlife. What he had forgotten, or hadn’t realized before, was the defiance of it, like whistling into a hurricane:

  Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

  Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

  For those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,

  Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me…

  Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

  And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

  And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well,

  And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

  One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

  And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

  The woman told how, as a young student, she had been reproved for using a semicolon in the last line instead of a comma. “Nothing but a breath—a comma—separates life from life everlasting. It’s very simple really,” she said, standing with one hand holding on to her IV pole and lifting the other, palm upward, in a half shrug. “Life, death. Soul. God. Past, present. Not insuperable barriers, not semicolons, just a comma.”

  Toward the end of the play, the sick woman died and this scene was one of pain and confusion. A team of doctors tried to restart her heart, and the shouting and barking of orders and what looked like brutalities inflicted on the small body pulled Nicolo’s attention fully away from Zoe at last and to the action onstage. In the play’s last scene, the actress, in the gentlest of motions, rose and walked away from the medical ministrations. This was the moment of her death, and she had risen out of and shed her own racked body. She stood for a minute, reached up and set aside her hospital gown and the cap that had covered her head, and then walked, naked, bald, toward a strong light that shone directly down on her.

  For a few moments the crowded theatre was silent and still. Then someone clapped in the upper balcony, and immediately after, several others joined from below. Like a flock of birds taking off in an expanding flurry, the theatre had poured into it a rising surge of applause. Nicolo glanced toward Zoe and saw a tear, a tracing of a sliding bead, creeping downward on her cheek.

  “You cry at plays?” he said. He stretched an arm around Zoe’s shoulders, and she lowered her head so that it leaned against his upper arm. He could feel her smooth hair against his chin, and under his arm he felt her heat, the speed of her heart and pulse, the way her breath pushed against and then pulled together the bones of her chest. He had an impression of how active the motor of her entire body was, even seated, and when she turned toward him, he felt that her face was transparent as a crystal and that he could see how her thoughts and feelings agitated inside her head.

  “Of course,” she answered. “Who doesn’t?” She placed a hand on his arm and examined his expression closely. “How could you not? It’s tragic. It’s not the death so much; we all die in the end. It’s the futility. What is life for, after all—getting things, learning things—when it always ends like that? It’s heartbreaking if you stop to think about it.”

  Nicolo didn’t know how to answer. He couldn’t remember the last time he had cried. He closed his eyes, experimentally, testing, waiting. Nothing came. The play had affected him; his chest had tightened and he had felt in the base of his throat an unnameable ache, but no more than that. Was he defective in some way? Was this evidence of an irredeemable lack of feeling? A sign that he had an unusually stony or obstinate heart?

  “It was sad,” he said, slowly. “It’s a terrible story. But part of me can’t let go of the fact that it is a story, with actors.”

  “I do forget,” Zoe said. “I suspend disbelief as easily as that.” She held up one hand and brushed her fingers against her thumb. “I’ve always been able to do it. It only takes a moment, when I read a good book or go to a movie or a play, and then, once it happens, I’m lost, as if I’ve fallen into a hole. It’s funny, but I actually don’t mind that, being dropped or pulled completely into another universe. Even when whatever happens makes me upset, it’s worth it. It’s like getting to live another life for a while. Otherwise you’re always stuck in your own. It’s a chance to be taken somewhere else completely.”

  The lights had not yet come up and the theatre was still dark. They were close to the stage, in very good seats in the centre, a dozen rows back from where the actors had played out their drama. Zoe’s head brushed against Nicolo’s shoulder and it may be that at one end or the other of their row of seats a door or vent was opened. A thin stream of cold air settled down around them. Nicolo’s skin contracted in this abrupt change of temperature, and, for the smallest space of time, he experienced a strange physical dislocation. He felt as if some essence of himself had rushed as easily as a breath out into the room, and then he had an even stranger sensation, of flowing in some unimpeded way into Zoe, as though she had become permeable and he was somehow moving through the receptive pores of her skin. For a moment he could feel her body from the inside, see through her eyes, hear what she heard, breathe as she breathed. He felt how wide and orderly and well-stocked was the calm place in the centre of her, like the shelves of a library surrounded by thick walls that held the world and its clamour and disorder at bay, and how complete and whole she was, not lacking in some important way as many lone people are—one hand soundlessly clapping, a scant pound of flour at the bottom of an enormous sack, a lone cypress tree without its companion Lombardy poplar, the barrel of a bell without its clapper. The experience lasted as long as a blink. He had time for only the briefest impression of a very different geography from his own. The space he inhabited, his own interior self, resembled the rooms and streets where he lived—busy, domesticated, commonplace, conventional. Hers was a more original and mazelike arrangement, and he felt it might take a very long time to work through it. Zoe shifted next to his arm and immediately the experience ended. He was himself, back inside his own head and skin. He felt a sense of marvel but also of confidence and warmth. What a strange sensation, but one for which there must be a rational explanation—the result of having just seen the play, and the darkness of the theatre, and his desire to understand Zoe. Or it was possible that he had fallen asleep; people must doze off in theatres all the time, and a play, after all, so closely resembles dreaming.

  “Do you think it might actually be like that?” Zoe was saying. “Do you think there’s a bright light and then walking along, through a dark tunnel, and then, I don’t know, do you think that then there’s heaven?”

  “Yes,” Nicolo said. “I do. I’m sure of it.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Nicolo did believe in heaven. His image of it was vague, but if he had been forced to do so, he very well might have described something like the Italy that his nonna spoke of—not the Italy that was, but the Italy that should and could have been, if there hadn’t been the wars, if the government had sent doctors and trains as promised when votes were sought, instead of tax collectors, whose complicity could be bought, and unscrupulous police officers. This heaven existed overhead, somehow, suspended by unseen wires or forces in a separate layer, like a stratum in a wedding cake, above the visible sky but lower than black outer space in which bright stars and blue and red and gold planets spun in their orbits. Heaven had gravity, like Earth, and light, but the gravity of rocks and dirt in heaven had less substance and the light somehow had more. Heaven had sidewaysslanting hills, deep-mounded earth that forced green shoots up through the soil after the afternoon rains, heavy grapes warm and sweet and
so willing to be pressed into wine that they were already half-fermented and loose on their stems under a sun that glowed through the gathered clouds of a second, higher sky. In this heaven, sturdily built stone houses with sound roofs had people inside them who knew exactly where they belonged, a benevolent padrone in a palazzo overlooking the central, fan-shaped piazza where festivals were held—a padrone who took every pain to ensure that all wants were anticipated and met before they were felt—fat, gold grain carefully stored in the barns, sturdy milk cows in the fields, cheeses ripening in caves behind the village and turned daily by small boys, the rumbling noise of coffee being ground every morning under every roof, bread baking in hot, banked rows in the communal ovens—every family having no more and no less than what they required. Heaven.

  Nicolo’s older brother Enzo went to a family Mass at ten o’clock on Sunday mornings with his wife, Mima, and their children, Zachary and Isabella. His parents went on Sundays as well, almost without fail, to the earliest service possible, anticipatory to their weekly sessions spinning in each other’s embrace on the dining room rug. Younger Enzo attended only funerals and weddings, and he did so in the manner of a visiting anthropologist—dispassionate, analytical and ironic, making mental notes of items that he could recount later to fellow unbelievers as evidence of the great distance his rational mind had carried him from his superstitious upbringing. Only Nicolo still went several times most weeks. He had not fallen away from the Catholicism of his early childhood but had become over time committed to its familiar rhythms and routines. He had grown aware that the rituals and ceremonies of attending Mass worked a transformation on his brain waves, immersing him into a kind of waking trance in which his thinking was both slowed and sharpened. He became restless if too many days went by between visits; he felt the lack of it more intensely than he felt the need for it. Nothing—not dreaming, not working out, not sports—took him out of and yet socketed him into the world in quite the same way, although he was aware that there were certain parallels between going to Mass and working with the heaviest weights at the gym. It seemed to him that taking part in church was a kind of lifting up of weights too, but exercising his spirit instead of his muscles, and with the priest as his spotter. He hadn’t deciphered, or even seriously questioned why faith was important to him. (This was a puzzle he solved years later, in his late fifties, after his wife’s death, after many hours of talk with his brothers at the coffee shop, and it had to do with ballast. Belief had centred him then, saved him from the sin of wanting without cease to be at her side, first in her coffin, which was too wide and too long for her to lie in alone, and then inside the space into which she had been fitted at the mausoleum with the shadowed void at the left for when his time came—how hungry, how impatient he had felt, how sinfully, how unforgivably he had ached for their separation to end.)

  Which is not to say that Nicolo was unaware of the many challenges and paradoxes and irrational demands of faith. Believers were called upon to think, but not to question, to worship without idolatry, to seek freedom in discipline, to speak routine utterances aloud and in unison in order to cement a fresh and personal and wholly interior connection to God, to make rote and ritual intense and personal.

  Nicolo was vigilantly, almost superstitiously, observant of the practices of faith and he had added to them some of his own. He always walked, when possible, on the left-hand side of the outdoor stairs leading up to the church doors, treading where the stone steps were not yet worn down. He pulled open the right-hand door of the heavy, panelled pair at the entrance. He touched the holy water with the tips of his third and fourth fingers. He made the sign of a cross with his head bowed toward the font, touching rather than tracing his forehead, his chest above his heart, his left and then his right shoulder. He sat in one of the pews at the back, close to the doors. Nicolo had occasionally been invited by the priest to come forward and read aloud from scripture, but he tried to avoid being chosen by keeping his gaze low, toward the tiled floor with its alternating pattern of burgundy fleurs-de-lis and yellow diamonds. He did not attend Mass in order to participate, but so that he could be ministered to; he wanted to arrive empty and be filled, with nothing more expected of him than his presence with an attentive heart. He preferred to sit quietly toward the back of the church, in a part of the sanctuary where two soaring columns had been placed close together, forming a kind of grove, a dim and sheltered recess. Here, the shadows never lightened, and the floor and columns gathered and amplified the spoken words and the music so that he could feel his chest respond to the resonance of the solemn invocations of the priest calling on all of the collected celebrants to reflect on their unworthiness and sinfulness. Even if Nicolo were suddenly struck deaf and blind, he felt that if he were brought here and placed in this spot, he would know through the medium of his bones exactly where he was.

  When Nicolo intoned the confession with the other celebrants, he spoke the words sincerely, confessing with right and proper candour that he had sinned in his thoughts and words, in his actions and in his failures to act. He sang the Kyrie—Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy—with a reverent and penitential heart. He recited the creed instinctively. Yes, he believed in God…Creator of Heaven and Earth, and, yes, in Jesus Christ as well…conceived of the Holy Spirit, born, suffered, crucified, risen again. He believed absolutely in the resurrection of the body, accepting that this was a mystery he would never penetrate, and he believed in life everlasting, those went without saying, but he had much less certainty about the promise of the forgiveness of his sins. The priest who had had the charge of the parish during the years when Nicolo was aged five to fifteen had spoken perhaps more strongly than he had intended, and he had left Nicolo convinced that the weight of a single boy’s transgressions might be more than even the most forgiving God could endure. Nicolo kept his eyes closed during the Eucharistic prayer and he felt, every time, even if he did not precisely understand the mystery it invoked, the substantiality of it, the consecration and transformation of the bread and wine into the very body and blood of a sternly loving Christ, that he took inside himself in hope, every time, of enduring grace. He felt precisely and gratefully the moment when Jesus entered his being, and his body and soul were almost always perceptibly lightened. This sense of buoyancy, of weightlessness, carried over until the Mass ended and the congregation was sent out by the priest into the world, but after a day or two it would wear away, like the shine on a new pair of shoes, like the point on a pencil, like the crease in a pair of pants, and he would need to return.

  In addition to the deliberate, purposeful service of the Mass, Nicolo liked the tidy, almost formulaic way in which the church’s teachings and obligations were enumerated and unambiguously conveyed so that it was possible to believe that they provided a certain road map to grace. What were the seven spiritual works of mercy? To instruct the ignorant. To counsel the doubtful. To admonish sinners. To bear wrongs patiently. To forgive offences willingly. To comfort the afflicted. To pray for the living and the dead. What were the seven corporeal works of mercy? To feed the hungry. To give drink to the thirsty. To clothe the naked. To shelter the homeless. To visit the sick. To visit the imprisoned. To bury the dead. There were seven of each, no more no less, finite and understandable and comforting—even though he knew that it was virtually impossible to accomplish them all and in fact the intent seemed to be to make them just slightly impossible to achieve in order to keep the faithful striving. And some of the works were metaphors. He understood that. He was unlikely to be called upon to physically clothe the naked or bury the dead, but he did make charitable donations that covered most or all of his duties. He also instructed the ignorant, although he tried not to think of his clients using that expression. He knew that he bore wrongs well—he was forgiving by nature, willing to make accommodations for others and to accept excuses for why they might act badly. He didn’t counsel the doubtful or admonish sinners, but he felt about those works much the same as he felt
about reading aloud in church—unskilled, not fit by nature or otherwise for the task, certain that God would arrange for others to undertake them in his stead.

  Nicolo thought as seldom as possible about his sexual sins, but when they did compel consideration, he found that they fell readily into two categories. The first was his irregular habit of touching his sexual parts in bed or while showering, and occasionally at other times when he was alone. There was no way to deny that he enjoyed the way they felt inside his hand: the always surprising textured softness of the skin over muscle and blood vessels, the warmth of them, like ripe fruit in the sun, their purposeful arrangement, as useful as new and well-constructed machinery, as satisfying to manipulate as an efficient lever, as capable and finely balanced as fishing tackle. These parts of his body seemed almost to have been calibrated exactly to his touch, being located where his hands fell naturally, and providing a combination of satisfyingly contradictory sensations against his hard thighs and firm stomach—downy, ridged, warm, cool, loose, tight, at ease, urgent, hard, soft, light, oddly counterweighted. (The first time he ate dim sum in a restaurant, he was astonished at how closely the warm, salty little dumplings filled with shrimp and bamboo shoots that were presented to him in a bamboo steamer-basket resembled the twin bundles that upholstered his penis in colour and texture and even temperature; he placed a dumpling in his mouth with equal parts anticipation and trepidation and was taken aback by their almost muscular resistance to his teeth and tongue.)