The Conversion
Page 14
“There are many candidates,” I respond. “But I guess I’d have to say Philip Roth.”
She smiles. “I love him. A great mind. I hear from a friend that Roth has a bad back and that the constant pain actually, though terribly aggravating, inspires him. Which makes sense. And I adore Updike, too, his elegant prose. And of course, the greatest narrative writer in America today is, in my opinion, John Irving.”
“No women?” I ask.
Marina grimaces. “Sorry, you must realize by now that I am not a feminist.” She reflects for a moment. “But maybe there is somebody right now in America, somebody like yourself working in obscurity who, in one hundred years, will emerge as the great one. Maybe the books of Updike and Roth will still be widely read, but people will come to find their work no more relevant than this unknown person writing a great novel in a garret or even a villa somewhere in total obscurity. It’s anybody’s guess who or what might be considered great a hundred years from now. And so, my friend, I beg you to leave off this concern with the final work of a dead writer and focus instead on what you, as a living writer, plan to do next.”
Nine
Master club is quite crowded, but Lorenzo has not yet arrived. Approaching the sign-in desk, I inquire about temporary memberships. A thin, overly tan woman looks at me appraisingly and then says, “Are you Lorenzo’s friend, the American?”
I tell her I am and she informs me that he has arranged for me to have a two-week guest pass. How kind of him.
While giving me a lift, Marina ended up teasing me about working out and told me that as well as my body, I should exercise my brain by learning Latin, which would certainly help my Italian. Now, as I go to get changed, I wish I’d informed her how I maintain a jaded attitude toward gym culture and that the routines and the attitudes are hardly different between Europe and America. There is the same feeling of competition, the same rampant narcissism, the same faux macho, the same cliquishness.
The one noticeable difference between Italian and American gyms is that Italian men are far more openly affectionate with one another. An Italian man might, for example, rest an arm on a friend’s shoulder during a conversation, his head mere inches away from the other person—all in all, more intimate than two Americans who have a similar rapport. An unschooled American might even wonder if the two Italians are lovers. In America I notice that people tend to keep a much greater physical distance from one another. And of course all Italians double-kiss hello.
Once when I was spending a few months doing English translations for an American art foundation in Venice, I went to a gym and found myself standing in the shower talking to a sexy built blond man whose grin was dazzled by a few gold teeth. He was explaining how he made his living as a boatman, ferrying goods into Venice through the lagoons and canals. At one point I asked if I could borrow some soap. He shrugged and held up an empty plastic container of body wash. He then scooped some of the lather off himself, approached me, and rubbed it on my chest, my shoulders, my arms, and my back in the most caring, affectionate way. There wasn’t a hint of sexuality to his gesture, just his casual response. I was stunned. I felt that no American stranger would dare such an intimate gesture without some sort of sexual motivation.
I’ve changed into workout clothes by the time Lorenzo arrives—out of uniform, dressed in a black T-shirt and snug faded blue jeans. He smiles coolly at me and invites me to accompany him into the locker room. Afraid that I might get turned on, I tell him I’d rather meet in the gym, that I need to do some stretching. I think I may have offended him, because once he emerges in his workout clothes, he ignores me and begins weight training with two other people.
I do a quick weight workout. Finishing before Lorenzo, worrying about having to shower at the same time, I return to the locker room, undress, and enter one of the shower stalls. Moments later, much to my embarrassment, he appears naked and enters the stall opposite me. He soaps his body generously, seeming very confident and relaxed. I try not to glance at him but can’t help noticing that the dusting of hair on his chest weaves a train down his ribbed stomach. From time to time, I also feel his eyes appraising me. The obvious scrutiny is stirring and I try not to let it visibly affect me.
Once we get dressed and are standing outside the establishment, I boldly say, “Ever think of doing porno? You certainly have the physique for it.”
He looks horrified. “Are you crazy?”
He then asks how I arrived at the gym and I explain that Marina dropped me off. The villa is a mere two kilometers away, and I’d planned to walk home.
“You don’t need to,” Lorenzo says, “if you don’t mind riding,” and points to a black Ducati motorcycle.
“No big surprise,” I say aloud in English.
“Cosa?” he says. “What did you say?”
“Niente. Nothing.”
“But before I take you home, would you like to ride out to Torre del Lago? I’ve even brought along another helmet and jacket.”
“Would that mean going on the autostrada?”
“Yes, it would.”
“I make it a rule not to ride on autostrade.”
“Why? It’s no less safe than a surface road. And a lot less dangerous because you don’t have these foolish people cutting in from different directions. Trust me, I know. I am a carabiniere.”
“One mishap at highway speed and I’m toast.” I try to translate this idiom literally.
“I’ve ridden for fifteen years with only one small incident not even worth mentioning. Not to say there isn’t, of course, a first time. I have ridden with many people behind me. My wife, for example, goes with me always. And so do my two children. I would never take them if I didn’t feel completely safe.”
“I’m sure I weigh a lot more than your wife or your children, so there is a lot more …” I can’t think of the Italian word for displacement.
Lorenzo catches the drift. “Now, this I will not dispute,” he says.
I finally relent. “Okay, let’s just go.” Lorenzo asks me if I am certain and I nod that I am.
“I will want to be telling you things,” he informs me as I don the extra helmet and leather jacket and climb on the motorcycle behind him. “So make sure you put your chin on my shoulder so you can hear me. When I go in one direction, just look in that direction and don’t, by God, lean that way and don’t take your feet off the pegs.”
Exactly the same things Michel said to me the first time I rode behind him.
Another man, another motorcycle, another country. But it feels the same somehow, the wind blasting my face, the oil smells of city and road, and the bittersweet smell of farmland and vineyards, all chased with nervous exhilaration. There is very little distance between where the gym is and A-11, the superhighway that runs to Torre del Lago. After the initial acceleration, my dread falls away and I begin to relax. The old riding euphoria returns. But instead of the Parisian metropolis, deco buildings and wide boulevards and amber light, I am hurtling through coastal Tuscany, drenched in marine air buffeting in from the Ligurian Sea.
As we rocket toward Torre del Lago, Lorenzo manages to point out the impressive twelfth-century castle of Nozzano, its now-ruined lookout towers once having guarded the region against the Pisani. The hillsides are dotted with villas, some of them fortified with surrounding walls and turrets. In the remnants of marble quarries that have eaten into hillsides I can glimpse the access paths stomped out by the mules that ferried rock to and from the stone hives. Silvery groves of olive trees, three months from harvesting, finally feather back to a fertile plain that runs toward the sea, ending in stands of umbrella pines, which in Italian have the very euphonious-sounding name pini marittimi.
Lorenzo brings me to a seaside restaurant shack built right in the dunes. The place is run by his family friends, who make a great commotion when we come in the door. Elbowing me, he introduces, “My American friend, a journalist writing an article about the region.” A sloe-eyed teenaged girl working at the restaurant s
ays smartly, “He doesn’t look like it,” assuming that I don’t speak Italian.
“Oh, really?” I say. “And what exactly do I look like? A rhinoceros?”
She is stunned to know that I have understood her, and the restaurateurs burst into uproarious laughter.
We earmark a small table where we can speak confidentially. Although Lorenzo claims he’s not particularly hungry, he ends up ordering a fish course that becomes one of those endless Italian seafood antipasti: scallops followed by mussels followed by sautéed tiny squid called totanini followed by three other small but delicious crustacean courses.
“They all know your wife?” I say during the second course.
He nods, but then frowns. “Is there a problem with that?” I shake my head and fall silent.
He looks concerned. “No, really, tell me. I want to understand.”
“It’s just different in America,” I say.
“How? How is it different in America.”
“It’s not often that two male friends ride behind one another on a motorcycle.”
“And why is this?”
I decide to be bold. “Just something that is done by men and women who are usually a couple. Or two men who are together. Or two women.”
Lorenzo frowns and seems genuinely bewildered by my explanation. “So, you are saying if you and I went riding in America, they would assume I was gay?”
Suddenly nervous that both Marina and I might have misread his signals altogether, I blurt out, “I don’t know what they’d assume. Forget it. Closed.”
“Don’t presume!” Lorenzo suddenly sounds peevish. I say nothing, wishing we could get past the awkwardness. “They would never think that about me,” he resumes. “I am happily married with two children,” he tells me discreetly after a conspicuous pause.
I force myself to say, “So then what’s going on here? Just a friendly motorcycle ride to the sea?”
Lorenzo leans forward and surprises me by saying within possible earshot of the restaurant owners, “What I’m saying doesn’t mean that I don’t want you, too.”
Now more assured of where this all might be heading, I say, “Well, your intentions are hard to read.”
“Wait a few minutes, will you please?” He is up and swaggering in a clomp of motorcycle boots toward the restaurant owners. I can’t help noticing how his legs completely fill out his jeans. He chats with them briefly, then embraces them. Once they bid me a gracious good-bye, I follow him outside the restaurant over to the motorcycle. Picking up his helmet and giving me mine he says, “So … what’s to finish?”
Donning the riding jacket, I ask, “I’d like to know if your wife is aware that you’d play around with somebody like me.”
He jams his helmet down over his head, begins fastening the chin strap. “No. Of course she doesn’t know.”
“Nothing at all? Not even that—”
“Nothing, I tell you. Nothing.”
So Marina was right that Lorenzo might be even more closeted than Michel. Lorenzo suddenly appears impatient. He closes the plastic face shield and his next words are muffled by it. “So are we going?”
I hold my ground. “But isn’t keeping this secret difficult? Especially over time?”
Lorenzo falls silent for a moment and I see the sadness my question provokes and how it also manages to dissolve his impatience. He throws open the face shield. “Of course it is,” he admits, suddenly docile. “I’ve even been to a doctor. To try and change it. To get it out of my system.”
“You mean, to a psychiatrist?”
He nods.
I tell him that in the United States it’s now considered absurd, pointless, even shameful in some quarters, to try to reprogram oneself.
“Well, because there you can at least live openly. In Italy you really can’t live as you do in America, especially if you have a job like mine. I’ve even confessed to my priest,” Lorenzo goes on. “Finally. Two years ago I broke down and told him. And since then he and I have prayed. And he has prayed alone for my conversion as well.”
A wheel-spinning waste of time, I think but obviously do not say.
Before following the autostrada back to the Villa Guidi, Lorenzo and I take a swing along the beach area. Outdoor restaurants with glass fronts are sandwiched side by side, one after another, and swarm with tourists dressed in ostentatious colors wearing lots of gold jewelry. “Milanese bourgeois,” he comments over his shoulder. I keep glancing toward the sea, hoping to see glints of water, but the tall dunes and the inkblotlike umbrella pines block the view.
We finally turn off down a quieter road lined with two- and three-story residences, driving slowly so that it becomes quite easy for me to hear Lorenzo when he speaks to me. Dusk is falling and I see a line of parked cars, all with their headlamps on. Beyond them a tall woman with an amazing figure saunters along with an exaggerated yet rhythmic gait, her matching gold lamé halter and shorts catching the last rays of daylight.
“That’s a transsexual,” Lorenzo informs me. “Beautiful, isn’t she?”
I say nothing because I am flabbergasted. The outfit, the figure, and especially her dreamy, sauntering gait are all eerily familiar. I tell Lorenzo she resembles somebody I once saw in Paris.
He continues, “A lot of men complain that there are nowadays so few female prostitutes in Italy. But that doesn’t seem to stop them, either. All these cars, they are watching the trans. They are her fans. Like fans of an opera diva waiting outside the stage door to throw their roses at the great talent. All of them are probably married with children. I happen to know that this one lives in one of these apartments by the sea. My colleague, Paolo, visits her quite often. He says she is a wonderful fuck and that her rent is paid by a wealthy Milanese man who sees her when he can. That for the pleasure of her company you must call and make an appointment with her service. However, few or none of these guys who are waiting to see her now would ever make love to another man.”
“But they all know her story, right?”
“Of course. They would not admit it, but they like trans even better than they like women.”
I force myself to say, “Do you like trans?” the way I once asked Michel.
Lorenzo shakes his head and says, “No, I like men to be men.”
A bit more secure about Lorenzo’s intentions toward me, I squeeze my knees against him and put my lips on the back of his neck and breathe in the scent of sun-toasted skin. He shudders—with pleasure, it seems.
The motorcycle moseys on a half block or so, and then Lorenzo throws the gear into neutral, brakes to a halt, and anchors both legs on the pavement. He turns around, raises his helmet, and, wagging a gloved finger, says, “I bet you must’ve had her, this trans you know from Paris?”
“No, I actually didn’t.”
He grins mischievously, his lovely eyes twinkling. “I don’t believe you.”
And then I explain that she’d been involved with my former lover in a brief affair that ended when I came on the scene.
“Let’s hope he was telling you the truth,” Lorenzo says. “That it ended when he said it did.”
“Doesn’t really matter anymore,” I say, even though of course it does matter. “She was a Moroccan, I believe.”
“Ah, and so is this one.”
On the ride back from the sea, the evening air has cooled substantially, the hillsides darkening in twilight, and as we head back toward the walled city, I shiver in my borrowed jacket even as I hold Lorenzo tight around his midsection, trying to take warmth from him. It occurs to me that I used to wonder if Michel’s transsexual lover would take some sort of revenge for my having stolen him. And in fact, after the hotel room was broken into, I found myself imaging that she somehow had been involved. The men, after all, were wearing masks and loose clothing, and the one that held the knife to my throat was of slight build. The mystery of their identity remains, and sometimes I find myself grasping at the most far-fetched explanations in an attempt to unravel it.
I now tell him the story about the hotel break-in and the ten nerve-racking minutes that probably contributed to Ed’s fatal heart attack, and how Marina is attempting to link the incident to the attempted robbery in the villa’s outbuildings and to a group of Muslim radicals who might be out to assassinate Stefano.
“Yes, I hear about this at headquarters. My superior, the signora’s old friend, mentions it. And that she brought you to the jail because she thought you might somehow recognize the thief.” He grins. “This warning, this is no small piece of shit.”
“You’re going to joke about this?”
He squints at me. “Absolutely not. She gets information from an important person … to be taken seriously.”
“But I need to ask you? How possible is it really that one of these days somebody might drive up to the villa and try and do something to Stefano?”
Lorenzo shrugs. “She pays for the surveillance, right?”
I nod.
He thinks out loud for a moment, his lovely eyes darting back and forth. “So that means unmarked cars patrolling the roads … Bo,” he says, blowing out air. “An attempt like this … really has not happened around here in a long time, as far as I know.” He frowns. “Does the signora seem very concerned?”
I explain that her worrying peaked right after the break-in on the outlying property but seems to have subsided for the time being. Lorenzo goes on to point out that for several decades now modern Italy has lived with intermittent threats of terrorism, which unfortunately have transpired from time to time, such as the horrific train bombing in Bologna in the 1980s. “And several shootings and kidnappings. However, we’re not quite as hysterical or as overly vigilant about these things as you Americans are. We’ve accepted that it’s a part of life nowadays. We know that, only if we decide, we can get concerned and paralyzed by thoughts of dangers, not just terrorism. Somehow, and I can’t explain quite how. We take these threats and make them part of the day. In spite of it all, we can still enjoy a good glass of wine and a wonderful home-cooked pasta. And a great fuck!” He shrugs and the discussion comes to an end.