Lauro rivets everyone’s attention, his every squeak or squirm. That little darling. He laughed. He swung his head to the side and a pure giggle came out of his mouth. Isn’t it good to witness the first laugh of someone only in the world for three weeks? Isn’t it amazing that someone just recently arrived seems totally present and essential?
Camille sips her juice, sketching, and reveling in the sunlight. Scudding clouds travel fast overhead, casting us in and out of shadow. She keeps glancing at Palazzo Monferrato’s Gothic arch around the inset door with a fanlight that looks like half a compass. Her sketch superimposes an imagined completion of the compass over the stalwart wood doors below. She’s homing in on the two giant lion-head knockers, drawing them enlarged on the checkered marble portal. She’s fracturing, architecturally extending, and making some elements outsized. All this Susan sees in glances over her shoulder.
Since the invitation to the American museums, Camille is spurred into even more intense action. On the morning walk to town, she’s relaxed and leisurely, but the minute she’s home, she throws together a sandwich, picks up one of the cats for company, and disappears to the limonaia until Rowan appears late in the afternoon. He’s working with Matilde on oversized papers for a one-copy book by an American poet and a Cuban artist. He’s obsessed, as a major collection—he won’t say which museum—already has expressed interest in acquiring it. Camille, in her new glory, teases him by saying she’ll put in a word for him at the High Museum. She thinks they’ll all travel to see his new one, wherever it ends up on display.
“Which did you like best?” Susan asks Julia. “Fall, winter, spring, or summer?”
Both Camille and Julia reply together, “Summer.”
Susan agrees. “There’s never in my life been a string of more divine long, long days. Every day lasts a week.”
I can’t name a season I like best. I like all of them best. But this, Lauro’s first summer, I’ll remember as a blissful time I’d like to bottle and put away for harder days sure to come. (Fatalist!) Memorable, lying on a quilt, writing under the pear tree with Lauro on his back finding out he can kick and wave. Fitzy liked to flick his fluffy tail over Lauro’s face, causing pure giggles, which I videoed, but mostly Fitzy preferred sitting on what I was trying to write. Memorable, Julia’s blackberry crisps with deep summer tastes, all the platters we served forth of fried sage leaves, crisp zucchini and squash blossoms; garish Popsicle-colored sunset walks with the sun wobbling down slowly, then quickly swallowed by the horizon; Leo’s melons, their musky-rose perfume wafting through their kitchen. (Cantaloupe: song of the wolf. Probably named for a place name near Rome.)
Memorable—seeing my friends’ astonishment over the brilliant fields of sunflowers splotching the landscape, each flower six feet tall with a round, brown face surrounded by golden spikes. They stand shoulder to shoulder, these crowded pilgrims wanting to march to the sun. That they swivel with the solar arc baffles me. (Though I do the same.) I can’t help but anthropomorphize the flowers; they look like sentient beings, especially when they droop before harvest, heads bowed down, shamed to be denied the immortality of the sun gods. Memorable—warm nights with black-flame shapes of cypress trees against the sky, and the Milky Way streaming over the house like a molten river of diamonds. (Diamondiferous sky. Not a good word for a poem, as it sounds exaggerated. But who can exaggerate the beauty of Tuscany?) In Florida, I never saw the Milky Way, diamondiferous gift to us on earth.
Memorable, the dramatic summer rains I love when the cypresses bend and bend in the wind, and I watch from my study, hoping once to see the tip of one touch the earth and spring back. I saw Lauro’s first fear during a morning thunderstorm. The crack hit loudly; he stiffened and his eyes widened. He discernably frowned. Did he feel vibrations throughout his body? I fancy that he looked for us. The lightning did strike the modem and we had to get a new one. These violent storms clear the air, letting the next day dawn sweet and transparent, with a favonian breeze and cottony clouds drifting high. One morning the sky appeared to be lined with glass. Colin and I were out in a field with Leo as he trained his new falcon. The bird, fierce and scary, soared up and up, wheeling against the blue as though it could fly forever up until it shattered that blue dome and slivers of glass would fall like rain. The reward for returning was a live quail for the falcon to dismember and devour. Colin and I had the same thought at the same moment. The falcon on Leo’s arm, Lauro in a sling around Colin’s neck. “Leo, it won’t…”
“No, cara,” he assured me, but I grabbed Colin’s arm and pulled him to the road.
Sometimes the land seems magnetically powerful. I try to write about its pull, its felicitous effect on the body, even to risk metaphors that can lead to personification, that most irritating and egotistical gesture in writing. (But see my sunflower description above!) The sky never smiles. The rain is not weeping. Better to find the more imaginative figurative image, like D. H. Lawrence’s: As we have candles to light the darkness of night, so the cypresses are candles to keep the darkness aflame in the full sunshine. Reading that changes cypresses forever.
Iconic, the curvy white roads, fields of poppies and sunflowers, cypress trees, stone walls. All touch me but I’m not going near. Not my bailiwick. I am working on a falcon poem.
I am wrapping up my monograph on Margaret, too. The father of her Colin has written to me again. He is coming to Italy next year and asked if we could meet. He wants to hear about Margaret’s life. I wrote back, saying yes, if I’m here, though he will go away disappointed. Margaret remains a cipher.
Before she left for the last time, she seemed to prefer Colin to me. (Now I know that she got to say his name, and to imagine her boy in Colin’s shoulders, hands, mouth, voice.) She planned a couple of months’ stay in Washington for meetings, to get her yearly checkups—she had a tingling cough she couldn’t shake—and to research a new novel she had formed in her head without yet writing a word. (Or so I thought. The manuscript in the suitcase turns out to contain a near-perfect one-hundred-page novella.)
After a month in Washington, she wrote that she’d been diagnosed with cancer and she was not going to put up with it if the initial treatments didn’t work. Esophagus. Nasty one. She said when she would begin radiation. Without telling her I flew home and turned up on her doorstep the first morning of the treatment. She was awed and weepy. Was sure no one ever had made such a gesture for her. She seemed fine with the treatments. I stayed until it was a routine, then came back home. Later, surgery, a brutal treatment that involved swallowing platinum, and the news that she would no longer be able to eat solid food. She was full of gallows humor. I look like a gargoyle, she wrote. Don’t come. My hair is a moth-eaten fright wig and I’m not up to seeing anyone. A caretaker made food for her in a processor. At least it’s not Gerber’s. After a few weeks, the humor stopped. Shouldn’t happen to a dog.
Then another round of chemo. I can’t talk. When you can’t talk, can’t eat, what’s left, and don’t tell me I always can write.
I’m coming to see you next week, I wrote. I’ll do the talking for once! I bought my ticket, guilty, guilty that I’d not insisted and gone sooner. She wrote back, Don’t come. I don’t want you to see me like this. I don’t. I mean it. I don’t want you to come. Stay with your pretty boy.
“What should I do?” I asked Colin.
“Sounds like she means it. Stay with your pretty boy. Man, she can still dig, can’t she?”
As we know, he who hesitates…I canceled.
* * *
—
A week later she slit first a wrist then her throat in the bathtub. On the bathroom door, she’d taped an envelope for the cleaning woman she expected the next day. Do not open the door, she instructed. Call 911. My apologies. Also inside the envelope, she left five thousand dollars. (Strangest tip I ever heard of.) I’m haunted by the final gestures: her hand on the faucet, turning on the bathwater, as though p
reparing for a nice soak, placing the knife and straight razor in the soap holder, stepping in. Too hot? Then, painful to contemplate, what thoughts ran through her as she leaned back in the tub. That moment. I will not ever move off that moment. Margaret. Her iridescent brilliance. Gleam on the knife blade. Cut the cancer. Margaret, always on point.
* * *
—
Then the reality of Margaret gone. Off the planet. Left no other note. I’m sure she thought her reasoning was obvious. And I began to have to live with my failure as her friend. I could have…I should have…The recriminations never stop.
Her lawyer/executor informed me that Margaret wanted cremation and no funeral but she’d asked if her ashes could be scattered in my olive grove and in the Tiber she overlooked during her Rome years. Yes, of course.
A week after her suicide, a postcard arrived. Addressed to me. Think of me on a long voyage where I am gathering information for my finest book. Kit, you are a rare friend. Ci vediamo dopo, Margaret.
Ci vediamo dopo, see you later. Kind of slangy for a final farewell. Tacked above my desk, the photo on the postcard I see every day is of Vesuvius shooting out fire and lava. Last rite, last gasp, last straw, last words.
* * *
—
My fire-and-lava friend. Her child. Lizzie. Charlie. My child. The insouciant Chinese daughters searching out the birth mother. The miscarried and aborted embryos of Susan’s and Camille’s, never to be. I’ve been writing all along this year about quest, about questions of arrival and departure, about creative explosions in later life—my tapestry of abundant life and friendship. Now at the end I see I have been writing about the force unleashed on your life when you become a mother. (I’m at the beginning.) This from a Robyn Schiff poem I came across today:…the most powerful jaw in the world is the one that sucks.
True, mothers. (Did my mother know this?) Learning about Margaret’s Colin, hearing the sagas of my three friends, I stepped into a new awareness I never had in the era of the tipped uterus.
Margaret, my friend. (How sweetly Susan’s white roses weave themselves among the gnarly wisteria vines.) What do you have to do with Susan, Julia, Camille? With me, at this juncture?
I gave them your novels. They were fascinated, excited, moved by them. Camille wears your pearls. My freedom to write I owe to you. (You made sure I couldn’t thank you.) I’m your doppelgänger (root: double-goer. I like that. I go now for you). Both of us self-exiled from a young age. After four excruciating years of my mother failing to thrive, I arrived here poised for change. As you once said of yourself, I entered Italy like a bride in her dress enters the church. You were the friend of sharp retort, the one who still flirted with waiters, and sat alone in the piazza at one a.m. smoking cigars. You wrote till all hours, then went out walking in the dawn to calm down. I remember a night at Vassaliki’s when I came in late and you were dancing alone with your long scarf. Everyone watching. Our Scheherazade. If not for you, would I have had the gumption to say to a stranger, “Do you have time for a drink?” As you continue to goad me onward, I in turn do the same to Julia, Susan, and Camille. The friend you were to me, I became to them. Spirals of friendship. What else do I have to offer? I can write your names, the colors of your eyes, your slips of the tongue, your jokes, the moons of your nails, your leaps into bright water. I write in ink.
* * *
—
A few weeks after Margaret’s suicide, I was stunned when her lawyer informed me that she left me the proceeds from Casa Gelsomino, her future royalties (if any), and a stash of stocks and investments, some of which she inherited from her father. Everything else and her papers she left to Georgetown.
The least I can do is write the damn book on her work. At least I can forgive the irrational stab at my reading in Washington when she piped up about the Italians not liking for foreigners to write about them. My Italy and you can’t have it! I’m petty to have kept smarting from that.
She could be petty, too. She could be magnanimous. She could be crude (the worst side effect is the butt-stinging diarrhea). She could be sublime, as in her fiction. She was a friend like no other friend. What a grand piece of luck to have met her. Memorable, Margaret. Especially in this most idyllic summer of my life, polar opposite of her unimaginable exit from this world.
* * *
—
What I am waiting to reveal to my friends is the now-set news. We are leaving for ten months. At least. This is the great opportunity Colin has craved. Not a renovation, not a hotel or service building like a hospital wing, or even a lecture hall at a university. The pavilion is a game changer for Key West. A career changer for an architect. The chance for the city to erect something symbolic of the place, a lasting monument for residents and visitors. Monumental is not the adjective architects often hear from clients. Colin grasps all the implications.
After some juggling, his firm has offered to lease my parents’ house, allowing us to live there while the project is under way and for other architects working in the Miami office to live there later. Back to my home. Lauro in my childhood room. Me set up in my father’s study. The circadian rhythms of Florida nights and days taking us over. But the bottom line: we’ll be back before the pavilion is playing music on a spring night, people gathering in late afternoon to count down the minutes until sunset.
Before we leave, my project with my friends will end. Will they leave? How do they go forward? What does this year suggest about the next?
My own question now has an answer. I’m leaving. I’m coming back.
“Does all of Italy go on vacation in August?” Julia sets down a basket of plums. She leans on a kitchen chair at Annetta and Leo’s. At the sink, Annetta runs long bloody tubes under the faucet. Julia is not sure at all that she’ll include this in her Learning Italian.
“If you didn’t get the kitchen painted or the drain unclogged or the tile ordered, don’t bother to try now.” Annetta throws the blubbery tubes into a pail of cold water. “The person you need is at the beach.”
“Or even just at home throwing parties but definitely not answering messages,” Leo adds. “You reach the peak on the fifteenth of August. That’s Ferragosto, Italy’s biggest holiday.”
Julia knows that’s when the Blessed Virgin Mary was scooped up into the sky. San Rocco prepares for days for a community feast in the piazza. Three hundred seated for dinner, and no, not with paper plates and plastic cutlery—white plates, real knives and forks. “What is this? I thought you were preparing goose.”
“Of course, goose,” Annetta tells her. “The goose we eat in the summer.” Her sister rinses the pail, spreads the tubes on a towel on the kitchen table, and begins plucking out pinfeathers on the goose carcasses.
Julia looks puzzled until Annetta’s sister, Flavia, motions to her throat. “Oh! You’re going to stuff the necks.” She doesn’t remember the word for neck and uses gola, throat, instead of collo. She’s remembering a disturbing video of someone force-feeding a goose. At least these are dead. “What do you put inside?”
“Oh, anything, meat, sausage, potatoes, whatever you want. We’re using the livers, odori, pecorino, eggs, bread crumbs, garlic. You tie the top, put in the stuffing, and tie the bottom. I poach it for a while. You’ve never had this?” She looks at Julia incredulously. No stuffed goose neck? You poor thing.
“After, they go in the forno outside. Leo already has the fire ready. They will be sliced and much appreciated.”
Okay, Julia thinks. Always something new but old under the sun.
“There are thirty of us making these for tonight. Maybe next year you will. The penne will be served with goose ragù and next the roasted goose with potatoes. Everyone is supposed to bring a salad or vegetable. For dessert, the summer tradition, wedges of watermelon.”
Julia already has prepared platters of roasted eggplant, tomatoes, zucchini, and peppers. Next year, she wonders, will the
three of us pluck those pinfeathers? Where will we be on Ferragosto in a year?
At four this afternoon, Gianni will deliver Hugh from the Rome airport. Since the flight from Istanbul is quick, Julia thinks a brief rest is all he’ll need before being introduced to San Rocco’s intense summer social life. He wrote that he will be looking for a perch for a while. Terrorist bombings in Turkey don’t deter him, but his broken (he finally admitted) ankle does.
* * *
—
San Rocco’s Sagra dell’Oca, Festa of the Goose, not only represents the culmination of summer, the celebration is the major community gathering of the year. The sagra marks the end of Tuscans’ favorite season. As Nicolà explains to Susan, “It’s when we best come together. The contessa will be dancing with the garbage collector, the postman with the marchesa, boys will be asking their classmates to dance for the first time. The communist councilman dances with the far-right doctor. It begins with prosecco and dancing in the piazza, proceeds to feasting together, with wandering accordion players, pauses for speeches everyone ignores, segues into more dancing—this time uninhibited—and ends with fireworks.” Chris bought tickets yesterday since this is always a sell-out event. The endless table for three hundred stretches half the length of the piazza. Along the edge, long serving tables are set up, and grills for sausages and some fish for those tourists who inexplicably don’t eat meat. Susan reserves places with their names. Already, midmorning, it’s not easy to find adjacent seats but she does, noticing that several friends are nearby. She knows Julia is excited; everyone else is privately thinking that’s a lot of goose.
Women in Sunlight Page 36