Enchantment

by Pietro Grossi

  “No,” they’d replied.

  For me, it had been a good excuse to go back home for a while. Over the years, as I had been pursuing my academic ambitions around the world, the familiarity with which I’d learnt to treat the laws that govern the universe had grown in proportion to my irritation with my native village. Suddenly, though, the idea of that calm, tranquil life seemed to me, perhaps for the first time, like a secure roof beneath which to take shelter. So I’d moved back into the room I’d had when I was a boy, left more or less as it had been the day I’d left for Glasgow sixteen years earlier, and I had assumed the role of the good Italian son I’d probably never been. In the morning I would prepare a cup of tea and two rusks for Mum, give the kitchen a bit of a clean if it needed it, go shopping at the Coop and chat to the cashier and the old ladies who would ask me with a gleam in their eyes about America, making comments about it as if they knew it. Somehow we always ended up agreeing that, when you came down to it, all the world is a village. I took care to inform everyone about my mother’s state of health and I would listen to their God bless hers. I went to mass on Sunday and found myself reciting the Mea culpa and the Pater Noster with a vigour of which I’d never have thought myself capable. Dad and I always occupied the end of the third row on the left, and there too the ladies were always very pleased to see me. On the way out, full of Sunday fervour, they usually lingered over the times when I was small and ran around the village. I didn’t remember running around the village all that much when I was small. They smiled at me, then placed a hand on Dad’s arm: “I’ve known this boy since he was born,” they’d whisper, before winking at me and walking away with their nice flowered dresses and their handbags over their forearms and their bandy legs. On the second Sunday, Don Roberto, the parish priest who’d replaced Don Gianni four years earlier, came up to me and asked me why it had taken me so long to put in an appearance in church.

  “I live abroad, Father.”

  “Yes, I know. But you come back from time to time.”

  “Maybe I was a bit confused.”

  “Well,” Don Roberto concluded, taking my hands and squeezing them, “the Lord is always here, waiting for us.”

  After dinner I would watch TV in the living room with Mum and Dad, all three of us sitting comfortably on the old yellow velvet sofa, watching a variety show or an episode of a detective series. When there was a pause on TV and Mum wasn’t coughing, I could hear the muted ticking of the big grandfather clock that Dad loved to rewind every night. I felt, quite pleasantly in the main, as if I were in one of those absurd minimalist films from northern Europe that my girlfriend Amanda liked so much—and I had always hated absurd minimalist films from northern Europe.

  When it came to New York, though, against all my wishes and all my predictions, I had fallen in love with it from the first moment. In my first weeks at Princeton for my post-doc, whenever anyone started talking about the nearby metropolis and the weekend they had just spent there or were about to spend there, I started to feel a slight but sharp sense of irritation, which I had to make an effort not to let develop into anger. To hell with New York, with its skyscrapers and its brokers and its movies and its strolls in Central Park and its clubs and its money and all those artists and the shops-you-can’t-find-anywhere-else and its stars who walk the streets as if it were quite normal and its “guess who I saw today?” and its Villages and SoHos and TriBeCas and other ultra-cool acronyms and that whole mass of indigestible clichés.

  Then one day I made up my mind. One Saturday, when my friends had decided to take advantage of the last sunny day and go to a beach resort in New Jersey, it struck me that the time had come—though mainly because the thought of spending even five minutes on a beach was a lot worse than a whole day wallowing in a big city with all its stereotypes. Nor was I crazy about being alone on campus that day. Yes, I suppose my enthusiasm for the warmth of that unexpectedly sunny autumn day had even overcome part of my increasing cynicism. So I would finally go to the Big Apple, I would come out of the station, I would have a nice day walking around the city and I would once and for all amass all the reasons I had to hate it.

  It didn’t go quite like that, although it would take me quite some time to admit it. When we hooked up again in the evening, the others—sun-reddened and unbearably excited about their day by the sea—asked me where I’d been and what I’d done. When I told them I’d taken a trip to New York they cried, “At last! So, did you see it?”

  “Yes, I saw it.”

  “Well?”

  “I don’t know if I was all that convinced,” I said with a shrug. The others shook their heads and went off to the showers, giggling and hitting each other with their towels like little boys.

  And yet, as soon as I could, I went back to the station in Princeton and took that damned train again for Penn Station. I didn’t get out immediately: every time, like a greedy little boy faced with a huge cream cake covered in coloured sugar, I couldn’t stop myself taking the blue line, going all the way up to Lexington and 51st Street, then catching the green line farther north and getting off at the next stop. As an intolerable chorus of voices rebelled inside me, muttering that all this was childish and stupid and that I had spent the best years of my life trying to free myself of certain kinds of shallowness and elevate myself to more noble and refined thoughts, that dazzle of height and glass opened up above me and I stood motionless on the sidewalk, with my head thrown back and my eyes on the sky. The skyscrapers seemed to sway as the clouds moved in the wind, and a flurry of electric shocks made me lose my senses for a moment. When I then walked for hours on end around every corner of Manhattan, always trying to discover new ones and occasionally venturing into quite dubious neighbourhoods, my legs seemed to move by themselves, driven by that first electrical charge at the intersection of Lexington Avenue and 59th Street.

  However hard I tried to silence all those voices barking inside me, I couldn’t ignore the fact that the idea of living in Manhattan had become my greatest obsession. The opportunity was offered to me by my lack of consistency. I was on the phone, making my usual weekly call home, talking to Dad. Usually I talked to Mum: she would ask me how things were, she would pretend to listen, she would monotonously repeat out loud to Dad what I was saying, and after barely two or three minutes would ask me if I needed anything. I would say no thanks, she would tell me to look after myself, I would say of course, we would say goodbye and each go back to our own business. That day, however, Mum was out shopping: a pipe had burst in the house, which had annoyingly delayed her trip to the Coop by two hours, upsetting her whole afternoon schedule and probably also dinner. So I found myself talking to Dad, who, if nothing else, asked me different questions than usual. At first, when I was studying the laws of physics, which he was in a position to understand because of his medical training, he would actually ask me about my studies, but that hadn’t lasted long—mainly, to tell the truth, because I didn’t really feel like explaining anything. That day, he was interested in knowing how I found America, if it was really the way you saw it on TV and in films.

  “Yes, I suppose it is,” I replied.

  Then came the glorious question: “What about New York?”

  Yes, what about New York? God, there were so many things I could tell him about New York, so many things with which to hit a virgin imagination: all the smells and the tastes and the tiny details I loved to immerse myself in whenever I had half a day free.

  “It’s interesting.”

  “Oh. Is that all?”

  “I don’t know if I was all that impressed by it.”

  “It looks great in the photographs. All those skyscrapers…”

  “I don’t know… I’d like to live there for a while, to see what everyday life is like. You know, until you live in a place…”

  “Of course.”

  “Maybe find an apartment, even a small one.”

  “Would you like that?”

  “Oh God, like is a big word. Just to see
how it is.”

  Dad paused for a moment. “Why don’t you do it, then?”

  “Where would I get the money?”

  Dad paused again. “Listen, Jacopo, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for quite some time. I know you’ve made a big effort never to ask us for anything, and that does you credit, but with all your scholarships you really haven’t cost us much at all. I’m not saying I’m rich, but when you’re a doctor, even a country doctor, you manage to put a few lire aside, and I’d always thought of giving you some of that money for your studies or some other activity of yours… I don’t know. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, but if you needed money for rent, we could see…”

  It was the typical moment when a man is called on to fight the great battle of consistency. No more than two evenings earlier, talking in the campus cafeteria, a Korean friend named Kim and I had boasted to each other that we had never asked anything of anybody: indeed, we claimed that it was almost our mission in life. In fact, I had stopped to consider more than once that there were few sensations that filled me with the same reassuring warmth as my beloved and hard-earned independence.

  “Well, there is a great two-room apartment with a kitchenette and a wooden floor that would be just right for me.”

  After a while, in my wanderings around the city, I’d started going into the various real estate agencies I came across to ask if they had anything small and nice to show me. I knew I couldn’t afford it, and yet entering those patches of the world for a moment and imagining sitting there with a book in my hand, or working at my desk, or making myself a coffee in the kitchenette, always gave me a thrill, which unfortunately soon subsided in a wave of sadness. Every day I spent away from that city, every morning I didn’t wake up in one of its bedrooms and every lunch I wasn’t served in one of its restaurants seemed like irreparable thefts of my precious and all too brief existence.

  The previous Saturday, walking down 34th Street on my way back to the station, I decided on impulse, as I was crossing Broadway, to follow it uptown. I stopped for a few minutes to take another look at the hustle and bustle of Times Square. Bumping into a couple of passers-by, I walked between the Midtown skyscrapers with my head tilted back and my mouth half open. I crossed Columbus Circle, almost getting knocked down by the traffic, and continued farther north. I turned my nose up at the ugliness of Lincoln Center and, seeing a sign for the New York City Ballet, felt the desire to go and see a good show for once. Then, at that long intersection at 72nd Street, where Broadway crosses Amsterdam Avenue, I suddenly felt a wave of warmth rise from my stomach and spread through my back and neck. It might have been the slightly British appearance of the area, a bit reminiscent, if not exactly of the centre of Glasgow, then maybe of part of the Strand in London, but the overwhelming excitement of New York gave way to something calmer and more reassuring. I noticed the sign of a small real estate agency and without thinking twice went in.

  A slim young man with a sharp demeanour named Josh greeted me as if I were an old friend and told me about a little place nearby that would be perfect for me: if I wanted, we could actually go and see it immediately. As we walked, after asking me if I had a girlfriend, Josh told me with a tiresomely knowing air that I was doing the right thing moving to New York—a city full, as he put it, of available girls. To quote his exact words: “You’re doing the right thing, bro—there’s a truckload of chicks within easy reach.” He winked as he said this and made a sucking noise with his mouth. A couple of blocks further uptown, we turned into a quiet side street lined by low three-storey houses with steps up to their front doors. On the second floor of every building were wonderfully large semicircular windows. The apartment he wanted to show me was in fact on the second floor, and the larger part of the two rooms that composed it faced this window. At the far end of the room there was a tiny kitchenette and beyond it a small bedroom with a huge glass door. On the left, opposite the kitchenette, was a small bathroom so small that anyone overweight would have found it hard to turn round in it. The floor was of light-coloured wood, and I hadn’t felt the same irresistible attraction to a place since the days of my beloved attic. I could already see the couch, probably brightly coloured, on which I would spend my afternoons reading, the desk in the corner on which I would study and work, the bed and the bedside table I could fit into the little room beyond the glass door.

  As we were walking down the narrow brown-carpeted stairs a few minutes later, a tiny, shrivelled lady came out of the door on the ground floor. She locked the door, then turned and asked who we were.

  “I’m Josh, madam, from the agency. I’ve been showing this young man the apartment.”

  The lady squinted at me. Her blueish hair surrounded a face that was a spider’s web of lines swamped in thick foundation.

  “And who might you be?” she asked.

  “I’m not anybody, madam, I’ve just come to see the apartment.”

  “Oh. And what kind of work do you do?”

  I instinctively thought of simplifying things and aiming a bit high. “I teach physics at Princeton.”

  The lady’s face immediately lit up. “A professor!” she cried. “And so young! How wonderful. Come in, both of you, let’s have some tea.”

  And then when we were in her living room on the ground floor, improbably covered in brocades, and it emerged that I was actually Italian, the floodgates opened and Mrs Schmidt started reminiscing about jaunts on the Amalfi Coast and honeymoons and meals by the sea and gondolas and serenades. It was like being in a Fifties film.

  Anyway, Mrs Schmidt seemed to like me a lot and by the time we had finished tea, which of course I couldn’t refuse, she had reduced the price of the apartment considerably. But as she was amusing us with her stories and serving tea and walking back and forth on her stiff legs, I started to feel a touch of remorse at the fact that I didn’t really have a cent to spend on an apartment on the Upper West Side, and when the woman started talking money, I wavered and tried to play it safe.

  “Look, madam, I don’t know, I wouldn’t like to—”

  “It’s too much, isn’t it? What do you think, Josh, is it a bit too much?”

  Clearly confused by this unpredictable turn of events, Josh opened his eyes slightly and shrugged.

  “Yes, it is too much,” Mrs Schmidt went on. “Let’s say a thousand five hundred.”

  “Madam, you’re very kind, but really…”

  “A thousand two hundred.”

  “Look, madam, I don’t know what to say, I think there’s been a—”

  The lady looked at Josh and smiled. “These Italian professors drive a hard bargain. All right, let’s say a thousand and long live science.”

  I looked at Josh for a moment, as if he knew about my lie and I was hoping he’d back me up.

  “But I’m not sure I—”

  “Including charges.”

  “All right, madam, what can I say? I think it’s perfect.”

  At the door, a few minutes later, I thanked her and told her I would be in touch as soon as possible.

  “In the meantime I’ll take it off the market,” Mrs Schmidt said, taking my hands in hers. Then she drew me to her and kissed me on both cheeks—“as you Italians do,” she said, very pleased with herself—before saying goodbye and watching us go.

  The frustration I felt on the train back to Princeton was in direct proportion to my satisfaction, barely five days later, in going back to Mrs Schmidt and telling her that I was taking the apartment. Seeing that I was there, and that Mrs Schmidt seemed to like me so much, I even asked her if it wasn’t worth skipping the agency and doing everything between ourselves.

  “I think that’s an excellent idea,” she said under her breath, laughing and taking me by the arm. “You Italians are so clever!”

  I loved everything about New York. I loved the icy wind in winter, the plumes of steam rising from the manholes, the black-clad policemen, the red and white fire engines, the can-laden carts of the homele
ss, the yellow taxis, the skyscrapers and the art galleries, the people who always ran rather than walked and in the subway read the newspaper folded in order not to bother everyone else. I loved the fact that if you took thirty people at random on the street there were no more than ten of the same colour. I loved Central Park and the lakes and lawns and the guitarists who sang there when the weather was good, I loved the diners and the hamburgers and the pubs and the endless bars where even if you went back ten times in a row you never saw the same faces. I loved the boats on the Hudson and the Statue of Liberty and the fire escapes on the outsides of the buildings and the smell of burning meat in SoHo and the rectangular porphyry of its streets and the glittering doorways on the Upper East Side. I loved the hotdog stands and the Puerto Rican dishwashers and the way the Italian newspapers left your fingers black. Yes, in New York I even loved being Italian: it was as if there, that narrow strip of land floating in the Mediterranean lost all its flabbiness and weariness and became a glittering and surprising place from which it was a privilege to come, a privilege constantly celebrated by everyone. I loved my two-room apartment and my neighbourhood and my books piled everywhere and the bar around the corner with its excellent cappuccinos and the Greek newspaper vendor and the all-night deli and even its awful Chinese owner, Ghon, who treated me like dirt and who once, after I’d already been living there a year and saw him almost every day, refused to lend me ten cents: I loved a place where dirty stinking Chinese bastards could feel free to treat me like dirt. I loved the bookcase I’d built by myself from pine planks, and the sturdy man in the hardware store who had sold me what I needed and his big yellow tape measure tied to his belt and his Canadian check shirt. I loved the fact that everything was exactly as it should be, the dignity with which the ticket collector on the train that took me back and forth from Princeton attached cards to the backs of the seats, the way he clicked his fingers and his straight back and his gruff politeness if you happened to ask for information. I loved the Public Library and its vast stale-smelling reading room and I loved Battery Park and Shakespeare & Co. and the distinct impression that everybody was on the thrilling edge of desperation.