Lost Hearts in Italy

by Andrea Lee

  He never dreamed he could bore anyone like that.

  The surprising thing is just how long it can take for pain to show up. Pain and bitterness. And how complete and tangible an artifact it is when it comes into the light of a completely new existence. Like those statues unearthed in Rome from time to time during the excavations for the new subway lines. The Christian Democratic government’s final burst of glorious public works, during the time he and Mira lived there. He remembers photographs in L’Espresso of earthmoving machinery and crowds of Roman workmen encircling a goddess in a pit. Rubble all around, a clay-smeared shoulder, a bare breast, a broken arm. And a face—vacant, flawless, staring at the Mediterranean sky.

  Just that way, memories, fragments from Italy, from that demolished first marriage, turn up from time to time in his days. In this new age, this complete, successful, and engrossing life lived between his happy home in London and the international boardrooms of finance in different corners of the world, where he flies to tend money like a skillful—a very skillful—market gardener raising a series of crops. A golden age without the perils; the built-in evanescence of a real golden age; a precious alloy, strong enough to last.

  Still, the fragments crop up, as they say stones rise to be harvested in New England fields, as shrapnel swims to the surface in already closed wounds. He might be in his office on Canary Wharf, twenty-seven floors up, staring out toward the Thames over the bleak council-house grid of the Isle of Dogs. He might be eating noodles in an airport lounge in Singapore or on the fast train from Hong Kong to Guangzhou, drinking tea, hammering on the computer. He might be riding the DLR, or the Tube from Notting Hill Gate. He might be in bed with Dhel drawing her tea-colored hair over his eyes in one of the morning trysts they snatch when he flies in from a trip on a schoolday and she can run home from the office to Chepstow Villas. He might be watching overpriced Saturday afternoon cartoons with his younger daughters, Eliza and Julia, at the Electric Cinema. In all these scenes, from time to time a shard.

  Often just a nonsense phrase, the kind he and Mira used to toss back and forth in the car or in the bathroom, catchwords between two kids who, though they belonged to different races, had grown up middle class in the same generation of seventies television shows and AM rock, the same textbooks, camp songs, and urban legends. Over shoulder boulder holder. Saright? Saright. I’m Popeye the sailor man, I live in the garbage can…and she’s buy-hi-yingg a stair-hair way to heavann.

  Or a line from Pound or Auden, engraved in his mind in the poetry seminar where they met as Harvard undergraduates. Where cross-legged on the rug in the instructor’s living room, Mira, lone brown face, queen bee of the ferociously ambitious little group of sophomores and juniors, would camouflage her lack of preparation by waxing emotional over single obscure lines. She used this bullshit technique, Nick recalls, with “The River-Merchant’s Wife, A Letter.” “Two small people, without dislike or suspicion,” she gushed. Only a great poet like Pound could find such perfectly simple words to translate a description of true love. Two people who are made for each other.

  A few times, Nick has wondered why he didn’t strangle her. Just a few times over the years this comes to mind, usually when he is in the packed street crowds of Asia, where everyone manages somehow to be alone. Crowds that it is the good fortune of a rich foreign visitor to avoid if he wishes, traveling instead in expensive cars that slice through jammed intersections like hot knives through butter. Nick is a powerful man nowadays, one of the tall blond expatriate masters of the world, the gweilo’s gweilo, his adoring second wife tells him teasingly. And he has paid his dues, and knows the worth of these petty satisfactions. But there are times when, at the end of a long day of meetings, before cocktails, he plunges deliberately into the rush-hour congestion on the sidewalks of Causeway Bay or the Bund. Plunges out of his air-conditioned executive fishbowl into the heat and crush and fumes—for refreshment, the way you jump into a swimming pool.

  And there in the slow mob of pedestrians, he might see a pair of sauntering sweethearts, window-shopping Cantonese or Singaporean kids marked by the special thinness that one has only once, the transparent thinness of early maturity, when, without knowing it, you are immortal. And completely permeable. When you can walk indifferently down the street with a lover because you have become that lover. Two small people without dislike or suspicion.

  Or he might see a couple of young tourists. American or European or Australian. Students, backpackers, roaming Asia. Riding the Star Ferry, shuffling in line for the plane to Koh Samui, the girls with their tits wobbling free in those cheap silk tops they buy in the street markets. Perhaps quarreling or kissing or even drunk and puking in the gutters, but always wearing that air of charmed ignorance that means “foreigner.” Not just foreign to the place, but foreign to age and care, caught in the bubble of shimmering egoism that makes distant countries, once gained, become theaters. Stage sets for private dramas that in the end are always about jealousy and boredom and the injustices of desire.

  It happens, then, that he can imagine his hands tightening around Mira’s throat. On his knees over her in a parody of a sexual position, as she lies like a toppled statue in their old bed. The marital bed she defiled, the shameless whore, the slut, the hussy, the harlot, the strumpet, the adultress. The sad tabloid insults come scuttling out like roaches during this flicker of a vision, which gives him a feeling of luxury, like the thought of a sexual adventure. The luxury of rewriting his demeaning part in a story. And at the same time he feels a sense of ingrained error, as if, like a dull schoolboy, he is being called to examination, over and over again, and fails every time.

  It’s different, he thinks, when someone dies. When someone dies, there’s that patch of blankness that makes it possible to accept. A certain satisfaction in encountering the finite. But when someone is lost to you and still lives, it’s an absurdity. Rags and motley tatters of sensation hang on the flutter as if on a fool. And who is the fool? Is it always the cuckold? Is it King Arthur, King Mark, Charles Bovary, Karenin?

  These thoughts have come to him not at home in London but in Asia, in the anonymous pedestrian heart of the street. And Nick keeps walking, and gradually he is calmed by the fumes, the choking stink of gasoline, spices, frying food, and sewage that after a dozen years of visits is both alien and famiiar. And the hot crush, the colossal indifference of the crowd. It’s magnificent, that indifference, unlike anything in Europe or America. It reminds him of a phrase seized from his late-night reading. In a letter from Yeats to a friend who sent him a Chinese statue, the poet wrote, “The East has its solutions always and therefore knows nothing of tragedy.”

  1985 • ETRUSCAN PLACES

  There’s a place I have to take you, Nick tells Mira. All those years ago, on that first blazing August morning in Rome.

  From the moment he first saw her pushing that ridiculous suitcase, looking disheveled and grubby, peering around in the airport crowd like a mail-order bride—he’s felt like a conjurer with the power to pull wonders out of thin air. Since they grabbed each other and kissed, and he smelled her perfume and her tired body. It’s time to show her marvel after marvel, facets of their new life. So he rushes his wife and her suitcase back from the airport in the first surprise, the little open Fiat that is somehow part of his expatriate package, and laughs when she asks if they are now in a movie. Repeating, with greedy anticipation, like a parent whose children have just started to open a mountain of Christmas presents, that this is just the beginning. Whisking her through the thinning morning traffic through the periphery of Rome to the Centro Storico, skimming by the Colosseum and the other sunlit monuments with the casual arrogance of possession, which Mira, quick to read his mind, understands; she doesn’t even ask him to slow down.

  Next comes their new home on Via Panisperna, a narrow village of a street that runs from Santa Maria Maggiore down toward Piazza Venezia in the stony urban valley between the Esquilino and the Viminale hills. Here in a motley stretch of
irregular buildings, tiny dark shops, a small disheveled street market, and herds of cars parked on sidewalks is the palazzo, a smog-stained sixteenth-century building with blackened oriel windows set under the eaves.

  It belongs to the grandmother of a friend of his at the bank, an old princess, who always rents to foreigners. With the help of a wall-eyed portiere who calls Mira Signora, they wrestle her giant bag across a shallow courtyard full of battered stone vases of oleanders and the smell of cats. Up a dim slippery flight of stone steps and in through a pair of mahogany doors. To stand in a long marble hallway waxed to a yellowish glow. Opening onto an enfilade of enormous rooms, each with tall draped windows and a crowd of gleaming dark antiques. For a minute Mira stands frozen with the impression that she has strayed into someone else’s apartment. Then Nick grabs her and races her through living room, dining room, kitchen, and study.

  This is—this is princely, says Mira, craning her neck. How can we afford this?

  A deal. Nick gives a casual, magisterial wave of his hand. There may be a problem later on with heating—I can’t figure out if there is any—but we don’t have to worry about that now.

  The owner, he adds, will make space for their own furniture when it comes in from New York. Mira is speechless, unable to imagine her wedding presents, her carefully chosen sofa and bed as looking anything but paltry and cheap among this rich jumble of ages and worn opulence. Coffered ceiling, as Nick promised, parquet that wavers up and down like melted and refrozen ice; a long table and a Venetian chandelier; rubbed velvet armchairs and settees; dim gold stucco curls around mirrors that reflect their ghostly faces, laughing helplessly like children when the adults are out.

  When they reach a bedroom, Mira, mistaking Nick’s haste for a rush to make love, slides her arms around him and whispers in his ear. After two weeks not touching her, it’s like drowning. He almost caves in, but then with difficulty pulls away.

  Whoa, steady. A little self-control, girl. We can christen the bed and the kitchen table and the rest of the place later. There’s a place I have to take you. Go take a piss and get a glass of water, and then we get back in the car.

  Are you crazy, darling? It’s hot. I’m asleep, Mira whines, but Nick notices she doesn’t refuse. He knows his girl—she could be half dead, she could have six deadlines or four exams, but if you suggest something new, a mystery excursion, a new Williamsburg club, an uninvestigated drink, or a new drug, she’s up and out.

  You can take a nap when we get there, under a pine.

  A pine? Where are you taking me, you nasty boy? Some kind of alfresco Roman orgy?

  Without waiting for an answer she is already in the big gloomy bathroom, splashing water on her face, shoving back her hair, humming an old camp song, “In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines…” Then they are back in the little car heading toward the sea on the expressway called Cristoforo Colombo. Christopher Colombus. Their seat belts unbuckled, Mira leaning uncomfortably over the gearbox to rest her head on his shoulder and slide her hand inside his shirt to where she can feel his heart beating. Gravely, without haste, reestablishing physical possession. The roof is up, and they are listening to music. Hex Enduction Hour. Burning Spear’s Marcus Garvey. London Calling.

  Italian drivers around them try hard to pass them, and Mira, exhaustion forgotten, stares with delight out the window at the motley array of traffic barreling along in carefree anarchy: midget trucks, delivery vans, all ages and sizes of Fiats, sports cars, Vespas, motorcycles. She giggles at the sight of a young family crammed onto a single Vespa, the mother casually giving her baby a bottle as she clutches her husband with her knees. Italy, Mira thinks. Europe. And as she studies the shoddy apartment buildings and roadside shops of the Roman suburbs, and the bleached grass slopes of the campagna beyond them, she observes as always how close the horizons seem compared to America. Piccolo mondo antico—that’s a famous Italian movie, isn’t it? The small antique world that is now hers.

  At the coast, Nick turns north toward Civitavecchia. Beyond the small beach towns’ stucco apartments and forests of TV antennae, the sea reflects a platinum glare on the bare midday sky, and on the right the scorched hills roll up through a network of Etruscan names, toward Orvieto and the extinct mines of Tolfa.

  You’re still not telling me where we’re going?

  No. We’re almost there. The tape is playing Madness, “One Step Beyond.”

  They turn off at Cerveteri, the Etruscan city of the dead. Nick discovers it after a cheerful tipsy Sunday at the beach in Fregene with some of the young Roman bloods he works with at the bank. Even stuffed with spaghetti alle vongole and Frascati, he’s enchanted and determines to bring Mira here as a surprise on their first day together in Italy.

  Now, pulling into the parking lot, he feels ceremonial. He has unveiled the chief marvel of the day. A phenomenal landscape. Acres of tumuli, big domed tombs shaped out of tufa, like huge bubbles in the earth, running up the grass hills toward Tarquinia and the other city-states. Lion-colored hills, dotted with poppies and live oaks. Far in the distance, a packed flock of sheep moves slowly across a slope like a single dirty sheepskin. Radiating from the cypresses and pines that shade the entrance to the archaeological park is a chorus of cicadas so continuous and loud that it sounds like heavy machinery. It is the lunch hour, the parking lot empty of cars and tourist buses, the ticket office shuttered.

  Mira climbs slowly out of the car. My God, Nick. What an incredible place. You knew I’d love it.

  I knew.

  You always know everything.

  Without waiting for the park to open, they sneak in, climbing over the low entrance gate. Nick with a flashlight and a tin box of carefully rolled joints tucked into his pocket, carrying a bottle of champagne. Not chilled, he says. In fact, more like boiled.

  Well, champagne soup makes the picnic, says Mira, darting ahead. I can’t believe there’s nobody. Come on. We own this place for the next hour.

  An image added to the collection in Nick’s memory: the sight of Mira in her crumpled black dress against the domed tumuli, huge and thick as bunkers, scurrying along with an urgency that for a second looks tragic, like a widow in a war movie.

  Nick, she calls. You know, this is where Lawrence got hooked on Etruscans. And what’s his name, the guy who wrote The Garden of the Finzi-Continis? That starts out right here at Cerveteri.

  Mira, Nick recalls, loves the first chapters of novels, and knows her favorites practically by heart.

  Just then from behind them come shouts and a burst of barking, and they turn to see a thickset old man with a feathery crest of white hair, with two small yellow dogs by his side. Shouting something. È vietato entrare durante il periodo di riposo! he repeats, stumping up to them. Repeating in parroted English and German as the dogs sniff their legs. Forbidden. Verboten.

  Shit, whispers Mira. Prison on my first day.

  No—quiet. Let me talk. Nick says something quickly to the old man, a burst of words among which Mira’s elementary Italian can catch only americani and chiedo scusa. His stern sun-blackened face relaxes and suddenly breaks into a smile of a thousand fractal wrinkles as he replies to Nick.

  What is it? What’s he saying?

  I told him that we’re Americans on our honeymoon, and he’s telling us how much he loves us. It’s half in dialect. He’s telling me how the partisans used to hide out in the tombs. Until the Americans came and ended the war.

  Look at him, says Mira, smiling up at the man as she kneels to stroke one of the little dogs. He’s a peasant out of Horace. No, he’s an ancient Etruscan.

  The old man is studying Mira in turn. Bella, sua moglie. Una bella ragazza di colore. Andate pure. Andate a vedere tutto. E ricordate—he quickly stuffs away the ten thousand lire that Nick puts into his hand—ricordate che si possono fare dei bei figli anche nelle tombe.

  He said you’re beautiful, say Nick, as they walk away. A beautiful colored girl, he snickers, giving her a dig in the ribs. Or was i
t off-color? Anyway, it’s a compliment in Italian. He said we can go in, but we should watch out for vipers. And he said—

  Well?

  He said it’s possible to make beautiful children even in tombs.

  That afternoon at Cerveteri becomes part of their gallery of private jokes. You took me to a cemetery and ravished me. You ghoul. Necrophile.

  But what both hoard in their memories is the sensation of complete freedom. By some miracle, or perhaps by the agency of the ancient Etruscan caretaker, no one shows up for an hour. The whole necropolis remains eerily deserted as if there were some holiday or catastrophe that they hadn’t heard about. And Nick and Mira duck into and out of the long rows of tombs like children playing in the ocean. In from the battering midday sun, the boiling dust of the rocky paths lined with thistles and wild fennel, where armies of lizards and grasshoppers flee at their approach. Into the sudden darkness of the tumuli, which they discover are actually oddly cozy and domestic feeling. Stripped, in order to supply museums, of their sarcophagi and the quotidian ornaments that once surrounded the dead, the tombs are dry and solid feeling, with their low entryways and lintels and their small alcove-lined rooms. They have fun moving from light to darkness, eyes dazzled, back and forth from the underworld to daylight.

  They find the crude light switches that illuminate the tomb of the aristocratic Matuta family and stare at the niches for twenty bodies and the red and black traces of painting on the walls. They light up other tombs with the flashlight, straying further into the field on paths increasingly overgrown with nettles. And finally, at one of the smallest, farthest places, a tumulus not even fully excavated, they move swiftly inside after a brief sweep with the flashlight. The moving beam illuminates a few bottles and condoms strewn about the ground. And this ugly debris gives them a feeling of affectionate communion with all the village kids who come here to drink and fuck under the indulgent eyes of their ancestors, a first glimpse of the palimpsest of generations that is Italy.