Lost Hearts in Italy

by Andrea Lee

  Here they sit down cross-legged to smoke a joint. After a few minutes, they strip off their clothes and make love clumsily, half against the gritty tufa wall, half in a small alcove made to hold a short sarcophagus. Even in the darkness, the noonday heat is so intense that their sweat evaporates as soon as it forms and their lips on each other’s skin feel cracked and feverish and dry.

  Later in their lives, each of them will think of this episode as a supreme romantic milestone. Equal to the first few times they made love or confessed their love or when they impulsively decided to marry.

  But what they actually feel before they mythologize it is more modest: a benign taste of darkness granted to them like a family secret by whatever shades still lingered in that ancient place. A truth so unadorned that they feel obliged to dress it up with grand emotions. An acceptance, as if they’d come home. An Etruscan truth, the kind Lawrence writes about, one that they won’t appreciate for years to come. In fact, Nick will never appreciate it. After their marriage is over and he has a few long nights to unstitch remembered incidents, he wonders why the hell he brought her to Cerveteri. Why not a place with water—Hadrian’s Villa or the gardens of Ninfa? Lilies, stone garlands, the sound of fountains, and fluid green light. Would things have been different if he hadn’t brought her to a city of the dead?

  Years afterwards, Mira will reread Etruscan Places and feel a shiver of recognition at Lawrence’s words describing Cerveteri: “…and the land beyond feels as mysterious and fresh as if it were still the morning of time.”

  THE ANCIENT ETRUSCAN

  I’ve been the caretaker at Cerveteri since 1959, when they cleared out the last land mine, and my problem since then has been keeping the living out of the tombs. Tombaroli, grave robbers, gypsies, and even a gang of Tunisian squatters. Drug addicts up from the port at Civitavecchia. And of course, courting kids. You should see the filth I have to rake up: bottles, rubbers, syringes. So I send trespassers packing, but this pair were Americans, and that’s my weak point. It’s not fashionable to like them these days, but I still see them charging up the coast from Gaeta in the fall of 1944, when Badoglio was at his last gasp and we partisans were living on chestnut soup and chopping bullets out of corpses. Grinning black and white GIs tearing into the village in jeeps and dumping a mountain of cans in front of the church. Campbell’s soup, Armour beef—for me they can do no wrong. And this couple were decent kids, and good to look at, the boy blond like a movie actor and the girl like one of those Brazilian dancers on TV. Una bella coppia—a beautiful couple. Let them have a honeymoon present, the way their fathers poured out tin cans of food.

  3

  ZENIN

  2004 • THE TARTAR OF THE LOWLANDS

  A sound of girls laughing. That is Zenin’s lifelong private flash point, which can send him into a dull rage, continuous and diffuse as a migraine. Laughter rising like a flood that needs to be channeled and controlled. Girls’ gabble and laughter through walls, silvery, chaotic, unstoppable like the seething adolescent uproar of his four sisters, packed into the tiny room they shared in the destitute years after the war, when Zenin’s family lived with—lived on top of, more like it—Zio Dario at Stra Pa in a freezing village house in Boara, just outside Rovigo, a shitty place whose plumbing was the Adige River out back.

  Teasing laughter like that of the girls at school who called him il tartaro—the Tartar—because of his foreign-looking lankiness and narrow eyes and one memorable year, when he’d suddenly outgrown his single pair of long trousers, made up a mortifying chant: il tartaro in pantaloni cinesi—the Tartar in Chinese pants. Unseemly rowdy laughter like that of the factory girls at his company headquarters when they go out and get drunk, presumptuous sluts that they are, on International Women’s Day. Terrified giggles from his two daughters, now adults, to whom he has been a distant, guilty father since his much-publicized divorce shook the Catholic stronghold that was the Veneto in the sixties. Haughty laughter, like that of his ex-wife, Cecilia, before they got married, when she was still the notary Bertin’s beautiful daughter and the prize catch of his small provincial city.

  Was it Cecilia and her sneering bitches of girlfriends—the rich bourgeois girls who played tennis at the Circolo—who laughed at his mother’s misspelled letters? It was forty years ago, and it’s hard for Zenin to recall the circumstances, but he remembers the letters, written in characters like chicken scratches on every kind of paper, from the coarse blue-lined stuff schoolchildren used after the war to wrapping paper, even newspaper.

  Letters she sent him from Rovigo to the big echoing barracks in the Dolomites where he was doing military service. Cecilia certainly laughed at the letters, but he remembers other laughter at the barracks, having to beat it into the head of Diberti, a pimpled oaf from Mestre, that it was a miracle his mother—who had grown up barefoot, working like a man in the fishing fleet of Chioggia—could read and write at all. This was 1955. Not so unusual for the desert that was postwar Veneto, but Zenin was and is still shamed by those loving chicken scratches.

  These things come to mind whenever he calls Mira. He knows that his signorine, that gaggle of birdbrained secretaries on the other side of the office walls, burst into giggles whenever he gets an office call or visit from any woman. From his ex-wife; to his present girlfriend, a good-humored, extremely pragmatic blond antique dealer from Verona; to the wily Tere, mother of his only son; to any of the diminishing number of casual lovers who sometimes pursue him at work. The signorine—homely to a girl, since Zenin doesn’t want screwups at work—giggle harder when he has them call Mira with those instructions about not mentioning his name. The amorous life of the boss—with his bags of money, his sad hungry smile, his tall chilling figure, his expensive yet somehow badly fitting suits—is a staple of company folklore.

  Zenin is famous. In his own country, his name is synonymous with the postwar explosion of prosperity and also with a kind of enlightened yet patriarchal way of handling big business that some call regionalism. He is best known for an ever-expanding army of plastic cartoon miniatures that invades millions of children’s houses every day, camouflaged in boxes of breakfast cereals and snacks or marching straightforwardly across television screens. Nowadays he produces in China but keeps his headquarters in Rovigo. Not two kilometers from the route he used to trace out on foot and bicycle, and later by Vespa, with his father, an itinerant vendor of knives and kitchenware. Zenin has never gone public, never wanted or needed to. Vain and cautious, he keeps a medium-low profile, neither hiding like Cuccia and other sacred monsters, or flaunting himself like Benetton and Agnelli. Like other self-made men, he has remained at the most elementary semaphores of success: cars, yachts, a jet, houses, a villa on the Brenta once owned by a prince. And women—a trail of beauties, some famous. Fewer, though, nowadays. And never another wife.

  His best friend, a journalist everyone calls Macaco—Monkey—a faithful sycophant and small-town eccentric who drives around in a battered Cadillac, said to him recently, At our age, a love affair, or even just plain fucking, is too much trouble. Even with Viagra. But the great thing would be to have a mouth—no girl, just a girl’s mouth—there in the bed to give you a blow job every morning. A different mouth every day.

  That’s one way of looking at it. And Zenin has enough money so that he’s got mouths when he wants them. Usually Russian or Chinese mouths these days, attached to bodies whose youthful perfection is so consistent that he’s stopped noticing. And he has his pragmatic girlfriend, a cheerful sporty aristocrat who knows everyone, who shares his tastes, and is even a sincere Juventus fan. He has his loyal family and his son, Daniele, a university student who is genuinely a good boy and the only person in the world Zenin loves with a trembling, self-effacing, sentimental love.

  So why does he still call Mira? He hasn’t seen her for years. He’s sixty years old, with more money than anyone knows about, and has hanging around his neck like a stone garland his own personal wreath of troublesome women from the past. Mo
st would be overjoyed to hear from Zenin.

  But only Mira sounds annoyed when he calls. Annoyed, yet strangely acquiescent. She never hangs up on him, as he half expects, when he is acting like a buffoon and a provocateur, making crude jokes and blunt propositions. Her wary voice on the line revives for him, for an instant, the excitement he always felt with her of intruding, of breaking into somewhere he doesn’t belong, with her half consent. A strange play of remoteness yet accessibility that makes him remember the thrill of being a sharp provincial boy on the way up, making his first trips abroad. Of all the foreign girls he has had, Mira is the one who made him feel foreignness most. It’s what made fucking her so good.

  What are you doing?

  Working.

  All his life, perhaps because of his mother’s chicken scratches, Zenin, who never reads books, has cherished the vision of a woman writing, dressed in some kind of fluid light-colored clothing, surrounded somehow by a dark wood frame. A woman of culture. It is a charged erotic image that has little to do with Mira, yet he drapes it around her. It was what made him pursue her when they first met.

  So. Next week. Milan. Paris. New York.

  Zenin makes his proposal, his fictitious plans, hears Mira’s assent, and then puts down the phone. Feeling curiously enlivened by the ritual. One of the small idiosyncratic luxuries a rich man has to procure for himself. Because once Zenin owns something, he doesn’t let it go easily.

  1985 • LUNCH ON THE WATER

  Che cazzo faccio qua? What the fuck am I doing here? Zenin wonders the first time he flies down to Rome to see Mira. Running after a little American girl, as if I didn’t have enough pains in the ass.

  It’s a slow time of the year for Zenin, and so he’s been amusing himself by calling Mira a few times a week during the month and a half since they met on the plane. Without any particular plan in mind, he has attached himself to her life as she begins to learn his country. Her complete indifference as to who he is, to what his name means in Italy, is tantalizing, as is the insulting friendliness, the lack of flirtatious reserve, with which she greets his first calls. From the start, peppering him, Zenin, with questions about places and customs, even requesting actual translations, as if he were some sort of glorified tourist guide.

  In his predator’s way, Zenin senses that beneath her breezy American self-assurance, Mira is disoriented, fumbling in a new language, feeling her way blindly in the maze of Rome. That what makes her vulnerable is her greed to see and know everything at once. The fact that she is married and clearly happy only adds a certain zest—a familiar one for Zenin, but not to be disdained. It took weeks, longer than he had thought, for him to convince her to meet him for lunch.

  The airport taxi jolts him—asshole of a Roman driver—as they swerve off the raccordo anulare, and Zenin is as surprised as usual by the greenness of the city. It’s the end of October. Getting chilly up north, but here in the irresponsible Mezzogiorno, people are still in sandals. Sunlight molds the dreamy boskiness around the crumbling stones of parks and avenues. Pines, palms, sun; it relaxes Zenin, makes him feel like he’s on vacation. There is nothing like it in the Veneto, where green means utilitarian expanses of cornfields or vineyards, or the sparse jewels that are the gardens of Venice. Each time he visits Rome, he thinks, cazzo, a building here in the historic center would be a good deal. He has a friend in the Beni Culturali office who owes him a favor and who’d find him a cinquecento palazzo from some ragged aristocratic clan. But then he’d have to come up with something to do with it. And to tell the truth, a certain heaviness of spirit has settled over him lately. He’s tired of buying things and then having to do something with them. Tired of his routine in general. That’s why he flew to Rome today.

  Nobody at home, not even his secretary, knows he’s here.

  And when Mira walks into the bar near the Pantheon, he thinks, Not bad at all. Even the barista, an insolent young Roman with a greasy ponytail, jaded with a surfeit of blond Germans in shorts and Californians in halter tops, takes an eyeful, announcing, Ammappete, che figacciona. What a dish. She’s horribly dressed, of course, in jeans like a student and a shapeless cotton sweater that disguises her breasts. But there are the long legs and round ass Zenin noticed in the cheap black dress she wore on the plane, and under the mass of frizzy hair pinned up in the heat is a tawny-skinned face that suggests not one but many faraway places. And she’s carrying a book.

  You thought you would be bored? he teases her, when they are sitting at the table having drinks. In front of them, merging currents of tour groups surge around the massive pillars of the Pantheon, and the piazza resounds with a continuous low hubbub like the roar of distant seas. It’s noon, and they are going to lunch, yet Mira orders a cappuccino in the ridiculous way Americans do. Zenin has seen them drinking cappuccino all day in Venice. She says she always carries a book, that it’s good luck, that she has a theory that when you don’t carry a book, the car breaks down, a train or planes gets delayed, and you’re stuck for six hours somewhere with nothing to do.

  She shows him the book, a novel in English by a writer called Edith Wharton, information that Zenin instantly deletes like all things useless to him. The fact of the book is important, not the book itself. What interests him now is the pulse he can see beating at the base of her throat like the heart of a small animal. The unbelievable tenderness and youth of the flesh over beating blood that suggests the secret of her entire body, hidden like the smooth wood of a sapling under the awful clothes. Zenin has often sat contemplating a number of pretty young girls and always glances down deliberately to notice how coarse his own hands seem by contrast. Peasant paws, huge and blunt, strangely restless, irreparably marked by middle age and tropical suns. When he was younger, before he got rich, he was ashamed of them. His wife and other girlfriends criticized them. But now he takes pleasure in the sight of these ugly hands that have the power to touch the most exquisite skin in the world.

  Does your husband know you’re meeting me for lunch? he asks, with the sudden blunt tone and aggressive look he uses—in business or with women—to move negotiations along. But Mira doesn’t giggle or look flustered. With a smile that is at once good-humored and slightly disdainful, she says that of course her husband knows, that she tells him everything, that it’s normal for a couple to have separate friends. That’s the way things are done in America, in their circle from work and university. A perfect brush-off.

  But at the same time, the curiosity that he has noticed as one of her elemental qualities continues to shimmer from her face and her eyes. Reaching toward him. It’s as if two parts of her are speaking separate languages. Zenin rarely wonders about personalities, but now, without realizing it, he asks himself whether it is the mixed blood visible in her face that makes her able to send this double message. And he wonders whether she has actually let her husband know.

  In any case, he has plans for this afternoon that she certainly won’t want to tell him about.

  He calls abruptly for the check and tells the waiter to call a taxi. Gratified by a flustered look from Mira, not quite so sure of herself now. We won’t have lunch in the center, he tells her. We’ll go outside the city. I have a surprise.

  Like Nick, he has a childish desire to impress her.

  At this point in his life, Zenin is at the first stage of weariness after the prolonged priapic revel that occurs when a man makes a huge fortune in a short time. Divorced for years, he had run through the usual list of models and actresses and husband hunters from impoverished noble families. When he took the plane with Mira, he was at a momentary loose end, having just broken up with a serious girlfriend, an Australian of Italian background whose parents made it clear they expected marriage. Mira, less beautiful than many of Zenin’s girls, attracted him in spite of the gauche eagerness of her face, which was exotic, he thought, and needed to be impassive to convey real beauty. Listening idly as he dozed in his sleep mask, he’d been amused by what a little pig she was, how she gobbled every c
ourse on the menu, much to the mirth of the cabin crew, who were used to rich women starving themselves. It was almost with a feeling of obligation that he came and flirted with her as they had approached Rome. But when he found out she was both married and a writer, a sudden change came over the way she appeared to him. She, the little adventuress, acquired a certain rank. While Zenin felt smaller and humbler.

  So he took her number and began calling, late in the morning, when she was sure to be alone. And from the beginning he made extravagant proposals. Just to let her know what was possible with him. Come with me to Sardinia, to the Seychelles, to Istanbul for the day. Proposals she turned down with such incredulous laughter that he suspects she sees him as an entertaining part of her new life abroad: an Italian lunatic on the phone. Worse, he suspects that he might be the subject of jokes between her and her husband.

  But today he’s changing the pace.

  He tells the taxi driver, a small bald man with batlike ears, to take the old Ostiense road down to the coast. You’ve been this way before? he asks Mira. She says yes. That’s all she says. The cab is hot, and Mira sits in a corner as far from him as possible, with a look on her face that tells Zenin she’s wondering if she’s being abducted. Don’t worry, I’m not Barbablù, he tells her. You know, Bluebeard.

  I’m not worried.

  Silence, as they pass through fields where harvested wheat is already bound in plastic-covered bales, and enter the shadow of the pineta, the thick coastal wood of umbrella pines, here contained in the five-mile wall of the Savoy royal hunting preserve. At the end of the wall, Zenin directs the driver down a back road near the sea, first paved, then unpaved, past sand dunes and cane fields, illegal apartment blocks, and a gypsy trailer camp. Peasant women walk by with bundles of cane on their backs. Zenin feels what for him is agitation, the wary feeling he gets when he is not sure his plans will work.