by Andrea Lee
Who sees Nick and Mira and exclaims, Oh no—love. Not again. Not in my seminar!
MADDIE
Just one thing: fuori dalle palle. Get the hell out of my way. That’s what all parents need to hear.
It gets on my nerves that they can’t figure out that they’re old and their lives are over. It annoys me that they can’t speak, can’t get it together to tolerate each other for one weekend to deliver their only daughter to college, for fuck’s sake. Most people’s parents are divorced and it’s not a big deal. I’m sick of being their messenger girl.
I’m prettier than Mom ever was. And less of a drama queen, less wacky and needy. She has to be told how hot she is every five minutes, which gets pathetic, and she flirts with my guy friends. As for Dad, I see that he’s not a prince. No, he’s just a dad with a slightly dorky crew cut, and I hate to say it but he’s getting one of those pretentious faux British accents. He tries with the Cool Dad stuff and I do think it’s awesome that he hung backstage with the Cars. But…but…but…
In the mirror I see a face that’s not Reiver, not Ward. A face from anywhere. That’s what they did to me: I’m American but European too. I’m neither black nor white. I’ve seen every episode of Scooby-Doo dubbed in Italian, and my idea of hell is tortellini in Boston or Chinese food in Milan.
Lots of my friends are mixed: half French, half Thai; half Russian, half Senegalese. It’s cool, it makes you good-looking, and in a funny kind of way nothing can surprise you. Mom says I’m as pragmatic as a forty-year-old. That’s just because I know what I want to do: study anthropology, and get married and stay that way. On a continent I choose.
I don’t remember when they were together. Just a long time ago, when there was a dark patch spreading everywhere. When I was at the little school near the Colosseum.
But I grew up okay. How is that? It’s like my eleventh-grade English teacher used to say when we’d fight in class about why the best stories were the sad ones: that hard times are like sculptor’s tools and make meaningful shapes.
And when I think of Mom and Dad, I imagine a weird picture of them: skinny and naked under a stormy sky like two little kids at the beach. It makes me feel protective, and a little superior. My life is different, my Harvard is different.
I have to say, though, that a lot of kids here seem really young. They go on about getting carded and I was already drinking wine when I was eight.
6
ZENIN
2004 • SMALL-TOWN BOY
Seven forty-five A.M. and Zenin stands in his bathroom shaving and watching a young woman across the river, a tributary of the Adige, that flows underneath his window.
Zenin’s bathroom is the size of a squash court, full of alcoves for steaming and washing and massaging and evacuating the body, lined with travertine and oriental rugs on pale carpeting. Gold faucets and a flat-screen TV, and a number of mediocre seventeenth-century Venetian paintings, school of Canaletto, or shithouse school, as his girlfriend the antique dealer calls them. Despite her energetic efforts, the place remains as bland as a hotel suite, the only personal touch a forest of half-used miniature bottles of sample cosmetics, with which Zenin amuses himself by making odd mixtures.
He has eaten his laxative breakfast of caffellatte and stewed pear, and now stands scraping sparse white hairs off of his lean cheeks, with his mind, as usual, running on four distinct tracks. Two of them run in the vast yet hermetic universe of money and product and chance, incomprehensible to all but a few thousand people in the world but as familiar to Zenin as the curve of his own ass. Another absently replays the sorry spectacle of the previous evening’s Manchester United–Milan match, when he and his friends wasted time by flying to England to see the Brits make fools of the Italians. And the fourth track is just watching the girl.
Not a pretty girl: the thirty-year-old daughter of the butcher whose shop is half visible in the brick alleyway beyond the weedy green stream. Across the small cobbled bridge where Zenin has installed a watchman to keep Gypsies and Albanian thieves away from his palace. The girl—Maria Grazia, Maria Caterina, some Maria name like that—whom Zenin has watched growing from a stolid ruddy child playing hopscotch on the paving stones to a stolid bleached blonde with a big bottom that stretches out the white work smocks she wears over tracksuit pants and nurse’s clogs.
Every morning, with the aid of the butcher, a pale obese melancholic mountain of a man, the girl scrambles up a stepladder to tug open the aluminum shutter that hides realms of veal roasts and lambs’ tongues and prosciutto. A graceless ceremony at which Zenin, in his opulence, through a rift in the double layer of swagged Venetian silk that the decorator thought a fitting setting for his nakedness, is faithfully present every morning when he is not traveling. The small scene is somehow linked to his bare mortal body, its long bony limbs growing daily more bristly and puckered with age, and his whole half-contemptuous affection for it.
No one would guess that Zenin, one of the industrial princes whose names sail like galleons through the financial pages, whose products have made this small city famous, that Zenin, who lives swaddled in Gobelins, Savonnerie, and tasteless but lush wall-to-wall carpeting in a Palladian villa purchased cannily in the seventies from the last direct heir in an ancient line that provided the Most Serene Republic with three doges, that Zenin is a voyeur of provincial life.
Yet unconsciously, obsessively he collects these glimpses of the butcher’s daughter; of the old men conferring in dialect as they stroll, their caps pulled low over their brick-colored faces; of the old women with cropped hair, white as thistledown, pedaling bicycles with stumpy legs; nuns hurrying from Ospedale San Giuseppe; salesgirls with sunlamp tans and vulgar filmy black stockings, adjusting the brassieres and nightshirts in the window of the underwear shop beyond the butcher; the ancient cobbler who is unchanged from when Zenin was poor; the baker’s wife with her necklace of gold coins; university kids on scooters, with their naïve tattoos and piercings on faces as callow as dabs of paste; some girls with such perfection of beauty as to make Zenin swear to himself.
But it isn’t desire that drives him. No, it is the sense of place, of himself in the town where he was born and that he has never really left. With the noisy current of its swift brick-bound river that runs from the Dolomites to the Adriatic, the sound of the parish bells of San Carlo and San Tommaso eternally in dispute over the correct hour. The scene of his poverty and shame, where now everybody is richer because of him. Which has become one of the well-heeled small cities where it is said that Italian life is lived at its best. Where the new shopping malls and maxi-stores, with their parking lots and ugly Plexiglas roofs, are relegated to the outside of town. Where the old fish market is now a center for crafts fairs and computer-animation exhibits. And where the old-fashioned profanity-filled dialect spoken by Zenin’s father and mother is praised as cultural heritage by eager local leftists.
A town where Zenin is still apart from everything, because that is his pathology: to be a penniless tourist in life, eternally deprived, unable to have anything for himself in any real sense. Though for a long time he has been as rich as a sultan in the Emilio Salgari novels he read as a boy. A billionaire who always feels like a beggar.
Yet still the city in its own way, along with the genius of Italian families and villages, accepts and sustains him. More than pride for an eccentric local tycoon, it is the shrugging Catholic indulgence that finds a place at the table for even madmen and criminals. Zenin, divorced and immoral, living misanthropically in the finest palace in the heart of the old city center, speeding through the narrow streets in his parvenu’s Rolls-Royce or one of the less significant cars he adopts when worried about kidnapping, is regarded with the stony loyalty small towns reserve for their own. And his spying on town life is his loving reply.
Only once has he tried to explain this to anyone: to Mira, the American girl. And she looked at him so blankly that he understood that for her he will always be the sum of his travels.
&nb
sp; C. 1962 • ZENIN’S MARRIAGE
Takes place in the early sixties, which in northern Italy will soon come to seem like the Middle Ages. A period after the war when mines from the Kesselring Line still dot the battered Veneto countryside and the Mantegna frescoes pulverized by Allied bombs still lie in flecks of colored plaster in the rubble of the Eremitani Church. When the Counts Manzano still occupy the castle on the Alto Sperone and are bowed to in the streets. When a bicycle is riches, and lice-ridden blond children steal bread and die of tuberculosis.
Zenin stands on the cathedral steps in a blizzard of confetti and applause, noisy tears from his crowd of sisters. Beside him, his bride, Cecilia, a provincial heiress and the town beauty. Nineteen, secretly pregnant, tall and stately in a column of satin as white as the marble of the statues at the high altar, her chubby adolescent cheeks flushed through a mask of pancake makeup below fair hair that has been backcombed according to the height of fashion into an airy monument like a Christmas yeast loaf.
A wedding that, though scorned by the nobility, is in some ways the wedding of the year. With an edge of social daring that goes with the reconstruction era. The bride is the only daughter of a canny local magnate whose plastic factories managed to both contract to the Italian Social Republic during the Badoglio confusion and qualify for Marshall Plan reconstruction grants afterward. A great leap for Zenin, the twenty-four-year-old “Tartar” with his primitive cheekbones and flat black eyes. Whose mother who was an eel-catching savage from Chioggia and whose father was a drunken peddler who beat his wife, did worse, they say, with his daughters, and died unmourned on the Russian front.
Yet there is something about Zenin that has impressed people since he was in short pants. Perhaps it is that stony face that hides a rapacious peasant mind and a cold ambition that belies his poorly dressed awkward figure. He is already the first in his family to achieve a university degree. Capped by a thesis that he paid a studious old maid to write, knowing even then that it was all bullshit.
Women feel his ruthlessness and pursue him. When he was ten, the tobacconist’s red-haired daughter took him down by the railway embankment one evening during Carnival. Breathing a hot smell of Carnival fried dough in his face. Yanked up her skirt and put his hand on her. As if he didn’t already know what was there, with all those girls at home.
By the time he begins to circle around his future wife, he knows exactly how easy it is for him.
So the tall morose youth fixes his single-minded attention on the rich beauty. In the street during the Saturday evening passeggiata, at Mass, during the few times a friend manages to wangle him entrance to the circolo where the middle-class kids play bridge. People snub him extra hard at the circolo because they sense that the distance is fast decreasing between the Tartar and themselves. And the heiress herself, fond of extravagant sentiments that she thinks of as aristocratic, yearning for a great love, comes to him like a bird charmed off a branch.
Her father considers having Zenin shot or horsewhipped, then quiets down when he finds out that she is pregnant like any factory girl—fruit of two Lido afternoons when she evaded cousins and maids to lose her virginity in the cabin of a friend’s boat. The rich old man reflects that he could do worse than to have a son-in-law who seems able to work as hard as a mule and—he says privately to himself—to eat grass and shit gold. Better than a dim-witted aristocrat or a small-town playboy. Zenin is a fortune hunter, but one with balls who will make something out of what he gets.
Thus Zenin in one move achieves a beautiful teenage wife, a job, a honeymoon in Rome with a papal audience, and two hundred square meters floored in gleaming Verona marble composite in the most fashionable speculator’s brand-new apartment building on the edge of town.
Standing on the church steps amid applause, feeling the corsetlike constriction of his wedding suit, magicked through some connection of his father-in-law from the legendary Zucchoni of Venice, he feels mildly astonished at the ease of his conquest, how it seems that he reached out his hand and grabbed a prize down from the top of the greased pole, what in old village fairs used to be called the albero della cuccagna—the Cockaigne, a prize that in the hungry days was usually a bundle of sausages, prosciutti, cheeses, and sweetmeats.
But behind his astonishment is the normal feeling he walks around with all the time. Of something missing. It opens onto a vision that serves at all times to add vastness to the landscape of cornfields and small villages of his world: a black mountain, a black lake that threatens to swallow him. A dark world of things lacking. His prize brightens it not even as much as a lantern or torch would: only as much, perhaps, as a firefly.
Non basta, he is thinking, without exactly forming the words. Not enough.
THE NEWSPAPER VENDOR
One Gazzettino and one Sole Ventiquattro, that’s Zenin. That pimp-faced Portuguese majordomo comes to get the papers even if the old man is away in China. The newsstand is right here in the wall of the palazzo, so the joke is that Zenin should be paying me doorman’s wages. I see him rushing back and forth like a bat out of hell in one of his fancy cars, and he always waves. Sometimes he stops by the edicola to check what the kids are buying among his promotional collections.
The story goes that he sneaks girls into the house late at night, but the only one I see these days is the signora from Verona, a nice woman, with the patience of a saint. He’s not a monster, old Zenin, though they say he drove his wife crazy and then divorced her. My mother-in-law helped sew the wedding dress, and says that nobody had a figure like Zenin’s wife back then. The prettiest breasts in the city, she always says. You’d think that would satisfy any man, but not old Zenin.
7
MIRA
2004 • THE LAKE ISLE
A magazine editor from New York sends Mira an e-mail. It begins: “Miranda Ward, I want your life! Oh, to be a writer in Italy!”
The editor, a gay woman who seems to lead a pleasant existence in Chelsea with her partner and child, goes on to propose a piece on the Lovers’ Walk of the Cinque Terre, but Mira is mesmerized by the opening lines. Of course she long ago discovered that every American, regardless of age, race, sex, and class, has the same maudlin soft spot for Italy. Street kids and hip-hop magnates believe that Italians are cooler than they are. Hardened travel snobs become humble and pliant when confronted with any hint of regional knowledge outside of Tuscany. The joke among Mira’s expatriate friends is that the best thing about living here is coming back to the States and mentioning it.
But rarely has the contrast between cloudland and reality been so glaring as at the present, ten thirty on a wet October night as she sits at her kitchen table surrounded by shopping bags full of cat and dog food, trying to check her e-mail by candlelight. Candlelight because in Mira’s beautiful old house—an early Renaissance villa that has belonged for generations to her second husband’s family, a house that in Roman brick and slightly crumbling stucco does indeed incarnate the fantasies of magazine editors and anybody else stuck behind a desk in Manhattan—the lighting system begins to strobe whenever it rains. Electricians come and poke around in the vaulted cellars and shrug, and Mira’s husband, Vanni, who like all Italian husbands views his wife as an organic and moral extension of his house, is annoyed with Mira personally about the archaic wiring. Tonight he came home and said, with his usual sarcastic flourish, So, my darling, love of my life, light of my soul, you’re up to your old tricks, I see.
Mira just stares at Vanni, who looks pompous and faintly stout in his business suit, his saturnine face glowing like a jack-o’-lantern through the candlelit dark. She thinks, Who is this man?
Her eight-and six-year-old sons are in bed, sullenly pursuing sleep after Mira broke up a battle that began during the blackout when Zoo, the younger, stepped on one of Stefano’s customized Lego dragon boats. Stefano called Zoo pezzo di merda and socked him, which was when Mira stepped in, but the boys made so much noise that Vanni dashed upstairs to roar at them himself in time-honored paternal
fashion, smashed more Lego, and then complained to Mira about the mess on the floor. What is the point of spending money on maids if the house is never in order, he asked, with that plaintive rhetorical intonation that means that he is about to reminisce about the legendary perfection of his Aunt Giusy’s household in Cuneo, where the silverware shone like the sun, the linen rivaled Alpine snowfields, and the storeroom was a cornucopia of wild boar prosciutto, dried chiodini mushrooms, and ambrosial jams from recondite ancestral recipes.
And at that moment the phone rang and it was Maddie calling from Cambridge to bewail her crush on a sophomore from Yugoslavia. When Mira, with a touch of pedantry, reminded her daughter that Yugoslavia no longer exists and then said that she’d have to call Maddie back because the lights were out, Maddie shouted that Mira only cares about the stupid house, burst into tears, and then hung up.
So Mira, now seated at the kitchen table, feels inclined to pack up the low farce of her existence, and indeed all of Italy, and send it off to the envious editor.
What would be my Lake Isle? My one everlasting dream of away? she asks herself. The States, certainly. No children or men. Perhaps a nice cozy lesbian life, not in Manhattan, though. In a snug little upscale suburban condo, with wall-to-wall hemp carpeting and everything ordered online, though occasionally we’d hit the malls. There would be nothing European in our house, not even wine or olive oil. Nothing old at all except perhaps a notable collection of Victorian hair jewelry. Mira loses herself for a second or two in a reverie where instead of hiking the Cinque Terre, she is power walking the nature paths of a gated community with an empathetic companion named Bethany.
She hardly notices that the lights have come back on and that Vanni, quickly, efficiently, the way he can when he wants to, has made himself and her a cup of chamomile tea. When he sets it in front of her—in a cup and saucer, not in a slapdash American mug—she looks at him across a distance of reverie, as if he were a tiny passerby in the background of a television travelogue. And he looks back at her with the amused, forbearing air of truce that Mira knows means love, the long-lasting kind that remains after the fanfares of courtship have died down. In Italy and elsewhere.