by Andrea Lee
It is true that Vanni is familiar with the panorama of Mira’s past, the pretty and not so pretty parts. As she is with his. And that somehow, amazing as it seems at this moment, they have accumulated a past of their own. Created this particular world of house and family that is independent of anyone’s fantasies.
Look here, Mira says, indicating the computer. There’s a woman who wants to take my place.
Her husband leans over to study the screen, propping his chin comfortably on the crown of Mira’s head and running his hand down the back of her jeans.
È carina? he asks. Is she good-looking?
1985 • IMPRESSIONS
Cities are like clothes, Mira writes in one of her first magazine articles from Italy. Each has its own style, its own fabric and weight, each transforms you…. The fabric of Rome is heavy, rich and coarse at the same time, like a mixture of sackcloth and brocade. It weighs on you, the constant mixture of old and new, spendthrift beauty and grotesque ugliness. It rubs away any delicate illusions a foreigner might have, any Puritan squeamishness. Pasolini, the latest great profane poet of Rome, writes, “La bellezza eccessiva di questa sovrapposizione de stili è un autentico shock al sistema nervoso”—“The excessive beauty produced by this juxtaposition of styles is a genuine shock to the nervous system.”
What Mira doesn’t write is that she hates Rome. Feels a visceral resistance to it, as your body does when it is trying to fight off a disease. A fever that gives everything a red-tinted haze, that makes the tawny battered monuments in their magnificence feel like predators, just waiting, considering.
She writes nothing about it but feels it all the time as she and Nick shape their new life, which is that of all prosperous young expatriates. Working, taking their morning cappuccino and cornetto at the neighborhood bar, diligent with their Italian lessons, wandering the backstreets of the Ghetto, deciphering odd inscriptions and eating pizza in Testaccio with new friends who are all handsome young people like they are. American and Italian, from the banks and multinational companies, from the embassy, from the academy, from the Food and Agriculture Organization, funded by leading universities, farmed out by indulgent rich families.
She feels it as she and Nick walk home hand in hand late at night, perhaps from an outdoor movie at the Baths of Caracalla, a hilariously dubbed American movie they never would have seen at home, giggling about bad Italian rock and roll, their footsteps echoing in the narrow cobblestone streets, feeling that they own the city. Except that something in Mira tells her that lovers can own New York, can own Paris, but not Rome.
Other scenes she doesn’t write about:
An old woman with thick black-penciled eyebrows and garish bleached hair is buying a tiger-striped brassiere with cutout nipples in a lingerie shop on Via Nazionale and having a good laugh with the saleswoman. My husband loves me in this stuff! she cackles. Keeps the whores away!
At a party on someone’s terrace in Parioli, where everybody else—an international crowd of junior staff from the embassy and journalists—is wearing jeans, a blond Italian girl arrives in a silver cocktail dress. People whisper that she is a university student and the official mistress of a famous right-wing politician twice her age. She kisses the hostess, drinks a glass of wine, laughs and flirts. She is Mira’s age, hard-eyed, with beautiful skin and an odd air of dignity. Mira studies her covertly, wondering, What does she know?
A cluster of African girls, stewardesses, actresses, students, friends of a Senegalese friend of Mira’s, sit around a kitchen table in a Monteverde apartment, complaining about their Italian boyfriends. The infidelity of Italians, worse than Africans; their vanity; their obsession with sodomy; their lies; their awful families. Listening to this, Mira begins to feel strangely left out. She asks why they stay with these terrible men, and they tell her that Italians, when they are good, are the best. And they’re not racist, they add. They’re more obsessed with your being foreign than your being black. They tell her all this in gentle, patient voices, like someone explaining the facts of life to a child.
Mira visits a yoga class one afternoon in a palazzo near the Lungotevere that seems cavernous and gloomy, even for Rome. The instructress, a spry upper-class Englishwoman sitting cross-legged on a needlepoint rug, tells her that they are in Palazzo Cenci, where Beatrice Cenci murdered her father after he raped her. Can’t you feel the blood and incest in the air? says the woman, smiling, gesturing around her living room.
And indescribable is the street world, the casual resonance between art and life. Botticelli angels in groups of high school girls, young Caravaggio toughs doing wheelies in suburban squares. How Mira begins to exist within the net of dialogue between men and women on the street, the endless conversation that goes on in every Latin country but has in Rome a touch of raucous fantasy. Mira gets used to attracting notice, to being called mulatta, brasiliana, cubana, or just bellissima.
She craves it and loathes herself for it, and could never explain it to Nick, though she used to tell him everything in New York.
No, there’s a secret between her and every man on the street, a guilty secret connected to her mad escapade on the boat with Zenin. Which she sees now, with shame and fear, as a seizure, an outbreak of delirium, an early warning as to what can happen if she doesn’t defend herself.
So Mira can’t write or talk about these things. Or about the fact that Zenin, once a certain interval has passed, still calls her from time to time. With no explanations, no further propositions, but as if he had a certain right to call. Just a few minutes of idle chat that she knows she shouldn’t tolerate. Yet she does.
She doesn’t admit to herself that she is creating an alternate world in her imagination, separate from her official life, and from Nick. A labyrinth of tunnels and evasions buried so deep that Mira believes she can construct her love, her marriage, over it, the way accumulating centuries have laid down layers of streets and dwellings over the catacombs and mithraea of Rome.
THE LITERARY WIFE
We know the Reivers because we’ve lived in Montevecchio forever and we get to know every American who passes through Rome who has anything to do with writing. Gore Vidal calls my husband the official greeter and majordomo of the academy, which would have been a major insult coming from anyone but Gore, but the fact is that there have been evenings when I’m making trenette with pesto for Nadine Gordimer and Giorgio Bassani slips in the door and starts playing Transformers with our son, and we’ve had poets unwashed and washed and starched—Rome fellows and fellahin, as my husband likes to say, but there’s no use playing at names, because it would be like a phone book, and I am keeping a diary, even if it will all be in the Novel, when my husband finds time to get back to it. But the Reivers are a pretty young couple, who look like they need a nanny. They tend to toddlerize each other—nicknames, playtime, cuddles—but I can tell it won’t last because marriage, a long marriage, takes something different. I’m Polish Catholic, and I know that someone has to break their back and give way, and it really should be the woman, even if it is unfashionable to say it. This girl doesn’t have it; maybe because she is colored, or black I should say, but I honestly don’t think race has anything to do with it. She’s just arrogant, full of herself without even knowing it, and at the same time horrifically ignorant, so that you just want to take her out to the kitchen and say, Honey, get your basket and go to market and learn from the old Italian ladies the way I did when we got here in the sixties. But she wouldn’t get it. I remember her sitting at the table one night when some writer, a real one, was here and saying that she wanted to write a trashy novel. When we asked why, she said she wanted money and power, just right out like that, just to annoy everyone. And Nick Reiver just laughed and egged her on. I remember thinking that she’s the kind of girl who gets in trouble in Italy.
8
ZENIN
2004 • GREEN EYES
It’s twelve thirty in Milan, and Bocconi University students are stuffed as tight as a bunch of asparagus aro
und the counter of the bar, waving receipts, clamoring for pizza, focaccia, puff pastry stuffed with crema pasticciera, all the carbohydrates necessary to keep young brains alert through the steely verbal cross-examinations that push them high through the ranks of the elite. Outside, streetcars strike blue sparks from wires in the rain, and inside is a cacophony of voices and cellphone themes. Zenin sits at a corner table with an empty coffee cup in front of him, eyes scanning the crowd, occasionally contemplating some rain-soaked student beauty, but obviously waiting. Waiting with eagerness, with emotion, but for whom?
Ciao papà! Only in Italy would a twenty-year-old male college student shout out a greeting to a parent so joyously, shove his way through a crowd, and embrace his father with such thunderous energy right in front of his friends and classmates. Even so, the sight of his son—for it is his youngest child and only son, Daniele—has an extreme effect on Zenin. The blood rises in his face and the expression in his eyes, reflected in the steamy bar mirror, is beseeching, rapturous, almost doglike in its adoration.
The fact is that he would do anything for Daniele. Whose birth and childhood were so tentative, dark, and confused, born as he was from a mother Zenin has never wanted to marry. Such was his cold fury at Tere, his former girlfriend from Udine, for trapping him into fatherhood once more, that he refused to see Daniele until the baby was five months old. But when he finally held the squirming baby in his arms and the child looked up at him with a sudden, huge toothless grin, Zenin felt a slow explosion of an emotion so intense that at first in his ignorant way he confused it with sex. But it was only love at first sight, strangest of all emotions to Zenin, that stranger in his own life. And then, so inexpertly that it seemed that the action should have been accompanied by a rusty creaking noise, Zenin smiled back.
Years later, Zenin sits watching Daniele, with strong white teeth, wolf down a focaccia stuffed with sliced tomato and cheese, sitting straight and tall as a lance in his quilted jacket and ridiculous oversize rapper’s jeans. His young hawk’s face eager and fresh beneath his fashionable Marine-style haircut, the green eyes of his Udinese mother brilliant and severe beneath his bristling straight dark brows. Zenin sees his own face there, his face bare of any suspicion, shame, hunger, ambition, as if he has been given a second chance to live in the world and enjoy it. Un bravo ragazzo, as everyone says. Well mannered, unspoiled—not like some of these little turds with rich daddies—getting on decently at school, has spent three seasons skiing for the Monte Rosa team. A son good almost beyond the hopes of any father. Except for what Zenin knows already: that Daniele is not forceful enough, not bloody-minded enough, not enough of a monster, perhaps, to take on all his father is going to leave him. And why the fuck should he be?
A car and driver are waiting for Zenin around the corner in Via Bligny, with the head of Zenin’s own patent office already quietly fuming and looking at his watch, the big shots at the Camera di Commercio already expecting them down in the smoggy corridors of power near the Duomo. But Zenin sits as grateful as a lover for these snatched moments between Daniele’s lectures, listening to him chatter about his projects. The Mille Miglia regatta from Trapani up to Trieste. A motorcycle trek with friends across the Libyan desert. All fabulous, mitico, except that Daniele’s girl hates both ideas and they’re fighting about it.
Zenin frowns. He’s not impressed with his son’s fidanzata, a prettyish half-Austrian daughter of a minor noble family from Vicenza, a girl a little too plump and serious for Zenin’s taste. He wants to slap his son on the back, say something paternal and risqué, make a normal joke, the kind he’d make to any of his friends, to the effect that women, the bitches, are good for only one thing, but as usual his son awes him into circumspection.
He settles for making a clumsy joke about not getting married and settling down too soon, and the boy, unexpectedly serious, replies, But I could, Papa. I’m crazy in love. Sono innamorato pazzo. This is the first time I ever felt like this.
And Zenin feels something seize up in his chest, so that he wonders with his usual hypochondria if this is it, if he will end up a leaden corpse of an old man stretched out shamefully in this place of the young. He is tempted to phone his friend, the head of cardiology at the Umanitas Clinic. But then, looking at his son’s shining eyes, he understands that it’s only jealousy.
1985 • UNA BRAVA RAGAZZA
There comes a time, dear fellow, when chasing pussy just isn’t enough, remarks Zenin’s oldest and best friend, Macaco.
It’s a May evening a couple of decades before Zenin sits listening to his son talk about love, and the two friends are driving through sunset fields to dinner in the hills above Asolo. Knights errant leaving the walled city in Zenin’s Rolls-Royce—or at least Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Zenin drives, a bit self-conscious about the stares the car draws along the country roads, while Macaco has propped his short legs up on the dashboard, his tuft of thinning blond hair standing up straight over his round impish face, which wears an air of resolute nonchalance. His name isn’t really Macaco, but everyone has called him that ever since the priest in catechism class ordered him to stop behaving like a macaque monkey, and he even signs his newspaper columns with the nickname. The class was where he met Zenin and first made the tall gloomy kid in the fraying short pants laugh. He’s been doing it ever since.
Now Macaco clasps his hands behind his head, settles back into the deep leather seat, and continues. Pay attention, Zenin. When this solemn moment comes—usually it’s a few years after you’ve been separated and have been fucking around like crazy—then it’s the moment of the nice girl. A good girl from a good family. Una brava ragazza. Not the only girl, of course. But an important girl for you.
They pass a battered brick shrine at a crossroads, the scene of some miracle or accident, where an old woman pauses on her bicycle for a minute to stare at the vision of the long gleaming green car. The few other cars on the small road move respectfully to the side as Zenin flashes through. In front of them, the road winds up into the darkening woods and vineyards.
Who is she? asks Zenin. Your cousin? What’d she pay you?
Macaco lazily tells Zenin to go back into his mother’s belly the way he came out. It’s a funny obscene expression in dialect, which makes Zenin shout with laughter. Zenin feels good, riding up into the cool rising damp of the spring hills, the plain below them filling with lights. The economic miracle is in full swing, and he has just set up a promotional deal with Mondadori that he knows in his bones is the affair of a lifetime.
Dinner is at a roadside inn on the outskirts of Conigliano, a place run by two old humpbacked sisters, where hunters used to go to fill up on polenta and sausage and the insipid but powerful prosecco of the area. Since then, rich people on their way to the mountains have made a cult of noisy dinners under the crocheted lampshades, swapping salty jokes with the sisters, who have added an ugly aluminium annex to the place.
The brava ragazza whom Macaco mentioned is there, of course, concealed in a thicket of mutual friends. She’s Tere, short for Maria Teresa, a professor’s daughter from Udine, not exactly Zenin’s type, but with tanned, sporty good looks and large shallow-set green eyes that look both surly and vulnerable. The rest of the crowd is the usual mix of small-town playboys, the thirtyish breed who still live with their parents, and tennis-playing middle-class girls working languidly through ten-year university degrees. They are in awe of Zenin but at the same time despise him for his low origins, which his fortune is not yet quite vast enough to obscure. Zenin, a slippery bastard, has fucked several of the girls once, quickly, and they would all like to marry him and civilize his money, but it is clear that he’s not going to be caught. Not a second time. Not with two daughters and his beautiful former wife (daughter of the notaio and the first divorced woman in their city) going around calling him a devil with an icy hell for a heart. But he must not be allowed to roam free, bestowing all that money on foreign models and Brazilian dancers. So tribal consensus has chosen Tere no
t as a sacrificial lamb but as a sort of lightning rod.
And they sit around the big table in a light that the crocheted lampshades brighten into a thick yellow glaze, eating not polenta on that warm evening but cold bean soup, and drinking prosecco until the women—pretty Veneto blondes, most of them—grow as flushed as courtesans in a Longhi painting. There is talk about unrest in Bosnia, just a few hundred miles past the Dolomites, which quickly shifts to talk of football and Formula One and the newest Spielberg movie followed by a high-flown discourse by Macaco on erotic friendship, which he illustrates with the story of the nun and the nearsighted hooker.
As they leave, Zenin invites Tere to come with him and some friends for a weekend in the Pontine Islands in his boat. She pushes back her hair with a tanned wrist and accepts in a light tone, but Zenin sees an avid flash in her eyes, and he likes it. He likes her being a part of this sporty, clubby group, and he likes the provincial greed in her that makes him feel at home. Perhaps Macaco is right and it is time for a nice girl.
MACACO
Let the small minds call me Zenin’s toady, or pet Macaco, ass-kisser, leccaculo; the fact is I’m his only real friend. I was his friend before he had a cent, when we were both boys and my mother told me to keep away from him because he had bedbug bites suppurating on his legs. My family was a family of lawyers and we even have noble connections, and Zenin’s family was trash, the father a drunk who beat his wife and probably messed with the daughters the way peasants did back then. Even then though there was something in the Tartar, and I felt proud for being able to winkle a smile out of such a sourpuss. I used to give him my Tex and Diabolik comics, and even my Salgari adventure books, though he isn’t much for reading. He never reads my column on culture and sport in Il Gazzettino, and I’ve never bothered to tell him about the novel of provincial mores I am writing. But he does listen to my pearls of wisdom on how to enjoy life. Because the poor fellow really has a blind spot there—Musil’s The Man Without Qualities in that one area. So I taught him the parvenu circuit of Regine’s and Castel and Porto Cervo and Formula One, but also offbeat things like going to country liscio dance places or visiting the crazy old Marchese Dell’Olio who has a room in his Friuli castle with twenty bathtubs in it. Of course Zenin always pays for the dinners, the trips, the girls. He’s the one with the money. But I’ve never asked him for a loan. Never had to—everyone knows whose friend I am.