Lost Hearts in Italy

by Andrea Lee

We will always be together, my darling! he says in English, and the entire tableful of Chinese and Italians roars with laughter at the ritual clowning of their two bosses.

  They sit overlooking the hazy expanse of Lago Maggiore on the terrace of the Hotel Wellington, a Belle Epoque leviathan with five hundred rooms, curly iron balconies, and an almost industrial number of huge geraniums at each window—geraniums Zenin always finds himself counting and mentally trying to calculate the cost of, wholesale from the nursery. For the past twenty years, whenever Hsu sweeps through on his biannual trip to Europe, with his entourage of mistresses, secretaries, second and third in command, and lately, grown children, he pauses, between bouts of frenetic shopping at Italian designer outlets, for a few days of golf at this hotel. This place that Zenin considers the most boring and vulgar on earth—depressing too, because it looks like a retirement home, full of doddering old farts of all nationalities in navy jackets and white trousers.

  By tradition, Zenin hosts the Chinese for at least one banquet. And he has long ago stopped being amused by the efforts of the Hong Kong contingent to mask their disgust at the taste of Parmesan and mozzarella, their subdued murmurs of apprehension about the rotten fish Italians eat, not hygienically chosen live from a tank, but two or three days dead. All this a reply to the nausea of his own staff when presented with feasts of shark fin and snake and jellyfish in Shenzhen and Shanghai. And traditionally, between toasts of ludicrously overpriced Barolo and Brunello and Rémy Martin, Zenin and Hsu demonstrate their business loyalty by hamming it up like two theatrical fags. Kampai!

  Zenin knows he doesn’t have to do it. Even his patient wifely girlfriend, the antique dealer from Verona, refuses to attend these gatherings, though she does guide the Chinese wives and mistresses on shopping sprees in Milan and Paris. But dozens of successful joint ventures that have earned Zenin the title of il nuovo Marco Polo—the new Marco Polo—in the business press have won Zenin’s loyalty over twenty-five years and he caters to Hsu the way he’d never cater to a friend or a lover. Besides, he likes the old son of a bitch. The Chinese is the same age as he is but looks much younger—with his elevator shoes, his gangsterish Armani black shirts, his sleek hair, his round, intelligent porcine face unchanged since the day they met as hungry kids with a few good ideas. And though Zenin knows that the crafty bastard has been going behind his back for years, cheating on him with the Americans among others, he still feels affection for him. Envies him, even. For the Chinese, besides being fitter—he swims a mile every morning—seems to have settled tranquilly into a complex life that is an uncanny blend of tradition and mad contemporaneity. He enjoys his money, his vulgar hotels and clothes, his mistresses—who get younger and younger every year—and a vast family of siblings, children, and in-laws ruled by Hsu’s mother, who back in Hong Kong still cooks his morning congee.

  Now Hsu’s astute, slightly swollen eyes study Zenin. More white hairs, my old friend, he says. Maybe you are worried about your family.

  Zenin conceals his annoyance. Tell me your secret, he says.

  Me? I have no secret. I keep my wife and change girlfriends all the time. He indicates his latest mistress, a lanky twenty-year-old covered in Gucci. Pretty, isn’t she? But there is one thing. I choose them always from my province. That way they understand me, my food, my wife when she talks, my mother also. We respect each other, and we don’t waste time. Perhaps that is the secret. Don’t waste time on strange girls.

  Zenin works up a smile and grabs his glass for another toast. Brandon, my precious, I learned that the hard way a long time ago.

  1985–86 • TRICKED

  In some ways Zenin hates women.

  He especially hates it when they have their periods, the way it is with all his sisters in the old house in Boara. The atmosphere of mass secrecy—they all bleed at the same time—the suppressed moaning and groaning, martyred pale faces, stink of bodies and flux, stained cloths discreetly hung up to dry, the weird sense of occult power, a lunar army arrayed against him.

  He hates certain things about his mother, her peasant face with its burst veins, her flinty eyes when she talks about quella bestia del tuo papà—your animal of a father.

  He finds he hates his ex-wife Cecilia most of all when she talks about her love of French literature, which she sums up in an adoration of Le petit prince. Which in a sentimental voice she calls il mio petit prince—my petit prince.

  He doesn’t hate his two daughters but doesn’t know what to do with them, whiny and reproachful even when they were small.

  He hates, without knowing it, all beautiful girls for making him want them.

  He hates secretaries and factory girls who get loud and drunk in pizzerias and bars on International Women’s Day.

  He hates many different women in many different ways, but rarely has he hated women in general as profoundly as when that nice girl Tere got herself pregnant with his son.

  That’s how he thinks of it: as almost an immaculate conception. The pleasure he finds in his brief relationship with Tere has been social, the comfort of feeling the approval of all of his friends, his family, the relaxing feeling of being a good fellow. He’s entertained by the fact that she is one of those upper-middle-class Friuli girls with low hairlines and greenish eyes that watch you as attentively as a cat. Not gorgeous, but good-looking. He likes it that she’s educated but tells jokes in dialect, knows her way around the stadium, how to talk to a maid, and what the right texture of baccalà mantecato is. He likes her streak of bourgeois slyness.

  So he’s outraged when it is used against him. The oldest dirty trick in the book, he thinks, regarding her with slowly increasing rage and incredulity until, red-eyed and sniveling, she confesses. And that yes, it is true that she lied when she said she was taking birth control pills. But it is a lie that grew out of the fact that she adores him. Another lie, he knows, in which he can hear the massed chorus of women’s voices—his mother, her mother, his sisters, all the women in the city, all the respectable women in the world who have been in on the plot to get him back in harness. To get him married again, to this girl who did of course use a trollop’s trick, but one every Italian mother knows is allowable in the case of a very difficult, very rich man. And Tere isn’t a secretary or a model, but a nice girl from a good family.

  He stands staring at her tearful face above an absurd reindeer-print sweater—they’ve been skiing at his house in the Dolomites, decorated by his ex-wife in Tyrolean flounces. It is New Year’s Day, and he realized the night before, celebrating in a mountain refuge with the usual group of friends, that he is getting sick of her. Now he wishes he’d shoved her off a glacier. Kill all these puttane, he thinks, baffled by his own stupidity, which had plopped him in the center of a traditionally undistinguished group, worse than cuckolds. Coglioni. Dickheads. Dupes.

  BRANDON HSU

  My old friend and partner Zenin is the one white man I know who does business like the Chinese. But he has never enjoyed life.

  TERE’S MOTHER

  I told the poor girl to be strong, to wait, to pray and be patient and that rascal would come around. No one, not even the devil himself, can resist a baby.

  13

  MIRA

  2005 • BAG BOY

  High noon in the supermarket parking lot, and Mira stands chatting with the toothless Moroccan boy who’s helping her with the bags. Part of the gang of North Africans who hang out near the island of mock America—Blockbuster, Media World, McDonald’s, acres of Japanese cars—set here on the Piedmont plain in view of the Alps. He says he’s sixteen, though she doesn’t believe it, and he’s not really toothless; just his upper front teeth are rotted down to the gums. His name is Bakhid, and every time he sees her, he demands a cellphone.

  You should be thinking about school, Bakhid. Not phones.

  Vado a scuola. A volte. I go to school sometimes, he says, flashing those pitiful teeth at her in an Artful Dodger grin. And Mira sees from the still babyish contours of his face under the
pimply malnourished skin that he is probably about twelve. She wants to take him home and wash him and raise him with her sons. She feels a pang when she sees him hoist the plastic grocery bags bulging with cereals and mini-mozzarellas and the fruits and vegetables he needs. Once he laughed as he helped her load a pumpkin, and said that back in his village his mother cooks it with couscous.

  She pays him triple, three euros instead of one, and in his presence feels personally responsible for American foreign policy. But he and his little band of ragamuffin friends always flash her a thumbs-up and call out, USA bravo!

  Don’t sentimentalize those boys, her brother-in-law, a Lega Padana conservative, tells her. They are part of an invading immigrant army that little by little is colonizing Italy. The new Muslim state, that’s us. Free health care, welfare, education, protection from the law—the fools down in Rome treat them better than Italians. One day we’ll wake up to muezzins in St. Peter’s.

  Study hard, Bakhid, says Mira, giving him the coins, and noticing that he is wearing a grubby Juventus soccer shirt and a pair of Reeboks.

  Ciao, Signora America! he says cheerfully, grabbing the shopping cart and skidding off with it like a scooter. Next time the cellphone, okay?

  1986 • MOVIES

  Once in a while, Mira watches old movies on Italian television at nine in the morning. It’s her little secret, her willful dissipation of some of the hours she reserves so carefully for writing. Nick leaves for the office, Tree, the Filipina housekeeper, wheels young Maddie off to the street markets or the park, and Mira turns on the computer, glances at the article in progress, and then drifts out of the study, coffee mug in hand, to sit in front of the television, a portal. Still foggy from interrupted nights with the baby, she steps into the gray-and-black world of early Fellini and Rossellini and a dozen minor directors, whose scrambling creativity and inspired use of scanty resources shine through sentimental plots and stock dialogue as records of an age when the gods of cinema walked the soundstages of Cinecittà. Films from the fifties so un-Hollywood, so embarrassingly old-fashioned to Italians that they appear only on television, only at this godless hour. She sits cross-legged on the rug, too close to the screen, feeling the images flowing through the dark rambling apartment, illuminating its gilded beams and tarnished mirrors and claw-footed furniture; flowing into the morning city outside, so that Rome itself takes on the attributes of the film characters: the architectural shadows under Anna Magnani’s eyes, Alberto Sordi’s baroque nose, the flat white oracular mask that is Totò’s face.

  One morning she watches a melancholy Cinderella tale: a young shopgirl freshly arrived in Rome from a poor Veneto village takes a walk one night and meets a young Roman count who writes poetry in a wing of his family’s decayed palazzo. He falls madly in love with her innocent beauty, and she comes to live with him. But the idyll wanes as the girl learns to move in high society, and finally, greedy for more than poetry, she runs off with his playboy friend. The movie, full of dusty half-light, cathedral bells, and the bare despoiled piazzas of the postwar era, is called L’amore a Roma—Love in Rome.

  When Mira sees it she knows it’s a sign she will hear from Zenin again, and a few weeks later, he calls. It is a gray April morning, the air pressing down over the city, and she has abandoned work to watch a Don Camillo movie. Don Camillo has won a skirmish with his old foe, the Communist mayor of the village, and is taking off his cassock for a celebratory swim in the river, when the phone rings.

  Don’t hang up on me, Zenin says.

  She hasn’t spoken to him for a over a year, since before Maddie was born. He called one morning and Mira said that she was pregnant, that she was very happy, and that she never wanted him to call her again. And she hung up the phone, as she had always wanted to do with Zenin. Feeling strong, pleased with herself, wondering at the ease of sealing off that underground passage.

  And as the hectic, absorbing months pass that transform first her body and then her whole pattern of life, as she undergoes the dazzling recognition, studying her daughter’s small perfect face, that a newborn child is yet another occasion to fall in love, as she and Nick fumble through the domestic alarums, the conventional terrors, the rituals of feeding and care, and take Maddie out into the city to the rambunctious chorus of admiration with which Romans greet babies, Mira has hardly any time to note a strange absence at the edge of her thoughts. A tiny indefinable lack. Like an almost invisible black spot at the corner of her vision. Or a pinhole that lets darkness leak in.

  She begins to feel it only when she gets back to work again and begins her clandestine mornings with the movies. And when she notices, it spreads like an inkblot. Not regret for Zenin, exactly—more regret for the fact of Zenin. An odd kind of nostalgia for things that never happened, for a presence that, like these old movies, opens a door on another dimension. A place where late-night footsteps echo in foreign streets and you hold your breath, perishing to know what comes next.

  And when he calls this morning, she clutches the phone with a peculiarly feminine feeling of triumph.

  Ho detto di non chiamarmi, she says, feeling each hard word on her lips, distinct as a subtitle. I said not to call me.

  Please don’t hang up. Please. Zenin has abandoned his faintly risible English and speaks to her in Italian.

  Mira is silent, but the silence is acquiescent, expectancy hanging in the air like the clouds hanging over the domes and belfrys of the city. She realizes that her breath is shallow, as if she’s been running. That she feels more awake than she’s felt for months. That she loves hearing him beg.

  I’m in Rome, says Zenin. I have to see you. I came only for you. Have lunch with me. Please don’t say no.

  On the television screen, Don Camillo leads a heroic village force to sandbag the levees of the surging Po River, his cassock sleeves rolled up to show off his muscular forearms, as the soundtrack blares hysterical neorealist music. But to Mira the music sounds like a pennywhistle. She has plunged into a different plot, one where a woman puts on a black dress—a black linen dress designed to show that she is sophisticated, a foreigner who at last has learned how to dress like an Italian, just as she has learned the idiom—and strolls out into the Roman crowds, where men turn to look at her. To have lunch in a restaurant that smells of money with a man whose eyes look dead but ask the kind of question that sets her blood tearing through her veins. The only question worth answering: What can happen?

  All right, says Mira. I’ll come. Once, and then never again.

  BAKHID

  The American lady looks like somebody from my country but she drives a fat shiny jeep like all the Italians and she talks like the ladies from the Servizi Sociali. Study, study, and then we have to memorize the poem “Quant’è bella la margherita,” but they don’t understand we are men already, we know sharia law and about the da’wa. And we know Italian: va’a fa’nculo, stronzo, puttana. The American gives more money than the others, but Raschid gets it. We hide coins in our shoes, in the sides of our cheeks, even up our asses, but that shark gets it all every time, he goes through us like a rake in the back of the truck when he picks us up at the parking lot every night. Balanaye, Sermata! he says. You little turds chat rubbish to me and you’ll find my fist so far up your ass I’ll wave hello out of your mouth, and there goes your permesso di soggiorno. Raschid is my cousin from Essaouira and has a room near Porta Palazzo where we all sleep, eleven or twelve of us, and shoot out the door if the questura police come in the courtyard. Below is the phone center where all the stranieri—the foreigners—Albanians, Romanians, Moldavians, those black Ivory Coast ajam, and the Chinese, everybody lines up to call international in the booths, but we don’t have money. If I had a cellphone I’d get a special card to talk to my mother and sisters. I’d be a big man with my friends if I had a phone, and I’d find a way to hide it from Raschid.

  14

  NICK

  2005 • OUTDATED

  You know, New York is dating badly, says Nick to his cou
sin Garcia. The two are eating brunch outdoors at the corner of Houston and West streets, gazing across the cobblestones at the SoHo Club, where even on Sunday at noon a couple of limos wait glistening like beached whales in the sun of one of those overheated Manhattan spring days when downtown girls roll up their capris to toast their moon-white knees.

  Typical expat pontification, says his cousin, wrinkling up her choirboy’s face, which has retained its freshness below her graying crew cut. Garcia is a nickname for Grace, a closet Deadhead who edits a children’s magazine, who is the closest thing Nick has to a sister. Now she scarfs a huge piece of his blueberry muffin.

  Although, she adds, Gertrude Stein once wrote that America is the oldest country in the world. But perhaps you would like to explicate, Mr. Fitzgerald, or Mr. Eliot, or is it Mr. James?

  There’s nothing to explain. Every time I come for work or play I realize it bores the crap out of me.

  Sounds like you’re the dated one, my boy. Perhaps it’s time to check testosterone levels.

  Fuck off, Garcia. Nick, grumpy from jet lag and nonstop meetings, wouldn’t take this shit from anyone but Garcia, who’s been a confidant ever since they were thirteen and used to sit out in a dinghy all summer in Maine arguing about the juxtaposition of Sartre and Joe Orton in the lyrics of Adam Ant.

  No, no—he goes on. I was thinking about it as I walked down Sixth Avenue to get here. Sun on brick. Stasis. Deserted shop fronts. It was like a museum piece. It was—quaint. And not just Sunday morning. I feel it even when I’m working. A kind of ongoing nostalgia. Frozen in time. Like stepping into a Hopper painting.

  And London is so exquisitely vibrant, right? Garcia’s tone is defensive, as if she intuits that Nick sees her as another New York museum piece, the trustafarian editor living at Pitt and Delancey with her obese lover, Carol, and two herniated cats. She straightens her Ozzfest T-shirt, which has a cleverly mended tear on the sleeve, and Nick remembers how, back in her thirties, her goth phase seemed to drag on forever. He doesn’t quote to her what an English art critic said about Hopper: that Hopper created a new type of pictorial heroism, the heroism of failure. “At some point in its cultural stalling, the world began to confuse inertia, impotence, poky hotel rooms and losers with things to look up to. A world view made and exported from America.”