Lost Hearts in Italy

by Andrea Lee

  But now the old woman plays at flattering Nick. You make me think of a Wagnerian hero. That high forehead of a preux chevalier. Or perhaps young Lochinvar. You came out of the West. Her English is perfect, and she is charmed when Nick, the teacher’s pet, supplies the next line of the poem. They sip weak tea and eat tiny stale rounds of pizza bianca, and in Roman dialect she remarks to Lodovico that this is the first friend he has brought her who has any charm.

  All this goes to Nick’s head more than if she were gorgeous and young. She knows New England well and had a fourth cousin who married a Lodge. She asks about Nick’s wife, and the yellow eyes grow piercing when Nick explains that Mira is African American. Avevi proprio bisogno di sposarla, figlio mio? Forgive an old woman’s bluntness, but did you really need to marry her? My brother certainly didn’t marry every pretty black piece he came across in Abyssinia. But Americans are different, and I’m sure she worships you.

  Lodovico gives a bray of laughter. No, he worships her!

  The princess does not seem to change expression, but wrinkles fan out suddenly around her heavy eyebrows. They tell me my advice is worth something, and I’m going to give you some. It is this: Never worship your wife. Here in Rome, we know that marriage, like everything else, is a game of power. Take it seriously, and arrange, with constant vigilance, to have the power, or she’ll make a fool of you. È sei troppo bello per giocare al cornuto contento—you’re too good-looking to play the happy cuckold.

  Afterward, when Nick has been warned by several Italian and foreign friends about the princess’s propensity for picking up well-bred young foreigners for use in her real estate maneuverings—she owns hundreds of apartments and thousands of acres in Lazio and Tuscany—after she has urged him to return for tea and given him the freedom of the family archive, he wonders how he sat there and let her say those things. But she says them with a mixture of mischief and genuine ribald goodwill, smiling at him with teeth as crooked and brown as those of the old vegetable vendor. As if she likes him and is telling the truth as near as she can come to it. Which, it turns out, she is.

  PRINCIPESSA CAETANAE

  A very pretty boy, and not stupid either. Just ten or fifteen years ago, I would have taken him from that wife of his and made something out of him. But I’m too old for lovers now, and entre nous, breeding Jack Russell terriers is more amusing than breaking in a protégé in bianco—without going to bed with him. So let him go. What eyes and shoulders, though—makes that fool Lodovico look like the inbred scarecrow that he is.

  18

  ZENIN

  2005 • ON THE BEACH

  Tropical Zenin, shaded by palm fronds, roasted by equatorial sun, wearing baggy pink hibiscus-print shorts, learns of the death of the old princess several days late, in one of the starched array of Italian newspapers handed him with morning coffee and a theatrical salaam by an attendant in a fez who speaks with a suspiciously Neapolitan accent.

  He is vacationing in a famous Indian Ocean hotel, palatially thatched, redolent of ylang-ylang, its pools and beach dotted with Russian billionaires and a few movie stars. Pissed off because he was bullied into coming here by his girlfriend, Mariella, instead of staying comfortably on his boat in the Balearics. And because he has found himself in that most horrific of situations, the August hotel vacation with middle-aged friends. While the wives—most of them old trouts hardly fit for bathing suits—go on cultural outings to Arab ruins and spend endless hours in esoteric spa treatments, the husbands go deep-sea fishing, play scopone, discuss Viagra, and eye the girls on the beach. Zenin is irritated that the Russian tycoons—most of whom look like kids, and who could buy and sell him—have wives or resident whores who are infinitely better-looking than Mariella. She’s gotten leathery and bores the tits off him by rattling on about the Dalai Lama.

  And the combination of mangoes and too much seafood gives him the runs.

  His mood isn’t improved by the news. He knew the old girl from Cortina, where she had a Hapsburgian chalet—kitschy furniture made out of antlers, with polychrome ceilings transferred from a defunct family castle. She was a horrific snob but, like many aristocrats from threadbare families, no slouch when it came to latching onto money. You had to respect that. It had even flattered him when she cultivated his acquaintance to push a few dodgy real estate deals in Rome and Sardinia, deals of staggering size and ineptitude that he quickly figured out had to do with the political tentacles of Fininvest and the tanned, smiling dwarf Berlusconi.

  She’d even placed a few of her ugly nieces in his path—an enormous honor—hinting that she’d be able to overlook his low birth and divorce and pull Vatican strings for an annulment. That failing, she had been kind about his son, Daniele, when news of the boy’s birth was choice gossip among Zenin’s friends. No, he’d liked her—that eagle’s face, the hooded eyes that went straight through you and could turn opaque and impudent like a street urchin’s, that steely flirtatiousness that could, without warning, loose a gust of invective in dialect. She was Rome itself, high and low.

  He throws down the paper and stares out past the wicker lounges and tall wooden statues, past the bougainville, the huge blue-and-white umbrellas, and the bronzed bathers on the sugar-white expanse of beach and the blank tropical sea. A little Mauritian girl in a ruffled nylon dress, one of the few locals who occasionally slip past the hotel guards, runs by and glances at him with a face that shocks him with its beauty. A black angel, who for some reason makes him think of the princess, of his dying sister, of time he is losing or has lost. I want, thinks Zenin, to go home. What the fuck am I waiting for? He picks up his cellphone and punches a number.

  1986 • REVELATIONS

  I have to tell you something, Zenin says to Mira.

  They met in the late morning, went immediately to bed, and now are eating lunch at the Casino Valadier. The ornate Belle Epoque pavilion with its well-heeled vulgar clientele ignoring the city view, like Mira and Zenin, from adulterers’ camouflage among potted palms. Prices like the worst tourist trap, yet decent food. Mira and Zenin have discovered a shared passion for fish, and years later the older Mira will wonder how an illicit romance could have been constructed on mountains of fried sardines.

  What do you need to confess? That you’re married too?

  Mira is wearing a white dress that looks cheap to Zenin—he will, he thinks, have to buy her some proper clothes—but that shows off her figure. She is smiling, at the high tide of any happiness she’ll ever have with Zenin, desiring, desired, but still detached. Believing that she can pick up this mystery in her hand and put it down when she likes, unscathed. But now Zenin takes the first step toward changing it all.

  No, married is one thing I am not. But I have a child.

  I knew that. Two girls, at university, aren’t they?

  No, I mean a young child. A boy just a little older than your daughter. A year and six months.

  She puts down her fork. How can that be?

  He shrugs. A girl I met about the same time I met you. Italian, of course. A professor’s daughter from Udine.

  He is staring at her arms as he tells the story, at her long bones and tender skin that call up all the fascination of the body that he has possessed in many positions and will soon possess again. Half distracted, he lays aside his usual caution and sketches for her the fights, the hysterics, the family councils, the bribes.

  I offered her a million dollars to have an abortion, he says, forgetting himself. His face is suffused with a dull flush. But she knew better, bargained on the fact that I’d fall in love with the boy. And I did.

  Is he beautiful?

  Beautiful. A midget with his hair cut down to zero, running and laughing…

  Mira says all the right things, how wonderful it is for Zenin, describes the passion she feels for that darting spark of life, her own daughter, Maddie. Disconcerted, she resorts to a feminine social manner, a ladylike enthusiasm that she has never used before in her life. Then asks carefully if the boy and his mothe
r live with Zenin.

  He gives a harsh laugh. No, I bought them a house in their own city, in Udine. They are very well taken care of.

  And the mother, what is she to you?

  To me she is like an ex-wife, someone I have no interest in. But naturally she wants nothing more than to marry me.

  And will you?

  I would never marry her. Never. Zenin’s eyes blaze coldly. She tricked me, and that would mean that she had won.

  Well. They stare at each other over melting glasses of sgroppino, lemon ice whipped with vodka, that the waiter has placed in front of them. The nearly empty restaurant with its tarnished fin de siècle frivolity seems to have expanded around their two small figures like a big pink balloon.

  Zenin feels obscurely relieved. Yet he has not added an important fact, for the simple reason that he is not aware of it. It is that the strange bitter-edged belated passion he feels for his infant son has a counterpart in the growing possessiveness he feels for Mira.

  As for Mira, she feels as she used to when she was small on summer afternoons back in Philadelphia, when masses of electricity rolled in clouds overhead. The devil is moving his furniture, the devil is beating his wife, her parents would say. The sense of huge domestic motions in a gigantic occult world. She cannot grasp the ins and outs of risk and vendetta in what she has heard. How a man and a woman could bargain over a child’s life. She has not had time to wonder yet what connection it all has to her. Yet she understands instinctively that such information contaminates.

  Zenin reads it in her eyes and it excites him. Let’s go back to the hotel, he says. There’s still time.

  HONORINE—THE LITTLE MAURITIAN GIRL ON THE BEACH

  Maman m’a dit jamais aller sur la plage près de l’hôtel à Fosse des Biches. My mother said never walk on the hotel beach near the tourists because the guards will chase me and the wasa, the foreigners, are the kind that do bad things to little black girls. But Laurencine and Saida and I sneak in anyway and ask for bonbons, and sometimes they give them to us because they are very rich. But this man looks old and very sad and not the kind who gives candy, and he looks at me in a hungry way that makes me afraid that he might steal or even try to eat me up, so I pick up my feet and dash along in the water and don’t stop until I’m near the rocks at Baie de la Cratère even though the new dress is all wet.

  19

  MIRA

  2005 • THANKS

  We have a ninety-six-year-old woman here, Mira tells the emergency-room receptionist. We think she’s had a seizure. We’ve been waiting nearly forty minutes.

  Keeping her bootless rage in check as the nurse presents one insurance form after another. Resisting the urge to scream about the barbarism of this bureaucracy compared to Italy or any place else with decent public health care.

  It’s late Thanksgiving night in Philadelphia, cold and gusty with dervishes of leaves in the streets, cloud wrack racing over stars. Mira and the boys have flown over from Turin and Maddie has come from Boston for a family reunion at Mira’s sister’s, Faith’s, house in Mount Airy. And as happens once or twice in every family, the feast has finished up in the hospital. Great-aunt Sissie got dizzy after the pumpkin pie. It sounds, thinks Mira, like a bad television script. But families are bad scripts. And welcome back home.

  Leaning on Faith’s shoulder, the old woman’s puckered face looks yellow-green under the wincing fluorescent lights, her white hair so carefully styled at the beginning of the evening now standing on end like stiff flames. The pleated wool skirt of her suit rucked up to show a Chantilly-lace border on a satin slip. Tall, withered, and spotted, but unbent by age, with a peremptory Tidewater voice, Aunt Sissie is a preacher’s daughter from Suffolk, Virginia. A former belle at Spelman who, like so many women in Mira’s family, went on to teach elementary school. But Sissie’s epic career spanned the exodus of Jews and Italians from Philadelphia’s row-house neighborhoods, postwar black migration, urban decay, and gentrification. She began with McGuffey readers and ended with Sesame Street.

  Like some fabulous old tree in a shrinking forest, she has outlived Faith and Mira’s parents, is in fact the last of the southern-born throng of ancient female relatives who loomed so large at childhood holiday tables that Faith and Mira privately referred to them as Aunthenge.

  I wet myself, Sissie murmurs now to her grandnieces, stretched on a gurney in the little observation room as shiny and bleak as a supermarket. I’m so ashamed, she adds in a whisper. And Mira’s heart turns over. The only thing she can think to do is to grasp Sissie’s hand—exactly, she realizes too late, as she used to do when she was little and wanted comfort herself.

  But Faith speaks up. Don’t you be ashamed, she says in the empowering tone she has developed as assistant head and director of diversity studies at a girls private day school. Then adds with just the right therapeutic hint of provocation, You changed our diapers and wiped our asses when we were babies too many times to be embarrassed about a little piss now.

  Aunt Sissie rallies enough to give a thread of a laugh and tell Faith to watch her language. And Mira looks with her usual grudging respect at her handsome sister, two years older and of course ever worthy in a crisis. You can see it in her neatly cropped graying hair, her combination of African jewelry and suburban cashmere, her general head-mistressy air of affirmation and substance.

  It’s hard to believe that when Mira and Faith were little they used to pee together, sitting backed up on the same toilet seat like a pair of spoons, giggling, bodies feeling as if there were no boundary of skin between them. Sisters, dressed like twins in velveteen coats for Sunday at New African, counting each other’s mosquito bites in the lake-smelling summer darkness of the cabin down in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, stomping shoulder to shoulder in defensive formation near the bad boys’ turf of the playground at Germantown Friends.

  Sisters. And like all pairs of sisters, with that curious distinction of chosen territories: the mappa mundi boundary drawn between the civilized world of the responsible sister and the “here be dragons” realm of the sister who wanders off.

  Mira stopped confiding in Faith when she was about nine and realized that every secret flowed through a permeable membrane in Faith and ended up with their mother. And that Faith thought this was the natural order of things.

  Faith went to Penn, married the son of family friends, and settled in a fieldstone Colonial just six blocks from the house where she and Mira grew up. Nowadays she arrives on trips to Italy knowing the exact layout of Chianti country, armed with floor plans of art galleries and lists of vintages to acquire.

  But Faith doesn’t cook, that’s a comfort, thinks Mira. Something in her sister’s idiosyncratic interpretation of feminism has kept her from following the Ward maternal tradition of working all day and sweating nobly over a fragrant stove all evening. Thanksgiving in her grand fire-lit dining room, with frozen supermarket turkey, greens, and succotash sent in from some neo soul-food caterer, is the usual anticlimax, superimposed on memories of the epic feasts the Aunthenge collective used to start preparing in September. As usual, Faith’s husband, Raymond—an attorney who looks like Malcolm X but is actually a proselytizing Republican—needles Mira about politics. When Mira praises the rainbow peace banners displayed in Rome, Turin, and Milan, he gulps his pie and says, Honey, you stopped being black a long time ago. You going to stop being American now?

  Up yours, Ray, says Mira. Mildly, because they have this argument every year.

  Just then, slowly and heavily, Aunt Sissie slumps sideways in her chair.

  Now Mira and Faith pass the usual hospital vigil, in garishly lit intimacy, the old woman dozing in between scans and incursions of nurses and irritable young doctors on holiday call.

  The two sisters developed a choreographed expertise at being in hospitals together five years before, when their mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Faith is provident, magisterial, and Mira imitates Faith. They take turns moving into and out of the room, calling Faith
’s house to give updates to Raymond, and overseas to Vanni, and checking on the children. The hospital is in Chestnut Hill, and Mira imagines the November wind tossing the oaks and beeches of the surrounding estates of the rich, whirling trash in the North Philadelphia slums, sweeping over the Atlantic coast, the mountains, the prairies, the whole vast slumbering country that still smells of roast turkey. Raking the cold sky where dawn is drifting eastward from Italy. Mira feels homesick for Vanni, for the warmth of their bed, for the creaks and chill and wood-smoke smell of the old villa above Turin. Strange to feel homesick in the place where you were born.

  Aunt Sissie falls asleep, and Faith describes in an undertone how the old woman constantly forgets her medication and refuses assisted care. She’s as stubborn as a mule. Worse than Mom was. I stop by every day, but sometimes I miss something.

  Faith, I can’t even think of the right way to thank you for everything you’ve done for Sissie. And that goes for Mom, too.

  Faith looks more irritated than pleased. I don’t need any thanks, she says, fiddling with an earring. I just do what there is to do. Because some people go away, and some stay and cope. Oh, that came out wrong, Mir. I mean that I’m the one who lives here, and you—