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Lost Hearts in Italy

Page 21

by Andrea Lee


  So many ways to lose a son: to war, to a freak accident, to a drunken skid on the road returning from a country disco late at night. To heroin, scourge of rich Italian kids. So many ways, also, to lose one’s own life: from a heart attack to cancer to the slow rot that is called healthy old age. Zenin stares again at the kids in the front of the congregation and feels a shudder of possessive love and desolate apprehension that he has never felt for anyone else. And his son will never know how he has mastered his father’s heart.

  Meanwhile, the five coffins are carried out of the church, and as they make their last journey something like a swell of unanimity passes through the crowd, something far stronger than the response evoked by the cardinal. The mood, the shared certainty beyond grief that for a moment unites the people at the funeral is this: the superstitious emotion of a small city, rooted in time and place, toward those who dreamed, as everyone in the provinces does, of leaving and going to the remotest corners of the world; and how it was the foreignness of the place, more than chance or destiny or divine whim, that cast them out of the sky. It was the strangeness that destroyed them.

  1987 • SNAPSHOTS

  Mira is spending the weekend at Zenin’s house, and she and Zenin are about to drive to Venice for a lunch of crab—the famous Adriatic moeche, in season just now—at the tiny nameless restaurant on the island of San Pietro in Volta.

  And Zenin catches a flash of a photograph as Mira closes her handbag. He takes the bag from her, opens it, and finds two snapshots of his son that he keeps in his bureau drawer. Daniele on miniature skis, screaming with delight; on the beach at Porto Cervo, staring solemnly into the camera.

  A mixture of rage and fear sweeps through Zenin. What are you doing? he demands. What is this?

  Mira wilts. I just wanted to look at him. Your son. He’s darling, beautiful. I wanted to take a good look, calmly. I was going to put them back. She says this in a warm insincere voice that she has never used with Zenin before.

  Zenin takes the snapshots away from her and puts them back in his drawer without saying anything else. He is infuriated with Mira for prying—a feminine failing he thought an American writer would be too sophisticated and intellectual to possess. Most of all, though, he is surprised at his own new vision of her as a menace. As if she might have stolen the snapshots for purposes of kidnapping or black magic.

  It reminds him of that terrifying American movie he saw a year or two back, Attrazione fatale, with that sexy blond actress who turns into a monster, confirming all of Zenin’s fears.

  There’s no doubt that Mira is now a problem. She is good-looking enough—seems to have gotten better-looking through all the fuss of the last six months since she left her fool of a husband. Though these days she overdresses, he thinks irritably, always in designer skirts and dresses, not understanding the way an Italian girl can wear jeans on a weekend and look elegant.

  As they leave the car in the parking garage in Piazzale Roma, as they take the water taxi out to the bare anchorite’s rock that is San Pietro, as they sit eating at one of the five tables lit by the pewter sheen of the cloudy Adriatic sky, men look at her. Porters, waiters, fishermen, tourists, yachtsmen he knows who are out for a Saturday afternoon jaunt with their girlfriends.

  She is still desirable, then, still an asset, and fucks better than any girl he’s ever come across. But there is the matter of the power shift that occurs when mistresses run off and leave their husbands.

  The snapshot episode is just the latest step in a farcical situation evolving in Zenin’s house. Where Mira arrives from Rome on weekends and Tere comes to visit with his son during the week, and where the two women have embarked on a clandestine war of espionage, each interrogating the household staff and poking in closets. Moreover, gossip is flashing through the city about his affair with an American gold digger.

  Though Zenin realizes he created the situation, he vaguely blames Mira for it.

  Because it’s mystifying, this bizarre American ease in transferring a life to another country, in unmarrying oneself, which, in light of the lingering fuss over his own divorce, seems to him almost indecent.

  Cautious as usual, Zenin would not be surprised to be confronted with a pair of American gangster brothers or a crazed father, brandishing a hillbilly shotgun to defend Mira’s honor. Or to find out that the husband has been playing a deep game of lying low to make his vendetta more of a surprise. It has crossed his mind that perhaps some sort of legal or financial scam is in the works.

  Yet apparently it isn’t. How can a husband just step back and let his wife go?

  The whole thing is eerily convenient for Zenin, who finds himself nonetheless wondering whether Mira can be a respectable girl if there is no one to fight for her. And she hasn’t come to ask him for money, though he has already mentally sketched out an appropriate settlement.

  The moment is arriving, he thinks, when things will have to be put in order.

  After their crabs and pasta with razor clams, they eat vanilla ice cream with black coffee poured over it. And look at each other.

  Mira says that she borrowed the pictures of his son because she wants to know more about Zenin’s life. And, because she adds slowly, as Zenin knows, her daughter, Maddie, is the same age. And she misses the little girl dreadfully during the days the child spends with Nick.

  Ma quanto hai sacrificato per me, says Zenin, squeezing her hand across the table. You’ve sacrificed so much for me. He tries to say it playfully, affectionately, to lighten the atmosphere as they sit in the dingy little restaurant looking out over the afternoon expanse of sea toward Croatia.

  È vero, says Mira, her face unreadable. It’s true.

  Zenin, waiting for the check, looking forward to an afternoon in bed with her, feels oddly grateful to Mira for saying it so quietly. An Italian girl would have sobbed it or screamed it.

  LIBERA

  I’ve been guardarobiera—laundress and person in charge of linens and wardrobe—for dottore Zenin for close to fifteen years, and I’ve seen a lot of women come and go, but never anything like this. What goes on in this house nowadays is like an Alberto Sordi movie or one of those old five-lire dancing and singing shows that used to travel around the Triveneto after the war. With the wife and the lover in and out of the closets, over and under the bed, chasing, chasing, until everybody goes crazy. But here, who can tell who should be the wife and who’s the lover? Make up the pink room for Signora Tere and the Signorino, then clear the room, change the towels for Signora Mira, divide up the clothes that both women left to be laundered. And both of them, La Tere and L’Americana, come to me with big tips and try to find out what is going on, something the dottore tells us strictly not to say. Jobs aren’t so easy to come by these days, not with all the Romanians and Peruvians stealing the work. So I keep quiet and watch the show. The little boy’s a darling innocent, and the two women are both decent girls, just both a little crazy about the dottore. It’s his fault, of course. Like all rich men he thinks the sun shines out of his ass.

  31

  MIRA

  2005 • A FAMILY TRIP

  Mira writes in her journal:

  Rome, this weekend, the first time in so many years. An official family trip, Vanni and the boys in tow. It’s all prompted by the shameful fact that Stefano and Zoo, at nine and seven, have visited Beijing and Nairobi and Orlando and New York, but never the grand capital of half of their ancestors, the birthplace of their sister Maddie. We’ve come through the airport countless times, on our way home to Turin from somewhere else. We’ve heard the Roman accents, and glimpsed as we landed the insinuating faded colors of the Lazio countryside. And once I flew in to interview a Roman leftist filmmaker who has one of those beautiful sixties apostolic faces, and who spoke, as all leftists do, with nostalgia for his comfortable middle-class childhood. After the interview, I ate a chocolate tartufo at Tre Scalini like a tourist, and then fled in a taxi. Rejecting the spell of Rome like an offered garment.

  But yeste
rday I stood giggling with Stefano and Zoo in a line full of Japanese and American tourists whose digital cameras flashed like heat lightning in the gloomy loggia of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, as each person went up and put his hand in the ice-cold stone slot that is the Bocca della Verità. The mouth of Truth. A mask of Hercules so degraded by time that it resembles, as Stefano remarked, nothing so much as a great big leering pizza. So great big overwrought heroic ideas are worn down over time into popular fare. The other tourists were determinedly grinning and posing for photos as if they might need proof of truthfulness for some document. Everybody but the boys and me. We hadn’t even brought a camera. We just laughed and stuck our hands for fun into that big unwelcoming mouth that not even the touch of a thousand palms can warm. And I wondered at the strange vulgar indifference of that great stone face, as my two skinny sons with their ruddy cheeks clowned around in front of it. I thought, Should I be scared for them?

  Vanni, scorning the plebeian line, waited in the rental car. With his Corriere della Sera propped in front of his handsome face with its heavy saturnine lines, he projected as always a sense of composure, maturity, a benign Mediterranean darkness. Though he comes from Turin, he has his own past in Rome, where he lived as a child and then as a university student. So he bored us by taking us through mustard-colored bourgeois neighborhoods, showing us the neighborhood bar where his buddies met on their motorbikes, the old school whose Fascist architecture is now covered with graffiti, the aristocratic gardens filled with generations of cats, the Belle Epoque apartment where he’d sneak in through the window of a girl named Matilda…. It made me happy to underline what I already knew, that my past in Rome is one of as many as there are pores in a coral reef.

  Z and S raced their father around the side of the Colosseum. Father and sons had a real test of their agility in making their way among the mountebanks, the fake Roman soldiers in their plastic armor, the Indian souvenir vendors, the school groups, the lovers, the massed Polish and Chinese tour groups. Seeing the three of them disappearing and reappearing in the crowd ahead gave me a sense of security.

  I walked behind, my feet fitting themselves to the familiar irregularity of the old stones. I noticed—as I never did when I was younger and more easily awed, and this scene was part of my daily landscape—that the color of the ruins is weathered into a soft organic hue that runs from living gray, to a tawny lion color, to deep ocher red. And the decayed edges of the monuments looked like wounds. Huge extravagant wounds. On this trip I have to admit that something happened: for the first time I looked on Rome with a certain compassion and fellowship, as a city maimed by time.

  1987 • UNFORESEEN

  Nick is the first one to realize that Mira is pregnant. Not even she knows it yet.

  One Sunday morning they are standing watching their daughter in the play garden of Villa Borghese. Not too close beside each other, with the searing awareness of physical frontiers that only separated couples have. In the deep pine shade near the Promenade of Poets where Mira used to run at dawn, a stone’s throw from the Casino Valadier where she used to meet Zenin, not far from the underground gym where Nick demolishes other young businessmen at squash.

  Almost a year has passed since Mira moved out.

  This morning they mingle with the handsome bourgeois families of the Parioli neighborhood who are out for their ritual stroll after Mass and before Sunday lunch. Sleek mothers and fathers smoking complacently as they watch their children, overdressed in Shetland sweaters and big embroidered collars, riding the merry-go-round and swarming around the balloon seller.

  Maddie runs among the other kids, wearing a pleated red wool smock, curls flying, brandishing a balloon in the shape of a dolphin. Turning from time to time, her eyes searching out the parents who have stopped shouting at each other and now live in different houses, each of which has a room that is Maddie’s. The parents who talk about still being a family though they live apart. The parents who meet on occasional Sundays like this one to take Maddie on the bumper cars and miniature train and perhaps to eat a quick pizza at Da Romolo.

  Still a couple in the eyes of the Roman crowd, a pair of young Americans dressed with weekend sloppiness among all the elegant Italians—running shoes, jeans, Mira in an old sheepskin jacket Nick recognizes from college. Nick, who knows now that she dresses up like a high-class hooker for that rich bastard, feels she is condescending to him.

  They can’t exactly see each other, can’t exactly use their eyes. Instead, with another sense, they view the reality: two spectral silhouettes in a burning wasteland.

  They chat sporadically, toss husks of private jokes and observations about Maddie. Sometimes without realizing it they fall into their old wisecracking shorthand speech.

  That guy looks like a fish.

  So did Lenin’s girlfriend. She had a disease.

  There’s a fish-face disease?

  More of a syndrome.

  They give a simultaneous snort of laughter and then stop short. Looking off into the distance as if someone is arriving.

  And Mira at one of these forgetful moments, yawns, rubs her eyes, complains that she isn’t feeling good, nothing special, a flu perhaps.

  Maybe you’re pregnant, says Nick.

  This just pops out in what he intends to be a dry quizzical voice, the tone of a friendly but dispassionate observer. But both of them hear the spasm in his throat. And as he says it, they both know it is true. He seems to know her face, her pallor, the chemistry of her body better than she does, and recalls with instinctive precision the exact smell of her when she was expecting Maddie.

  A flush like a sudden bruise comes over Mira’s face, and she shakes her head and walks away. Leaving the words to drift after her: Not possible.

  After a minute she recovers herself, changes the subject, and calls to Maddie to come and see, that the marionette show is starting.

  Parents, grandparents, children, and dogs flock to the recorded fanfare that blares from the little stage near the belvedere. They hand ticket money to the woman with the tired Gypsy face and the bowler hat. Nick, Mira, and Maddie with them. They sit in the heart of the crowd as little Pulcinella in his papal-white robes and highwayman’s mask, with his screechy eunuch’s voice, sings out his loves and fears, rights his wrongs with a big stick. Whack, whack, whack. The children scream with delight. Even the grown-ups laugh without faking, as if they hadn’t seen it all a hundred times before. And Nick and Mira, too, forget their woes long enough to laugh, only from time to time letting their eyes drift toward the shadow of the pines beyond the stage.

  PULCINELLA

  Adesso vi dico, bambini, che questo mio nemico e molto molto furbo e cattivo. Now, I’m going to tell you children, that my enemy is very wicked and clever. So I need your help. I’m going to hide in this big pot, and when you see the devil come in and try to kiss my Colombina, shout, There he is! And what will I do? I’ll jump out with my cudgel and go Bam! Bam! Bam!

  So let’s rehearse what you have to say.

  Children: There he is!

  Pulcinella: Louder!!

  Children: There he is!

  Pulcinella: And now what do I do?

  Children: Bam! Bam! Bam!

  32

  NICK

  2005 • RELATIVITY

  Dad, asks his youngest daughter, Eliza. Is it true that I’m a little bit black?

  It’s a couple of hours after sunset on Halloween, and Nick, who is walking her through the gusty leaf-scented darkness of Cadogan Square to a party at Garden House School, gives a start as if some yobbo in an orc mask had jumped out of the bushes. No, you’re not, he says. Where’d you get that idea?

  Eliza, eight, is dressed as Wednesday, the daughter from The Addams Family, and in the street light the resemblance is unnerving—the tightly parted hair, the Victorian orphan’s dress, the ghoulish, knowing pale face. She glances up at him as the wind rattles her trick-or-treat bag.

  From Maddie, she says. When she was here this summer, she told
me and Juju she was part black. And Maddie’s our sister.

  Your half sister. Nick raps out the correction with such sharpness that he feels he has done a violence to two tender creatures. To sweet spindly Eliza, and to Maddie, sleeping like a nymph in her dormitory across the Atlantic. Bad dad, he thinks. Down, boy. He’s just flown in from Brussels and he’s worn out, and besides he hates Halloween in England—a tame self-conscious expat kind of thing compared to the anarchic masked gangs of kids skidding up and down driveways, screaming, gorging, that he remembers from Little Compton long ago. It would be nice, he thought, if Dhel and some of the other mothers from the group of schools sponsoring the party would ditch the Morgan le Fay robes and dress up as Catwoman. His own minimalist persona is indicated by a ketchup-smeared T-shirt and a toy stethoscope and the title Dr. Death, from a fifth-season X-Files episode.

  Half sister, Eliza repeats. That means—

  We’ve been through this a million times, Lize. Maddie is your half sister because I am her dad, but she has a different mother.

  Because you were married a long time ago to somebody who wasn’t Mommy. And she was Maddie’s mom, and she was the one who made Maddie part African American. The way Mommy made us part Vietnamese. When Eliza gets hold of an idea she reminds him of a terrier worrying a rat. We are a mixed-up family, aren’t we, Dad?

  Yep. We are. It seems to Nick that Dhel and the girls do nothing but discuss the subject—the Notting Hill flat is filled with enough books on multiculturalism to supply a Save the Children conference, with videos of family reunions in Rhode Island, Quogue, Zurich, Saigon.

  They’ve crossed the lamplit street and are walking by the leafy billows of Cadogan Square Gardens, where later in the depths near the swings and the Wendy House there will be refreshments and a Thai fire show for the kids who’ve made it through the haunted house and a carefully selected trick-or-treat route among the lamplit terraces of Belgravia. Nick has seen a pub closed down for a private celebration with a lot of little kids in costumes, but otherwise no other signs of Halloween. Do you think they’ll have the blood-and-guts tunnel this year? he asks.

 

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