Lost Hearts in Italy

by Andrea Lee

  Yes. Boiled pasta and grapes. Boring. Eliza holds her lace collar from blowing in her face. So Dad, am I even a little bit Italian?

  No. Why would you think that?

  Because Maddie has Italian brothers.

  Thank God, thinks Nick, there are only two blocks left. Eliza, he says. Sweetie pie. What is it with you tonight? It seems to me that Mom and I have explained this to you girls enough times to get it right. Listen, you are my daughter. Maddie is my daughter. I was married to Maddie’s mom a long time ago, and then we got divorced. I fell in love with your mom and we got married, and Maddie’s mom married an Italian man. Maddie now has two half brothers and two half sisters.

  So those Italian boys aren’t even a tiny bit related to me?

  No. Look—there’s the school. What’s that, jack-o’-lanterns in all the windows?

  Can I meet them?

  What?

  I said I want to meet those boys. Maddie’s brothers. Juju does too. When can we?

  It would be easy enough, as he realizes later, to murmur something equivocal about someday. The next trip to Italy. When Maddie graduates from college; when Maddie gets married. But they hurry toward the school, and the word springs off his lips and then turns to stone in the air as if frozen by a Harry Potter spell: Never.

  Da-ad! How come? Eliza squeals, but then they are at the school, its ample Victorian brick spaces transformed into a ghastly labyrinth for the night and a Gandalf clone handing out flash tubes under a phosphorescent spiderweb at the door. Here, mercifully, Eliza is swept up by her giggling friends and borne inside on a tide of monsters and heroes of her own generation.

  Leaving Dr. Death to look around in vain for Catwoman, mentally declining the verb to haunt.

  1987 • AN OFFER

  Of course one can get to him if one wants to. Uno può trovarlo, se uno vuole. All these small-town rich men are paranoid and yet completely unprotected. They’re tightwads and they only pay their bodyguards part-time. They invest in armored cars—in fact the damned Socialists are handing them out as perks nowadays—but then they get sick of them and take the Ferrari to show off to their girlfriends or the Cherokee to go to lunch at their mother’s. Careless. Rossi got kidnapped right in front of his house in the country. Not that you intend kidnapping or indeed anything illegal. Just a token reminder to a son of a whore who took what didn’t belong to him.

  Nick sits staring at the sheep-faced blond man in the polo shirt and Timberlands who is squeezed at a tiny aluminium bar table beside Nick’s friend, the well-connected lawyer Lorenzo. The man saying this stuff, not with the cinematically appropriate Sicilian hiss or sadistic Teutonic aspirates, but in the comfortable fussy tone of an Emilia-Romagnan discussing his personal preferences in baked pasta.

  Of course this encounter is all a dream, at least it should be. But it has the straightforward outrageousness of real life. In fact, it is real, the fruit of the sympathetic machinations of Lorenzo, also known as Lorenzaccio, who since Nick and Mira’s separation has been offering, with the pressing warmth of a midwestern neighbor at a funeral, to “help out.” The profferred help at first took the form of evenings with comely Russian exchange students or ambitious RAI starlets, which lasted until Lorenzo—with the kind of private manly relief one might feel for a backward teenage son—learned through his foreign gossip contacts that Nick in his recovering grief seemed to be boning half the female staff of the American embassy. It only remained for Lorenzo to drag his young friend to this dubious appointment at a tubular metal café in one of the palmy Blade Runner suburbs off the Cassia. Where the three of them sit over drinks—the sheep-faced man takes only an iced tea—under the awning of a small grim terrace that overlooks a sun-broiled supermarket parking plaza filled with housewives loading cars with bags of groceries. Nearby is a tabaccheria, a newsstand, and a tanning salon called Neri per Sempre—Black Forever.

  Nick hardly knows why he’s there, but the real reason is that he’s curious. The small part of him that is most himself, that is untouched by hurt, that will recover again and again from profound losses in his life, as it did from that early loss of his brother, wants to know what it looks and sounds and tastes like to plot a vendetta.

  A half-remembered line comes into his head; he thinks it’s from Hemingway: more or less it says that all that’s necessary for survival is an interest in life, good, bad, or peculiar.

  In this moment, though he’ll never know it, he is closest to what Mira felt when she took her first steps toward Zenin.

  And this is what it’s like: The syrupy taste of the vermouth he ordered, which is rumored to have powdered Egyptian mummy as one of its secret ingredients. The early summer heat, the Cassia traffic fumes, through which arrives the tiny finger of sea breeze that Romans call the ponentino. A billboard over the supermarket showing three bikini-clad models smiling on a generic Mediterranean beach, all gorgeous but with strangely simian foreheads. Across from Nick, the broken capillaries on one side of the blond man’s nose as the man pauses in his vague shop talk and addresses Nick in a fawning interrogative as dottore, as if urging his honorable assent before proceeding to specifics of ways and means. And Nick sees that he is a ragioniere, a small-time bureacrat, not a thug, not a thug’s agent, but a thug’s agent’s agent. And what is he going to prescribe in the mild case of Nick’s honor? Jumping out from behind a palm tree with a Darth Vader mask? Beating his rival lightly with a lead pipe? Sending Zenin’s mother a nasty note?

  A plaintive song is playing on Roma 105 FM, which Nick recognizes as one of the canzone d’autore anthems for Italians who grew up in the seventies. It’s called “In questo mondo di ladri”—in this world of thieves.

  He finishes his vermouth and says, Riflettendo, credo che non mi conviene.

  Out of polite respect for Lorenzaccio, who set the whole thing up, he tries to give concise utterance to his feeling that once half the stars have been sucked out of the sky, there’s no fucking point in revenge. That payback means nothing. Isn’t that right? And it’s more satisfying not being a shit. Didn’t Hemingway write that too?

  Non mi conviene, he repeats. It’s not worth it to me.

  The five-o’clock sun beats on the asphalt. A friar from a suburban convent shuffles by in bulky sandals, sweating, clutching a supermarket bag. And for a minute before they recover themselves, the two men, Lorenzo and the blond stranger, sit looking at Nick as if he were an extraterrestrial.

  ELIZA

  I love it when I get Daddy all to myself without that show-off Julia hogging the attention. Halloween isn’t really scary but anyway nothing bad can happen in the dark when I’m walking with my hand swallowed up in his great big hand. Daddy works very hard and travels a lot and always brings us back hotel chocolates and chopsticks for my collection. He’s teaching Juju and me about war games, except Juju’s too dumb to understand strategy, and sometimes when we’re on the motorway he puts on the Clash and we sing and drum on the seats until Mom tells us to shut up. I think he’s the coolest of all my friends’ dads, almost as handsome as David Beckham. But he doesn’t know everything. And I think those Italian boys are related to us no matter what he says. I’ll ask Maddie about it. Maddie looks like a model in a magazine, and she can do henna tattoos. She tells us about her Italian brothers in Turin and how one whines worse than Juju and how they built a maze for lizards they caught. Juju and I already swore we’re going to run away and visit them. They’re our sister’s brothers, and that makes them part of us. I think families are like spiderwebs: they stretch all over the place where you don’t expect them.

  33

  ZENIN

  2005 • AN EVENING IN ROME

  Che rottura di palle. What a pain in the ass, thinks Zenin, seated at a very elegant kitchen table in the neighborhood that is the Upper West Side, the Left Bank, of Rome—the Via Margutta zone. He hates eating out unless it is with family or old friends, with whom he can drink and joke around, or clients, when there is a clear goal in sight, or, rarely th
ese days, in an expensive place to impress a pretty woman.

  But this is another one of Mariella’s social projects. First cocktails at an antique dealer in Via Giulia, who is showing off a remarkable School of Caravaggio painting recently acquired for a song from an impoverished Calabrian prince. Zenin had flown down willingly from Rovigo, hoping to see some decent-looking girls, but the vernissage looked like a convention for aristocratic senior citizens, too many old trout with yellow teeth and fur scarves framing wrinkles. Including three of Zenin’s ex-lovers, bleached, tanned, tits and faces lifted, looking like fossils cleaned up for display.

  Now he’s stuck at a fake informal dinner in a penthouse kitchen with walls studded with Morandis and Vedovas—he tries mentally to add up the cost—with a vegetarian second course of zucchini blossoms, which he loathes, stuffed with ricotta from someone’s country estate. Just six of them at a table laid with earthenware dishes, but displaying heavy old silverware with a family crest: Zenin; Mariella; Smeralda, the hostess, a lissome, blue-eyed countess famous for her column in L’Espresso; Paolo, a leftist editor, friend of Einaudi and Primo Levi, who writes cryptic books with kabbalah images on their covers; Melina, a blond war correspondent; and the Old Man, who is no richer than Zenin but, having for years headed up the country’s largest publishing empire, is as much a monument to Italians as the Colosseum.

  All the women are dressed in designer black, with jewelry that is either North African or elaborately crafted family gold.

  Everyone is chummy, asking about children, grandchildren, and vacation plans at their country places down in the Maremma.

  Zenin is nervous about his table manners.

  It looks as if things might be amusing when before dinner the Old Man starts pawing Melina and asking her to pull up her shirt so he can see if she has love handles.

  But then the conversation shifts into English, which everyone else speaks better than Zenin. They dissect current events, crack jokes quote bons mots and outrageous excuses made by journalists and political mandarins on the Anglo-Saxon side of the world. From time to time in a way Zenin finds humiliating, they thoughtfully translate terms they think might be too complex for him.

  Then they talk about books. About Philip Roth and Anna Maria Ortese and Fleur Jaeggy, and an array of Indian authors with incomprehensible names.

  Zenin sits there with his big speckled hands on the table. Thinking how much more fun Rome used to be a long time ago when he used to fly down to fuck Mira and eat platefuls of fried fish.

  When discussing their children, the Old Man says that, as everyone knows, his own son is a worthless dimwit who is blowing his inheritance in bad investments. He’s just gone off to India to stay with Sai Baba. But what does it matter, says the Old Man. I’ll be dead, and the little turd will be poor, with expensive tastes. It’s the way of the world. Has a fortune ever lasted longer than three generations? Think of it—Bardi, Krupp, Rothschild, Morgan; what do they mean now compared to the Asians, the Russians? It’s like waves washing up over the sand. The world is littered with the rubble of big fortunes. What do you say, Zenin? How long will it take your ragazzi to piss it away?

  Holding the crested dessert fork in his hand, Zenin makes an acceptable joke that makes Mariella flash him a smile. He who rarely allows himself to get angry thinks how much he loathes these people with their sneering assumption of privilege, their arrogant careless nihilism possible only for brats who were born with forks like this. Joking about his dearest, most secret kernel of a dream, when his son, Daniele, is enthroned, extending the empire he has founded. With proper table manners and perfect English.

  Non ti sei divertito, tesoro? croons Mariella, when they are back at the hotel. Didn’t you have a good time? Zenin, already on the bed in his underpants, channel changer in his hand, does not even bother to tell her to shove the whole evening up her ass.

  He should have bought the School of Caravaggio painting in front of all those figli di puttane, he thinks. Just thrown down a check and carried it away under his arm.

  1987 • WHAT ZENIN DOESN’T SEE

  He doesn’t see that the limousine, of average length, seems blacker than other town cars, blacker and glossier than piano keys or black caviar or a black alligator purse. That it blends in its blackness with Mira’s coat, a soft sheath of cashmere that Zenin bought her on an earlier, happier New York trip by walking into a Madison Avenue shop and paying with his usual wad of dollars. That as she sits slumped groggily on the soft leather of the seat opposite him, she looks out of the window at the lines of taxis gleaming through the evening rush on Park Avenue and knows that she has been swallowed at last by the beast that has been sniffing around her for years. What beast? Huge and gorgeous, dark and deadly, studying her for so long with its wolfish golden eyes. Mira’s awake yet dreaming. Free of pain. They call it twilight sleep.

  Stretched out in the opposite corner, his sharp features and lank hair barely outlined in the moving city lights through the tinted glass, Zenin looks like the personification of the word silence. He tries not to breathe in the slight medicinal smell emanating from her, not to think of anything that is wounded, spoiled, bleeding. In his relief, he is farther away in spirit than the invisible third person in the car, the Sri Lankan driver who did not seem surprised to have to help a stumbling, apparently drunken girl, not out of a fashionable restaurant or a club, but from a darkened doctor’s office in the East Sixties.

  We’ll take care of it in New York, Zenin told Mira, three days earlier, when the test twice comes out positive. There is nothing to discuss. The words, the decision, emerge stamped on a tablet of stone. It is the first time Zenin has let Mira see him unveiled, in the full, austere power of his money and the cold implacable will that made the money. And he sees that in the middle of her confusion and distress, the tiny part of her that is eternally curious is gratified. To see someone in extremis, forced to use his full strength to defend himself, is, for a moment, to have complete intimacy. And Zenin is in extremis. Suddenly ferociously aware of the threat of being manipulated as he was by Tere, of the threat to his son, Daniele, who is now the center of his world. From the moment Mira tells him she thinks she is pregnant, he keeps looking at her, shaking his head and giving a slight knife-edged smile. A look that also has an edge of wary admiration in it, as if for a worthy opponent.

  Swiftly, it’s all programmed like clockwork. Zenin’s jet to London, Concorde to New York, a suite on a high floor at the Plaza—a hotel where Zenin does not usually stay—overlooking the carpet of autumn color that is Central Park. And a doctor, a famous obstetrician recommended, unbeknown to Mira, by an Italian hotel concierge who is used to resolving such intimate problems for his top clients.

  The obstetrician, Dr. C., as his patients and television fans call him, is German, redheaded, gay, and adores women. He is very nice to Mira, whom he finds time to examine, though his waiting room is overflowing with beautiful South American and European mothers-to-be, and he tells her that her IUD failed and that she is about six weeks into a healthy pregnancy. If she doesn’t want to continue the pregnancy, he adds in a quiet voice, she should come back that evening.

  And that of course is the plan until Zenin goes out for a walk in the late afternoon, leaving Mira to rest in the hotel. He hasn’t left her alone for several days. But now that everything seems under control, he strolls up Fifth Avenue, glancing into shop windows, looking benignly over the hordes of fat midwestern tourists in sweat suits, as foreign in Manhattan as in Italy, at Puerto Ricans and blacks and Orthodox Jews and strange robotic businesswomen in pinstripes and running shoes. Idly wondering what life he would have conquered had he gone off to live in America like Macaco’s Zio Giorgio.

  When he comes back, Mira is looking out at the darkening expanse of the park under a glassy, perfectly clear, early-evening New York October sky. At Olmsted’s dream of an American Arcadia.

  She turns around and says, We could do this differently. Potremmo fare questo in modo diverso.
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  Zenin curses himself for going out and letting her get ideas in her head. Potremmo, potremmo, he says. We could, we could. Here’s your coat. The car is downstairs.

  He hears an odd dry tenderness in his own voice. It’s true, he does feel tender toward her. What he doesn’t know is that Mira is looking, really looking, at him for the first time in many months, and that to her he looks old, older than she has ever seen him. Gray in his hair, his skin pale and mottled, eyes sunken, the hawk nose sharper.

  We could do things differently, Mira persists. We could keep this child.

  Zenin gives a bark of laughter so sharp, so flagrantly amazed at what she is proposing, so insulting and dismissive that it is like a magic word that throws Mira from one dimension to another. Someone more perceptive than Zenin might have seen in her eyes what has happened. A pantomime backdrop of conventional marvels has collapsed and for a minute shown her the true view: the monotonous extent of dry mountain ranges and gullies that make up her folly. For an instant she sees herself as she actually is: pregnant, divorced, alone, crazy, the slave of Rome and the rest of the Old World in her own country, in the city where she once basked in love and freedom.

  I’m going out, she says to Zenin. You can’t rush me into this. I want to think about what to do. I don’t want to see you right now.

  You’re not going anywhere except downstairs and into the car.

  She tries to walk past him and he grabs her arm. Her arm through a silk blouse feels as small as a child’s to him, as brittle and cold as an icy twig. And he lets himself scream at her. It is a curiously terrifying griping wail that, as much as the hold he has on her, stops her dead.