Lost Hearts in Italy

by Andrea Lee

  Sei come tutte le altre puttane, vuoi prendermi in giro, incastrarmi. You’re like all the other whores, trying to catch me. To squeeze money out of me. Do you think that just because I fucked you once or twice that you have a hold on me?

  And in a quiet voice he adds that if she doesn’t come with him that second, he’ll make sure that things are worse for her.

  That is all it takes, Zenin is relieved to see. There is no need for anything else to make her come to her senses. Mira is not brave at that moment in the suite at the Plaza. It’s as if she has been turned into stone or a store mannequin. Only a few tears leak down her cheeks, and she doesn’t wipe them away. Silently she allows him to put on her soft black coat as if she were a child. Tame as she is, he takes no chances, and returns his grip to her arm as they go down the elevator filled with people dressed for dinner and the theater. And does not let her go until she is safely in the car. All next week she’ll see five finger-shaped bruises fading from purple to yellow.

  DR. C.

  To me a woman’s body is the most amazing thing: a blossom and a labyrinth made out of flesh and blood; infinitely precious; predictable, yet always surprising. I adore babies too; I help make them. But in this work you get to despise men. Straight men, the sperm givers, the moneymakers. The models and the little prep school girls come in with their rich, sleazy older boyfriends to get the evidence scraped away; the millionaire bully husbands come in to talk about their wives like brood mares.

  When the mixed-blood girl came back for an after-hours procedure, I said what I always say to the ones who look like they’re being forced. Her po-faced Italian boyfriend was tucked away in the husbands’ parlor, so I asked before we prepped her if she was sure she wanted to go through with it. I can just pretend to operate, you know, I said. Or, there’s a back door here. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  And she gazed at me as they always do, and said I was an angel. And thanked me and said that it was too late to help. And a minute later, when she was already on the table and drifting under, she murmured, Where would I go? I’m from Italy.

  And that was an odd thing because this girl was most definitely American.

  34

  MIRA

  2005 • SECURITY

  Ma’am, could you step this way?

  The Boston airport. A local flight from Boston to Philadelphia. The man without a face—erased, excised, or is it just that she can’t look at him?—the animated uniform in the airport security line, holds Mira’s passport and boarding pass and those of her older son, Stefano, and makes the request that is not a request, in a southwestern military twang that makes her think of dust and barracks and linoleum corridors awash in disinfectant and olive-drab filing cabinets with an infinity of manila envelopes.

  A tenebrous fantasy of Fascist bureaucracy always grips Mira at the slightest nod from authority. And transforms her into an illegal immigrant from Honduras, vainly proffering badly printed false documents; or a timid Colombian mule, nauseated from the drug-filled condoms she has swallowed; or a trembling suicide bomber, forgetting the sweetness of revenge, the promised paradise of the faithful, only aware of the sweetness of the body that is about to be smashed to atoms.

  You always look so damn guilty, Vanni tells her. C’hai l’aria colpevole. You’re a sitting duck. Why the hell do you look so guilty? You own the world, bourgeois American wench. Just strut on through. Look at me. Nobody ever bothers me, not even the customs people.

  And in fact, nobody ever stops Vanni because he looks exactly like who he is: one of the lords of the earth. Rather a short lord—a wily Mediterranean trickster rather than a tall blond ruler like Nick Reiver, who also never gets stopped—but unmistakably one of the men who run things. The men who are never suspect, even in the long fearful wake of 9/11.

  Step this way. And your son too, Ma’am.

  Is there a problem? asks Mira, knowing in some feral victim’s way that you should never question them.

  Problem? No. No problem, he says, in the tone Hollywood FBI agents use to talk down the psychopath with the Uzi.

  Mira’s heart begins to knock against her ribs. A small uniformed woman with dry peach-colored lipstick defining where her thin lips would be if she had a face has materialized and is hurrying them through a crowd of travelers that parts asunder in Old Testament fashion, with faces turning to gaze at them like a field of sunflowers. As two other uniforms unroll a crowd divider of red tape that leads to a separate set of metal detectors apart from the crowd.

  Stefano cocks his cropped head and looks up knowingly at her with long dark eyes that his father and brother teasingly call ferret eyes. He’s wearing a Gap sweatshirt that Maddie gave him two days ago when they visited her at Harvard, with a tiny silver pin that he got at the Peabody Museum. Hey Mom, he hisses. Look, they’re cutting us ahead of everybody. Cool. What is this, some kind of upgrade?

  No. No, sweetie. It’s an extra security check. It happens sometimes. Just hurry up and follow the lady.

  Step along, please. Now please put your hand luggage, shoes, and jackets on the belt and step through.

  They have to go through the metal detector twice and then both of them are patted down and searched from head to toe with a handheld device. They have to bend over and simultaneously stick out their hands, then kick each leg out behind. Then they have to open their carry-on luggage and watch as the woman and two other men go through everything. Mira’s copy of Framley Parsonage, her dark Peyrano chocolate, Stefano’s Lego Bionicle and Calvin and Hobbes.

  The man patting down Stefano chats purposefully with him. So, dude, you live in Italy. Do you really speak Italian?

  I am Italian, says Stefano firmly. I’m American and Italian. His naïve excitement has faded. He has traveled all over the world and been through all sorts of security, but he sees his mother’s anger and fear, and knows that this is different. Mira feels a heavy resentment build in her as she sees his small face grow pale and his eyes grow large with her own apprehension. Who do they think we are? he whispers to her.

  You’ve got to learn to take it in stride, Mira’s friends have said over and over to her. It’s your passport with all the back and forth on it, all the foreign visas, the fact that you have residence outside the States. It looks suspicious these days. Then, it’s the way you look. That swarthy mixed-race thing. You used to be just colored. But now you could be from any terrorist nation on the planet. We’re at war, a war based on idiocy, but a war. Deal with it. Don’t take it personally.

  But she does take it personally. Is this something I chose, to be treated like a criminal in the place I was born, to have my son puzzled and scared and mortified by people staring at him? Is it my destiny, because, no matter how elegantly I dress, I look like a Cuban or North African and acquire a refugee bloom of guilt that shines like a spotlight whenever I pass a checkpoint?

  She wants to scream at the faceless woman with the lipstick, who has a thick Boston accent, that she, Mira, has more generations of American ancestors than all of the woman’s white-trash family put together. But instead she grabs Stefano’s hand and tells him not to worry, forces a smile, tells him that this is something that has to be done to keep the airlines safe. Together they gather up their scattered possessions on the belt and repack their luggage.

  Passengers in the normal security lines are still staring at them.

  You can proceed, Ma’am, says one of the uniforms, without adding thank you or goodbye.

  The military ma’am, thinks Mira. Also used for the queen of England. But when Mira hears it, she always thinks for some reason of the scene when Tom Sawyer is disguised as a girl, and then unmasked when he claps his legs together. And from there, she thinks, it’s just a skip and a jump to Huck Finn and Nigger Jim. Fugitives on the river, strangers in their own land.

  1987 • MIRA’S RUN

  Mira is running away through Venice. Actually not running but walking quickly in the low-heeled shoes she put on this morning as if she knew she’d
need to move fast today. Usually she wears high heels with Zenin, but these shoes are like dance slippers, supple black leather embroidered with black silk flowers by some Third World couture slave. They carry her swiftly and surely along the calles and alleyways, slippery with April rain, that lead away from the pullulating tourist fields of San Marco across the Accademia bridge and on a circuitous route through the Sunday-afternoon quiet of Dorsoduro and San Polo. Away from Zenin, who sits waiting for her to return to the table in Harry’s Bar.

  She attracts glances as she passes by in her handsome tweed suit, her skirt short and her hair long and loose, as a woman wears it when she is dressing for a man. A fur coat rolled up under her arm like a bundle of newspapers. Not running but moving with a furious discretion, as if she knows where she is going and is determined to get there unseen. Near San Pantaleon, she stops at a cash machine and takes out a hundred and fifty thousand lire and then hurries on. Occasionally she stops and asks directions and when she comes back onto the Grand Canal at the Rialto, she climbs onto a vaporetto headed for the train station at Santa Lucia.

  On the vaporetto she stands on the outside platform, feeling the mild drizzle on her face and refusing to have any tears join it. She will not be caught crying on a vaporetto on the Grand Canal. This is not a movie, and the only way to keep the moment for herself is to make immediate practical plans and lock her tears away for a time when she can howl in a place without history or atmosphere. And so she rides the next few stops to the station, only noting, as everyone in Venice does, that the colors of the water and the buildings in any weather are so many and so changeable that they are nameless, and that beauty so unremitting is hardly beauty at all but something more like pain.

  When she gets to the station, she goes into a shop and buys a pair of jeans and changes out of the tweed skirt, which she stuffs into the shopping bag along with the fur coat. Then she buys a bottle of water and a paperback in English and a ticket to Rome and runs to catch a train that is just pulling out. Then for four and a half hours she sits staring out the window at the changing terrain of Italy, occasionally glancing down at the novel. At the newsstand there had been a choice among only Agatha Christie, Wilbur Smith, and a budget edition of Middlemarch in almost invisible print. She chose Middlemarch, which has brittle yellow pages as if it’s been sitting neglected a long time in the sea air, and her eyes run absently over the fates of Lydgate and Dorothea, which she knows almost by heart.

  She walked out on Zenin because it had become suddenly enough, in the abrupt way that comes to strong people who for one reason or another have made themselves weak.

  It began as an ordinary Sunday, as ordinary as possible for Mira and Zenin, who were just beginning to have habits outside of the rituals of secrecy. An early spring weekend around Venice; driving up from Verona under a colorless drizzling sky; stopping to poke around in a junk shop owned by a feral-looking mad marchese; pausing in Mestre to eat thumbnail-size raw shrimp at Da Angelina; a night at the Gritti Palace.

  Five months have passed since she came back from New York, a shadow of herself, and with efficient blankness took up her work, the care of Maddie, her life that now revolves around Zenin.

  Then Sunday lunch in Harry’s Bar, adrift between gray sky and restless lagoon and overflowing with glossy Americans with loud vacation voices and Italian families intent on their food, where Zenin and Mira are greeted by Cipriani with the usual jokes in dialect and a downstairs window table. Where, as they are waiting for dessert, Zenin, in the most relaxed way possible, tells Mira that he plans to go away for Easter week with Daniele and Tere. Probably to Fiji or the Maldives.

  And once again, as at that moment in the Plaza in New York, the scales fall from Mira’s eyes; but this time she is not as vulnerable and the vision lasts. She looks at him, really looks, as you do at your first sight of someone. His tall figure, his eyes as flat and black as those of the Great Inca. She sees that he is not as offhand about telling her this as he sounds, and she sees the depths of shame and fear that underlie everything he does. And she sees also an icy immeasurable solitude running through him that stretches deeper than the roots of mountains.

  Are you going to marry Tere? Strangely, she is able to talk. She is in a state of complete clarity where it becomes important to say things, to gain information.

  Zenin gives a sour smile. No, I’d never marry her, he says. But you have to realize that the two of them are part of me. I have to look after them.

  And what about me? It sounds better in Italian, thinks Mira. E io? A wail—mourning, martyred, out of the ancient days—of black-veiled women who have sacrificed everything, left behind on the shore like Medea on Naxos.

  You have to be patient. I’m not breaking it off with you. You know I love you. But we need to work out an agreement. A sistemazione. You know I’m already arranging things for you. Money, a house. You’ll take it, I suppose.

  I’m not honorable or stupid enough to refuse.

  And so you have to be patient. I’ll send for you the week after next. We can go to Malta or perhaps Essaouira. Then Zenin makes a sign to the waiter with his big hand and orders dessert for both of them. Chocolate cake, with coffee to follow. Then he looks across the table at Mira with a kind of complacent affection. As if they have finally called a truce and begun to understand each other.

  And Mira sits for a minute and lets him run his hand down her knee. She calls back the waiter and asks a question about the cake. Then with wily naturalness, she excuses herself to go to the bathroom, gathering up her bag and flashing Zenin a sulky half smile like a girlfriend who has taken offense but is beginning to give in.

  Men stare at her as she picks her way through the crowded restaurant, and she knows they see the masklike face and desirable body of the young beauty owned by the older rich man. But she sees as never before the peculiar haunting charm of Harry’s Bar. How it has survived authors and movie stars and manages to be both American and ineffably Italian, both provincial and sophisticated. Meretricious and somehow innocent. Perhaps the only place that she and Zenin were meant to occupy. Afloat in the foggy afternoon, a small vessel freighted with money, a place she’ll never see in quite the same way again.

  She doesn’t know what she intends to do, but as she heads down the short hall toward the bathroom, she sees, as if she had created it herself, that there is a back door, and it is open. Framing dripping walls and paving stones and a damp gray light.

  At first Mira tells herself that she intends just to get a breath of fresh air, but the black shoes carry her out and over a bridge and then she just keeps going. No one at Harry’s sees her exit, except for a young waiter or dishwasher, a teenager with acne and curly fair hair, who gives her a wink and puts his finger to his lips as if to say he won’t tell. Probably she isn’t the first girl he’s seen leave like that.

  CHICCO

  We laughed our asses off in the kitchen at the poor son of a bitch sitting there with his two plates of chocolate cake. And just for a minute I felt like a richer man than old Zenin, because I knew what happened and he didn’t.

  35

  ZENIN

  2005 • WALKS WITH KINGS

  But, dottore, if you’ll pardon the presumption, you are far too modest about your own achievements.

  The ghostwriter, a tall dandified young man with a thick Piedmontese accent, a rosy prematurely balding head, and a pair of stylish heavy-rimmed glasses, reaches over to make a minute adjustment to his tape recorder, brushes a speck of lint off his monogrammed shirt cuff, and then regards Zenin with the eager eyes of a sycophant. They are in Zenin’s plane, flying from Milan to Venice, strapped in facing each other like prisoners.

  This dickhead wants a job or a handout or both, thinks Zenin. After about fifteen minutes of impertinent, fawning Bocconi University questions on labor paradigms and modular economic approaches and ancient government-union disputes, Zenin realizes that this bullshit idea of his writing an autobiography, dreamed up by his son-in-law and Gilar
di of the press office, is just that: bullshit. Another way to try to edge out the old man. Write yourself an epitaph, he thinks, and you’ll be underground in the blink of an eye.

  The ghostwriter has already proposed an ass-kissing title: Camminare con i re—Walk with Kings—which he informs Zenin is taken from a famous poem: “Se” by the English poet Kipling.

  Zenin has always shunned publicity. He’s been turning down offers from Rizzoli and Mondadori for years. In the early period because of a superstitious belief that his new prosperity would be snatched away if he flaunted it; later because he feared his rivals would be infuriated and screw him doubly; still later in the Years of Lead because he feared the Red Brigades; and finally, when he fell in love with his son, Daniele, because he was terrified of kidnappers.

  He agreed to the book in a weak moment after certain private disturbances this past summer and fall. Nothing really wrong, yet nothing right. A gentle indifference when it comes to food or women or his friends, or even soccer. Little pleasure even in adoring Daniele, who he can’t avoid observing has grown up to be a sweet-natured, decent, but entirely ordinary young man.

  In Yugoslavia on the boat this summer, Zenin’s old friend Macaco dubbed him Il Premio Nobel, the Nobel Prize Winner, because he never looked up from studying his copy of Panorama or Il Gazzettino, even when his pretty niece arrived with a group of girlfriends from Padua University, who sunbathed in nothing but tangas and tattoos.

  The same thing happened at his shooting lodge in Scotland, and at his place in Cortina. And when the company continues buoyant even in the stagnant European economy, when it escapes even the shadow of the Parmalat scandal that brings down his old fox of a traditional rival, Gualtieri, he feels none of the glee that should attend a lifetime victory. He feels it as something far-off, something that happened a long time ago.