Lost Hearts in Italy

by Andrea Lee

  But only once, thinks Nick, could he settle in a foreign country, and have that country colonize him.

  Nick yawns and sits down at the desk by the window and opens the computer, fixing the earphones in his ears as his playlist kicks in with Kasabian’s “LSF.” A title that strikes him as unnervingly appropriate when he remembers it stands for Lost Souls Forever.

  There are a couple dozen e-mails, including one from Maddie. He glances up once at the seacape in front of him and remains transfixed by an odd effect of sunrise passing between the heavy typhoon cloud cover and the wall of skyscrapers below it, giving the clouds, for a few seconds, a strange tender color like flesh. And Nick realizes suddenly that he is trembling.

  This is nothing to get fucking nervous about, he thinks. It’s just called living happily ever after.

  1989 • … ALL STATES, ALL PRINCES…

  Two years after Mira walks out on Zenin in Venice, Mira and Nick meet up at the American embassy in Rome. Nick has been promoted and is moving to the London office. Mira will stay in Rome with Maddie, who has begun kindergarten at the American school on the Cassia. They’re here to sign custody papers and both are dressed up. Nick because it’s a working day and Mira from vanity and the feeling that it’s a ceremonial occasion.

  She looks at Nick in his familar, slightly spotty gray suit and remembers how her throat used to catch in a spasm of tenderness when she saw him coming out of the office with his Italian colleagues, a mob of business apprentices surging onto Piazza Colonna with the touching wiseass air of schoolboys who run the world.

  Nick looks at Mira with the armored heart of a man who has rediscovered the pleasures of being a bachelor in a world of rustling crinolines. He encounters her once or twice a week because of Maddie, but this sighting seems definitive. He notes with grim satisfaction that her expensive suit with its gleaming buttons and tight short skirt is too smart for a daytime errand at the embassy, and that in comparison with some of the spectacular women he’s been seeing, she looks ordinary.

  They sign the papers, and Nick annoys Mira by horsing around with the assistant consul, who’s a friend of his. The assistant consul, a baby-faced black preppie named Whittaker who wears suspenders and ridiculous horn-rims, is on his first overseas assignment and clearly wants to look dignified in front of the crowd waiting in the consular section, not be loudly reminded of a recent mojito-fueled Trastevere evening.

  What an insensitive jerk, Mira thinks, scribbling her name, as Nick goes on joking.

  They leave the embassy and have coffee standing at a Via Veneto bar that they have seen so many times in La dolce vita that the place seems as though it should be scintillating black-and-white. Instead it’s a bland touristy cavern with trilingual menus and plastic chairs.

  And after they’ve talked for the twentieth time about Nick’s apartment full of Bollinger boxes, and his temporary quarters near the City, and how Maddie will react to visiting London, Mira asks in a hostessy tone what Nick is going to miss most about Italy. Besides us, of course, she adds, with an awkward laugh.

  Not specifying, Nick thinks nastily, whether us means herself and Maddie; herself and the vast jolly throng of Italians and expatriates; herself described in the royal plural; or herself and Nick as they once were.

  I’ll miss the smell of bread, he says. Mira looks at him as if he’s gone mad.

  Bread? she repeats blankly.

  Yeah, when you walk down the street in the early morning, and every other shop smells like a panetteria, like fresh bread. It doesn’t matter if it’s Rome or some tiny village. I’ll miss the bread smell, and I’ll miss how kind everyone is.

  Kind? Italians? Are you kidding? Now she is really looking at him as if he’s crazy.

  No, I’m not kidding. It takes a while to understand it, of course, he adds. Nick looks at her steadily for a minute, and with a twinge of malice sees her struggling, wondering if there is something in him she missed all these years. Whether the white boy is subtle after all.

  Then her expression changes to the speculative glitter that belongs only to Mira.

  Yes, I guess everyone here is kind, she says thoughtfully. But in a terrible, awful way.

  And both Nick and Mira give a snort of laughter, catch themselves up short in annoyance, and flash a look at each other that is full of deep knowledge, the instinctive affinity one has for one’s own country, one’s own people. They look at each other with anger, with contempt, and yet with the automatic relief and anticipation that a traveler feels upon catching the first glimpse of the coastline of his native land from the deck of an ocean liner. They look at each other with hate and love, the twin lenses that add perspective. With friendly pity, the way grown-ups do. With terrible kindness like all Romans.

  I have to go, says Nick, setting down his coffee cup.

  Me too.

  On Via Veneto, Mira turns downhill toward Piazza Barberini, and Nick continues on toward his office. Before separating, they kiss goodbye, on both cheeks in a civilized European way. Then they turn away, immediately separated by a long line of sightseeing Ursuline novices in navy blue, and are then so quickly lost in the lunchtime crowd of office workers and travelers that it is impossible to say if either one of them turns to look back.

  And there we will leave them.

  WHITTAKER

  First thing, I’m not the Agency’s in-house man in Rome.

  But I do like to think of myself as one of those low-key guys who no one would suspect has lived a long and intrigue-ridden career circling the globe as an undercover action hero. That is, mild mannered and naïve on the outside, with a hint of…well, profundity. It’s not been a bad persona for a black mama’s boy from Wheeling, West Virginia, making his way through the wilds of Deerfield and Dartmouth, not to mention the D.C. corridors of power.

  After briefly slumming it at the bottom of the ladder in Lisbon, I got kicked upstairs to assistant consul in Rome, and oh Lord, it took no effort to act naïve, because I was staggered by my own sudden greatness and at the shadow of the ancient world. Power in my grasp, and Rome spread between my colossal bestriding legs—you get the idea. Augustus, Constantine were nothing compared to me. Head Nigger in Charge, still wet behind the ears, you may say, and I freely admit it, because it’s only been ten months since I left D.C. Even the endless opera woven from the tales of woe of my fellow countrymen—stolen passports, knockout gas in train compartments, denied U.S. visas for pizza chefs—is still exotic music to my ears. Like everybody else, I always dreamed of Italy.

  When I saw Nick Reiver and his ex-wife in the office and took care of their little custody amendment, the tragic strain in the music got a little louder. How, I wondered, could two people live together and have a child in this gorgeous city, and not be madly in love? I knew Nick, from more than one evening dash with the Anglo-American Barhop-pers Guild, and he was an all-right guy, though, right then, being a bit of an asshole, with all that white-boy phat rap that I got fed up with at prep school. But it was the first time I had met the woman in the case, and she was quite hot, dressed up, and looking like my cousin Martine. I’d heard the story, like everybody else—that they’d come a few years ago, the perfect marriage, and then she’d gone off with some dago playboy, to put it in politically correct terms. When I heard she was staying on in Rome, it even crossed my mind to ask her out, though I’m into white girls and specifically Italians now.

  Well, they signed and for a second I felt weirdly like a preacher presiding over their unmarriage, though the unmarrying part happened a while ago. Then they took off, and the rest of the afternoon was a sea of stolen passports belonging to Marymount girls with beefy legs and visa requests from little old Pugliese men with long-lost brothers in Pittsburgh. So that I completely forgot about the melancholy sight of the pair of them, and in fact, I filed them in my mental category of failures: Americans who are somehow on their way out.

  I did see Mira a few times at parties over the next year, but hardly spoke to her because I am
very involved elsewhere. In fact, if you have time for a coffee, I can tell you something about the ins and outs. It started with Marianina, the USIS events coordinator who is from Prato and has only one arm, but a face prettier than any of the Puerto Rican beauties at Dartmouth. And then there is my Italian tutor, Ombretta, a university instructor who’s separated but still living with her husband, who is Pugliese and very jealous, and—shit, it’s complicated, life here. Anyway, I’ve been studying Italian assiduously and I’m getting quite fluent.

  E così, as Ombretta likes to say, finisce una storia e ne comincia un’altra. It’s one of the first phrases she taught me. Here one story ends and another one gets started.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to my wonderful agent, Amanda Urban; to my Random House editors, Jennifer Hershey and Laura Ford; to the great Helen Garner for inspiration; and, of course, to my beloved family—especially Ruggero, who corrected the spelling of all the Italian swearwords, and Alexandra and Charles, who remind me constantly how many things are more interesting than writing. My gratitude above all goes to Elinor Schiele, a dear and generous friend who took time off from her mosaics to bring order to my life, get my knickers out of their twist, and enable me to finish this book.

  A CONVERSATION WITH ANDREA LEE

  Reader’s Circle: Since you have lived in Italy for a number of years, do you ever attempt to write in Italian? How does living in Italy affect your writing?

  Andrea Lee: Though I have lived in Italy for over fifteen years and speak fluent Italian, I’ve never once considered writing in Italian because I have such a passion for the English language. It’s a love affair that began in my childhood, when I realized a word like “secret” could darken and embellish an entire conversation—not just because of what it stood for, but because of how it sounded and felt in the mouth. English is such a fabulous language, so flexible and voluminous with its mixture of Latinate and Germanic roots. I went deep into its past as a student of Old and Middle English in college, and though I enjoyed studying other languages—French, Russian, and of course Italian—I have always known that my element, my invaluable craftsman’s tool, is my native tongue. It takes a certain amount of upkeep, because as any expatriate knows, during daily life in a foreign country the language of your birth tends to evolve into a peculiar kind of patois mixed with the local language. My Italian husband and our kids gossip, joke and argue in an Italian-American hodgepodge—a habit that could infect my written English, if I didn’t rigorously immerse myself in literature, not to mention overpriced imported magazines, newspapers, and lots and lots of satellite TV.

  RC: How did you come up with the premise for Lost Hearts in Italy? Was it an idea you’d been thinking about for a while?

  AL: Lost Hearts is a story of a love triangle, of adultery and betrayal, and it is a plot I have had in the back of my mind for many years. Since I began writing, I’ve been obsessed by this theme. As a child, I was haunted by the Arthurian tales of Lancelot and Guinevere and Tristan and Isolde, and as I got older, by Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. Adultery, of course, is one of the great literary themes, summing up everything that is best and worst in human nature. It encapsulates our ability to trust and to form idealistic bonds like marriage, and our equal ability to blast those bonds to smithereens, impelled by the irrational but very human power we call passion. It is a terribly sad and terribly beautiful theme, and an inexhaustible source of inspiration for a writer.

  RC: Much of your writing centers around expatriate characters. Do you write from some of your own experiences? What draws you to explore characters in unfamiliar territories?

  AL: I draw my plots, place descriptions, and characters from a mixture of my own experiences and the experiences of people around me, and from a whole gallery of people, places, and things I have simply invented. The last part is the most fun. I am interested in expatriate characters because not only do I live in Italy, but I also spend several months a year in Africa, where I have a house in Madagascar. So my daily experience tends to be connected to the expatriate role of living in a place where you never quite belong.

  But my interest in the experience of outsiders springs from two other sources. The first is simply that, like every other writer, I am always somewhat apart—taking a step backwards from life to observe patterns and notice details. Being a writer is like being a spy—you are always gathering information, listening to conversations, memorizing faces—but the information is for your own use. I might give a character a face I saw a year ago on a street in Florence or New York.

  The second reason I write so often about the experience of outsiders is that I grew up in an African-American family deeply involved in the Civil Rights movement, and one with a long history of being both privileged and mixed—my family tree includes Native American, Irish, and Danish ancestors. And just as every American of color feels excluded from the American image of its ideal self, so my family felt a bit adrift, in that we fit in neither with the stereotypes of American blacks nor with the Caucasian ideal. As one of the few black children in white private schools—an experience I wrote about in my novel Sarah Phillips—I had early experience in feeling like a foreigner.

  RC: You’ve written novels, short stories, a memoir, and a number of journalistic magazine pieces. Which format comes most easily to you, and which do you enjoy writing the most?

  AL: I’ve written in many forms, but what I really love writing—and reading—are short stories. Short stories are like poems: the limitations of the form compel a writer to concentrate her powers—to distil a character description into two sentences, for example, instead of two pages. Writing a short story is a more intense experience than writing a novel, where you have the luxury of space and time to amble in many directions.

  RC: What are the cultural differences between Americans and Italians that you want to convey in your writing? As you spend more time in Italy, do these changes become more apparent to you or more difficult for you to pick out?

  AL: The cultural differences between Italians and Americans that emerge in my writing are those that I have noticed repeatedly over the years since I married into an Italian family. They all boil down to a palpable sense of the past, the weight of tradition. This atmosphere is quite natural in a place where, as I drive to the gym or the supermarket, I pass over land that was successively occupied by Roman legions, by Napoleon’s troops, and by Italian partisans fighting the Nazis. It is easy to observe that Italians, like most Europeans, are more attached to family and birthplace than are Americans. This to me seems both positive—families are wonderfully close in Italy, and no one is ever at a loss for a hot meal or a babysitter or the means to keep an elderly relative comfortably at home—and also suffocating—I’ve seen too many talented kids deny career dreams that would involve moving to other cities or countries, and too many forty-year-old bachelors still living with their parents. By contrast, our American ideal of independence and individualism seems rootless and scary, but at the same time rather magnificent.

  RC: Lost Hearts in Italy spans a number of years and a multitude of characters—it possesses the widest scope of any of your work yet. What were the challenges of writing from different viewpoints and different time periods?

  AL: Lost Hearts is the most challenging book I have written so far, largely because of its complex structure. It’s divided into two time periods—the late 1980s, when the love triangle existed; and the present day—and into three major viewpoints—those of Mira and Nick, the young American married couple; and that of Zenin, the older Italian man whose love affair with Mira destroys the marriage. In addition, there is a sort of “Greek chorus” of random people—sometimes friends, sometimes passersby, who comment on parts of the drama.

  One thing that has always struck me is while every story has thousands of angles of approach, the one way to get close to any kind of truth is to observe and acknowledge dispassionately as many facets of a situation as possible. This was what I was trying to play with in L
ost Hearts: to take a standard melodrama, a love triangle, and look at it through a kaleidoscope. It was difficult to make a pattern that did not grow too monotonous or bear too heavily on one character or one period. At a certain point I had to lay out all the pages on the floor and arrange them like parts of a puzzle.

  RC: The novel is a coming-of-age story, a love story, a story of betrayal, and a story about living in an unfamiliar land, all at once. Which component was the most important one for you to convey?

  AL: Lost Hearts is above all a novel about the different ways people have of being foreign to one another. It’s about the basic curiosity we all have throughout our lives that attracts us to new places and new experiences, and that can even tempt us out of a good situation—say, the security of a happy marriage—toward a seductive unknown that may hold pain and destruction. Moving from the known to the unknown is also how we grow up and become aware of our human condition. It’s the old, old story of Adam and Eve’s apple, which made them alien to their former protected life and forced them to travel into a completely new, completely mortal world.

  The novel plays with this idea in a number of ways. Nick and Mira are of different races—he is white and she is black—and they are initially attracted to what is mysterious in each other. But when they almost too easily overcome these differences and melt into a premature “happy ending,” they are lingering in an extended childhood. Their move to Europe is a step toward maturity, but it coincides with Mira’s move into infidelity with Zenin, who represents all the mysteries of age, of wealth, of foreignness. For Zenin, Mira is irresistible because she is both foreign and educated, and at the beginning, at least, independent of his money. For Nick, Zenin is the undefined menace of the old world: the nameless, powerful rival.