Alibis

by André Aciman

  Even our food reflects a country squire’s fare. For breakfast we have bread, butter, and peach jam—all of it made no more than a few hundred yards away. At lunch we gorge ourselves on the juiciest tomatoes, seasoned with olive oil, lemon, basil—all from around here. The large, brittle crystals of salt, however, are from Sicily. Very frugal. The wine is of the simplest vintage. Nothing fancy anywhere.

  We buy into their world, their customs, their temper, their elaborate kindness, and we want to take intimate, furtive peeks at their history these past eight hundred years. We like to touch the ground and feel how each clod of earth has already been trampled on and held, if not bled on, by other human beings. Here have walked artists, poets, braggarts, and ruthless mercenaries. They drank from the very well our children enjoy throwing pebbles in; they serenaded, brawled, and cursed down the very same alleys where just last night we stood waiting for a table for four.

  I am talking to the gardener and getting driving directions. I am headed for Chianti. Someone mentioned Sant’Andrea in Percussina, near San Casciano, where Niccolò Machiavelli whiled away his years of exile from his beloved Florence. An unusual place, everyone says, because it personifies unassuming, ramshackle aristocracy.

  As I’m getting directions, I am already earmarking this morning. The gardener, who probably suspects something like this is going on in my mind, hands me a sprig of dark sage. “Here, smell.” Tourists have ways of finding mementos in almost anything a native gives them. He is right. Tuscany is made for these mnemonic earmarks. One comes here to feel that this clear sky, these small towns and valleys with complicated names, these towers where Baron So-and-so punished his unfaithful wife or where Count Such-and-such starved with his children and, as legend has it, ended up devouring them, this little terra-cotta town that suddenly rises from nowhere, like a cluttered ziggurat made of clay, and as suddenly slinks back into a tufted valley mottled by entire swatches of girasoli; that all these are indeed meant to outlast so many lifetimes that they probably won’t change till the very last minute, when planet Earth runs headlong into the sun. You want to jot each instant down.

  Seven a.m. I like to go out and buy milk and bread. I like the swish of sandals on wet grass, on the gravel, and on the pebbled path farther off before I turn and head out on the dirt road. The shrill cry of birds circling high above the cypress trees. Not a soul anywhere.

  Eight a.m. I’m the first to arrive at the bar. I order an espresso while the barista gets me a small carton of milk. The next person to walk in is an American. Has the Herald Tribune arrived yet? Non ancora, signore. The American grumbles as he sits and orders an espresso as well. Obviously a regular early bird who, unlike me, is here for an “extended” stay. On my way to get warm bread, I remember that the baker is always a cuckold in Boccaccio’s tales. Tuscans don’t salt their bread. In Dante, eating salted bread adds bitterness to the wound of exile.

  Which reminds me of Machiavelli again. In his famous letter of December 10, 1513, to his friend and benefactor, Francesco Vettori, a disgraced Machiavelli pens an embittered portrait of a squire’s life in the countryside. “I am living on a farm,” writes the man who can’t wait to be recalled to public service in his native city. It is a most anticlimactic portrait of agrotourism by Tuscany’s most famous agroexile. He gets up before dawn to snare thrushes with his own hands. Machiavelli, who in the course of his letter drops a hint that he’s finished a “little work” on princedoms, goes on to describe how he must first prepare the birdlime he’ll need for catching the birds, adding that he knows he must surely look totally ridiculous as he trundles about the country carrying a bundle of birdcages on his back. “I caught at least two thrushes and at most six.”

  Ten a.m. Must do something useful before the day wears on. Later, there’ll be no time or willpower left to do anything. The air is still brisk, and you must hasten the pace before intense sunlight sets in. An entire day’s activity squeezed into a few charged, brilliant morning brushstrokes of pure light.

  Machiavelli: By this time in the day, he must oversee the tree fellers. He chats awhile with them, taking in his daily dose of their tireless bellyaching, only to turn and bicker with those who purchase firewood but are forever coming up with excuses not to pay. By midday, his monotonous schedule takes him to an inn where he’ll chitchat with a few people and then head home for lunch with his family, “eating such food as this poor farm of mine and my tiny property allow.”

  Eleven a.m. Blinding light suddenly explodes like an overripe, flushed peach that fell on the ground this morning and is succulent to look at and must be eaten on the spot else it spills all over. Light acquires the color of earth and of the buildings around us: the color of clay, eternal ocher.

  Noon. The distant peal of bells—reminders of time, of place, of customs that make of this world another world. On the scented, dry earth, how sound carries. Will I be able to stand the peal of a distant church bell elsewhere and not think back on this?

  The road to and from the villa has become familiar. I no longer get lost in the house. Part of me likes knowing my way around so soon: it means I’ve gone native, that I’m settled. But another part of me wishes to remain forever lost, as if I’d just landed here and have days and days to go yet before getting used to anything.

  We arrive in the small hamlet of Sant’Andrea, in Percussina, at close to one o’clock. I had expected that it would be as difficult as going back in time, but it was faster to get here than to find a bookshop with an edition of Machiavelli’s letters.

  One p.m. Two Latin words: fulgor (radiance) and torpor (lethargy, apathy). At what precise time of the day does fulgor finally become torpor? Light has already lost its transparency, its whiteness, and slides thickly down the slanted rooftops. People automatically seek out the shade. The sun, as people say here, “gives no truce.” A translucent mist rises from the ground and lets everything seen through it sway. The air heaves, but there isn’t a draft. How do you describe the intense, overwhelming silence after lunch—if not by invoking the most immaterial of sounds: insects?

  Machiavelli: Having had lunch at home, the author of The Prince will return to the inn, where he’ll seek out the company of the host, a butcher, a miller, and two furnace tenders. But these are no Chaucerian pilgrims. I can just picture these sharp-tongued Tuscans burrowing away from the sun in a dingy inn. “With them,” he continues, “I sink into vulgarity for the whole day, playing at cricca [a card game] and at backgammon, and then these games bring on a thousand disputes and countless insults with offensive words, and usually we are fighting over a penny and are heard shouting as far as San Casciano.” Niccolò Machiavelli couldn’t have sunk any lower.

  What seems so paradoxical is the degree to which he must have hated everything we have come to love about small, rustic Tuscan life—from its local color, its people, down to his dingy home in this dingy hamlet in Chianti. The house is not for sale, of course, but I can’t help myself and am doing something that comes naturally to every New Yorker. I am secretly prospecting. I see potential. What if for a price…? I could winterize the place so that I could come at Christmas, at Easter, during the harvest, at Thanksgiving—let’s face it, year-round. Start a new life. A vita nuova—the title of Dante’s earlier collection of poems dedicated to his beloved Beatrice.

  In the mud-ridden, stultifying universe where bad fortune thrust him, the only solace Machiavelli found was in books. Dante, Petrarch, Tibullus, Ovid. “When evening comes,” he writes, “I return home and enter my study; on the threshold, I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on garments that are regal and courtly. Thus fitted out appropriately, I enter the venerable courts of the ancients, where, graciously welcomed by them, I feed on the food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to question them about the reasons for their actions, and they, out of their kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time, I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread
poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I give myself over to them wholly.”

  And this is what I’ve always suspected about Tuscany. It is about many beautiful things—about small towns, magnificent vistas, and fabulous cuisine, art, culture, history—but it is ultimately about the love of books. It is a reader’s paradise. People come here because of books. Tuscany may well be for people who love life in the present—simple, elaborate, whimsical, complicated life in the present—but it is also for people who love the present when it bears the shadow of the past, who love the world provided it’s at a slight angle. Bookish people.

  This is how I have come to love Tuscany, the way I love most things: by drifting ever so slightly from them. I count the days because I love them too much. I count the days, already knowing that one day I will remember how tactless it was of me to have counted the days when I could so easily have enjoyed them. I count the days to pretend that losing all this doesn’t faze me.

  But I also know myself and know that I am counting other days, days and months when I’ll come back and find an old house on a patch of land here and, without too much fussing or too much niggling, I’ll begin to make it all my own.

  Barcelona

  The view from the hotel room on this clear sunny morning belongs to any Impressionist painting. Past the French windows and the fluttering sheers that billow every so often to suggest we’ll have yet another temperate late-summer day on the Mediterranean, you step out onto the balcony, lean against the slim banister, and there, right before you, is Barcelona’s grand cathedral, La Seu, beaming in the sunlight. It stands at the very heart of the Barri Gòtic, the city’s old quarter, the way so many large churches stand in the middle of medieval towns that have lived through too many eras, sprawled too far and seen too much to remember who did what to whom, when, and how. Paris, Milan, London, and Berlin have no longer just grown into imposing centers of culture, tourism, and finance. They are global hypercities. And Barcelona, after nearly four decades under the ruthless dictatorship of Generalissimo Franco, is not just on the rebound. It’s on the hypermap and it means to stay there.

  From the balcony, where I stand and try to fathom this city that continues to elude my grasp, I can make out the same beggar woman I’ve been seeing for days now. She is dressed in black and always sits on the steps in front of the cathedral doors, her permanently outstretched, stiffened arm almost grazing the tourists who amble in and out of the narrow entrances. She’ll be here, as she probably already has been, for many years, uttering doleful thanks to those who give and to those who don’t.

  There was a reason for coming to Barcelona, but the reason, as everyone warned me, couldn’t have been more far-fetched. I came to look for remnants of my Jewish ancestry in Spain. “Remnant” is the wrong word. I know there are no remnants or even vestiges. But I don’t know what else to call what I’ve come looking for. We go to certain places to find what corresponds to something we half-suspect has long been in us already; the outside helps configure, helps us see the inside better. Without the outside—even an arbitrary outside will sometimes do—some of us may never reach the inside.

  According to inherited lore, my ancestors came from various places in Catalonia and Andalusia. I am the first in my family to visit Spain in five hundred years. But, as when I am thinking of billions of dollars, I do not know what five hundred years mean when they’re applied to me, to my body, to my living hand, to my mother. Five hundred years is unthinkable.

  Here, in Barcelona, in August 1391, the Jewish population was all but wiped out in a brutal pogrom. That was also the year in which huge numbers of Jews around the Iberian Peninsula began, or were forcibly made, to convert to Catholicism. One hundred years later, these new Christian converts—referred to as conversos and invariably suspected of being false Christians—were hunted down so systematically by the Spanish Inquisition that, after some two hundred years of dogged persecution, it is fair to say either that more Spaniards today have traces of Jewish blood in them than care to know or that the sweeping eradication of Jewry has nowhere been as thoroughly successful as in Spain.

  As for the Jews who refused to convert in 1391, they were expelled from the United Kingdom of Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella 101 years later, in 1492. Jews who live in Spain today either “returned” centuries after their ancestors’ expulsion or are recent arrivals from Eastern Europe, America, and North Africa. But they are grafted Jews, imported Jews. The native Jews disappeared.

  Ironically, it is not unusual in Barcelona for people to say they suspect having converso ancestors. There is something bold and somewhat roguish in the admission, as if having Jewish blood were almost a diversion, a fillip in one’s ancestral tree. These individuals, to twist Freud’s term, are shadow converts, people who extrapolate a Jewish past when perhaps none whatsoever existed. If there is a touch of naughty chic in inventing a Jewish lineage, it’s also because the possibility seems either remote or simply irrelevant.

  And walking around what used to be the calle next to the cathedral, one can easily see why. Except for those Jews who, armed with Michelin guides, desultorily look for a clue they’ve been warned they’ll never find, a Jew wandering in the calle is like a species that has been extinct for centuries suddenly turning up in its ancestral plain. Death we can countenance. But extinction is unthinkable. I feel like a time traveler returning to the past to avert the death of his forefathers.

  On a “Jewish” tour of Barcelona offered by Urban Cultours, I am shown a path through what was once the calle mayor, the larger ghetto, and then to the calle menor, the ghetto “annex” nearby. I am shown the place where a Jewish temple may have stood once. Ditto the location of another smaller temple. Then I’m shown the house of a Jewish alchemist. One day a young man knocked at his door asking for a love potion. The alchemist, willing to oblige, brewed the desired philter, not realizing that the young man’s beloved, for whom it was destined, was none other than his own daughter. The tale has all the makings of a cross between Boccaccio, Ben Jonson, and Love in the Afternoon. The lovers, I am told, lived happily ever after.

  Outside the alchemist’s house I catch myself looking for what I imagine every Jew secretly hopes to find. I am not a believer, and there is something verging on kitsch in the gesture, but with my hand I feel the right lintel of the door in the hope of touching a telltale indention marking the spot of an absent mezuzah. I know that my guide has seen and understood my gesture, but is tactful enough to say nothing. I-know-she-knows-I-know-she-knows … I grew up with such converso antics.

  The narrow paths of the Barri Gòtic still promise to lead us somewhere, but as we wander through streets that couldn’t be more picturesque, streets that are at once very quiet and, a second later, filled with the sounds of artisans plying and banging away at their manual trades, the “Jewish” tour ends where it began, on the tiny Plaça de Sant Felip Neri. I’ve come full circle and realize that all I’ve been shown were might-have-beens. This might have been a temple, this might have been a moneylender’s house, this the home of a famed courtesan, this yet another temple. Even the Hebrew inscription along one of the building walls is a reproduction. What is genuine and authentic, however, is the fact that after five hundred years, not a trace of one Jew remains.

  To see what Jewish life must have been like in medieval times, I am told to visit the tiny town of Girona, less than an hour’s train ride from Barcelona.

  But in Girona, the same sights reappear: winding, dark cobbled lanes, a ghetto that has seen its heyday and its hellish days, the dank, cloying smell of clay and cloistered chalk, the sound of a dog barking at noon, the ubiquitous presence of the large cathedral overlooking the old ghetto and the painfully sweet odor of flowers about to go bad. I can smell someone cooking lunch and instantly I know how life could have gone on here. People haven’t forgotten about Jews here; they’ve forgotten that they forgot.

  Girona is a gem of a little town: it is a carefully reconstructed, meticulously maintaine
d, thoroughly researched Jewish theme park. Headstones have been brought to the Jewish History Museum from the old Jewish cemetery; inscriptions and dates and a few words in memory of so-and-so and such-and-such happen to bear the exact same names as my great-aunts and -uncles.

  But in “re-creating” itself, Girona has broken up alleys, altered its walls, and relandscaped itself, which is more or less what the inhabitants of Girona had done centuries earlier when they sought to fend off and pen in their Jews. They tore down walls and built new ones. Modern planners did not necessarily reverse the process; they did not restore Girona, but in trying to uncover a shadow Girona, they’ve reinvented another. There is as much historical accuracy as there is naughty chic in this.

  Playing fast and loose with memory is not uncommon in Barcelona. By defacing artifacts, we deface memory as well. We do it every day. Perhaps cities should be held to higher standards, if only because stones remember for us. We alter stones to alter who we are.

  The cathedral in Barcelona is built on the remains of an old basilica that was razed in the tenth century, rebuilt in the eleventh, and rebuilt yet once more on the same site in the thirteenth century. The façade of the cathedral, which is illuminated from the inside in the evening, is imitation Gothic dating back, not to the Middle Ages, but to the late-nineteenth century.