by André Aciman
I wanted this walk never to end. The silent and deserted alley was altogether murky and its ancient, pockmarked cobblestones glistened in the damp air, as though an ancient carrier had spilled the viscous contents of his amphora before disappearing underground in the ancient city. Everyone had left Rome. And the emptied city, which had seen too many and seen them all, now belonged to us alone and to the poet who had cast it, if only for one night, in his own image. The mugginess was not going to break tonight. We could, if we wished, have walked in circles and no one would have known and none would have minded.
As we ambled down an emptied labyrinth of sparely lit streets, I began to wonder what all this talk of San Clemente had to do with us—how we move through time, how time moves through us, how we change and keep changing and come back to the same. One could even grow old and not learn a thing but this. That was the poet’s lesson, I presume. In a month or so from now, when I’d revisit Rome, being here tonight with Oliver would seem totally unreal, as though it had happened to an entirely different me. And the wish born three years ago here when an errand boy offered to take me to a cheap movie theater known for what went on there would seem no less unfulfilled to me three months from now than it was three years ago. He came. He left. Nothing else had changed. I had not changed. The world hadn’t changed. Yet nothing would be the same. All that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance.
The bar was closing when we arrived. “We close at two.” “Well, we still have time for drinks.” Oliver wanted a martini, an American martini. What a beautiful idea, said the poet. “Me too,” chimed in someone else. On the large jukebox you could hear the same summer hit we’d heard during the entire month of July. On hearing the word “martini,” the old man and the publisher also dittoed the order. “Ehi! Taverniere!” shouted Falstaff. The waiter told us that we could either have wine or beer; the bartender had left earlier that evening, on account of because his mother was taken gravely ill to the hospital where she had to be taken. Everyone smothered a laugh at the waiter’s garbled speech. Oliver asked what they charged for martinis. The waiter yelled the question to the girl at the cash register. She told him how much. “Well, what if I make the drinks and you charge us your price on account of because we can mix the drinks we are mixing?”
There was hesitation on the part of the waiter and of the cashier. The owner had long since left. “Why not?” said the girl. “If you know how to make them, faccia pure, go right ahead.”
Round of applause for Oliver, who sauntered his way behind the bar and, in a matter of seconds, after adding ice to the gin and a bit of vermouth, was vigorously shaking the cocktail mixer. Olives couldn’t be found in the tiny refrigerator by the bar. The cashier came and checked and produced a bowl. “Olives,” she said, staring Oliver straight in the face, as if to mean, It was under your very nose—had you looked? And what else? “Maybe I could entice you to accept a martini from us,” he said. “This has been a crazy evening. A drink could not possibly make it any crazier. Make it a small one.”
“Want me to teach you?”
And he proceeded to explain the intricacies of a straight-up dry martini. He was okay being a bartender to the bar’s help.
“Where did you learn this?” I asked.
“Mixology 101. Courtesy Harvard. Weekends, I made a living as a bartender all through college. Then I became a chef, then a caterer. But always a poker player.”
His undergraduate years, each time he spoke of them, acquired a limelit, incandescent magic, as if they belonged to another life, a life to which I had no access since it already belonged to the past. Proof of its existence trickled, as it did now, in his ability to mix drinks, or to tell arcane grappas apart, or to speak to all women, or in the mysterious square envelopes addressed to him that arrived at our house from all over the world.
I had never envied him the past, nor felt threatened by it. All these facets of his life had the mysterious character of incidents that had occurred in my father’s life long before my birth but which continued to resonate into the present. I didn’t envy life before me, nor did I ache to travel back to the time when he had been my age.
There were at least fifteen of us now, and we occupied one of the large wooden rustic tables. The waiter announced last call a second time. Within ten minutes, the other customers had left. The waiter had already started lowering the metal gate, on account of because it was the closing hour of the chiusura. The jukebox was summarily unplugged. If each of us kept talking, we might be here till daybreak.
“Did I shock you?” asked the poet.
“Me?” I asked, not certain why, of all people at the table, he should have addressed me.
Lucia stared at us. “Alfredo, I’m afraid he knows more than you know about corrupting youth. E un dissoluto assoluto,” she intoned, as always now, her hand to my cheek.
“This poem is about one thing and one thing only,” said Straordinario-fantastico.
“San Clemente is really about four—at the very least!” retorted the poet.
Third last call.
“Listen,” interrupted the owner of the bookstore to the waiter, “why don’t you let us stay? We’ll put the young lady in a cab when we’re done. And we’ll pay. Another round of martinis?”
“Do as you please,” said the waiter, removing his apron. He’d given up on us. “I’m going home.”
Oliver came up to me and asked me to play something on the piano.
“What would you like?” I asked.
“Anything.”
This would be my thanks for the most beautiful evening of my life. I took a sip from my second martini, feeling as decadent as one of those jazz piano players who smoke a lot and drink a lot and are found dead in a gutter at the end of every film.
I wanted to play Brahms. But an instinct told me to play something very quiet and contemplative. So I played one of the Goldberg Variations, which made me quiet and contemplative. There was a sigh among the fifteen or so, which pleased me, since this was my only way of repaying for this magical evening.
When I was asked to play something else, I proposed a capriccio by Brahms. They all agreed it was a wonderful idea, until the devil took hold of me and, after playing the opening bars of the capriccio, out of nowhere I started to play a stornello. The contrast caught them all by surprise and all began to sing, though not in unison, for each sang the stornello he or she knew. Each time we came to the refrain, we agreed we’d all sing the same words, which earlier that evening Oliver and I had heard Dante the statue recite. Everyone was ecstatic, and I was asked to play another, then another. Roman stornelli are usually bawdy, lilting songs, not the lacerating, heart-wrenching arias from Naples. After the third, I looked over at Oliver and said I wanted to go out to take a breath of fresh air.
“What is it, doesn’t he feel well?” the poet asked Oliver.
“No, just needs some air. Please don’t move.”
The cashier leaned all the way down, and with one arm lifted up the rolling shutter. I got out from under the partly lowered shutter and suddenly felt a fresh gust of wind on the empty alley. “Can we walk a bit?” I asked Oliver.
We sauntered down the dark alley, exactly like two shades in Dante, the younger and the older. It was still very hot and I caught the light from a streetlamp glistening on Oliver’s forehead. We made our way deeper into an extremely quiet alley, then through another, as if drawn through these unreal and sticky goblin lanes that seemed to lead to a different, nether realm you entered in a state of stupor and wonderment. All I heard were the alley cats and the splashing of running water nearby. Either a marble fountain or one of those numberless municipal fontanelle found everywhere in Rome. “Water,” I gasped. “I’m not made for martinis. I’m so drunk.”
“You shouldn’t have had any. You had scotch, then wine, grappa, now gin.”
“So much for the evening’s sexual buildup.”
He snickered. “You look pale.”
“I think I’m going to
be sick.”
“Best remedy is to make it happen.”
“How?”
“Bend down and stick your finger all the way inside your mouth.”
I shook my head. No way.
We found a garbage bin on the sidewalk. “Do it inside here.”
I normally resisted throwing up. But I was too ashamed to be childish now. I was also uncomfortable puking in front of him. I wasn’t even sure that Amanda had not followed us.
“Here, bend down, I’ll hold your head.”
I was resisting. “It will pass. I’m sure it will.”
“Open your mouth.”
I opened my mouth. Before I knew it I was sick as soon as he touched my uvula.
But what a solace to have my head held, what selfless courage to hold someone’s head while he’s vomiting. Would I have had it in me to do the same for him?
“I think I’m done,” I said.
“Let’s see if more doesn’t come out.”
Sure enough, another heave brought out more of tonight’s food and drink.
“Don’t you chew your peas?” he asked, smiling at me.
How I loved being made fun of that way.
“I just hope I didn’t get your shoes dirty,” I said.
“They’re not shoes, they’re sandals.”
Both of us almost burst out laughing.
When I looked around, I saw that I had vomited right next to the statue of the Pasquino. How like me to vomit right in front of Rome’s most venerable lampoonist.
“I swear, there were peas there that hadn’t even been bitten into and could have fed the children of India.”
More laughter. I washed my face and rinsed my mouth with the water of a fountain we found on our way back.
Right before us we caught sight of the human statue of Dante again. He had removed his cape and his long black hair was all undone. He must have sweated five pounds in that costume. He was now brawling with the statue of Queen Nefertiti, also with her mask off and her long hair matted together by sweat. “I’m picking up my things tonight and good night and good riddance.” “Good riddance to you too, and vaffanculo.” “Fanculo yourself, e poi t’inculo.” And so saying, Nefertiti threw a handful of coins at Dante, who ducked the coins, though one hit him on the face. “Aiiiio,” he yelped. For a moment I thought they were going to come to blows.
We returned by another equally dark, deserted, glistening side alley, then onto via Santa Maria dell’Anima. Above us was a weak square streetlight mounted to the wall of a tiny old corner building. In the old days, they probably had a gas jet in its place. I stopped and he stopped. “The most beautiful day of my life and I end up vomiting.” He wasn’t listening. He pressed me against the wall and started to kiss me, his hips pushing into mine, his arms about to lift me off the ground. My eyes were shut, but I knew he had stopped kissing me to look around him; people could be walking by. I didn’t want to look. Let him be the one to worry. Then we kissed again. And, with my eyes still shut, I think I did hear two voices, old men’s voices, grumbling something about taking a good look at these two, wondering if in the old days you’d ever see such a sight. But I didn’t want to think about them. I didn’t worry. If he wasn’t worried, I wasn’t worried. I could spend the rest of my life like this: with him, at night, in Rome, my eyes totally shut, one leg coiled around his. I thought of coming back here in the weeks or months to come—for this was our spot.
We returned to the bar to find everyone had already left. By then it must have been three in the morning, or even later. Except for a few cars, the city was dead quiet. When, by mistake, we reached the normally crowded Piazza Rotonda around the Pantheon, it too was unusually empty. There were a few tourists lugging huge knapsacks, a few drunks, and the usual drug dealers. Oliver stopped a street vendor and bought me a Lemonsoda. The taste of bitter lemons was refreshing and made me feel better. Oliver bought a bitter orange drink and a slice of watermelon. He offered me a bite, but I said no. How wonderful, to walk half drunk with a Lemonsoda on a muggy night like this around the gleaming slate cobblestones of Rome with someone’s arm around me. We turned left and, heading toward Piazza Febo, suddenly, from nowhere, made out someone strumming a guitar, singing not a rock song, but as we got closer, an old, old Neapolitan tune. “Fenesta ca lucive.” It took me a moment to recognize it. Then I remembered.
Mafalda had taught me that song years ago when I was a boy. It was her lullaby. I hardly knew Naples, and, other than for her and her immediate entourage, and a few casual visits to Naples with my parents, had never had contact with Neapolitans. But the strains of the doleful song stirred such powerful nostalgia for lost loves and for things lost over the course of one’s life and for lives, like my grandfather’s, that had come long before mine that I was suddenly taken back to a poor, disconsolate universe of simple folk like Mafalda’s ancestors, fretting and scurrying in the tiny vicoli of an old Naples whose memory I wanted to share word for word with Oliver now, as if he too, like Mafalda and Manfredi and Anchise and me, were a fellow southerner whom I’d met in a foreign port city and who’d instantly understand why the sound of this old song, like an ancient prayer for the dead in the deadest of languages, could bring tears even in those who couldn’t understand a syllable.
The song reminded him of the Israeli national anthem, he said. Or was it inspired by the Moldau? On second thought, it might have been an aria from Bellini’s Sonnambula. Warm, but still off, I said, though the song has often been attributed to Bellini. We’re clementizing, he said.
I translated the words from Neapolitan to Italian to English. It’s about a young man who passes by his beloved’s window only to be told by her sister that Nennélla has died. From the mouth where flowers once blossomed only worms emerge. Farewell, window, for my Nenna can no longer look out again.
A German tourist, who seemed all alone and quite drunk himself that night, had overheard me translating the song into English and approached us, begging in halting English to know if I could be so kind as to translate the words into German as well. Along the way to our hotel, I taught Oliver and the German how to sing the refrain, which all three of us repeated again and again, our voices reverberating in the narrow, damp alleys of Rome as each mangled his own version of Neapolitan. Finally we said goodbye to the German on Piazza Navona. On our way to our hotel, Oliver and I began to sing the refrain again, softly,
Chiagneva sempe ca durmeva sola,
mo dorme co’ li muorte accompagnata.
She always wept because she slept alone,
Now she sleeps among the dead.
I can, from the distance of years now, still think I’m hearing the voices of two young men singing these words in Neapolitan toward daybreak, neither realizing, as they held each other and kissed again and again on the dark lanes of old Rome, that this was the last night they would ever make love again.
“Tomorrow let’s go to San Clemente,” I said.
“Tomorrow is today,” he replied.
Part 4
Ghost Spots
Anchise was waiting for me at the station. I spotted him as soon as the train made its prolonged curve around the bay, slowing down and almost grazing the tall cypresses that I loved so much and through which I always caught an ever-welcoming preview of the glaring midafternoon sea. I lowered the window and let the wind fan my face, catching a glimpse of our lumbering engine car far, far ahead. Arriving in B. always made me happy. It reminded me of arrivals in early June at the end of every school year. The wind, the heat, the glinting gray platform with the ancient stationmaster’s hut permanently shuttered since the First World War, the dead silence, all spelled my favorite season at this deserted and beloved time of day. Summer was just about to start, it seemed, things hadn’t happened yet, my head was still buzzing with last-minute cramming before exams, this was the first time I was sighting the sea this year. Oliver who?
The train stopped for a few seconds, let off about five passengers. There was the usual rumble, fo
llowed by the loud hydraulic rattle of the engine. Then, as easily as they had stopped, the cars squeaked out of the station, one by one, and slithered away. Total silence.
I stood for a moment under the dried wooden cantilever. The whole place, including the boarded hut, exuded a strong odor of petrol, tar, chipped paint, and piss.
And as always: blackbirds, pine trees, cicadas.
Summer.
I had seldom thought of the approaching school year. Now I was grateful that, with so much heat and so much summer around me, it still seemed months away.