Enigma Variations

by André Aciman

  “You should hear him imitate Tarzan’s yell.” And turning to Nanni, he said, “Show them.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “He yells and then he swims. The other day he crossed the bay in four and a half minutes. I do it in eight.”

  “When you don’t give up, you mean,” scoffed Nanni. “Actually, ten to eleven is more like it.” Then, feeling the sense of pressure in the room, he did a quick pivot and, informal as ever, said, “Alla prossima, until next time.” My father uttered a compliant “Sì.”

  I liked their fellowship and the way they gibed with each other. I had seldom seen my father like this, sprightly, impish, boyish, even. “What do you think of him?” he asked my mother.

  “He seems like a nice chap,” she said, almost trying to sound cordially indifferent. There was even a note of suppressed hostility toward the cabinetmaker that might not have been entirely genuine but that was her typical way of dangling her veto on anything or anyone she had not brought into our fold. But then, noticing my father’s exasperated shrug, which was his way of saying she could still have said something nice about the poor fellow, she added that he had the most beautiful eyelashes. “Women notice these things.”

  I hadn’t noticed his eyelashes. But then, maybe this is why I was never able to hold his gaze. He had the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen, certainly the only ones I’d ever paid any attention to. “Still, I find him a bit too bold, too forward. He doesn’t really know his place, does he?”

  I was sure that what had irked her and why her mood changed as soon as Nanni walked into our house and made a beeline to the frames was that he had used the familiar tu with the man who had hired him.

  * * *

  A WEEK LATER my mother decided to pay the cabinetmaker a visit. Did I want to go with her? “Why not,” I answered, adding a casual “I wouldn’t mind.” Perhaps she picked up an inflection in the studied nonchalance of my Why not that alerted her to something, because a few minutes later, as though from nowhere, she said she was glad to hear that I was interested in the ordinary things of our planet. What things of our planet? I asked, trying to gauge what she had really inferred from my hasty reply. “Oh, I don’t know—furniture, for example.” I could just picture her adding “friends, people, life,” always a bit arch and suspicious in the way she took in my seemingly offhand remarks. Or perhaps she wasn’t aware of anything, any more than I really was myself, though I felt, and perhaps she felt so as well, that there was something too deliberate in my carefree reply.

  But as we ambled to the old town to Signor Giovanni’s shop early that afternoon, I didn’t know why but her cryptic silence reminded me of what she had told me a year or so earlier during a similar walk: I was never to let a man or a grown boy touch me there. I was so thrown off by her remark that it never occurred to me to ask why anyone would want to touch me there in the first place. But that afternoon on our walk up the hill to San Giustiniano Alta, I remembered her warning.

  The shop reeked of turpentine. I recognized the smell from art class. But here it spoke to me of quiet afternoons when just a few shops stayed open while everyone else was closed for hours after lunch. The barber, the grocer, the coffee mill, the baker—all closed. Signor Giovanni was quietly carving away at some ornate woodwork with his doors wide open to let out the fumes. He was not surprised to see us, and right away stood up and with his left hand lifted the hem of his apron to wipe the sweat off his brow. He excused himself and disappeared into another room to bring out the desk.

  Left alone together on this quiet afternoon, my mother and I felt entirely out of place. I looked around. Too many tools, too much junk, too much wood dust everywhere. On a brick wall, a coarse brown sweater hung on a nail. You could tell it was bristly, but when I reached up to touch it, it felt less like wool than it did something between burlap and male stubble. A look from my mother said Don’t touch.

  The desk, when he finally carried it in and stood it on the ground before us, had lost its sheen and looked dulled and blanched, as if it had been skinned alive. “This is work in progress,” he said, to assuage what was clearly a horrified look trying to pass for restrained concern on my mother’s face. He knew what she was thinking and reminded her that in a few weeks she wouldn’t believe how the desk would glow under candlelight, more luminous and translucent than polished marble, he said. To move away from his awkward and perhaps futile attempts to comfort her, I asked Signor Giovanni how he had known about the box. “After a while of doing this, one just knows,” he said, repeating one just knows as though mulling the answer himself, because difficult admissions about hard work and experience gathered over years of exacting labor could be justified only with a sigh. Suddenly he seemed older than his looks, work-weary, muted, even sad. He showed my mother the repairs he was doing on the desk. It was a masterpiece of smoothed and sanded curves, but the legs were grayed out with a protective temporary coat. He touched the exaggeratedly rounded corners of the desk, let his hand rest there, as on the rump of a docile pony. Then he placed a hand on my back as I pretended to peer into the cavity where my grandfather’s box had lain hidden for so long. To prevent him from changing the subject or from removing his hand if my mother was to speak, I kept looking in and stringing one question after the next about the wood, the design, the products he used to remove the layers of grime to bring back to life the shabby object that had always languished in a corner of our house. How did he know when to change from thick sandpaper to thin? When was turpentine bad for wood? What other products did he use, where had he learned all this, why did it take so long? I loved hearing him speak, especially when I pointed at something and he’d lean next to me to explain. My mother was right. I loved his voice, especially when he was so close that he seemed to breathe on me and speak in whispers. He knew so much and yet, when he’d sigh before answering, he sounded so vulnerable and so wary of the unexpected turns things took sometimes. Things didn’t always cooperate, he said. What things? I asked. He seemed amused by this. Then, turning to my mother: “It could be life or it could be a strip of wood that refuses to bend as it should.”

  I remembered how upon ending his inspection of the desk the first time in our house, he had tied up and secured the movable parts that might have opened or dropped on the floor and then hoisted the whole thing on one shoulder and walked away with it. He reminded me of Aeneas fleeing Troy balancing his elderly father on his shoulder and holding his young son Ascanius by the hand. I wanted to be Ascanius. I wanted him to be my father, I wanted to leave and walk away with him. I wanted his tiny shop to be our home, grime, wood shavings, dust, turpentine, the lot. The father I had was a wonderful man. But Signor Giovanni would be better, more than a father to me.

  When we left, my mother stopped by the baker’s and bought me a small pastry. She bought one for herself as well. We ate them as we walked. Neither of us spoke.

  I knew that what I’d felt in the shop was unusual and stealthy, possibly unwholesome. I felt it yet more keenly on the day I decided to take the long way home after seeing my tutor and, while circling through the old town at least twice, ended up knocking at the glass door of his shop. He was giving instructions to his assistant, a boy slightly older than I, who I later found out was his brother Ruggiero.

  When he saw me, he gave a quick nod, and all the while greeting me, he continued to wipe oil stains off his hands with a rag, which I later realized was soaked in paint thinner. “I already told your mother that it’s not ready yet,” he said, clearly annoyed by my impromptu visit, which he probably took as a sly, nudging intrusion spurred by my mother’s impatience to see the job done. I was passing by after seeing my tutor, I said, and just wanted to say hello. I could take only hasty peeks at his face.

  “Well, well then, hello, come in anyway,” he said, opening up. And suddenly, because of his expansive welcome, I hugged him as I’d hug all my parents’ friends when they visited. The last thing I wanted to be was a boss’s son dropping in on an unsuspecting hire
ling caught slouching on the job. But I was interrupting, and he was halting everything and setting time aside for me, because I was, there was no hiding it, the boss’s son. I should never have come, I thought, feeling unbearably awkward as he produced a small, rickety wooden chair for me to sit on. I should have gone straight home and helped the gardener prune herbs instead. But he broke my silence. Did I want lemonade? he asked. I did not weigh my answer. I nodded. He stepped over to a very thick, sagging worker’s table littered with tools, lifted a porcelain pitcher whose top was covered with a faded doily, and poured a glass. It’s not cold, he said—meaning not like the lemonade they serve in your house—but it will quench your thirst. He handed me the glass and then stood there and stared like a nurse making sure the patient downed his medicine to the last drop. It smelled not just of strong lemon or of those midsummer afternoons when the heat weighs you down and you’re just seconds away from dropping on your bed and are grateful that someone invented lemonade; it smelled of the turpentine on his hands. I loved that it smelled of his hands. I grew to love the scent of his shop, his little bric-a-brac world made of wood and sagging tables and ragged sweaters and rickety chairs that you could rest on during scorching afternoons when your entire being seemed intoxicated by the tart, sweet, overpowering scent of lime and linseed oil.

  A few days after my visit, I decided to drop in on the cabinetmaker a second time, and then a few days later again, each time immediately following my tutorial. Along the way I was so starved that I was in the habit of buying the same pastry as soon as the baker reopened. But thinking twice about it, I decided to purchase two more, one for him and one for his brother. I would wait to eat mine until I sat with him in his dingy shop for five minutes. Had I been slightly older, I would have right away known that I was disturbing him. But I was convinced he was happy to see me and that our friendship had indeed blossomed. He offered me lemonade, pulled up a chair to sit beside me, and talked as he ate the pastry, one adult speaking to another adult. I loved it. He talked about his father and grandfather, who had been cabinetmakers as well. They went back generations, he said, throwing a hand behind his shoulder to mime the passage of time. And was his son going to be a cabinetmaker too? He did not have children, he said. But didn’t he want children? I asked, feeling that this was grown-up talk. Who knows, he mused, he hadn’t found the right wife yet. I wanted to tell him that I would gladly fill in the role of a son and serve as his apprentice every summer and learn everything there was to learn until his son would replace me. “I want to work with you,” I said. He smiled, then stood up and poured himself a glass as well. “Don’t you have friends?” he asked. He might have meant, Don’t people your age have better things to do?

  “I don’t have friends here. But I don’t have many at home either.”

  So what did I do all day these days?

  The beach, reading, the daily homework for my Greek and Latin tutor.

  He recited the opening verses of The Aeneid.

  “You studied Latin?” I asked, thrilled by the news.

  “Poco, hardly, but then I had to abandon it.”

  To tease him, I asked him to recite the opening verses again.

  He started reciting them but then burst out laughing mid-verse. Which made me laugh as well.

  “The things you make me say, Arma virumque cano, really, Paolo!”

  He was making fun of himself. I loved when he did this. It drew us closer.

  “So why don’t you have friends?” Were we being serious again? He was starting to sound like my mother. Yet I didn’t mind it coming from him.

  “I don’t know. I want friends. Maybe not everyone likes me.”

  “Maybe you think they don’t. Everyone makes friends.”

  “Not everyone.”

  “But you’ve made friends here.”

  “That’s because I like coming here.”

  “Don’t you like people your age?”

  I hunched my shoulders. “I don’t know.”

  And, as though to punctuate what I was saying to him, I caught myself exhaling something like a mini-sigh, which was the younger version of the weary sigh he himself had emitted when speaking about his years growing up as a cabinetmaker. What I liked was not only having to put my cards on the table and disclosing a very private fact about myself but, for the first time, I had spoken with someone about things I thought troubled me and no one but me. I liked speaking like this.

  When my father or my relatives asked why I had no friends, I would find a way to avoid the subject or claim that I had very good friends, but only at school. At school I’d say that I might not have classmates as friends but that I had many friends in San Giustiniano. Yet I had never had a friend with whom I could talk about not having friends. Here it felt so easy that I had to hold myself back from sharing too much for fear of boring him.

  “I want to learn everything from you.”

  He smiled wistfully. “Wood is impossible to learn quickly.” And so saying, he walked over to a shelf and brought down a longish object wrapped in what looked like a blanket. “This,” he said, cautiously unwrapping the object, “is a very, very old violin.” It had no strings at all. “My grandfather made it. I’ve never built a violin, and I wouldn’t even try, but I know wood, I’ve grown up with wood, and I know what needs to be done to keep the sound alive.” He had me slide my hand on the base of the instrument. “Wood is unforgiving. A painter, even a great painter, can change his mind midway or paint over a serious mistake. But you can’t undo a mistake on wood. You need to understand how wood thinks, how woods speaks, and what each sound it makes means. Wood, like very, very few living things, never dies.”

  One might have thought he was Michelangelo speaking about marble.

  “So, do you still want to work in my stinking shop?” he finally asked after I said I didn’t care how long it took to learn. More than ever, I wished to say, adding, I want to be with you, I want to be your son, I want to open the shop for you before you arrive and close it after you leave, I want to bring you coffee and warm bread in the morning, squeeze lemons for you, sweep and mop the floor, and, should you ask, forswear my parents, my home, everything. I want to be you.

  I knew my answer would have made him laugh. So to restrain my fervor, I said, no, I didn’t want to work in his stinking shop. The wording became a source of humor between us.

  I dropped by twice a week, then more frequently.

  One day, as I was coming with pastries for the three of us, I froze on the spot. My mother was leaving his shop. She was wearing a large straw hat and sunglasses. I spotted her right away and immediately dashed inside the barbershop and kept watch behind the beaded curtain until I saw her pass by on her way down vicolo Sant’Eusebio. She hadn’t seen me. But it gave me a shock and I promised never to walk in on him unless I’d made certain she wasn’t visiting. I was sure that they had spoken about me. But I never asked myself what impulse had driven me to hide from her. Perhaps I didn’t want her to think I idled around town after my tutorial. But I knew this wasn’t the reason.

  Nanni was always working whenever I walked in. Sometimes it would be so hot in his shop that he would not be wearing a shirt. My father was right. I had no idea he had an athlete’s frame.

  “Che sorpresa, what a surprise, two days in a row!” he said when I decided not to space my visits. “Today I will let you help me.”

  So he brought down a large picture frame. Even though I’d been staring at it during my previous visits, it took me a few moments to recognize it was ours. It looked so clean, so new, so bleached of color that it made me think of a tanned man whose naked butt is as white as talcum.

  The frame was far from finished, he said. We needed to remove the grime that had accumulated over the years from its carved floral molding and in the ridges at the corners.

  “And how does one do this?”

  “I’ll show you. Just do as you’re told.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “It will be t
he end of you.”

  We smiled at each other.

  He bit off a piece of the pastry I had brought and left the rest of it on that day’s newspaper that lay wide open on the sagging table. It had most likely served as a makeshift tablecloth during today’s lunch with his brother.

  He handed me a simple gouger the likes of which I’d never seen before and said that I should do exactly what he told me.

  He brought two chairs out to the sidewalk where it was cooler and then handed me an apron.

  “Because I don’t want you to dirty your clothes.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “Put the apron on.”

  I smiled at the mock command. He was smiling too.

  After we both sat down with our aprons on facing each other, he let the frame rest on our knees and showed me how to scrape off the impacted grit, but not too aggressively, because I might be removing not just dirt but also the wood underneath it. He said he had already sanded the frame and just this morning treated it with a very weak acid to remove some stains. He also pointed out spots I needed to avoid touching with my gouge because he’d rebuilt some of the damaged or rotten sections of the frame with gesso.

  Wouldn’t it have been wiser to use the gesso after the acid, not before? I asked.

  He looked at me. “Ma senti quello, listen to this one. Doesn’t think I know what I’m doing. Just do as you’re told.”

  He was making fun of me. I liked it.

  And so I did all I was asked to do, and for about two hours late that afternoon we sat there on the vicolo, a step away from the gutter that runs down its middle, digging into the frame, clearing the dirt that had caked into its carved crevices. Tomorrow he was going to treat it with clear oil. No stain, just oil. “You’ll see how beautiful wood can be once I’m done with it. A work of art. In a few days I’ll bring it over to let your parents see.”