by André Aciman
He chuckled. “Because they’re afraid you’ve come to repossess the land. Everyone has an eye on abandoned land these days.”
I smiled. “Are you eyeing abandoned land these days?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t be human if I weren’t.”
Then, to test his reaction, I told him we were probably going to rebuild the house. Part of me was almost ready to swear I wasn’t lying.
“So I will be your gardener again.”
“So you will be our gardener again.”
He gave me another hug, and without thinking, I caught myself embracing him as well.
I never wanted to see his face again. He knew, as I knew, that he had no intention of being a gardener. One day I’ll come back and find he owns all the adjoining properties, including ours.
* * *
ON MY WAY back to the harbor, I crossed the tiny piazza and decided to knock at the small door that opened to the mayor’s one-room office. There, an old lady who had pulled open her desk drawer and was busy rummaging for something in its rickety, cluttered space, told me that her son wasn’t in the office. “Come back tomorrow” was her peremptory reply when I asked when he’d be back. But I was leaving this afternoon, I said, and then introduced myself. She interrupted whatever she was doing in her drawer, seemed to recognize the family name, and gradually remembered that our villa had burned down. Years ago, wasn’t it? she asked. Then, suddenly, she was cordial, deferential, almost diffident. In a year or so we were going to rebuild, I said, not so much to convey a fait accompli or to project a sense of ownership and authority but more to test her reaction. She couldn’t have looked more disappointed. “Mi dica allora, so tell me,” she said, already anticipating worse news. There was nothing to say. I just wanted the mayor to know we were going to hire builders from the mainland. I knew she would have preferred local workers. There was spite in my heart, and I liked watching discontent limn itself on her features. “Please tell your son that I came by today.” And as I opened the door, I pivoted and performed what I hoped was one of those accomplished inspectors’ by the way exit lines seen in so many movies: Did she happen to know how one could reach Giovanni, the cabinetmaker?
The old lady thought for a moment. No, she didn’t. “Quello è sparito tempo fa! He disappeared long ago.” “Any idea where?” She hunched her shoulders. “Perhaps your father knows.” Why would my father know? I asked. But she didn’t hear me or pretended not to and was back rifling through her wide-open desk drawer. Finally, with a barely concealed dismissive glance, she said, “Good luck finding workers.”
I headed out into the blazing sun, where I looked for a caffè. I wanted to sit somewhere and jot down thoughts about my return visit. I thought of seeking my Norman chapel, but I’d already seen it on my way to our grounds and, strangely, it hadn’t spoken to me.
Nothing spoke to me. Even jotting a few thoughts in my notebook failed to mean anything. I wanted something and could not begin to know what it was. The last thing I’d written was I’ve come back for him. And that was hours ago. I closed my notebook and looked around. I was seeing the place for the first time. I was seeing it for the last time. The caffè faced the harbor, with a view of the town uphill, while fishermen were at work with their cordage and nets. At this hour of the morning, I was the only customer. None of the umbrellas had been opened yet, and I knew that sitting under direct sunlight would inevitably give me a headache. So after finishing my coffee I decided to walk back up into town and amble about in the shade. I remembered where the bookseller was and hoped to drop by and buy something to while away the time until the ferry docked. But I also thought I should visit my old tutor and get this personal errand out of the way.
I had forgotten absolutely nothing and was able to find his building right away. At the entrance, by the portico, sat the same lopsided, dilapidated mailboxes I had seen a decade before. His name was written in large capitals that betrayed an old man’s tremor as well as his determined will to proclaim his name. He had written each letter three times, once in purple, twice in blue, on square math paper that had been folded over to fit in the name slot. Prof. Sermoneta. Interno 34. I hadn’t forgotten that either.
After climbing the spiral stairway, I stopped on the fourth floor and rang his doorbell. I felt nothing. From behind the door, I could hear the clumsy chink of dishes and silverware, then the slow shuffle of feet, and a tremulous, ill-tempered, jerky hand opening the locks on the door. The same three locks, and as always the same struggle to remember which lock went which way, which invariably put him in a foul mood before even opening his door to you. This also made you want to crawl in and apologize for troubling him to teach you Latin and Greek.
He was wearing slippers, as usual. Chi è? he asked with the door still shut. But before I could make up my mind how to let him know who I was, he had already flung the door open, almost with a rage. “Ah, sei tu? Oh, it’s you?” he said on seeing me. “So come in.” I stepped inside. The place smelled as it always did: of camphor for his joints and of Tuscan mini-cigars, which had always made my clothes stink. “I was just washing some dishes, come in, come in,” he said impatiently as he led me straight into the kitchen. “And give me a hand, will you.” He handed me a towel and a teacup, which were immediately followed by a saucer and a plate. “Dry them well.” This too hadn’t changed. You became his apprentice, his disciple, his servant. “So you’ve come for a lesson?” I stared at him in disbelief. Did he really remember me, or was he just trying to hide that he had absolutely no idea?
“No, no lessons for today,” I said, almost catching myself saying it the way one might turn down a strong dose of grappa on an empty stomach for breakfast.
“Why not? A bit of Latin never hurt,” he insisted. We might as well have been arguing about grappa. “Have you studied?”
These were strange questions. He hadn’t seen me in a decade and he was picking up a conversation from scarcely the other day.
“Why haven’t you studied? Are you not well?” he asked.
“I’ve been quite well,” I said, changing my mind about telling him what I’d studied in college, how, despite failing my Latin and Greek exam ten years earlier, I had majored in classical literature. I was even going to allege that it was because of him that I had developed a fondness for Greek literature. For all he knew, it seemed, I was just late for class again and, as usual, had been playing marbles with the local boys before coming upstairs for my tutorial.
“Allora? So?”
“Allora nothing, really. My father asked me to say hello,” I lied. I was not going to mention my mother.
“And promise to say hello back. Promise?”
I promised.
“Do you still read one canto a day?” I asked, trying to break the strain in our conversation, only to realize I had given it a further torsion.
“A canto a day it still is.”
Silence, again.
“And do you still teach?”
“And do I still eat?” he snapped back, parodying my question.
He looked at me as if I was meant to provide an answer to his question. But in this strange conversation, I had nothing to add. I had not expected such erratic small talk.
“Of course I teach,” he went on, seeing I had failed to supply an answer in the allotted time. “Not as much as before. I need to sleep more, but I have some very gifted students.”
“Like me?” I asked, trying to liven the conversation with a dash of irony.
“If it pleases you to think so, why not. Like you.”
As he was lighting his cigar I couldn’t help but ask, “Do you remember me?”
“Do I remember you? Of course I remember you. What kind of a question is that?”
“Because I remember everything,” I added, swiftly trying to cover up my tracks by throwing in the first thing that came to mind.
“And why shouldn’t you remember everything? I’m not going to ask you to decline words today. But don’t tempt me.”
I’d been expecting an expression of utter surprise at the door, even an embrace and a warm welcome once we sat down in his musty old study, not this sputter of jolts and darts.
“These have not been easy times, let me tell you.”
“How so?”
“How so? You ask the most fatuous questions. Everyone is getting wealthy these days, thievery everywhere, except for teachers, to say nothing of penniless tutors in their late seventies. Difficult enough not to afford a new winter coat. Need to hear more? No.”
I apologized.
“Plus there are other issues.”
“Other issues? What other issues?”
“Called old age. May the good Lord spare you that craggy abyss.”
I could do no more than nod.
“You nodded. Why, because you know so much about old age?”
“My father.”
“Your father?” He breathed deeply. “Your father was a genius.”
“My father, a genius?”
“A genius, and don’t disrespect! He knew more than any doctor both here and on the mainland. But he also saw where things were headed here so he decided to move. Not all of us were as prévoyant,” he said, using French to prove he was still in possession of his marbles. “But as a result, this town was left without a single man who had read a book, any book. Except for the pharmacist—and what does the poor clueless soul know about aches and gallstones and enlarged prostates?”
As a joke, I was going to recommend our barber Signor Alessi but held myself back. Still, the comic thought brought a smile to my lips that I couldn’t quite contain.
“This is no laughing matter. You’ve always been a bit of a blockhead, Paolo, haven’t you?”
This was the first time he had used my name. So he did know who I was.
“Explain,” I asked.
“Only a blockhead would need to have things spelled out. To see a real doctor I have to catch the ferry, and a ferry ride in midwinter is no funny business. I see no reason for smiling.”
I apologized.
Was this the lost world I had come looking for—all bile inside his small apartment and rank looting outside? No wonder Nanni couldn’t wait to get out of this medieval gutter that had once been home to pirates and Saracens.
“So your father is well?” he said.
“My father is well.”
“I am happy for you.” As always, bitterness and humanity, like kindness dipped in venom. All I wanted was to get as far away from him as I could. I told him about my visit to what had once been our villa.
“The house did not catch fire. They burned it down, the animals. Everyone came to see. I came to see.” He made a huge gesture with his arms and hands to imitate the conflagration. “They blamed a young cabinetmaker. But everyone knows he had caught the bandits using your parents’ house as a storage space for their loot. Our lovely police were in on it too, I am sure. They arrested him, beat him, then they burned the house.”
“Why?”
“Because everyone in this wretched little town has larceny and treachery seared into his soul, from the mayor to the police down to the hooligans who load and unload their booty in front of our very noses every day.”
A long silence ensued.
“Let’s go for a walk. Otherwise I get drowsy and I don’t want to nap yet. And buy me coffee, because the way things are going with my pension and my measly income these days…”
* * *
PROFESSOR SERMONETA DECIDED to walk me to the town’s caffè. It took him forever to get down the stairs. “When is your ferry leaving?”
“This afternoon,” I said.
“So we have time.” Then, changing registers: “They even tried to blame your father.”
“My father?”
We were walking the narrow lanes together. I had never walked with my tutor anywhere before. He was not a friendly sort, and though my parents told me that his sternness was his way of keeping pupils in tow, I’d always felt that he had singled me out for the sort of abusive treatment one reserves for unruly terriers. I had heard he had a far gentler side to him, but I had no sense of how to bring it out.
He was holding his cane and focusing on each step down the cobbled lane, perhaps his way of avoiding the subject.
I soon began to realize we couldn’t have been headed anywhere but toward vicolo Sant’Eusebio. When we reached the locked-up shop, I found myself struggling not to tell him that I used to come here after our tutorial and that here, as far as I knew, life had started for me.
“I heard the cabinetmaker is gone,” I said after a moment of silence.
“Did you know him?” he asked.
Did I know him! I wanted to say. I was in love with him. Still am. It’s why I’m here. “I knew him,” I finally said.
“We all knew him. I can’t say I knew him well, but at night, in the caffè, after a few glasses, he’d always begin singing with that voice of his.”
“What voice?”
“Lovely voice. Always the same aria, though, from Don Giovanni. He didn’t know any other. You know the one,
Notte e giorno faticar
per chi nulla sa gradir;
…
mangiar male e mal dormir …
“I forget the rest but he’d sing the whole aria.”
I knew the aria all too well and supplied the missing words. My father used to sing it too, I said, the twenty-second variation. Sermoneta laughed.
“But then one night he disappeared,” continued my tutor. “He’s never coming back, you know. I heard rumors he may be in Canada.”
“Why in Canada?”
“I don’t know, Paolo, I don’t know.” He sounded irritated. I could almost swear he was about to call me a blockhead again.
We left Sant’Eusebio and headed farther up toward the caffè within sight of the castle. “Do you still remember the caffè?” he asked.
“How could I forget? I used to come here with my father at night.” Sermoneta remembered; he’d seen us there many times. He parted the curtain and peeked inside. It was dark and empty at this time of the day. But the beefy proprietor was there, as always wiping the counter.
“Salve, Professore,” he said as soon as he saw us step inside.
“Salve,” replied my tutor. We ordered two coffees.
“Subito,” said the proprietor.
I paid.
“Recognize this young man?” asked my tutor.
The caffè proprietor squinted his eyes and took a good look at me. “No, should I?”
“The doctor’s son.”
The corpulent proprietor mused a moment. “I remember the doctor. I also remember those frightful dogs.” He mimicked a shudder with his neck. Then turning to me, “How is your father?”
“He is well,” I said.
“Ah, your father, what a good man, beloved and missed by everyone here, un vero nobiluomo, a true nobleman. And what a shame about the house.” Then, with a wry smile settling on his features and with his palm chopping the air three or four times to ape the gesture of a man about to administer a light spanking to a child, “Tuo padre, però, your father, however … un po’ briccone era, was a bit of rascal.” He let the sentence trail without finishing his thought, which made me think he’d been simply jesting with me.
He leaned over on the marble countertop, indicating that he was about to lower his voice to a whisper, even though the place was empty. But then he changed his mind. “Acqua passata, water under the bridge,” he said, “acqua passata.” Pulling himself away from the counter and slowly straightening his back with a bit of a grimace, he said, “This town unfortunately is all chiacchiere, all gossip, and I always tell myself, Arnaldo, look the other way, look the other way and never spread rumors about the lives of others, even if the rumors are true. I’m saying this man-to-man, because I think you’re a grown-up now and understand these things.”
But unable to contain himself, the owner turned to my tutor and, almost on the point of snickering,
as though the two were sharing an old private joke, he extended both his index fingers and rubbed them together, an ancient gesture suggesting collusion, secrecy, and slop.
“Acqua passata, Arnaldo,” repeated my tutor.
* * *
AS I WALKED my tutor back to his apartment, already sensing that in all likelihood I would never see him again, I began to realize that none of this was really news to me, that perhaps, without having the facts, without suspecting, I had always known, known without knowing. I probably already knew when, for years, my mother, brother, grandmother, great-aunt, and I were so expeditiously shipped off the island at the end of every summer, while my father stayed behind to lock up and arrange everything for the following year. Everyone on the island knew the house.
The caffè proprietor’s gesture said it all. “Early in the morning when they went swimming,” he had said, “then every night in the caffè, and during the winter months too, in case you thought winters were out of the question.”
“How long?” I’d asked, still trying to pretend I wasn’t the slightest bit shaken by what they were telling me. I was assuming a season, a few months.
“Nanni’s parents were very much alive at the time. So he must have been, what, eighteen, nineteen? Why do you think Nanni kept crossing over to the mainland at least twice a month during the winter months? To buy paint thinner?”
Now that I thought of it, it would have taken half a day to close the house every fall, not a whole week to ten days as was my father’s custom every year. No wonder, then, that without knowing exactly why, my mother, heeding an ageless instinct, eventually grew to dislike Nanni and found him so sinister and unsavory. I thought that she, like me, was exaggerating her hostility the better to disguise that she liked him and that, by calling attention to his shortcomings and overstating his flaws, she was asking us to disagree with her, and by disagreeing, speak of qualities she did not have the courage to name herself. I had always thought that it was she who had leaked what I’d said about the tremor in his hands. Small wonder Nanni knew his way about our house. He had most likely examined the desk long, long before he came to discuss the job with my mother. The way he pranced into the living room as though he owned the place, knew there’d be a hidden box inside the desk, addressed my father as his pal, and had even gotten the dogs to like him, plus the whole banter between them about swimming across the bay—all such dead giveaways. And those nightwalks with my father—he, like me, craving to run into Nanni and hoping that by extending our walks and making up excuses to delay heading back home, we might in the end run into him at the caffè. I was like a lover who is suddenly able to cobble together facts and realizes he’s been cheated on for weeks, months, or even years on end.
