by Paul Theroux
They all laughed, seeing how startled I was, and then I laughed too, but I said no. They dropped me on the main road south, where I stuck out my thumb—autostop. I got a ride from some men who said, “Siamo comunisti,” and when I asked them where they were from, one laughed and said, “Kansa Seety.” They were from Bologna, and they left me a few miles south of it. Not long after, a red Alfa Romeo drew up and the man inside leaned over and said, “Tedesco?”
“No. American,” I said, and patted my chest pocket, drew out my passport, and showed him.
He was in his late thirties, perhaps forty, a handsome man in sunglasses, who sat at an angle, driving with one hand and chatting to me. His English was good, but when I asked him what he did for a living, he laughed and said, “I am lazy.” I took this complacency to mean he had money.
“You Americans are so free,” he said. “Your passport in your pocket and autostop. That is all you need. You are lucky.”
It was a beautiful day, a hot afternoon in July, as we sped toward the coast—and I did feel lucky, in this fast car with this smiling man who was taking me south. When he asked me where I was going, I said Fano, because it was there that I could get my bearings. We passed Rimini and Cattolica, which I’d seen from the northbound car with the Germans.
“You’re a student?” he asked.
“A writer,” I said. I disclosed my secret with hope, with anxiety, holding my breath. And I told myself that I could call myself a writer even if I was not published.
“Bravo,” he said.
That gave me hope, someone who didn’t mock me, who believed me. We talked about Italian writers. I mentioned Moravia and Pavese and Primo Levi. He said that he knew Levi—he was from Florence. I asked him his name, and he told me, “Ubaldini,” and I said, “As in Dante.”
“Another Ubaldini. But maybe the same family. Who knows?”
We talked about Dante, we talked about the summer’s films, Otto e Mezzo and Che Fine ha Fatto Baby Jane? He said that he dabbled in the film business. He did some writing—“but not serious, like you.” He said he could introduce me to some publishers, and I thought: Yes, I could stay in Italy, keep writing, have an Italian publisher, raise an Italian family, perhaps near the coast here, in a villa, watch the sun rise over the Adriatic, live in the local way, in the slow, lazy, stop-go life of Italy.
We were then near Pesaro. Without a word, instead of continuing to Fano he jerked the car inland on a rising road. He must have seen a question on my face.
“This is better,” he said with confidence.
The road narrowed, slanting into the hills, and for the next half-hour or so he seemed to use all his concentration to maneuver the car, taking the sharp bends by yanking the steering wheel, and speeding whenever the road straightened. We passed farmhouses, some small squat churches, and hillsides of cows, and I marveled that so much had happened since the Shainheits had tossed me out of their house.
All this time he was talking, with the casual enthusiasm of a benevolent Italian, about good food and great books and the lovely weather. And sometimes he was talking about nothing, but with such lazy pleasure he was exulting in his good mood and, in the Italian way, filled me—his passenger—with the confidence that happiness conveys. I was slightly tipsy from all the talk.
Then the car was slowing down and drawing into a widened viewpoint at the edge of the road, overlooking a village and the sunlit fields of rural Italy, the blue sea in the distance. We were parked on a parapet of land surrounded by poplars, outside time, as though he’d flown me from the sky to tempt me with the glorious view. I had no idea where we were.
He shut off the engine and turned to me, perspiring. He looked tormented, and his sudden seriousness alarmed me. When he wiped his face with his handkerchief he had to remove his sunglasses. His damp eyes were both lewd and benevolent.
“Bella sole d’Italia,” he said, seeming anxious, wearily wiping his face again in the heat.
“Where are we?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He said, “I am from Florence, as I told you. But I have a villa on an island. You know the Isole Tremiti?”
“No.”
“Is very beautiful,” he said. “You can swimming, you can boating”—in his apparent fluster his English broke down. “Is the sweet life. Good food. You can make writing there. Is perfect.”
I said, “I need a job.”
“What money you need, I give you.”
It was a dream, it was everything I wanted: a house by the sea, the freedom to work on my book, comfort and happiness. But it was so voluptuous I knew there was a catch, and I suspected what it might be. “What do I do in return?”
“You make writing. You write fabulous!”
“Anything else?”
The sweat was dripping from his face, but he didn’t wipe it. His tight shirt was plastered to his body. He seemed determined not to say anything more, and yet to elicit an answer from me. He turned to gaze across the russet tiled rooftops and through the slender pines to ocean below us, and for all I knew the island he promised me, where I would write, was floating like a lotus blossom somewhere in the glittering scales of that sea.
“Sorry.”
“You say no because you never try.”
“I can’t do that.” Then, as though to explain, I said, “I have a girlfriend.”
“I sometimes have a woman,” he said in a sour tone of rebuttal. “It is”—he curled his lip—“like stroking a cat.”
“Let’s go,” I said. “You can drop me at the next town, wherever that is.”
His face hardened, and he wiped it with his bare hand and flicked the sweat from that hand. He said, “You are a big stupid. You refuse me, eh? Okay, Signore Scrittore, write something on this little road!”
And in his anger he reached for me. I lifted my arm to block him—but I moved too quickly, and in the confinement of the small car I caught his chin with my elbow, banging his head against the doorpost and knocking his glasses sideways, so they swung across his face.
He howled, then said, “Va via!”
And as soon as I pulled my bag from the back seat he slammed the door and sped downhill, leaving me in the long shadows of the tall poplars in the late-afternoon sun on the empty road. He knew he was abandoning me, and he was furious because I had rebuffed him. My talk about being a writer annoyed him, as it had annoyed Hal McCarthy and the Shainheits. I thought, irrationally, that these people were actively trying to prevent me from becoming a writer, but instead of making me feel small, I was defiant and saw myself as wolfish and resourceful.
I stood on the road, the setting sun on my face, looking around, wishing to remember every detail of this abandonment. I didn’t know which way to go, but because Ubaldini had gone downhill, I decided to head uphill. I walked for a while and saw a sign, Gallo, with an arrow, and kept walking in that direction, but I did not see a town, and no cars passed this way.
Then it grew dark, a car came out of that darkness, I made the autostop sign with my hand, and the car slowed down. It was a Fiat driven by an Italian man whose English was excellent. He was going to Urbino, some miles into the hills. He said he was a professor at the university there, and what did I do? Superstitiously, I said I was a teacher. “I am looking for a teacher,” he said. I thought to myself, Another one. But when we got to the town, he dropped me at a pensione and said would I please visit his office in the morning? He had a job for me, teaching English.
I spent the next two months in Urbino. I fell in love with Francesca Porretta, one of my students—“Paolo and Francesca,” I said, “I celebri amanti.” I tried to work on my novella, Ticket to Hell. Francesca tickled me as I wrote, she kissed my neck, some afternoons she lay on the edge of the bed and kicked her legs and laughed. “Gli amanti condannati,” I said. Francesca showed me the great painters of Urbino, Uccello and Raphael. I was blessed with luck: it was my luck that these people recognized and resented. I got very little work done, but I was learning.
Late in August I was notified by the Peace Corps that I’d been assigned to teach in Nyasaland, in central Africa. For my application, I was fingerprinted at the main police station in Urbino by an amused policeman, who smoked a cigarette between inking the right and the left set of fingerprints.
Kissing Francesca goodbye, I hitchhiked—more autostop—to Rome, then took a train to Naples, then a ship home, traveling third class in a cabin with seven Lebanese immigrants to Canada, who got off in rainy Halifax. From New York City I bummed a ride to Boston, starting from under the George Washington Bridge. A few months later I went to Africa. By then, Francesca had stopped writing.
At last my hitchhiking stopped. In a remote village of mud huts, among illiterates who lived on porridge and stewed greens, a place without pictures or books, all of it smelling of woodsmoke and the sour grass of its roofs and in the rains stinking of its red clay roads, I wrote every day. I went on writing, working, always in distant places. I traveled, I published my books, married twice, and raised my children. It was the life I’d wished for. And whenever I returned to Italy, I remembered the sunlit Italian roads and that autostop summer on the Adriatic and in Urbino, all of it like a banquet. And that was why, when Vittorio asked me in Florence if I had a guest for the dinner, I said, “Pietro Ubaldini.”
Copies of the Italian edition of my novel were stacked on a side table at the restaurant, one copy upright, showing the cover. In a private room on the second floor, reserved by Vittorio for the dinner, a long refectory table was set for a dozen people.
I had climbed the stairs warily, watching for Ubaldini, but only one person was there, Vittorio’s young assistant, Dialta, setting out place cards, smiling to see that I was the first to arrive. She poured me a glass of wine, and we waited. I did not know whether to stand or sit. Some more people came, two journalists, and then Vittorio with an attractive woman. Vittorio introduced me to the others. Tito Frasso, the young green-haired man from Vittorio’s lunch, slipped through the door, padding in on his orange sneakers, in the same leather vest but a different T-shirt. He approached me and said hello. It occurred to me that he dressed that way, absurdly, defiantly, creating a street style all his own, because he didn’t have much money.
I wanted to sit, I hated the delay, but I knew that an Italian dinner was a ritual, and the delay itself was part of the ritual, like the chitchat, the predinner drinks that we sipped standing, the laughter, the teasing. Everything that seemed inconsequential was part of the observance—nothing could be hurried. All this time I glanced around, wondering about Ubaldini.
At last, Vittorio sighed and said, “Allora . . .” The word was like an order, as people maneuvered to take their places at the table. I was seated at one end, Vittorio at the other. A chair stood empty near Vittorio, the linen napkin folded like a nun’s cornette on the plate before it.
“I am so excited to read your book,” the woman on my right said. She was a journalist, she would be reviewing it. “Is your first book?”
“No.” I could not bring myself to tell her it was my thirty-fifth.
“Parla Italiano?” asked the woman on my left.
I said no, I didn’t dare, and she smiled and sipped her wine, and the woman on my right told me of her trip to Eritrea: “Magnificent! Africa! But so sad, so poor.”
I said, “I used to live there.” But still she went on describing it to me.
And while she spoke, and the waiters served the antipasto, an old man came through the door, nodded at Vittorio, handed his coat to a waiter, and, sizing up the table, stepped to the empty chair. I would not have guessed it to be Ubaldini. He was slack-jowled, horse-faced, and his ill-fitting suit was too loose. He was smaller than I remembered, and with distorted features, his ears and hands much bigger. His only affectation was a stylish pair of glasses, tortoiseshell, with pinkish lenses. He tugged them down, surveyed the table, said something to the woman next to him—a pleasantry, I guessed, and a word to Tito Frasso, who sat across from him. When he smiled he showed his discolored teeth to their roots. Then he ate, daintily, in the Italian way, poking his food with a fork, not betraying any appetite.
After the antipasto came the soup course, the fish course, the pasta course, the meat course. I heard about Eritrea and the Red Sea, and poverty in Africa, and the animals—fantastic; and the dancers in Kenya—fantastic; and Somalia—a tragedy. More wine, more water, more bread.
Ubaldini kept his head down and picked at his food. I watched him closely as he ate with concentration, from time to time lifting his napkin to dab at his lips, and as he dabbed, meeting the gaze of the young man in outlandish clothes, and smiling at him with yellowish teeth, as though sharing a secret.
Waiters came and went, plates were gathered, glasses filled. The dessert was served, tiramisu, and the cheese set out.
As the coffee was poured, Vittorio rose and thanked the guests for being there, speaking in sonorous Italian; and then for my benefit he spoke in English, and the temperature of the room went down with the sound of the foreign language, the air becoming slightly stale.
“Tonight, my friend, our distinguished author, has joined us for the occasion of his new book—yes,” and he paused for the light clapping. “And he has agreed to say some few words.” He motioned to me. “Please.”
I pushed my chair back and stood up.
From the moment Vittorio began speaking in English we seemed to slip into an amateur theatrical, a play in which we were unsure of our lines. I spoke haltingly, as Vittorio had done, but the slowness threw me and made me less certain of what I was going to say next.
“Fifty years ago I visited Italy for the first time,” I said. “I was just a boy, really, but it was here, in the beauty of Italy, that I began to write . . .”
I did not say that it had been an autostop summer of obstacles and temptations. I described my arrival, my first impressions of Italy, the sunlight, the smells of food and hot oil, the glow of old stone, the texture of ancient marble, the way the whole of Italy had been sculpted and formed, every hill, every field, every town—none of it wild, all of it showing the evidence of the human hand, where eating was on everyone’s mind; not books but food.
I glanced at the dinner guests as I spoke, and my gaze returned to Pietro Ubaldini, whose elbow was propped on the table, his hand idly cradling his head, his fingers stroking his cheek, listening attentively.
Then I risked it. “One day I was traveling from Venice by autostop. I was picked up by an Italian man in a car. We talked and talked, and finally we disagreed. He dropped me suddenly by the roadside at nightfall, abandoned me on one of the branching roads of Italy.”
I looked squarely at Pietro Ubaldini. Still he stroked his cheek and stared through his tinted lenses.
“He didn’t know me, and I’m sure he forgot me. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, he did me a great favor. When you’re young the world seems unknowable, and so it seems simplified by its obscurity. You have no idea how precarious the road is, or where it leads, and it’s not until much later that you understand its complexity and how you found your way. Sometimes it is with the help of kind strangers, but more often perhaps, perversely, by the hostility of strangers. It was rejection that got me to Urbino and a job and a sense of myself. I arrived there through a series of accidents, one road leading to another. I didn’t know where I was, only that I had to keep going. I knew one thing—that I couldn’t go back. I was open to any suggestion—taking chances. I had to. I had no money.”
As I spoke, Ubaldini stopped looking at me and began to look at the young man, as though I was offering encouragement and a promise in my own story to the young man, who was listening with rapt attention.
“I see it now as a series of expulsions. Each person I met believed he was frustrating me. It was not the great literary culture of Italy that made me a writer. It was the opposite, its philistinism. You say you want to be a writer, and Italy orders you another glass of wine and says, ‘What’s the point?’ Italy’s love of
comfort, its taste for good food and leisure, its joy in talk, its idleness, its laughter, its complacent teasing cynicism”—and here I paused for the people at the table to savor this description and bask in it—“all these traits make it the enemy of art.”
“Oh, no!” Vittorio called out, and Ubaldini nodded at the young man Frasso.
“But you give in to temptation, and you’re tested, and that’s how you learn. Italy’s great complacency, the way it wraps its arms around you, produces the occasional rebel who does not want that embrace. That person writes a good book, or a poem, or makes a film. I said no to that embrace on a country road.”
The scattered laughter, the uneasy murmurs, some of the whispers translations, made me want to finish.
“So I want to thank you for helping a bewildered stranger find his way. You didn’t know what you were doing, and neither did I, but here we are—and all’s well.”
Knowing that I was done, feeling released from their bewilderment, they clapped hard in relief. Vittorio thanked me, some of the people left, and the rest milled around the table talking, another Italian ritual, the protracted goodbye, a way of showing gratitude or warmth, the period of hesitation in a culture where hurrying, or any urgency, even the urgency to be alone and write, is considered a vice.
I stepped over to Ubaldini and thanked him for coming.
“I was fascinated by your remarks,” he said. “I appreciated the ambiguity.”
“What do you do in Florence?” I asked.
“I do nothing! I am ancient!” And laughing, he again caught the eye of the young man. “Tell me, will you be here long?”
“I leave tomorrow.” I looked for the lewdness and benevolence on his face, but saw the exhaustion of old age, and yet still a glint of greed in his eyes.
“A pity. I would like to invite you to my home. I have a library with many fine books. I have important pictures. I have a view of the river.”
Now he was speaking as well to Frasso, who had drifted near. Ubaldini muttered to him rapidly in Italian. Each time he smiled he moved his tongue against his lips, as though he was tasting his own smile. The young man murmured his thanks, and I understood that the same invitation was directed to him, and that he was agreeing to a visit.
