“That clock thinks it’s on Mars,” the old woman had told Amelia in a conspiratorial whisper. “It tells you what time it is there. And you, an American, want to argue with it?”
The poem in front of Amelia on the desk had been written near the beginning of the nineteenth century, in an obscure Botho-Ugaric dialect combining the language of courtly love with warfare, with an additional admixture of liebestod, called mordmutt in this dialect. The idioms of love and war should have blended together but didn’t. In some not-so-subtle manner, the poet seemed to be threatening his beloved with mayhem if she refused to knuckle under to him. The language of these threats (Int çantolet ya élosete, for example: “I could murder you with longing,” or, more accurately, “My longing longs to murder”), inflated with metaphors and similes of baroque complication, was as gorgeous as an operatic aria sung by a charming baritone addressing a woman who was being flung around onstage and who wasn’t allowed to open her mouth. And it was all untranslatable! You couldn’t heat up soggy English verbs and nouns to a boil the way you could in this dialect, which actually had a word for love bites, muttzemp.
Amelia put down her pen and tapped her fingers. The decorative clock, painted green, was amused by her troubles. There’s a second of your life you’ll never get back! And there: there’s another one! Too bad you’re not on Mars like me. There’s lots of time on Mars. We’ve got nothing but time here! Today is like yesterday! Always was!
With a tiny advance from a publisher and a six-week deadline, she felt like a caged animal hopping on electrified grates for the occasional food pellet. Her professional reputation was at stake: after this volume was published, she would probably be held up to ridicule in The New York Review of Books for her translation of this very poem. She could already see the adverb-adjective clusters: “discouragingly inept,” “sadly inappropriate,” “amusingly tin-eared.” One of the few Americans who had any command of this dialect, she belonged to a tight little society full of backbiters. The other poems hadn’t been terribly hard to translate, but so far this one had defeated her. Let me murder you, the poet demanded, and we’ll descend to the depths together / where darkness enfolds us in—what?—the richest watery silks. / Down, down, to the obscurest nethermost regions, / where sea creatures writhe in amorous clutchings…
Awful. The olive trees didn’t care what she was doing, so she looked at them gratefully. Downstairs, her twenty-year-old son and his girlfriend were making love-noises. Chirps. Impossible! Everything was impossible.
This particular afternoon, in the little Tuscan villa she had rented a month ago, Jack, her son, and Gwyneth, the girlfriend, were cooking up sausage lasagna. They cooed at each other after coaxing the pan into the oven. Over the noise of the clock, Amelia listened to their endearments. Here she was, enjoying the voyeurism of the middle-aged parent. After several minutes, she could hear them washing the ingredients for salad, speaking lovely birdsong Italian to each other. Through the years, Jack had spent so much time over here in boarding school that his Italian was better than his mother’s. He didn’t even have the trace of an American accent that Amelia had. Gwyneth, like Jack, was bilingual (her father was English and had married a local Italian), but she and Jack preferred Italian for their intimacies, as who would not?
The hour: too early for preparing dinner! What did those two scamps think they were up to? Gwyneth, beautiful and bossy in the Italian manner, though she was a blonde, held Amelia’s lovesick son tightly in her grip; she gave orders to him followed by gropes and love-rewards. They had met a mere three weeks ago. Love happened fast in this region, like a door slammed open. Amelia had seen those two trying to prepare dishes together while holding hands. Very touching, but comical.
She glanced at her watch: actually, the day was almost over, and the day’s work was kaput, obliterated. She had struggled all afternoon on those stupidly impossible poetic lines full of masculine posturing, and now she had nothing. She felt word-nausea coming on.
The poet she was translating fancied himself a warrior type—aristocratic, arrogant, and proud. In one tiny corner of the world, mentioning his name—Imyar Sorovinct—would open doors and get you a free meal. But elsewhere, here in Italy and in the States, he was mostly unknown, except for the often-anthologized “I Give It All Up,” his uncharacteristically detached and Zen-like deathbed poem. In midlife he’d presented himself in verse as a man supremely confident of his weapons, arrogantly imploring his beloved to join him in what he called “The Long Night.” The particular line on which she had spent the last two hours contained consonant clusters that sounded like distant nocturnal battlefield explosions.
In real life, however, Sorovinct hadn’t been a military man at all but a humble tailor of army uniforms, a maker of costumes, driven to poetic fantasies about the men who inhabited them. Bent over, he cut and stitched, ruining his eyesight in the bad light. To no one’s surprise, then or now, the poet had been unhappily married. Together, he and his wife had had a child who, as they said in those days, “never grew up.” Cognitively, the son remained a child for all of his twenty-three years before his death, by drowning.
Armored for sorrow, steeling my resolve, I sing/cry/proclaim (to) you our love-glue
In English, the vulgarity was shockingly nonsensical, and it missed the force of the verb in the original and suggested nothing of the poet’s menace. “Love-glue”! Muttplitz in the dialect. What Walt Whitman meant when he used the word “adhesiveness.” No real English word existed for it, thank God.
Downstairs, a cork came out of a wine bottle.
They were going to fall into bed and make love any minute now, those two kids. At least someone was having a good time. No point whatever in trying to stop them, unless Amelia could appeal to Gwyneth’s probably nonexistent Catholic morality. Should she mention the necessity of contraception? They’d just laugh. She came downstairs to see them pouring two glasses of the cheap blood-dark Chianti you could buy for almost nothing in this region. Just as if she weren’t standing there, they raised the glasses to each other’s lips.
Gwyneth’s hard little face, bravely glassy-eyed, turned toward Amelia, and she smiled in the way that young people do when they know they’ve been dealt a good hand.
“Going out, darlings,” Amelia said. “Just for a minute. Have to buy cigarettes. Be back soon.”
“Well, don’t be long,” Gwyneth commanded with her charming Brit-Euro accent, putting the wineglass down on the counter and raising her finger in a comic admonitory fashion. “Food’ll get cold. Hurry back.” She leaned away from Jack for a moment so that he could admire her bella figura.
Jack, handsome in his khakis and soft blue shirt, turned toward his mother.
“Momma,” he said, “what’s this about cigarettes? You don’t smoke.”
“Well, guess what? It’s a perfectly good time to start.” She tried to straighten her hair, which probably looked witchy after so much futile desk work. “After a day like this one, I need a new affectation. I need to be bad. I need to be bad right now. If they’re selling cigarettes, I’m buying them.”
“Then you better buy a lighter and an ashtray too,” her son reminded her.
—
She had leased an old Fiat from a man the villagers claimed was a part-time burglar. It was probably a stolen car. After starting the engine, she turned on the radio, hoping to hear Donizetti or Bellini, or at least somebody. Instead, they were playing Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time,” a mean-spirited irony considering how the day had gone. The gods laughed easily in the late afternoon, watching human futility fold up for the day. All poetry, good or bad, made the gods laugh. To the gods, poems were sour useless editorials, like bitchy letters to Santa. The Fiat coughed and hesitated as Amelia first passed by a vineyard, then, on the other side of the road, a painterly haystack. One old bespectacled man, holding a walking stick, ambled along the road, going in the opposite direction. He doffed his cap at her, and she waved at him. A single blue-flecked bird,
chirping in Italian, flew overhead. But nature was unforgiving. The sun, lowering toward the west, recited one of the lines that Amelia couldn’t translate: Féyitçate fyr tristo, eertch tye mne muttplitz.
By the time she reached the village, after negotiating three hairpin turns and avoiding death by collision from an errant truck out of whose way she had swerved in a last-minute effort to save her own life, she could feel the sweat in her palms oozing out onto the steering wheel. No water came from the fountain in the town square: the pump had been broken for weeks, and there was no money to fix it. The air smelled of burnt rope. A brownish liquid flowed in the gutter. She parked her car, turned off the ignition, and waited until the motor coughed and sputtered and dieseled its way into silence. An American couple sitting in the square’s sidewalk café gazed at her with tourist-interest, as if she were a quaint item of local color. Amelia hurried into the general store, where she was greeted by the owner, Signor Travatini, a timid man who had a tendency to avoid her gaze; he was probably in love with her, or maybe he was planning on hiring someone to rob her.
“My dear Carlo,” she said. “How are you? It’s been a terrible day.” Italian, with its languorous vowels, was sheer pleasure after a day’s struggle with the Botho-Ugaric dialect.
“Yes,” he said, looking out toward the village square and her car. “Yes, and the sun has passed its way through the sky once again. Things are not translating? Sometimes they do not. Sometimes they stubbornly stay what they are. I am sorry.”
“No. Things are not translating. I need some cigarettes,” she said.
“Ah, but you do not smoke.” Everyone here kept track of everyone else’s habits, and the villagers all knew her by now.
“After such a day as I have had, I think it would be a good time to learn.”
He shrugged. “You are correct. As we get old, we need to acquire new vices. God will not be interested in us otherwise. We must wave our arms at Him to get His attention. It is the end of the day, so I will speak to you in confidence. I myself have attracted God’s attention by acquiring a new…how do you say this in English? Ragazza.”
“Girlfriend.”
“Yes. I have acquired a new girlfriend. Perhaps I am being too bold in saying so.” He stared at the cash register, harmlessly confabulating. The man was in his midfifties, and his pudgy wife, Claudia, dressed in black, sometimes lumbered into the store to do the accounts, and was known everywhere in the village for her terrible tongue lashings. Like Imyar Sorovinct, Carlo Travatini had earned a right to his fantasies. “My girlfriend loves me. And of course I adore her. She tells me that she admires my patience and my skill at lovemaking, despite my advanced years. The years give us older men a certain…technical skill. Forgive me for being so crude.” Amelia shook her head, disclaiming any possible shock. “Why do I tell you this? I do so because our love, hers and mine, is an open secret. I will not, however, give you the young lady’s name, because I should not wish to appear to be indiscreet. We Italians are not noted for our subtlety or discretion. We are announcers and are combustible. We announce first this, then that. In this announcing manner I have written poems for her, my beloved. Would you like to see my poems? They are of course not at the level of Montale, but…” He began to fumble in his pocket. Amelia stopped him in the midst of his harmless comic charade.
“No, thank you.” More love poems! They came out of the woodwork everywhere and should be outlawed. There was far too much love, a worldwide glut of it. What the world needs now, she thought, is much less love. “How wonderful for you. But, please, no.”
“All right. But I beg of you, do not mention the beautiful young woman to my wife, in case you should see her.”
“I shall say nothing,” Amelia told him. “What cigarettes do you have? I would like an Italian brand.”
“Well, we have Marlboros. Sturdy cigarettes in a crushproof box. And L & M. That is a good brand also.”
“Both American. No, I want an Italian cigarette.”
“Well, let me see. I have MS.”
“MS?” She felt a moment of pity.
“Yes. MS. Of course. It is a brand of cigarette we have here. Monopoli di Stato. You should know that by now. Filtro? Or Blu?”
“Blu, please.” He brought down a pack on which appeared, in rather large letters, the Italian phrase for “Smoking kills.”
“You should not do this,” he said, putting the cigarette pack into her hand with a tender gesture, brushing her fingers as he did so. “It is no way to get God’s attention. You should get a boyfriend, perhaps?”
“Also, I need some matches, please.”
He reached under the counter and brought some out. He shook his head as she paid him for the cigarettes. “After all these years,” he said, “I do not understand you Americans. Forgive me. I have been listening to the news on the radio just now. Iraq, Afghanistan. You are unexplainable, indefinable. So friendly and yet so warlike. This contradiction…I cannot understand it.”
“Yes,” Amelia said. “You are right. We are puzzling and incomprehensible. Thank you, my friend. Ciao.”
“Ciao, signora,” he said, looking away from her again, down at his hands. “Grazie.” What a sorrowful man, she thought, with his sorrow painstakingly narrated every day. You would never see such a man in the States. She had almost returned to the stolen Fiat when her Italian cell phone rang. When she answered, there was silence. She hung up.
The American couple waved her over. They were drinking wine.
“Hey there. Good afternoon,” the man said in English with a slight southwestern accent. “Care to join us?” He wore a Tyrolean hat, a blue shirt, a tan-colored sport coat, a string tie, and cowboy boots. His wife, deeply tanned, wearing a plain gray dress and a collection of thin gold bracelets that rattled like jail keys, smiled nervously upward at the sky, avoiding eye contact. She had very expensive hair, Amelia noted, highlighted with blond streaks.
“How did you know I was an American?” Amelia asked.
“Aw, you look like one of us,” the man told her. “It’s a duck recognizing another duck.” The wife nodded at the sky. Amelia felt all her strength leaving her body: she was heavily invested in appearing to be Italian or French, with a trace of beautiful haughtiness, or at least generically European snobbishness, and if she could be exposed this easily by lunkheads, then her nationality might indeed be an essence that no role-playing could disguise. Being an American was a curse—you were so recognizable everywhere that your nationality was like a clown suit. Maybe Jack would escape it. She had come to think of her own countrymen as them. She shivered. After all her efforts, she was instantly identifiable and still looked like one of them. Fucking hell.
“Sorry,” she said. “I have to get back. They’ve prepared lasagna,” she said. “The kids.”
“We’re going to be here in town for a few days,” the man said, before gulping down half his glass of wine. “You just drop in on us any old time. We got ourselves that villa up the hill. There for the whole week.”
“Okay,” she said, before waving goodbye to them.
—
On one of the hairpin turns on the way back, her phone rang again, and this time, when she answered it, the voice that came out—the connection was poor—sounded like her brother.
“Amelia?”
“Yes?” She held the cell phone in her left hand as she downshifted with her right. The steering wheel wobbled. “Jerry? Is that you, Jerry?”
“Yeah. Of course it’s Jerry. Who’d you think it was?” Amelia let her foot off the clutch, and the car lurched into the lower gear. “Sorry. That was rude. I’m really sorry. I mean, we’re on pins and needles here. I’m a damn mess, is what it is. Yvonne’s a mess, too.”
“What is it? What’s going on?” There was another pause for the transatlantic long distance or for her brother’s hesitation. “Is it Catherine?”
“Yes, of course it’s Catherine. She’s taken a bad turn. The doctors have been saying that…actually, I don�
��t really know what they’ve been saying. It’s all a jumble to me. But like I say, she’s worse. Now her kidneys aren’t working. And that’s on top of everything else. The pneumonia. But I’m not saying you should come here. I’m not saying that.”
“Of course I’ll come,” Amelia said to her brother. “I’ll be there as soon as possible.”
“Thanks,” he said. “We could use some bucking up.” Amelia heard another voice in the background, and then her brother said goodbye and broke off the connection.
As soon as she had parked close to the villa, she emptied herself out of the car, looked at the package of cigarettes in her hand, and went inside. The table had been set, and Gwyneth and Jack were waiting for her on the sofa, both of them beautiful and radiant. This world was paradise, after all, when your son and his girlfriend, healthy and in love with each other, cooked dinner for you inside a cool dark Italian villa, and you could worry all day about a line of poetry that you couldn’t translate properly, and you could be annoyed by simpleton American tourists. To be bothered by trivialities was sheer heaven.
“Momma,” Jack said. “What happened to you?”
“Your cousin Catherine’s worse,” Amelia said, tossing the cigarettes onto a side table, as if she’d never bought them. “I’m going to have to fly to Minneapolis. You two will have to hold down the fort here for a few days. Can you do that? I’ll even leave you the Fiat if you drive me to the airport.”
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