Yes, there is more than a touch of self-pity and drama in that statement, but it bites through the novel with sharp teeth, because the truth that even the novel doesn’t see clearly enough is that all those who work in offices and, as Leo is quick to notice, look sprightly and busy cradling their lit pipes in their hands, even they feel like survivors of a long-extinct species. They may not realize it, and may be hiding it from themselves and from everyone else, which is why the novel speaks to everyone, which is why everyone is ultimately a self-identifying existentialist, even when we feel ridiculous admitting it and can so easily trace our own profile in a novel steeped in malaise and ennui. No one belongs, but everyone is persuaded that everyone else belongs. The truth is, we are, each of us, perpetually alone. It is difficult to determine whether what devastates us more is knowing that we are condemned to perpetual solitude or thinking we have been singled out to confront and then deplore our solitude. Leo and Graziano are like two soon-to-be fossils roaming the surface of planet Earth. “If I were a fag, I’d fall in love with you. Wouldn’t we make a lovely couple?” Graziano says. But here is the ultimate bummer: “We’ll turn gay and then at least we’ll be something. This way, what are we now? We’re nothing, not even fags.”
There was a moment when Leo was persuaded that except for Arianna, everything else he touched was destined to be an avanzo. But then, just when he believed she was in his life, he discovers that she too, like everything else in his life, is an avanzo—in this case, an avanzo from another man’s bed.
“Che sfiga,” he thinks when he finally realizes that the woman he loves is now headed to that other man.
Sfiga means bad luck, the way sfigato means inept, unlucky, loser, downright pitiful, a word that coincides with another word that pullulates in the novel as well, sfinocchiato, meaning dejected, exhausted, fucked-up. These are signature words in this novel, and there is no doubt that Leo is pursued by bad luck and a paralyzing sense of inadequacy. There is no escape. Something grabs ahold of him and won’t let go until it chokes him, because, to paraphrase Cavafy, having ruined his life in this little corner, he has destroyed it in the whole world.
* * *
On Christmas Day, feeling completely disconnected and stranded in Rome, Leo Gazzara boards a train headed for Milan. Like Ulysses, who finally wakes up in Ithaca but fails to recognize his homeland now that two decades have elapsed, Leo has some difficulty identifying the street where he grew up. So much had changed during his short absence. But then having found his bearings, he spots his father leaving their building and getting into his car. Upstairs, from a window, his mother is watching her husband, while he gestures for her to get back inside and shut it, for fear of catching a cold. Leo has half a mind to put his arm under his father’s and surprise him, but then he hesitates and decides against it. He had planned to spend Christmas with them, but now he realizes that his sisters and their husbands and children, along with his parents, lead lives where someone like him has no place. Why bother them? He buys a sandwich and gets on a train headed back to Rome. But, then, Rome is not home, and neither is Milan, nor, for that matter, is Trieste. They are all mirages, leftovers from the ledger of time and space.
When he returns, he’ll eventually hear that the friends who had lent him their apartment are returning from Mexico, and thus, one by one, the cards dealt him are being reshuffled, the good with the bad. He is alone. He moves back to the hotel where he’d been living before his friends’ hiatus abroad.
There is only Arianna left, probably the love of his life. And she loves him too. But she lives with someone else now. Then he tells her that Graziano has died. And for the first time since he’s known her, she is totally hysterical. She was already weeping because she feared they couldn’t have a life together. Now she is inconsolable because death has brutally barged into their lives.
There is nowhere to turn, no one to talk to, nothing to do. He packs up one suitcase with his books, another with his clothes, says good-bye to the porter at his hotel, jumps in his old Alfa Romeo, and knows what he must do. First, he’ll have a swim. And maybe at this point he’ll remember the words from The Last of the Mohicans that he’d read at Graziano’s funeral, because they apply to him as well: “My race has gone from the shores of the salt lake and the hills of the Delawares. But who can say that the serpent of his tribe has forgotten his wisdom.”
These are the words of Chief Chingachgook, who ends the funeral speech for his son with these three tragic words: “I am alone.” Calligarich does not quote “I am alone,” but he couldn’t be unaware of their dark and brooding presence over his own words. His protagonist too is alone. Indeed, Leo is, has always been, more than just alone.
No language has a word for being more than just alone.
1
Anyway, it’s always like that. You do your best to keep to yourself and then one fine day, without knowing how, you find you’re caught up in something that sweeps you along with it to the bitter end.
Personally, I would happily have stayed out of the race. I’d known all kinds of people, some who’d reached the finishing post and others who hadn’t even gotten off the starting block, and sooner or later they all ended up equally dissatisfied, which is why I’d come to the conclusion that it was better to stay on the sidelines and just observe life. But I hadn’t reckoned with being desperately short of money one rainy day at the beginning of spring last year. All the rest followed naturally, as these things do. Let me make it clear from the start that I don’t blame anyone, I was dealt my cards and I played them. That’s all.
And this bay really is magnificent. It’s overlooked by a Saracen fortress on top of a rocky promontory that juts out into the sea for a hundred yards or so. Looking toward the coast, I can see the dazzling spread of beach and the green of the low Mediterranean vegetation. Farther on, a three-lane highway, deserted at this time of year, tunnels into a chain of rocky hills glittering in the sun. The sky is blue, the sea clear.
I couldn’t have chosen better, truth be told.
* * *
I’ve always loved the sea. There must have been something in my boyhood tendency to linger on beaches that reflected the impulse that had led my grandfather to spend his youth on Mediterranean merchant ships before landing in Milan, that gloomy city, and cramming an apartment full of children. I knew this grandfather. He was a gray-eyed old Slav who died surrounded by a large number of descendants. The last words he managed to utter were a request for a little seawater, and my father, as the eldest son, left one of my sisters to mind his stamp shop and set off for Genoa in his car. I went with him. I was fourteen, and I remember we didn’t say a word for the whole of the ride. My father never talked a lot, and since I was already giving him a few problems with my lack of progress at school, it was in my best interests to keep quiet. It was the shortest of my trips to the sea, just long enough to fill a bottle, but also the most pointless, because by the time we got back Grandpa was almost completely unconscious. My father washed the old man’s face with water from the bottle, but Grandpa didn’t seem to particularly appreciate it.
A few years later, the fact of the sea being so close was one of the things that drew me to Rome. After my military service, I was faced with the problem of what to do with my life, but the more I looked around, the less I was able to come to a decision. My friends had very clear ideas—graduate, get married, make money—but that was a prospect that repelled me. These were the years when money mattered even more than usual in Milan, the years that saw a kind of nationwide conjuring trick also known as the Economic Boom, and in a way I too benefited from it. It was at this time that a medical-literary magazine for which I occasionally wrote a few well-judged but badly paid articles had the opportunity to open an office in Rome and I was hired as their correspondent.
While my mother used every argument she could to prevent my departure, my father said nothing. He’d silently watched my attempts at social integration, comparing them with the successes of my elder sis
ters, who at a young age had married white-collar workers, perfectly respectable men, and, as I had done during that trip to get water for my grandfather, I took advantage of his silence to keep quiet myself. He and I never talked. I don’t know which of us was to blame—I don’t even know if you can talk about blame here—but I always had the feeling that if I’d confronted him directly I would somehow have hurt him. The war had sent him a long way away without sparing him any of its well-known peculiarities. Nobody to whom a thing like that happens can return home exactly as he was before. In spite of his proud silence, it always seemed as if he was trying to make us forget something, perhaps the fact he’d come home a shattered man and had made us watch his big body writhing as the electric shocks shuddered through it. Anyway, that’s how he was, and when I was a boy I could never forgive him for his unheroic profession, his love of order, his excessive respect for inanimate things, not understanding what terrible destruction he must have witnessed to then set about repairing an old kitchen chair with infinite patience on the very day he came back from the war. And yet, even now, after almost thirty years, there’s still something of the soldier about him, the patience, the tendency to hold his head high, the habit of not asking questions, and even now, if he’d given me nothing else, I’ll never forget the fearlessness I felt as a boy walking by his side. Because, even now, the thought of my father’s stride is the one thing more than any other that immediately takes me back to my childhood, and even now, even in the green expanse surrounding me, I can return as if by magic to his side, remembering his soft, dusty stride, apparently impervious to fatigue, the stride of those long marches as a soldier, the stride that one way or another he’d somehow managed to bring back home with him.
So I set off for Rome, and everything would have gone perfectly if my father, quite unexpectedly forgoing his own pride, hadn’t decided to go with me to the station and stand waiting on the platform until the train left. The wait was long and unbearable. His big face was red from the effort of holding back the tears. We looked at each other in silence, as usual, but I realized that we were saying good-bye, and all I could do was pray for the train to leave and put an end to that heartrending look I’d never seen in his eyes before. There he stood on the platform, lower than me for the first time ever, so low that I could see how sparse his hair had become as he constantly turned his head to glance at the signal light at the end of the track. His big body was motionless, and he stood with his legs wide apart as if preparing to receive a blow, his hands like weights in the pockets of his overcoat, his eyes moist and his face red. And just as I was at last realizing that it meant something to be the only son, just as I was about to open my mouth and yell to him that I was getting off the train and that we would find a way to work things out without destroying our lives, the train gave a little lurch and began moving. And so, once again in silence, I was wrenched from him. I saw his big body give a start when the train moved. Then I saw him grow smaller the farther away I got. He didn’t move, didn’t make a gesture. Then he vanished from sight completely.
* * *
My period of respectability didn’t last long. I was dismissed after a year, although, to be honest, it could have happened even earlier. The small Roman office was the last asset to be liquidated before the magazine closed down, along with the boom that had given birth to it. The place where I worked, drumming up a little advertising for the magazine and occasionally writing a few articles to indulge the medical profession’s unfathomable fondness for literature, was a room filled with furniture upholstered in red damask in a neo-Renaissance villa just beyond the wall along the Tiber.
The owner was Count Giovanni Rubino di Sant’Elia, a distinguished man in his fifties with a nonchalant and somewhat affected manner. Distant at first, almost as if he came into my office only to open the French windows that looked out on the garden and allow me to breathe in the scent of his lilacs, he ended up spending more and more time in the armchair in front of my desk and engaging me in conversations that became more familiar in tone as his true financial situation was revealed. When he told me he was completely ruined, we decided we could be on a first-name basis.
He lived with his wife, a plump blonde, disorientated by her husband’s straitened circumstances, in the back part of the house, opening the door only to the baker’s boy, and ever since she’d opened up one day only to be confronted with some fellow who had then confiscated the magnificent gilded table in the drawing room, I’d been obliged to play the part of their somewhat bumbling secretary. But I was glad to do it. Especially for him. I liked seeing him come into my office, smooth the gray hairs at his temples with his hands, and jerk his elbows so that the cuffs of his spotless shirt shot out from the sleeves of his jacket. “So what are we doing, working?” he would say. Then I would put the cover on the typewriter and take out a bottle. He never talked, as a Milanese would have, about his financial problems, only about pleasant things—aristocrats and celebrities and, above all, women and horses—and sometimes telling quite risqué jokes with a gleam in his eye.
When summer arrived, we got in the habit of moving into the drawing room, and there, when the sun retreated from that part of the house, the two of us surrounded by walls that bore lighter patches where the furniture had been removed, the count would play his Steinway grand and I would sprawl on the last remaining couch and listen to him. And every afternoon, as soon as I heard those first notes, I would telephone a nearby bar, order some cold beer, and join him. There he would be, wearing an old silk dressing gown, hopelessly carried away. He would dredge up his repertoire, old songs I’d heard from my mother, tunes by Gershwin and Cole Porter, but, above all, an old American song called “Roberta.” Sometimes, we would sing together.
On the first day of fall that year came the letter that shut the office. I informed the count, who leaned on the piano and smiled. “Well, my friend,” he said, “what will you do now?” That’s all he said, although I should have known that for him it was a fatal blow. Two days later, as I gathered my papers, there was a knock at the door, and four determined-looking workmen loaded the piano on their backs and took it away. It was quite an effort for them to get it through the gate, and the old Steinway must have hit some corner or other because its voice rose from the street in a kind of death knell. The whole time the operation lasted, the count didn’t leave his room, but when I shook hands with the countess, who was visibly moved, and walked out of the house, I saw him at the window, raising his hand and waving to me. There was something so uncompromising in his gesture that I responded in the only way I thought appropriate: I put my bag down on the pavement and bowed.
For a few days after the office closed, I stayed in my hotel, pondering my future. The only thing the contacts I’d made through the magazine could offer me was a job in a pharmaceutical firm outside the city, where I would have to write advertising material from nine in the morning to six in the evening. I decided to wait for something to happen. Like an aristocrat under siege.
Every day I would go to the sea. With a book in my pocket, I would take the metro to Ostia and spend most of the day reading in a little trattoria on the beach. Then I would go back to the city and hang around the Piazza Navona area, where I’d made a few friends, all of them adrift like me, intellectuals, for the most part, with the anxious but expectant look of refugees. Rome was our city, she tolerated us, flattered us, and even I ended up realizing that in spite of the sporadic work, the weeks when I went hungry, the damp, dark hotel rooms with their yellowing furniture squeaking as if killed and desiccated by some obscure liver disease, I couldn’t live anywhere else. And yet, when I think back on those years, I have clear memories of a small number of places, a small number of events, because Rome by her very nature has a particular intoxication that wipes out memory. She’s not so much a city as a wild beast hidden in some secret part of you. There can be no half measures with her, either she’s the love of your life or you have to leave her, because that’s what the tender beast de
mands, to be loved. That’s the only entrance toll you’ll have to pay from wherever you’ve come, from the green, hilly roads of the south, or the straight, seesawing roads of the north, or the depths of your own soul. If she’s loved, she’ll give herself to you whichever way you want her, all you need to do is go with the flow and you’ll be within reach of the happiness you deserve. You’ll have summer evenings glittering with lights, vibrant spring mornings, café tablecloths ruffled by the wind like girls’ skirts, keen winters, and endless autumns, when she’ll seem vulnerable, sick, weary, swollen with shredded leaves that are silent underfoot. You’ll have dazzling white steps, noisy fountains, ruined temples, and the nocturnal silence of the dispossessed, until time loses all meaning, apart from the banal aim of keeping the clock hands turning. In this way you too, waiting day after day, will become part of her. You too will nourish the city. Until one sunny day, sniffing the wind from the sea and looking up at the sky, you’ll realize there’s nothing left to wait for.
Every now and again, someone did get the hell out. When it was the turn of Glauco and Serena, two of the Piazza Navona group, I moved into their apartment on Monte Mario. By now I was at the end of my tether with hotel rooms, and I couldn’t believe I was actually going to have a place I could call my own. When I also bought their worn-out Alfa Romeo for fifty thousand lire, I naturally thought I’d reached a significant turning point in my life. I packed two suitcases with my books and moved in the same day they left. They were going because Serena had managed to get a two-year contract as a set designer in a theater in Mexico City, but above all because their marriage was in trouble and Glauco had stopped painting. Rome had crushed them and they were leaving, taking their unlikely names and an excessive number of suitcases with them. “Lousy city,” Glauco said, looking out from the balcony.
Last Summer in the City Page 2
