He smiled with pleasure, looked over his shoulder. “Ssh,” he said. “People will hear you.”
Spode. Wedgwood. Royal Doulton.
We had our picture taken together. Tom framed a copy, and put it on the desk in the kitchen, the one on which he worked out the menus for the dinners he catered, and wrote the children’s books he could never get published.
His devotion amazed me. Nineteen manuscripts, hundreds of rejection letters, and still he persevered, claiming that he derived enough satisfaction from the mere act of writing, and enough pride from the pleasure the books gave to the children he knew.
For they all read his books in manuscript, those Justins and Sams and Maxes. Their mothers read them too. “Those New York publishers are absolutely crazy not to take these,” Gina said once. “If they did, they’d make a fortune.”
But not even his friend Mary, whose brother worked at Simon & Schuster, ever offered to help him.
He asked her once. I don’t know how, but somehow he mustered the wherewithal to ask her. If she could mention him to her brother, mention his books …
Mary’s mouth tightened. “But my brother works in the marketing department,” she said. “Probably he doesn’t know anyone in children’s books.”
That probably. It gave everything away. The truth was, she wanted him in his place.
Caterer. Babysitter. Giver of kitchen wisdom. Have I mentioned marriage counselor? If Tom had come into his own, he might no longer have been available.
“Tom, you’re so wise!” How often I heard those words, spoken by his weeping married friends. Sitting in our living room, they would sob and vent. Stories would dribble out, of stains and threats and temptations.
And Tom would hand over the box of tissues, pour the tea, and proceed to give the shrewd and reasoned advice for which he was famous.
He was good at it, too. He kept more than one spouse from straying. Unfortunately, it was never his own.
Via in Selci
I’m starting to relax now, to fall into the rhythm of interrogation. Already I’ve been here for three hours. Once we’ve gone out for coffee—me, the maresciallo, and his deputies. We walked down Via in Selci to Via Cavour, to a bar on the corner, where all three of them bought cigarettes. We ordered espressos. As is the masculine fashion in Italy, the carabinieri drank theirs Arabic-fashion, out of shot glasses.
Afterward, they fought over who would pick up the bill. The maresciallo won, which probably explains why he is the maresciallo. Then we returned to the caserma. It was just after eleven o’clock in the morning, the sky cloudless and blue, a perfect backdrop for the Colosseum rising above rooftops. I remembered Tom taking me on one of his typically brisk tours around its periphery. As was his habit, he had pointed out unusual details: the flowers growing in the cracks, the birds who had built nests in the little holes pocking the ancient stone.
“Lovers used to come here for trysts,” he’d said. “Remember ‘Roman Fever’? Malaria—from the Italian, mal aria. Bad air.”
Last night, the Colosseum was lit up with bright yellow spotlights. I asked the maresciallo why.
“They’re lit every time a death sentence is commuted somewhere in the world,” he said.
“Whereas in Italy,” I said, “even if you find the person who killed Tom, you couldn’t sentence him to death.”
“Would you want us to?”
“No! I’ve always thought the death penalty was barbaric.”
“You are more civilized than most of your countrymen,” the maresciallo said.
At the caserma, he waves to the guard in his bulletproof cubicle, then leads me down a badly lit corridor, past two empty holding cells, up a staircase, through a storage room, and back into his office. Once again, he takes his place at the gunmetal desk. His deputies, however, change positions. The one who had been typing sits on the corner of the desk. The one who had been sitting on the corner of the desk prepares to type.
“So where were we?” he says, opening his pack of cigarettes. “Oh, yes. You were saying that the professor would never have brought someone home with him when he had a guest staying.”
“At least he never did when I was staying there.”
“Please forgive me if this is an intrusive question, but when you and he lived together, were you faithful to each other?”
“He was faithful to me.”
“As far as you know.”
“That much I know.”
“Would you describe him as jealous?”
“I made sure he never had occasion to be jealous.”
The maresciallo smiles. Like his colleagues, he is broad-shouldered and hairy-chested, the first three buttons of his shirt undone to show off the gold chain around his neck. When I first arrived here, I felt anthropological, as if I were a member of some tribe whose habits the experts interviewing him found fascinating but bizarre. In Italy examples of the “out” homosexual are still rare. Much more common is what one might call the situational homosexual, the man who, though he might go now and again to the park on the Monte Caprino, or even to the bar just up Via in Selci from the caserma, would never in a million years identify himself as a frocio. Perhaps the maresciallo himself went around that block a few times, when he was doing his military service, before he got married … Yet the idea that Tom and I, beyond youth and very publicly, should have chosen to make this thing the center of our lives—even to forge a sort of marriage—this was the part I feared the carabinieri would never get their minds around.
The surprise, however, is that the hours we’ve spent together have revealed unsuspected common ground. If nothing else, the carabinieri recognized that my life wasn’t really all that different from theirs. For instance, the reluctance to sleep on the sofa of someone with whom you once shared a bed—that they could understand. Or the sly evasions of the disloyal spouse.
“Let’s move on to another matter,” the maresciallo says, lighting another cigarette. “Did the professor ever speak to you of a friend called Pepe?”
“A few times.”
“Do you know his last name?”
“I never met him. I only heard about him.”
“Did he ever happen to say how he met Pepe?”
“I think they were neighbors when Tom first moved to Rome.”
“When he was living in Monti.”
“Exactly.”
“How old is Pepe? Do you know what he looks like? Have you ever seen a photograph of him?”
“I haven’t. I’m sorry.”
“Do you know if the professor ever had sexual relations with Pepe?”
“The way he talked about him, it seems unlikely. My impression was that they just went out together. That they were friends.”
The deputy reads: “The professor had an acquaintance called Pepe, who had been his neighbor when he first moved to Rome and was living in the Monti area. As far as I know, he never had sexual relations with Pepe, though they went out together.”
“Might Pepe have been a person the professor approached if he hoped to procure a sexual partner for money?”
“It’s possible.”
“Was the professor in the habit of offering money in exchange for sex?”
“Certainly not when we lived together. In Rome … well, if he was, he never said anything about it.”
“Did he ever speak of anyone to whom he was attracted? A student, perhaps?”
I think for a moment. Then I remember our lunch. Taste that rosemary …
“There was a waiter,” I say. “His name was Enzo. He worked at a trattoria—Da Giuseppina, I think it was called—near Torre Argentina.”
“But not a student.”
“Come to think of it, he did mention a student. Piergiorgio, Piervincenzo: one of those compound names. Tom said he was very good-looking. The only problem was that he was a Fascist.”
“And the professor was a Communist.”
“He was a Democrat, yes.”
The deputy reads: “The professor expressed attraction
to a waiter called Enzo, who worked at the Trattoria da Giuseppina, as well as to a student with a compound name, beginning with ‘Pier.’ However, they were of divergent political views.”
“Anyone else?”
“Only the Dying Gaul.”
“The Dying Gaul?”
“Tom always claimed to have a crush on the Dying Gaul,” I say.
When did it start, his passion for marble? Certainly there was no evidence of it in our San Francisco days. I don’t remember anything about marble from our San Francisco days. Back then Tom had other passions: cooking, chiefly. He also collected baseball cards. Though this may have been more for the sake of his many godsons.
As for me, I went to night school. Foreign language courses. I was lucky; fluency came naturally to me. For most people new languages are buffeting, even brutal oceans. I dived into them without hesitation. Although timid in English, I found my voice when speaking these stepmother tongues, deriving a gastronome’s pleasure from words: tendresse, Zitronen, geniale.
Already I spoke French, German, and Italian. Now, three nights a week, I studied Russian and Japanese. Later, just for the hell of it, I convinced a woman I knew from Bilbao to give me lessons in Basque. “Vincent is so intellectually curious,” Tom would say at his dinner parties. My studying, my lessons with the woman from Bilbao, became his amusing excuse for my being out on the evenings when he gave dinner parties.
The marble, though—it must have come after we broke up, when he was first living in Rome, in that tiny apartment on Via del Boschetto. Not yet the big, dreary apartment in the Olympic Village, in which he was killed. For the moment, his plans were too uncertain to justify furniture. After all, he had moved to Rome on the spur of the moment, in the immediate wake of my deciding to move to Düsseldorf. Tit for tat; or maybe he left in order to feel that he wasn’t being left.
In Rome, he let two furnished rooms from a widow who lived on Via Frattina. Like many Romans, she owned pockets of real estate all over the city, none of which she occupied. Instead she rented the apartments she owned in order to pay for the apartment she rented. Recently she had sold her beach house in Fregene, the furniture from which had been moved into Tom’s bow tie–shaped flat. Old seaside junk: a rattan sofa with matching armchairs, the wicker uncurling; a wrought-iron dining table with four wobbly chairs; a bed with a headboard shaped like a wave, topped by a crest of white foam.
There was always a smell of salt air in that apartment, which was odd, since it was very dark, its attic windows giving only onto rooftops and balconies and other attic windows. No water, no fishing boats. If you took the pillows off the armchairs, grains of sand scattered onto the floor.
I remember one afternoon we were taking a stroll through the Forum. It had been raining, and the ground was muddy. Tom was talking about the different kinds of marble that the Romans quarried. “That’s africano,” he said, pointing to a paving stone that lay propped against a rusty fence, in tall grass. “Look how it glows, after the rain. As if it’s been polished.”
I looked. In the gray light, the stony masses that made up the slab glistened green and red and a white like lard. Nearby lay a column, cream veined with purple-brown. It made me think of fudge-swirl ice cream.
“Pavonazzetto,” Tom said. “And that one there, that’s rosso antico. Not porphyry. You can tell because the red isn’t speckled. Porphyry is always speckled. It’s the caviar of marbles.”
“Marmo come lardo,” I said, my eyes still on the africano. “It’s like a poem.”
Tom had his eyes on the path in front of us. “If you look carefully, sometimes you see glints of things,” he said. “Especially after the rain, the stuff comes up like mushrooms. For instance—there.” And he stopped. “You have to use your toe,” he added, digging in the mud with his boot.
The path winked. He stepped back.
“Make sure no one’s watching,” he whispered.
I glanced over my shoulder. In the distance a German family was photographing itself. “Be my lookout,” Tom said, and pulled a screwdriver from his jacket pocket. Then he bent down and jabbed at the mud.
The German family put away its cameras and walked toward us. “Tom,” I said.
“It’s O.K.,” he said, stuffing something into his pocket.
“Well, what did you find?”
“We’ll see in a minute.”
We turned off the path, into a copse of umbrella pines, where Tom took out his treasure. At first I thought it was an ordinary rock, until he scraped the dirt off with his nails. It was the color of red wine, spotted like a duck’s egg.
“See?” he said. “Porphyry.”
He put it back in his pocket.
“But isn’t it illegal to take things out of the Forum?”
“A little crumb like this? Who’ll even notice? Anyway, the real crime would be not to take it. To leave it there to crumble into tinier and tinier pieces, under the tread of all these tourist feet. Instead of which—think of it this way—I’m saving a piece of history.” He took my arm, which one could do in Italy. “Besides, no one ever really owns marble. It’ll outlive us all. All I’m doing is giving it a home for a few years. Protection from the elements.”
How many excuses he had! Nor were most of them unconvincing. After all, as he went on to show me that day, the Forum was already overflowing with relics, more than anyone had the money or resources to catalogue, much less display. In ditches left over from old archaeological digs, in makeshift “temporary” warehouses set up decades ago and never dismantled, bins of marble fragments lay untouched, unsifted. Cats meandered past them, slept on them, peed on them. He was right. What did a little chip like that matter?
A few nights later, though, returning to his apartment after some touring of my own, I tripped over something as I came through the door. The paving stone—the enormous one of africano—was sitting on his living room floor.
“How on earth did you get it out?” I asked.
He winked. “I used my toe,” he said.
He started to acquire larger and larger pieces. Some of these, he told me, he had bought from a dealer he knew, while others he had won at poker games hosted by his friend Adua. Although by profession Adua was a doctor, her real passion—her only passion—was for marble. “You think I’ve got good stuff!” Tom said. “Wait until you see what Adua has stashed away!”
I met Adua only a few times. She was a small, heavy-hipped woman in her mid-forties. Her hair was dark, crudely cut. She lived alone, Tom told me, and was a sort of theoretical lesbian, though she had no lovers of whom he was aware. All her friends were men, fellow marmisti, or marble collectors. I called them the marble thieves. Around Tom, at least, Adua spoke of little else save her collection.
One morning she took us for a drive along the Via Appia Antica. The air was muggy that day. Outside her apartment building in Monte Verdi, where we met, she opened the trunk of her battered Fiat so that we could put our coats away. An immense block of serpentine sat next to the spare tire, half-covered in plastic.
“From the Temple of Heliogabolus,” Adua said.
“Where did you get it?”
“I won it,” she said. “The only problem is, I haven’t figured out how to get it up the stairs.”
“In the old days, at Hadrian’s Villa,” Tom said in the car, “you could find incredible stuff. All the marble, it was just piled up in these caves the archaeologists had dug out. The caves had metal doors on them, but they were never locked. You could walk in and help yourself.”
“And now?”
“Oh, everything’s padlocked. I suppose they got wind of what Adua was up to.”
He winked. Adua tousled what hair he had left. By now we were out of the city, driving through the campagna, a flat landscape of sunflowers and hayricks. Big villas passed us, their high walls studded with hunks of broken glass bottle.
We came to some ruins—old arches and bits of aqueduct. Behind a tall fence, fields of grass and wheat spread out. In th
e distance I could see sheep grazing against a silhouette of buildings, one of which I recognized as St. Peter’s.
Adua parked the car. We got out. It was raining, which should have clued me in on what they had in mind. With a kind of medical authority, as if it were a gland to be palpated, she felt at the metal fence. A sign was tacked to it, explaining in bureaucratic Italian that this was an archaeological zone: no trespassing.
“I think we can get over it,” Adua said, fitting her foot into one of the wire squares of the fence. Yet when she hoisted herself up, the fence sagged. She started again. “Push my ass,” she commanded, and we did. She hauled herself over, dropping abruptly onto the other side.
Tom went next, then I. As I fell, my jeans caught on the fence, which ripped a hole in them.
“Don’t worry,” Tom said. “Torn jeans are fashionable this year.”
I looked back at the fence. How were we ever going to get back over it? I wondered. Meanwhile, Tom and Adua had set off toward St. Peter’s. I followed them. For several minutes we trekked through mud and grass. Very far out, so far that you could no longer see the car, the ground started yielding up marble. The rain had moistened it, making it easier to see. I hadn’t noticed before, but both Tom and Adua were carrying backpacks. Very quickly, they began gathering up their booty. “Look, this one’s perfect!” Tom said, digging out a hexagonal paving stone.
“Oh, cipollina,” Adua said, as she yanked a column fragment from the mud. “Look, the surface is striated, like a slice of onion.”
After about twenty minutes—by now their backpacks were nearly full—a dog appeared. She was a very friendly, very dirty, brown-and-white sheepdog. I patted her head. Next some sheep rounded a hillock, accompanied by an old man carrying a stick. All of them gazed at us.
Immediately, Tom and Adua put down their backpacks.
“Good morning,” Adua said to the old man. “Are these your sheep?”
“They are.”
“What are you raising them for? Ricotta?”
“Ricotta, pecorino.”
She smiled confidingly. “It’s not too easy now, finding a really fresh ricotta in Rome. Not like in the old days.”
The Marble Quilt Page 20
