Last week it was my cousin’s son’s birthday, and I sent a gift. I’ve been thinking a lot about my cousin lately. I’m starting to understand why she lied to us. She and her husband live with their children in the village where I grew up. It is called Morano Calabro, and the small stone houses wrap around the mountain like a cloak of many pockets. At the top of the village are the ruins of a Norman castle where teenagers hide from their parents. It is always windy. They learn how to smoke and drink beer. They watch the drifting lights of cars in the valley. There’s talk of moving to Naples, Rome, Venice, but most stay in the village and have beautiful children who grow quickly and want scooters.
Morano Calabro is about 500 kilometers south of Rome. In spring, it is common to see flocks of five or six butterflies. My father told me when I was a child that butterflies are just flowers that have come loose. Childhood was hard for me because I worried about everything. I worried about the end of the world, diabetes, earthquakes, asphyxiation, each of my family members slipping into a coma, one by one (as if going off to look for the others).
At age eight I would set my clock to rise in the early hours and check the regularity of my brother’s breathing against my palm.
Life now is sometimes difficult, but at least I know that my condition is a condition and my concerns aren’t always serious ones. I may not be normal, but I no longer worry about worrying, I just worry and know it’s who I am. If you’ve never heard of such a thing, I’m surprised, as it’s fairly common. You probably know someone who has it. Let me give you a recent example.
I was in a toy shop two weeks ago buying a present for my cousin’s child. There was a box of lambs. I picked one up. The wool looked grubby, so I put it back and picked up another. Then the one I put back had this look. So I put the second lamb back to go with the first lamb (because I felt sorry for it), and the second lamb also had a look that said, for God’s sake, can’t you see I need love, too?
The shopkeeper was looking at me. “Can’t decide, eh?” he said stupidly. I began to perspire. I looked around. On every shelf peering down at me were little heads, all pleading to be taken home and rescued from the darkness of a loveless existence. I almost slipped into a panic attack, which, if you’ve never had one, feels like you’re freefalling in darkness (like Alice).
After twenty minutes, the shopkeeper said something else. I couldn’t stand his looking and decided to buy them both. It was settled. I scooped them up in a moment of ecstasy and relief.
But two remained in the box. They both had looks. And one had a missing eye. I picked him up. I now had three lambs. There was one very lonely lamb left. He was very lonely. So alone he couldn’t even look at me. And so I had all four sent in a box with the store’s shiny wrapping paper and a sticker with their address on it. As he addressed the package, the shopkeeper asked me if Morano Calabro had a place to buy toys. “Of course,” I said. You could tell he lived only for his shop.
My cousin’s husband called during the birthday party a week later. There were children everywhere, he said. They were wearing paper crowns of different colors. I could hear them in the background, a jumble of soft, shallow voices. It’s amazing to think they will age together, love one another, deceive one another, weep for each other, and in old age congregate at the public gardens and lock their arms. He put his son on the phone. “I’m three,” he said. “Would you cry if I died?” “Yes,” I said, and he blew me a kiss. I wonder if he thinks I’m really in the handset, tiny and groping.
The handset is sometimes like my body.
His father came on the phone. He wanted to know why four lambs. “Are they supposed to look the same?” he asked. “They don’t look the same,” I said. Then I told him they came as a set, which really wasn’t a lie. “But why not three in a set like musketeers?” he asked. “Why not four,” I said, “like the Ninja Turtles.” “I suppose that makes sense,” he said, having watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with his eldest boy that very morning. Never admit you have obsessive-compulsive disorder to someone who doesn’t have it because they’ll think you’re crazy.
But the reason I’m telling you all this is because his wife, Isabella, who he thinks is my cousin, is not really my cousin. My entire family and her husband and children are living the most beautiful lie.
Her real name is not Isabella Ferrari, but Jocasta Lefferts. She’s from Queens in New York City, and her last name is the name of the street she was found on by the local New York police. She came to my village five years ago. It was winter. She showed up and said her name was Isabella. She had a photograph of distant relatives, my grandmother’s uncle, Luigi, and his wife, Luciana. Luigi was a metal craftsman. Luciana made clothes. She was partially sighted from birth. In 1917, Luigi’s younger brother died in his older brother’s arms from shrapnel wounds. Luciana waited for Luigi at the edge of the village to return from the war. When he did they walked to his mother’s house in silence. His mother was outside hanging clothes. The sound of drops into dry earth, then footsteps. She turned around. It was the saddest-happiest day of her life.
Luigi and Luciana were soon married in an olive grove high above the village. The spot has not changed but for an old washing machine abandoned on the road halfway up the mountain. In 1920, they departed Morano Calabro for Argentina. No one knows anything about their lives after they left the village.
Isabella’s Italian has improved over the past few years since she arrived from North America. From her look, I actually think her ancestors were West Indian, but that doesn’t matter. She arrived with an elaborate story of how her grandmother (who was the daughter of Luigi and Luciana) married a Canadian soldier after World War II and moved to Toronto.
Isabella now has two children with a man from the village. She met him soon after arriving. He is handsome and wears Versace glasses. He works the village espresso machine at his newsstand. He dresses so fashionably tourists think he is from Rome or Milan. He is worldly without having gone anywhere, so nobody in the village was surprised when he married a stranger.
I think my grandmother knew Isabella was lying when she first came to the village five years ago. I wonder why she didn’t say anything. She is a quiet woman. Her husband was older. When he was alive he worshipped her like a teenager.
My grandmother may know that Isabella is not really part of the family, but only I know her real name and her history (which is bleak). No, I would never say anything because everyone in the family (including her) is in love with one another.
She, her husband, and their two boys take a vacation once a year (nowhere special—Sicily or Bari), and at Christmas Isabella and her husband watch, from a sea of other parents, their children in the Nativity play, dressed in a patchwork of cloth and old carpet. I remember being on that stage dressed as a little bear. I was so nervous. I thought I was going to die out there and was sure that my outfit was teeming with fleas. After the play my father scooped me into his arms and I felt brilliant. For weeks, I felt brilliant. I even asked for a book on real bears.
Now I see it was such an insignificant event to the world. But then every beautiful moment in my life has been an insignificant event to the world.
Even though Isabella doesn’t know it, I can relate to her. I know how it feels to be an outcast.
I left the village because I’m gay. And it’s hard to be gay in a small place like Morano, even though it’s beautiful and the streets smell of wood smoke, and you can go anywhere at anytime and you’ll never be turned away by anyone. You must understand, it’s a question of practicality, not a question of acceptance. Times have changed. In Morano, if you’re loved, everything else falls away. My grandmother knows I fell in love with a man from Rome (the relationship has long since finished), and I pursued him here, which is where I’ve lived for four years.
Maybe I’ll move back to the village in my twilight years. Perhaps I’ll have a partner to take long, slow walks with. It’s such a beautiful place. The Dutch artist M. C. Escher loved Morano. In 1930
, he quietly made a woodcut of the village on Japanese paper. It hangs in the National Gallery of Canada.
We also have a fifteenth-century polyptych by Bartolomeo Vivarini in the main church, the skull of an old castle at the top of the village, a convent, ancient houses built into the mountain rock, and a public garden with a chuckling fountain where teenagers gather and explain the world to one another.
I wonder if Isabella suspects I know the truth about her. I don’t have the courage to say anything, even if I could say I love you in the same breath. But then I don’t see the point of truth anymore, it causes just as much heartbreak as lying.
Isabella told us five years ago when she arrived that her family was dead and that when she was going through her grandmother’s things she found a photo with information written on the back.
She was actually in the village for two days before we met her. She arrived a few days before Christmas. Everyone was excited for the holiday, and it snowed through the night. The scent of trees blew down from the mountains in the morning, but by lunchtime this was replaced by the smells of baking, which spread through the streets like long fingers that pulled on everyone’s tongues. Everyone had put up their decorations. You could sense the excitement of every child in the village, and they walked around in the evening with their eyes turned upward.
Isabella had taken a night train to Spezzano Albanese. After coffee and a croissant she hitchhiked to Castrovillari. The man who picked her up called his younger brother and asked him to drive Isabella to Morano Calabro. He had just worked a night shift and had to take his daughter to school. “She’s from America and has come to find her family,” he had said to his brother, which piqued the interest of their grandmother, who secretly listened in on her grandsons’ conversations from an upstairs phone. The silence over dinner would be like cotton wool in the grandmother’s mouth.
When Isabella arrived at the village it was the afternoon. She was cold and went to the village’s grandest church, the Chiesa di S. Maria Maddalena. She fell asleep on a stiff pew. When she woke up, a man was sitting next to her. He had watery eyes. He asked her why she had come to the village.
She showed him the photograph of Luigi and Luciana. He hugged her. He explained that his own mother had died when he was six. He said it was like God had taken a bite out of him.
Isabella’s Italian was very limited then. She didn’t understand much that was said to her, but she hugged the man back. His sincerity made a deep impression.
Together, Isabella and the man with watery eyes went to the house of the local police inspector who had access to all the village records. He lived in a stone cottage on via Chiazzile. There was a pink plastic cup on his front step.
The man with watery eyes knocked. A man with white hair poked his head out of an upstairs window. “I’m trying to watch the news and my wife has a headache,” he said. The man with watery eyes explained everything passionately. “One moment,” the police inspector said, then closed the window.
In a few minutes, it began to snow. Then, the police inspector, dressed in full uniform, complete with medals he’d been awarded for bravery, quietly closed his front door and led them to the building where records were kept. The man with watery eyes pointed to the police inspector’s medals and narrated the rescue of two boys from a frozen pond in the 1960s. Isabella asked where the brothers are now. “Costa Rica,” the police inspector said. “I just got a Christmas card from them.”
At around three in the morning, the police inspector tapped a name in a dusty book. “I have found your family,” he said. “I will call them at dawn.” And the three of them sipped wine around the space heater until the sky turned white.
Isabella was kissed and hugged more than she had ever been in her life. The building of public records was a scene of great joy. The children of the family wondered what they would give her for Christmas. The man with watery eyes was the last to go home.
The day after Christmas, the police inspector and the man with watery eyes knocked on the family’s door. The police inspector had his hat in hand. They had made a mistake, he said. They were not Isabella’s real family.
There was anger and confusion. Isabella was summoned from an upstairs bedroom. One of the youngest children cried so hard it became his first memory.
She trudged back to the building that contained the public records. The wrong family followed. When my family arrived from the other side of the village, the wrong family eyed them jealously. Then the wrong family demanded to see the records for themselves. An unmarried uncle of the wrong family pointed out to my father that the police inspector had made one mistake, so was certainly capable of making a second. My father agreed this was a possibility.
Before leaving to come home with my family, Isabella promised the wrong family she would visit them and said kindly that you never know who is who and that she was sure they were her family, too. My mother agreed that God often did things like this for good reason.
I was in Naples visiting my uncle when all this happened and came home the next day to find an American girl sleeping in my bed. My English isn’t bad, and I told her I didn’t mind and then listened to my mother’s story of the mix-up and how the police inspector is really too old to be in such a position of power. But then my father added that it was all the police inspector had and to take his position would destroy the man’s spirit.
Isabella presented me with the photograph. Written on the back were the names of my grandmother’s uncle and his wife, the name of the village, and the date they left. The photo was taken in an orchard. Nobody knows where. Luciana is smiling in the photograph. “Perhaps she was pregnant,” I said. My grandmother looked at me sadly from the kitchen as she dried her hands on a dish towel. Then she looked at Isabella.
I’m going on a second date tonight. Marco is a restorer of Renaissance works, but he is really a sculptor. I met him on via Condotti. We’ve sipped coffee together. His hands are beautiful.
It is quiet in my apartment as I pick out my clothes. I can hear the future getting into position, like shuffling actors on a stage before the curtain goes up.
Last night in bed, the idea of going out with Marco kept me awake. My pillow must have soaked up a thousand conversations. Then I imagined Marco choking on a piece of penne. Then I saw myself doing the Heimlich maneuver on him. But then I awoke from this half sleep, this shallow river of worry, and realized that I don’t even know the Heimlich maneuver, and had to go online at 3:00 a.m. and find out. Then I practiced in front of the mirror with a pillow.
This morning when I woke up I felt like a fool. I drank green tea and thought about Isabella as I watched the men in the market set out their day’s vegetables and fruits. I then remembered the four lambs I had bought Isabella’s son. One had a missing eye.
After Isabella had been with us a week, I decided to find out more about her because while looking in my room for something, I saw her passport poking out of her suitcase. I looked inside, and it said that it belonged to Jocasta Lefferts.
There was also a business card for a social worker. I wrote to her pretending to be the Italian authorities. I sent Isabella’s passport as verification. It wasn’t a very kind thing to do, but I was worried. Isabella didn’t even realize the passport was missing. She hasn’t left Morano since she arrived. The social worker I wrote to was assigned to an orphanage in Queens. She sent me a copy of Isabella’s file. She had the file officially translated, but in clumsy guidebook Italian; the social worker had written, “Please take care of her” on the front of the file.
According to the file, an unnamed child was discovered by police in May of 1981 next to a Dumpster on Lefferts Avenue. As a teenager, she ran away several times from the center. She became a prostitute for two months to pay for her boyfriend’s drugs. He died. She was beaten several times. There were other things, too. Terrible things.
After reading her file I began to love her. Whoever she is, I thought, she’s now a member of the Ferrari family, and in
the name of the Virgin Mary, I thought, we’re claiming this child as one of ours (and I’m not even religious).
I rode my brother’s bicycle up into the mountains and burnt her file along with her passport in the body of an old washing machine abandoned at the side of the road. There were wildflowers everywhere.
My grandmother saw I had received a package from America but said nothing. She and I are very close.
It is a beautiful evening, and I am walking through Rome to meet Marco. I am passing the Coliseum. I can imagine Marco waiting for me at the Piazza Navona beside the fountain of meeting rivers. There are tourists everywhere. They are taking pictures. I wonder what will happen to each photograph in the future. Strange to think photographs outlive us. The Roman Coliseum was once the scene of mass slaughter. People watched people being torn apart and crushed by wild animals from all over the world: lions, elephants, crocodiles, hippopotamuses. The Romans, the Romans. I can’t stop thinking that everybody is somebody’s child.
I once heard a guide explain to a spellbound crowd of tourists how when the Roman Empire fell, the Coliseum was abandoned and became overgrown with exotic plants and flowers, the seeds for which had been carried in the feces of animals brought from Africa, Asia, and Europe.
I’m now walking through the Roman Forum. If you ever come to this magnificent city, you’ll be delighted to learn that it’s all free. And bring your children, Italians love children. They’ll be treated much better than you and given things to nibble on in every shop.
There are men strolling around dressed as gladiators. They will take a photo with you for a price. They play their parts well. Perhaps they really feel like Roman soldiers. Maybe they tell their wives over supper they were born too late.
I wonder if things can happen too early or too late or if everything happens at exactly the right time. If so, how sad and beautiful.
I’m almost at the Piazza Navona, which is where I’m meeting Marco. The alleys are choked with tourists. I’m tired. I haven’t slept, remember. The sky is the color of a peach. It’s evening, but it looks like morning. Every moment is a beginning and an end.
The Secret Lives of People in Love Page 12
