Guesswork

by Martha Cooley

  In Castiglione’s castle, among the hundreds of books, manuscripts, and incunabula stuffed into various armoires—even in the cellars—are first editions of Dante in multiple languages, a Divine Comedy printed in 1472, original works by Petrarch, and letters of Leopardi and other writers. The contents of Loris Jacopo Bononi’s library would slacken the jaws of any seasoned archivist. Bononi also collected musical instruments, paintings, sculpture, furniture, and household objects, all dating from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries.

  Structurally, the castle is just as it was during its heyday. A few frescoes are missing, and the kitchen and baths have been modernized; otherwise, all’s the same. Entering, you feel as if you’ve just taken a long fall backward in time, clunked your head, then woken up, dazed but unhurt—indeed, dazzled—to find you’re no longer in the early twenty-first century but in the middle of the Renaissance. Lining the walls of the castle’s huge entry hall are portraits of various dead people, all connected in some way with Lungianese history. Their sober faces peer down from the walls of the music room and library as well.

  Tucked in various corners are small photographs of Bononi and Raffaella. In these photos il professore wears his usual hawkeyed expression, while Raffaella grins engagingly at the camera. Why such small images of Loris and Raffaella, I remember wondering when I first took note of the photos. Aren’t their lives worth celebrating, too, especially since they’ve done the heavy lifting around here? Or will nicely framed photos come only with their deaths? Is that what it takes to merit attention in this place?

  A few weeks before Bononi’s passing, Raffaella made tea for Antonio and me. As we’d done on other occasions, we talked with her and il professore about the castle’s future. It was drizzling outside, the late-October afternoon unusually cool. We all sat by the large fireplace off the kitchen.

  Bononi was ill and weak but voluble. He’d sunk his fortune into this place, and some deep-pocketed person or entity would need to step in and take over its cultivation after his death. Who, when, how? He and Raffaella had not managed to come up with a clear answer to these questions. As he talked, his body seemed to hum with agitation.

  You’ve given so much energy to this, said Antonio.

  My life, said Bononi.

  Wincing a bit, he shifted in his chair.

  I live here, and I write, he added. To myself. To my unknown life. I’ll never know her, always long for her, she’ll always be a stranger to me . . . I came to Castiglione del Terziere to build this castle idea, and to write. It’s what I was meant to do. The rest was a preface.

  Loris, said Raffaella, take your heart medicine now, please.

  Che balle! Always handing me pills!

  He smiled at her, tenderly.

  Raffaella threw another couple of logs on the fireplace, jabbing them expertly with an antique poker. Alarmed by the noise, one of the castle’s newest kittens, no more than six weeks old, hopped onto Bononi’s lap. He lifted it up and thrust it like a handkerchief into a front patch-pocket in his wool jacket. The kitten’s tiny head and paws emerged, but it didn’t wiggle further out. Bononi massaged the animal’s fuzzy crown with a crooked forefinger. Both of them—man and cat—gazed at us, their eyes an identical china-blue color.

  Drink your water, added Raffaella. Wash those pills down.

  Doctors! said il professore, his grin partly a grimace. Tutti matti—they’re all crazy! Credetemi, I know what I’m talking about.

  He tossed back his handful of pills with a gulp. The kitten slipped from his pocket and vanished into the kitchen.

  Listen, Bononi continued, his tone urgent now. These books in my library, I’ve told you already, they all found me, not the other way around. It happened because it was meant to happen. I’ve always been loyal to Lunigiana; my loyalty brought me here. These books followed me, tracked me down, they tell me things . . . it’s not just the words. And something will happen to protect them. I am sure of this.

  Raffaella poured us more tea. I leaned forward, not because I couldn’t hear Bononi but because whenever il professore spoke about his library, articulating a lifetime of desire, I found myself wanting to get closer to such strangeness. What sort of person amassed a library in a castle? This biblioteca wasn’t merely a storage center. For Bononi it was a repository of esoteric insights—emotional, intellectual, spiritual—which he’d alchemized into poems. He was proud, to be sure, of the physical beauty of his old volumes, especially those bound in hand-tooled leather, their covers and spines stamped in gold. Yet Bononi’s library wasn’t meant to be impressive in that way. What’s more, it was organized and displayed so haphazardly that no visitor could appreciate what it actually contained. A serious archivist or book conservationist would be appalled by Bononi’s collection—not that il professore cared; he scorned such people.

  I want anyone to be able to touch all these books and manuscripts, he said. They have to touch them. That’s how my library will keep living.

  Finishing our tea, Antonio and I stood and pulled on our coats; it was time to leave. We said goodbye to Bononi, who ordered us not to forget our umbrellas. Raffaella and Mia accompanied us down the wide steps to the lower terrace; despite the rain, Mia’s tail wagged as we headed to the huge iron gate at the base of the ramp.

  No, amore, said Raffaella to her dog, restraining Mia. You can’t go find Pedro now. He’s at home, keeping dry. Ciao! she called to Antonio and me, waving as the gate clanged shut behind us.

  We headed down the path to our house, raindrops tinkling all around. Visualizing Bononi’s bookshelves, I realized they reminded me of the shelves of a smart but sloppy child. Their seeming disarray reflected the movements of a mind incessantly noting links and intersections, seeking coherence. During our tea, Bononi had told us that his biblioteca gave him access to an interior space, a realm of truths at once hidden and open, available to all. What he hadn’t said, though I was certain he felt it, was that this realm belonged to the dead, could belong to no one else. They and not he were its real curators.

  * * *

  A few months earlier, we’d joined Bononi in the sala grande for one of his castle tours. Antonio reminded me about that afternoon as we shook our wet umbrellas over the doormat before entering our house.

  Il professore always used to begin his tours in the castle’s main hall. All manner of people came to visit the castle each week—not in droves, to be sure, yet a reliable flow: tourists, local teachers and schoolkids, members of historical societies, the occasional journalist or local politician. One never knew who might walk up the hill. Having done a tour myself during our initial visit to the village, I could still recall shaking Bononi’s hand for the first time. He’d worn a beautiful linen shirt and pants, and flashed his winning grin. We’d listened to him for the better part of three hours straight. Ci ha preso quasi in ostaggio, Antonio’d murmured after that inaugural encounter—the guy practically took us hostage, didn’t he? What a talker!

  On the warm August day that Antonio summoned to memory, Bononi had hosted a group of high-schoolers. We’d asked Raffaella if we could tag along. (Certo, she’d said—you’ll get to watch him seduce them . . .) After assembling the kids and their teacher, Bononi explained how he’d restored the castle. Then he conducted a reasonably brisk run-through of the main rooms. He was clearly tired; his breath was labored. But he grinned and joked his way through the tour, and after opening a huge armoire in his study, he let all the students put their hands on a school primer dating from the fifteenth century. Look, he said, flipping to the back of the primer, here’s where the kid who owned this book scribbled and drew pictures in the back—just like you guys do in your own books!

  Back in the main hall, sunlight slanted through the high, lead-paned windows. The group reassembled for a final peroration from il professore. Two cats slunk in just as he began to talk, their bellies low to the ground as they aimed for the kitchen. Bononi paused and laughed, watching a girl try but fail to catch o
ne of the cats. Lascia perdere, he told her; forget it, you can’t win that game!

  Then he urged the students to be proud of Lunigiana. It’s yours, he said, all yours, so love it! He recited a few of his poems, gesturing extravagantly with his delicate-fingered hands; to my surprise, the students stayed quiet while he performed. When he’d finished, Bononi spent a few more minutes flirting mercilessly with the girls and using vulgar language with the boys. Then he sat, exhausted, and drank the glass of water Raffaella handed him.

  The kids were won over. To me it seemed they’d sensed this was a place with a secret life. And as they listened to Bononi’s accounts of the past—how a particular book had wended its way to his library, how the year 1929 (that of his birth) had been carved into the base of the castle’s bell tower by some unknown laborer, how the wife of Ugolino, the child-eater in the Inferno, is buried under the well in Castiglione’s piazzetta—the students and their teacher jumped willingly through his story-hoops, ready to believe each tale.

  * * *

  Recalling that afternoon, I wondered how Bononi had managed to sustain such confidence in his castle idea. For him, the restoration of a ruin atop a hill was the launch of pure potentiality—his own most of all.

  Was his belief in the rightness of his undertaking nothing but narcissism? I didn’t think so. Like Walt Whitman’s, it seemed derived not from egotism but from estrangement, an alienation that couldn’t be remedied yet might be repurposed. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, wrote Whitman in “Song of Myself.” And what I assume you shall assume. For those students he’d shown around the castle, it’d been thrilling to be held captive by a seeming madman raving about rare books and declaiming poetry. Yet this castle’s owner wasn’t actually mad. He’d simply spent longer than most people under time’s circus tent, and knew when to stop talking, fall abruptly silent, and let the reverberations of earlier music—voices of people famous and infamous, celebrated and overlooked—lap around him.

  Bononi was involved with several women during his life, yet death was always the most compelling of his romances.

  He’d have disagreed with this statement, would say it was life he loved, as he surely did. During his final years, he worked on a poem he described as literally and deliberately endless: a letter addressed to una sconosciuta, the figure of an unknown woman. She is life, he said; all life, and his life. He could not have her, never had her, only longed for her. Lacking her, he conjured her daily in language. Each of his additions to his ever-expanding poem got dumped into a big chest in his study, where the pages accumulated. He never looked at them, never revised what he wrote, never returned to what he’d already composed.

  What he insisted upon, as he penned this extravagant work, was ongoingness: a continuous emission of words, a constant search for new ways to speak to his beloved. And what made this effort remarkable was his recognition that he and she were locked not in an embrace but in a contest:

  To me it always seemed the world

  was mine

  and I

  was jealous of my self

  then

  life

  started seizing my world

  and thus I understood

  it wasn’t mine

  and life and I

  would have to test each other

  and only one of us

  would win

  She’ll win

  I’ll have loved her

  so much

  sometimes without knowing it

  * * *

  After crossing the border into his eighties, Bononi rarely left the castle. Very hard of hearing, he had difficulty conducting a regular conversation. Yet he could tell stories for hours on end.

  His mother figured indirectly in all of them. When he was a young boy, she told him he was exceptional; then she detached herself from him, insisting he go forth unaided, on his own. He was sent to boarding school and university. And then his mother died—leaving him imaginatively primed to re-create with other women a story of love and respect vying ceaselessly with frustration and despair.

  In his twenties he became involved with a woman who, in his description, seems to have been quite like his mother: affirmative on the surface, yet wholly unavailable. (Also, he claimed, she was in love with her father.) This woman hailed, like him, from Fivizzano, though they ended up in Rome, where—by this time married—they consorted with actors, dancers, and movie folk, and café-hopped with Federico Fellini.

  The public man wore silk suits and had affairs, but the private man suffered. Bononi asserted he never had any physical relationship with his wife, whom he left after ten years without divorcing her. He rarely saw or communicated with her again, yet they remained legally married till his death, Raffaella notwithstanding—consenting, in fact, to this arrangement, for reasons as complex and, to the outsider, as impenetrable as il professore’s own.

  After leaving his wife, Bononi commenced a series of romantic entanglements, some highly dramatic. To Antonio and myself—and to numerous others, for he was anything but inhibited in detailing his personal life—Bononi spoke of lovers of his who’d killed themselves (one self-immolated, he claimed, and the other jumped off a bridge); of an affair with a woman who, he said, he then discovered was his child; of prostitutes who were his greatest teachers, not of sex but of self-affirmation.

  A serving of virgin-whore tropes with a big dollop of incest and suicide on top? So it might seem; yet Bononi was too aware of his own manipulations, too invested in mythmaking as an art, to be so reductive. He followed Emily Dickinson’s injunction—tell all the truth but tell it slant—and allowed invention to mingle freely with projection and repression in his creation of a narrative for his life. No doubt he’d have concurred with the lead character in John Dryden’s comic play Amphitryon—“I never saw any good that came of telling truth”—although il professore claimed never to have told a lie, and to have paid dearly for his honesty. He might as easily have said that the words lying and honesty meant what they needed to mean to him—which is not to suggest the man was a charlatan. He was, rather, a person who found the border between fantasy and reality porous and easily traversed, and liked it that way.

  What riveted me when in Bononi’s presence was the struggle I felt him waging with himself, a battle requiring all his force.

  His castle and its contents possessed him, not the other way around. They were at once alive and dead, which is how he saw himself as an old man. He wanted to die, he insisted—it was time to go—yet he clung to his home, his work, his sense of mission. I was raised by my mother to be a prince, he asserted repeatedly. Bononi wasn’t speaking as a snob; he was incapable of an aristocrat’s emotional detachment. What he meant was this: I was raised to believe wholly and blindly in myself, and I’m having trouble doing so, for I’ve become old and impotent, and my psychic and physical sufferings seem daily to outdo my strength.

  In the weeks before his death, he spoke agitatedly about a demon whose existence he’d always been aware of, but whom till now he’d managed to keep at bay. One afternoon he spoke of terror lasting for hours as his mind, normally lucid, slipped and skidded . . . I no longer knew who I was, I was someone else. This demon of his had no physical reality; it was invisible, like toxic air.

  And like anxiety, I thought. Like my own demon—which isn’t, like Bononi’s, intent on making me question my identity, but rather on making me second-guess and doubt myself.

  What might I learn about demons from this dying man? I wasn’t sure, but was struck by the fact that while describing his own, Bononi’s language grew richer and stranger than usual. Reviling his enemy, he was also reveling in depicting it.

  During those final days, Bononi oscillated between tenderness and cruelty toward the woman who’d been at his side for several decades, telling her in one moment that he needed her help to live and then, a minute later, that she ought to help him kill himself and was monstrous for not doing so. Where, he raged,
had she hidden the kitchen knives?

  That pattern of supplication and excoriation wouldn’t change. Nor, before dying, would Bononi recover from the wound his mother remained for him. Why should he, a physician, have sought to heal himself at the end, since the damage had been so fruitful, had allowed so much poetry to spill forth?

  My heart, he wrote in one poem, is a wounded migrant . . . The journey a love without end.

  Now, as during the final months of il professore’s life, I’m writing in the garret of our old stone house. This house never belonged to a nobleman, never served as a seat of power; it lodged peasants. From its terrace I can’t see the whole Magra Valley spread out before me. Nor have I spent decades contemplating this region and its history.

  And that’s not all. I couldn’t then and can’t now imagine composing an unending poem. Am tempted to say, I don’t have time for that. Stories, novels, plays, poems—they have beginnings and endings. (Though not really: they are written, read, and rewritten in their readers’ minds. A cycle, a continuous stirring.) And a writer makes, steals, or borrows time just like everybody else.

  Compared to Bononi’s, my library in Brooklyn is meager. But the books’ reverberations—how I felt as and after I read that one, that one, that one . . .

  When I was young, I used to lie in my bedroom at night and picture all the books on the shelves at the foot of my bed. They’d be talking with one another.

  The musicians who performed Shostakovich’s quartet didn’t need to see one another. Their instruments’ voices spoke with shattering clarity in the dark.

  Sometimes I picture il professore gazing out his window in the middle of the night. (He was an owl who slept little, just a few hours between four and seven in the morning.) He’d be staring at the ebony sky. At stars whose explosions we’re only now able to perceive, illuminations resulting from galactic blasts that have taken so long to reach us, signaling something as yet indecipherable. He’d be thinking: the books in my library are like those stars.