Once Bononi died, I couldn’t put off confronting the question of ambition. His singular experience threw it into sharp relief, but it was bound to arise in any case.
For so long I’ve been earnestly marching, urged on by an inner bandmaster wielding his baton as mirthlessly as a martinet with a whip. Till now I’ve imagined myself reaping a bigger crop; not just publishing more, but writing something that would have to be reckoned with, a game-changer. As I picture Bononi in his study, each day penning his endless poem to his beloved, I’m struck by how he skirted the problem of ambition: by refusing any limits. He would continue that poem till he dropped, and no one could tell him otherwise, or accuse him of wasting time. While he always hoped for greater fame (and notoriety) than he received, his expressive freedom counted more. His work would eventually make its way into the right hands, in any case: of this he was ever confident.
Many are the letters the man has written his Unknown and we have read some at random, / leaving the rest to more diligent readers.
One evening shortly before her death, my friend Andrea began talking to me about her life. On this topic we’d shared a dialogue of thirty years’ duration, but now both the tone and the terms were different.
She spoke with quiet sadness about the fact that she hadn’t accomplished anything in the realm of art, as she’d always felt she ought to. Having studied drawing for a time at the Art Students League, she hadn’t gone any further—hadn’t put all her self into it, hadn’t taken the leap. But that was all right, she concluded. It was enough to think of her life as her artwork. To have committed wholeheartedly to the living of it.
There’s nothing greater, I reassured her when she’d finished speaking. Nothing more intrinsically valuable than that.
Yet I did have talent as an artist, she said. And I failed to fulfill it. For all kinds of reasons I didn’t do what I thought I could do, should do. What I’d always hoped to do.
In the silence that followed, Andrea’s gaze went limpid. Then she added—still quietly, for she was never a drama queen—that the sorrow of leaving so soon was beyond any words.
I held her hands, her wrists like twigs. Then hugged her. She seemed a bird on a branch, about to take off. The weight of speech no longer upon her, she was able to hear—as I in that moment could not—the music in the dark.
As I walked home after that conversation with her (which took place in November—I remember it was cold outside, I kept having to wipe my eyes so I could see where I was going, and at one point I broke into a run so the tears, pushed by the wind, would roll to the sides instead of fuzzing my vision), I replayed in my mind scene after scene of Andrea doing various things. Cooking, reading, dancing, watering plants, folding laundry, stacking books on a shelf, playing with her cats, talking on the phone . . . all the so-called trivialities.
Then I thought about how much I’d learned from her simply by observing her going about the business of her living. Doing all that nothing, the stuff we’re taught to dismiss. Did it flatten her sometimes, the why-bother feeling? No doubt. But she was in natural possession of a sense of proportion, which got her over the hump. That, and her sense of humor. And when she became sick and then sicker, she was most of the time a saint about it, and for the most part without self-recrimination.
Andrea had been robbed of time; it got yanked out from under her. Yet a seemingly endless bolt of time still unfurled before me. I’d pulled the charm out of the Cracker Jack box; she’d drawn a skeleton from the pack of tarot cards.
Making me feel guilty about this would’ve been the furthest thing from Andrea’s mind. It was I, not she, who silently flogged that horse. Yet even as Andrea sought to affirm that since she’d lived openheartedly she could die feeling more fulfilled—more whole—than if she’d been an artist but lived incompletely, I heard the fatigue in her tone. It was profound, caused not just by illness but by the burden that time had handed her. You’re not doing enough, the clock’s tick says. Or: What you’re doing counts for so little in the end.
I sometimes hear Andrea’s voice. Pipe down, she gripes mock-seriously. Don’t you know your thoughts are a broken record?
Inside the tent we think we’re listening to the dead, but it’s our voices we hear, mimicking theirs. We ventriloquize, hoping thus to revive those we’ve lost, or perhaps merely revive ourselves. Especially when in the slough of despond, as it used to be called. I had not thought death had undone so many, said Dante, astonished, to Virgil. Well, yeah: it sure did, it sure does. But who are the many undone—the dead or we who still live? And how to undo the undoing?
An evening thunderstorm in Castiglione. Heavy rain on the roof.
Under the eaves of my studio, I hear the steady thrum. Looking out the window, I see the castle garden’s wall—ivy-plaited in parts, mossy everywhere, water sluicing down it and down the alley and down to la colla and down the macadam road, to the creek that leads to the stream in Villafranca that leads to the Magra River running between Villafranca and Aulla and thence, a hour or so from here, to Bocca di Magra, the river’s end, debouching into the Mediterranean.
The water says what the dead don’t have time or heart to say, or what they feel they’ve said already. Read what’s already been written, they say. Read the poems, stories, novels, essays, plays. Read the words for the first time, or again; it doesn’t matter which. In any case you’ll be writing them again, each time you read them—rewriting the words for yourselves. Because what you claim to hear, when you come here to listen to our voices, is only and always yourselves.
It’s grown very dark; the storm has blotted out the stars. I can see nothing beyond what the dim lamp at the foot of the alley illumines.
Water in sheets now, and long rolls of thunder. Like listening to Shostakovich’s Fifteenth: consoling and terrifying at once.
Up at the castle, a month before his death—still able to spend a bit of time in his study, writing to his beloved—il professore would have been gazing out his window during such a tempest. Hungry, always, for the natural world’s dramas. He’d have been able to see only what the sole lamp by the castle gate might enlighten: the little church, the well in the piazzetta, the lights of a few houses across the valley. Otherwise, everything a blur.
But he’d be listening.
13. Mullets
Antonio and I are in Porto Venere, a small town on the extreme southern promontory of the Cinque Terre, facing the Gulf of La Spezia. The little island of Palmaria lies humpbacked in its harbor, with Tino and Tinetto just beyond; Byron must’ve gazed at them when he visited. (He swam from here to Lerici, or so the story goes.)
In summer Porto Venere gets crowded, but nobody’s hanging around here on an early-April afternoon. The bar where we go after our walk is empty, its owner startled to be asked for hot tea. It isn’t particularly cold outside, in fact. We’ve sunned ourselves on the terrace of a Gothic church that sits atop rocks at the harbor’s far end, where Porto Venere juts into the sea. The little chapel is cool, gray, unperturbed. Portions of its floor date from the sixth century. Staring at the remains of what must’ve been a floral-inspired pattern of stone underfoot, I try imagining the individuals who’d built the church—worshippers for whom beauty was as urgent an imperative as faith. Despite everything else vying for their attention and energy, they’d found time to design a lovely floor.
Taking in the view of the Mediterranean after weeks of rain and damp in Castiglione—such a wet spring!—Antonio and I watch as a small fishing boat approaches the harbor, bucking against the waves. It goes at a good clip. Then we walk down to the docks, where the boat is doing a bit of business: some townspeople have lined up to buy fresh fish. An impromptu, pop-up mercato is under way.
We join the queue, surveying the gamberoni and coda di rospo and seppie and naselli and polpi and cefali. What bounty, even in wintertime! In a container at the center are a few dozen small, red-skinned, shiny fish called triglie.
Let’s get those, says Anto
nio.
We bring the triglie home. Tristana slips in through the terrace door, enticed by the scent. We dispatch her outdoors; she sits with Big Boy, who’s too scared to venture inside. Gazing hungrily through the glass door, the two cats wait while Antonio scales and guts our gift from Porto Venere.
We prepare the mullet alla Livornese (tomatoes, olives, capers, garlic, oil), give a bit to the cats, then serve the rest to ourselves, along with some rice and Swiss chard. Eating with relish, we wash the meal down with a bit of local Vermentino and sit quietly afterward, hands folded contentedly over bellies.
* * *
Beauty, I think, staring at my empty plate. Do I notice it, do I privilege it on a daily basis?
The sunset en route home was floridly pink-purple; the lichen on the steps up from the lane to our house glowed gray-green at dusk. Tristana’s fur was cool and soft when I stroked her; Big Boy’s was cool, too, and sleek as an otter’s. The mullet tasted delicately sweet, the chard sharp, the rice nutty. The house smelled, after dinner, of those things and more: of centuries of dust and damp, the natural world’s encroachments and leavings. All variously beautiful.
Yet beauty’s not just that—not merely what my own or someone else’s senses discern and deliver. Hard to say what else it is, though, or how best to acknowledge it. Scarf it down or set it on a pedestal? Revere it or revel in it? Talk about it or stay silent? Beauty can make me teeter precariously between pleasure and discomfort, even terror. So what am I to do when I encounter it?
The fisherman would find such musings ridiculous; so would Tristana and Big Boy. Eat and be glad, they’d say. And be curious, sniff things out. That’s how best to respond to beauty: wonder freely about it, go where guesswork leads. To confusion as well as clarity, sorrow as well as pleasure. What seas what shores what grey rocks . . . Sometimes groping for it, as in fog; not knowing if it exists save in the mind, or in a world of time beyond me, as Eliot wrote in his strange poem “Marina.” The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships . . .
* * *
Realizing no further treats are forthcoming, the cats retire to the rooftop. A few hours later, Antonio and I head up to bed.
We decide not to hang the green curtain, leaving it on the floor of our balcony. Moonlight floods the bedroom; the sky’s a steel-gray vastness. Up at the castle, Mia barks as if in conversation, though nobody responds.
Before falling asleep, I picture the chapel in Porto Venere, its floor’s graceful motif still visible despite cracks and holes in the stonework. How had it survived the corrosion of the salt air? The human depredations? Then I visualize the grassy ruins of the old hospice we saw up at the Lagostrello Pass. It, too, once boasted four walls and a roof. Nothing was left now, merely a faint impression in the ground where the foundations had been. Time and people had carried off the rest.
What had the hospice’s floor looked like? Was it patterned? Did the colors of its stonework graduate from light to dark gray and back again? Did children ever use it for hopscotch? Would pilgrims sometimes prostrate themselves upon it? Did soldiers drag their muddy or bloody gear across it?
I hope to see it in my dreams.
14. Anniversaries
June, and we’ve been here a year.
Valeria died six years ago this month.
Liam killed himself two months after her death.
Andrea was diagnosed with cancer eleven years ago, and passed away four years later. In between, my friend Lucy Grealy, a talented writer, exited by way of a heroin overdose.
Richard Gilman, a beloved mentor, died almost a year after Andrea’s death.
Nuala died five years ago last month. As did another friend, the poet Jason Shinder. That same month, in fact.
The writer David Markson, with whom I grew very close near the end of his life, died three years ago.
Nearly all these friends were in their fifties and sixties when they departed.
I can count as many friends’ kids’ births during the same stretch of years. And a marriage. Oh, and a pair of divorces.
Endings, beginnings. The words’ banality.
Throughout my sabbatical, have I dwelt too much on terminations and not enough on starts? Everything in Castiglione is new to me; have I stepped up, leaned in, given all this novelty a whirl? Or have I let grief bully me? Days when I’ve been too empty to write, sorrow-drained, capable only of solitary walks—the natural world jostling my senses, calling me to attention, though I resist . . . Have those days been absurd? Have I wasted this gift of untrammeled time?
The question is itself a waste, of course.
Look elsewhere, I imagine Mom saying.
An orange-going-into-rose descending / circle of beauty and time.
Jason Shinder’s short poem “At Sunset” equates dying with the sun’s setting—a risky move, since the trope’s not original. But the poem executes it beautifully. In a tone stripped of self-pity or reproach, “At Sunset” ends with this: You have nothing to be sad about. That circle of beauty and time, the poem says, can be perceived only by way of grief—and grief not after death but right now. And then grief, too, must be relinquished.
Jason was a colleague of mine; we both taught for many years in the Bennington Writing Seminars. He was not only a terrific poet but also a superb anthologist and tireless activist. Jason founded the YMCA’s National Writer’s Voice, a lively network of literary arts centers serving tens of thousands of people nationwide. Whenever I think of my lanky friend—his humor droll, his smile a little lopsided—I think generous.
A beautiful dancer, Jason often moved to music with arms aloft, hips swiveling in effortless syncopation. Everyone wanted to dance with him, literally and figuratively, but Jason was challenged by desire—others’ and his own. He longed for and resisted intimacy, physical and emotional. From nothing nothing could come, he concluded in another of his poems, “About a Man.” From nothing nothing could be taken. Ambivalence was painful equipoise; poetry was how he broke its grip.
What more is life than to live it? he wrote to me, not long before dying of leukemia; he was fifty-three. And living, as I understand it, if you are lucky enough, is a certain kind of attention and, if you are luckier, a window that opens now and then on a battlefield in which the armies in you no longer see each other as enemies but as children.
My mother surely has her own anniversaries to remember. Endings, especially. Yet she rarely speaks of them. Maybe they’re at once too ordinary and too numinous for her to acknowledge.
How often I’ve entered a room where she’s sitting quietly, hands in her lap, and realized she’s unaware of my presence. How often I’ve stood and watched her, unable to fathom what she might be experiencing in her illumined interior.
She’s learned over time to be out of time, freed of it.
Whenever we give ourselves over to poems or stories, Jason wrote, we are giving ourselves over, in part, to the interior life . . . So please let us encourage each other to go there, if for no other reason than this—to stay close to what matters most—and if such does not write the poem, it will almost always help us write the life, without which there is no poem.
July now, and the days so long we dine on the terrace at nine-thirty. We don’t need candlelight till ten; then bats swoop nearby, emboldened by the dark. Occasionally they carom through the terrace, wing-beats audible.
Porco pipistrello! says Antonio, dodging a bat one evening. Can you believe we’ll be leaving here in a month?
No, I say, I can’t believe it—nor that it’s been more than a year since that bat flew into our bedroom . . .
A cat in la colla has had kittens. One of the babies’ eyes are infected; Raffaella says she’ll pick up some ointment to treat it.
Roberto, one of the renovators of the Madonna, gives us a couple of bottles of his olive oil as a gift. We helped him harvest the olives last fall. I have photos of him at the frantoio, grinning as he watches a great many little green ovals descending
the shoot to the macerator. When I uncap one of the bottles, the smells of those days rush at me.
Use it up by year’s end, Roberto says of the oil, or it’ll turn. Store it someplace cool.
On a marble slab, maybe? I think. We’ve got one in our kitchen in Brooklyn. Not Carrara marble, but still, it’ll do the trick.
Nonno! yells Antonio’s grandson Milo as he trots up the lane. Ho visto le capre! He’s seen the goats on the hill opposite the cemetery. All are thriving, including a new pair of brown-and-white kids. Recounting the scene, hands sketching the air, Milo prances in delight.
15. Phone Call
A week before we leave Castiglione to return to Brooklyn—seven days till the end of my caesura—I call my parents.
My mother picks up the phone. There is silence as I hear her fumbling, first with the receiver and then with her hearing aid, which squeaks a little. I know what she’s doing: feeling with thumb and forefinger for the small toggle switch on the side of the aid she wears in her phone ear, as she calls it. She can’t see the switch. She must grope for it.
Oh, she says before anything else—before hello or who’s calling—oh, what’s wrong with this phone . . . wait a minute . . . Yes? Who is it?
It’s me, I say, your oldest. Calling you from Italy.
What? she says, and I know she can’t hear.
It’s me, I repeat loudly, your oldest . . . This is a little joke with us—my identifying myself to my mother in this way, quasi-bureaucratically.
Ah, she says after a moment, yes, my oldest . . . She chuckles.
I ask how she’s doing.
What? she says.
I repeat myself.
Your voice isn’t . . . , she begins, then stops, and I know it won’t work—she won’t be able to hear any more. Either the phone or her hearing aid is on the fritz. It’s been like this recently; I’ve called a few times, we’ve exchanged a few words, and then she’s had to end the call because some element of the technology that’s supposed to serve her has failed, and she can hear nothing I’ve said.
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