The Conversion

by Joseph Olshan

“Precisely. They are of the state.”

  While one of the older carabinieri leads us to the interrogation room where they are holding the man who broke into the dependence, I manage to catch the glance of a tall, muscular carabiniere with a deep tan and startling pale green eyes—this is the face of complete heartbreak, I think to myself. It’s not a face that is totally unfamiliar to me, either. I’ve seen this sort of mien before in Italy, the refined features that one expects to see in a European combined with an American openness, broadness, and natural masculinity. The dazzling eyes really pierce through me. And then he actually smiles.

  Marina and I are brought to the small interrogation room. Viewed through a thick glass window, it is large enough to fit a rectangular table and a small bookshelf filled with thick manuals of, I imagine, police code. Suddenly, euphoria: The handsome carabiniere is standing next to me, his veined masculine hands fiddling with a ring of keys to open the door. As the three of us go in, I wonder how I’m possibly going to concentrate.

  The prisoner is huddled over a book that looks like a religious text, probably the Koran. He runs his fingers across columns of print, lips trembling with unintelligible words. Finally he glances up at us. From the accident he has a large purple contusion on his forehead. His complexion is dark with rough patches of acne, his hair thick and glossy and wavy black, his beard unkempt. And although we lock eyes for a moment, there is no familiar flicker of recognition on his part, no extrasensory inkling that we’ve come in contact in the recent past. Not that I expected there to be. He glances away quickly, a tremor of agitation knitting his features. His cowering could mean something, or it could mean nothing at all.

  Taking off his official jacket, the carabiniere instructs us to sit down at the table. His forearms, lightly dusted with hair, are broad. His biceps swell against the conservative cut of his light blue short-sleeved shirt. He’s too preoccupied with his duties, he’s too unself-conscious, and I inwardly wager that he’s got to be incorruptibly straight. Alas, I have found that this sort of easygoing masculinity is rarely a characteristic of a man who is sexually interested in other men.

  “You do speak Italian, don’t you?” Marina presumptively addresses the prisoner. She has already informed me that Albanian immigrants usually have a good command of the language from having watched so many Italian programs on Albanian satellite television.

  The man nods.

  “Good. Why don’t you tell me how long you’ve been in Italy.”

  The man holds up one hand, fingers spread wide.

  “Answer her!” the carabiniere orders him.

  “Five years.”

  “And where do you live now?”

  “In the camp by the river,” the man says.

  “The warehouses, you mean?”

  He nods.

  Marina shakes her head. “Terrible conditions there,” she remarks to the carabiniere. Then to the prisoner, “Does the van belong to you?”

  “Borrowed it.”

  “And have you lived in this camp since you came from Albania?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you came to Italy by boat, presumably?”

  “Yes, by boat.”

  “We know which dwelling is his in the camp, Signora,” the carabiniere informs her.

  Marina turns to him. “So you could check and see if there is anything—”

  “I was the one. I did it last year, too,” says the man.

  “Ah …” Marina glances sharply at the carabiniere, who calmly explains that the man has already confessed this. “That’s what I came to find out for my own personal reasons.” She turns to me and, seeming relieved, says in English, “Nothing to worry about now,” but doesn’t elaborate. Then she once again addresses the man in Italian, but sounds more lighthearted when she explains to him, “My outer buildings have been burglarized far too often—much more than the villas surrounding me. As there is hardly anything in them, it makes no sense to me.”

  Eyes down, the man nervously shuffles his feet back and forth under his metal chair. Finally he looks up at Marina balefully. “But they said you are rich.”

  “Who said?”

  “People in my camp.”

  “Relative to them I suppose I am. But truthfully we have very few things that will resell very well.”

  The man shrugs.

  “Shame about the statue, Signora,” says the carabiniere. “I was told—”

  “Let’s hope it can be repaired,” Marina remarks. Then, turning back to the prisoner, she says, “Do you have a family?” The man explains there is a wife and two daughters. Shaking her head, she turns to the carabiniere, “If you can find out and let me know where they are, I will make sure they get food and some money.” Then back to the prisoner: “And what you stole last year—”

  “Sold most of it,” the man says simply, looking at Marina with great solemnity.

  “Of course you did. To live you sold it. I should’ve assumed that.”

  When the interview is finally concluded, we get up and file out of the cell and Marina excuses herself to say hello to her friend, the head of the carabinieri.

  After a stretch of stiff silence the handsome carabiniere says to me, “She’s bringing food to the family? That’s kind of her. But then she comes from a family of do-gooders.” He shakes his head. “Sad situation. I just wish these people could know how difficult it’s going to be before they get on those overcrowded boats and cross the sea.”

  “They get hooked on the illusion of paradise.”

  “Yes, this is true.” He suddenly grins, folding his arms across his chest. “So you’re American, aren’t you?”

  The gesture, which seems flirtatious, leaves me a bit light-headed. I nod.

  “Your Italian is pretty good; I wouldn’t necessarily know that you were American. Except that you’re built in that American way. Most Italian men are slimmer. Even the ones who go to the gym.” He frowns. “And why don’t I see you at the gym?”

  “I need to find one.” I’m having difficulty maintaining eye contact with him without blushing.

  “I will take you. My gym is actually not far from where you live.”

  I wonder stupidly how he knows where I live and this must register on my face because he says, “Villa Guidi. Everybody knows the Villa Guidi.”

  He gives me the gym’s address, assuring me that Marina will know it, and invites me to meet him there at five o’clock the following day. I follow him to a waiting room outside a closed office where I can hear Marina arguing vociferously. “My name is Lorenzo,” he says, smiling.

  “Russell,” I reply. We shake hands and he walks away.

  Watching him, I am reminded that here in Italy, my sexual signal-reading is consigned to a very low frequency. Body gestures, innuendos, double-meanings are cultural specifics that take years of living in a country to decipher. In America, I would know definitively if this man was trying to pick me up. In Italy, I haven’t a clue, although I do have my hopes.

  Moments later Marina comes storming out of the office and says haughtily, “Let’s go.” Once we get outside and are making our way to the car, she fumes, “I’m here because of Stefano. I am here to make sure this man is not one of those who threatened to harm him. He isn’t. He’s merely and only a thief. And yet he has to stay in jail. His trial won’t be for at least six months. Which is a problem because his family will go hungry.”

  “Well, he was caught stealing. Aren’t there social services to help his dependents?” I ask as we get into the car and Marina begins driving us home.

  “Of course there are, but never enough. I don’t want to be responsible for a mother and children who starve. The problem is I expect nothing less than for this man to steal. Nobody gives these people jobs or education.”

  Marina gets distracted for a moment as she maneuvers to change lanes in a stream of traffic. “I suppose I should just be relieved that this was the man who robbed us last year rather than one of the people who may have threatened my hus
band.”

  After a few moments of silence, I say, “Marina, could you tell me specifically what it is that Stefano writes that puts him in danger?”

  She nods and then slams her horn at an audacious Mercedes convertible. “Well, first of all, Stefano’s mother died when he was ten, and his father ended up marrying a cultivated, very beautiful woman from Syria. From her, Stefano learned Arabic so that he can speak with some of the Muslims who live in Italy. And he has been warned time and again by the moderate Muslims trying to make a life here that the government should cooperate with them and be advised on which mosques in Italy are being used to spawn jihadists and that the government should, in fact, shut these mosques down. And Stefano has written precisely this.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Well, that would certainly be enough to make him a target.”

  “Of course,” Marina says. “The pity is so far the government hasn’t even considered doing what he asks.” She shakes her finger at me. “And the Muslims know this, too!”

  We end up driving back to the villa a different way, on a more main thoroughfare. The road is passing over the autostrada that stretches between Florence and coastal Viareggio when Marina says, “Now, about this carabiniere who seems to fascinate you so much—”

  “How do you know?”

  She laughs. “How could you not be fascinated?”

  “Okay, okay.” And then I admit that he invited me to his gym.

  “Ah, so I was right to bring him up.” She honks at yet another car that veers dangerously in front of us. “These people are mad!” Gripping the steering wheel tightly, she instructs me, “Just beware of him.”

  “Beware?”

  “Well, for one thing he is most assuredly married. Did you look for the wedding ring?”

  I shrug and admit that I didn’t.

  “So, it’s wishful thinking all over again. Remember, you’ve already gotten twisted up in a similar situation over a married man.”

  I certainly cannot dispute this. “That’s assuming this carabiniere is even available. I have absolutely no idea what his sexual story is.”

  “If he looks at you the way I noticed and then invites you to his gym so quickly, he probably is a gay who is married. As are a majority of gay men in Italy. Which means he is not available as your Frenchman was not available. And probably even less available than your Frenchman.”

  “Thank you, Marina,” I say with a bit of sarcasm, and then deliberately in English, “I guess I don’t want to spin my wheels again.”

  “Spin?” she says. “What is this now?” I explain. “Ah,” she says, “excellent, this one.”

  “I also want … I know this particular man a little better than some of the others. He has come to the villa on several occasions because the alarm has gone off. We have spoken. I find him a very intelligent fellow. In fact, he told me that he went to university and read philosophy and was even contemplating an advanced degree when he decided to give it all up to join the carabinieri.”

  “Did he say why he gave it up?”

  “No, but I assume because it is hard to get jobs with his sort of intellectual training. He probably realized this. And then having a family to support.” Marina pauses reflectively. “A few years ago he asked me to read one of his student articles, which I luckily avoided.”

  “Why did you avoid it?”

  “Because I felt sure I’d be disappointed. And it would have made my response very awkward.”

  “That’s rather arrogant of you to make that assumption.”

  She shakes her head and says in a slightly patronizing tone, “It’s different here. You must be kind and obliging and fair. But you also know what to expect.”

  She seems to be suggesting that the difference between her social standing and Lorenzo’s is intellectually impossible to bridge. Now, here is someone terribly concerned about civic issues and inequities and yet clearly presumptuous about class differences.

  “I know what you are thinking,” Marina says, broaching the silence. “But you must believe me. There are rarely any surprises. What you see and perceive here is normally what is. In America there is still this wonderful possibility of cultural paradox. I will give you an example of this, of something that I saw there that would never happen in Italy.

  “Once I was invited to speak at Amherst College, and I asked to visit the Emily Dickinson house because she is my favorite American poet. The professor who taught her poetry and had written books about it was kind enough to take me. On the tour were he and I and a very fat man who, according to this professor, looked like he walked out of one of your trailer parks. He was wearing one of these sun visors that are popular in America, and was carrying a plastic drink container from, I believe, Disneyland that we suspected had a beer in it. He looked very rough and ill-bred.

  “Well, the professor, who, mind you, seemed quite kind, whispered to me with very distinct disdain that perhaps this other fellow was drunk and that he might be looking for the Basketball Hall of Fame, which apparently is only ten miles away from this place, this poet’s house. The professor kept apologizing for this man’s presence on the tour. But I didn’t mind. I found him a curiosity.

  “The woman who led us around the Emily Dickinson house was a sylph of a graduate student, one of the professor’s former protégées. As we went along, she addressed everything she said to her former tutor and to myself, of course. She completely ignored this so-called basketball fan, this ‘trailer-park trash,’” Marina says in English. “Is this how you say it?”

  I nod, embarrassed by the existence of such a horrible expression.

  “Perhaps ten minutes into the tour, this strange man who had been completely silent finally spoke up. And he did it to kindly correct something that the graduate student had misstated. About a certain manuscript of Emily Dickinson being at Harvard rather than at Amherst. ‘He’s absolutely right,’ the professor told his former student. But let me tell you, that professor was stunned. And then this fat man with the beer in his cup started to speak about Emily Dickinson. He knew her life, her poetry, but his knowledge wasn’t pedantic, it was profound. It seemed to me that he understood the woman’s writing. Then the professor, the author of critical studies on Emily Dickinson, attempted to—dared to, I should say—argue about the woman’s life, her motivation, and even about certain lines of her verse, perhaps to assert and prove his dominance in front of a foreign visitor such as myself. But this trailer-park man kept up his end of the discussion with great confidence and, in my opinion, made a complete fool out of the professor.” Marina turns to me and says with great vehemence, “This, my dear friend, could never happen in Italy. And I never loved America more than I did at that very moment. It was perhaps one of the three or four high points of my entire life.”

  We have entered the residential road that will lead to the villa, but then Marina surprises me by making a sharp right turn onto a one-way thoroughfare. “You haven’t been this way, have you?” she says.

  “Don’t think so.”

  “I want to show you.”

  We drive down a narrow lane barely wide enough for one car and suddenly, on either side of us, rise stone walls that are at least twenty feet high. The vaulting effect is dramatically Old World. The road narrows to a point where the Renault barely fits. Many vehicles, Marina explains, cannot venture down this thoroughfare; indeed, I can see scrape marks on some of the stones left by cars that were too wide to pass through. It occurs to me that in Europe much more than in America, the prerogatives of the past are constantly intruding upon the present.

  The road spits us out directly opposite the entrance to the villa. But instead of heading through the metal grille of its gates, Marina makes a right and we drive along the property wall until we reach another driveway that is lined with fig trees and oleander bushes. The fig trees are so laden with black fruit that much of it has fallen off the boughs and is lying squashed and rotting, staining the ground like blood.

  We pull up in front of a hous
e built of stones and mortar that looks incredibly old. “This is the dependence that the thief broke into,” Marina tells me, and goes on to explain that the building was once an active convent and is just over a thousand years old. Very little was done to it until 1950, when her father had the house updated and modernized and reconfigured into three apartments. She points out the empty pedestal that stands just to the right of the front entrance and then kills the engine. We get out of the car and approach the fallen statue that is alabaster, darkened by a quarter of a millennium of exposure to the elements. The Apollo lies on his stomach, his severed, idealized head with its tamed curls lying next to his narrow waist. His ass is perfectly globed and dimpled at the small of his back. A meter or so away from the breaks in his ankles is a neat pile of his hands and feet, which have been sheared off.

  Although seeing the broken statue is disturbing, I actually expected it to be in worse shape, pulverized by the initial concussion and subsequent fall. I mention this to Marina.

  “Yes, sure, we are somewhat lucky; however, even with careful restoration, he won’t be the same.” Sounding forlorn, she says, “I don’t mind that this man steals things from me. I do mind about this piece of history being ruined.”

  I glance beyond the house, through the orderly-looking rows of the villa’s grapevines that are tended and cultivated by a local farmer. I notice how the road we just followed winds up to an old Romanesque church.

  Marina resumes, “In a way, I understand why you attract these married men who are gays.”

  “Oh, and why is that?”

  She picks up a shard of alabaster and lays it gently on the pile of fractured hands and feet. “You don’t seem so. Your manner is rather ordinary, though of course you have the cultural refinements that many gays have. But I suppose if a married man chooses to spend time with you, then he might be able to delude himself into thinking that he is spending time with a friend rather than a lover.”

  Fixing my attention on the statue’s beautiful yet broken limbs, I say, “I think it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

  “No doubt it is. These thoughts are new,” Marina admits and falls almost ruefully silent.