L'America

by Martha McPhee

  On Sundays, Signora Cellini stirred the polenta herself, tending the hot molten mass of bright yellow mush, stirring and stirring and fussing. They served it as a first course with either milk or cheese and then as a second course with the uccellini (bones and all). The first time Beth joined them for the Sunday meal she learned the subtleties of polenta. Trying to be polite and proper and to do everything right because she wanted terribly to impress and be something other than a silly (threatening) American who entertained them with stories of her eccentric family, Beth used both milk and cheese. Cesare laughed, then Laura, then the parents—an endearing lovable laugh that seemed to want to embrace this silly American. Beth blushed even so, embarrassment welling up from her toes. (On polenta, milk and Parmesan do not go together.) No matter what she did in Italy, Beth seemed to always get everything wrong. On her second-course plate, the tiny birds lay whole and butter fried, staring up at her, their eyes now like dulled silver. This was the first time she had ever eaten uccellini and she didn't know what to do and didn't want to watch the others or ask. The uccellini were delicious. The bones added texture. No one said a word, so she assumed the bones were meant to be eaten. The heads however were not.

  And the black glove: it was not really a glove. Rather it was a hand. His father had lost his hand as a young man when firecrackers exploded in it. He had been studying to be a doctor, the first of the Giovanni Paolos and Cesares to study something other than economics. After losing the hand, he reverted to finance. Beth understood that he was a hard man, hard on his son who was not interested and thus slow with his studies, hard even on his beloved daughter for her fancy, silly dreams. But his desire to be a doctor and the loss of his hand would always soften him for Beth simply because it seemed that he, too, had once had the desire to step outside the plan. She had her father send her pumpkin and corn seeds from America so that she could give them to Giovanni Paolo, who spent hours in his garden. Those vegetables were exotic here and thus would be a challenge. The seeds brought him a patch of bright orange pumpkins and a row of sweet Silver Queen so bizarre and delicious he could not help but fall in love with l'Americanina.

  ***

  This morning of the kissing in the summer grass, Beth had sat in a chair while Giovanni Paolo gardened, keeping him company. Signora Cellini hung up some laundry on the line and spied on her husband and Beth as he told her that Cesare had failed two more exams. "This is not good, not at all good," he said, looking into the dirt. He could never look Beth in the eye. Even so, each time he spoke to her she felt she was gaining acceptance, becoming real for him. He was telling her of Cesare's failure, she understood, because he assumed that she was the reason for Cesare's continued distraction. And if there were good reason for the distraction (say marriage) then he would abide as long as she helped Cesare get back on track. He plucked at weeds and snapped branches awkwardly with his left hand using the gloved hand to steady himself. She wondered what his stump looked like. She wished she could ask him about his dashed dream. She remembered the little Amish kids stealing apples from the gala trees at home. How they held the apples in their hands, turning them over and over like a discovery, before they bit into them and ran away.

  "Cesare doesn't like the Bocconi," she said boldly. "He doesn't like finance and business and socks and shoes. He likes books, literature, writing." Big American big-mouthed gaff, but she would not be afraid of this man and she knew that was the only way to make him love her, knew that Laura was not afraid of him and that Cesare was.

  "What?" he asked, looking up from his job in the dirt to meet her eyes.

  "He needs a break," she said softly.

  A professor from college shot to mind, standing in front of a blackboard explaining Kierkegaard's Repetition and the need to change experience through a rotation: read the play from the middle backward; finish the end of a book before reading the beginning. She remembered that Kierkegaard meant "churchyard" and that the professor had said the philosopher's most famous words were, "You must change your life." And what was she doing in Italy after all? She wanted to explain all this to Giovanni Paolo, but didn't, of course, because she was just twenty-one and didn't understand it all that well herself.

  She helped him weed for a while and he instructed her on how best to get weeds at the roots. "See, like this," he said, jutting his hand into the soft earth, wiggling the weeds before plunging his hand again deeper into the dirt and then plucking the clump, roots and all, free. "Nature does not like gardens. It does not like to be controlled." Balancing on his right hand, he held up the perfectly extracted weeds for her to admire. His garden was nearly weedless: straight clean rows aligned like soldiers. Then for a bit they did not speak, and then they did. "We have never had an American in the family, never a foreigner of any kind, for that matter." And in that way he welcomed her. She felt warm and eager to please him, though she understood somewhere that her triumph did not involve her roots and she wondered if she really had the will to leave America. In fact, being welcomed, the whole notion of leaving America permanently made her nervous and then—once again, yet always surprisingly—sad.

  From the garden, she looked down through forests to the lake, which spread out like a small whitecapped sea on which billowed many pretty sails. For five hundred years the Cellini family had spent weekends in this house in woods thick with maple and ash and some pine. The Fiori house was a stucco building with an enormous fireplace in the dining room in which all the cooking (polenta and uccellini) had once been done. In this room the fresco of Valeria had been made. In this room Valeria had flirted with, been romanced by, Benvenuto; in these woods they had stolen kisses, lain in the grass, hunted for mushrooms perhaps, dreamed impossibly for sure.

  Each room of the Fiori house had french doors leading to a small patio. A porch extended from the kitchen to a trellised walk dripping wisteria in the spring. The azaleas and rhododendron thrived on the hill that rose to the winter cottage (where the bird arbor was and where they stayed once the weather turned cold because the cottage was small enough to heat) and in May when the bushes flowered, the hill turned vibrant with all their various colors. And every year the Cellinis had the big party to celebrate the flowering of the azalee, women in white gowns with gloves rising past their elbows, men in fine dark linen suits.

  From the Renaissance to now, Beth thought. An epic journey, a colossal amount of time, slippery like an iceberg, that she was trying to scale, to fathom and understand. Great empires had risen and fallen; America had been discovered; Bernini had been born, leaving a trail of sculptures in his wake that made one weep. If a hundred years holds four generations, then five hundred years holds twenty. Twenty generations of Cellinis with fine Federicas on their arms—into and out of great gardens and porticos and churches and palazzi, into and out of peace and Garibaldi's unification, and more wars and peace again to here: the late-twentieth century with all its fancy spaceships to the moon and a young American girl with the potential to destroy it all.

  Each generation of Cellinis had given the world a living breathing vibrant kissable Cesare with hopes of his own. She saw them all marching across time. Through the repetition of this life, it was to Beth now as if this family had somehow figured out how to achieve immortality. Her mother had died in a car crash in Turkey when Beth was three, and her father had renounced conventional life in order to live the dream he had dreamed with his wife when they pondered the heights of their future. Was this five-hundred-year-old Cellini family the pondered heights of one person's dream? She felt wicked for telling Giovanni Paolo that Cesare did not like the Bocconi.

  "By my estimation you're approximately the tenth Cesare," Beth said, turning to face him. It was dusk now and the late summer air had cooled. Swaths of violet streaked across the sky. The sounds of dinner being made inside the house could be heard. On a faraway road a car honked and church bells rang for evening mass. The air filled with the musky smell of summer mushrooms, wet and soft in the diminishing light. He studied her, re
ading that something entirely too big was going on inside her head. "What little miseries are you concocting in there?" he asked.

  "My roots aren't very deep," she said.

  "They're wide," he said, "very, very, very."

  "It doesn't make it easier for me to give up everything," she said. She knew that she was going home and she was losing faith that he would come. Something big pressed against her chest, something irreversible, something final that left her standing alone.

  "I know," he said.

  "Your father thinks I'm a weed," she said.

  "A powerful weed," he said, trying to lighten her mood.

  "This is real," she said. "Don't be lazy." She wanted to cry. He lay still, looking into the early evening. A thin moon shone against the indigo blue, and stars began to bubble in the sky. He thought of his paraplegics, trapped in their chairs, of how he loved to let them roll fast down gentle hills, how they shrieked with delight.

  "What happened before five hundred years ago?" she said, reading the sky, too, as if it held the answer.

  "I suppose some boy had his own name," Cesare said. For Beth, becoming a part of Cesare's family, with all its laws and time and its well-grooved path, would be like slipping into the cool sheets of a well-made bed on a tired night. She closed her eyes, feeling his fingers at her hips, on her back, tracing the arc of her spine. Surrendering can be so comfortable.

  "You're not coming," she said.

  "Don't be dramatic," he said.

  "I can't compete with all this." She thought of the portrait of Valeria, of how her face alone held the story of before and after, of the exquisite love that led to despair. And all those oblivious partiers carried on, merrily ignorant of the real, the universal, of their own suffering and the ambiguous claw snatching all that was good.

  "I want to marry you," he said, pulling Beth to his chest. He imagined America, the pull of it, and her strange little world at Claire.

  "Then know the rest of me," she said, almost as a dare.

  "Doesn't your father ever want to leave?" he asked, as if that were a key.

  "Doesn't your father ever want to leave?" she countered.

  After leaving Greece, Cesare did not see Beth again until they found themselves on a train traveling from Città to Milan. It was a dangerously foggy early October day—that fog of the Lombardy kind, suspended over the entire Pianura Padana. He was headed to the university to take an exam he knew he would fail, and he knew that by failing the exam he would make his mother anxious and his father angry. He would fail the exam because he had not studied. He had not studied because he wasn't interested. In front of him was an impenetrable wall that he could not see his way around. He kept failing the exams, one after the next, and it seemed he was going nowhere, though his direction was very clear. All he needed to do in life was follow the path. If he did, in one sense, he would be free from the burden of want and desire and longing and ambition, of having to make himself. He would be made already, given a jump start on life by being handed a position of prominence and power in a wealthy little town nestled into the foothills of the Alps, surrounded by emerald lakes. But the simple duty of studying he could not do and thus he became a disappointment to his parents. He feared they thought he was stupid. Rather he wanted to please his father in some other way. Prove himself. Show his father he could succeed. Write a book, say, and hand it, published, to him, for him to read and admire so that he would not think him stupid.

  On the highways, flooded with lights like a football stadium, as if that light could penetrate the fog, two of his friends had died. His two friends had not been able to carry forward anything. He looked through the window to see if he could see through the fog. Instead, he saw the reflection of a woman sitting down next to him. She wore blue jeans and a pink sweater that made her blond hair more blond and her blue eyes more blue. She wore sneakers. Studying her reflection it took him a moment to recognize her. Once he did, he was afraid to turn, afraid that he would be wrong. He had hoped for this, that they would run into each other. He had been waiting for the moment ever since she vanished in Greece. He turned. She smiled. He smiled. She had known when she sat down who he was. She, too, had been hoping for a chance meeting, afraid to call him once she returned to Città because Greece seemed like a dream and she thought he might be angry at her for leaving without a word. Now she was on her way to Milan to register for an Italian class. She didn't know what to say. She noticed that he was reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem, so she slouched toward him and told him she was a child of Bethlehem, which, indeed, she was. She began to flirt effortlessly, looking downward in a slight gesture that suggested both vulnerability and abandon. Somehow it was as if they were meeting for the first time all over again. In response to something silly that he said about the nebulous nebbia, she laughed exquisitely. Her face fractured into a hundred shades of light. And he wondered, if silly wordplay can release her so entirely, what will love do?

  Instead of going to the university, she went with him to the roof of the Duomo, where they picnicked on panini and drank a little too much wine. They were alone up there. Who would bother climbing all those stairs for a view of fog instead of Alps? The fog was so thick they couldn't see their own hands, so thick they couldn't see each other even if only a few feet separated them. They played hide and seek, emerging and reemerging, swimming through the fog, sneaking up from behind to scare each other, thrilling with anticipation—those splendid moments before the soft lips of a first kiss (all over again), when curiosity and expectation combine. She poured the wine generously into the plastic cups and took him on a tour of the ferocious gargoyles, showing him her favorite faces, teeth and fangs designed to keep away the devil. Then she disappeared again. Each time she disappeared he worried that the fog would swallow her, would suck her back into the void that existed before he met her. He tried to convince himself that he was not concerned. He had been raised to be tough and stoical. He tried to convince himself that it would make no difference if she vanished as quietly as she had reappeared.

  That night he telephoned his parents and told them that the exam had gone well and he would stay in Milan to celebrate. For three straight days he disappeared with Beth until waking up on the fourth he understood for certain that she was the other half of his life. And he understood for the first time the meaning of ambition.

  Then she was gone and then he was here, standing in an immigration line at John F. Kennedy International Airport, listening to a recorded voice repeat "Welcome to the United States of America" with a pride distinctly and sweetly American. At Malpensa Airport in Milan no voice said Benvenuto in Italia. He thought of Beth as a little girl pledging allegiance to the flag in school, right hand pressed to her heart. She had explained that children all across America pledged allegiance to the flag each morning. He saw all those many teachers teaching love of country to immigrants from everywhere. In Italy national and civic pride did not need to be taught, rather it flowed with one's blood since they were and had always been Italian—remember, campanilismo, the pull of the bell tower as natural as breathing.

  He noticed small differences like truths: the people most of all. Hundreds of other tourists and immigrants were having their visas checked. They came from all over the world. Even in the line for American citizens—fast moving and enviable—the faces came from all over the world. No distinguishing them from us, the melting pot clearly visible, all exotic, and he felt the beauty of anonymity, the past of who you are quietly erased if you choose. All these lives stood on the threshold of the hope for something more.

  The customs official checking Cesare's bags was a big happy man with thick hands that sifted through Cesare's neatly folded clothes, packed by his mother's maids the night before as his mother ran around nervously going over lists of what Cesare might need—aspirin, shampoo, socks—as if they might not have these simple things in America. "You're coming back?" his mother repeated, while his father sat quietly in an armchair, reading the paper, flipping t
he pages with the black glove of his missing hand. Giovanni Paolo looked up just once, his gentle "Cara mid" dismissing the idea altogether. He knew his son absolutely. He knew the youthful desire to flee prescription, knew how age dissipated the need like a solvent. He remembered studying to be a doctor, the defiance and ambition he had felt in knowing he would make himself. And he remembered, years later, after age had gained its advantage, after his lost hand recorded his lost quest, his gratitude for so many ancestors working together to create history, albeit a private history, but history all the same. Giovanni Paolo knew his son, knew that Cesare, too, would come to appreciate the Cellini heritage. Hard he may have been as a father, but that did not mean he did not fiercely love and know his son.

  Waiting for the official to finish with his bags, Cesare tried on different expressions, understanding that he was free to make himself; he was not known here. He was not a student; he was not the son of a prominent family from a rich Italian town. He could become whomever he liked. His slate was clean. The not knowing was what he adored about this culture of multiplying possibility. He was giddy, rolling fast down that gentle hill. The old rules would lose their grip. He looked down at his legs and wilted just a little, embarrassed by the creases in his jeans, pressed by one of his mother's maids; he wanted to be tough; he wanted, absurdly, to be a cowboy. Even to feel this possibility, if only for a moment, was like the anticipation of that first kiss.