by Andrea Lee
9
NICK
2004 • A POSTCARD
Nick writes on a postcard to Maddie:
Dear First Daughter,
No comparisons, please! You may recognize the battered stone fellow on the front: Pasquino, one of the Roman godparents who watched over your toddler days. As always, he is stuck all over with papers scribbled with political doggerel. Your sisters call him Ape Man just like you did, but all the documents make your old dad think far too much about the office. We’re here for a night on a whistle-stop half-term tour—Pompeii, Venice, Assisi, et al.—and the girls want to see where you were born. I think they’re disappointed that we didn’t live in ruins like the Forum cats. For me, that time seems as lost as old Pasquino’s heyday. A peculiar pair of sandals that the womenfolk assure me you will understand will be arriving in the mail. Midterm news? Love from all of us and especially from Ancient Dad
The postcard is a small colored rectangle in his hand. Sitting at the desk in his bedroom at the Hassler, he feels like a god holding a portal onto another world. In the sitting room of the suite, his daughters Eliza and Julia, seven and four, are watching television and bouncing on the couch. Dhel comes out of the bathroom running a wooden comb through long wet strands of hair, her face mysteriously perfect and dry. Beautiful. Half Vietnamese, half Swiss, with a terse mid-Atlantic accent from a lifetime of diplomatic schools. And a touching dignity in her bearing, like a kid on best behavior.
Very Baedeker, she says of the hotel rooms, heavily upholstered, filled with nineteenth-century mahogany and engravings of antiquities and the general atmosphere of steam-heated comfort that spoke to the hearts of the stout Teutonic hoteliers who gave the hotel its name.
Perfect for a cinq à sept, he says, grabbing her towel-covered ass and pulling her toward him. As he does—and their heads turn automatically, parentally, toward their daughters in the next room—the question flies through his mind as to whether Mira ever came here with that scumbag. At various times in the past, he has imagined her in every hotel in Rome. An image of her face contorted with illicit pleasure in the Victorian gloom. A thought no sooner there than gone, a shadow of a bird. And he is holding his young second wife, who has skin as poreless as a child’s, and who arranged this trip with her usual efficiency because she wants, in an ingenuous way, to overwrite his history with that of his new life.
She loves him and hates the thought of his having a past. As he is jealous of her old boyfriends, of lecherous City boys and the Oxbridge cybergeek artists she works with now. Yet what’s the point of it all?
The engraving over the bed shows a cowherd napping against a funerary monument on the Appia Antica, the cow placidly pulling grass from the rotten masonry. What is that Browning poem, “Two in the Campagna?” “…memories that should be out of season, with the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago…”
What struck him while touring Herculaneum, three days ago, was how some pragmatic municipal gardener had planted the courtyards of the shattered villas with apple and pomegranate trees. All bearing fruit in the ruins.
It’s not been hard to avoid Rome, a financial backwater, all these years. To avoid Italy. His family vacations on Formentera, on Nantucket, in Thailand, in Devon.
But now his little girls, almond-eyed angels, are splitting their sides over the Simpsons dubbed in Italian. From Piazza di Spagna down the Spanish Steps rises the noise of the crowd of shoppers and tourists, like the roar of far-off breakers. And he can smell the smell of Rome, unchanged, creeping in through the closed windows, through the hotel walls themselves. The smell of car exhaust, of frying, of a million perfumes applied daily over centuries by a vain populace, of sewage, of baking bread, of the dust of martyrs, of hope and despair.
And the postcard lies on the desk.
He hates this fucking town.
Come on, he says. Let’s go hit Via Condotti. I haven’t wasted enough money on you girls. And then we’ll go eat some exploded artichokes the way they do it only here in the Eternal City.
And we didn’t throw coins in the fountain yet, Daddy, says Eliza.
Yeah, come on, ladies, says Nick. Let’s go be tourists.
1985 • TERRA DEGLI UOMINI
Guarda queste. Look at these.
The fruit-and-vegetable woman is not old but astonishingly ugly, with a black fright wig of a perm, a squat powerful body, and a bristly cragged face of almost North African swarthiness. She has paused in weighing eggplant for Nick, disappeared into the gloomy onion-scented fastness of her tiny shop on the corner of Via dei Serpenti, and emerged with her hand full of photographs.
Look—pictures of my daughter. Her accent is thick Roman, hardly different from dialect in all its harsh jangle, and her eyes in her dark weathered face shine an unnerving clear blue. For months, she has been selling big mottled cuore di bue tomatoes and broccoli rabe and figs and lemons and chopped-up fresh minestrone greens to Nick, who enjoys stopping by on his way home from work, to fill a list sketched out for him by Mira in the mornings. He enjoys the woman’s looks, her speech that he is taking some trouble to untangle, the way he is gradually learning the back streets of Trastevere and Monte Mario.
But he hasn’t thought that the woman might have been observing him as well, that he for her might also symbolize some new exotic landscape.
Now, as she slides the pictures into his hands, not snapshots but black-and-white prints that look almost professional, he gets a glimpse of how he must seem to her. Tall with his straight fair hair and a face that everyone in his office tells him looks as American as a baby’s behind. In a Wall Street suit badly cut by Roman standards but made of expensive fabric. With the briefcase and the jaunty little sports car out front.
The photos show a very young blond girl, perhaps seventeen or eighteen, heavily made up, with lined, glossy lips. She is posed in a variety of conventional studio shots, in evening dresses and in bathing suits, her thick wavy mass of hair pulled up dramatically or flowing backward in a wind machine. It seems impossible that she could have come out of the old stump of the vegetable woman, but the girl stares out at him with the same clear eyes, with mischievous provocation. She is very beautiful, and in the last two photographs is bare-breasted, her pale nipples as round and precise as two coins.
Hot, thinks Nick, blushing slightly. Bellissima, he says, handing back the pictures to the fruit seller.
Keep them, she says.
No, no. No thanks.
She’s gorgeous, isn’t she? says the fruit seller, who is blushing herself, as mothers do when talking of a passionately adored child. A curious sight on that old, dark, coarse face. She wants to be a model.
Well, she should be.
Lei potrebbe aiutarla. You could help her, says the fruit seller. Looking at Nick as at a schoolboy who is particularly slow on the uptake.
Me? Nick is genuinely astonished.
You are an important man. A businessman. An American.
Always comes down to this, he thinks. Even buying vegetables for dinner.
Nick Reiver disapproves of himself. Not of his tranquil fuck-the-world inner self. Of himself as part of his tribe: the ruddy WASP freemasonry of men who know his father, who sit in Boston and Providence boardrooms with his uncles, who run the Ida Lewis Yacht Club, who burned the children of Cambodia, and whose toothy sons and daughters took up useful space in all the schools he ever went to. The Men in Charge, whose establishment power his father rejected in his own waffling dilettante career, if it can be called that, as small-town newspaperman and unpublished novelist, but freely took advantage of when it came to getting his sons into clubs and colleges.
Nick is under no illusions about what he bought into when he went to work in finance. He likes the money—money which was in short supply in the underheated rooms of the beautiful shabby Federal house in Little Compton, where he grew up. Given a choice, he might have tried to be a writer, but he has already been witness to his father’s gentle bohemian failure. And so he watche
d with a benign detachment through the sixties and seventies as his rich older cousins took off for Maoist communes or teepees in Maine. Knowing that his role is to make up for a lack, to provide. Yet he hopes that somewhere underneath he is different from the men in charge and longs for people to understand this. He tried to demonstrate it to Mira’s family and was amazed by their stony indifference. And the same happened earlier with the kids he tutored in the Providence Head Start project.
But Italy, as no place he has ever been, pushes Nick to act like one of the lords of the earth.
At the bank, in the group of junior account executives and vice presidents where he is the sole foreigner, the band of handsome full-blooded young males from all the provinces of Italy, who go out to the beach and the stadium in a happy pack like a group of young hunting dogs, he finds that men his age who happen to be rich and noble are pleased about it. If they aren’t rich, they are striving cheerfully to marry an heiress. Nowhere does he see the pangs of liberal conscience that tormented boys like him in prep school and college.
There is no idea that there is something wrong with being on top, that one has to pay something back. Or at least be modest and guilty. In Italy, you can even, it seems, be both leftist and a happy snob.
Everybody, even the secretaries, even the men who wash the marble office steps, seems to feel that all is right with the world as Nick sweeps by in his suit and drives off in his shiny little car.
It is a corrupt feeling for this young American in Rome. There is an element of temptation in it, for him just to relax and be what he is.
Of course he says nothing about this to Mira.
But the atmosphere is beginning to work on him.
As now, in the shadowy little store, in the autumnal perfume of the grapes and cardoons and chestnuts that are just coming in from the campagna.
My daughter would be happy to meet you at any time, says the fruit seller.
She’s lovely, certainly, but I’m a married man. The lame phrase sounds like Doris Day even in Italian, he thinks.
The woman bursts out in a hoarse laugh that shows her strong yellow teeth. Che cazzo c’entra? What the hell has that got to do with it? she demands.
THE FRUIT SELLER
And he goes off swinging his bag like a kid whose mother sent him to run an errand. Why do they all walk like babies, these Americans and Englishmen? I see the tourists going around wagging their big asses with their short pants and big white sport shoes looking like real cretins. Like they have no hair on their balls, and that’s half the reason when they blunder in here I charge them double for rotten stuff that nobody with any sense would touch. But this boy is as polite and handsome as an angel, a rich man’s son, obviously, bless him. He could be the twin of my daughter, una ragazza d’oro, a golden girl, even if she’s too much of a fine lady to wreck her hands hauling crates and loading up the van with those sons of bitches down at the mercati generali depot at three in the morning. I do everything, I tell her, ever since her sodding father took up with that bitch who sells rags down at Porta Portese. And I’m as strong as a mule; I don’t mind it, as long as she gets her beautician certificate. But the silly little cow wants to be an actress, and now we have the boyfriend hanging around all day, a worthless Sardinian who calls himself a theatrical agent, but who looks like a pimp, I tell him to his face. If she goes off with trash like that she could end up on the street or sold to some Arab or in one of those filthy films. So I do what I can to help her out. In this life, there’s nothing else, you need a raccomandazione to get ahead. You need someone rich and important, a sponsor.
Shame that this boy is too young to understand. But pazienza. He’ll be a man when he learns a thing or two, I can see that. When he leaves, I hand him his bag and say, Sua moglie però dovrebbe prendersi più cura di Lei. Your wife should take better care of you. A gentleman like you should not shop for vegetables.
10
MIRA
2005 • PEAS IN A POD
Toss the pods in the washtub, the artist says, nudging forward a big galvanized tin. It is a Sunday morning in May, and Mira is one of nine guests shelling peas in a castle courtyard. Busy leveling a mountain of waxy green pods among the coffee cups and remains of breakfast focaccia on a stone table shaded by a huge mulberry tree. In front of them unroll the budding vineyards of Monferrato. Behind rise two medieval towers restored in garish nineteenth-century brick, an arch wreathed in roses leading to high dim rooms encrusted with frayed opulence. Enthroned in the center are the lord and lady of the domain, an elderly pair of children’s-book illustrators—white-haired, leftist, and famous. The guests are mainly literary and artistic Milanese in linen trousers and expensive snub-toed country shoes. Friends of Mira’s husband, Vanni, who comes from the same kind of well-heeled bookish background. They exclaim over the freshness of the peas, which they will eat for lunch with homemade tagliatelle. Their children run screeching among the new cyclamens and old beech leaves of an overgrown allée, playing in and out of a rusted old camper propped up there, and Mira feels a wing of boredom brush her mind. She loves Vanni but has grown weary of the cloud-cuckoo-land, of these gatherings where he is in his element, weekends of political chatter and rustic pursuits, where the men are all terrible intellectual flirts and their beautiful emancipated wives trade lore on artisanal mozzarella or buckwheat pasta made by monks.
It was on a weekend like this, over ten years ago, at somebody’s country house outside Lucca, that Mira first met Vanni, divorced, childless, ten years older than she. A lawyer with a snuffly upper-class Piedmontese accent and a pair of hooded gray eyes that could be cold and magisterial or as warm as a boy’s. She was enthralled by his mixture of frivolous wit and obvious thunderstruck lust for her, as well as a kind of expansiveness that from the beginning seemed to propose not simply a love affair but a life together. A happy crowded existence that has allowed her to sink unexpected roots into a country where she had once felt like the heroine of a melodrama.
Still, the fact remains that she now finds these gatherings extraordinarily tedious. Just one of the small, sometimes inflammatory differences in taste that, it is said, add spice to marriage.
Already the chatter of her husband’s friends around the table mingles the arcana of kitchen gardens with the usual scatological jokes about presidents and prime ministers. The details of the latest CIA-Mossad conspiracy. She has already heard the word egemonia—hegemony. Vanni says it, his voice grown playfully didactic as he gestures to make his point to a pretty museum directress with earrings like little chandeliers.
Soon, thinks Mira, she will have to pretend to check up on her perfectly contented sons. Or hide in the bathroom with her emergency book, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. How many bathrooms in rundown castles and beautifully restored farmhouses has she escaped to to read through tedious afternoons and evenings of politics? Castle bathrooms all look the same, like bathrooms in an Edwardian girls’ school, with clunky English porcelain knobs and worn mahogany seats. Vanni doesn’t ask anymore where she disappears to, just waggles his eyebrows like Groucho Marx when she returns.
Someone asks their host about ghosts in the castle. He admits to only one manifestation, a supernatural tug on his shirttail when he was digging in the old midden heap. And he was happy, he says, because it meant that there is something else. That he will meet his wife in the afterworld. His great love. He says it simply as his wife beams at him. Forty-seven years since they found each other, he says. Since they met as students clutching their portfolios in the offices of Einaudi. Mira looks at them, white-haired, like twins, almost sexless. Their adoration, their marriage, is legendary. Childless, they work together in adjoining studios in the Navigli district of Milan, nurturing a talented young crew of graphic designers who help them create the literary and television adventures of Leonardo, the plump pacifist hedgehog who has made them famous.
The host leaves the table for a minute, disappears into the kitchen garden, and returns with a handful of raspberrie
s that he places ceremoniously in front of his wife. The first of the season, he announces, and the guests burst into spontaneous applause. You have to make a wish! someone shouts. Mira notices that, faced with all this connubial bliss, the younger husbands and wives avoid looking at each other. As she shields her glance from Vanni.
She zips open another pea pod, thinking, Well, these two old darlings found their work and they found their mate. That’s what people are supposed to do in the world—not fumble with trial and error like most of us poor slobs. And, if you’re lucky, I guess you end up in a castle, in the arms of your childhood sweetheart.
But then she remembers something she saw earlier during a tour of the castle. Upstairs in the garret that is remodeled into a gallery, a display of small ceramic statues modeled by the wife. The one art form she does without her husband. Twisted and frightening, real gargoyles. There is a small blue-glazed statue of a woman wound around with three serpents, her mouth opened in anguish or glee, it is impossible to tell.
