by Andrea Lee
Lorenzo doesn’t know what result he expects from this kind of fatherly meddling. Tears, perhaps, or a punch in the face. Or a tight Puritan smile.
But Nick surprises him. First by waiting to reply like a seasoned negotiator, after pulling one big foot after another out of the suck of the slimy black lake mud and deliberately wringing out the sides of his shorts, once he stands in the buzzing shade of the fig tree.
Then he looks directly at Lorenzo, who flinches for a moment at the acuteness of that look. Saxon blue, surely, as he has thought many times, as clear as the eyes of Pope Gregory’s angels. But with a stony desolation to it and something more: a calm rigor, a decisiveness that sends a thought like a chill through Lorenzo—that he has underestimated this American kid.
Lorenzaccio, caro mio, says Nick. Perché non fare cazzi tuoi? Why don’t you mind your own fucking business?
LORENZO
He’s no fool. And if I’m not mistaken, a man already.
21
ZENIN
2005 • HOME RELAX
Not a bad idea, muses Zenin, shifting one bare leg over another as he lies propped up on a motte of hotel pillows. He is in Frankfurt, in the lunar luxury of a suite in a tubular modern hotel. A hotel with chromotherapy and ionized air and polished stones piled in the corners of its rooms. Watching one of his favorite movies, Amici miei, with Tognazzi and Noiret, on RAI satellite. But now the plasma television, wide as his outstretched arms, has switched to an infomercial with color and detail as hyperreal as a video game. A big blue massaging armchair, where a weary but excited-looking man in a business suit is sitting and talking while his face jiggles. The man on the screen has made the mistake of putting on hair gel, and Zenin, with schadenfreude, watches the man’s young but balding scalp gleam under the lights. The new Home Relax, the man shouts. Like living with a shiatsu master!
What bullshit, Zenin thinks, as the price flashes on the screen. Che cazzate. We could make them for under thirty euros in Harbin. Problem is the containers. He knows he could produce them and make a success out of the whole thing, but does he care? Does he need to work anymore? To get any richer? He could hand the project on a plate to Tonio, his inept son-in-law, who would as usual fumble and drop it. No, he, Zenin, would have to take care of it himself. He sighs melodramatically. Seeing ways to make money, he has come to realize, is a talent he was born with and other people weren’t, like a dog who can hear sounds inaudible to human ears. And does he give a shit anymore?
The girl comes out of the bathroom at the far end of the suite, and he presses the mute button, leaving the blue armchair and the gesturing man on the screen. Stop, he says, and the girl freezes as if he has pushed a button to control her too. Turn around and then walk slowly, says Zenin. I want to look at you.
He requested a Russian girl and supposes that she is one, since he overheard her in the bathroom gabbling on a cellphone in Slavic gutturals. Yet she speaks some Italian, as almost all of them do. Very young, possibly a teenager. Tall and almost inhumanly perfect, as if she had just been created in that instant to lope toward him in maroon underpants and high heels. Nipples a faint lavender on lunar skin. Short platinum spikes of hair.
Are you from Moscow? he asks, as she gets closer.
No, Suzdahl. A holy city. City of churches.
He has nothing to say to that, so he makes a crude joke about vodka as he stands in front of her and she drops to her knees. Occasionally she angles her head to look up at him, and the progress of his pleasure is almost derailed by those fierce pale eyes and elfin hair.
Her body is so uncanny that he toys with the idea of taking her downstairs to dinner to impress Mario, his amministratore delegato, also in the hotel. And the tedious but essential German flunkies, Hammerschmidt and Thun. Take her out to a disco, perhaps, as they have done hundreds of times with hundreds of girls. But then, between gulps of Red Bull, the Russian girl says, Adoro uomini italiani. I love Italian men. Take me to Italy. And he knows it is time to get rid of her.
When the door has clicked shut and he has torn up the business card she gave him, he climbs back into bed for a nap before dinner. Home Relax, he sees, with an odd feeling of contentment, is still on the screen, and he turns out the light and watches the blue armchair shiver as he dozes off.
1986 • A GOOD BALANCE
This is one of the happiest times in Zenin’s life. The instinctive alter ego that makes his fortune—in a series of twilit precise visions that anticipate fads, show the way to transform an almost imperceptible playground novelty into mass desire—is striding ahead with gigantic confidence. Provincial caution and tightfistedness keep him from overextending himself in the deceptive prosperity of those years, while hubris sends his chief rivals, the Fillia brothers, down in flames. He makes the deal of a lifetime with the biggest confectionary company in Europe. He’s begun nosing around for production sites in China and Eastern Europe, because that’s the way the wind is blowing. He buys himself a bigger boat and his first jet and a chunk of the Grand Prix.
And as another kind of luxury, he tells Mira he loves her. That means he feels he owns her and that he gets intense pleasure from fucking her, not the least because she still feels distant to him. For Zenin at this point she is still the American writer, adrift in a rarefied atmosphere where he is out of place. His Gulfstream and her work writing travel pieces means that they can meet often. For a day, an afternoon, a night. Not just in Rome. In Venice, Paris, Vienna, Budapest, Vienna, Monte Carlo.
He’s pleased with her beauty, which he has helped her make over in a dramatic yet conventional way, so that other rich men in airports and hotels turn around to look at her. He knows it’s a mistake, but it relaxes him to talk to her about love, to watch the transforming effect it has on her foreign intellectual haughtiness. He doesn’t actually want her to leave her husband—poor long-suffering fellow about whom he is not curious, but with whom he feels a sort of fraternal bond. Still, he suggests it.
The other side of the coin is his young son, Daniele. The child born of a mercenary speculation who is now the dearest thing in his life. Zenin’s mother and sisters adore the little green-eyed boy whose existence was concealed from them for the first months of his life. The whole town now knows that moneybags Zenin has a son with a professor’s daughter from Udine. Every weekend the boy and his mother come to stay at Zenin’s big house on the river. They spend vacations on Zenin’s boat or at his place in the Dolomites, and Zenin, who sleeps occasionally with Tere, enjoys these visits enormously. When the little boy with his funny red-cheeked squinting face runs up to him shouting Papà! Zenin feels all barriers collapse inside him. No woman ever made him feel like this.
So at the same time Zenin is exploring romantic possession with Mira, he is also exploring the mysterious land of paternal love. While Mira’s family is withering, Zenin is, for the first time, coming to understand the joys of domesticity.
In a complacent moment, he remarks to Mira with his usual crude humor that it’s a pity he can’t be Muslim and marry two women at once. He’s expecting a laugh, but Mira for the first time screams at him.
He stares at her coldly. And a few days later he goes to bed with a Brazilian girl he meets at a Formula One trial. After a while, these minor escapes from love become a habit. They give him a feeling his life is well balanced.
DANIELE
One of the first things I remember is Mamma dragging me out of Papà’s big house on the river, pushing me into the big green car with the leather smell and driving away so fast through the Centro Storico that she scraped a fender. She was crying and shaking as she drove, and her hair was all over her head like snakes. There had been some kind of a fight about a fur coat, a coat so big and fluffy that when Papà gave it to her I made everybody laugh by asking whether it was a bearskin. Other people were there, Nonna, aunts, and cousins, and then it was just us. It must have been Christmas because I remember silver paper and panettone. And Mamma was happy at first and then she began talking loude
r and then she threw the big coat on the floor and shouted that if he couldn’t give it to her with love, she wouldn’t take it. Niente elemosina! she was screaming. Niente tangente! No charity, no bribes. And also, Pensiamoci al bambino! It was a refrain screeched in a terrible seagull’s voice that I heard all through the time I was small. Think about the child. The child everyone had to think about was me.
My asshole cousin, Sandro the bully, used to tell me, Siete zingari—that we were gypsies, Mamma and I. Because we always seemed to be in the car racing back and forth between Udine and Papà’s town. Or heading up to Cortina or to the Venice airport to fly somewhere to where the boat was. Though we had a home and a dog, it always seemed that we were moving, running in those days, and I associated our gypsy life with those terrible fights, with the fact that Papà didn’t live with us, with the dark cloud of mystery that descended whenever I heard Mamma crying, the mystery that cleared up when I first heard the word I had to punch off Sandro’s lips: bastardo.
It all seems a long time ago, those scenes. I heard from another cousin who heard Zia Clara gossiping that things were bad because Papà had a woman for a while that he was serious about. A foreign woman, an American. But that affair broke up and he never said anything about it.
Nowadays they get along, Papà and Mamma. They see each other and crack jokes at every family baptism, and they squabbled over the apartment I wanted to buy on the Zatteri in Venice like an old couple who have been married for twenty-five years. Papa always has his girlfriends, and when I was at school, Mamma had a fiancé for a long time, an osteopath from Asolo.
Everyone teases me for being Papà’s favorite, and they ask me if I’m going to run the company. I say I’ll do whatever Papà wants.
Neither Mamma nor Papà likes my girlfriend, but that’s my business. She’s part of the family now, and that’s what counts in the end. We’re getting married after I hand in my thesis next spring. Papà offered me the Shanghai office, but Caterina was born in Vicenza and wants to stay near her parents. So we’ll start off here and buy a house in the hills when we have children. It feels good to stay put when you grew up as a gypsy.
22
MIRA
2005 • A CONTRAST
Just after Christmas, Mira has two dreams on the same night.
In the first, she is marrying Nick for the second time. They’ve met somewhere, and with a strange detached tenderness, he has taken her back. He is still the boy she knew, yet older, powerful, with something mysterious about him, and he wears a strange antique gold watch. There is something unsettling about his tenderness toward her, his lack of anger. She wants to ask what will become of his wife, Dhel, of his young daughters in London, but doesn’t. They are going to be married again with both families present in a rambling New England house like his family’s summer place in Maine. But Mira realizes she has only a pair of dirty jeans to wear. It doesn’t matter to Nick and his family—they beg her to get married as she is—but she has a vision of herself in a beautiful cream-colored gown, and asks for just two hours to go to the mall. She sets out and in the flicker of an eye finds herself on a dark steamer like a banana boat, in neorealist black and white. She has become an Italian heroine like Anna Magnani, screaming and collapsing on deck as a dark man approaches her with a knife. And she knows it was all foreseen and planned.
In the second dream she gives an excuse to her husband, Vanni, and goes off for an illicit evening with a close family friend, the husband of one of those lifelong couples who are perfect for each other. He takes her to a small, luxurious hotel in the center of Turin, obviously a local institution for well-heeled affairs. The lovemaking is pleasurable, but more pleasurable still is the feeling of security in the arms of this family friend, who she knows will never leave his wife. Mira derives great enjoyment from the sight of his shiny expensive shoes in the opulent Edwardian furnishings of the hotel, which are just like the rich dark interior of his car. At one in the morning, she leaps out of bed to slink guiltily home, trying to invent excuses for her husband, but when she arrives, Vanni just pats her hand and says, Don’t fret. I know you’ve been with Edoardo; he called me so I wouldn’t worry. He kisses her affectionately and they go to bed and Mira lies awake with relief and fear at the revelation of a world in which everything is safe, upholstered, rich, predictable….
Both dreams leave her with the feeling of being permanently marked.
The contrast is important, she writes in her journal. Yet what is it, exactly? Is it the contrast between youth, when everything is a knife thrust, and middle age, when everything is cushioned with relativity? Or is it the contrast between the American I was and the European I have become?
1986 • HOUSE OF ZENIN
Mira spends the night at Zenin’s house. It’s easy; she’s been interviewing on location on a television movie set in a grand Palladian villa near Asolo. Zenin sends a car to take her to Venice, where they meet for dinner at Harry’s Bar. She walks into the buzz of the packed low-ceilinged room that always manages to seem more exciting than other places, and feels the stone and water maze that is Venice at night enfolding her like a black rose. She and Nick went to Harry’s once and felt like tourists, exiled at an upstairs table. Now Cipriani himself waits on her, his long doughy face tender and deferential as he swaps jokes in dialect with Zenin. With them are Zenin’s friend Macaco and Macaco’s very young girlfriend, a Padua law student and a tennis champion. The girl has frizzy blond hair and bolts down a plate of squid risotto before going off to the bathroom to vomit. Mira likes Macaco, who flirts as easily as a gay man. When she asks how he met his girlfriend, he shrugs one plump shoulder and says, She’s an heirloom—I had an affair with her mother first.
After midnight, Zenin drives her to his home from Piazzale Roma in his Porsche, tearing through cornfields as flat as Iowa until they reach the ramparts of a medieval city, wind through narrow streets, and drive through a silently opening gate. Afterward, for the rest of her life, she remembers that the brass knobs on the double front door are in the shape of turbaned Moors.
He takes her through his huge, empty house, turning on lights. She makes admiring noises at Gobelin tapestries, polychrome wood Madonnas, multifoliate Venetian chandeliers, acres of Aubusson and Savonnerie, a grand piano that twangs disconsolately out of tune when she touches a key. Privately she thinks the house looks like a hotel with its overstuffed furniture and big televisions in every room. A hotel without clients, growing dowdy in its luxury, the loneliest house she has ever been in. It used to belong to a prince, he tells her, and was the mainland residence of a family that produced six doges.
How did you first make your money? she asks him later, when she has seen the gold taps in his bathroom and lies in the acreage of his bed, which faces another immense television.
Zenin sighs. I sold encyclopedias and plastic goods door-to-door, village-to-village. In my father’s old Giulietta. You can’t imagine the humiliation.
It’s love, thinks Mira as she falls asleep.
But later she wakes up in darkness, shaking. She thinks she hears Maddie crying, reaches out for Nick, then orients herself. In the complete blackness of a room shuttered in the European way so that no breath of air enters. A room like a vault. A foreign prison. And in the pitiless clarity that comes at these moments, she knows it is no use going to Zenin for comfort. Zenin, who sleeps with his big body curled rigidly in one corner of the vast bed. So she lies there, unable to pull even one illusion over her terror of what she has called into being. And knowing, too, that the remark about humilation is the truest thing Zenin will ever say to her.
The next day, Zenin leaves early for London and has Mira driven back to the film set at Asolo.
THE ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
She’s been a hit among the cast and crew, a pretty young journalist with a lot more on the ball than most of the magazine morons the publicist brings around. Fluent in Italian, pleasantly ironic in the questions she asks, wandering through the formal gardens and the
trailers and the frescoed halls with her little tape recorder, jotting down notes in the back of an old copy of Crime and Punishment.
23
NICK
2005 • ARIA
Nick chats online with his friend Kip, a medievalist at Case Western who has built his reputation on the Fourth Crusade. Nick has been fascinated since boyhood by the tale of the crusaders who started out from Venice to crush the infidel in Egypt, but were manipulated by Enrico Dandolo, the blind doge of Venice, to sail on Constantinople and sack the great Christian treasure house that was Byzantium. In between jokes that Dandolo was an early neoconservative and Kip’s incomprehensible musings about religious recidivism among Janissaries, they both reflect on the naked power of the story, which is one of revenge. As a young envoy to Byzantium, Dandolo had his eyes put out by imperial order during a period of anti-Venetian violence. Decades later, as an old man, he returned to gut Constantinople with fire and sword, swept its treasures off to his land, and put a whore on the holy throne of Hagia Sophia.
The whole thing is an opera, says Nick’s friend. The symmetry of it. You know he had himself buried in Hagia Sophia. Eastern Orthodox Christians spit on his grave.
A few weeks later, Nick dreams about the blind doge. The doge is dressed not in medieval clothes, but in an eighteenth-century Casanovan cloak and tricorne, with a beaked priapic carnival mask. And he is walking with Nick through the misty late-night alleys of Venice, across bridges, along canals, through piazzas that Nick has never seen. Though he is blind, he gives Nick a tour, indicating half-ruined ancient constructions on either side, and even a Chinese shrine built of jade like a giant snuff bottle. They begin to hurry because they must get to a ship. And Nick feels the doge dragging him along with an iron grip like that of the Old Man of the Sea. They are no longer in Venice but in Constantinople, a set of Byzantine domes like pillows in the mist, long smudges of fire on the horizon. And at some point the doge has started singing the first words of the aria from Rigoletto in a wobbly countertenor: Vendetta, tremenda vendetta! Then he pulls off his mask to show his empty sockets. Singing in the same horrible voice—an eye for an eye…
