by Andrea Lee
The sound of traffic increases, and church bells. The morning smells drift in through the window: car exhaust, coffee, garbage, fresh bread from the bakery two doors down, hot chemical steam from the little dry cleaner. Furnishings of a small antique world, and Nick’s world is now huge, huge and bright and cold. Later, in the gnawing hours of reflection, he will think that it feels as though a curtain has suddenly dissolved. As if he and Mira, joining their lives together, had knit a fabric, a screen, a safety net, that at this instant has dissolved into mist. Leaving him alone, naked, seared by the glare of the truth.
Later there will be time for bargaining, for many more words in the traditional liturgy. You whore. Can we try. I thought we were different. Come back. I’ll kill him. Kill you. You stole the best days. Think of the child. Hate. Hate you. Come back. I still love you. Get out.
But now it’s Mira’s turn, and with each word she speaks, with each of her craven self-serving gusts of tears, he mentally sends her farther away from him, to an ice floe caught in a swift current, spinning into the polar noon. He doesn’t want to kill her, he just wants her to disappear, to leave him to get used to the light.
TREE
My name is Mariateresa Rosales and I come from the city of Davao, Mindanao Island, Republic of the Philippines, and I came to Italy through Austria, hiding under the seat of a bus.
I worked for Signor Nick and Signora Mira for four years total, from the time Maddie was eighteen months old until Signor left Italy and the baby went to kindergarten. First in the big apartment near Via Nazionale and then, after they separated, going back and forth with my little Maddie between Via Nazionale and Signora’s new place on the Aventino.
They were my second employers in Italy. The first, an eye doctor and his wife who lived on the Flaminia, I left because they made me sleep on the dining-room floor and refused to put my documents in order with the questura, and paid me half the proper union salary because they said I was slow to understand Italian. So it was a relief to come to work for Signor and Signora where I could speak English, which I know because of the air force base in Mindanao. They said so many pleases when they told me how to keep their house that it was like they were scared of me. Until they understood that it is not the custom, they tried to get me to sit down at meals with them.
A kindness that frightened me, not for myself but for the two of them, with their long legs and their big American teeth, like the soldiers from the base, and their round eyes like kittens that saw so little. If I had been a different girl and had no faith, I could have taken advantage like so many girls do with their employers. They never asked to see the shopping receipts. It was always “Take the afternoon off, Tree” and “Here’s a present for your daughter, Tree.” When I told Signora about the problem with my husband and the drug and how I had to leave my children for my sister to raise, she offered money to send them to school with the Ursuline sisters.
Maddie became my secret baby, my passion, as happens with all the Filipina girls who have hearts hungry for children far off in the hot soft air of home, and she was more lovely than any other baby. I used to dress her up in ruffles and take her to San Paolo, which is our Filipino church in the Prati neighborhood, and my friends taught her the word maganda—beautiful.
But it was Signor and Signora I felt I was protecting. They were also like my children. I was twenty-three and they were nearly thirty, yet I felt they had no idea of how the world always has terrible traps waiting. Italians know about it. Italians have cold hearts, cold as the old stone statues that lie around Rome, and the traps are part of how they live their life.
Signora Mira was the one who got caught. I noticed nothing until one day my cousin Dolo told me she had seen Signora getting out of a cab with a strange man in a neighborhood up near Villa Ada, where Dolo works. She was certain it was Signora, all dressed up and looking sexy like a stewardess or a fashion model. Then I began to remember all the times that the phone would ring in the middle of the morning, and Signora, who had been typing in her study or playing with the baby, wearing jeans and with her hair all over her head, would put down the receiver and say she had an appointment for lunch. Then she’d drop everything and wash her hair and put on lipstick and dress up and look so pretty it hurt your eyes. She had a closet full of the most wonderful clothes that she hardly ever wore with her husband. I’d say, Signora, you should dress like that for Signor Nick, and she’d laugh and say he loved her the way she was, without trimmings. And all the time there would be a fever-glow about her that made me recall, though I tried not to, my husband when he was on the drug. Then she would hug and kiss the baby a dozen times so that it was impossible to settle her down afterward, and run out the door.
Until Dolo told me, I never thought of another man, because Signor Nick was maganda. You’d have to see him, going off every morning in his suits which I kept in perfect condition, never a grease stain or wrinkle. And he loved her. It began to seem to me, after I understood what was going on, that he was always in a way on his knees in front of her, which was not right. It was like someone saying a Hail Mary in front of a statue of the Mother of God and finding out that it was Mary Magdalene you were praying to.
Though anger and hatred are sins, I must say I began to hate Signora a bit.
Then she began to travel a lot for her work writing for magazines, and one night I found Signor Nick at the table with a bottle of vodka and he looked at me in a way that reminded me once again of my husband when he was on the drug—his eyes bloodred around the blue—and said that the bitch was leaving him, that she loved somebody else.
And I said that he musn’t speak about Signora that way, and that sometimes women get these ideas and why didn’t he talk to her—thinking why didn’t he give her a good smack—and surely she would change her mind.
And he looked at me with those eyes glowing like embers, like a demon’s eyes, and said something that I’ve always remembered, that seemed like both the truth and the worst news that anyone could hope to hear. They both said some awful things later, things that made me never again want to lay eyes on either of them, those children who had everything in the world and threw it away on a whim. But I understood this thing that he said, because I was, the same as they were, a foreigner in this stone-hearted land.
It’s just too late, he said. She’s lost her country now.
27
ZENIN
2005 • BURQA
A woman veiled in black from head to toe is walking the streets of Zenin’s city. I bambini si spaventano e gli automobilisti si bloccano per vedere quella strana apparizione, reports Il Gazzettino. Children are terrified, traffic stops at the sight of the strange apparition.
Faceless, as dark as the thought of death, moving across the cobblestones of the center and along the roadside of the periphery, sometimes clutching plastic shopping bags and at other times accompanying a little girl to school.
Oh, for heaven’s sake, to be shocked by a woman in a burqa, says Zenin’s girlfriend, Mariella. Sometimes I don’t know what is worse, Muslim fundamentalism or provincial small minds. The priests don’t help, those scoundrels, and did you read what the assistant mayor—Gentili, that Fascist leghista, he went to school with my cousin—said? He claims he’ll have any woman in a burqa arrested because going around in public with your face covered is a security violation. Well, I ask you. Can it be that no one has figured out that we’re part of the rest of the world now? Women in veils show up in Italy every day. What I want to know is why nobody’s figured out who that woman is and whether she wants to be covered up like that, poor thing.
Zenin glances nervously at Mariella, who is driving them up a steep mountain road near Val Noana in her Range Rover, managing to smoke, shift gears, and gesture indignantly as she talks. She looks pretty in smart olive tweed and a man’s loden cap, but when she gets excited and polemical—about women, about Tibet, about rainbow peace banners—her eyes bulge and her voice grows shrill in a way extremely distasteful to Zenin, rem
iniscent of his sisters and many past girlfriends.
He looks out over the huge amphitheater of rust-colored autumn foliage sweeping down from Croce d’Aune to the glinting thread of the Cismon River, the higher gnarled peaks of the true Dolomites, already powdered with October snow, standing guard in the distance over the bell towers and huddled stone houses of impossibly remote Alpine hamlets. He knows this region because it was part of the route he took when he sold encyclopedias, rattling up vertical half-paved roads in the faithful old Giulietta. It’s a desolate area, where no one goes to ski, and he has allowed himself to be dragged up here by Mariella, who as usual wants him to buy something. In this case it is an entire medieval village restored and transformed by an architect friend of hers into a deluxe time-share condominium complete with helipad, private ski lift, solar panels, high-speed Internet access, and a standing contract for organic cheeses and produce from local peasants. Zenin thinks it’s a piece of flimflam, like most of Mariella’s projects, and he suspects also that she is fooling around with the twenty-five-year-old architect behind his back.
But it’s mushroom season, and there’s a place famous for canederli in the village up ahead, and he doesn’t mind spending a day alone with Mariella once in a while. She travels easily with him, but doesn’t whine when he leaves her behind. After years of high-strung beauties, he has found a companion who never makes scenes, who amuses him by the depth of her stratagems to marry him.
And why the hell not, asks Zenin’s mother, in dialect. You need somebody to take care of you, and even Padre Giacomo isn’t against civil remarriage anymore. Even pederasts can marry now. You can’t run around with sluts in that plane and that ridiculous boat forever. Look at your gray hair—you’re not a ragazzino anymore. You wouldn’t marry Tere, so take Mariella. Another nice sensible girl from a respectable family. A girl from here, who speaks your language. You know what they say: Moglie e buoi dei paesi tuoi. Wife and cattle should be from your own village.
Zenin ignores her, knowing that what she says may well be true for a poorer man, but that he himself will never be abandoned with rotting diabetic feet and hairy nostrils in an old-folks residence. Doesn’t he still have his ex-wife and various ex-girlfriends and poor neurotic Tere, and his resentful clinging daughters, not to mention his surviving sisters? One, or several, of them will be around to care for him in his cottage. And Mariella, like all Italian fiancées, is capable of hanging on for a good twenty years.
A few days after his trip to the mountains, Zenin himself catches sight of the veiled woman. Late on a November afternoon on an ugly stretch of the state road toward Belluno, where the cornfields have been invaded by a French hypermarket and scruffy lanes of small factories and public housing apartments. Burqa rippling in the wind, she is picking her way along the side of the road, pulling a small collapsible shopping trolley stuffed with bags. And Zenin, driving by in one of the small cheap cars he replaces like Kleenex to befuddle kidnappers, is stunned to find her very beautiful. Tall and slender and fearsome in her fluttering black disguise, a walking secret, an envoy from the land of shadows. The woman without a face, symbol of foreign strangeness in his home town. The opposite of the women he knows and can’t stand. It’s as if he invented her himself, and he knows one night she will walk into his dreams.
Later, Mariella finds the woman’s name in the newspaper and tells Zenin. She is Roushana, from Bangladesh. Married to a construction worker who also emigrated from her country. And she wears the veil willingly, she tells the reporter, per amore di Dio e di mio marito. For the love of God and her husband.
1987 • WHEN TO PAY
Casually, over a glass of wine, Zenin learns from a lawyer friend that, as he has guessed already, he has no formal responsibility. In the case of an American girl running off from her husband. Impulsive, as are so many foreign girls. It’s natural that, like so many of her sex, she has a weakness for Zenin. Who has, it is true, often spoken of marriage, but fortunately without actually proposing.
Zenin is often amazed but rarely rattled by the talent of women for avalanches of emotion and general chaos. Over the years he has seen more hysterics than Mira could ever imagine, and learned to negotiate them with detached practicality and surprising good humor. He is actually in love with Mira, as much as he can be, and wants more of her, though he would have been content to leave her assigned to a husband and family. The end of her marriage is not an apocalypse but an ordinary annoyance. And once he has ascertained that neither Nick nor any male relative of Mira’s is going to try to shoot him, he makes a few rapid calculations and then, as always, steps back to observe.
The mess. Mira moving out of her house into a residential hotel on the Aventino. Glimpses of barbaric American divorce practice, in which it seems children can be shared between mother and father. The desperate phone calls, tear-drenched lovemaking, melancholy lunches and dinners from which Mira no longer has to hurry home.
It becomes clear to Zenin that Mira, unlike an Italian girl, will not demand that he marry her.
He lets this run through his mind as he sits in the Madrid stadium with his small son on his knee, both of them bouncing up and down and screaming themselves hoarse as the Juventus Dream Team pummels Real. His son in a miniature black-and-white-striped Juventus shirt, and his son’s mother, Tere, in tight jeans and a Juventus scarf, also screaming. One of the best things about Tere is that she’s as rabid a Juve fan as Zenin is, and she is raising their son in the same noble tradition. From time to time, he wonders whether he should let the two of them come live with him. But then Tere will have won a complete victory over him, and he’ll lose Mira.
Although at this point Mira is tiresome and often, when he sees her, looks unattractively red-eyed.
This runs through his mind amid the despairing groans of the Spanish fans, through the singing and chants and waving of banners. He is slightly distracted but not worried, because he knows he can afford as many lives as he wants. He is just waiting as he always does, to see which direction the wind will blow.
Zenin knows you always have to pay for things. But his great talent, which has made his fortune, is knowing when to pay, and paying less than anyone else.
ROUSHANA
No one is like me here. The women go around with their faces bare to men, and their skin gets hard and cracked like clay in the sun. At first boys threw stones and soda cans at me, but now they let me pass. This is a rich place. No children die and they all go to school. Outside the city there are flat fields full of water in ditches and rivers like in my country, and the big shops are temples full of music and light and food and furniture. The hypermarket is like paradise, and they give plastic bags for free. We will try to stay in this country forever, and I am learning the language. Buongiorno. Grazie. Per amore di Dio.
28
MIRA
2005 • JUST SAY IT
How many times have I told you that you have to say you’re sorry, says Mira’s friend Foy. You have to call him or write him a letter. How many years has it been?
Almost fifteen, I guess. You’re crazy, Foy. He won’t read it. He hates me and you can’t blame him. And what’s the point anyway? Do not, repeat, do not say the word closure or I will be forced to smack you.
Closure. Now just try smacking me. Foy gives Mira a dangerous grin. She’s from Bend, Oregon, a six-foot-tall artist with platinum hair and bronze skin who a few years ago strode up to Mira at a Castello di Rivoli opening and said, So you’re the other colored girl in town.
The two friends, in tank suits and regulation nylon caps, are in the whirlpool at the gym, stretching after their Sunday morning fifty laps. Swimmers churn through the lanes beside them, awash in chlorine-scented anonymity, while through the steam on the glass wall alongside the pool, sunlight glistens on late snow that still dots the Turin hills.
You still have to settle things, insists Foy, who is childless, a hardcore romantic happily married to a misanthropic Turin architect half her size.
Set
tle things in what way, for fuck’s sake? Mira raises her voice so that the two older Italian women sitting across from them in the whirlpool pause in their quiet discussion of how to cook lamb’s brains. We’ve been divorced for a million years. Yes, I screwed around and left him, and it was awful. Awful, awful. But we’ve moved on.
But have you? Did you say you’re sorry?
Of course I did. I’m sure I did. I think.
You probably said some hysterical guilty things in the heat of the moment, but you need to say it again. Calmly, like a grown-up. I just feel it in my guts, Mira. You could have taken him aside at Maddie’s high school graduation.
He hardly spoke to me. He came bearing gifts, he sat through the ceremony, he hugged Maddie, he took off.
That proves it, girl. He’s still wound up in the past, and so are you, and indirectly so is everyone who touches you both. You know me—I’m instinctive and I believe in karma, and I just know that you’ll all have better luck and better lives, better hearts, if you say you’re sorry. You’re a writer, Mira, so write him a letter.
Letters are magical, adds Foy, sinking down in the warm water. I saw this installation in Paris where the artist glued all his old love letters together and made a tent. You can’t imagine how powerful it was.
Mira looks at her, thinking about how it is that girlfriends get under your skin when you live overseas. You go away from your home and family, and then reconstruct the intimacy, the pressure, the invasiveness.
