by Andrea Lee
Then there are the dreams that wake him in a sweat. Dreams of familiar people and places, all behaving in shadowy alarming ways. The worst is that the river outside his bedroom is flowing closer to the walls, is actually trickling through, and is filled with dead and dying voices, the voice of his father, that of his sister, ebbing away there in the clinic in Switzerland.
His tireless girlfriend, Mariella, offers for the hundredth time to move in with him, saying that he is understandably becoming a pack of nerves rattling around in that big house. And when Zenin refuses, she smiles, knowing that before long she’ll be there.
Privately he worries that this is the beginning of senile dementia, and so makes arrangements to see a priest and a doctor. The priest, an aristocratic Jesuit and former missionary from an old Venetian family, receives him with the warm welcome and light-handed man-of-the-world chiding due to a divorced reprobate tycoon, a local prodigal son who hasn’t taken Communion since he was twenty-seven. He speaks of spiritual adolescence, of the mysteries of the Sacred Heart, and elicits, to his own surprise, a grant for an entirely new elementary school and maternity clinic in Burkina Faso.
The doctor, a director of Umanitas Clinic, is a sanguine Pugliese who shuttles back and forth between Milan, where he has a wife and family, and Monte Carlo, where he has a beautiful Ukrainian mistress. He’s used to examining troubled rich friends and tells a couple of good jokes as he inspects Zenin’s body cavities and oversees his entrance and exit, like a loaf of bread, into and out of the MRI machine. He tells Zenin that his prostate is that of a man in his forties, that except for a benign cyst on one kidney and a bit of high blood pressure, he is enviably healthy, and that if he wants to take care of the bags under his eyes, there are superb plastic surgeons right here at Umanitas.
And of course he waves the little packet of blue pills in Zenin’s face. The gift of the Magi, mio caro, as if you didn’t already know about it. That apathetic feeling just means you need Saint Viagra in your life. That and a few Russian blondes should take care of everything.
And about the same time, Zenin says yes to the book idea, and now he’s stuck with this baby-faced fool following him around and double-checking everything, though it is clear that the kid wouldn’t know truth if it ran up and bit him on the ass.
Zenin tilts his seat, and closes his eyes rudely in the face of the ghostwriter, and wonders what would happen if he really told the truth. About how you have to screw people before they screw you, whether the screwing takes the form of impressing them or fucking them, or making them want to buy something, or grinding them into dust. How knowing how to make money is not something contained in some innovative idea or bullshit philosophy, but something he knows the way a bird knows how to fly and a leopard knows how to track down and tear apart. How that instinct carries its own shadow: not fear, exactly, but a growing detachment from the world, just when you are busiest heaping up the world’s prizes. Detachment that makes you not give a shit about young Russian blondes or buying sainthood from some swindler of a Jesuit. That makes you just want to fall asleep in the river that flows through your bed.
He opens his eyes sharply and catches the writer staring at him in bemusement, and realizes that he must have dozed off. And abruptly decides to cancel the book.
The plane bucks slightly in the tramontane wind blowing south from the Dolomites. Near Verona the cloud cover breaks, and as they circle for landing, the brown-and-green expanse of the Veneto unrolls beneath them, in air so limpid they can see the factories of Mestre and the archipelago of Venice, and behind them in a faint smear of civilization, Zenin’s town and the other cities of the plain.
Guarda. Casa, says Zenin, almost automatically, feeling an unreasonable surge of pleasure, in spite of his woes. Look. Home.
1988 • ANOTHER PHONE CALL
Zenin is thinking about the widow on the train to Brussels. The woman he met decades earlier on one of his first sales trips outside Italy. Zenin, twenty-seven, married a year, full of himself and his big black snap-over display case. And like a traveling salesman in a joke, he meets this Belgian widow—hardly more than a blond teenager, with huge calves in black cotton stockings and pale red-rimmed Flemish eyes—traveling home to some peasant village after her Italian husband dropped dead during the rice harvest in Vercelli. And near the French border Zenin takes her to a railway hotel and fucks her all day. Fucks her in ways that he never dreamed you could to a decent woman—in her ass, in her mouth—as she shudders with pleasure and weeps and moans that she is going to hell. And when the girl falls asleep, hair plastered, skin slippery with grief and sex, her clumsy black coat and dress thrown over a chair, he pulls his clothes on, slips out, and jumps onto a night train. He remembers washing his cock over and over in the tin basin in the train’s washroom as the train rocked through the dark beet fields, thinking with nervous satisfaction that at least he left her with money for the hotel, a good dinner, and first-class fare back to her village.
The memory, for some reason, floats into his mind when he gets a call on his private line from an unknown old woman. Mira’s friend Madame S.
His first response is cold fury. How dare the bitch give out his number, after walking out on him in Venice like that?
Then he becomes wary and concentrates on understanding what this old woman knows, what she really wants, and how it can work to his advantage.
She didn’t want me to get involved, but I insisted, says Madame S.
From her voice he can picture her exactly: the kind of old battle-ax who goes around bossing parochial projects and feeding armies of stray cats. Sister in spirit to the Princess Caetanae, his own mother, his aunts and sisters, and even his dour oldest daughter. The phalanx of respectable women who form the ultimate barrier—the shaping force that substitutes morality—to the behavior of men like Zenin.
There is a tinge of ingrained cynicism to the voice with the Bolognese accent, of a crafty awareness that Zenin will doubt everything she says. And Zenin respects this, and by extension respects Mira herself for having made such a friend.
He’s increasingly impressed as the conversation continues. I need to have this old biddy running the press office, he thinks, instead of that brainless Gilardi. In one minute, Madame S. manages to sound conversational, compliment him believably and extravagantly, and then, with brutal frankness, come to the point.
And of course, Cavaliere, I realize that a man of your extraordinary resources would be all the more aware of the precarious position of a young woman in a foreign country without official protection in the world. She needs a sistemazione. A secure position.
She wants nothing more to do with me, says Zenin. She walked out, and she won’t even speak to me on the phone.
And she also left her husband because of you, comes the relentless voice. She was a respectable wife and mother, not a tart. She fell in love, though it was madness. And beyond that, though I don’t like to go into it….
The old witch knows everything, thinks Zenin. Hastily he assures her that he is aware of his responsibility to Mira, that she will have a house, investments for a proper income, whatever she needs to live—
Per vivere in modo dignitoso. To live in a dignified manner. Madame S. actually says these words, with the gravity of a judge.
And because she is truly a woman of the old school, who understands instinctively Zenin’s way of thinking, she names a figure.
And Zenin, not the least bit surprised or insulted, names a lower figure. This language he understands, and his respect is growing for the tough old bird who speaks it. This is exactly the kind of conversation he had with Tere’s family before his son was born.
The haggling is inconclusive, but they both know it represents a promise on Zenin’s part.
And he knows as well that Mira would never have been practical enough to put her up to this.
She’s lucky to have a friend like you, he says, and Madame S. actually gives a flirtatious chuckle.
We both understand
that there is nothing in this for me. I just hate to see injustice. If it weren’t for me, the child would be in the middle of nowhere. She has no sense of reality. She refuses to say anything to her family at home. And a foreign girl doesn’t know how to make rascals like you behave.
Zenin laughs too. Relieved to have things made clear. Translated.
Ah well, Signora, he says. What can one do? Adding in a humorous tone, Americanate. An expression that can mean simply, American ways, or American nonsense.
And they take leave of each other with great courtesy.
And later, when Zenin has spoken to the commercialista who handles his private transactions, he thinks with satisfaction that this is all for the best. Things should, he thinks, be organized. The security he will bestow on Mira will allow him to own her until he, Zenin, decides that it is over. And still later he again thinks of the Belgian widow who, in her grotesque garbled Italian, moaned on about her husband, even as he pulled her about on the sagging hotel bed, repeating, Amour dopo mort. Love after death.
THE GHOSTWRITER
I was born twenty-eight years ago in Torre Grimalda, a frazione of Cuneo, I have my degree in Italian language and literature from Bologna, and of course I write novels. Existential spy and adventure thrillers, set in exotic places like the Solomon Islands and New England, and also the backwater villages of Liguria, where I grew up; a bit of Maurois mixed with Salgari mixed with Pavese, if you know what I mean. Nothing published yet, so to keep the polenta boiling, as my grandfather says, I’m doing the line of Our Great Business Minds for Rizzoli. And everybody wants to know what it’s like to travel around with Zenin.
Com è? What is it like? What was it like for Dante to visit the dead? The weightless, the eternally famished dead? He sits across from me like a sad clown in his jet or in his office or on that boat of his, and I feel like nothing, I feel how he despises me, that bastard, and yet I feel that to be despised by him is good fortune. I feel happy about my cheap suits from UPIM, my Fiat Panda, my Club Avventura vacations, and my not-so-gorgeous girlfriend Rinalda.
Because he is the most joyless individual it has ever been my bad luck to come across. Most rich men got where they are by being bastards, and Zenin is no exception, but the other shits have more fun. This one, with all his money, owns exactly nothing. And if I were to write a true story of his life, it would be called The Emperor’s New Clothes.
36
NICK
2005 • AN ENCOUNTER
Amy hated Warsaw, says Nick’s old friend Friel, squeezing his wife’s shoulder. Spoiled wench. Bitched every minute about the cold and the shit food and coal dust in her hair.
I’m so not a trooper! giggles Amy, who is Chinese American and met Friel back at Princeton.
Who wants to be? says Nick’s wife, Dhel. I’m PTBHM—proud to be high maintenance. Nick hates it but he reaps the benefits, don’t you, darling?
The two couples are eating dinner at the China Club in Hong Kong, celebrating Amy’s forty-first birthday. Nick is in town on business, and this time he’s brought Dhel and the girls.
It’s a great evening. Nick, having returned that afternoon from a chilly two days among the scrolled hills and appalling hotels of Hunan, relishes the lowlit opulence of the club, its ironic retro take on colonial Shanghai. He loves looking at the rich Chinese families eating around him, the tycoons settled so comfortably into their wealth as if it were silk cushions. He enjoys his old friends, who talk his language with the raucous intimacy of longtime expatriates. They get Amy drunk on wildly overpriced Château Margaux and make her go over the legendary tale of her roommate, the ounce of skunk, and the Princeton wrestling team. And Friel, who works in Singapore and is both a fiscal ultraconservative and an old-style freethinking Democrat, has them pissing with laughter at tales of his forays among the Republican toadies of Malaysia.
When they get up to go, Friel spots a friend in the corner. The friend is an Italian named Giorgio, a Milanese who heads up an economic-research project funded by the political party La Margherita and based in Beijing. He is seated with a beautiful Chinese woman, who seems to be his girlfriend, and another two Italian men who are very young, almost students. One of them strikes Nick as being especially good-looking, with an eager white smile that Nick imagines would be attractive to women.
Nick drags out his rusty Italian. Si, ho vissuto a Roma, tanti anni fa.
In the Pedder Building elevator, Friel says, High-class babysitting is what Giorgio’s doing. Do you know who those two kids are? His new interns? One is Teodoro Agnelli, and the other is the son of Zenin. You know, the annoying cartoon toys.
Friel isn’t a close enough friend to know the connection between Zenin and Nick, but does notice the quality of silence that falls, the microscopic glance that passes between husband and wife. What? he says. You know him?
Nothing, says Nick. I might have met him once.
And afterward on the ferry going back to Kowloon Side, Dhel—who in a feminine way has annexed her husband’s first marriage by becoming an amateur historian conversant with its minutest facts and implications—goes on about the long arm of coincidence, and what a darling face that boy had, and how this confirms her theory that there are really only fifty people in the world, all doomed to keep crossing paths. And how that very pretty boy is about Maddie’s age, and how ironic it would be if they met and fell in love. She sees Nick’s face and shuts up for a minute, leans back against the sticky painted bench, and stares out at the lights of Central behind them.
Then:
Darling, is it portentous? she asks.
No.
Does it mean anything?
No.
Does it make you sad and thoughtful?
Nope.
Do you love me?
More than anyone in the world.
At that she leans over and bites his left ear, and they sit sweating and contented like any other tourists in the sticky late-night heat of the Star Ferry.
But before dawn Nick wakes in their bed at the Peninsula, with the face of the boy in his head. So handsome. So unaware. The mask of youth, mysterious in its conventional innocence, its lack of scars. Like a newly minted coin. Like his daughter’s faces, or those photos of Keith Richards in the sixties or Joe Strummer in the seventies, when they look too gormless to be walking around without a nanny.
Like his and Mira’s faces in their wedding photos.
And this kid had barely noticed Nick, had met his eye for a second and murmured a greeting like any well-bred European child. Never guessing that the middle-aged American before him had wept, cursed, contemplated murder, wanted to die through long nights invoking his father’s name.
The child of my enemy. And what does the little bugger mean to me?
Softly he gets up from the bed and takes a piss in the bathroom, then walks to the living room of the suite and opens the curtains to look out at Kowloon Bay. The yellowish leaden sky of a dawn in typhoon weather over the incomparable spectacle of the expanse of steely water dotted with container convoys and passenger boats and junks, tugs, and ferries. And beyond, the lunar cityscape of Central, the tops of the Bank of China building, and the Peak shrouded in mist, the hills rolling back toward Stanley, the old earth dragons slumbering in a broil of black cloud.
He peers left down the murky coast toward Sha Tin, where there is a huge Buddhist temple complex that is modern but an exact replica of a Tang Dynasty structure, down to the bamboo nails that hold thousands of cedar shingles in place. Why build an exact replica of something old? his daughter Julia asked when they visited. Why not make something modern? Because we need to see history, dumbhead, her sister told her.
And now his own drama suddenly seems like history, like something artificial and didactic on display. Those two very young people and their Italy. A sort of Williamsburg of the heart.
When did he stop hating Mira? He thinks now of the last time he saw her, at Maddie’s high school graduation, still good-looking, though with her
careful slimness and expensively sleek clothes and hair, she looked generically foreign, a woman who belongs more to her age and social class and painstaking elegance than to a particular race or country.
He recalls her expiatory chumminess to him, as they sat under big white umbrellas in the International School courtyard in a well-heeled group of international parents just like them. Her wifely asides in Italian to her husband, Vanni, who is a genuine good guy, though Nick is pleased to hear hints from Maddie that he leads quite a life. Mira the betrayer has achieved a husband with a wandering eye.
What does this woman have to do with the skinny sand-colored girl who enchanted him and married him and then wrenched out his heart?
The answer is: precisely nothing.
Forcing hate is just as impossible as forcing lust or hunger or faith. Either you’ve got it or you don’t.
What he feels for her now—besides irritation at her disorganized approach to tuition payments—is a kind of distant, rather condescending camaraderie. Perhaps it’s friendly pity, the devastating phrase Joyce uses in “The Dead,” which was the single short story assigned in the poetry class where he met Mira.
Does this mean forgiveness? No. Nick has traveled a long way beyond the point where one forgives. Beyond bitterness. But he’s just realized it now. He awakes to it so suddenly that he feels that he had something amputated, like an arm or a leg.
All the weight of his anger must have been gone for some time. And he feels free and also doomed, because along with the anger he has also lost the last pretense that he’s still young. Only once could he feel such complicated pain, all linked by the glorious egotistical certainty of living a betrayal unique in the world.
And he has become aware of this in China, in a part of the world that makes Europe, and even America, seem like stuffy old relatives left behind somewhere. The place where Friel and Amy live exactly as Nick and his family do in London, in a cloister of international schools and clubs and the expatriate’s wary deepening consciousness of the culture outside the walls.
