Читать книгу Under the Rose - Flavia Alaya - Страница 19

7

Lou had graduated from Columbia College with honors, ambitious to be a doctor. But it was one thing for an Italian American kid who’d worked summers, nights, and weekends trimming cutlets and sirloins, scraping blocks and sweeping up sawdust in his father’s butcher shop, to apply to medical schools, another thing to get into one. Try telling a medical school admissions committee in 1952 that nothing could be better training for hip surgery than dismembering a side of beef.

After sweating out rejection after rejection, he was finally admitted to Long Island University Medical School. This was exceptional, a coup. Most of the aspiring doctors among his Italian American classmates, including his best friend, Mario, would have to go to Italy to train. Mario used to drop over with Lou’s other buddies on holidays and flirt with me, in a careless, God’s-gift sort of way. God gave me fair warning, I think, the day Lou and his friends came in and found me on my knees scrubbing the kitchen floor, and Mario said in what sounded like all seriousness that “it was just the way he liked to see a woman.”

Lou himself would never have said such a thing. At least I thought not, and I loved him the more for it, the more because I already felt for him something approaching awe. Coming out of his teens he had grown into his own kind of good looks—never tall, but square-jawed and handsome in a tough, Georgie Raft sort of way, athletic, physically powerful, a strong swimmer. A lifeguard for a time, he had made varsity track. Judy was mad for him. If he’d had the time and money to date that other boys had, I thought you’d have to peel the girls off him.

But there was another side to Lou, a kind of sleeping beast, given to lightning surges of feckless anger. He would abruptly pull away, come back as suddenly as sunlight after a storm, tenderhearted and all duty and discipline again, every inch the first son. The truth was, for all his determined push toward medicine, he’d actually wanted to be a geologist. But they wanted a doctor. He’d resisted at first, cried when Mom pleaded, and in the end obeyed, as I had.

As for Carlo, duty had never been his strong suit. He’d finished New Rochelle High School academically just getting by, doing some things well in typical fits and starts, periodically showing up in the principal’s office. He was a jokester, good for a laugh, good for a good time. He could crack you up if he didn’t go all sarcastic and mean. But his soul seemed too blocked with anger to care what anybody thought. He finally earned enough money doing summer jobs to buy himself a motorcycle. My parents gave him a struggle, but he won.

He loved to cut a swagger on his bike, like Uncle Joey before him. “He even looks like Uncle Joey,” my mother would say. She tried to accept, to vocalize acceptance and make peace, to make herself believe that now that the discussion was done it was done. But I know she died every time he vroomed off and careered around the curve of Sickles Place toward Lockwood Avenue. I know she had a vision of him dead, smashed and bloody under the El like Joey, but not coming back.

Carlo and Lou both built their bodies with weights. It might be either of them I could hear heaving and grunting in their bedroom across the hall, the leaden rings clanking as they pressed, followed by the sudden thud as they brought them to the floor. Carlo used to stretch himself on a horizontal bar, longing to be an inch or two taller. He’d dreamed of becoming a pilot but the dream had died when he’d found himself blocked by his bad eyesight, and it only made him more bitter. Why, besides being short, did he also have to be blind? Lou’s bad eyes had hurt his vanity but Carlo’s hurt his soul. Whenever he put his motorcycle goggles on over his glasses, and then the black leather fitted helmet and tight black leather gloves, he put a meanness on him you could’ve walked into, if you’d been reckless enough.

So you could sense it was coming even before he got in with a bad bunch and slammed into trouble with the law. It was kept very hush-hush, even at home, but there was a court appearance. The judge went easy—seeing he came from a good family, as my parents said—and made a point of repeating. But the experience shook him, turned his ambition around. He began to work hard, suddenly yearning to know what it was he was good at, finding, amazingly, that it was math, calculus, geometry, trig. He was beginning to see himself, who he was. He must already have been preparing to take his community college degree back to Tucson and try for an engineering B.S. at the University of Arizona, by the time I entered Barnard. He amazed us. He amazed himself.

Ann would have been entering her second year at New Rochelle High School by then. She was smart, diffident, artistic, scared of her own talent, lagging behind it. She’d begun in her soft, shy way to be just as beautiful as her sweet baby looks had promised—my mother, without really meaning to be hurtful, had come to describe her to people as “the pretty one” of the two of us. She was right. Ann seemed never to have had to pass through my awkward ages, to suffer being all doughballs, as I had before I’d finally shed my fat, or looking into the mirror and seeing nothing but mouth, teeth, eyes, nose, all too big for my face. Her hair, cut short a year or two after me, had kept all of its fine curl and softness of color and hand, while mine had lost its chestnut lights and gone almost blue-black. A little vain of her tender, brown-blossom eyes, she would refuse to wear her glasses and squint toward you on the street until you got close enough to be seen, and then her gaze would take on that strangely liquid, vulnerable look of someone straining through tears. I loved the long brown lashes that needed no help to curl like a doll’s, the mouth that had never been swollen with scar tissue like mine and that bowed perfectly when she smiled, dipping up into her dimpled cheeks.

I was a rough Maggie Tulliver to her sweet Lucy Deane, I suppose. Or so, when I read The Mill on the Floss, I liked to think. And yet I doubt Maggie ever wanted to hug Lucy as I did Ann. If conscious envy ever tainted my envious-seeming comparisons, I don’t remember feeling it. Except once, when we were drying off after a swim and Ann, who was possessed by an exquisite parochial school shyness even with me, let down her towel for a moment, and out flashed a killing glimpse of two perfect breasts, pearly and round as the Venus’s at the Met. Till then I had grudgingly accepted my own cone-shaped pair, their areolas as big and brown as those of a fertility fetish, now I despised them.

But Ann could never appreciate her own beauty. She’d have been appalled to know how I felt about her desirable, innocent, wary sexiness, which she only feared. She had developed no miraculous moral muscle out of the banal cruelties of our childhoods. She’d been told too often that she was the cause of all our mother’s pain to make it to the first grade of self-love. The summer reign of terror with Carlo that had left me sore had left her scarred.

By now she and I had necessarily grown somewhat apart, even in our shared tower, our twin beds placed long ago on opposite sides of the room. Even had she known how much I’d suffered the lie I’d lived all through high school—and how could she? I had hardly let myself know it—she had every right to envy me. Of the two of us, I was the one whose achievements drew praise (the choice my father had made between his boys, repeated), the one whose talents had to be nurtured, for whom sacrifices had to be made to educate, whose life-center was the great Emerald City of New York. I’m sure she saw how wearing it was, the toll it took in sleep, how it explained my neglect of her and excused my distant crossness. I’m sure she imagined I had something unattainable for her. I’m sure she did not for that reason want it any the less.

She had become increasingly attached to my mother, in some sense my mother’s refuge. How we hated to see the store consume them, mother and father both, day and night, consume him, especially, who had made us conscious of so many better talents. My mother hated it too. It exhausted her. Things had not always gone as they had wanted, as she had wanted. Dad’s heart was not in his work, she knew that. It might be brutal, degrading work, but no, he had never allowed it to degrade him. It was only the hand that fate had somehow perversely dealt him. Her heart swelled as he spread out paints and fine sable brushes on the dining-room table to letter signs for the store windows like an artist, so they could see out there the artist he really was—so his own children could see it.

But how hard it was to stay above the blood and stink of slaughter, above the wheedling and whining and carping of customers and the arrogance and greed of vendors whose every chicken-scratched bill for eggs had to be vetted. Always to be playing the master butcher, keeping up the façade, acting as if he had been the misplaced surgeon. It left little energy to spare to love her. And she hungered for love, savored Ann’s willingness to stay close, to be the good girl, to scale back ambition.

Me she had fought for, not always against my father’s wishes, but against his fears, and had paid the price on both sides. I had fewer rules to obey, yet chafed continually at the ones I had, wanting fewer. I was the Fisherman’s Wife in the fairy-tale, never satisfied, she the fisherman pleading with the Big Fish to be generous, to be kind. He didn’t see all my sulks and storms. Didn’t I understand how she’d fought not to have me trapped as she had been as a girl, as she was now, as Ann was becoming? Nurturing my gifts had seemed so simple, once. But now my future mystified rather than emboldened her. She stood at the last frontier of her expectations. She thought then that she could not follow me into the dark wood.

But who can completely understand these things? And she had fled from understanding. There was no understanding, when the banked fire of his inner rage once again sublimated into illness, and he sulked down, crippled with sciatica, curled into inanition on the bed, on the couch. He would sit alone, watching the Army-McCarthy hearings on television, whole days, transfixed before the flickering screen or prowling sourly about the house, when she would have to deal with the store, when Lou would have to rush from school to help her as soon as he could get away. What could she do but pity and caress him, who seemed so beached in his anger and pain, to forgive him, even when his violence might erupt against Ann because she, poor girl, could not tolerate the unholy beast of red-baiting that somehow salved his soul? When Ann’s innocent objections baited him like filthy words, and he had struck her, taken the golf stick he had been toying with on the living room carpet, taken it with all his fury to her back and legs, as if she were the one who had brought down his world?

He was a great wounded animal, sensing danger, always sensing the danger of his loss of mastery, the danger in our pushing boundaries. In my pushing them. Didn’t my mother now have to make a show of servility to protect me—to protect us?

She too had told herself a treacherous lie of the mind—it had become habitual, as her perpetual look of weary grief betrayed. She believed that the old fault somehow was hers, that it was hers now to make it right.

But she still adored him. So did I, so did Ann, so did we all. There was such solicitude for our well-being even in his tyranny. The promises he made of small, material things we longed for were always fulfilled. So, in spite of the petty codes my mother enforced for his sake, we forgave him, forgave him his rages, rare as earthquakes, as sudden and unaccountable as the cyclonic rainstorms of the desert. And always, otherwise, there was that theater of undying love between them, that illusion of cloudless skies, and she so happily, so proudly, beside him, consoling, softening his pain, making beautiful things to wear for him to see her in, to approve, touching herself behind her fine, shapely ears there, and there, with his favorite perfume.

The fire that destroyed the store must have started in the back, some faulty electrical circuit overloaded as it struggled against an Indian summer heat wave to cycle the gigantic freezer. All the stuff in the back room—the stored egg cartons, the tightly wrapped and closely stacked rhomboids of brown paper bags, the great rolls of wrapping paper, as thick and round as if someone had cut the columns in front of the library into firewood, the gigantic balls of twine for tying roasts, the full coal scuttle for the stove where the sliced steaks had been seared for a quick lunch, and wolfed down with a piece of Italian bread torn from a loaf the size of an arm and a cup of boiled coffee right off the grate, where hands numbed from holding frozen flesh for hours could be warmed—all of it seemed to have been put there just to feed the smoldering flames. And then the fire had exploded, burst into the flue of a stairwell at the back, and threatened to engulf the apartments and the sleeping families upstairs. But they were able to escape before the firemen came, screaming their alarms through the night, destroying with their hoses what little the fire had spared and carrying off whatever meat had not been already roasted, and some that had.

The shock first. Then the stunning aftershock, that fire had made the decision they could never have made themselves. The insurance, not enormous, was enough. Enough to think. Enough to make decisions by. Enough, finally, to say no more to this hard business that had put us through life. There was little to salvage—nothing at all from the back room. There were a few fixtures from the front of the store, two faintly wounded oak blocks that had given most of their lives already, every face they could turn scraped raw (my brother, night after night, leaning into the steel sanding brush with his full force lest a single smear of that day’s blood be carried over to the next), a pair of paper-roll dispensers with their wrought cast-iron knots of decorative flowers. One had been for waxed paper, the pristine inner wrapping for folding directly against the meat, the other the finishing wrap, a satin-white coated paper my father had used for hand-lettering his window signs. I had loved this paper. Always it had seemed an infinite blank page for drawing, for writing novel after novel for a lifetime. These became our salvaged treasures, along with the majestically carved, bell-ringing cash register, a delicate spool of red-and-white twine that had stood on the long marble counter behind the glass display cases, their images repeated in the silver mirrors that ran the full length of the wall. The mirrors had been smashed. A fragment of marble remained. A scale. These few things came through, and took on a museum kind of afterlife in the basement of the house on Sickles Avenue.

I had begun to write again. I had used to tell fanciful stories as a child, and illustrate them myself. At twelve I had started a Brontë-ish Yorkshire moors romance, which my indulgent teachers at Hunter had thought promising. But until my teens I had not written my life—and this life—our lives, never. I couldn’t dare. It would have been the last audacity to tell such stories, to retail all this tangled family misery and inwardness, all this conflagration of the soul. And I couldn’t also because it was too inwardly ravening and full of gross undigested cubes of pain, like raw meat at the grinder.

My commitment to engineering had lasted about a month into college chemistry. I had of course floundered on, postponing organic, continuing math. Midway through a course in the theory of equations in my sophomore year, I had simply stalled. There had been no question of my somehow going back to making art, slipping such classes past my parents. Apart from the additional cost, studio art was not on Barnard’s educational agenda, considered too “servile” a subject by the John Henry Newman standard of a classical liberal education. The registrar would not even give graduation credit for courses taken in Columbia’s East Hall. One of the professors there saw a bit of my work and invited me to take his sculpture course, free, but I started and dropped it, unable to commute and write papers and study till my eyes stung, and sculpt too. Just the same, I used to go around to East Hall sometimes, at the corner of 116th Street and Amsterdam, to visit Judy, still studying there.

She was happily painting away. She’d say, “Funny how you’re so good at art and me at writing, and we’re both doing the opposite.” It was true. Her mother was a writer. Her father had been. It ran in her blood.

“We never do what’s easy,” I said. But I looked at her happiness and thought afterwards that I spoke only for myself.

One difference with writing was that Barnard cared about it. Miss Tilton, commenting on something I’d written once, said she thought artists made the best writers. I presumed she meant fallen-away artists. “Something about composition,” she guessed. “Seeing it whole.” I didn’t know. I knew things—experiences—had a shape.

The first story I wrote for John Kouwenhoven’s creative writing seminar was not about my family, or was only obliquely. It was about me. Or it was about a young college girl named Gabriella, with a summer job as an artist in a small costume jewelry factory near home. I had had such a job.

After years as an ugly duckling, Gabriella has metamorphosed into a surprising beauty. She is not used to this, and acknowledges it only because the other women in the factory, already distanced by the advantage of her education, communicate it in cold, envious compliments that make her feel self-conscious and strange. She tries being friendly but they hold back, suspicious, and she grows increasingly isolated and lonely. Every day, her boss, divorced, in his fifties, comes by the little studio she works in alone to cheer her up. He takes her out to lunch. Then to dinner. In the dark, afterward, in the front seat of his parked car, he romances her. They never really make love, and he never presses her for surrender.

The romance lingers. Fall comes and she returns to college. Saturdays, he takes her on long drives into the country to see the changing leaves. He sends her flowers. He tells her he loves her. She loves him, too, a little. She feels safe in his kind of loving, but also vaguely beached in it, as if she is asleep, as if it is an endless summer from which nothing has stirred her. Her mother, who has watched her come and go in his big silver Cadillac, wonders what is going on between them. What is going on? Gabriella realizes that she doesn’t know and must at last confront him. He confesses he is impotent. He begs her not to leave him, but she does, renouncing his summer love, his passionless world of summer without end.

I called it “The Door Out of Innocence.” I suppose Mr. Kouwenhoven could see how, even for a girl’s story, it might fit into the master narrative of American coming-of-age fiction. Being discreet, he didn’t ask whether it had actually happened. I imagine there were a few laughs in the faculty lunchroom about the door not being opened quite wide enough. He gave it a B+.

I was encouraged. I dared to reach back now to the passionate depths of my childhood in Arizona, searching out the hidden roots of the life we were living at home, a life so hauntingly anguished and violent at times and yet so utterly frozen that none of us could look it in the face. I wrote about the squab farm. I told about my brothers’ beating. I wept. I seemed to write it, word by word, on my own body. But Mr. Kouwenhoven didn’t get it, just didn’t get it, he said. He pick-picked at little details. He gave a B-to an undigested bit of my soul.

Both stories—the second with more strategic and secret care—had to remain hidden from my parents, who would first have killed me and then killed each other if they’d known what I was doing. The whole idea of my writing, which to them meant prima facie the likelihood of revealing family secrets, threw them into a steely panic. Not just my father, an educated reader who theoretically knew that this was what writers did, but my mother too, who held with an even fiercer passion to the principle of omertà—the guarded and sacred silence of southern Italians surrounding all things within the walls of la famiglia.

And yet they did not ask to read what I wrote. Perhaps they were too self-absorbed, my father in bed more and more now, still structuring tragedy out of the mysterious catastrophes of his life-drama, my mother working hard toward her equivalency diploma, because something needed to be done—how else keep all this together—keep us in school? And there had always been a certain sacrosanctness in what took place between me and my teachers, which perhaps they preferred to guess than to know. But though it might be a long way off, what might someday land between covers was another matter, and I can remember the bizarre clash I had with my mother the day she found Ogden Nash’s Bad Parents’ Garden of Verse atop a pile of books about to go back to the library, and flew into a rage simply over the title.

So they helped me preserve my innocence for them. But I was not innocent, not in any of the ways they would have wanted me to be, and maybe not in any way. I hadn’t yet slept with anyone, of course, but I had wanted to, longed to, dreamed of doing it, many times. The confessional would have burned with my adulteries.

But my father had been right about keeping me at home: commuting to school and passing every night under his roof did hobble one’s love life. It hobbled one’s social life. I could see it quite easily from the college man’s point of view. Without a car, what was he supposed to do with a girl who lived in New Rochelle, New York, which was barely still in the state, for Chrissake? How was he supposed to get home once he got me there? He wouldn’t get me there. If I was lucky, he would drop me off at the 125th Street station about eleven and wait for the train, then see me onto it with a peck on the cheek, careful not to rouse himself before the lonely trip to upper Broadway. And he would not do this often.

But, oh, how they would murmur as I passed them on the mid-Broadway island, firing them a glance like Giovanni Verga’s hungry Lupa. Tom Galvin, a young college poet who made the Catholic students’ club one of his haunts, featured my flashing ankles in one of his poems, with a suggestion, perhaps, that I was a moving target, but I was impressed. He was a wonderful poet. He wrote incessantly, a model of dedication to the craft. Uncertainly half-Catholic, he was also a bit too professionally James Joyce with his wire-rimmed spectacles over his shortsighted eyes, having come to about chapter 4 in Stephen Dedalus’s struggle with writing and faith and sex. He actually invited me out one night, then took me to the railroad station in a taxi. On the way he placed his hand gently on my thigh. When I quivered, and asked him not to, part of me meant it. It was the part he heard.

“The elephant is slow to mate,” he muttered, in a considered, lapidary way, like a life sentence, staring at me as he withdrew his hand. I stared back into his glasses, a deer in headlights, a hurt, stung panic at my heart. “T. S. Eliot,” he said.

Well why didn’t I at least kiss him? I don’t know. I was scared, conflicted, a pagan little virgin. Vorrei e non vorrei. That terrible beautiful line in that cruel and beautiful opera, it had been written for me. I didn’t love Tom Galvin, and he hadn’t yet awakened any other recognizable passion. I could do nothing in cold blood, not even in cool blood, least of all chance my body to a stranger, a real person and not some phantasm I had cranked out of my own mental dreamstuff, someone who was not impotent, not impotent at all, but who knew just how and when to be kind.

My mother would have understood this keeping back, this fierce maiden integrity, from inside her own chaste-hearted shame. She might also have understood it from inside of my shame, knowing it to be different from hers, that it had always been different. But she had refused, and it had opened a new gulf between us. She had taken me to a doctor to treat an unaccountable pain at the tailbone end of my spine—a cyst, but he had not accurately diagnosed it, and had had me come back, night after night. His nurses applied compresses to it and warm, buzzing electrical devices, but the pain went obstinately on and got worse. One evening after an appointment, when I was waiting for my mother to fetch me home, he surprised me, sternly announcing, “No more of this, young lady, let’s see what’s really wrong with you.” The nurses had gone and we were alone. He had me partly undress. He roughly bullied me into the examining stirrups and explored me savagely with his hand.

I didn’t know it was criminal to do such a thing, alone like that in his office, I knew only, as soon as outrage had cleared my mind of the sheer blackness of terror, that it was wrong. I had stupidly complied. But then he was a doctor—what was I to do? How could he have done this? And when my mother had finally come and seen me white and terrified, she was furious. But furious was not enough. Why hadn’t she killed him when I told her? Why instead had she fled with me in baffled anger as if she flinched from it—she, who had always been so righteous and bold? Why hadn’t she killed him? I myself wanted to kill him. Why hadn’t she protected me?

Yet as if my mother’s ethic of self-blame had passed into me, I drowned and denied what had happened, telling no one. Not Ann, not Judy, not even my two best college friends, Anita and Joanne.

They were Italian girls, like me—full-blooded Sicilians, actually—and like me they commuted to school, though by subway from Queens. Intimate as we had become, I felt daunted, subdued, by their superb sense of maiden intactness. Such magnificent creatures!—always perfectly groomed, perfectly turned out, an inspiration to be beautiful whether or not I was any match for their glory. Wherever they went—wherever we went, for we would often meet at lunchtime and spend the better part of the day together—heads would “swivel,” as Anita jokingly, even self-mockingly described it, to take in her sumptuous Lollobrigida body and dark, close crop of thick Lollobrigida curls, and Joanne’s astonishing aureole of insanely rose-colored hair. They considered me the brainy one of our peripatetic threesome, but we were still a threesome. Judy—now deep into the Greeks for her inspiration, and I think a little jealous that I had struck out for new territories of friendship on my own—called us the Thesmophoriazusae, for the women in Aristophanes’s comedy who forgather in honor of the Great Goddess and perform secret, feminist sex-rites.

She was not far off, for it was surely their Sicilian devotion that got me to the Catholic Newman Club, to all those lunch hours and soirées where they knew they could legally flirt with Irish and Italian sons of immigrants under the chaplain’s benevolent eye. What kept me going there, besides Tom Galvin and a few wary flirtations of my own, was something, some stirring thing I began to sense in Father Daly’s homilies on Christ’s collective body, as a politics of mutual responsibility. But being friends with Anita and Joanne was not an inspiration to intellectualize one’s spirituality. It was a little, in fact, like discovering a couple of my Spagnola aunts in a time warp. That same self-drama, that hair-trigger laughter and tears and love of glamorous clothes and beautiful men and the romance of romance. That attitude. I loved it—I shared it—knowing we were a bit anomalous, even a bit scandalous, in the world of understated black-garbed Barnard feminism.

The in-betweenness of commuting was some excuse for this half-defiant, girlish alienation, but it was only partly to blame. It may be true that alienation, however expressed, was part of the essential gestalt of fifties Beat. Yet we understood without having to speak of it that this too, somehow, was a subculture not ours to claim, that there was something in it in fact that despised us a little, and, for us, in return, something just that too much too strenuous in trying to be what the college seemed to want to make us—oh-so-worldly-wise, and if politically conscious, conscious with a secret air of being safely monied and above all harm, above all risk.

With more personal ambition than either of my friends, less interest in hurrying to be manned and married, I acutely felt the halfheartedness of all but a few of my teachers toward my future, and returned it. Only Eleanor Tilton, under whose tutelage I had deepened and grown as a student of nineteenth-century literature, seemed to intuit that something Italian in my makeup deserved cultivating. It was she who had introduced me to the Sicilian Verga, author of La Lupa, had watched me flower as I had discovered D. H. Lawrence discovering and so powerfully translating him, so magically interanimating my two literary worlds of language and longing. She never told me she disapproved of my friends—she was above such sanctimony. Yet for her, perhaps, as for other would-be mentors, though it might be differently signified, there was an Italianness to approve and disapprove. There was Maristella Bové, Barnard’s new director of Italian studies, for example, a recent aristocratic emigree and paragon of cultural refinement, an Italian Ingrid Bergman compared with my flamingly full-breasted Mae West girlfriends.

But Miss Tilton was not so taken with “class”—in any sense—as to miss how easily the binaries of Italy north and south and pre- and postwar immigration might caricature such difference. She knew I was already studying Italian, learning to read it and even speak it with a quick comprehension and fluency that astonished even me. She spoke to me one day of a visiting foreign student taking a history degree on a special fellowship from the University of Rome: “I think you’ll like her.” She may even have said, “I think she will be good for you,” though I have possibly imposed that bit of conscious didacticism. My guess is that she saw no swifter route to the completion of my education, for Margherita Repetto was an active socialist, daughter of a Socialist member of the Italian Parliament.

We arranged to meet. No one answered when I knocked on her dorm room door, but then I heard a chanted “Allo!” from the far end of the hallway, followed by Margherita’s little body, wobbling with precarious speed and virtually invisible behind a tall stack of books—the entire holdings of Butler Library on Hart Crane, as it turned out. A midterm paper, she explained breathlessly. I was awed. A small bouquet of flowers, a handful of the first anemones of the season, was trapped in one fist, her room key in the other. She managed to negotiate the lock without my help, which she brusquely refused.

Inside, she dumped the books on her bed. Filling a glass of water from the sink, she placed the flowers in it atop her bureau, and pausing reflectively, gazed wistfully into their great black eyes, saying: “Flowers are so curious—so strange.” I cannot explain what this phrase wrought in me, except that she uttered it in such deliberate, studied English, striking such a tone of old and weary grief, that I somehow saw those astonishing clusters of red and purple velvet as I had never seen them. For this I immediately loved her—for what seemed to me a tragic wisdom, that could summon such fugitive beauty out of a distantly remembered sadness and joy. I longed at once for the love and approval she would never return, the love, the approval, of the Italy of my desire.

Damian—Damiano—seemed to appear in my life, perhaps just before Christmas in the middle of my senior year, like a darkly radiant annunciatory angel.

It was the day I gave my first recitation of Italian poetry, and opened for myself a fleeting career acting classical literary theater at Columbia’s Casa Italiana. The poem was a medieval lyric by Iacopono da Todi—a long, dire, vivid melodrama of the Crucifixion, operatic, full of multiple, anguished voices and images of dark passionate suffering. I loved it. I sang it. I had found Italian. And, finding it, I had somehow found my own voice.

I could see him at a small distance afterward, fixing me from head to heel with the haunting, unblinking onyx gaze of a crucified Christ. He brought me a small glass of red wine. “You were very good,” he said.

He was tall, taller than any man in my life had ever been. He towered over me, olive and dark and seductive, a long Valentino metaphor for Romance languages. This was in fact his field. He was brilliant in it, as I discovered, unconscionably, egotistically so, very near to finishing a master’s degree on existentialism in three literatures. He was also Napoletano, born and raised in Mussolini’s Italy in a village near the historic town of Caserta, scant miles from my father’s Sperone. His own father was gone—I was never sure where. Venezuela, was it? Or some other country of the dead? His mother, migrating to America after the war, had raised and educated him and his younger brother on her own. He later showed me photographs of himself before he’d left Italy, wearing the dark shirt and short Italian pants of a boys’ paramilitary brigade. Even at thirteen there were those same deep, pinioning eyes, staring angrily into the camera against the sun, refusing to be blinded.

Perhaps I could only adore a man as brilliant as Damian, and as cruel, as careless of his power. I didn’t understand this then, I simply adored him, with a sudden, fatal, hungry, inexorable passion. When he came to see me play Nerina in Tasso’s Aminta and told me, my face still flushed with delight and triumph, that my interpretation had been ravishing, yes, but deeply flawed, when he said I’d carried off my role as a confessing adulteress in Machiavelli’s Mandragola like a slut to the manner born, when he told me I was stupid as a cow, when he said I was the most rational and intelligent woman he’d ever known—I loved him because of this, because he could be so suddenly, unbearably cruel, so unbearably kind. Because of his unspoken Italian certainty that I would suffer—that I would gladly die—for him.

And I would have, if perhaps not gladly. I imagined it. I found myself composing Romantic verse drama, captivated at the time by the lurid poetry of Shelley’s Cenci, staging my own self-murder in the suicide of my heroine, flinging myself down a granite staircase in an ecstasy of self-heroicizing self-surrender.

His mother was as tall as he, a warrior woman. She had his eyes. She adored him, too, it was plain, plain as the incestuous terror in those eyes the moment he brought me to meet her. She thought I might actually have won him, so proud she stupidly imagined me, and yet in truth so secretly trembling in his power. Why did this twisted labyrinth of operatic Italian emotion make me feel so alive? I felt alive. I did my best work ever. Surges of genius flashed through me like galactic implosions. I felt tremendous, invincible. And yet tragic, tragic as the Lady of Shalott with the curse upon her. I wept inwardly, in a fury of baffled freedom.

Spring came. On the great bluffs overlooking the Hudson, Damian kissed me, amid the unspeakable spring beauty of the Cloisters. He told me he loved me. I so longed to believe it, so believed it, that I could not see for the cloud of unknowing that wrapped my sight, that made the beauty of the lady in the great medieval tapestries there, the chaste and beautiful lady and the whitest white unicorn in the universe, swim before my eyes amid the green, the jasmine green of the world.

And when he took me to a romantic senior dance and, afterward, pressing me down on the bed in his room and, lifting my soft yellow gown, said, “Let us do this now, let us finally do this”—and I had wanted to, yes, but not now, not yet, vorrei e non vorrei—and he had stood over me as I lay there on the edge of the bed and lifted me roughly by the thighs and pushed himself as far as his first hard thrust would go till I cried in pain—I had welcomed him in the surrendering agony of my mind.

Damian left for Paris the August after I graduated. A year passed, some of it in misery, before I followed him to Europe.

It is a long time, a year—long enough to bury your heart like a bone in the garden, long enough to imagine it bloom again.

Long enough to transform the book of loving-to-know into the book of love.