Читать книгу Under the Rose - Flavia Alaya - Страница 21

1

Perugia, October 1957. I had been nearly a month in Italy, and until this singularly fateful afternoon had felt nothing like such joy—not since the S.S. Giulio Cesare had docked in the Bay of Naples and dropped me for the first time in the hard lap of my father’s homeland. Oddly, I can remember all the prescient little details, racing to the headquarters of the University for Foreigners, darting up and down the city’s toothy hills in my new Italian heels, muttering a girlish prayer: Please God, don’t let me be late again, not for Luigi Barzini.

And those miraculous new shoes!—carved by some ingenious Italian sculptor out of a deliciously edible-looking buttercream-color leather, unbelievably sexy, unbelievably soft. Leaving aside the fact that I could have run an Olympic 100-meter dash in them, they did things for my legs, a fact duly confirmed by the owner of a white Fiat who slowed down just long enough to pronounce judgment. It didn’t even occur to me at the time that I wasn’t supposed to love it. No macho had ever filled me with such a sudden bliss of entitlement, a conviction that all this—all this Italy—belonged to me.

Damian had met me when I’d arrived in September. He had actually come to the pier like a facsimile of an eager lover. For months I had longed to see him. For more months I had dreaded it, for weeks, for days, up to the very dawn the ship pulled into the harbor and slumped shuddering into the pier. But there had been nothing to dread. I had instantly and unequivocally detested the sight of him.

Fever blurs the scene, mitigating my indifference. I had caught the Asian flu—the asiatica—on board. Tiny Santina Dimichino, my father’s cousin, eyes shaded by an elegant gray Borsalino, is waving a huge white handkerchief and crying, “Flavia! Flavia!” my name suddenly new and beautiful in her mouth. Damian fades away, there is barely time for me to smell the salt of the Santa Lucia harborside or take in the bay awash in morning light, before Santina and I and cousins Gino and Maria, and a poor driver friend who has lent the car and is glumly crushed against the steering wheel, are all of us squeezed like bread stuffing into a tiny Cinquecento for the trip to their apartment, and I understandably go blank.

By the time I come awake, the city is gone, and I am in my Zi’ Irena’s garden in Striano, thirty miles away. Two beautiful cousins, Alfonso and Carlo, are taking turns plucking ripe purple figs from the orchard and feeding them to me from their hands. Striano is a teeming world of cousins, many of them young, some of them the handsomest beings I have ever seen. But also the poorest. My cousin Anna, Zi’ Maria’s daughter, is ashamed to expose her poverty to me, thinking I will judge it. She cries, “Ah, Flavia, come siamo combinati!—how we live!”—blushing as she leads me up the metal stairway to a makeshift apartment where five of them struggle to live in a drying room of the family’s old spaghetti factory. They are kind. Unbearably so, my every wish their command. But I know that, with my soft American face unmarked by suffering, what they feel cannot all of it be love.

So it was that after about three weeks with my cousins I had been rather glad to come away to Perugia, where new Fulbright grantees had been invited to be prepped for what was, sub rosa, really a year’s duty as paradiplomats for the Eisenhower State Department. And so it was that on this strangely sublime October day I had already been in the hilly Umbrian city a week—time enough to know I would always be late for afternoon lectures, time enough to have learned to sprint up those last few marble steps and, with my aerobic heart still pounding, let the blinding shade of the portico chill the sweat off me before I made my red-faced entrance through the front door of the lecture hall.

But even as the familiar cool grabbed my hair, I could hear from deep inside an echoing riff of American laughter, unmistakable as bebop. In the frame of the great door, space and time collapse. My face abruptly meets his face shining above the thick black pillar of his cassock. Somebody shouts, “Canceled!” and he fractures the news back at us like some bad archangel: “Barzini has died! Barzini is risen! Barzini will come again!” Laughing, laughing with relief—for I have not missed the lecture after all—I let the momentum pivot me into reverse again. Somebody says, “Meet Father Browne.” Our eyes join in a sudden clearing of haze.

I did not know I would love him. I thought I still loved someone I had left behind me. That day meant nothing more to me then than a reclaimed afternoon, a few sunny hours to sip vermouth under a yellow umbrella, to sail like an American fleet out to the Corso and into the bay of the piazza, Father Browne and the three of us: a young California composer named Paul Glass going to Milan, Anna McGill, a weaver from Milwaukee going to Florence—and me, a master’s year in English and comp lit at Columbia behind me, taking my Fulbright to Padua to read literature and politics at the university.

This Cagney Irish priest named Browne was Father Henry J., a Catholic University professor on a research grant in immigration history, just arrived from New York. Paul had staked a personal and instant claim to him. I could see why: the movie star presence, the face a miracle of cunningless animal brightness like a feral child’s, the electric violence in his wonderful hair. He had a bristly military brush cut, black sketched with gray—more fur than hair, really—jump-starting from a sharp widow’s peak and surging back over that splendid head, which was set as squarely on his thick shoulders as a prizefighter’s. And he was funny. Before we’d even ordered our drinks he was off the runway like a Cessna in an updraft, everything Ful- or half-bright, the underbelly of every American careerist in Italy in his gunsights, soaring away as the laughter crashed. The timing infallible, one resistless jolt after another. My brain spun. I laughed as if he’d invented it, as if a depth charge were rupturing some deep archeology of Italian-woman seriousness crusted down in me like a buried sea of Sicilian salt.

He asked me if I was from New York, and still daubing my eyes with a fingertip, I nodded yes. “Well, actually from New Rochelle,” I corrected. His burst of laughter was ruthless—the stab-laugh of a comic with a ready punchline. His face came at me in a pitch of forehead that stopped at a pair of black eyebrows like skidmarks, tiny hairs at the tips seeming to sway like antennas. He croons: “Forty-five minutes from Broadway. . . . And oh what a difference it makes.” I hear myself say that I still go to the dentist in East Harlem. I hear him roar again. Everybody roars. He is on to me. When he asks, “Di dove?” in Italian, I know he means it just as Italians would: from where have my people come, from what inhospitable bony piece of southern mother-soil did they tear their roots? Mine is a New York story and he obviously loves it. And yet he seems also to love having me feel safe in his laughter, unraveling that old familiar worm of Italian girl-child shame like a knot. I notice that his eyes under that jagged fringe of eyelash break light to pieces. I beam him a reassuring smile. I see what a difference it makes, it says. I see what a difference it makes to know the difference.

He grins back. “Great teeth,” he says.

John, the love I had so ironically left behind me in New York, had so much wanted me not to leave him, had begged me not to. I had inescapably pictured his suffering a thousand times, the image of mine before he’d rescued me, hunting me down like the hound of heaven. Somewhere out on the Atlantic crossing, I thought, I must have swallowed his wounded eyes, and they were liquidating inside me now like capsules of cyanide.

He’d been a fellow student in the Columbia master’s program, a Greek American writing his thesis on Forster. When I thought of him, sometimes I’d think of A Passage to India too, of Forster’s lyrical digression on the Adriatic, the Mediterranean, on an Italy perfectly poised between East and West. It had seemed a promise of return somehow, a reference point of safety. But now I saw it had become a trick, a mental trick, an evasion, because sometimes in reality—if this were reality—I felt nauseously unbalanced, dazed, agoraphobic—missing to myself. As if I were here in Italy inside a dream somebody else had dreamed, moving against an architextile of incompatible centuries. I felt it now, even now, electroplated in the gold of this Perugian sunset, as if the four of us were huddled together at some twentieth-century mike, plugged into time like a wall socket, waiting to hear what we would say.

Father Browne said he was going to the Vatican Archives in Rome to look at U.S.-Italian immigration documents and “find out what those guys were really thinking about.” I felt the self-satirical bite of this and laughed, but I also found myself watching him as he spoke, as he stretched back against the rear legs of the café chair with the cassock buttons on his chest straining, and from time to time pushed his square jaw up and out, and then shoved a restless forefinger behind his stiff Roman collar and gave it a little tug. He whipped somehow into a flashback of growing up Irish in Hell’s Kitchen, as if a true historian had to start with Genesis, with the kid who played sandlot baseball with another kid on Tenth Avenue—a kid named Rocky Consaniero, with an eeeeaasy centerfield arm, who could throw you out on a base hit every time. Consanieeero, he said, dragging it like a poet.

“Baseball got you here?” Paul couldn’t believe it. He drove his hand through the tracks in his Santa Monica beach-bleached hair and went on about Vivaldi and opera. Anna followed, speaking out of her own cowl of dark hair like a sibyl, remembering the colors she used to go back to look at, again and again, among the Italian paintings in the museum. And now—“Look at this,” she pleaded, waving her arm as if she were lifting a curtain off the piazza’s palette of sunset on old stone. A flash of longing to paint came over me. For a drowning instant I was almost dizzy with the memory of my own hands.

But Father Browne had suddenly turned the conversation to food, and was amazingly describing his first Italian family dinner—“eucharistic,” he called it, uttering the word with a disbelieving awe. I too am there, but the family he is describing evanesces, and instead I see my father, rising with imperious, almost fearful dignity to carve the roast, gracefully moving the knife against the whetstone of the long sharpening steel, swinging them across each other with a frightening skill, a rasping and hypnotic sound, slicing the air repeatedly in a movement swift as light. I feel the last bliss drain from my body, down my legs and through my beautiful buttery yellow heels, in a sudden insane bafflement as to what has bracketed this place to my life.

Absurdly comes that unbidden visitation of love again in a line of poetry: Amor che a nullo amato amar perdona. . . . I knew my Dante now. Long passages by heart. This is what his Francesca had said: the law that had commanded her to love her lover, Paolo, forever—the law of love. But I had known it, it seemed, all my life.

The priest with the golden eyes cannot read the drowning message in my mind. I see him again, envy him, connecting this, this dream, with everything he has left behind him. I think you could trace a perfect line, like a cord, running from this piercing quattrocento sunset beauty back to his mean Hell’s Kitchen streets.

I do not know him. I do not know him at all.

Luigi Barzini did come again, days later, bringing his famous bittersweet take on Italians, the one he would eventually make a book of, imaging his countrymen with a eye to the future cultural export trade. I did not think he was speaking to me. He breezed in and out, taking his aura with him, leaving us to the mercies of a windy academic from the Education Ministry who led us down the byzantine byways of the Italian university system for more than an hour.

I was downhearted. But I was not always downhearted, and didn’t always resent our forced introductions to an Italian culture I barely recognized. And I didn’t always injure these magnificent October days in Umbria, stringing themselves so obligingly out on the week like glistening blue beads, with my little grief. We could still stroll along a Corso backlit in orange autumn sunsets, as the sun-warmed streets turned cooler and the lecture halls colder, as the lectures on Christian democracy got more and more drowsy. Father Browne could still make us laugh. On good days I could even make him laugh, as in the class in conversational Italian where I needled him about his Church Latin accent, and he beamed as if I were finally catching on to the basic malicious subtext of human relations.

There was this funny thing about him, that he had at least ten years on most of the scholars in the Fulbright cohort, yet lacked our pseudocynical boredom, pentup, postadolescent offspring of Beat that we were, trying to pretend to be above shame at being citizens of the country Italians called “Usa,” in a word that was the third-person singular of the verb to use, above berating our national psychoses around McCarthyism and Little Rock, our mindless devotion to psychoanalysis and Valium, as if we shouldn’t have to be accountable for them. Father Browne was no chauvinist. But his peculiar fractured reverence not only closed the age gap between us, it introduced something harder to name. Was it that sense of history? That urgency, not precisely missionary, to engage the world? He seemed to have an expectancy about him, a sense of the future along with the past, that made him seem younger than we were, as if he had actually swum out ahead and was lying poised and smiling out there on some big cresting wave about to break.

He joined Paul and me at the National Gallery one day, split between flattering my best Barnard art history spiel with his attention and skewering the other Americans wandering through the galleries saying immortal things. Paul stood in front of the paintings he liked, taking deep, meditative breaths, as if Pinturicchio could be inhaled like a reefer, until he finally lagged so far behind that we lost him. When he didn’t appear outside, we decided he could catch up with us at the café.

It proved a major move: the first time I had walked with Father Browne alone, woman with cassocked priest, on an Italian street. We were unavoidably self-conscious and took an outdoor table in spite of the chill in the air. “Macy’s window,” he said. “He can’t miss us.” Neither could anybody else, and that was the point.

“So tell me about John,” he coaxed, when the waiter had served the Campari. My father used to say, quoting his mother, “The tongue goes where the tooth hurts.” I didn’t need much coaxing. I fumbled in my bag for the cablegram that had demanded I come home, wired to me aboard ship. The paper, so tightly folded for so long, had already begun to crack at the seams. He opened it as gingerly as an archivist, then passed it back. “Sounds ambivalent to me.”

“You don’t know John,” I said. He hadn’t seen the letters. Pleading, menacing. Four of them.

He drove an incredulous hand through the electric fur of his hair. “Does he have any idea what this means to you?”