1
Anyway, it’s always like that. You do your best to keep to yourself and then one fine day, without knowing how, you find you’re caught up in something that sweeps you along with it to the bitter end.
Personally, I would happily have stayed out of the race. I’d known all kinds of people, some who’d reached the finishing post and others who hadn’t even gotten off the starting block, and sooner or later they all ended up equally dissatisfied, which is why I’d come to the conclusion that it was better to stay on the sidelines and just observe life. But I hadn’t reckoned with being desperately short of money one rainy day at the beginning of spring last year. All the rest followed naturally, as these things do. Let me make it clear from the start that I don’t blame anyone, I was dealt my cards and I played them. That’s all.
And this bay really is magnificent. It’s overlooked by a Saracen fortress on top of a rocky promontory that juts out into the sea for a hundred yards or so. Looking toward the coast, I can see the dazzling spread of beach and the green of the low Mediterranean vegetation. Farther on, a three-lane highway, deserted at this time of year, tunnels into a chain of rocky hills glittering in the sun. The sky is blue, the sea clear.
I couldn’t have chosen better, truth be told.
* * *
I’ve always loved the sea. There must have been something in my boyhood tendency to linger on beaches that reflected the impulse that had led my grandfather to spend his youth on Mediterranean merchant ships before landing in Milan, that gloomy city, and cramming an apartment full of children. I knew this grandfather. He was a gray-eyed old Slav who died surrounded by a large number of descendants. The last words he managed to utter were a request for a little seawater, and my father, as the eldest son, left one of my sisters to mind his stamp shop and set off for Genoa in his car. I went with him. I was fourteen, and I remember we didn’t say a word for the whole of the ride. My father never talked a lot, and since I was already giving him a few problems with my lack of progress at school, it was in my best interests to keep quiet. It was the shortest of my trips to the sea, just long enough to fill a bottle, but also the most pointless, because by the time we got back Grandpa was almost completely unconscious. My father washed the old man’s face with water from the bottle, but Grandpa didn’t seem to particularly appreciate it.
A few years later, the fact of the sea being so close was one of the things that drew me to Rome. After my military service, I was faced with the problem of what to do with my life, but the more I looked around, the less I was able to come to a decision. My friends had very clear ideas—graduate, get married, make money—but that was a prospect that repelled me. These were the years when money mattered even more than usual in Milan, the years that saw a kind of nationwide conjuring trick also known as the Economic Boom, and in a way I too benefited from it. It was at this time that a medical-literary magazine for which I occasionally wrote a few well-judged but badly paid articles had the opportunity to open an office in Rome and I was hired as their correspondent.
While my mother used every argument she could to prevent my departure, my father said nothing. He’d silently watched my attempts at social integration, comparing them with the successes of my elder sisters, who at a young age had married white-collar workers, perfectly respectable men, and, as I had done during that trip to get water for my grandfather, I took advantage of his silence to keep quiet myself. He and I never talked. I don’t know which of us was to blame—I don’t even know if you can talk about blame here—but I always had the feeling that if I’d confronted him directly I would somehow have hurt him. The war had sent him a long way away without sparing him any of its well-known peculiarities. Nobody to whom a thing like that happens can return home exactly as he was before. In spite of his proud silence, it always seemed as if he was trying to make us forget something, perhaps the fact he’d come home a shattered man and had made us watch his big body writhing as the electric shocks shuddered through it. Anyway, that’s how he was, and when I was a boy I could never forgive him for his unheroic profession, his love of order, his excessive respect for inanimate things, not understanding what terrible destruction he must have witnessed to then set about repairing an old kitchen chair with infinite patience on the very day he came back from the war. And yet, even now, after almost thirty years, there’s still something of the soldier about him, the patience, the tendency to hold his head high, the habit of not asking questions, and even now, if he’d given me nothing else, I’ll never forget the fearlessness I felt as a boy walking by his side. Because, even now, the thought of my father’s stride is the one thing more than any other that immediately takes me back to my childhood, and even now, even in the green expanse surrounding me, I can return as if by magic to his side, remembering his soft, dusty stride, apparently impervious to fatigue, the stride of those long marches as a soldier, the stride that one way or another he’d somehow managed to bring back home with him.
So I set off for Rome, and everything would have gone perfectly if my father, quite unexpectedly forgoing his own pride, hadn’t decided to go with me to the station and stand waiting on the platform until the train left. The wait was long and unbearable. His big face was red from the effort of holding back the tears. We looked at each other in silence, as usual, but I realized that we were saying good-bye, and all I could do was pray for the train to leave and put an end to that heartrending look I’d never seen in his eyes before. There he stood on the platform, lower than me for the first time ever, so low that I could see how sparse his hair had become as he constantly turned his head to glance at the signal light at the end of the track. His big body was motionless, and he stood with his legs wide apart as if preparing to receive a blow, his hands like weights in the pockets of his overcoat, his eyes moist and his face red. And just as I was at last realizing that it meant something to be the only son, just as I was about to open my mouth and yell to him that I was getting off the train and that we would find a way to work things out without destroying our lives, the train gave a little lurch and began moving. And so, once again in silence, I was wrenched from him. I saw his big body give a start when the train moved. Then I saw him grow smaller the farther away I got. He didn’t move, didn’t make a gesture. Then he vanished from sight completely.
* * *
My period of respectability didn’t last long. I was dismissed after a year, although, to be honest, it could have happened even earlier. The small Roman office was the last asset to be liquidated before the magazine closed down, along with the boom that had given birth to it. The place where I worked, drumming up a little advertising for the magazine and occasionally writing a few articles to indulge the medical profession’s unfathomable fondness for literature, was a room filled with furniture upholstered in red damask in a neo-Renaissance villa just beyond the wall along the Tiber.
The owner was Count Giovanni Rubino di Sant’Elia, a distinguished man in his fifties with a nonchalant and somewhat affected manner. Distant at first, almost as if he came into my office only to open the French windows that looked out on the garden and allow me to breathe in the scent of his lilacs, he ended up spending more and more time in the armchair in front of my desk and engaging me in conversations that became more familiar in tone as his true financial situation was revealed. When he told me he was completely ruined, we decided we could be on a first-name basis.
He lived with his wife, a plump blonde, disorientated by her husband’s straitened circumstances, in the back part of the house, opening the door only to the baker’s boy, and ever since she’d opened up one day only to be confronted with some fellow who had then confiscated the magnificent gilded table in the drawing room, I’d been obliged to play the part of their somewhat bumbling secretary. But I was glad to do it. Especially for him. I liked seeing him come into my office, smooth the gray hairs at his temples with his hands, and jerk his elbows so that the cuffs of his spotless shirt shot out from the sleeves of his jacket. “So what are we doing, working?” he would say. Then I would put the cover on the typewriter and take out a bottle. He never talked, as a Milanese would have, about his financial problems, only about pleasant things—aristocrats and celebrities and, above all, women and horses—and sometimes telling quite risqué jokes with a gleam in his eye.
When summer arrived, we got in the habit of moving into the drawing room, and there, when the sun retreated from that part of the house, the two of us surrounded by walls that bore lighter patches where the furniture had been removed, the count would play his Steinway grand and I would sprawl on the last remaining couch and listen to him. And every afternoon, as soon as I heard those first notes, I would telephone a nearby bar, order some cold beer, and join him. There he would be, wearing an old silk dressing gown, hopelessly carried away. He would dredge up his repertoire, old songs I’d heard from my mother, tunes by Gershwin and Cole Porter, but, above all, an old American song called “Roberta.” Sometimes, we would sing together.
Copyright © 2016 by Bompiani / Rizzoli Libri S.p.A., Milano
Translation copyright © 2021 by Howard Curtis
Foreword copyright © 2021 by André Aciman