Before Fernando returned to Venice, we had scribbled a time line of sorts, establishing priorities and settling on definitive dates by which everything would be accomplished. It was he who thought it best to sell the house immediately rather than rent it for a while, to wait and see. Sell the car, too, he had said. And the few pieces of good artwork, the furnishings. I should come to Italy with only those things that were absolutely indispensabili. I balked until I remembered the talk I’d already had with myself about “house, fancy car, etc.” Still, I thought him callous, talking as he did about the house as though it were only a pretty container in which I would wait until it was time to go, a nicely decorated launchpad. But, also, I remembered another talk I’d had with myself after knowing Fernando only a few days. He needed to lead.
I already knew how to lead. For better and for worse, I had always been more than ready to carve away at life whenever the fates left me a little room. But he had been a sleepy observer of his life, watching its events and embracing them in a kind of passive obedience. He said that telephoning me that afternoon when we first saw each other in Venice and, more, chasing me back to America were among the first acts of sheer will he’d ever dared to undertake. Fragile, I think. There is a new gossamer-thin self-awareness about him, and Fernando needs desperately to be in charge. So be it. As much as I know how to lead I know how to follow, when I trust someone. But I know, too, that the following sometimes chafes.
“Let’s just begin at the beginning,” said he who’d lived his most of his life in two apartments on an island less than a mile wide and seven miles long, said he who’d gone to work in a bank at age twenty-three when what he really wanted was to fly airplanes and play the saxophone. Yet, unsolicited, his father had secured a post for him and then laid out a new suit and shirt and tie on his bed, new shoes on the floor below it, and told Fernando they’d be waiting for him at the bank at eight the next morning. He went. And he goes there still. It was curious, his telling me to be a beginner when so many things in his life would remain exactly as they were. Or would they?
And so I had to decide what would go over the sea and what would stay, and the most puzzling things made the short list. A small oval table, black, marble-topped with ornate carved legs; nearly a hundred crystal wineglasses (going to the kingdom of hand-blown glass!); too many books, too few photos, fewer clothes than I thought I would take (the waitresses in the café were presented with a life’s worth of Loehmann’s and Syms’s final markdowns); an old Ralph Lauren quilt; a set of antique sterling flatware (packed and shipped separately for reasons of security and which never arrived in Venice); and pillows, dozens of small, less small, tasseled, corded, ruffled, chintz, silk, tapestry, velvet pillows, like so many pieces of so many places where I’d lived. Small evidences of past lives, I thought. Proof of my well-decorated nests. Were they, perhaps, to cushion my landing?
Much of the rest, I divvied up into small legacies. Sophie was transforming a spare bedroom into an office; hence, she got the French desk. I knew my friend Luly wanted the baker’s rack, and so we stuffed it into the backseat of her car one evening. There were many such scenes. And rather than being sad at parting with so much, I found my new and relative minimalism exhilarating. I felt as though I’d weeded, scrubbed, dug in the earth clear down to China.
My waiting days were full. The café in the morning, writing in the afternoon, back to the café for final prep. I fitted in meetings, way out on the godforsaken edges of the city, with the Italian consulate, which comprised a battered old wooden desk, an older Smith Corona portable, and an older yet palermitana—a woman from Palermo—the wife of the insurance agent in whose office the consulate was situated. La signora was aubergine-haired, thick at her middle, and had spindly legs. Her fingernails were painted bright red, and she sucked at cigarettes in a hungry, hollow-cheeked way. She somehow pulled the smoke up into her nose and into her mouth at the same time, then tilted her head back and sent the last wisps of it curling upward, all the while holding the smoldering thing between those red-tipped fingers and up close to her cheek. She whispered a lot. It was as though her husband—two yards away and seated at a huge formica desk—shouldn’t be privy to our discourse. She pecked away on the Smith Corona, preserving my life’s story on sheaves of official paper provided by the Italian government.
My personal data, my motive for moving to Italy, testimonies of my free and unmarried state and my upright citizenship, the size of the bankroll with which I would enter my new country, premarital documents to satisfy the state, premarital documents to satisfy the church—all were transcribed. It was a work that might have been accomplished in less than forty efficient minutes, but the lady from Palermo saw fit to extend the task over four full-morning congresses. The signora wanted to talk. She wanted to be sure, she whispered through her smoke, I knew what I was doing. “What do you know about Italian men?” she challenged, from under her dark-shadowed, half-closed eyes. I only smiled. Miffed at my silence, she typed faster and stamped the papers viciously, repeatedly, with the great inked seal of the Italian state. She tried again. “They’re all mammoni, mama’s boys. That’s why I married an American. Americans are less furbi, less cunning,” she whispered. “All they want is a big-screen television, to play golf on Saturday, go off to Rotary Club on Wednesday, and to watch, once in a while, when you’re dressing. They never complain about food as long as it’s meat and it’s hot and it’s served before six o’clock. Have you ever cooked for an Italian man?,” she whispered more loudly.
As her inquiries became more intimate, she typed and stamped more furiously. She told me to leave my money in an American bank, to put my furniture in storage. I’d be back within a year, she said. She saved for last her story of the Illinois blonde who divorced her handsome politician husband to marry a Roman who already had a wife whom he kept in Salerno and, as it turned out, a Dutch boyfriend to whom he made monthly visits in Amsterdam. I paid her arbitrary and exaggerated fees, took my thick, perfectly executed portfolio, accepted her airy Marlboro-scented kisses, and drove away, wondering about this compulsion some women seemed to have about saving me from the stranger.
The evenings I spent almost always alone, in a soft sort of idleness. Before leaving the café, I’d pack up some small choice thing for my supper and be home by eight. I’d pull Fernando’s same old woolen undershirt, still unwashed, over my nightgown, light a fire in one room or another, and pour a glass of wine. Looking for that same good sensation of having weeded, scrubbed, and dug clear down to China, which I’d earned from sorting through my material cache, now I wanted to look at things more spiritual than silver teapots and armoires. I wanted to be ready for this marriage.
I challenged ghosts, looking backward into long-ago shadows lit with old, strangely palpable tableaux. I could see my grandmother’s sweet, teary eyes and the two of us kneeling by her bed to say the rosary. I always finished before she finished because I skipped every third bead. She knew, but she never scolded me. I learned about mystery from her. Or maybe it was that mystery was as natural and easy for both of us as it was to weep or weed the scrawny patch of hollyhocks and zinnias against the shed out back. It was easy to walk down to Rosy’s or to the coffee lady’s, up the three steep steps and into Perreca’s for two loaves of bread—one round crunchy loaf for supper, one round crunchy loaf for the block-and-a-half walk back home. She was contained, closed even, to most others, but together my grandmother and I would tell secrets. When I was still too young to really understand, she told me about her little boy.
He was five, I think, or perhaps younger, and each morning she would awaken him before the rest of the family, sending him to race across the narrow street in front of the house to the railroad tracks to gather coal for the old iron stove. Together, then, they would make a fire, set the coffee brewing and the bread toasting, before they tugged everyone else awake. One morning, as she stood at the kitchen window, watching him as she always did, a short line of B&O freight wagons came careening around the curve, way off schedule. Out of nowhere. Her screaming choked by hurtling steel, she watched the train crush her baby. Walking alone to where he lay, wrapping him in her skirts, she carried him home.
When my babies were born and, maybe even before that, I began to understand why she’d freely told me the story that she’d never been able to recount to anyone in the then half century since its happening. Of course, people knew the story, but no one had ever heard it from her. She’d lived through the most horrific of human injuries, and her telling of it was a legacy: it gave me a perspective that would serve me always, a prism through which I would examine my own injuries, to give their weight and their solution a just energy.
I had far too few days to spend with my grandmother. I used to wish I was older than all her children, older than she was, so I could take care of her. But she died alone in the early twilight of a December afternoon. Snow fell. And the rags of my illusion about family died with her. The pain of childhood loneliness still haunts me. But life was round, sweet during those flitting moments when my grandmother was holding my hand, whenever she was close enough for me to catch the scent of her. It is still.
In those solitary evenings by my fire I found finely spun threads, a pattern, my own story. I opened up the kind of memory that feels like a wistful hankering for something lost or something that never was. I think most of us have it, this potentially destructive habit of mental record-keeping that builds, distorts, then breaks up and spreads into even the farthest flung territories of reason and consciousness. What we do is accumulate the pain, collect it like cranberry glass. We display it, stack it up into a pile. Then we stack it up into a mountain so we can climb up onto it, waiting for, demanding sympathy, salvation. “Hey, do you see this? Do you see how big my pain is?” We look across at other people’s piles and measure them, shouting, “My pain is bigger than your pain.” It’s all somehow like the medieval penchant for tower building. Each family demonstrated its power with the height of its own personal tower. One more layer of stone, one more layer of pain, each one a measure of power.
I’d always fought to keep dismantling my pile, to sort and reject as much of the clutter as I could. Now, even more, I made myself look back straight into that which was over and done with, and that which would never be. I was determined to go to Fernando, and if there was to be some chance for us to take our story beyond this beginning, I knew I would have to go lightly. I was fairly certain the stranger’s piles would provide enough work for both of us.
Except with my children, I had little conversation with anyone during those last months in Saint Louis. It was my own counsel I wanted to keep. There were two exceptions. Misha, my friend from Los Angeles, came to visit, condemning my intentions to marry Fernando, placing them neatly into the ranks of midlife crisis. Milena saw things differently. My best friend, a Florentine who had been living in California for more than thirty of her then fifty-six years, Milena was characterisically severe and talked mostly with her eyes. Trying to read her by telephone was maddening. I would have to face her if I wanted to know what she was thinking about my news. I went to Sacramento to visit, and only then, sitting in front of those sharp, dark eyes, could I feel her acceptance. “Take it in both your hands and hold tight to this love. If it comes, it comes only once.”
When I told her about Misha’s cynical predictions, Milena called him a two-penny prophet whose oracles might even be true. And, with eyes looking far away, chin tilted up, mouth pursed, she banished Misha’s gloom with a wave of her beautiful brown hand. “If this is love, if there is even the possibility that this is real love, what do you care? What will it cost you to live it out? Too much? Everything? Now that it has presented itself to you, could you dare to imagine turning away from it for anything or anyone?” She lit a cigarette and pulled at it fiercely. She had already finished talking.
“Did it ever happen to you?” I asked. Her cigarette was nearly a stub by the time she answered.
“Yes, I think it did happen once to me. But I was afraid the sentiments would change. I was afraid of some form of betrayal and so I walked away. I betrayed it before it could betray me. And maybe I thought life inside that intensity would suffocate me. So I chose a sort of pleasant, safe compromise, an emotion less than passion and more than tolerance. Isn’t that what most of us choose?” she asked.
“I find the intensity beautiful. I’ve never felt more serene than since I met Fernando,” I told her. She laughed.
“You would be serene in hell. You’d start cooking and baking and redecorating. You are your own serenity. It didn’t come from nor can it go away because of Fernando,” she said. Milena’s cancer was diagnosed that next fall. She died on the night of Christmas, 1998.
Too quickly, too slowly, June arrives, and on the night before departure, Erich comes to stay with me. The house is as empty as a barn. On my bedroom floor we make two pallets of the packing quilts left behind by the movers, cover them with fresh sheets borrowed from Sophie, finish the last of the Grand Marnier, and talk away the night, liking the echoes that our voices make in the empty house. Next morning we say good-bye easily enough, having settled that he will come to Venice for the month of August. The shuttle driver, Erich, and two neighbors heave my baggage into the van. My new minimalism seems to have gained weight.
It takes half an hour to wheel and drag everything into the terminal and over to Alitalia. The overweight fees are too terrible to pay, and I wish I had heeded Fernando’s good advice about bringing only what is indispensabile. There is nothing to do but unpack and stage an auction right here in front of check-in.
The ticket agents unzip and unbuckle while I pull out treasures. I inaugurate the event. “Would anyone like this Limoges chocolate set?” Then, “Here’s a suitcaseful of hats, winter hats, straw hats, veils, feathers, flowers. Anyone for hats?” Soon there is a gathering of travelers and passersby, some just gaping, some happily, incredulously taking things off my hands. I am offering up a case of ’85 Chateau Montelena cabernet and a trunkful of shoes when the captain of my flight saunters by with his equipage. We recognize each other from different lives: his as an occasional guest at the café, mine as “that lady chef.” He stops. I offer an abridged recitation of my story and, after a short conference with an agent, he motions me to follow him, bending down to whisper, “Everything will be taken care of.”
A steward ushers me into the first-class waiting room, another sets down a tray with a bottle of Schramsberg Blanc de Noir and a flute. One pops the cork, pours, hands me the glass by its stem. I’m impressed. At twenty-second intervals I sip, fiddle with my shiny new Casedei sandals, take my hair down, and tie it back up again. I keep trying to remember to breathe. A woman of, perhaps, fifty, wearing a Stetson, alligator boots, and capri pants sits down next to me, avoiding the other six tenantless leather couches.
“Are you a woman in transformation?” she begins. I’m not sure I’ve heard her correctly and so I just continue to spit-polish my shoes while flashing her a smile of welcome.
She asks me again, and this time I have no choice but to believe my ears and so I answer her, “Well, I think we all are. I hope we all are. I mean, isn’t life, itself, transformation?” She looks at me with craven pity, tilting her head, preparing to illuminate my innocence, when I am rescued by an attendant and escorted up into the penthouse of the 747, far away from my original coach position.
I am fed and coddled by the staff and given much attention from the four Milanese businessmen who are my cabin companions. After everyone is settled down, chocolates and cognac duly consumed, the captain opens his microphone with wishes for all our sweet dreams. He adds that, in honor of the American woman who is going to Venice to be married, he will take the liberty of singing an old Roberto Carlos song. At thirty thousand feet, all husky and sensual, he croons. “Veloce come il vento voglio correre da te, per venire da te, per vivere con te. Fast as the wind I want to run to you, to come to you, to live with you.”
At sunrise I am still awake. The little cabin is washed in new June light, and I pretend to breakfast as though it is any normal morning. The balladeer masquerading as our captain announces our descent over Milan. I sit there in tremors, emotions tumbling, colliding, an icy free fall from one life into the next. I clutch the seat arms as though they and the quick hard beating of my heart could force the great hulking machine down faster or make it stay still. A last attempt at control, perhaps. I’d descended upon Italy so many times before, a traveler, a visitor with a return ticket. I have time only to wipe my face dry, to take my hair down and put it up one more time. We touch ground with the gentlest thump.