I woke up in Giancarlo’s apartment, his roommates noisy outside the door, the room bright and cruel. He was no longer in the bed next to me, but his cell phone’s buzz had woken me up. Without giving myself time to stop, I checked it, and the small gray screen showed a message from Laura. Once I’d opened one of Laura’s books to an inscription from Giancarlo, barely legible because of his small, cramped handwriting, the Italian full of jokes and abbreviations I didn’t fully understand, and it had occurred to me that this was what real intimacy would look like, a fully formed culture created between two people, a circle including just them. I didn’t read the message on the phone screen, instead I dressed quickly. I liked Laura, I thought. But I’d known exactly what I was doing the night before. I wanted to get out as soon as possible, before Giancarlo came back from wherever he was, mostly likely the bathroom, so I found my bag, dressed quickly, and opened the door, almost running by the doorway to the living room, where I could see Giancarlo’s roommates and maybe Giancarlo, but I didn’t look directly, just ran, now, out of the building, noticing as I did the enormous claws of the garbage truck cranes, shaped like a tulip’s petals, and the rounded forms of the dumpsters themselves, in their preschool colors, like the limbless creatures of some kinder planet.
I snuck into Loredana’s apartment quietly, exhaling only when I closed the door to my room, grateful I hadn’t run into her or Agnieszka wearing yesterday’s clothes, wondering if my absence the night before had been noticed. I lay on the bed, rubbing my face with both hands. Every thought, every physical sensation, filled me with dread. I had taken Giancarlo to an Irish bar full of tourists, had bought us round after round of gin and tonics. I had been sick of these buttoned-up Italians and their total control, I had wanted to see him loose, to push him into my arena, where the weapons were familiar. I supposed it had worked, had only the haziest memory of us supporting each other on the way back to his apartment, of the condom wrapper being tossed to the floor, of his sloppy expression as he came. I spent the entire day in bed, dozing on and off, grateful I had my own bathroom in which to vomit, spooning a pillow in my misery.
What was I doing in Rome? I hadn’t even seen my family. The call of endless motion had seemed so strong to me the night before, I had wanted to return to my routine of South America, shedding an old self as I left city after city. I knew that was why I had sought out, had slept with Giancarlo, this destructive tic was familiar to me, I’d done it to force myself to leave Rome. It was the same reason I’d cheated on my boyfriend I’d lived with in Oakland, it was to burn the bridges to this city, so that I would leave before I had the chance to get ensnared into a life.
Sometimes, in recent weeks, I had had the thought that 10 percent wasn’t that much. It wasn’t as huge as I had believed when I was twenty. But then if my life did continue, what did I have to show for my years? A life I’d destroyed for a few months of travel, and a failure to find an old man I had never met. The shape of my years since college was so unclear to me, I even found it difficult to answer when people asked me what place I had liked best from my travels. I panicked every time and gave a different answer, usually with the same explanation: it’s beautiful, and the food! But what was wrong with me that I’d now seen the better part of another continent and I couldn’t name a place I liked best, could only think of the eucalyptus groves on the bottom of the Berkeley campus, hundred-year-old trees with enormous twisting trunks where they usually found at least one suicide every year, hanging placidly among the branches. But these trees had always given me a feeling of peace, though I was supposed to hate eucalyptuses as a Californian, they’d been planted shortsightedly by settlers because they grew fast, but their wood was too splintery to build with, instead their leaves dropped oil that killed native species and contributed to the hill fires every October. But I couldn’t help it, I loved the trees in that grove around the creek, their leaves curved and elegant, reaching for the ground like thousands of elderly fingers. But this wasn’t really a place, it was a feeling, and one I’d been far away from for a long time.
That evening I heard a knock on my door, and Loredana’s voice asking if I would like to join her for a cup of tea. I’d been sleeping all day in sweatpants and a messy ponytail, but something about the formal phrasing of her request made me decide to change. I washed my face carefully in the shower, removing the mascara of the day before. I put on a raw silk top I’d bought from a Nepalese woman in Buenos Aires, the fabric soft but the stiff collar lending a bit of dignity, which I needed. I sat on the edge of the sofa, Loredana already perched with her antiquated posture in an armchair, and I resisted the urge to curl my feet up underneath me, to wrap myself into a ball. Loredana and I had only exchanged pleasantries while I was on my way in or out in the week and a half I’d occupied the room, had had a few small conversations during the handful of lunches we had shared. I had spent most of the days outside of the apartment or else in my room, unable to escape the feeling that the apartment was hers, and that I was intruding, knowing, also, this distance was so that when I left it would be easy.
Loredana handed me a cup of tea with a small smile, and asked if I was hungry. I shook my head, not lying, but dinner was funny here, unpredictable, I remembered once one of my aunts had offered me a single fried egg for the meal. The tea was very hot, but the first sip, chamomile, was immediately soothing to my stomach.
I wanted to tell you about my daughter, she began cautiously, and paused. I leaned forward and did my best to give her a small smile that I hoped wasn’t strained. Of course I’d been curious, but I could feel my heart rate increasing, even after all this time, I realized I’d been hoping she might never tell me, I still preferred to not learn about my mother as she’d been before. I took a deep breath, focused on letting it out of my body as slowly as possible. It was very difficult for me to conceive, Loredana began. She spoke with simple words, in a measured pace, as if her main aim was for me to understand her word by word, and not the larger meaning. When Benedetta was born, I was so grateful. She smiled. My husband was a very good man, but his family did not like me. I’m afraid they saw me as northern, cold. The town I came from was very small, so close to the border I’m not sure they even considered me Italian. They are still upset that I am in this apartment, as if I should have been removed when my husband passed away. I’m afraid they extended these feelings to Benedetta as well. Her grandparents openly preferred her cousins. The children picked up on this, of course, and used the information in a cruel manner. My husband would try to shield her from the worst, but they were his family, we still saw them frequently. I so badly wanted Benedetta to have a sibling, but the doctors had told me it would be very difficult, with some complications that had happened during her birth. She took a long sip of tea. We were not granted another child. I was so grateful for your mother. They were friends from almost the first day of school. Your mother was so full of light as a child, she invested Benedetta with some of it as well. The change was immediate, as if all Benedetta had been waiting for her whole, short life was a peer to tell her she was worthy. She even grew five centimeters that year. They used to come here every day after school, your mother said she liked the quiet. She had her sisters, her house was very loud, though I know for that reason Benedetta loved it there, and sometimes your mother would agree to go there since she knew Benedetta wanted to. They were the type of little girls who would stand as close together as possible, they always seemed to be whispering in each other’s ears and clutching each other by the arm. Most days they were here, and I would make them a little snack and they would play right there, she gestured to the space under the large window where the family pictures were arranged. I feel like most of their childhoods passed in this room.
You mother had a difficult time in middle school, Loredana continued. She became tempestuous, but they remained just as close. They would come in from school and I would hear your mother crying angrily, sometimes she even lashed out at Benedetta. I’ve wondered since then if this was a sort of . . . premonition, of the darkness that was to come. She was so moody, it wasn’t like anything I or my friends had experienced at that age. I noticed suddenly there were tears on my face, the silk of my sleeve darkened as I removed them. I was grateful when Loredana did not mention them.
All of that changed when the girls were fifteen, she continued. One day when Benedetta’s father was leaving his office a man he had never met walked right up to him and shot him, once in the head and twice in the chest. They call it an assassination, but he was murdered. It wasn’t an assassination, that makes it sound noble, for a purpose. He didn’t have anything to do with politics.
Things changed again between them after that. There was some ugliness, like I said, with my husband’s family over this apartment. Benedetta changed completely. Now it was she who grew silent. She never cried, not after the first week, but she didn’t leave the apartment for a month. Sometimes I would find her standing, staring into space, not at anything at all. When I would come upon her, she would move as if she had only paused for a moment, but I could see the sadness of her early childhood returning, I felt powerless to stop it. Now your mother became again full of light, as if the two girls always needed to stay in balance. It’s only because of her that Benedetta returned to school, your mother appeared at the apartment one morning and ensured that it happened, though Benedetta continued to move as if underwater. I’m sorry to say that I hadn’t noticed how long the absence had gone on. My grief was very hard to bear, you know. My husband was all the family I had, until Benedetta.
Your mother dragged Benedetta through her adolescence, I think only with the force of her own will. Benedetta tried to kill herself, the first time, when she was sixteen, and your mother lived here for months afterward, slept with her in her bed, refused to leave her side. By the time they started university things were better, they both stayed in Rome and saw each other frequently, though they were in different courses at different universities, they would still study together, often at this table. I know your mother was nervous about leaving her to go to the States for her graduate studies. But they were now twenty-two, and though Benedetta was never the same, she carried her sadness throughout these years, she was much better. She wanted your mother to go, wanted to visit her in California.
Benedetta was at your parents’ wedding, and when you were born, when your mother had her problems, she went over to try to help. But she came back quickly, she didn’t feel there was much she could do. She could only visit your mother for an hour a day, and you were just a baby. It was very hard for her, that visit. She had some good years after that, she was engaged for a while to a nice boy, she liked her work, she designed things on the computer for companies, but I’m not sure she ever recovered from losing the support of your mother. Even after she got out of the hospital, it was like your mother didn’t recognize Benedetta’s voice on the phone, she would tell me. It became too painful for her to call. She died ten years ago, she had some problems over the years, terrible boyfriends, but when she died it was intentional. Anyway, these are just the things I thought you might want to know. I have a few boxes of her things, Benedetta’s, some clothes and school papers and photos, and there’s a lot of your mother in there, if you would ever like me to show you.
In my bed that night, I realized for the first time in years I wanted to talk to my mother. There was information only she knew, had the two friends kept in touch throughout my childhood, had Benedetta been a presence that I’d forgotten? There had been cards and gifts that arrived for me from Italy on my birthdays, but I was a greedy child, my mother had so many relatives I’d never met, I never bothered to remember who had sent them. But now I wanted to know more about this fable that had ended so terribly for both little girls, wondering if it would ever stop, this tally of ways we had lost my mother.
The last time I’d seen my mother was on my twenty-fifth birthday, the last one I’d had before leaving California. I’d driven myself to her residential home in a nondescript suburb of Sacramento. Ever since I’d gotten a driver’s license at sixteen I’d visited her alone, continuing every other Sunday during middle school and high school, on every visit home from college after I’d left for Berkeley. Her eyes were unfocused, the light in them had dimmed, and somehow I could tell she had not been the one to brush her own hair. When I remembered the years of my childhood, I remembered the terrors of her mood swings, the volatility of life when we shared a home, the episodes that stalked the edges of my memory. But I also remembered her sharpness, how she could cut to the quick on things, whether it was in helping with my homework or analyzing the lazy neighborhood gossip. In my childhood I’d frequently caught my father giving her a frankly admiring look, and I could see how even casual acquaintances valued her wit, her intelligence. My mother’s sentences, at least when she was taking her recommended prescriptions, were always short and clipped, she exerted control over each syllable that left her mouth. Nothing was more important to her than her own intelligence.
She moved uncertainly, she said her medications made her dizzy, so when she was not sitting rigid in her chair, she moved like a small child just learning to walk, or a creature of the ocean floor, arms spread wide, motions fluid but uncertain. She had always been a careful dresser, wary of her figure, but since she’d gone to live at these facilities, she appeared to me in grays, her face and body bloated from the starches and lack of exercise. A tremor affected the bottom left quadrant of her mouth, and I remembered watching it on that afternoon, transfixed, braced for its next spasm as if for the aftershock of an earthquake. Other than this movement, though, her body was incredibly still, she sat straight in her chair across the table from me, her hands on both armrests of the chair as if strapped. I wondered if they ever were. My father had several times tried to tell me about the research he’d done into the places she stayed, how things were progressive and they didn’t do, he said carefully, things that had been done before to people like my mother, things I saw he couldn’t bring himself to tell me about, anyway things that might still have been done in Italy, so it was better she was here, he’d tried to explain this to her sisters, but I was already changing the subject because I didn’t want to hear, only wanted to leave the room and scream somewhere, but how could I, it was the suburbs, so instead I would hold my book closer to my face and put my iPod earbuds in. How grateful I’d been to the iPod in high school, the comfort of its white earbuds and their power to exclude the world. And so I would wait, wait until my father stopped talking about the things that were and were not happening to my mother while the words in my ears and the words on the page swam together into an incomprehensible soup, and I wondered, sometimes, if this is what it had felt like, those early years when she was changing.
Nothing in particular had happened on this last visit, though my father had, in his tentative way, tried to ask me several times. I knew he thought she’d said something sharp and cutting, as she had so often before, maybe he even imagined she’d had a violent episode of some sort that had been kept from him. I didn’t know how to tell him that I’d have preferred that, that nothing at all had happened, nothing except that I’d sat in a room with my mother for an hour on my last birthday, and during this hour I felt nothing but a grief so overwhelming I decided it no longer made sense, I no longer wanted this life I’d been given. And so I’d never gone back, I’d left the country two months later.
I’d known then that it was a terrible thing that I’d done, to have left her that way, but in a different way from how I knew the fact now. I was also old enough to realize that it didn’t matter that I knew it, that it was terrible, what mattered was that I had done it, and that I would never be able to explain it to her sisters.