It turned out that Roberto did not live far from Vietri’s apartment. The streets to the via Bevanda sloped up from the river, turning at ninety-degree angles, and one Saturday morning I walked up them, passing a mother in a yellow coat and heeled boots loading her toddler into a car, several elderly couples out for walks, an Asian man crouched alone on the sidewalk with an assortment of alarm clocks, scissors, various other small practical things for sale. A young African man stood in front of the café where I’d taken the Palestinian book from the unknown Chiara and told me buongiorno formally, as if it were his one line in a play. Earlier, when walking up the hill, a man with white hair behind the wheel of a small car had slowed almost to a stop and waved at me, smiling as if I were known and dear to him.
Potted plants, trees, ropes of ivy were everywhere around me, as they were everywhere in Rome. In Parioli the ivy was protective, sometimes even plastic, threaded through wooden gates and chain-link fences to obscure both the view of the inside and the fact of its concealing. Here the abundance felt natural, part of the buildings, the sidewalks, the balconies themselves. I walked to Vietri’s apartment that morning, but, standing before the gate, I didn’t ring the buzzer. Exhaling, I realized that this was no longer what I was after. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to know, didn’t want to meet him, but it was the same way that I’d stopped checking my ex-boyfriend’s Facebook page, though I felt regret I hadn’t before, I now had no desire to analyze pictures taken at house parties for which girls were trying to sleep with him, I had at last absorbed some lesson that freed me from the actual person. Vietri was no longer just one person, finding him, talking to him, asking him questions, this was no longer what I wanted, to understand him I would need to absorb something more complicated, something enormous, perhaps encompassing a century of this country’s history, or my own.
Instead I decided to go to Aliano. I wanted to see the town in which Vietri had been born, where the painter had spent his two lonely years, though I no longer thought I would meet Vietri I was beginning to conclude that there was importance in the past and its landscapes. I’d taken a train from Rome that morning, waking up at four, had transferred buses twice. My second bus pulled into Aliano around five o’clock, and in the evening light the town was a dusty yellow-gray. I knew it had been mostly destroyed by an earthquake in the ’80s, and some buildings sat open still, three walls supported by neighboring houses, stone guts spilling out into the road. Dozens of old men lined the street in front of the church like crows on a wire, observing all as I descended the bus, the church bell going at unsettlingly irregular intervals. I went to the only open business to buy a water and before me a young man ordered a café and a prosecco, he sipped the espresso and an old man whose front row of teeth had been ground down into nothing appeared and drank down the cup of prosecco in four unsteady sips. I left the bar and went to look for the room I’d booked online on the Street of Hungarian Martyrs, and at first no one answered, but after some minutes a man appeared from behind me in the street, he must have been watching me, and exchanged my passport for a room key. When I got into the room, I lay on the bed, suddenly exhausted.
After an hour or so I got up and wandered the town in the fading light, took a walk down the large hill. The landscape was disorienting, from one view you saw only the strange white formations of the calanchi rising lunar and ghostly, like the Badlands in South Dakota, but from the other side of the town you saw only the green cultivated fields of the valley, a perfect snowcapped Apennine peak beyond. The old part of the town, the part where the painter had stayed, was at the bottom, the ravine steep beyond it.
I had told Loredana I was taking a short trip, but I didn’t want to announce my departure more broadly. Was I intentionally testing Roberto? That night, seeing the messages I’d received from him throughout the day, I called him and explained where I was. Ah, he said. I said I wasn’t sure how long I would stay. Okay, he said. Well, I hope you will tell me when you come back to Rome. Of course I will, I said, surprised at his plaintive tone. Of course.
The next morning I asked the lady who’d appeared to set out yogurt and coffee in the shared kitchen about a family with the name of Vietri, and she shrugged and said the old man would know, but didn’t tell me how to find the old man. I spent the day walking through the hills, eating dinner at the small restaurant attached to my hotel, served four courses alone in the menuless restaurant despite my protestations. No one had heard of a family with the surname Vietri. The painter was a tourist attraction for them, no one who remembered him as a person had been alive for twenty years. I pressed the yogurt woman, who was running the restaurant as well, and she said the old man was away, maybe he’d be back in a week or two, maybe a month, he was visiting his daughter, there was no way to tell with these things, I could wait if I wanted.
On the day I decided to return to Rome, I climbed to the graveyard at the top of the hill, the graveyard where the painter had wanted to be buried, and at its edge I looked down across the valley. The hills from this view were striated, blanched white. There were two tiers, one farther down the hill where the gravestones were older, some of them toppled or cracked. I wandered there, up and down the rows, reading the names, the dates of birth and death, occasionally phrases in Latin or small etchings of angels or crests, the distances between the years impressively long or achingly short. It was in a far corner that I found it, the gravestone that read “Maddalena Vietri, b. 1901, d. 1945.” I remembered her name from the military records, I slipped down to my knees in front of the grave, resting my weight on the backs of my feet, this was Vietri’s mother. The grave was well tended, free of weeds or overgrowth, the stone was weathered but had no cracks. I searched the rows around it several times, but could find no other Vietri gravestones, she was alone. And when she died, Vietri would have been twenty-five.
What else did I need to know about Vietri? He would have grown up in this village of bone-white clay and short shadows, would have spent his childhood in the dust, with half of his fellow children dead before their fifth year, where he either had or had not befriended a painter already marked for death. He’d wanted to go to Africa or he hadn’t, but either way he’d gone there as part of an army, he would have had no skills, nothing to offer, just young bones, had some job given to the most expendable, say a motorcycle driver, an easy target for the planes and snipers along the uncovered desert roads. Then the ships would have stopped arriving, there would have been no water, he would have waited with his fellow soldiers while bombs dropped and men disappeared into flames and sand, sometimes without a trace of blood, the nights would have been cold and long and what would there have been to do but talk, like so many of his generation he would have learned Italian in the army, wrenching his soft voice from the swamp of his dialect toward a common vocabulary, and maybe there were men there on those nights who would have been in Ethiopia, and maybe they would have had stories, or photographs they called trophies, and new stories would have been a rarity, and maybe there was a man who’d spoken of the monastery and the shallow gulley where they’d thrown the bodies of the monks, and if he had heard this story, he, a boy who had grown up praying to a black Madonna, what would he have thought of this massacre of black Christians? He would have been at El Alamein, would have taken part in a battle for an expanse of Libyan desert that was today still under conflict, sent to a trench that faced that other army across a patch of desert, in front of them would have been mines and snipers, behind them desert, Germans, and when the British overran them they would have surrendered with exhaustion that was something like cheerfulness. He would have spent weeks in the impromptu prison camps set up in the desert, and then onto a boat, with fresh water at last, tinny, and strictly rationed, but fresh, and the caps of waves in the sea would have been like shark fins, but the real fear would have been torpedoes, and yet torpedoes, for a boy who would have seen his first car at the age of nine, who wouldn’t have used a toilet with running water until he arrived in Ravenna for the army, how could he have been scared of a torpedo, in what world did these things coexist? The British officers on the ship would have treated them like children, with disdain, belowdecks with them would have been Indians and Chinese, the cooks, the cleaners, not in the same spaces, but he would have heard, sometimes, strange other languages, he who would have never met even a German before Africa. He would have been a prisoner of war in a foreign land, most likely England, farming alongside the rural women of the countryside, wearing great brown coveralls they called tutas with large yellow circles on their backs, roaming from farm to farm, repeating the cycle, this would have been his life for almost six years, when they arrived in England America would have had yet to enter the war. It would have been where he had learned English, maybe he’d been lodged in a country house with an enormous library, maybe there’d been a local he’d befriended, either way there had been lots of time, years and years in that green damp country. After his third year, things would have changed, away in the war, the Italian king had begun a speech to a friend, “My dear duce, it is no longer any good,” and the Americans had prepared an invasion of the peninsula, and the princess of Italy, married to the grandson of a German emperor, was arrested while attending the funeral of her brother-in-law, the king of Bulgaria, and, on the day the laborers in England observed the harvest festival, as these formerly enemy soldiers celebrated the end of the season’s work having affirmed that they had no allegiance to that party of a duce that no longer existed, the Italian princess, mother of four, was sent to the concentration camp at Buchenwald, where she was to bleed to death short months later after the amputation of her right arm, wounded during the bombing of a munitions factory. And in the north, the painter would have waited in a town overlooking a lake made by an enormous, long-melted glacier, wondering if he and his family would be permitted across a border. That would have been two years before the war would end, but it would be another year after that before Vietri would be repatriated, and in that time he would have turned twenty-five, still away from home, and his mother had died, her child still far from her.
And then? Repatriated at last, say that he would have gone to Rome instead of returning to his motherless town, would have gotten a job, probably as a laborer of some sort, depending on who he’d befriended in the POW camp, years would have passed. Then somehow he would have been involved in that trial in the ’80s, I would never know what he’d seen, what he’d done, I would never know what blood was on his hands, whether he’d washed it away, but he’d survived the years of lead, his years had continued, he had survived. Maybe he’d had a chance encounter with the American women who’d founded the pottery company, maybe they’d known they needed someone with connections with laborers or at the ports, maybe they’d taken his name as a sign. And maybe it would have been enough to extract himself from whatever structures of favors had ensnared him in the trial, enough to start a new story, one in which he was an elderly man who ordered esoteric academic books in English from a bookstore in California. And in all this time, would he have thought of the monks in Ethiopia, if he knew of them, or would he have thought of the things he witnessed himself during the war that I would never know? Maybe the orders of the books were an atonement, maybe they were a project Casaubon, but either way, did it matter? It didn’t even matter if he read all of the books, they were there, and when he wanted to read them he would read them. And when he didn’t read them they would have been there for him as well.
When I’d arrived in Rome I had wanted to walk into a room filled with dusty book light and find Vietri in a low chair, I had wanted to sit on a stool at his feet like an acolyte and have him tell me everything he’d learned from his books, that is, I had wanted him to tell me how I should live this life. But I knew now that this was as close to Vietri as I would get, and as I inhaled the warm air, felt the tip of my nose begin to burn, as I rose from the grave site, I thought that maybe it would be enough.
An image arose of my parents in California, I pictured them side by side for the first time in years. In Rome there was Loredana with her fragile heart, Andrea, Dida, Settimia, they were a net that would hold me, and Roberto was waiting for me, steady and deep. I had been going through my life as if all of our circles didn’t touch, but they did, if not interlocking exactly, then the membranes were thin, they bumped and they merged. But I could see now that though Vietri’s circle and mine had met, they would no longer, our arcs branched out from here, to force anything else would be counter to the great pattern I could see had always been at work beneath our feet. Where his arc had gone I didn’t know, I knew now I would never know, but I saw more clearly where mine could go, I could arc, gloriously, back to Rome, or to California, I had my aunts and my cousins, and Roberto’s circle, mine, they could come together, at least for a while. When he was twenty-five, Vietri had lost his mother, but I still had my mother, she was still alive, and even if she couldn’t change I now knew that I could.
I descended the road from the graveyard and the valley laid itself out greenly before me. I packed my bag in the small, stone room, reclaimed my passport from the man at the desk, and when the bus arrived I boarded it back toward Rome. I curled my feet underneath me on the seat, embraced my knees to my chest, let my forehead rest against the window to absorb the southern light, patient and strong. And then? What was this life, if I could have it, to be?