I’d gotten into the habit of a long morning walk across the city to acquire a certain pastry once or twice a week. My route took me across the river as it sloped south to what I thought of as the Vatican side, through wide avenues shaded by enormous trees. I liked this part of the city, liked the surprise of a small triangular concrete island at an intersection with nothing but a bench and a trash can around which a whole block could orient itself. On one of these outings, perhaps three weeks after I’d requested the military records, my cell phone rang just as I passed one of these anchors, and I winced, I knew my Pronto? would give me away to the teenage boys leaning against walls observing it all from a remove of two hundred feet, I’d never been able to get the roll going on the r. Distracted by these self-conscious thoughts, I answered the phone to the sharp, patient voice of my aunt Giulia.
I asked how she’d gotten my number and felt immediately ashamed, I hadn’t intended for it to be the first thing out of my mouth, but Giulia was unfazed, as, I remembered, she always was. Your father, she said. I’d given my father the number in case of emergency, it seemed the daughterly thing to do, the small offering I could make, but I hadn’t known that he was in touch with any of my aunts, it had never occurred to me that the channels of communication did not flow solely through myself. The street had become still, strange. I asked how often she and my father spoke, and she said every month or two. I felt my world lifting and realigning, the ground shifting under me. I’d assumed when I’d stopped my summers in Rome, when I’d been absent from my grandfather’s funeral, I’d assumed that these ties had been permanently loosened, that I had changed something that I would have difficulty getting back. Giulia’s voice interrupted, I’ll be in town soon. I’d like to hear about your travels.
We agreed to meet for lunch in a few days, and I hung up the phone bewildered, my shoulders jerking strangely, tallying the assumptions about my own life that had just been called into question. I fiddled with my phone as I walked, pushing in the buttons though I knew the screen was locked. It calmed me, my hand and the phone both hidden in the pocket of my jacket, walking up the stone steps to the bridge, blind to those around me. Who could I call? I’d been so deeply alone with my thoughts these last months, the conversations I’d had with other travelers tended to be utterly mundane or cosmically deep, there was none of the usual airing of thoughts that I’d found had come with living with my boyfriend, though by the end there was so much I’d been keeping to myself that it had in fact been much longer since I’d had this release. The phone twirled in my fingers. Call Andrea? Settimia? Loredana? I had no desire to talk to my father, and it was not out of betrayal, but I felt our relationship had shifted fundamentally, and I wanted more time to feel the contours of this change. He’d always wanted me to connect with my mother’s side, it was why I’d been sent to Rome for those summers in the first place. He was an only child, the only one of his family on the West Coast, I know he believed it was my only chance to grow up with a family.
My aunts had found out about the departure of my grandfather a few years after I’d stopped my Roman summers, one Sunday when their keys no longer worked in the locks of the apartment they’d grown up in, had visited every week, the apartment they’d expected to inherit, the apartment soon to be owned and occupied by an American professor of art history and his third wife. The drama reached me secondhand, conveyed by Giulia over the phone. But I’d felt unaffected, the impact of the betrayal wasn’t capable of sustaining itself across an ocean and another continent. What did the dark apartment where I’d spent some chaotic and vaguely unhappy summers have to do with me, with my college applications and summer job as a lifeguard, driving aimlessly through the valley with my friends on the weekends, with chilly nights spent drinking cheap vodka with juice in empty orchards. When he’d died, less than a year later, I had just started college. The coffin had arrived from France, sent by, as my aunts put it, his Algerian whore. The funeral took place during my first week of classes at Berkeley, and it was one of the few times my father had involved himself in my relationship with my aunts. My mother, to our surprise, had agreed with her doctors that it wasn’t a good idea for her to attend, they thought it was too triggering based on previous delusions, and by the time my father told me the date of the funeral he’d already informed my aunts neither I nor my mother would be coming. Your education is more important, he said. I felt relieved, that this decision had been taken away from me, but I also wondered what I would have done, what I would have chosen. The next time I saw my mother I told her I was sorry for her loss, and she gave me a sharp startled glance I wasn’t able to interpret.
I had so few distinct memories of my grandfather. I remembered him in corners, reading, or doing a sudoku, a recent hobby, seated in an armchair, never at the center. Once he told me, just as I was exiting the apartment with my cousins, that my top was cut too low, and I burned with shame around him for the rest of the summer. He’d said the same thing to all of my female cousins at one point or another, they assured me, but only I seemed to take it seriously. I’d put the top, of which I’d formerly been so proud, it was from Urban Outfitters, which felt like the epitome of grown-up fashion to me at the age of thirteen, back into my suitcase and didn’t wear it again for the rest of the summer.
The drama with the nurse that caused so much pain to my aunts and their children was for me a backdrop in the blurred dark space of my teenage years. My grandfather hadn’t needed a physical aide, during the summers I had seen him, but his memory was failing. Who are you? he would ask, and I would tell him I was my mother’s daughter, and he would rub my shoulder and say, that’s good. Sometimes he would ask where she was, and I would say California, and he would shake his head indulgently and correct me, that’s too far, she would never go so far. On other days he would tell me where she was, she just went to buy some olives, assuring me she’d be back soon. Or he would say, she’s in the kitchen with her sisters, can’t you hear them? Often, he would slip into the dialect of his village near Salerno, and I would wave over Andrea or Giulia, helpless to understand. I was grateful that he never mistook me for my mother, he often called my female cousins by their mothers’ names, the time he lived in was fluid, I existed in the present, and my cousins were emissaries from thirty years before, though this never seemed to confuse him, or even to offer any contradiction. So that, in his reality, some of his daughters and their generation had teenage children, while some were children themselves, and there was a peace with which he accepted all of these facts. The only thing that caused me grief, because it upset my aunts, was his inability to acknowledge the previous existence of my grandmother. Unlike what he thought about my mother, he was never convinced my grandmother was at the store or in the next room. He simply never mentioned her, and if one of my aunts sat down next to him and tried to introduce a memory, he would ask, abruptly, who’s Claudia? Who’s Mamma? And if they tried to tell him, then he would say, I’ve never been married, I’m too young. Maybe one day I’ll find a girl. But I saw that my aunts did this less and less as time went on, that it was too painful to lose their mother, over and over, every time their father denied her existence. I wondered, now, if that was why they got the nurse in the first place. No one in the family could have kept him at home? They were busy, yes, Giulia had always traveled for work and Settimia’s mother-in-law lived with her and her husband, Giacomo, but I thought I understood how living with someone who would deny your best memories, the ones you kept closest since there wouldn’t be any more to come, would be too hard, day after day. They would have had to choose, his reality or theirs. And I suppose in this way they both chose their mother.
I was still in the street, walking toward somewhere I no longer remembered, but my fingers were texting Andrea. Come, he replied, there’s someone I want you to meet. I walked there, he was with some friends at a café, and I recognized his imperious posture as I approached, his ridiculous acid-wash jeans low on his hips, his arm slung around a figure almost his height, whose hair-darkened chin tilted up to Andrea’s ear to say something I couldn’t yet hear, and I saw Andrea smile, and then I saw everything I hadn’t been seeing since I’d arrived in Rome, and when Andrea had introduced me to the boy, his ragazzo, Fahad, an engineering student, born in Lahore, it felt as if all that had been floating since I’d answered Giulia’s call had fallen back to earth, had assumed new form, one that was more solid, a landscape in which I could learn to navigate.
I went with Andrea and Fahad back to Fahad’s dorm kitchen at the university, a white cavernous space with cheap appliances where he cooked us an extremely competent risotto while other foreign students wandered occasionally in and out. I teased Andrea, who of course couldn’t even boil water. I had to explain to them the expression. Fahad had the shaggy haircut of a ’90s movie star, his eyelids tended downwards toward a sleepy droop. Their physical comfort with each other was evident, their touches were casual, but they would lean unexpectedly on each other as if each was the other’s favorite tree. I smiled broadly at them over my risotto, but inwardly I mourned the time I had wasted by not seeing. What other facts about my family had I failed to notice? At what cost had my search for Vietri come?
Lunch with Giulia was pleasant. We met in Monti, in the heart of the city, at a restaurant she deemed good at the classics. She’d always tried to impose on me a loyalty to Roman cooking, shrugging as she ordered for us, Thursday gnocchi, Saturday tripe, a horrific phrase I’d forgotten. Fortunately it was Thursday. She’d traveled widely, to several of the places I had been in the last year, and we talked of Bolivia, the south of Argentina. I’d always been slightly afraid of her sharp humor, I suppose in my teenage years it had reminded me of my mother’s cutting remarks, but over lunch I found a witty warmth that was easy to fall into and enjoy. I wondered if she had always been this way, the idea of adults having distinguishable personalities was only just becoming available to me at fifteen, and I didn’t trust my previous observations. I asked her, tentatively, how long Andrea had been out to the family, and she told me seven years. But his mother has always known. I thought of Settimia, and suddenly felt that if I were to speak I would cry. So I let Giulia talk of the nonprofit she worked for in London, the work they did in Africa, her partner, a Hungarian who worked for the British Museum. She told me of the rest of the family: Dida had been living in Paris, had just had a baby, was about to move back to Rome. Clea had a law degree, Andrea was still working to complete his dottorato, which seemed to be a source of humor I didn’t quite understand. When she asked, toward the end of the meal, why I hadn’t told her I was in Rome, I shrugged and said I hadn’t been sure if I was ready to stay. She squeezed my hand and told me she understood. I realized that Giulia had left, too.
As we exited the restaurant, we walked naturally next to each other, neither of us asking the other if we had anywhere to go. It made it easier to hear the question I knew was coming.
And now?
I wasn’t sure.
Would I see the rest of the family?
I didn’t know yet. Yes, maybe soon.
Will you stay in Rome?
I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure.
It felt suddenly silly to me, after we parted and I walked back northwards, climbing toward Parioli, that I had avoided my family for so long, I felt ashamed. It had felt so oppressive when I was younger, these women above me who wanted to guide me and help me and in return know every single thing about my life. I was an only child, my parents were so distant, each in their own way, this board of elders was frightening when they were suddenly thrust in to my life at the age of eleven. Then of course there were also the questions they might have asked about my mother, the memories of her I’d be obliged to dredge up, she was their sister, they would want to know, their loyalty would be to her. They would ask how recently I had seen her, they who had not been able to see her, while for me it was a choice to spend my last months away from her, my failures as a daughter would be exposed. And I was so afraid of being like her, of learning about a childhood similarity between us, something that might indicate I was also destined for her fate. It didn’t make sense outside of the fuzzy underside of my brain where the thought lived, but avoiding my family was a way of avoiding the diagnosis, if it were to come.
I’d wanted to make my own way, desperately, but now I saw how tempting it might be, how tempting it was, to sink into these embraces, to absorb these advices, to let myself be connected to this other generation, to take inside myself their lessons and also their fears for me. I had thought this would mean giving up a part of myself, my autonomy, which I’d held so close for so long. But now, was it Italy, was it Rome, was it my failing search for Vietri? I wondered if these ties, these other stories and other lives, might make me better prepared to face my own. After Giulia had kissed both cheeks and told me how glad she was she’d seen me, after I’d caught her arms to give her a hug far too American, close and desperate, I said to her ear, unable to look at her face, that I would like to see Settimia.
The next afternoon, I called my father. He seemed surprised to hear from me when he picked up the phone, it hadn’t been long since I’d called on his birthday. I’d thought I might tell him that I’d seen Giulia, to ask about their relationship over the years. But I hesitated, I wasn’t yet ready to face the responsibility that would come with this knowledge, so instead I asked him to tell me about Italy in Africa during World War II. Loredana was out, Agnieszka was accompanying her to some appointment, and I was using a phone card on the apartment phone, grateful she wouldn’t overhear. My request was based in a habit my father and I had developed as he drove me to high school in the two years before I’d gotten my license. Tell me about this, I would say: black holes, the colonial history of Hong Kong, Supreme Court disputes, there was nothing he couldn’t give me a twenty-minute introductory lecture on. I hadn’t appreciated it at the time, how can you know about everything, I’d ask when I was young. The other fathers I knew were into the Sacramento Kings and their shotguns, or almond farming, the Civil War. You can’t be interested in everything, I remembered pleading. My brain has a lot of space, he would say, unbothered, whereas I believed that if I wasn’t an expert on something I had no right to an opinion.
So tell me about Africa, I said.
Well, the Italians had already been in Africa a long time before World War II, he said. At the end of the nineteenth century various pacts had given them part of Somalia. They’d invaded Libya in 1910 and set up a colony, and in 1935 the British had let them through the Suez Canal to invade Ethiopia. Ethiopia had been a sovereign kingdom, there had been an outcry in response, but the League of Nations was toothless, they couldn’t do anything. By the end of the ’30s they had a pact with Germany, so when the Germans invaded France, Italy declared war on France and England as well. Most of the Italian soldiers were already in Africa, and they decided to invade British-held Egypt from Libya. But the British had Malta, they had planes and the Italians had boats, and the British had no trouble sinking the supply ships with their air force. And after Germany invaded Russia, the Italians had no access to oil, they had hardly enough fuel to get the boats they did send across. There were hundreds of thousands of Italian troops in the desert with no water. The Germans had to step in, start escorting the supply ships by air, they sent over Rommel. So then the Germans and the Italians were fighting the British together in North Africa, from Tunisia across to Egypt, with the Germans really in charge. It was all over by 1942. After a major battle over two hundred thousand Italians surrendered all at once and were dispersed into POW camps in the British Empire.
I asked the question I really wanted to know. Well, he said in response, the Italians weren’t known for war crimes, like ones that took place elsewhere, it was a gentlemen’s war compared to what happened on the Eastern Front.