The next morning I decided to write down everything I knew about Vietri. I loved lists, their orderliness and the way they offered up a clear set of tasks, breaking down the world into smaller and smaller parts, when my thinking tended to the expansive, to the currents, not to the details. I felt spun out of control by the reestablishment in my life of so many family members all at once, and I wanted an anchor, I wanted a path that was mine. So far the quest to find Vietri had gained me only fragments, I felt adrift, I had glimpses of stories, but they did not cohere into a whole. How were these things, Vietri’s book orders, the painter and his lonely death, the massacre of the monks in Debre Libanos, how were these part of the same world, how would they ever be one narrative?
These were the facts I knew:
The rest was a blank. My mind settled into the gap between the last two items, what had happened to him after Africa? The foglio matricolare declared “prigioniero di guerra degli Inglesi in A.S. 6 Febbraio, 1941,” but there was no information about where he had been sent, how he had returned to Italy, what had happened to him after the war. A government website confirmed that only a small portion of the records the British had kept on their prisoners of war were digitized, and none were searchable by name. It was a dead end, unless I wanted to go to England and spend years combing the lists of prison camp residents hoping to see the familiar letters, terrified my attention would slip at just the wrong moment and I would pass over, never knowing how close I’d come. Not to mention those captured in Africa weren’t all sent to England, not only to Australia, like signora Elena’s husband, but also to South Africa, India, the US, all were possibilities, he could have gone anywhere in the empire of the British and their allies, and those were the years when the “sun never set” on them.
I googled listlessly. How would I find the thread in the postwar years? I felt that morning how deeply this was a foreign country, a foreign language, and I felt a sense of despair and alienation come on so fast it was as if I’d been thrown into an ocean. I could be here for years before I was fluent, and it wasn’t just the looking, it was the knowing how to look. I tried to imagine what it would have been like if I had continued my summers in Rome, I mourned this other self, imagined a life in which I felt at home in this city, fluent in Italian, in which my cousins and I knew about one another’s wardrobes and boyfriends, interests and fears. For the first time, I wondered if this fear I had of being like my mother, of being, I made myself think the word, schizophrenic, was something the others in my generation of my family shared. I’d never thought to look up the chance of a niece or nephew, a second or third cousin, inheriting it. Had this shadow been here, even in Rome? Had it haunted Dida’s pregnancy? Part of me had always believed that it was a sickness of California, of its idealism and naivete, its rootlessness and sun, the long expanse narrowed between mountains and ocean. How could it have happened to my mother in Rome, there was no space, no room for it to have taken root, no quiet afternoons for it to have begun its creep, no solitude where thoughts could betray you. If I let myself be reabsorbed into this Roman family, would I be safe? Or would I simply remind them that they themselves were not safe, would I be a reminder to my aunts, a threat to my cousins, a specter to haunt this new generation?
I’d already rejected the quiet, easy life I’d slipped into after college, the one I’d left for my months of restless travel. Was that now over? I’d now been in Rome longer than I’d been in any other city. I was running out of lives I could pursue in my twenties, there were few directions left in which to swerve. This search for Vietri was a non sequitur, a jump out of the narrative, but I was afraid for it to be over, because then I would need to choose a new life, a new mode of moving through the world, and now I was twenty-five. I felt strongly that whatever I did next would need to propel me through my thirties, but a woman’s risk extends to the age of thirty, it might not matter. I didn’t know how to decide what did matter. What had Vietri done with his years? Why had he stopped ordering from the store? What had he done with those books, where had he taken them? What had he learned, and what had I hoped to learn from him? I was beginning to worry that my search would never have a body, a conclusion. Instead of the mystery narrowing to a solution, a culprit, Colonel Mustard, in the conservatory, at five o’clock in the evening, with a lead pipe, for reasons of inheritance, it would expand outward like an inverted cone. The things I could know about a life were nearly infinite, I could go on collecting knowledge of Vietri for years, there would always be gaps, there would always be something I didn’t know, or failed to understand. The question was beginning to lurk in the periphery of my thoughts, when would I be done? And that other question, the propeller of all Italian conversational narrative, arose: E poi? And then?
In the end I reread the business profile of the pottery company bearing his surname I had found my first week in Rome, the one that had mentioned a Giordano present at the founding of the company, and decided to look into it. I didn’t know how Vietri could have been involved in the founding of the company that bore his name without leaving any trace of his presence, didn’t know how likely it was that this Giordano was the Giordano Vietri I searched for, but what else did I have to do, I found the email of the journalist who had written the article and asked if he would meet me for a drink.
He, Roberto, arrived at the bar only fifteen minutes late, older than I was by perhaps a decade, stocky without having any extra weight, his dark hair curly with narrow lines of gray I could tell had just begun to appear. He came up so confidently to my table that I could only imagine how American I looked, though we’d emailed in Italian and he might have been expecting a boy. We ordered beers, which I paid for. I had told him of my interest in the article in my initial email and I asked him, once the waiter had returned with the drinks, if he had met everyone he’d interviewed for it, specifically the man named Giordano he’d quoted, if he had recorded his full name. I’d printed out a copy of the article at an internet café as if it were a homework assignment, afraid he wouldn’t remember, it had been written over half a decade before, and I took it out, a bit embarrassed, but he took it from me eagerly and, I flattered myself, appreciatively. He read through efficiently, taking quick sips of his beer, his elbow out at an energetic angle. He finished, folded the paper and returned it to me, then extracted a small notebook from his pocket, these are my notes from that time, he shrugged with a smile. I felt my lips part. Roberto was charming, in the way some Italians have of making you want to help them though nothing they’ve said is particularly out of the ordinary. Roberto had that quality, that rush-over-to-the-cute-toddler-and-pay-attention-to-him magnetism. I suppose it must have been helpful in his career. I was not immune to it, though I distrusted it.
I spoke with him on the phone, Roberto continued, it was when I was first in Rome, I was just starting out, this is the type of piece I would do. His next sip was apologetic. They weren’t important enough for face-to-face interviews, probably they were all phone calls. I didn’t record his last name, usually that’s because the person asks me not to, though I don’t remember why this would have been the case. I was disappointed and then ashamed of myself for this disappointment, of course he hadn’t met Vietri, of course he couldn’t tell me if it even was Vietri he’d spoken to. I still had yet to meet anyone who’d met him. He seemed to sense my deflation, which made me feel embarrassed, and summarized the rest of the notes for me in some detail, the Giordano of the article had been working as a laborer in Ostia, he’d had a chance encounter with the American women who’d wanted to found the company. It was common at the time, still even now, Roberto said, for companies owned by foreigners to need to have someone on the ground to help with the shipping and customs, things like that. I asked what his voice had sounded like, and he said it was soft, an accent from the south. I wasn’t sure if Roberto was making any of that up, it seemed a lot of detail for the sparse amount of words written on the page, but I was grateful.
Shall we get another round? he asked, and I nodded, he was already gesturing to the waiter. I was finding Roberto that rare thing, that creature I hadn’t encountered since arriving in Rome, an enjoyable drinking companion. He had a looseness that was rare for Romans, and I asked where he was from. Brescia, he said. It’s in the north. Why are you interested in this man? He turned to examine me. I thought it was the company you were interested in, maybe because you are American, but it’s this man, yes? Do you know him?
No, I said. Or, not really. We corresponded a few years ago, I was helping him to order academic books from the US, and when I got to Rome, I wanted to meet him, but I couldn’t find him. I just wanted to find out about his life . . . I shrugged. I started, and now I feel like I have to finish.
He nodded as the waiter placed the new beers before us. There are stories like that. Usually it’s that you need something about the world explained to you. You want to understand the order of things and you think that if you trace the life of this man it will do that for you. You are Italian, yes? Your family? I nodded, hesitating only slightly. So you come, and you want a way to find the history you think you missed. Usually people look for their own grandparents, great-grandparents. He looked at me sharply. Is he your grandfather, some relative? I shook my head slowly. Roberto’s quick movements, his energy, seemed to foster the opposite in me, and I could feel how languidly I moved, reacted, how hesitating I was when I spoke. He moved sharply, his body was like a knife, he spit his words like they were darts. I felt as if he could split me. I asked if he’d had a story like that. He nodded. Of course. It’s something you have to learn as a journalist, he said, breaking eye contact. When to let a story go.
The next afternoon I went back to Dida’s apartment. As I’d suspected, now that my cell phone number was family property, I was at the mercy of these invitations, and I was surprised how little I minded. Andrea had helped me decipher his own texts at the beginning of my time in Rome, the code of x’s and k’s and numbers that transubstantiated into other words when spoken out loud in Italian, so that I knew enough by now how to answer “6 lib?” and I was always free. Perversely, I liked to text in full, grammatically correct sentences, which I knew annoyed Andrea, but I felt it was my right to claim this one way of expressing correct Italian, when I could write it out and check for errors. I’d been quite proud of the email I’d sent Roberto, it had been my first opportunity to write a full paragraph, and I’d felt during our drinks that he had been convinced in advance of my seriousness. That morning, Dida had sent me a squillo, she’d let my cell phone ring once and hung up, a way of saying hello, or that she was thinking of me. I knew enough now to never pick up the phone unless someone called twice, a legacy of the minute plan when the call was free unless you answered, but I still wasn’t totally sure how to interpret this new idiom, so I’d sent her a text back, and anyway, here I was going over to see the baby.
On my previous visit he’d alternated between sleeping and breastfeeding, and now that he was awake and unattached, he was in a particularly gurgly lie-on-your-back stage, I could see that his eyes were a deep blue, the features of his face unfixed as if pushed gently out of clay. Dida smiled whenever she looked down at him but was openly more interested in complaining about Jean-Luc’s difficulty in finding work in Rome. Everything here is connections, she repeated often as if it were a form of punctuation. I’d assumed his job was a reason they had moved back, but in fact it seemed that the work he had was part-time or freelance, I could never quite parse the Italian economy, anyway Dida complained about “contracts.” She herself was working part-time for a publisher, a job she’d gotten through a high school friend. You must know, she said. I made a vague gesture, embarrassed to tell her plainly that I hadn’t really attempted to look for work in Rome, I had no desire to nanny for an American family or teach English to business students, I found it easier just to not spend any money and live within my monthly deposit. I assured her it was bad in the US as well, the economy had crashed a few months after I’d graduated and the microgeneration I inhabited was divided by the sharp line of that September. But you value the young, she said. No one here thinks you have anything to contribute until you’re forty, but we can see plainly that there will be nothing left for us if we wait our turn. You know that woman who married your grandfather still collects his pension. She fixed me with a stare, and I nodded, acknowledging that she would probably do so for another forty years. Jean-Luc talks about going to Dubai, Dida continued, you can have a good life there. She checked her phone and announced casually that Clea was on her way over to see me, and I decided not to bring up my objections to the labor practices of the Emirates.
Clea showed up with her boyfriend, Marco. They had been together for four years, though they didn’t live together, she still lived with her parents, and so did he. Of course they wanted to join the conversation I’d begun with Dida, the favorite topic of Italians my age, I was learning, was their morose but not unfounded fatalism about the life that was possible for them. Marco spoke of the high turnover rate among his fellow journalists. A lot of my friends have become chefs, he said almost wistfully, and I could see it sparked a panic in Clea. She had maintained her white-hot energy since we were younger, and argued with him, they must have had this conversation before, possibly they were having it again using simplified language for my benefit.
What I loved about the young people my age, I thought while their debate continued, was that no one asked me what I did all day. I had expected to be embarrassed, but I had slowly observed that no one my age had full-time employment, this was an economy of freelancers and temporary part-time workers, if they weren’t lucky enough to still be in school like Andrea. No one called Clea a lawyer, she “had a law degree.” Everyone my age understood how easy it was to loaf away the hours, especially, I could see, with these visits, so that seeing one member of my family turned most often into a full reunion, every meal set for a dozen people. Even with small tasks, the conversion of time was twenty to one, anything that took five minutes in California was an hour in Rome, I remembered in my teenage summers spending a full hour buying ibuprofen for my cramps, first finding a pharmacy that was open, then waiting patiently for the pharmacist to wrap the box in paper and tie it with ribbon, curling the ends.
The conversation went on, propelled by Marco’s frequent jokes, he flung some in my direction and I would laugh. I liked Marco, but was uneasy with his ease, I still had not found my balance vis-à-vis the male-female nonrelational friendship in Rome, was it okay for me to be friendly with him in front of Clea? Clea wasn’t as straightforward as Dida, she could hide her emotions, I didn’t want to offend her, my last foray into such a friendship, with Giancarlo and Laura, I had destroyed spectacularly, and I felt a pang of regret. The ease of traveling, which comes from leaving behind any problems you create, was no longer with me in Rome. I supposed I was going to have to learn from my mistakes and try hard not to repeat them.