Giancarlo picked me up outside the hostel late in the afternoon that Thursday and drove us to Laura’s apartment. I’d felt uneasy with the demand on their time, but Laura, perhaps sensing my discomfort, had mentioned being able to cite the translation work for her graduate studies, and whether or not it was true, it was kind. I was interested in the village book, eager to see its mysteries unfold from the unknown script, drawn, too, to Giancarlo and Laura and the entanglement that I sensed awaited me there.
Our meeting that day was like a bizarre reading group, Laura and Giancarlo sitting next to each other, both bent over the book, Laura pushing up her glasses, Giancarlo making the same attempt at his hair, arguing about the meaning of this word or that, or if it was indeed this word or that, if this dot or that small brush of line changed the interpretation completely. Her fingers were long and thin, interrupted by bulbous knuckles, there was something grotesque about her thick unpolished nails that ran along the pages, their vertical ridges prominent, the tips yellowing. The book stayed on her lap while Giancarlo oriented himself around it. I sat across from them, smiling along as if I understood, translating what they said into my notebook, sometimes doodling, feeling childlike and oddly content.
I often couldn’t understand what Giancarlo and Laura were saying, not only because their Italian was so rapid and complex, more and more, I realized, my family, even my mother, must have been speaking to me in circumscribed Italian, but also because they spoke with the peculiar slang and rhythms of serious couples, their words expanding backward and forward through time, pulling in their deep knowledge of each other sideways, so that following the trajectory of their sentences was especially hard to accomplish. My Italian had always been shaky, my first four or five years of life, when my multiplying brain synapses would have made the absorption of a second language fluid and easy, were “bad years” for my mother, and she’d lived with us infrequently. My parents had planned to raise me bilingual, but what could they do, my father didn’t speak Italian. When my mother came home, during the “good years,” the years before she went away again when I was eleven, it was already too late, I was in kindergarten, and she quickly became frustrated and spoke to me in English when I couldn’t respond. When my mother spoke to me in Italian for those few short years, it was orders, it was questions, it was demands, and she never tried very hard, we never talked about the period of my life when she was gone, but she must have felt that with this gap, without this language, I would never be exactly like her, raised in her image, able to speak with the same continuation a whole life of Italian. I knew words and phrases, and I had the pronunciation, but it wasn’t until I studied French in high school that the grammar fell into place. Then listening to my aunts and cousins on my visits became easier, but it was a shallow way to understand the language, as if words and tenses had been mapped onto the deep French grooves that I’d spent so much time studying. I loved learning French, when I spoke French it was Baudelaire and Aimé Césaire, it was debating politics in church basements for three-hundred-dollar prize checks, it was memorizing whole poems while passing time in class, “Mon enfant, ma soeur,” it was getting the references in T. S. Eliot poems, it was being able to pronounce certain words in Chaucer when made to read aloud in Middle English. Italian was my cousins shouting at one another, making jokes I could barely begin to understand, some animal or another, jokes I could only hope weren’t at my expense. I didn’t know anyone who was French, I’d never been to France, it was the language of a contained reality, a perfect one I would never enter. Once in high school a friend asked if I wished our school had taught Italian instead, like some of the richer private schools in the Bay Area with their fourth generations of Luccesan pastry makers and bankers, and I’d responded that if the Italians had wanted more people to speak their language they should have been better at colonizing.
Giancarlo and Laura were continuing between their three languages, “Youadi,” they said, over and over. Then, “Chiamare.” Some whispers about churches, Giancarlo making a gesture, as if from a pulpit, that owed more to the American South than to the Catholic services here. Then, finally, they turned to me, pleased. “It is a call and response,” Laura said in English. Switching to Italian, she translated from the Arabic:
We have put before you the names of the village lands, part by part, the names of the springs and valleys, the names of the pools and wells, the names of the fruit and other trees, the names of the seasonal crops, and we give you the responsibility, this charge, to you, the children and grandchildren, who are the trustees . . .
“It’s answered by the grandchildren,” Giancarlo explained, but he didn’t read their responses aloud.
I still didn’t quite understand what it was we were translating, Giancarlo’s explanation being, it’s what they do to remember. I asked Laura the next time we were alone, when Giancarlo had gone out to buy cigarettes. He tended to talk over her enthusiastically, though I preferred her measured and direct explanations. Laura was suspicious of me, that was easy to see, her longing for Giancarlo was plain. But there was an earnestness in her, a desire to share this knowledge that her life had so far been devoted to that I could see overcoming her reluctance. I started in Italian, though I regretted it, Laura’s English was much better, so that my clumsy question came out, what is the purpose of these books? Laura looked serious, then answered, they try to describe everything about the villages that are no longer there. Al-Tantura, it’s a village that was destroyed in the war there, over fifty years ago. In general, she said, they were written by the elders of the villages, the old men, but written for the next generations, so that they could know that these villages had existed, that they had had homes, histories. That’s why there are so many maps. You know, she said, her fingers playing delicately over the top edge of the book, these are people who know they are going to die without seeing their homes again because the homes no longer exist. Giancarlo and I, we left our towns because they were so small, we had to, there are no jobs there, but of course it is very hard in Rome with no connections, we are near the end of our studies, we know there are no jobs for us here. So we are stuck, neither of us can go back to live in our towns again, now it’s only the very old there, we wouldn’t be able to find work. But they still exist, at least we can go back. I tried to remember where she’d said she was from, and remembered only that she’d followed its name immediately with the fact that it was near Lecce, the way you do when you know someone hasn’t heard of the place. I’d often done the same thing myself, when pressed to be more specific than California, I’d learned to treat Sacramento qui vicino a San Francisco as the Italian name for my hometown. Some of them have been in the refugee camps for generations, Laura continued. They do it to remind themselves, to remind their children, that there was a world in which they also had landscapes and histories, where they were considered fellow people. She looked at me frankly. You understand.
Giancarlo came back into the room then and approached each of us in turn, offering to make more coffee, a snack, a cigarette, it was so easy to see that he wanted everyone to be happy. Laura was different, I saw now, and I turned this knowledge over in my mind. I’d observed, in the academics who frequented the bookstore, that whatever underlying impulse had driven them to a particular subject, after only a few years they were so deep under the water it was as if they’d always had these obsessions, this particular marine environment. I admired her self-awareness, the thought she’d given to the impulses underlying her own life. With Giancarlo, though it must have taken him years of intense study to become as fluent as he was, I could imagine the original impulse being based on nothing more than a passing thought. But then, of course, he’d devoted himself to it. I wondered what had brought him and Laura apart. It was clear they’d once been as intimate as any couple I’d seen, I could tell even from the way they oriented their bodies toward each other in a room, as if they each felt the gravitational pull of the other’s circle. Giancarlo’s motives were confused, I saw now, he was like a toddler who hadn’t realized that the two things he wanted could not simultaneously exist, to use me to get to Laura but also to have me, and I found I was surprised by my apathy. And so Giancarlo would return to the room, my coffee in his hand, and he would squeeze my arm in his way, but his eyes would be on Laura’s eyes, and yet none of it seemed intentional. And in that moment, in that gesture, I saw what it was I could destroy and I stood at the edge, observing my temptation.
It was September and the afternoon streets were full of children in their neat uniforms or wacky t-shirts, the sidewalks crowded by their braids and shoulder bags on my walks. It was at that point my third week in the hostel, and I’d noticed a new ecosystem had begun to open up to me. I’d come to know hostels intimately over the last year, but I’d never stayed in any one longer than about ten days, and I felt something shift after the second weekend turned over, something foundational, the way the new arrivals regarded me, the way the staff suddenly considered me an ally.
The next day was my father’s birthday, and I called him early in the evening, when I knew he would be awake in California. He was doing fine, it was the same as every other call I’d made to him in the last few months, he told me about his garden, the oleanders were responding to the gray dishwater he’d begun to save, and how the Kings were playing, never very well, and asked if I’d been visiting a lot of art museums, for years he’d thought I would be a visual artist, something I’d only half-heartedly been interested in in high school, and I told him about the statues I’d seen at the Capitoline museum, where the heads and noses of the pagan-made statues had been smashed in by later Christians in an attempt to erase any proof that they had also been human. He didn’t ask when or if I was planning to come back to California, never told me about his weekly visits to my mother unless I asked first. When I came home from Berkeley on college breaks he would always pick me up from the Amtrak station having bought me a vanilla milkshake from In-N-Out, so thick you’d have to use a spoon, and whether I was hungry or cold or not I would consume the whole thing on the way home. We operated this way, my father and I, on signs we’d once decided had meaning, worn tracks of conversation and tradition that neither of us questioned. Of course I felt guilty, at almost all times, for leaving him alone for the last months. I had emailed updates, made sure to call every few weeks, but I didn’t tell him, would never tell him, that once I’d left California I felt paralyzed by the thought of going back.
The denial of my request for Vietri’s birth certificate arrived around this time, I’d found the envelope tucked into the door of my locker when I returned from a long morning walk. I carried the envelope up to the hostel dorm and then opened it. A short form on official stationery informed me that the record I requested was unavailable. With the opacity of Italian bureaucracy, there was no way to tell if it was unavailable because I did not have permission to request it, because I had not provided enough detail to find it, or because the record did not exist at all. There was no contact to request further information. I was surprised at how quickly I’d received the response, but now the immensity of the roadblock overwhelmed me. I hadn’t particularly liked the Hannah Arendt I’d read in college, but one line returned to me now, bureaucracy was tyranny without the tyrant.
If the request had been denied because I’d applied to the wrong location, the wrong commune, I thought I should give up. The only thing I knew was that Vietri had lived in Rome, I had no idea if he’d been born there. If he hadn’t, there were over eight thousand communes in Italy, I wouldn’t possibly be able to guess his hometown. I lay down on my bunk, the room of twelve beds surprisingly quiet this morning. Usually it was full of nineteen-year-olds hungover and scrambling to make their next flight or train, off to whatever European capital followed on their list. I was suddenly exhausted by the hostel, thought that maybe I should find a room to rent somewhere, but that would admit a desire to stay. I still thought that I might leave Rome at any moment, maybe go to Greece, or Croatia. Even France. I’d never been anywhere else in Europe, I’d barely even been out of Rome. I’d always intended to continue traveling after, if, I’d found Vietri, had a quick visit with my relatives, and now I wondered if I should abandon the search altogether. A room would mean a level of permanency, would mean I should contact my aunts, who would be hurt I hadn’t contacted them already. I wondered if Andrea had told them I was in Rome, or if he had kept his promise. So much easier, if they confronted me, to have been night to night in a hostel, a few days in the city to look up an old friend, no time to resume a relationship I’d discarded in my teens, unaware that the tossing away—I always thought of the Italian word, gettare, possibly the origin of the word ghetto, where it’s the people who are tossed away—unaware that this rejection might become permanent, that I might one day regret it.
Sometimes when I walked through the city I felt there was a presence behind me. I’d often felt this effect in Rome, had always attributed it in a vague un-thought-out way to its overlapping histories and traumas, empires and populations, it was a city not of ghosts but of shades, and as I walked, sometimes I felt something just behind my left ear, nothing mystical, exactly, but I never felt, even in my long hours of solitude, alone. Despite this, I was surprised to find on my walks that Rome was an empty city. I hadn’t realized it in my previous summers, I’d seldom been moving in a group of less than five family members. Certainly the tourist sites were crowded, I avoided the Colosseum, the Pantheon, any fountain that might have appeared in a Dan Brown novel, but away from them, even in the city center, the streets were empty, though every once in a while I would come across a lone American family darting right and left like a bee that had wandered too far from the hive. I observed something like this to Andrea, who, in his typical fashion, agreed and then went on as if it had been his original observation. It’s true, he said, no one lives in those apartments. Half are owned by the church, half by foreign organizations, anything left is for tourists. We all live in the periferia now. After a thought, he added solicitously, you know, we would say, in Romanesco, we would say borgata.
I began to wonder about my mother on these trips. I knew the apartment she’d grown up in, it was my grandparents’, the one I’d spent much of my time in during my summers. I knew its large stolid rooms and pale green and yellow wallpapers, the sounds of my aunts’ shoes on its tiles, but I didn’t know the school she went to, I didn’t know her shops and parks, benches and gelaterias. I asked Andrea how often the family got together, now that our grandparents were gone. I was curious about the dynamics, the alliances. He said they didn’t see one another very often, my aunt Giulia had left for London, it wasn’t like those summers when we had all been young and second and third cousins I’d never heard of had seemed to sprout at family gatherings like mushrooms. Andrea and Clea, I had learned gradually, were the only cousins still living in Rome. Andrea had offered to set something up, and I declined, said maybe later, which, as always, he let pass without comment. I wondered if this was a result of my semi-estrangement from the family, if I was now treated like a skittish animal for whom you might leave food on the porch but don’t, at first, try to lure inside. I’d been absent for ten years, lost to them, I thought now, just as my mother was.
I adored Andrea’s mother, Settimia, her presence in a room was like a balm to me, everything she seemed to suggest in those family settings was always what I’d been secretly hoping would be decided but was too shy myself to advance. Perhaps it was because Andrea and I were so close in age, and I’d arrived that first summer crucially on the right side of puberty, unembarrassed to receive the affection she showed to both of us, and I was able to keep this ease somehow through the following summers. I was most afraid of seeing her again, of her disappointment that I hadn’t seen her immediately, but there was no way to do it, there had never been a single dinner, event, coffee the family in its entirety hadn’t been invited to. They took comfort in being around one another in large numbers, like certain flocks of birds or fish. And I knew I hadn’t yet faced the vitriol over what had happened with my grandfather before his death, I was still unsure about how they viewed my place in the drama. He’d married the nurse my aunts had hired to look after him as his mind slipped further away from him, had sold the family’s apartment and run off to France, and within a year he had died. I’d never been close with my grandfather, by the time I’d started my summers in Rome his mind was seldom present in the room, but the outline of this trauma was still visible in the family ecosystem, and then I hadn’t come back for the funeral. I couldn’t handle the thought of taking all that on, I knew that I had hurt them with my distance, could tell in everyone’s ninety-second share of my annual Christmas call, and I didn’t want to face it, I didn’t want to own up to the hurt I had caused, to my family and to myself, I wasn’t ready to absorb another dozen intimates into my life, my self’s private circle. Was it that they weren’t truly Romans, that my grandparents had both come to the city from elsewhere, was it a small-village mentality? They clung to one another as a unit and it stifled me, I couldn’t imagine my surrender to this loss of autonomy.
It was Giulia, of all of my family, who was the one to insist on sharing my mother’s history with me over those teenage summers, but I had hoped to use that time away from California as a break, the rest of the year I went to see my mother every other Sunday morning, awkward visits I dreaded but endured. Giulia was two years older than my mother, though they didn’t resemble each other, her hair was a lighter brown, like mine, her body soft, while my mother was dark-haired and built on a wire. She was trying to help, I knew that now, trying to show me the person my mother had been before I’d known her, but I hated hearing these stories. My mother’s pregnancy was what had brought on the symptoms of schizophrenia, as long as she had been my mother she had been this new person, and I resented, or felt guilty for, the existence of her old self, the one that perhaps would have continued except for the fact of my conception.
Sometimes I wondered if her pregnancy was accidental, she was only twenty-five when I’d been born, and the thing that had been imparted to me most was her ambition. She’d left Italy at twenty-two to come to Berkeley for a master’s degree, a place where she knew no one, and she had only been working at her firm for two years, it was the ’80s, she would have known what she had to prove. It was only after my aimless but still disciplined studies that I’d confronted what she’d lost when she disappeared from herself. I’d had to take entrance exams to get into my Catholic high school, then there were the AP classes, college applications, once at Berkeley the papers, the midterms, the finals, the honors thesis, the work, so many hours of work, and I’d studied things I enjoyed, reading-heavy classes that I was already interested in, very little of the graphs and equations I occasionally glimpsed in an open engineering textbook down the table in the library. How could I not have been unwanted, if my mother had known what would happen, how could she have been ready to abandon all of that work?
I felt that I’d done the most reckoning with my upbringing in my teenage years, after I’d stopped my summers in Italy, with friends whose families I could observe objectively. My friends and I felt so distanced from childhood then, so removed with our new bodies, but really we were close enough for the details to be fresh, for the grooves to be vivid. But I was beginning to see how the reckoning would have to happen again and again, every five years, every decade, as the ground shifted beneath my feet and I had to learn to walk again with the knowledge that I had a schizophrenic mother, a great uncertainty that therefore shadowed my own life, that I might become like her, a father I could count on and yet had never felt close to, another web of family six thousand miles away with its own traumas and histories, which I was wary of being drawn into. It was exhausting, why couldn’t I set things in place and move on? Why did I keep having these memories, this grief, overwhelm me, often at moments that felt utterly random and therefore unpredictable, not, for example, in front of the ubiquitous depictions of that anguished mother and her child but rather when I smelled a tomato at a vegetable vendor and remembered how my mother would serve them to me after school, on garlic-rubbed toast, with salt and pepper and olive oil.