When Giancarlo finally emailed me he addressed me as if we’d parted moments before and suggested I come with him to Laura’s apartment that Thursday, after they were done with their university obligations. I wondered what to do in the meantime, it was only Sunday. I thought about the book, safe in my hostel locker. Whatever was written there, I decided, it was probably not a direct course to Vietri, it was no treasure map or diary. Maybe he was the author, maybe he had a relationship to its subject, but it seemed unlikely based on his book orders, they’d never had a particular geographic focus on the Middle East. Whatever his connection to Palestine, I thought I might as well pursue other paths in the meantime.
Since I’d failed to find an obituary, I decided to proceed on the assumption that Vietri was still alive. I spent several afternoons scanning the online staff directories of universities, archives, libraries, calling the ones that had none listed on their websites, giving Vietri’s name, but without luck. The next day I visited the handful of academic bookstores in Rome, annoying the clerks by asking if they had any peculiar customers who read a lot, or strangely, but unsurprisingly these interrogations got me nowhere, except to remind me how blunt Romans could be to strangers they considered dull, but they were useful nevertheless, after these efforts it became clear to me that Vietri was no academic, that I would never find him through association with the books that had so fascinated me.
At that point, I thought perhaps what I should do next was to try to look up a birth certificate. I’m not sure what I thought a birth certificate might tell me, but at least, I imagined, it would tether my search to the real world, would be something tangible for me amidst all of my thoughts and conjectures, would prove that my search could have a conclusion, could have, or had had at one point, a body. I obtained the request form online, I’d had to track down a few documents like this to claim my citizenship, and perhaps it was nothing more than my mind, my fingers, following paths they already knew. I had to submit it to the commune of birth, basically the township, as well as the province, and I chose Rome, listed Vietri’s address, left his date of birth and the names of his parents blank. At the line requesting my name and information, I hesitated, I thought I remembered that personal records might only be available to family members, but I wasn’t sure, I couldn’t remember, the form gave no indication. After a few minutes of staring down at the piece of paper I’d paid two euro to print, I wrote Chiara Vietri and the address of the hostel. I put it in the mail slot quickly, addressed to the Ufficio dello Stato Civile.
The hostel I’d found was near the Piazza Bologna, neither central nor cheap enough to be a true party hostel, but still, it was Rome, it was August, and in the mornings there was the sticky-sweet smell of spilled limoncello in the air, occasional vomit outside on the curb, wet bras and phone chargers draped along the top bunks, and I looked around sometimes and wondered what it was, this life that I thought I was living. I was frequently mistaken for much younger than I was, a fact that I was grateful for in these situations, especially as I crept toward the end of my twenties with nothing to show for my years. When people commented on this, I usually replied that I would probably follow the model of Italian women, looking eighteen until I was thirty-five when suddenly I would gain fifty pounds and sprout chin hairs. This hadn’t happened to my mother, however, she had always been thin and painfully small, but I had always had great success with this joke and was reluctant to abandon it, though it was so far unproven by my own genes.
Neither of my parents was particularly funny, they were both engineers and serious, cautious in their spoken words, but I’d grown up an only child desperate to draw adults’ attention. I developed a sarcastic and world-weary wit that I drew on like a shift, getting me through the prolonged social navigation of middle school and high school, though the probing questions of friends’ parents that came when your own mother was mysteriously absent in what was, despite being the capital of the most populous state of one of the world’s largest countries, a small, provincial, farmy town, and though I felt I could count on it I equally felt that it wasn’t a true part of my nature. Sometimes in the last year, in between these big cities with their aggressively social hostel scenes, in the quieter weeks I’d spent by myself, I felt this trait, this self-effacing sociability, was wasted, and I wondered if it would still be there when I returned to claim it, and if not, what would be left.
Some nights I’d go to the hostel’s basement bar with a book for a euro beer and a two-euro plate of pasta, and this was the way that I met Maria. She had stood uncertainly near the bar, holding her drink and surveying the crowded room. It was clear we were both alone, moreover that she was also older than our fellow travelers by a crucial few years, and it was those few years that led me to ask if she’d like to share my small table. Around us were Australians, Americans, Dutchmen, speaking loudly and bringing their drinks to their mouths with exaggerated gestures as if on a stage, the Americans the youngest, the Australians the most intent on drunkenness. There was an energy in the room I knew well from these hostels, it had to do with the possibility of sex, not of one couple’s chemistry but that of many individuals, the kind of near infinite possibilities of coupling that I imagined gave rise to the universe and its subsequent forms of life. I said something to this effect to Maria, and she smiled in a downward direction and replied that she didn’t know, she’d just gotten married when she started to travel. She and her husband had met in college, she told me, worked jobs they liked well enough for a few years after graduating, had saved, gotten married, then quit their jobs and planned to spend a yearlong honeymoon seeing the world before returning home and starting a family.
I’d met a few couples traveling together on these extended trips in South America, but they were rare. I imagined they stayed in hotels for the privacy, or weren’t on these monthslong trips so common to the rest of us to begin with, that they had more settled lives, ones they couldn’t depart. Moreover, I couldn’t have imagined my months of travel without the freedom of being untied to a partner, the thrill of flirting, of sex, it had become a part of the changefulness inherent in my weeks, a different country, a different language, a different boy. It wasn’t that the sex was always good, or that it was every night, or even every week, but I became addicted to the way these boys said my name while they were inside of me. I’d spent most of college with one boyfriend or another, and I’d loved not feeling any allegiance, not having my thoughts occupied, being able to say goodbye and wish them well and not worry about running into them again. I felt an overwhelming amount of tenderness toward the boys I’d slept with, all of them, even the ones who were too drunk to come or who told me, the next morning, about their girlfriends back home, afraid I would comment on their Facebook pages. These boys never asked why I was quiet, we took each other as we were in a way that was liberating, they were all nice guys, I stayed away from the creepers, the assholes, the really wild ones, I’d prided myself on having a sense for it, and so I would kiss very few boys I didn’t sleep with as well. It had been helpful to me to stand next to these different boys and evaluate their reflection on my own self, which I was trying so hard to define, or leave behind, I wasn’t sure which. And so I felt an over-rushing sense of tenderness toward all of them until suddenly I didn’t, suddenly the fact that they were all the same, no matter what their nationalities were, no matter the things we did while together, no matter if it was a hostel bed or one of the love hotels in Argentina, suddenly this fact, that these boys were all the same, became heavy, and I’d felt as if I’d been skimming on a wave for years without noticing, and only now that I was underwater did I realize the weight I’d been acquiring the whole time.
I asked Maria to tell me about her travels with her husband, wondering idly where he was, appreciating how content she was with the silence between us. They’d gotten married just before they left, she said after a pause, and had chosen Bali as their first stop, had planned to stay there for a month, wanting to ease into traveling and not rush around immediately. They’d found a place through a network of worldwide organic farms where they could stay in exchange for work, where they imagined they would fall asleep every night tanned and exhausted, other travelers for company in the evenings, but with a private room, enough to enjoy the honeymoon.
When they arrived they found not so much a farm as a decrepit concrete house with a sickly looking vegetable garden. The Dutch woman who ran it came out to greet them before they reached the gate, surrounded by six or seven dogs, all bearing uncertain amounts of fur, barking fiercely as they approached, and the woman chastised Maria and her husband for appearing afraid, implying that if one of the dogs lunged it would be their fault.
Things did not improve. It turned out there was very little farmwork to do, the fields had been left fallow for a decade at least, and the Dutch woman really wanted their help to build a website and write it in English. She seemed to have, Maria said, a delusional idea that the property could become sort of a hotel or campground she could rent to tourists. To this end their room was not a room but a cheap tent pitched outside on hard dirt.
They stuck it out for a few days, hoping their impressions were wrong, that things would get better. They had some good times in the tent, she said, laughing about how mistaken they’d been about what it would be like. Then, Maria said, on the fourth morning her husband woke early and stepped outside the tent to pee. A dog neither of them had seen before, that her husband barely saw before it was on him, lunged for his leg, leaving behind a mess of blood, several barely attached pieces of skin and flesh, a small white bubble of saliva.
His scream woke her up, she said, and she grabbed a towel. It took almost an hour to stop the bleeding, she said, and it was the only thing she could think of. It was only later she thought of rabies. She looked for the dog for days, returning to the farm on a bicycle from the hotel they had booked in the nearest town for far too much money. She assumed they would go to Denpasar and get him the rabies vaccine as soon as possible, but he’d refused. The bleeding had stopped, and she’d cleaned the wound as best she could, now a huge bruise with three precise puncture marks. She spent her nights in the internet café, researching the disease, growing increasingly panicked, bringing him dinner and pleading with him. He refused to leave the hotel even when there was a taxi downstairs, and she, sobbing, gave it the fare for the trip back to the capital. Was this an early symptom, and it was already too late? Or was it something that had always been in him, but she’d never had the opportunity to notice? They’d been together for five years before they got married, and she couldn’t remember him going to a doctor, but why would he? He was in his early twenties and in perfect health.
I started having panic attacks while bicycling to the farm, she continued. Once I even fell over, though usually I could stop in time by the side of the road. Oddly I was never scared for myself, even though I was intentionally out in search of what I believed to be a rabid dog, rather my panic was immense, universe-sized, encompassing everything I’d ever learned or experienced or believed to be true in the world. The first time I thought I was dying, it was like a heart attack, and I remember that part of me was glad, that in some way we would be dying together as we’d once discussed when very drunk. I never got used to them, each one was world-ending, when they were over it felt each time like I had to remake the earth around me, but I did develop a response, putting my head between my knees and ignoring everything, even passersby on the road who stopped to help. Once, my head down, I felt a hand on the underside of my skull, where you might hold an infant’s. The attack was subsiding, and I was only beginning to be aware of sensations again, so I was unsure how long the hand had been there. Through my hair, I couldn’t feel any skin contact, and I never raised my head, even after my breathing returned to normal. That hand held my head for what seemed like hours, and after it was gone, so gently removed I was never sure the moment it had left, after it was gone I waited much longer to finally move and cycle back to the hotel.
After two weeks my husband got the flu. Only once he was bedridden could I get a doctor in, earlier, in his delirium, he’d pushed the old man to the ground. Now he was too weak. It was awful. It was so hot, and he’d scream when we tried to get him to drink water. That’s what they used to call rabies, you know, hydrophobia. The one thing you need is the thing you become most afraid of.
Did he die? I asked.
I had a hard time with bottled water after that, she continued. Not drinking the tap water in those countries, it forces you to plan, to be so aware of where your next sip is coming from. I had a really hard time with that. But I couldn’t go home. I still had all the money we’d saved, in a joint account. We’d planned everything, I couldn’t think of anything else to do but stick to the plan, and I have. Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, India, South Africa, now Europe. I took a boat cruise down the Mekong, I rode my bike through the Belgian breweries, spent a week on the beach in Croatia, everything we talked of doing, I showed up for everything we prebooked. And now Rome. It was supposed to be our last stop, a luxury before we went home, to have one more month on honeymoon. But what do I do now? The money is gone, my husband is gone, I don’t know anything anymore. I’ve never seen more of the planet and I’ve never felt so unconnected to this earth, it’s like my feet could lift up at any moment. I can’t go back to Denver, our storage unit, his family. I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know where to go.
Maria was staring at a crack in the wall beside us, her eyes running up and down it as if she could see through it to the earth that surrounded us. Rome is so old, she said, I like it here. I like the layers. They say it grows an inch every ten years. And then all of a sudden they renovate a pizzeria and find some vault or millennia-old bedroom, and it was like it was never there before. But it’s just accumulation. I think about the things that are lost every generation. This city has known so much and forgotten so much more. My husband was an architect. He loved this city. I never really listened when he would talk about it since I knew he would tell me again once we came here. And now I’ve been to so many countries it feels like my own has been erased. So, no home, no country, no job, no husband, just Rome. And what can I do with Rome? I should have tried harder to get a doctor. I should have hired strong men to force him into a taxi, to hold him down while we gave him the vaccine. I shouldn’t have left him there. The worst is not knowing if it was him or the virus. They say it takes two weeks to affect the brain, but that means my husband was himself for the two weeks that could have kept him with me. I would kiss him while he lay in that hotel bed, I’d read it was possible to transmit mouth to mouth, I would kiss him deeply whenever he’d let me. It felt like the hotel was the whole world and if I left the world I would die.
I’d been studying Maria while she told her story, emboldened by the fact that she’d rarely looked at me, instead she’d spoken almost entirely in profile, her face sideways and now tilted up toward one of the narrow windows at the top of the basement bar, so that her posture resembled nothing so much as the beatific, saintly virgins rendered in pop blues and reds in Renaissance churches, their hair thin and pale against the splendor of the other colors. Maria’s face was narrow, in contrast to those Madonnas, and angular without being sharp, and as I was thinking about these women and what they’d witnessed, my lips must have parted without me noticing. As if to cut off the question I hadn’t yet repeated, Maria looked at me directly for the first time in several minutes.
I don’t know, she said. If he is alive. After I got him to the hospital in Denpasar, I called his parents, then went straight to the airport and got on a flight to Bangkok. I didn’t wait for them to arrive. They will probably never speak to me again. But they didn’t understand, he was the one who had betrayed me. He was the one who left.
After a few minutes of silence, Maria stood up and left the bar, a good-night trailing behind her. I didn’t follow her, or try to delay her with polite words, acquainted as I was with the sudden need for solitude after disclosing information of this type to strangers. People had always been inclined to tell me things, my features were my father’s, wide-set and Germanic, my face naturally assumed a neutral, detached expression that encouraged the confessional, and this wasn’t the first time during my travels that I’d been told a story the person needed to pour out of them into someone else. But my whole system felt knocked askew, I fiddled with my empty glass, tilting it to one side and letting it fall back to the table, this was the problem with deep empathy, it required action. I got up to refill my beer at the bar. Maria was trying to outrun her guilt, the loss of her husband, but what else was she to do?
The great uncertainty that hung over my life, the thing that prevented me from feeling that my life was real, that it belonged to me, was the dull and predictable fear of becoming like my mother. The average age for a female schizophrenia diagnosis was twenty-five, the same birthday I’d had a few months before coming to Rome, and the statistics varied, but as the daughter of a schizophrenic the chance my mind, my life, could disappear from me at any moment was around 10 percent. As my dad would have put it, great odds in Vegas. There was no test, no way to prediagnose, one was a schizophrenic when one manifested the symptoms of schizophrenia. This was why I never felt attached to that life with my boyfriend and the bookstore, why the increasing professional accomplishments of my peers had never truly bothered me. Why build a career, why build a life when I knew it could all disappear? I was waiting through this decade for the ground to remove itself from beneath me, to become a stranger to myself, so I estranged myself from my own life. As long as this was held over me, this swerve my life could take, I felt as if there were no point in striving for something, as my mother had. I was content to wait out my twenties, to do everything I could to not get pregnant, condoms and birth control, a liberal use of the morning-after pill when in doubt. This search for Vietri was another way to pass the time. Of course it occurred to me, of course I worried, that my interest in Vietri could be a sign of the type of obsessive and detached-from-reality thinking that could result in a diagnosis, but I had spent years being suspicious of my own mind, and it was it was like a scab I picked at, hoping for an infection to spread that wouldn’t strictly be my own fault. I was traveling even though my mother’s schizophrenia had been triggered in a foreign country, I knew on some level I was tempting it, but I also knew that if something was to happen I wanted it to happen, wanted to have my fate decided and move on. These months of travel had rocked me into a lull of complacency, I really thought that maybe they could continue forever, or at least until I was past the age where symptoms could appear. If they did, I knew I would give myself over to the disease, and if they didn’t, then I would stand as if the sole survivor of a plague, surveying the ruined landscape. If something wasn’t perfect I’d always had the impulse to destroy it, a way of being in the world I was just beginning to see as childish.