The next morning I woke up with the knowledge that what had been tugging at the back of my mind was the name of the town where Vietri had been born. Aliano. I hadn’t thought about Vietri among the events of the previous days, ready as I’d felt to leave Rome. But the town, I knew that morning as I lay in my narrow bed, as the green tops of the Seussian pines waved casually out the window, as my unformed thoughts crawled their way toward consciousness, I knew the name of the town was familiar.
I got out of bed and wrapped a soft robe around myself—a gift from Loredana, I’d found it neatly wrapped on my bed a few days after moving in—and went into the study and sat in front of the computer there. This was my favorite room in the apartment, with its dark shelves, long windows, and dusty, heavy smell. Loredana’s husband’s collection of books was quite large, the kind, I assumed, amassed over generations of inheritances, and judging from the shelves he’d been particularly interested in the Greek and Roman classics, there were beautiful editions that I had yet to open for fear of cracking the spines. As with all rooms full of books, there was a unique kind of silence, cushioned by the bound paper lining the walls, and I felt reverent as I shut the door softly behind me. Loredana rarely entered this room, I’d noticed, but she’d encouraged me to use it as often as I wanted, had seemed quietly pleased by the idea. There was an enormous oak desk that dominated the space, its surface bare, while the desktop sat in a corner on a small stand, plastic, beige, and conspicuous. I’d been surprised that Loredana owned a computer, but I supposed at some level of wealth technologies were acquired rather than sought out.
The connection was slow, but once Google loaded I typed in the name of the town, and there it was, Aliano, the setting of a well-known prewar memoir I’d read excerpts of in college. Written by a communist painter who’d been sentenced for his anti-fascist activities, the book chronicled the two years of his exile there. It was well-known in Italy, I remembered that at least some of my cousins had had to read it in school. The part I’d read, I tried to remember as I rocked back in the chair, concerned the plight of the peasants under the fascist state, it was for a class called something like Reckoning with the Trauma of the Twentieth Century, taken to satisfy one of Berkeley’s world history requirements. The course materials had ended up such a catalog of horrors around the globe, trenches in France, famine in South Asia, death camps, gulags, that it was hard for anything distinct to remain clear in my memory. I thought I remembered a scene when the fascist government had raised the taxes on livestock, and the peasants, already entrenched in a cycle of debt and near starvation and unable to come up with the cash, were instead forced to slaughter their goats. They’d feasted for a week, many of their children had never tasted meat, and after were left without milk or cheese or any source of protein, their diet reduced to a hard black bread made once a week in enormous loaves, so tough the practice was to cut it toward the body while girding it against the stomach. The graduate student who’d taught my discussion section had treated the absurdities and inefficiencies of the fascist state as hilarious, but I remembered only being able to find them tragic.
After a thought, I googled the author’s name along with Vietri’s, then Vietri’s with the town, but there were no relevant results.
An English copy of the book was easy to find, I walked down through the clean leafy streets of Parioli to the enormous three-story bookstore at the Termini station and found two copies on the shelf, remembering as I moved among the other travelers that first afternoon I’d arrived in Rome. It occurred to me that I was beginning to glimpse another Rome, one I wasn’t sure I’d been aware of when I was fifteen and homesick for the dry, golden California summers.
At a store across from the station I bought a cell phone with preloaded minutes. I thought it would be good to have in case Loredana needed to reach me in an emergency, she had mentioned a heart condition, and in a world without her daughter, I decided that it was a small thing that I could give, what I could offer her was my presence. I entered the phone number of the apartment into the phone from the page where I’d written it in my notebook, and after a moment of hesitation I entered Andrea’s as well, then texted him so that he would have the number. I would not be leaving Rome, not yet.
I went next to a café I’d found a street or two off of the Piazza Navona, in the middle of the rounded bump poked by the river into the west of the city. The piazza’s Bernini fountain had in fact been featured in a Dan Brown novel, and the café was filled with British tourists thrust onto the sidewalk on tables the size of prayer mats, but the very good glasses of wine were two euro and I liked that I’d found it, that it was mine. It was a relief to be away from the divey student places near the Sapienza, the silent luxury of Parioli. I liked to return to the anonymity of being a tourist, to be exempt from all of the silent rules governing my behavior when I was among Italians, to be able to order a glass of wine without a meal, to have it expected that I would not even try to speak Italian. Giancarlo and Laura had been the last people to speak to me in English, now that I’d so expertly severed that tie, and moved out of the hostel, it would be only Italian, Loredana and Andrea both spoke it with me exclusively, offering a word if I seemed stuck, Loredana hesitantly, Andrea impatiently.
I read the memoir over the spread of the afternoon. It was short, episodic, made up of vignettes describing the notable inhabitants of the village: his landlady, a known witch; the barber, her lover and a violent albino; the petty fascist officials, unoccupied and largely ignored. The town had been carved into a hillside of white clay in a region renamed after a forgotten Byzantine emperor, perched as the Lucanian Apennines crumbled jaggedly toward the high arch of the peninsula. The painter was in jail in Milan before his sentence was reduced to exile, and he first finds the village a paradise, and then another prison. At sundown, once the heat of the day has faded, the town’s inhabitants gather in small clumps to gossip in the piazza, a stretch of packed dirt lined by a low wall at the top of the stairs leading down the steep hillside farther into the valley. The major fascist contribution to the village, a large public toilet, set as if it were a monument in the main square, was primarily used by various domesticated, unpenned animals in search of shade and moisture. Occasionally young boys attempted to prove their courage by leaping off the stone roof onto the hard ground three meters below.
According to the painter, peasants regarded the fates of the political prisoners as similar to their own, some being, in some other place, made a decision on a whim, and here they all were. I stopped on the line “They don’t consider themselves human beings, like the people in Rome.” How could they, one of them dies of a burst appendix, his cries echoing down the mountain, his family unable to afford the useless, nearly blind village doctor. Children don’t play in the streets, instead they lean, listless, in the town’s short shadows, bellies distended from malnutrition and skin turned yellow by malaria, they beg not for money or candies but for quinine pills.
But reading the book in whole, I found it wasn’t only a catalog of these medical horrors, the painter’s observations are full of wonder and melancholy as he wanders day by day from the cemetery at the top of the town to the last house at the bottom, the limits of his freedom, and I thought it cruel that my professor had chopped it so mercilessly into parts for the class. I had a superstition about books then, that they should always be respected as whole entities, it was painful to me in college to read fifty assigned pages photocopied into a course reader. I’d never abandoned a book I’d started, it felt like I was leaving a soul incomplete. It would take me years to break the habit, and when I did there would be a sense of loss, as if my soul, too, was less complete having abandoned this practice.
The memoir ended with the political prisoners being freed in celebration of the Italian army’s victory in Ethiopia, the painter says his goodbyes and leaves the village. But I knew, or I thought I remembered, that there was a tragic ending not contained in the book. The painter wrote nothing of his life before his exile, only the short biographical note on the back of the book told me he’d been born in Turin. I was curious about him, there was so little truly personal information in his book, everything was outward-facing, focused on his observations of the present moment. I wondered what he’d done to be arrested, what had happened to him after he was freed. The bio noted that he’d died in 1943, nearly seven years after his release. And never once in the memoir was it mentioned, by himself, the fascist officials, the peasants, or the village gossips, never once was it mentioned that the painter was Jewish.
I’d done the math before I started reading: Vietri had been born in 1920, and the painter was kept in the village from 1935 to 1936. It was possible they’d met, even that Vietri could be mentioned in the memoir, the town had less than two thousand inhabitants, but the painter had taken care to note at the beginning of the text that all of the names had been changed.
There were no English-language biographies of the painter, and the Wikipedia page was sparse, barely more information than the bio on the back on the book, listing his death in 1943 in a town I located on the Swiss border, near Lake Como. The Italian biography was already two decades old, but I found it for sale at the third bookstore I tried, in a student-frequented place in San Lorenzo near a café where I’d often met Andrea. It surprised me that there was no more recent biography, given the popularity of his memoir, but it seemed to me that his book was now only read by schoolchildren to learn lessons about the extremity of southern poverty and the hardships of the past, or, I supposed, by tourists passing through the Termini curious about some bucolic recollection of scenic villages, soon to be surprised. I thought of his description of the long sad eyes of the village dogs, the fierce expression of the black Madonna when the statue was unveiled in the street on her feast day. The book deserved better.
I spent the weekend reading the biography, the language dense and circuitous in the manner of the global academy, so that at times I would realize that my eyes had traversed entire pages without absorbing anything, only the repetition of certain words, stato, fascismo, Torino, sorella. It was clear to me how far I was from being fluent in Italian, despite how smoothly I could get through the five-line transactions that made up most of my days, my childish conversations with Andrea and Loredana. I found myself returning to the translation of the memoir as I read the biography out of a craving for simple clear prose in my own language, and the weekend passed, back and forth between the English and the Italian, the first person and the third, the translated and the unsullied, the village and the world.
The painter had been raised in Turin in a comfortable home. His family’s roots in the city ran deep, his father owned a steel factory on the outskirts, and he and his sister, elder by four years, were given expensive, coddled educations. He was just barely of the generation young enough to have escaped the First World War, if it had gone on another year he would have turned twenty and been sent to the front. They, those of his birth year, were called the line of ’98, his cousin, born nine months before him, was killed in a tunnel carved recently into a mountainside by a canister of tear gas dropped neatly by the Austrians from above. The war had ended, he’d enrolled in the university to study chemistry, Italy’s territory gains from the war amounted to a few villages, one or two scenic peaks, and how, then, could he concentrate on his studies, the hallways had gone silent before him. After two years he’d wandered away from its disciplines, replacing the clean, sharp smells of the chemistry lab with the sticky-thick fumes of oil paints, the hiss of the burner with the crack of dried canvas across a boarded frame. He went to Paris for almost a year, returned to Italy, and spent most of his time in his family’s summer home on the coast of Liguria. He painted. An arbitrary line had been drawn, and he’d fallen on the right side.
I had made it only halfway through the biography when I grew impatient, I wanted to know more about the painter and his strange, short life, this was my problem with my life as well, I wanted to know the ending. I searched for other publications on the painter on Google Scholar, which led me to an article on JSTOR published by a doctoral student at Roma Tre, on the painter’s reputation abroad in the postwar years, particularly in Germany and America. I’d found the author of the article’s name in the directory of Roma Tre, and it was as simple as writing her an email that said I had read her article, that I had an interest in the painter and I would love to buy her dinner, lying only a little when I said I was from Berkeley and implying an adjacent scholarly interest of my own.
Even though I’d given him my cell phone number, I’d avoided Andrea for a week or so after the spectacular way I had ended my friendship with Giancarlo and Laura. That night, Giancarlo had placed his hand tenderly between my head and the wall, I had put my fingers under his long, soft lashes and, stroking up, had asked if he knew what a butterfly kiss was. I knew I had ruined something there, but I wasn’t sure precisely what it was. In any case, I was grateful my actions didn’t seem to have filtered to Andrea, or perhaps they had and he had decided to ignore it, whichever it was, he never mentioned Giancarlo or Laura to me again.
I had realized, after the absence of a week, that I enjoyed Andrea’s company, it was a surprise, even a revelation, to have his friendship. He was observant and cynical, it was fun to bring up a topic and watch his thoughts unspool. I told him about the dinner I’d set up with the scholar who had written about the painter, and he asked when it was, and I said in a few days. Anna, the woman I was meeting, had written that she was likely to return to Sardinia in the next month, and graciously, I thought, arranged her schedule so that we would be able to meet before then. Ah, Andrea said. You will have to talk first, then, she’s a Sardinian. And then, in response to my expression, offered, well, Sardinians, they are quiet, and went on to expound on the nature of Sardinians, inserting occasionally, as if he’d registered my skepticism, the phrase these are stereotypes, you know they’re not all true, before repeating generalizations, gossip, and anecdotes of each of the three or four Sardinians he’d ever met in his life. My feelings were equally divided between three reactions to this speech: I was annoyed, deeply, at his bombast, I was also genuinely touched by his desire to prepare me for the meeting, and I was awed, an emotion I did not normally associate with Andrea, at how sincerely he believed this geographical fact of her birth would determine how the two of us might get along at dinner. My Roman family’s casual racism had been bewildering to me as a teenager, and I had never decided if this expansion of prejudice beyond the boundaries of nationality or skin color to nearly the village level made it better, or if it made it worse.
When I arrived at the restaurant, Anna was already seated at a table along the sidewall adjacent to the door. Her face was thin and pale, her dark hair pulled tightly back, she was several years older than I was but trying to seem even a few more. She stood to greet me, shaking my hand instead of kissing me, and gestured for me to take a seat. English? she asked, and I replied in Italian that either was fine. She grimaced slightly and began to speak in English. I had expected her to be curious about my interest in the painter, but she didn’t even ask what it was I wanted to know. Instead, she launched into a description of her studies as if giving me a résumé, her laureate in Pisa, her dottorato at Roma Tre. She was now in search of a university position, she concluded, a search that was now entering its second year. Most of her colleagues had gone to the States, or to England, but there was very little interest in her subject outside of Italy, or even in Italy, she shrugged. She’d been hoping to find a position in Turin, but the academics there were, she made a gesture, the fingers entwined with those of the opposite hand to make a solid sphere of digits, which she then shook. Her parents owned a farm still in operation in the interior of Sardinia that they’d turned into an ecotourism bed-and-breakfast, and her siblings and their spouses all lived there now, along with the rotating presence of foreign travelers. Soon she might have to go back while she looked for a placement, she said, as she had mentioned in our correspondence. Who knows if anything will work out, she shrugged, looking past my shoulder as she precisely cut the last tomatoes of the summer and took a small sip of her wine. She wasn’t warm at all, I hated the thought that the things Andrea had told me were largely right, but she possessed a directness and an air of fatalism that made me like her.
Anna had written her dissertation, she continued, on the Torino Sei, a group of painters, including mine, as she referred to him, who had debuted together at the Venice Biennale at the end of the 1920s. They were all from Turin, of varying backgrounds and visual styles, christened by this geographical accident and bonded by their shared youth, they had all been young enough to miss the war. They embraced their status as a group, my painter had invited them all to his family’s villa on the coast of Liguria, a stay intended only to last for a few weeks of the summer months, but they’d all ended up living there for nearly half a decade. They’d created a community, isolated from the outside world, and devoted themselves wholly to their work. The villa had been intended as a summer residence, it was impossible to heat in the winters, three seasons of the year were so damp that they all lost several works on canvas to mold, but there were orchards, there was the ocean, there was the north-facing, constant light in the rooms in which they painted. Their nicknames for one another were numbers, based on their assignments at that fair. One of them, Gian Luca, Secondo, brought his wife and newborn son, some of them had mistresses who were there for months or years, Gian Luca’s wife had another child, at least three of them were one another’s lovers at one point or another over those years. It was utopic, they lived totally communally, taking turns bicycling into town for food supplies paid for by money they received sporadically from relatives, or, less often, when one of them sold a painting. In the summer they ate the fruit from the orchards, in the fall they harvested the olives and made their own oil. They all painted the same things, the villa, the women, the children, the olive orchards in harvest, the waves of the ocean after a storm, but their styles remained distinct, perhaps because of the proximity they guarded their borders closely. Their outputs were enormous during those years. Anna took a long drink of her water.
It’s not that they were unaware of the political movements happening, how could they be, they were all from Turin and would return to visit their families, of course they noticed the men walking through the streets with pistols and black arms. But they believed in reacting aesthetically, rejecting the classical grandeur of futurism, the metaphysical painters with their spooky piazzas, they were after what they called a pictorial language of freedom. They believed that there was no choice between art and politics, that the way to oppose fascism was through their art. Our plates were cleared, the left-behind juices of the tomatoes slipping on the oil like beads of blood. I wanted to ask Anna what one painted in a pictorial language of freedom, but did not.
My painter would return to Turin for all of the holidays, she continued, and his parents would come to spend weeks in their villa in the summer, the group all loved his mother especially. She sat for portraits for all of them, but she would never admit to liking any of them, she referred to them as the fools in the castle. His father was more tolerant, his mother would say that she had to care about respectability since she was the only one who would. Every time she visited she would pull aside Gian Luca’s wife and give her a lecture on the risks of bringing a child up in such an environment, and Marta, a Slovene, would smile back with her broad, placid Slavic face. But you can see his mother’s fondness for all of them in her eyes in the paintings they made of her, Anna added. When his mother died, the painter was thirty-four and his friends carried him all the way to the beach on their shoulders and threw him into the ocean fully clothed. Her death was the beginning of the dissolution of their group.
He returned to Turin for the funeral, had only been gone from the villa for three weeks when he received another telegram, Gian Luca had died. Tuberculosis. He’d had the cough so long they’d stopped noticing. My painter returned for the second burial in as many months.
Two weeks later, they awoke to Marta and her children gone from the house. Ludovico, called Quinto, had left a letter announcing their elopement. It was as if in that moment, the moment of reading the letter, someone had inserted an axe into the crack made by his mother’s death, and twisted until the whole thing split. All at once the fellowship they’d founded was no longer sacred, their group ceased to exist as a unit of meaning. My painter went back to Turin, and never returned to the villa.
In Turin, it was as if he realized how much time he had to make up for, he began writing for a friend’s paper, a communist publication, anti-fascist. His swerve from art to politics was total, once he’d raised his head above the water and inhaled he could no longer return. He didn’t paint at all for the next three years, nothing, not so much as an editorial cartoon. It was 1932, there was work to be done.
The pasta arrived and we arranged plates. There was so much I didn’t know about the years she was describing, fascists, Mussolini, the self-proclaimed duce, sure, but none of the details, it had always been enough for me to see where it ended, the privilege of all Americans born after the war. He did go back to painting, Anna continued, during his exile. He was arrested for his anti-government writing in 1935, imprisoned in Milan for three months before they sent him to the south. Can you imagine the sun on those white clay hills when you haven’t seen daylight for twelve weeks? It was a common thing then, to reduce the prison sentence to exile, they figured the prisoners couldn’t do any harm. You’ve read the memoir, yes? The mail was brought in once a day by an old woman on a donkey, all of it was read and censored by the fascist official of the town, all of the letters sent and received there. No one visited the town, there was no reason for anyone to go there, he was completely cut off. He made no attempt to contact his comrades or resume his political activities, he completely abandoned his previous work. So what did he have to do but to paint, to return to his art. His paintings changed there, you know, have you seen them? I said, apologetically, that I wasn’t sure, I’d only seen images of his work online, but the paintings often weren’t dated. Some of them are in Rome, she said, almost sternly, naming a villa that had been turned into a museum. You must go and see them.
She smiled forgivingly as our plates were cleared. Can you imagine, by the time he got to the village, he was only thirty-seven, he’d already had three lives. What was he to do? He walked the village, he observed its colors and inhabitants, he painted them. He found himself in a white-dust-covered world where the majority of people thought themselves at the level of wild animals, unuseful to humankind. So he painted the peasants, he never painted any of the town gentry, though it’s clear from his letters this created resentments and probably made his time there more unpleasant. But this was his gift to them, the peasants, painting their faces, affirming they were also human beings.
I asked her to tell me about how he died, what happened to him after his release from the village. I still hadn’t finished the biography, the arrest and legalese of his sentencing had mired me in a particularly difficult chapter, since I’d known I was soon to meet Anna I’d been unmotivated to push through. She nodded and refilled my glass from the bottle of sparkling water, then looked me squarely in the eye. He wrote the memoir of the village in the years after his release, in his childhood home in Turin. It’s incredible, she continued, for each place he lived in his adult life he had a different mode of expression. By the time he died, I sometimes wonder if he thought that he’d already run through all of his possibilities. I wonder if he wanted to start over yet again. His older sister encouraged him to write the book, do you know about his sister? She was the great relationship of his life, I think. Their letters to each other are full of such tenderness, I felt bad for reading them during my research.
It was his sister and her husband who decided they needed to leave Italy. She’d married a man from a similar family from Turin, Jewish, she and her husband were both doctors. Their father, already old when he and his sister were born, was frail, and her two children were still quite small. But her husband had his ear to the ground, the deportations had started farther south. They went to a town called Agno, on the Swiss border, where people in normal times vacationed on a huge glacial lake, and joined a camp of other refugees. There had already been a flood of people crossing the border, but most had been trying to get to France, the Swiss had been tolerant about them passing through. But now France was in the hand of the Germans, people were crossing the border to stay in Switzerland, and the attitude of the Swiss government had changed. They said they were afraid of their high rate of unemployment. The information was fluctuating day by day, a few weeks before they were letting in only military refugees and uniforms of various armies were scattered through the camp, now they were letting in only the politically persecuted, not the racially targeted. The painter might have had a chance to qualify, as a communist, but he refused to leave his family. Sometimes the Swiss let a few people in and stopped at the seventh person, sometimes they required papers that did not exist, sometimes the Italian carabinieri shot those who had hired fishermen to smuggle them across the lake if they were intercepted before they reached the opposite shore. The family was there for weeks, growing increasingly desperate, they didn’t think they’d ever be let across.
Anna signaled to the waiter, who brought us two espressos a few minutes later. He took morphine tablets from his sister’s medical supplies, she continued, and wandered into a small stable on the outskirts of the town. It was October, it would have been cold in the mountains, it must have seemed a warm place. The next morning the officials changed their minds, they were to be let across, the whole family, everyone was ecstatic, but no one could find him. When they did they had to leave the body behind, they paid some villagers to dig a quick grave, on a hill near the churchyard. And then they went into Switzerland. No one knows where the grave is, or on what hill, his sister always claimed to have no memory of that day, with its violent elations and upsets, and his father died in Geneva four months after they arrived. His sister was the one who found the memoir among his things, she was the one to get it published after the war. With the papers, they also found a note asking to be buried in Aliano. She gave me a small smile as I exhaled, trying to slow my heartbeat, which always seemed to speed up in response to sadness it could do nothing about.
I left money on top of the bill for the waiter to clear with our glasses, and as we moved to gather our things I asked Anna what had interested her in the painter, how she’d first been drawn into her research. She replied that in her first degree she’d been focused on the restoration of paintings, she thought she would work for a museum of a historical trust. It was only for her dottorato that she began to focus on this group, on the other side of the art. She hadn’t really considered the painter’s memoir, she said. In Italy we read it mostly for its descriptions of southern poverty, but his paintings are so affecting, and he wrote plenty else, brilliant things, and now the only people who read them are people like me, who only come across them after five years of university study. He was capable of great volumes of work, his output of paintings, his journalistic writings, the memoir. I think he was a person who never knew quite what to do with the freedoms he’d been given, but the thing that drew me to his art, to his writing, the thing I couldn’t get out of my mind, is that this group existed for five years, maybe less? They were trying to find a different way, apart from politics, through art. These people cared so much about ideas, beauty, they gave everything in their lives to these questions, they didn’t care about their families or mistresses, not really, just art and their discussions of it, and they lived this way so purely for half a decade, they built their whole adult lives on it, only to watch the earth upon which they thought they lived crumble beneath them so that they were left with dust in their hands. None of it mattered, in the end they were all swept away in one way or another by the regime, by the war, and the whole world they lived for ceased to exist almost overnight. All of the things they cared about turned out to be totally irrelevant in the face of this violence, this absolutism. Of course it mattered, we still talk about their art, their ideas, but in most ways, now I think that in the most important ways, it didn’t matter at all.
After she received her dottorato, Anna continued as we walked down the busy street with its graffitied short buildings, greens glimpsed through the fences suggesting gardens beyond, she’d been given a research fellowship and had spent three months in Germany, in Frankfurt. She’d met another student on the same fellowship while there, a Norwegian. They both found the city soulless and chilly, though he studied economics and, she said, was more predisposed to the atmosphere of black suits and tall gray architecture. They would walk along the river together in the endless rain, would buy ten-euro train tickets to small towns along the Rhine, would spend their nights together in their cramped temporary residences. I fell in love with him, she said, pausing on the ball of her foot and turning to meet my eyes, as if tempting me to challenge her. I met her gaze, and we continued walking. But the relationship quickly took on an edge of antagonism, she said, at least on my part. I’d never been jealous before, never particularly interested even in physical affection, in fact the men I’d known or considered dating during my studies in Rome and before that in Pisa had annoyed me with their attentions, with their physicality, their need. Kristian was the opposite, it was hard to justify my jealousy because he never seemed to flirt with anyone, but he never seemed to betray any feeling toward me either. He would tell me things, in a matter-of-fact tone, like he wanted us to live together in Norway or in Italy, that he loved me, even, he did say it a few times, and I would repeat the things he had said back to myself later and try to inject feeling into them. But I was never able to feel from him that he felt anything, never felt that these feelings existed outside of words, and it began to drive me crazy. I would pick fights that I knew were insane, I would do it in public, I would flirt with his friends in front of him, I even slapped him once, but nothing I did, nothing I ever did, would get an emotional reaction from him. I’m embarrassed of how I behaved, especially since there were other students on the fellowship who witnessed many of these things, I tried to stop, my actions seemed insane to me when I wasn’t with him, I tried to be concerned for my professional reputation, but I couldn’t, it all seemed worth it to me when he was there, the chance to get any sort of rise out of him, to make him veer even slightly off the path of whatever he was already going to do. Eventually it came to a breaking point, I felt as if I’d been throwing my body against a brick wall for weeks, and we split up and I returned to Italy. And I still can’t figure out what it was, if it was love that caused me to behave this way, or if it was something else, something within me reacting to him like a chemical that can’t tolerate others of a similar atomic nature.