Settimia and I were now taking walks together a few evenings a week. I met her when she was off work in the park outside her office, where she would change her heels into one of several pairs of flamboyantly colored tennis shoes. Our talks would range on these evenings, but mostly they were taken up with the ten years of family news I had missed: I hadn’t known, and wanted to now, about Dida’s scoliosis in high school, Bipo’s recent health scares, the series of career moves that had brought Giulia to London. Even the legal case surrounding my grandfather’s apartment, I’d vaguely known that it had dragged on for years after his death, but I had been in college, it was Bleak House as far as I was concerned, but here, I did want to know what the various judges had concluded, which was ultimately not in the sisters’ favor, but they’d felt vindicated anyway, having made their point in an official capacity. We also talked about my mother, I left alone the sharp memories of my childhood, but I told her about the facility she lived in now, I calmly answered her questions about doctors and treatments. On these walks the October wind moved kindly in the trees over our heads, and it was hard for me to argue with the importance of the world in front of me.
Settimia was easy to talk to, she had the sharp opinions of every Roman, but, what a difference it made, I was automatically included by her inside the veil separating the family from the rest of the world, once I had accepted my place there all of my actions were to be defended, not questioned. The week before, at dinner, I’d made a comment to Clea about some of the boys I’d known in the hostels, not realizing Settimia had turned to listen. After Settimia had given me a kind smile and went into the kitchen, Clea, seeing my face full of horror and embarrassment, had said helpfully, she understands. I decided I had no choice but to act like this was true.
On one of our walks I asked Settimia about Fahad. Did his family know about Andrea? Would he stay in Italy? He’s been here for seven years now, she said, after a few moments of thought. We paused at the crest of a small hill, and she materialized a small handkerchief with which she dabbed her forehead before taking out a small compact and reapplying her lipstick. I think it would be hard for him, to go back. But we don’t know. He is still on a student visa. Of course Andrè will be very sad if he goes back. But Andrè is still so young. Maybe it would be better.
I was surprised by this, Settimia always had such warmth toward Fahad, but I had underestimated the standards of the Italian mother. I confessed to her then that I didn’t feel young, though I was the same age as Andrea, I felt ancient. I felt that I’d already exhausted all of the lives available to me, that the changes needed to get me where I wanted to be, and I didn’t even know where that was, were insurmountable, I didn’t see how they could ever take place. Settimia didn’t laugh at me, just said, simply, it’s easier to see the accumulation of small bits of progress when you are my age, it’s true, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.
It was in Sicily, Roberto told me, I’d finally asked him. We had walked to the river from his office, he’d just gotten off work, and we sat on a bench overlooking the water. It was one of the last days, I thought, where we would be able to stay outside, it was already on the verge of being too cold. I intertwined my fingers with Roberto’s and pressed them together. I had gone there to interview the refugees in the camps, he said, turning to me seriously, I heard a lot of things there I will never forget, and he began to recite them as if they were a list, as if there were images in the camera of his mind, stories he could purge by imparting them into my brain. The boat of migrants, mostly refugees culled from the edges of the Mediterranean by the Arab Spring, deliberately rammed by smugglers once they were sufficiently offshore, they’d wanted to turn around, start a new trip; the woman, eight months pregnant, who was to be rescued first from a boat minutes away from sinking, who in climbing to the rescuer’s boat lost her balance and fell between the two vessels and drowned or was crushed; another boat whose engine broke down a quarter of a mile from the coast of the new continent, and since there was no service on any of their phones someone lit a blanket on fire to signal for rescue, but the blanket fire spread to spilled gasoline from the engine and in order to avoid the fire all of the passengers went to the other side of the boat, causing it to capsize, and even though they were so close to shore, almost none of them could swim, over three hundred people had drowned; and then there were the people they pulled from the water suffering not only from hypothermia, exhaustion, but also from various everyday illnesses, colds, the flu, a surprising number from the chicken pox.
But the story I couldn’t let go of, he continued, was told to me in Greece by a Palestinian boy who’d befriended an Egyptian law student on the boat, the Egyptian boy had left law school without telling his family in order to go to Europe to earn money, he wanted to pay for a heart treatment needed by his father and he’d decided the family couldn’t wait for him to graduate and find a job in Egypt, especially with the situation there. Their boat left from Egypt, after it sank they clung to a life buoy together for almost two days. The Egyptian boy succumbed to exhaustion a few hours before they were rescued, and the Palestinian boy, just a teenager, was so traumatized he couldn’t remember his friend’s last name. Just Ahmed, from Cairo. So his family, the father he wanted to save, they still don’t know, to them he just disappeared. I tried to find out more about this Ahmed, I wanted to let his family know what had happened to him. I spent a week interviewing everyone else who’d survived that boat, searching for Ahmeds from Cairo on the social networks, asking Egyptians who came through on later boats if they’d met him. But I never found out who he was, I was never able to tell his family.
And you know, he continued after a pause, my hands were on his thighs, it won’t stop. It’s only going to get worse. The fishermen there now call it the season. There are so many people who want to come.
There was a look in Roberto’s eyes I wanted to absorb into my body, the look of someone in a dark room so long they can’t bear to lift their eyes to the light, and by the end of his litany I knew this was the day I would sleep with him. It was still early evening when we walked the rest of the way to his apartment, and the light was soft through the window, and he kissed me gently on the neck, and we lay down together on the mattress in his room. The next morning the sweepers were out with their maroon outfits, the bottom half of the legs orange as if they’d been dipped in a vat of melted traffic cones, they traversed the centers of the streets, sweeping up broken bottles and other trash, removing the evidence of the parties Roberto and I had missed the night before, calling to one another over the hard scrapes of their brooms across the pavement. It was a cold morning, there had been rain during the night, but the windows of the room were half open and we listened to them making their way along the avenues, our limbs still stacked on top of each other. Roberto’s skin felt different from the skin of boys my age, his thighs were dry, paper-like, but his hands were steady, they’d moved with purpose. The joke from the hostels was finally right, it was heaven.
Roberto lived just above the Ponte Milvio, down a small ivy-filled passage I would have called a driveway but he and all of his neighbors called a “tunnel,” emphasis on the first syllable so that it matched the last one of cartoon. The bars of this neighborhood spread their patrons languidly out into the streets, I came to enjoy leaving his small room in the mornings and passing through them for a cappuccino before continuing the long way back to Parioli, looping right to avoid the horrible elevated express road filled with empty beer bottles and condoms used in despair after Lazio games. His bedroom was built under a mansard roof, and the ceiling sloped down to wood-framed windows that opened out onto the tunnel, and everything out the window was green, white, or brown. In this room, with Roberto, I felt as if we’d left the oranges and pinks of the rest of the city behind.
Within a few weeks everyone in my family had met Roberto, I could see Clea especially approved, it made me more serious in her eyes and she invited us to the movies with her and Marco. Dida was so absorbed in her family, she had no special interest in Roberto except that he represented a way that I could follow her path, which she was encouraging of, she was already despairing that after four months her baby did not yet have a cousin. Roberto was especially charming with my aunts, he had a special affection for older women, and I wondered if it was because of the loss of his mother. He and Fahad would spend entire evenings in long conversations about world political events, often joined by Marco, the only thing that perplexed me was that he and Andrea did not warm to each other. There was no animosity, but this fact of their benign indifference allowed me to admit that my family was not the monolith I believed them to be, they still were able to have individual reactions and preferences, even if they were always enacted in the group setting. I saw my family so frequently now, they were already talking of teaching me to make certain holiday dishes, though it amused me that neither Clea nor Dida could cook, their mother cooked for them.
My relationships with my family had become easier, somehow. Their intensity and irony bothered me less, I was able to delight in their use of language, the demands of intimacy also seemed easier to bear. On one of our evenings together, while Settimia finished in the kitchen and Giacomo set a single bottle of wine for the nine of us to share over dinner on the table, Andrea jumped in when the conversation tilted back toward me and what kind of work I wasn’t finding, now that I was back in the family fold, it seemed he regarded me as having no secrets. She is writing a book, he declared. It’s about the Hebrews. I listened, amazed, as he spun out a story for everyone that I could see was totally plausible from his point of view, the few things I’d asked him about or that he’d seen me reading, that Palestinian book, the painter, I was shocked at how complete the narrative was in his own version of reality. And I realized I had two choices, I could attempt to correct Andrea’s version of reality, or I could live it. So I told them about Vietri.
I myself thought my search for Vietri was so weird that I was continually surprised that the Italians I told didn’t think there was anything unusual about it. There were so many mysterious rules and reasons for doing things, they were all so high-strung and uncompromising, I remembered Clea once taking the eggs out of my hands one morning at the beach when we were young and I’d wanted to make myself some scrambled eggs for breakfast. She’d returned them to their spot on the counter, eggs weren’t for breakfast and so I would not be eating them. They were cosmopolitans, these Romans, still one Fourth of July they’d asked what Americans ate on this holiday and I’d described corn on the cob and they’d looked at me in horror. But it’s pig food! Dida had said. Only in Rome did being cosmopolitan have absolutely no association with open-mindedness. They were all still shocked by my instinct to drink the tap water, this despite their lectures to me on the failures of American environmental policy.
You know, Marco said, there are TV shows that can do this for you, find someone, Clea was rolling her eyes, but it’s true, he continued, waving his hand at her, my mother watches them, and they hire journalists, too, I have some friends who have gotten work. Clea interrupted, clearly embarrassed by Marco and wanting to take this in a more serious, factual direction. There are two television shows that are premised on finding people, she explained. Chi l’ha visto? is on RAI and it is about people who have gone missing. They explain the case and then they wait for people to call in with information. Lots of adopted children finding their birth parents, teenage runways, things like that. C’è posta per te is sillier. It’s people who want to send a “letter” to someone they knew long ago, usually an old boyfriend who left them, something like that. It’s very melodramatic. They actually send someone dressed like a postman to deliver the letter, like a male model, someone too attractive to really be a postman. We were all laughing, but I was shaking my head, shocked at a world in which everyone knew my secrets. Well, Marco said, just let me know if you want to do it, my mother would love it!
Even though he had met my Roman family, I still felt that I was keeping much of myself from Roberto, I was realizing at last that the facts of my family were separate from my true self, I had told Roberto the first, but the second still felt untouched. I couldn’t bring myself to ask Roberto if I was the only person he was seeing, I was aware that one answer would devastate me, and the other would trap me. I had never considered my life in Berkeley to be real, had never expected anything that happened before that great uncertainty of my life was resolved to matter, and it wasn’t that my life in Rome felt more real to me, but the passage of the years since college had suggested to me that perhaps this was as real as life would ever feel. There was no secret level I would finally find, just the world and the people before me, and what I would do with them. Perhaps, I was also realizing, it wasn’t only up to me to decide if my actions mattered.
I was seeing that for Dida, the rest of my cousins, their lives flowed seamlessly out of the elder generations, their place had been waiting for them in advance of their arrival. But I knew I wasn’t like this, accepting my place in the family system did not give me all of the answers, I was absorbed and yet I still didn’t know what to do, my cousins had never needed to reconcile multiple narrative threads. I had always wondered if my mother’s schizophrenia would have developed if she had stayed in Italy, and now I wondered if her desire for a coherent story was simply a longing for the one she had left.
There had been a drought for most of my childhood in California, one that lasted a biblical seven years, and during that time, before these ideas had merged or transformed into her theories about my grandfather, my mother had become obsessed with rivers. Away from the coast as we were, those great, lazy rivers of my childhood, the American, the Russian, the Sacramento, where one could float down a gentle stream on an inner tube for days, were assumed as the image of water by the psyche. My mother began to collect maps, historical, topographical, maps of their floodplains. She ordered books from the local library, drove with me to the levees and peered down at the banks suspiciously. She developed a grand theory that all the rivers had once been one mighty river, which had carved the valley. She would sit me down, and with a desperation that embarrassed me, it should have worried me, but I was so young, it didn’t worry me, it embarrassed me, she tried to explain it to me, passionately drew her fingers over the maps, tried to show me how they all had once been one great river nearly the width of the state. She’d studied chemical water treatments during her master’s, she knew a lot about the science, I didn’t know anything, why shouldn’t I believe her? But I didn’t believe her, and she cared so much, over and over she tried to make me see. When my father got home from work she’d quietly slide the maps back into the drawer and put her finger to her lips, our secret.
One year, the year before it got “very bad,” my father had one of the maps framed as a Christmas gift. It was one she studied often, made at the beginning of the twentieth century, showing the current boundaries, and, almost whimsically, where the river might have spread, the other paths it might have taken. The colors of the map were oranges and golds, though it depicted water, and my father had chosen a pale cerulean for the matting, a deep redwood for the frame, I remembered it as one of the most elegant things I’d ever seen. But my mother’s expression changed as she realized that her beloved map was encased away from her. She began to wail, and threw it on the floor, shattering the glass. I’d never wished more than in that moment that I’d had a sibling, someone to clutch hands with, someone in the lifeboat with me. Instead I sat stock-still as the rest of the scene played out, my father trying to comfort her, sweeping up the glass, the broken frame, later, out by the garbage. It was one of my most feared memories, worse even than the days in the motel, and I curled away from it whenever it crept on the edges of my thoughts.
Years later, when I could finally bring myself to, I would do some reading on schizophrenia. I had to do it while pretending I wasn’t doing it, with eight other browser tabs open so I could click away at any moment as if burned. The line I remembered from these quick bursts of research was that schizophrenia, or maybe it was hallucinations in particular, was the brain trying to make a coherent story out of the disparate and often false and disorienting information it was receiving. In those final years while living with us, my mother had thrown all of her energy, all of her intelligence, all of her love, into this project, she cared more about proving the rivers were the same than I had ever seen anyone care about anything. I’d realized that it was no wonder my mother cared so much about this story about the river, this story was the only thing she had.
Sometimes I worried, wondering if I was any different, I was trying to assemble the facts of the world into an understanding of Vietri, instead of voices on the flat line of a motel telephone I had the massacre of monks in Ethiopia, instead of braided rivers I had a painter exiled to a town of white clay, I was attempting to exchange those days in the motel with a man who’d once ordered hundreds of scholarly books on every topic from a bookstore in Berkeley. I had a feeling of grasping, that if I could only sift together all of the stories I had heard, if I could understand these stories as a part of one story, maybe, maybe I would get close. I wondered if I was trying to save myself, and I wondered if it would work.