I still wanted to find Vietri, I was frustrated I had not accomplished this goal, I’d clung to the scenario for so long, the knock, the chat, the end of my journey, the idea had been so simple. Still, this search didn’t consume all of my time, much of it disappeared in the mysterious way that my days of the past months had slipped by, mornings lost to hangovers, afternoons spent reading and walking, excursions to acquire food or views, but it remained a pull at the back of my mind, a question, an unopened box, and every few days I would walk by and test the latch, confirming the continuing fact of my curiosity.
The only thing I knew for sure about him, I thought as I walked, chewing the inside of my bottom lip, the only information I had, other than the list of books he’d bought, was his address. There had never been an email address for him, all his communication with the store had been by letter. He might have given us a phone number, perhaps to provide to the bank, but I wasn’t sure, and it would have been too odd to call the store now, who knew who’d be answering the phones, if they’d give out customer information. I’d checked the pagine bianche, hoping to find his phone number in the listings, but not even his name was present. It was funny to me that Italy had a phone book. When, in this country, had anyone ever lost track of a friend or relative, or wanted to contact a stranger? So all I had was the address on the via Bevanda. It would have to be enough.
I had to hope the apartment was in his name, and for the first time I wondered if he’d given us his real name at the bookstore. It occurred to me, as I followed these thoughts, that his real name would have to be used on other things associated with the apartment, for example the electric bill. The utility company could at least confirm this, and I wondered idly what story I could make up if I called, tried to remember if I knew anything at all about utilities in Rome. Surely he would have had an account under his name, the account might even have more than the name, might allow me to fill in more of the taunting blanks on the birth certificate request form.
I tried to ask Andrea about utility setups, calling him later that afternoon at a time when I thought he’d be less likely to be bothered, barely fitting into one of the phone booths at the internet café around the corner, the hostel’s pay phones for show, everyone got cheap SIM cards or Skyped on the computers. I asked how complicated they were to set up, which I’d decided was the most plausible way for me to phrase the question. Why? he asked immediately. Are you thinking of renting an apartment? I said something vague and I actually thought I could hear his arm moving in an impatient gesture. But you will probably need a room then, not a whole apartment, Rome is too expensive, in this case you will not need to set it up. I will let you know, he said, as I’d only begun to start protesting, and hung up.
I realized I didn’t need to go so far as to look up a utility account, really I could check any piece of mail. I tried to remember the dim orange-lit lobby of the apartment building, attempting to summon the memory of a mailbox. I decided that if I was willing to go as far as requesting a complete stranger’s birth certificate, if I had possibly stolen and kept in my possession a rare and not unpolitical book from someone named Chiara, then it seemed arbitrary to draw the line at trying to check Vietri’s mail. At least, I thought, I should return to the apartment, see if the mailbox was easily accessible, if so, peek at the names, put everything back in its place. A car was exiting the driveway as I walked up the street, I’d timed my visit to the morning, hoping to catch some resident leaving for work, and I broke into a jog, slipping inside the metal gate as it rolled shut, keeping my eye on the car as it continued down the street, but it didn’t slow. I doubted they had seen me, given the angle, still, I felt a rush of anxiety, or excitement, as I ascended the stairs, gave three soft knocks on Vietri’s door, suddenly afraid of what would happen if the shrill neighbor heard me again. But no one answered, and the steady thuds of my feet moving down the stairs calmed me, by the time I’d returned to the lobby my heartbeat had slowed, my head felt clear. The postboxes were just inside the entryway, thin and metal, with a lock at the bottom so that the door opened upwards to reveal a slot. Vietri’s number, like the door buzzer outside, was missing a name card, and I slid my fingers under the lip at the opening and gave it a tug. It didn’t move. I looked around to make sure I hadn’t been observed, and left the building.
I returned to the apartment building that afternoon at three, that rare quiet hour in Rome. I’d bought, at a tourist stand near the hostel, a heavy metal beer opener, flat, palm-sized, in the shape of the Colosseum. I’d asked the vendor if it was strong and he’d replied fortissima! in an offended tone, and wedged it between two metal postcard displays, using it as a lever to tilt one slightly to the side. I’d smiled and didn’t even bother to try to knock half a euro off the price. I entered the lobby quietly, the outside gate caught open an eighth of an inch by a small rock I’d located in the gravel earlier that day, testing to make sure it would open and close without obvious detection. The anxiety of the morning staircase was returning, I didn’t know how long Vietri had been gone, if there would be any mail left for him, but there was no point in wasting time, the longer I was there, the greater the chance someone would catch me in the middle of my strange mission, so I walked straight to the box with Vietri’s number on it, inserted the bottle opener’s edge into the thin slit below the lock, and pushed downwards against it with all of my weight. It didn’t give, and I nearly stamped my foot in disappointment. I crouched down until the lock was at eye level. From this angle I could tell the door had given a little, bent now so that there was a thin sliver of white revealed. I inserted the opener again at the crack and brought down the heel of my palm with all of my strength. I felt no hesitation or doubt in this gesture. In my last few years I’d barely influenced, barely touched, barely felt the world, I was so distantly tethered to it I felt in danger of floating away. And now I’d already inserted myself into the narrative of Vietri’s life, I wanted to find him, I wanted to prove he existed in reality. The third time I brought my hand down the lock gave with a crack. I reached my hand into the box, took the envelope that lay there, and left the building.
I took the envelope out of my bag only once back at the hostel, feeling too paranoid, or guilty, or superstitious, to examine it on the bus, but my hand had stayed pressed to its shape on the side of my bag as if to feel for a heartbeat. I went into the hostel bar, just opened for the evening, and only then removed it, turning it over to see tree-shaped orange logo of Enel, the energy company, exhaling a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding when I saw the name GIORDANO VIETRI. He existed. Vietri was his name. I hadn’t admitted to myself how worried I’d been that I would find no trace of him at all, no proof of his existence except my memory, a story that originated and remained only inside of my head, a fear that Vietri was actually a sign that my mind had broken in a fundamental way from the world around me, like I had always feared. He existed, or he had existed.
The bill was three pages, the top of each page listed his name, his address, a customer number consisting of twelve numbers, and something called a codice fiscale, a string of fifteen numbers and letters. No information that would fill in more of the birth certificate request form, but I wasn’t bothered, the sips I took of my beer while I scanned through the pages were cheerful and large. I checked the time, almost six. I’d planned a walk with Andrea that evening, and I hurried to finish my beer, secure the envelope in my locker, and dig a sweater out of my backpack, as the evening had turned cool. Andrea met me at the hostel, he had seemed determined to see where I was staying, though we met outside, I hadn’t suggested a drink, I didn’t want to associate myself in his mind with the hostel bar and the things that happened there.
We walked down toward La Sapienza and then diagonally through the campus, the light beginning to fade, past the small groups of students scattered across the lawns. The patches of grass appeared almost identical to the Californian soccer fields of my childhood, the white starburst of a weed flower, a yellow stumpy thing aspiring to daisy-hood, the dried pine needles like a brown lace overlay on the clumps of green and dirt. I was always surprised by the amount of familiar vegetation in Rome, sometimes I thought it had the flora of California by way of Jerusalem, oleanders and palm trees, the plants of my childhood with those of some Middle Eastern locale, as if I’d had exotic dreams that had unfurled themselves amidst the greenery outside my childhood bedroom window. Everything else had been so different that first summer when I was eleven, the streets, the cars, even the beaches, I’d held this one thing close as if it were for me personally, that the plants could be familiar.
Do you remember that summer at the beach? I asked Andrea. We’d all gone one summer for a few weeks to a coastal town an hour or so south of Rome, all of the aunts and cousins, uncles dropping in for a few days, seeming impermanent and background, as they always did. Andrea had met a girl, or he’d met another group of kids, but really he’d met the girl. She was thin, fifteen to his fourteen, with deep red hair that I might have thought, in other lights, was brunette, but on the beach, in the bright coastal sun, it burned orange. She was fiercely freckled, over almost her entire body, which we saw every day as she and her friends, Andrea with them now, marched their bikinis up and down the sand, the tanned boys in the group following behind with their arms draped over one another or sprinting ahead of the girls like dolphins along the wake of a ship. I was also fourteen that summer, but it seemed she was another age group altogether, I could tell that some invisible membrane separated us. I’d stayed with my younger, more distant cousins, all twelve or eleven, and we laid our bodies out in the sun on display as if hoping someone could walk by and choose us to join this other world.
Andrea has a ragazza, my aunts crooned all night. A girl, a girlfriend, there were only two categories in Italian: it was either ragazza, which simply meant girl, covering any sort of casual relationship, or fidanzata, the same word for fiancée, for an exclusive one, which I thought unremarkable until I myself started dating and imagined having to be in one of the two categories. On one of our last nights on the beach Andrea stayed out later than usual, and in the morning his face and even his neck turned as red as the girl’s hair in response to my aunts’ crude jokes. I burned with shame for Andrea, and swore to myself that when I was the age to do these things, the next summer, or the one after that, I was sure my breasts would grow sometime, I would never let them catch me.
That sex was so frank in Rome had made me uncomfortable in those years, but now that I was older I respected it, to be able to see a couple in the street and know if and even why they were fucking. I’d never seen such cleavage. Even the girls we passed now on the campus with their oversized shirts and loose imported pants somehow conveyed the outline of their bodies despite the apparent covering. Andrea hadn’t answered me, had taken drags on his cigarette as if thinking, and I continued, do you remember that girl? With the red hair? Did you ever see her again? Andrea was giving me a look I couldn’t read, as if I were the one to have forgotten an obvious memory. I suddenly felt embarrassed and didn’t know why, wanted to change the subject, cast around, and asked, what’s a codice fiscale?
He sighed, and rubbed the back of his head, pushing the hair forward, elbow up to the sky. It’s like a social security number, he said. We were speaking Italian, which he’d started doing with me since the afternoon he’d introduced me to Giancarlo, and so what he really said was numero sociale, but I knew what he meant. It was endearing to me to hear him speak clumsily, usually he was so precise, and our conversations in Italian put me at the disadvantage, I didn’t understand a quarter of the words, felt like I was singing a constant refrain of cosa vuol dire? che cosa vuol dire? Andrea was continuing, talking about taxes. So you get it at birth? I asked. He shook his head. You have one, too, you can figure it out, it’s a, and he paused and grimaced, said a word I didn’t know. I had an image of him again as a teenager, preoccupied, so much more serious than now, walking hunched over through the apartment, ignoring his mother’s calls. But today he brushed it off, told me he’d think of the English word, repeated the Italian one again questioningly. I shrugged. So tomorrow, are you free in the morning? I said yes, unsuspicious. Good, he continued, I have a room for you to look at. It took me a few steps to understand that this room would be for me, a room for me to rent, only then remembered his response when I’d asked how to set up utilities. I’d assumed he’d forgotten. I started to protest, to say I wasn’t sure how long I was staying, if I could make the commitment, but he stopped suddenly and smacked the back of his left hand into his right palm. It’s an algorithm, he said in English, and only then did I replay the Italian word he’d said, almost identical in spelling, upset I hadn’t been able to manage the conversation. I’ll send you the calculator, Andrea was saying, so that you can see what yours is.
Later that night I printed out the email Andrea had sent me with the instructions for identifying a codice fiscale, curious now about my own. I looked around for Maria as I entered the hostel bar, though I hadn’t seen her since our conversation. I wondered if she’d left the city. I hoped so. I found myself a table, borrowed a pen from the bartender, and began. The first three letters were made up of the consonants of my last name, then those of my first name: MLL GBR. I’d noticed that Vietri’s had the familiar V’s and G’s in his. I looked at the step for the following digits, due numeri per l’anno di nascita, and my breath caught. The next group of numbers were determined by the birth date. I put a coaster on top of my beer, draped my sweater aggressively over my chair to save the table, the bar was reaching the hour where the hordes from the bunks upstairs would gather to pregame, and ran up the stairs to my locker. I returned with the electricity bill with Vietri’s number on it. Finally, I would know. I paused, like my boyfriend had pointed out, I had no proof Vietri was old, and I recognized my assumptions were about to be questioned. Was I prepared for Vietri to be my age, or middle-aged and ogling, was I prepared for sex to be on the table? And we were in the tail end of the Berlusconi years, even an advanced age was no guarantee.
Vietri’s number was 20T14, and I read the instructions greedily. The first two numbers were the final two of the birth year. So, 1920. The letter code was for the month, December. He was born on December 14, 1920. I had been right, he was old, he’d be ninety-one if he was still alive, just as I’d pictured. I was flooded with a euphoria I hadn’t expected to come with this knowledge, though I’d been searching for exactly this, I’d held my emotional investment in the search for Vietri at a distance even from myself. I gave the rest of the instructions only a half glance, ready to channel this excitement into the king’s cup game starting at the next table that I’d just been invited to join, but then I saw that the next number was determined by the birthplace. I put down my beer. Andrea had sent me only the instructions for those born abroad, so I went over to the row of computers at the entrance to the bar where I’d printed the original email, fortunately one of them was free, inserted a two-euro coin, and within a few seconds had the page pulled up, the number that identified the commune. I searched for the number in the registry, so excited I mistyped the first time I put in the code. I tried again and there it was: Aliano, the name of the commune, Vietri’s birthplace, a town in the Basilicata region. I said the name out loud, its vowels smooth as they exited my mouth.
I logged off the computer, giddy, feeling high on my luck. I had a birth date, I had a hometown. Vietri was his real name. He was a person. One of the king’s cup players came over again to ask me if I wanted to join the new round, he was American and bought me two euro beers to bring over so I could catch up. None of the group expressed any curiosity about what I’d been calculating at my table in the corner, what my quick and gleeful Google search was about. I liked that we fellow travelers were so uncurious about the mundanities of one another’s days, knew, though, that by the end of the night I was likely to learn things about them that some of their closer friends back home didn’t know. Usually I was annoyed by the other Americans in the hostel and tried to avoid them, but this night I felt expansive. The knowledge I’d gained of Vietri made me feel superior in a way none of them would ever understand, and this inequity made me feel in their company lighthearted and unconcerned with the consequences of my actions. We played a few rounds, two, three?, and when the rest of the group left to go out to a club, it was already midnight, the boy who’d first brought me over pulled me into the hallway leading to the dorms and pressed me against the wall. He was younger than me, maybe only twenty-two, was he still in college? I couldn’t remember. We found one of the dorms empty and he slid into the bottom bunk next to me and kissed me on the cheek and asked, is this okay? as he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me to him. I nodded, thought it was endearing, this adjusted chivalry after his aggression in the hallway, and then he spooned me for so long I wondered if he did just want platonic companionship, but then the arms around my waist tightened and he pulled me against him, and I felt his erection then, and he began to run his hand up and down my stomach. Is this okay? he asked again, and I nodded and he unbuttoned my top and began to kiss me as his hands traveled over my breasts, and moved on top of me, and I remembered then that he’d mentioned a girlfriend, was only in Rome for a few days, perhaps this caused his hesitation, he ran his hand around the rim of my underwear, and I looked up at him questioningly, I wondered if that was what was making him stop, but I wasn’t going to bring it up, and maybe he was drunk and had forgotten he’d told me, but he would move himself so that I could feel how hard he was. Finally he sighed, then took off my underwear, started to kiss down my stomach, positioned himself so that he had turned and was now in my mouth, and began to move his mouth against me so that I had to take all of him in my mouth to absorb the sounds of my moans. His tongue found me, and after I came, I turned around and when short seconds later he filled my mouth, it tasted of salt and slid thickly down my throat, but the name on my lips as I fell asleep was Aliano.