A few days later I had occasion to revisit a memory from the bookstore, a memory that was precious to me, and so one that I rarely thought about. It had been a Saturday, which, given our reliance on the campus community, was always a quiet day in the store, and I was up at the front desk, observing the minutes pass slowly. There was only one customer, a woman in perhaps her early sixties with blonde hair that blurred seamlessly into gray, cut like a helmet in the protective way of academics of a certain generation, who had headed to the more obscure subject sections on the mezzanine. She approached with her purchase after an hour or so, with a wry smile that bordered on exasperation, and I braced myself, I never knew what mood of a customer I would need to absorb. The book she handed me was a volume on Dante, priced at over a hundred dollars, one of those volumes put out by university presses that they expect exactly thirty-five people or libraries in the world to buy, and when I told her the total with tax, she shook her head mournfully. I shouldn’t be buying this, she said matter-of-factly, but when I read the dedication, she continued, I found I had to. She opened to the page and pushed the book gently toward me on the counter. “To Peter,” it read, “il sole dei miei occhi.” The sun of my eyes, I said. She smiled at me, completely unsurprised that I had been able to read the Italian, and I smiled back, feeling blessed by the sentence’s grace.
I hadn’t thought of this woman for years, not even when I’d encountered the occasional Dante impersonators blown south from Florence, leering through their white paint, until one afternoon, momentarily blinded as I came from behind the pillar of a fountain on a hill with the city and the midday light below, that phrase arose, “il sole dei miei occhi,” and I think only then did I truly realize what it meant.
I began to see Roberto. Suddenly the unending time I’d had, the long afternoons and evenings of reading and walking, content in my solitude, were no longer mine. Everyone in Rome was wonderful at loafing away time, relocations, breaks at home, tardiness, somehow a whole week was lunch with Loredana, a spritz with Andrea and Fahad, or Clea and Marco, parading the baby around a park with Dida, Sunday dinner at Settimia and Giacomo’s, Roberto now filling in the gaps. We proceeded slowly, we were cautious with each other, often he joined me for my long walks after he was done at the office, or for a midday break. My relationships with my family, in contrast, expanded exponentially, once I’d been admitted into one person’s life, their whole friend group was opened up to me, they seemed not to have in their possession the concept of an invite list, or rather, not inviting every intimate to every gathering. But their friend groups were all decades old, from childhood, I was exempt only because I was family, a term that could stretch as far as one needed. There were no divisions, all of my Roman selves, all of the different selves I had had with different people, I could see now they were all merging into one person.
I found Roberto waiting for me outside of Loredana’s later that week, leaning against the building, smoking a cigarette with no discernable enjoyment. I smiled and leaned into the kisses he placed on my cheeks. In the daylight I could see the difference in our ages, his face had lines mine had not yet developed. He’d mentioned, during our first conversation, that he’d been frequently away from Rome for the last two years, often in Sicily. Another time he’d said that he hadn’t been back to the north in five years. Surprised, I’d asked if his parents were still there, and he shook his head. So, he was usually boisterous, but he had his silences. This night, I could tell he was frustrated, restless, as the late-afternoon light changed to orange of Campari in our spritzes, which he insisted on referring to as pirlos, his one Brescian trait. I asked him what he was working on and he mentioned something about a migrant center, stopped himself, then told me I didn’t want to know. I withdrew my hand from his arm, which he caught, apologetic. He gave me a weary smile. It’s just, I will work on this for years, and nothing will ever happen, most people will never go to trial. They’ll make deals, find a way out, make the right compromises with the right people. Most of these things, these corruption investigations, most of the evidence has even been recorded, it’s just a matter of obtaining the records. There are records for everything, we have a mania for bureaucracy, I bet you every name in Italy is in a document like this somewhere. But it doesn’t mean anyone is punished, that anything changes, even that we can publish anything. He tried to smile. Let’s talk about something else.
But I leaned into him. How do you get these records? My search for Vietri was more or less at a standstill, my recent days had been so full he had been away from my thoughts, but I was intrigued by the existence of any files that might have caught his name. Is there a database? I asked, and Roberto made the laughing sound he made when I’d exposed myself as very American. Seeing my expression, he pulled me to him and kissed my temple. I’ll tell you, he murmured into my ear, his hand against the side of my face. I have a mentor who calls it the human touch, he said, upon releasing me. Usually, it’s best to meet with the prosecutor for coffee or a dinner. You have these relationships for years, you can’t just find someone out of the blue. They have all the power, but they will never give you the documents themselves. If you’re lucky, they’ll ask if you’ve met a certain person, a clerk, a carabiniere, and that person will be the one with the document you need. Sometimes there are five or six of these links, these meetings. It’s all relationships, you always need permission from the person you know to contact the next person, you can never go directly. What do they get out of it? I asked. My belief in humanity’s innate sense of justice had been weakened over the past weeks of my historical research. I’ve thought a lot about that, Roberto said. Sometimes it’s revenge, it’s personal, and sometimes there really are whistleblowers who want to act for good in the world. But for most people, I think, these men and women are office workers, they’re removed from these important processes even if they are instrumental to it. Sometimes I think it’s nothing more than a desire to have a hand in something bigger than themselves, to affect the world in some dramatic way. Like the people who leaked the Berlusconi documents, to open the newspaper and see a powerful man brought down and know they had a hand it in. I think what people want sometimes is a connection to the narrative of history, though they are stuck in the present. You know?
In fact there was a kind of database, or something like it. Clea had access to it with her law certification and passed me her credentials without comment. Vietri’s name appeared in connection with a trial in the early ’80s, he’d been listed as a witness but had never testified, the trial had been scheduled but had never taken place. The record listed one other witness, when I looked him up I found he was a communist of some notoriety who had passed away the year before. Roberto had found his nephew for me, had even located his number and helped me to set up the meeting. I’d planned to refrain from gloating when I told Roberto about the existence of the database, but when I told him, he said, that isn’t what you asked about. He seemed perplexed at even the suggestion.
The communist’s nephew insisted on meeting me in a nightclub on the outskirts of Rome, my taxi ride was exorbitant. It had been built in the ’70s, he explained as he led me through the club, clearly he was comfortable in this environment, he was practically giving me a tour, telling me about how it had been built by avant-garde architects attempting to make the nightclub a total art experience, including music, writing, visual arts, a vegetable garden, he shrugged as we pressed ourselves through bodies. It was crowded, a Friday, when I’d called the day before I’d said that I could only meet him the next night, for some reason I’d felt like being difficult. Though I knew to be grateful to Roberto for setting up the meeting, I was impatient with this next clue, I still wanted the assorted facts I’d learned about Vietri to cohere into a life. The nephew hadn’t been bothered, he’d said he had some business, but I could accompany him, and the employees did seem to know him as he led us to a small table in the back, where he asked quickly for a gin, and I asked for one with tonic. Once, he told me as a way to open the conversation, surveying the room, this club was held up by Sardinian shepherds. He didn’t elaborate on the story. Our drinks arrived, carried by a waitress with eyes so dark you couldn’t see her pupils.
My companion had very dark gray hair streaked occasionally with brilliant veins of white, and his forehead and face protruded as his hairline receded, giving him a look that was permanently anxious, his thick eyebrows jumped rather than moved. I asked him to tell me about the trial, I had told Roberto to tell him it was what I wanted to talk to him about, so I’d been ready for him to be ready to launch into a monologue. But he was able to talk about the legal matter, as he called it, for nearly fifteen minutes uninterrupted by my questions or his own pauses without giving me any real sense of what the crime was or any of the details were. We were speaking Italian, he didn’t speak English, and while I knew all of the words he was using, he wasn’t speaking Romanesco though he’d used it with the waitress, none of these words were solid nouns, and I had the feeling the phrases he chose were suggestive of other things I was missing in my literal translations. Roberto had offered to accompany me, and I regretted not accepting his offer, I was completely lost in the vagueness, my confidence in my Italian was evaporating rapidly into the sweaty air. I could gather that there was some sort of work, some organization that his uncle had been involved in, but he wasn’t there, he kept repeating, but where, I kept asking, nothing was ever resolved. The more I tried to clarify what had actually happened, if the organization was the communist party, no, the Red Brigades, no, the less precise his sentences became. But I don’t understand, I said at last, and he nodded, accepting this reality. Sergio only died a year ago, he said, sipping his gin, what bad luck you have. He brought the glass to his mouth while keeping eye contact, so that I didn’t believe he thought my luck was bad at all, and I wondered what sort of underworld I had opened up, and how far into it I could proceed before it would be too late to turn back.
You know, he said, just as I’d thought our conversation was over, I was sad, embarrassed, and ready to leave these beautiful people to their dancing, you know it’s the fault of your country. Italy was the battleground in those years, and it was you and Russia pouring in fuel. Do you know what I mean by fuel, eh? Money. We say years of lead, but it was money, even that vapid Russian book. There were three thousand murders in those years, political murders. And what have you ever heard about it? My lips parted. They don’t teach you that in school there, do they? He had slipped into Romanesco, he brushed his nose as he inhaled sharply, and I wondered if he was drunk already, or high. I felt claustrophobic, with the loud music, the dim lights, the bodies crushing against one another. My companion had fallen silent, looking moodily into his drink, but I felt no urge to defend myself, or my country, even to point out that this was also my country, and I was doing my best to absorb its traumas.
I had continued helping myself to the library of Loredana’s husband, somehow I’d started reading an account of the classical docks at Ostia, where according to Roberto’s interview the Giordano that might be Vietri worked millennia later. Despite the fact that the ancient iteration of Rome had reached a million people, a number not matched again by a metropolis until London in 1800, it had been an illogical place to build a city, fifteen miles upstream of a fast-flowing river, the mouth of it so silted that goods needed to be loaded and unloaded onto several different vessels along the journey. Two-thirds of the ancient Roman diet was imported grain stored in warehouses throughout the city, and when the Tiber flooded, as it did every twenty years or so, the grain molded and the people died of famine. There were jobs, then, for laborers, most of the importing costs were for dockworkers. Each emperor resolved to expand the port of Rome, each faced the same engineering problem and failed to solve it. It reminded me of a joke popular in the multinational hostels of South America, each country had a slightly different version, where in heaven the French were the cooks, the Germans the engineers, the British the police, and the Italians the lovers; in hell the British were the lovers, the Germans the cooks, the French the police, and the Italians the engineers.
I’d called the PR department of the pottery company, telling them I was a writer based in Rome and asking for more details about the founding of the company. The extremely pleasant woman directed me cheerily to the “our story” page on their website as if I had not thought to read it, in fact I hadn’t, which told the story of three American southern women captivated by the patterns on their dinnerware on a visit to the Amalfi Coast in the mid-’80s, saying the name came from one of the towns there, Vietri sul Mare. She said she was sorry she couldn’t share any more details.
I was again finding it difficult to talk to my cousins, it wasn’t that we’d run up against the limits of my Italian, it was more that our senses of humor, our essential outlooks, seemed to exist on alternate planes. Even as teenagers they had a reserved, ironic attitude toward life that guarded against silliness and openness, they were always sincere, but there was a distance, sometimes in those years I got the feeling their verbal repartee was practiced, that every night they retired to their rooms to ruminate over the best way to phrase a cutting but still jovial remark about the other’s new haircut while I, bewildered, observed it all. It wasn’t just that it was nearly impossible not to be totally earnest in a language in which one lacked secure footing, it was not only that I couldn’t make a joke, that Everest of language learners, that I couldn’t pull off sarcasm or irony, it was also that I was Californian, a cutting remark I didn’t mean would have been the greatest violation of my inner code. The furthest I’d gotten toward a shared humor was a running joke in our teenage years where s’okay, which slipped easily from my mouth, meant it’s not okay, in the function of the Italian commencing s. I was still proud of that one and had tentatively revived it on one of our recent evenings.
But would I stay? It hadn’t yet occurred to me to decide if I liked Rome. My cousins had no feelings about it, they were so utterly of it. Loredana, I gathered, did not like the city, but had long ago accepted it as her fate. Roberto loved Rome, it had, he said, claiming to be quoting Pasolini, the perfect mixture of beauty and ugliness. He was more connected to the violence of the city than I was, was updated by his colleagues daily on the bodies found in the Tiber. That Roberto’s job was important made him all the more alien to me, and I wondered more and more if he took me seriously at all, at times I thought of course he didn’t, I was an unemployed American a decade younger not even fluent in his language. We hadn’t yet slept together, and I was unused to evaluating boys’ interest in myself without seeing them at their most vulnerable. But sometimes, I tried to be objective, he did look at me with a hungry interest I didn’t think was only sexual. His kisses were earnest, he would grip my hips tightly, but we were never alone together in private, we hadn’t made an effort to make the opportunity occur. I was unsure how to proceed, I didn’t really know the rules, I could feel my impatience brewing, worried I would act out soon to force things to some sort of breaking point, sex hovered between us, it fueled our walks and our conversations.
I dressed well around Roberto, Dida had given me a few dresses, matter-of-fact about the changes pregnancy had brought to her body, they would now look better on me, and so I should have them. Agnieszka had even stopped short to declare one of them “super cute!,” her highest form of praise. I’d bought good leather flats and a vintage purse at the Porto Portese market, where I ended up many Sundays. My bargaining skills had been honed in South America, and I enjoyed putting them to use, even Loredana had been impressed. I had an innate Californian fear of being overdressed, but I had reluctantly relearned that, here, dressing well was a matter of respect. I couldn’t be as flamboyant as most of the Roman women I saw, heels were beyond me, but I did make an effort, did sadly discard some of my travel-worn t-shirts and my leather flip-flops, one of whose sole had finally worn through, bidding them a secret, elaborate farewell at the trash can as if releasing their corpses into the ocean in a Viking funeral, a gift for some other world. I’d also bought tights, the most conscious acknowledgment that I would be staying in Rome for the new season, spending those six euro at H&M felt like the most momentous decision I’d made since my arrival in the city. And, thinking of Roberto, I’d bought new underwear.
Roberto knew my whole family situation, of course he did, trying to hide the details, the geography of that particular landscape, would have been like trying to keep a secret where I’d gone to college, I suppose I could have done it, but it would have taken a level of diversion and secrecy I no longer had the energy to perform. After I’d finished telling him about my mother, but before I’d brought up the statistics that haunted me, he said, well, it must be hard to be so different from her, which knocked the breath out of me and made me hide my face in my glass. Anyway, I didn’t even have the more traumatic family story. Roberto’s father had lost a leg in the ’70s when an anti-fascist demonstration he’d attended was bombed, his father’s anger had been like a veil over his whole life, and he’d lost his mother to cancer while he was at university in Bologna. Still, there was a tenderness when he spoke of him, this legless, widowed father he hadn’t seen in five years, one I didn’t understand.
What I wanted to know was the story that Roberto had mentioned, the one he couldn’t let go. I searched online for his byline, but never opened the articles, it felt like a betrayal, it was unearned. I had absorbed so many of the stories of others—Maria’s, Benedetta’s, the painter’s, Anna’s, the communist’s, my mother’s story underlying them all—I felt full to the brim, I walked unsteadily holding a bowl that threatened to spill over, the surface was calm, but these unrelated stories churned next to one another underneath. And yet none of them was Roberto’s story, none of them was Vietri’s story, and none of them, none of these stories, was mine.