Most of the painter’s works, I learned from outdated tourist websites, were in a small museum in Aliano, or at the university in Turin with his archives. A handful were in Liguria, near his family’s home there, but a dozen or so were in Rome, as Anna had mentioned, and after our dinner I felt the need to see them as soon as I could. Vietri had been less in my thoughts since I’d started learning about the painter, his story had eclipsed the others in my mind, and I needed it come full circle, to see if it would merge with Vietri’s. When I brought up the museum’s website to check the hours of admission, I saw that the villa, located off the flank of the Sapienza, was the one in which the self-called duce had lived during his years in Rome. The small collection of twentieth-century art was an afterthought, it seemed most visitors went to tour his bomb shelter. I found these coincidences of Italian history completely ridiculous. There was no room in Italy, everything had happened in the same places, so the painter’s work hung in the home of the very fascist leader whose regime had arrested and exiled him, a home built, I read, on top of thirteen thousand square meters of Jewish catacombs, occupied by the very person who would murder his country’s Jews. What was one to do with all of this? Nothing could ever be only one thing in Rome, everything had already been touched by so many wars, traumas, millennia, the city was greedy for history, what other city laid claim simultaneously to two separate myths of its own foundation? I’d been reading a book on ancient Rome from Loredana’s husband’s collection, it had already been two thousand years since Juvenal lamented how a crowded settlement had been allowed to be built on the site of a holy spring where a water spirit had once seduced the second king of Rome. It was as if the Confederacy had surrendered on the same rock where Manhattan had been purchased for beads and silver spoons, if Andy Warhol’s factory had discovered Incan mummies interred in the building’s foundations, it would never happen, in America we had too much space, and we had the bliss of leaving our physical spaces free of their histories, only in the last four hundred of ten thousand years of occupation of the continent had this level of minutia been recorded for the subsequent generations. It was no wonder the members of my family felt no true sense of individuality outside of the group, and I shuddered, imagining the sticky ties that were already trying to pull me in, and down, away from my pure and unentangled self. Nothing was ever able to stand for just itself in Rome.
I decided to ask Loredana if she’d like to accompany me to see the paintings, I had a desire to see her outside of the apartment, I wanted to shake her out of her calcified grief. I’d finally googled to find the name of Loredana’s husband on a website commemorating the Italian victims of terrorism during the years 1969 to 2003. He’d been on an advisory council to the finance ministry, the killing had been claimed by the Red Brigades. Eventually, a pair of twenty-seven-year-olds had been sentenced, they would have been released from prison around the time Benedetta died. What did one do, I wondered about Loredana, when one’s losses tracked one’s country’s so closely?
We arrived in a taxi and climbed the dozen wide steps at the front of the villa slowly, carefully, Loredana lifting one foot and then another with such effort I wished I could carry her in my arms. But I hadn’t remembered, hadn’t known, hadn’t thought to look up, that there was no elevator inside the building, and the paintings were on the third floor, the Italian third floor at that. She wasn’t able to climb that many stairs. She was unfazed and patted my arm. Go see your paintings. I can wait in the garden. I protested, it felt rude to leave her. We compromised that we would tour the ground floor with its grand furnishings together, and then she would wait for me in the garden on the grounds. We wandered the ornate, jewel-colored rooms, the ballroom Pepto-Bismol pink and smaller than I might have thought, the erstwhile duce had used it to house his billiards table. Loredana had told me she had never visited before, but she remained impassive in the face of this luxurious history. I thought of asking if she had any memories of these years, but the history was so deep, there were so many layers the question might disturb that they exerted their own force of inertia. The Italians I knew rarely talked about this part of their historical past, or else it was so coded I had yet to observe that they did.
I descended the front stairs with Loredana, who moved her foot laboriously down each step as if there were a foreign object attached to each leg. The day was perfect, dry and sunny, the kind I imagined monasteries awaited to make paper or harvest hops. I walked her to a bench on the grounds, surrounded by purple flowers, and she waved me off. I reentered the villa and climbed the stairs quickly, as if there were a creature set to attack my heels. The rooms on the first-second floor were all painted with themes chosen in the seventeenth century, as there were no hallways I spiraled upwards through them, one covered in hieroglyphics, another with the feats of Alexander the Great, my sense of reality was becoming unmoored by my surroundings, looking at the trompe l’oeil on the ceiling of the bedroom of the duce himself I imagined the large body looking up at a clever painting designed to trick him into thinking he could see to infinity. I realized I disliked picturing evil, powerful men naked, and left the room quickly. As I did I felt a chill, and noticed that I had been alone in these rooms. The tourists were gone, the summer had passed.
The next room I entered was full of scenes depicting the myth of Cupid and Psyche, the god still asleep with Psyche’s disloyal lamp above him, Psyche prostrate before Venus, then the mighty Jupiter. It was the myth I’d found the most romantic as a teenager, married to a spouse she’d never seen, visited only at night, unsure even if her husband was a human being, learning, in the end, he wasn’t. It only occurred to me now that this myth was about penance.
The top floor of the villa housed the small collection of twentieth-century art. These rooms had none of the ornate detailing of the previous three levels, rather, the beige walls seemed thin and temporary. I went straight to the room with the painter’s works, suddenly impatient, and I stood in the center for a few minutes, looking at none of them closely, instead letting the colors and landscapes absorb into my peripheral vision, trying to transport myself. There was a sole self-portrait and I went closer, in it I could see that the painter would have been a good-natured old man, rotund, with something vulnerable in his soft large brown eyes, cow-like, searching for approval and accepting of the world’s flaws. I wondered at the early years of his life in Turin as the city awoke, mechanical, enlarging itself with haphazard parts. He had the long gentle fingers of an artist, not meant for industrial labor, let alone armed struggle.
The paintings done in Liguria in the years he’d lived in the villa were all rich purples and blues, the lines were primitive and worried over like those in cave paintings, as if the details of the persons were yet to be filled in. It was the paintings he did in the village that moved me, Anna was right, there was a change, the greens were so deep they were almost black, the lines were thicker, the paint more decisive on the canvas. The landscapes of the town and the surrounding hills were the color of sun-bleached bone, while the people were in pinks and sallow greens, faces and forms repeating through the dozen half canvases, the eyes of the peasants wary and resigned. The scenes depicted were desolate, provincial, hills and animals and dust and sunsets like dried blood. No water in sight, the occasional single tree. But there was a yearning conveyed by the scenes, I felt the pull.
One painting in particular drew me in, it was of a boy, his eyebrows long and thin, his nose aquiline, his expression cocky and calm, both searching and all-knowing, a goat slung confidently around his shoulders like the stole of a wealthy woman. The caption titled it La Squadrista, and I wondered at the name, I couldn’t remember any fascist squads or Blackshirts present in the memoir. He looked too young, fourteen or maybe fifteen, and his eyes had no violence. He appeared in several of the paintings, I noticed, in two he was among a group of boys, and I thought I could make him out in a large canvas depicting several families of the town. I looked into his face. Given the date of the paintings, he would have been the same age as Vietri.
I found it difficult to sleep that night, my thoughts turned over and over, kept returning to the boy in the painting from Aliano, la squadrista, and his long clever eyes. I was curious, I could have waited until morning and reread the book, waiting to see if he was mentioned, but I was impatient and sleepless and I discovered that some kind soul had uploaded the copyright-expired English translation onto the internet. I opened a search bar in the window of the text of the memoir and quietly typed in the words. “La squadrista,” the nickname had been kept in Italian, appeared six times. Given perhaps a page and a half of the book, he is first mentioned as one of the boys who roam the village throughout the day, who treat the painter as a welcome curiosity, an emissary from a world with nothing in common with their own. School had been a vague presence in their lives, already in the past. Sometimes the younger boys search out the painter and find him in the graveyard, where he naps in open, unassigned holes, the only place of shade to be found in the deforested landscape. They are not from the peasant families, their parents have spent their lives in petty competition for the few government jobs. The older boys, the ones who would have gone to America a few years before, are now trapped by the immigration quota, they have nowhere to go. La squadrista is fifteen and desperate to get out of the village, he speaks to the painter about his plans to enlist in the war in Ethiopia without using the words enlist, army, war, or Ethiopia. Go to Africa, he says instead. I must go to Africa. He has five years until he can join the army, and he is despondent at the thought that he might miss the war.
It was clear to me reading these pages that the painter meant this nickname ironically, even slightly affectionately, and that the boy, la squadrista, has no idea of the connotations the word had acquired in the world outside the village. Milan, the north, factories, snow, fascist squads, these things are as far away to him as Africa. He is already nominally a party member, as all the boys were compelled to be, his name had been sent to the office of the military district in the year of his birth. He repeats to the painter, matter-of-factly, I must get out, it’s my only card. Why not go to Africa?
It was still night when I finished rereading these excerpts, and I was quiet as I moved through the apartment to my room. I was intrigued by the squadrista’s story, moreover in my long hours of consideration of the bureaucratic traces of Vietri’s existence that might be available to me, it hadn’t occurred to me to look up military records. Vietri was born in 1920, he would have been eligible to enlist in 1940, by the time that war in Ethiopia had shifted and grown, like a monster devouring other monsters, had become the Second World War. I only vaguely knew anything about this history. There’d been fighting in Africa, with the British, I thought.
I’d never heard anyone on my Italian side of the family talk about the war, I knew my mother’s father had been too young for the army, and I’d never thought to ask. California was so different, my father’s father had been in the navy, had fought in the Pacific, I’d grown up knowing that history, had written school reports on his elopement with my grandmother while on leave. Of course the war was romantic and noble to Americans, but in Northern California it was closer to a foundational myth, the industries that employed my friends’ parents, Lockheed, Boeing, the port, all sprung from that conflict. Even the shame we carried, the internment of Japanese families, was not ignored, many of those now empty dusty enclosures weren’t far from Sacramento, but it was so cleanly handled by our textbooks as to be dismissive, the one moral mistake we’d made, and look how we were owning up to it, with this month of fifth-grade history. But how could it be that way for Italy, which had been both occupier, then occupied? They’d colonized Ethiopia, Somalia, Libya, invaded Slovakia, Albania, Greece, but had then been invaded themselves by the Germans, their country split into two with civil wars enacted in both halves, even before the final invasion by a motley group of British, American, and occasionally Polish armies. It was bewildering to imagine, even these decades later, the history was so complicated it confused empathy.
It had never occurred to me to ask Andrea about his military service, he’d been born in the cutoff year, the last one in which it was mandatory in Italy, though I’d always assumed he’d avoided it by enrolling in university. If I’d been a boy, born a few months after him in the new year, I would have been of the first generation free. The draft was such an antiquated word to me, in Berkeley it was spoken of as I imagined very superstitious medieval populations spoke of dragons. I couldn’t picture Andrea holding a gun, in one of those funny hats. Andrea who was always so calm, so in control, I couldn’t see this Andrea taking orders, folding precise bedsheets, I had only the vaguest notions of what being a soldier entailed in the modern world. Andrea could be imperious, but he was gentle.
I tried to square my preferred image of Vietri, elderly, in dusty book-reflected light, with one of him young, as a soldier. My imagination failed. But what did I know of boys, really? I’d known a lot of them, plenty in the biblical sense, but I’d grown up without brothers, a distinction I’d always found essential. The boys I’d dated, the ones I’d known in my travels, all of them had been nice. But how then to explain the terrible things that had happened, over and over, often on the very ground of this city? Its own namesake had murdered his twin. Earlier that week I had come across a casual reference in my book, or at least it seemed casual to me, for how could it ever be written with enough gravity, I’d forced myself to read the Italian sentence several times to make sure the verbs were what I thought they were, to the fact that the emperor Nero had kicked to death his pregnant wife. I found my hand on my stomach at the memory. I thought of the final sentence of the Aeneid, in which Rome is born as Aeneas kills the wounded Turnus, Turnus who pleads, from the ground, “Go no further down the road of hatred,” Aeneas who implants his sword to the hilt in the prostrate man’s breast anyway, this planting of the sword simultaneous with his founding of the city, the same Latin verb. That is to say, it did occur to me as I filled out this next request form I’d found online, as I put Chiara Vietri under the name of the requestor, as I filled in granddaughter under relation, as I wrote in my own name and Loredana’s address on the return envelope, as I put it in the mail, it did occur to me that looking up Vietri’s military records could lead me to something I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Someone had to commit war crimes. Not all boys could be good.