I decided to email my cousin Andrea. It had been a decade since I’d last seen him, my father had first started sending me to Rome for the summers when my mother had gone away in middle school, saying it was important that I get to know this side of my family, though I’d always suspected he wouldn’t have known what to do with me alone in the house over those long Californian school-less days. I stopped going once I was sixteen and could get a summer job, convincing my father it was more important for me to get work experience to put on my college applications, and once I left for college I’d stayed in Berkeley for the breaks instead of returning to Sacramento, finding cheap sublets and working my minimum-wage jobs at delis and libraries. I’d still talk to my aunts once a year, early on Christmas morning, the sounds of a large family on their side of the line, the quiet on mine. I’d answer their occasional emails with guilt, too briefly, and after too much time had passed, I never felt I had anything to report. My cousins had begun to befriend me on Facebook in the last year or two, and sometimes I looked through their photos, sometimes they commented on mine. But I knew it was a shallow way to have this family.
I recognized Andrea’s tall frame as he approached my table at the café where we’d arranged to meet in San Lorenzo, near the bottom border of the Sapienza campus, his brown hair almost, but not quite, as light as mine. He still wore the worried expression I remembered from our teenage years, when his face had seemed to reflect some constant offstage tragedy, but it had softened somewhat, his eyes were darker and gentler than I remembered. It wasn’t exactly that I was closest to Andrea, out of all of my family members, but we were only three months apart, had been thrown together from the beginning. It had surprised me that he had stayed in town for the holiday, wasn’t off with the rest of the family, but perhaps this was our true kinship, he also had a desire for occasional solitude.
We met the day after the appeals court admitted the DNA evidence used to convict Amanda Knox had been unreliable, and her soft face angled up toward us from a newspaper abandoned on the next table. “You look like her, you know, bionda,” Andrea said, after he’d kissed my cheeks and folded himself into his chair while lighting a cigarette. He’d called me that nickname the whole summer I’d turned fifteen, the last summer I’d spent in Rome, after we’d been separated at the Sunday market in Porto Portese and he’d found me shaken, on the verge of tears, because a man had been following me, calling me bionda, bionda. “But I’m not a blonde,” I remembered saying, which Andrea had found hilarious. It was still true, I thought to myself. With my light brown hair, in America, I was not a blonde.
Andrea ordered us two espressos, dismissively, without asking what I wanted, and I found I was glad for this, I had never been able to keep track of the hours of the day in which it was appropriate or horrific to instead drink a cappuccino. We settled into a conversation, he asked about my travels, and I tried to figure out exactly what he was studying without asking directly. I knew he was still a student, but I could never remember the subject, maybe economics? I tried to parse clues, but he mostly complained about his advisor, who he could never find or get to answer emails but could not make any official progress without, a conference he’d just been to in Athens. On what? I asked hopefully. Cities, he said apathetically. On his part, I could tell he was trying to figure out why I was in Rome, how long I had been here, how long I would stay, prodding at my casual explanations, I’d left my job, I’d been traveling, and why not? We spoke in English, the way we always had when we were teenagers. I’d always assumed this was his way of proving he hadn’t suffered in education from being part of the family that had stayed in Italy, no one else in the family usually bothered, except my mother’s older sister, Giulia, and I was surprised to find that our conversation despite all of this was not awkward, even if it was not warm. I realized I’d been nervous only when I felt my leg muscles relax under the table, somewhere away from my conscious brain, I’d half expected him to be mad at me. The light reflected on the building behind us was just beginning to change when he lit another cigarette without breaking eye contact and exhaled. I told him I wanted to ask a favor. What do you need? he replied in Italian, and I realized that his voice always sounded kinder in this language. The one conversation I could remember having with him in Italian, I thought as I looked back at him, as I weighed my answer to what it was I needed, was when he’d asked me to tell him what had happened to my mother.
My Roman family, especially of the older generations, acknowledged no boundaries between themselves, and it had been hard for me, I’d grown up with so much solitude, the only child in a suburban house and preoccupied parents. Their word for privacy was the English word, il privacy, my relatives had no native concept of it in the abstract. But Andrea had the ironic distance of all Italians our age, I didn’t need to worry about this turning into an emotional imploring of my duties to the family, and I had always felt that he understood, a little, more than anyone else, anyway. I needed help, and here he was before me.
I need to find someone who can read Arabic, I said, and he nodded.
Andrea had a friend who studied Arabic literature, they knew each other from a soccer club connected to the university, and this Giancarlo opened the door to his apartment in a worn Bob Marley t-shirt. He had a stooping posture that made him seem shorter than Andrea, though he was in fact taller, and seeing them next to each other had an unsettling effect as my eye traveled uncertainly between the tops of their heads, Giancarlo’s curls looping and dark. Andrea was asking him about his holiday, he’d just gotten back into town, August was almost over, he had been with his family in Lecce. I followed them both into the apartment. Giancarlo moved quickly through the room while bantering with Andrea in a mess of words that was difficult for me to follow, and soon the book was out of my hands, had been placed among the collection of cigarette butts on the table. I wanted to tell him to be more careful with it, I had no idea what the book was, but it was unique in its possible connection to Vietri, as far as I knew there was no other book like it in the world, and even if it was mass-produced, even if there were a million of them, this one was mine and in the way of being twenty-five I didn’t know if anything so precious would ever be given freely to me again. I imagined Vietri’s hands on these pages and it was enough, this tactile feeling connecting us, the dark paper gray and smooth, slippery, the lines imprecise. But Giancarlo’s energy was so transferable, he was eager to please, and so I ignored the small tendrils of imagined catastrophes creeping along the backboards of my mind, the lit cigarette in the tray, the white ceramic cups of espresso uncertainly balanced, and let myself become absorbed in his monologue. We sat together at the large table, and the book spread open before us covered almost a third of it. It was from Palestine, he said, a village history. Al-Tantura, he read, running his fingers along the title as if reading braille. He kept up a rapid stream of words in Italian, while I tried to translate into English in my head. All that remains, I caught. Andrea was leaning back in his chair, eyes on his cell phone, and Giancarlo maintained a loud murmur only half of which I understood. He turned the pages rapidly, decisively, reading out loud, while every so often I would reach out to stroke a margin, to reassure myself that it was still there, was still mine. Did the book describe a village? I asked, and he shook his head in something like frustration, though Giancarlo was so jovial it hardly came out as a negative emotion. Andrea got up and began busying himself in the kitchen with Giancarlo’s other roommates, only half-glimpsed forms to me through the open door, making the sounds boys make when they are speaking unseriously among themselves. He said he’d been reading me the names, the professions, the surnames that labeled the structures on the maps, but, I interrupted, what’s it about? Giancarlo gave me a perplexed look, and said that if I really wanted to meet with someone who could explain it, he had a colleague—I noted the a that terminated that word, a female colleague then—an anthropologist, he clarified, who studied this sort of thing. We were looking at the pieces, he continued, and she would know the whole. Can we meet her? I asked. Andrea had come back into the room then, or rather he stood in the doorway, and I saw him exchange a look I could not read with Giancarlo, who then checked the time on his cell phone and stood up, motioning for me to follow him and mumbling something I couldn’t understand while he slipped on a jacket, despite the August heat. I hadn’t meant to suggest meeting his friend the anthropologist at that immediate moment, didn’t these people have anything else to do? But, as I’d learned from Andrea during our chat at the café, dottoratos, which they all were, basically PhD students, neither taught nor took classes, they had no jobs or internships, and the economy being what it was, they all tried to pursue these educations for as long as possible, so no, they didn’t have anything else to do, and anyway, the words to correct what I’d meant didn’t arrive in Italian. A thrill moved through me as I followed Giancarlo out the door, as Andrea turned his attention from Giancarlo’s roommates and waved goodbye to me from across the room dismissively, or warily.
Outside the apartment building, Giancarlo unlocked a scooter and handed me the helmet, and I put it on but didn’t tighten the straps. Once he sat down, I climbed on behind him, tentatively holding his sides, and we pulled off his crooked street onto the via Tiburtina. The traffic was heavy, but the movements had an underlying grammar, a flow, that made sense to me, and I leaned into Giancarlo on the turns, idly imagined moving my palms to press against his stomach. It had been some time since I’d been this close to another person. It began to rain, lightly, the drops surprisingly cold on my bare arms. South Asian umbrella vendors were appearing on the sidewalk next to us as we waited at a light, withdrawing cheap black umbrellas from huge duffel bags like swords and shouting “cinque euro” as they waved them flamboyantly. I worried about the book in my cheap cloth bag, currently lodged between Giancarlo’s back and my stomach, and I thought about asking into his ear if we should stop, but the light changed and we drove on, his gaze fixed on the road ahead, and it was a relief, after traveling by myself for so long, to surrender decision making entirely. We drove for another twenty minutes, away from the city’s center, to a neighborhood full of tall apartment blocks, all two-toned uniform rectangles flanked by wide dusty expanses colored gray in the rain. Giancarlo parked the scooter outside one of these buildings, locked it carefully to itself, and only then turned to me solicitously, asking if I’d gotten too wet, and jogging with me to the doorway of the building, his arm guiding me at the center of my back. I had no idea what neighborhood we were in, certainly we were on the outskirts of the city, but Giancarlo moved confidently through the street. There was more garbage strewn on the road here, and in the apartment building where Giancarlo led me the staircase was dark. An open door at one landing let me glance, quickly, into an apartment where a dozen people of more than two generations were in various poses of rest and play across the floor. I followed Giancarlo farther up the dark stair, and heard him call ahead of me, through the thin door, Laura, eccomi.
Laura opened her door, and I could see her surprise at seeing me behind Giancarlo. I’d taken the book out of my bag and had held it to my chest as I climbed, trying to assess any damage, brushing away imagined drops of water, hoping they would absorb into my shirt, the skin of my palms. Giancarlo stooped down to kiss Laura’s cheeks, she was short, shorter than I was, her dark head like a small animal pulling away, and I heard her muttering disapprovingly, maybe pleading, I couldn’t make out any of the words. He pulled her partway into the apartment so that I could no longer see their faces, and after a few awkward seconds curled the top half of his body around the open door and beckoned me inside.
Giancarlo had told me that Laura was an anthropology student who did a lot of work in Lebanon and Syria, and once inside the large and dark apartment he made a joke about her slow progress toward her degree, punctuating this sentence by pinching my arm playfully. His large hand fit over my entire biceps, as if squeezing a tube to see if it was hollow, and I wondered if he was trying to flirt with me, if it was to make Laura jealous, and I felt weary. Laura glanced at the neckline of my shirt and offered me a coffee. Giancarlo followed Laura into the small kitchen, asking something about her roommates, leaving me in the main room, and I thought about how I hadn’t had a conversation alone with another woman in a long time. While traveling I’d gravitated toward men in small groups, joining them for a city or two before detaching to go my own way. I found traveling with guys to be easier, I was less likely to be hassled and I felt safer, but also the leaving was easier, there were no promises to email extracted, often it was just a hand gesture at a bus station as we boarded separate vessels.
I’d remained standing in the living room, and through the sliver of the open kitchen door I could see Giancarlo moving comfortably around Laura, who leaned back against the counter with her arms folded, he was taking cups down carefully from the wood cabinets as if he were handling small pieces of her soul, moving his lips gently, her head shaking occasionally in response. They came out and Laura set down a large bottle of water and glasses on the coffee table and I pretended to have been looking at the bookshelves. I perched myself uncomfortably on a plastic chair, and they sat opposite me on the sofa. Laura’s face was sharp, angular, her small dark eyes had the unstill, jumpy quality of a rodent’s, yet she spoke slowly and clearly. “The thing you need to understand,” she said in English, though Giancarlo had been speaking to me in Italian, “is that this trauma moves through generations.” She drew out the vowels on the word trauma so that each one encompassed its own syllable, making it rhyme with the Italian pronunciation of her own name. She described the decades-ago war that led to the destruction of these villages—not destruction, erasure, complete erasure, she said, and she continued without a pause, telling me of the refugee camps that she had visited, where the people from these villages had gone afterward; about the policy of the Italian Red Cross to send its members to these camps no more than three times; how some of the members, over the course of these three visits, had seen entire generations grow up: the babies they first met have their own children, then grandchildren, still in the camps, waiting. Laura ran her finger around the top of her cup, now empty.
As we walked down the stairs of the apartment building, I realized that I had been so caught up in Laura’s monologue it hadn’t occurred to me that we hadn’t even discussed the book. I said as much to Giancarlo as we approached his scooter, the day sunny again, the water evaporating as thick steam from the pavement. He shrugged. “Yes, we will have to go back.”
I had asked Andrea, when I’d first emailed him, not to tell the rest of my family I was in Rome. September was approaching, I knew they’d be back soon, the population of the city would switch out after the end of the August flight, but I wasn’t ready, not yet, for the full reunion. The web of my family in Rome extended into the dozens, and starting with Andrea felt achievable to me, the way when making certain cakes one must introduce only a small portion of the melted chocolate into the egg mixture so as not to produce a scramble. We’d met for a drink in San Lorenzo, were sitting outside in comfortable heat, one drink that neither the waiter nor Andrea ever moved to replenish. I’d waited for Andrea for half an hour past the time we’d agreed to meet, and when I’d complained, he’d mimicked the annoyed gesture I’d made and asked when I would get a cell phone. I’d answered that I wasn’t staying in Rome. In the week since I’d last seen him, since the day I’d met Giancarlo and Laura, none of them had emailed me, and I’d felt shy about contacting them.
I hadn’t planned to spend more than a few days in Rome, but I was beginning to see how time could move differently here. I’d been afraid of long empty hours that actually passed quickly by me. I had had a job since I was sixteen, these last months of travel were my first time since then not working, and I found myself on a slippery expansion into a life without constraints on my time, the borders of myself no longer had any boundaries to push against and I felt seduced by the nihilism of such a life, comforted by its hopelessness. My sightseeing in Rome had been confined to that first blurry summer when I was eleven, passed every day to a different aunt or cousin who plainly resented the embarrassing fact of their presence at the Vatican or the Colosseum. After the first two weeks it was assumed I’d been shown everything the family had decided I should see, and I faded into the background with the rest of my generation. Now, though, the water from a fountain in a half-crumbled stone wall catching the light, I felt a vague curiosity stir.
I spent most of my time that week wandering the streets, often thinking of Vietri, speculating about the strange book and his connection to it. I especially liked walking along the river, drawn to the enormous sycamores that grew there. In California their branches were trimmed down year after year to keep them from growing into the electrical wires above, so that the original branches would spread and clump as the offshoots were removed, and they’d always, in this deformed state, reminded me of an upraised fist whose fingers had been amputated at the first knuckle. Here they grew to their true height, their crowns broad and full, appearing only slightly related to their stunted cousins.
I had so few memories of the time I’d spent in Rome as a teenager, those four, or was it five? summers seemed to be one long unbroken stretch of time in which I watched television with my cousins, trashy reality competitions or long specials on RAI of elderly musicians I’d never heard of, locked myself in the bathroom for hours trying to teach myself to shave my legs, emerging only once I’d been able to stop the bleeding from the deep nicks on my ankles and knees, helping my aunts cut up vegetables, chided for being so quiet while with the same breath they continued their overlapping monologues, reading, mostly, in whatever room I could find empty in whatever apartment I’d found myself in. There’d been several apartments we moved between, were often at one of my aunts’, but I mostly remembered my grandparents’, with its dark tall walls and wood paneling, its tiles and its odors, the silhouette of my grandfather in the corner.
I’d never met my grandmother, but she was a presence in the house, as alive to my aunts as I was, she moved in the air between us. She’d died when I was two, when my mother was having her “problems,” before things had been “calm” enough to bring me over to meet her. My grandmother’s cancer had taken up the last months of her life, and my aunts were frank in their belief that my parents had had plenty of time to do so, and I was her only granddaughter. My cousin Claudia, really my grandmother’s niece, had been named after her, but we called her Dida, her sister’s toddler invention. I’d been given my grandfather’s name, though in America Gabriele was clearly the name of a girl.
Dida was the one who’d showed me how to shave my legs, finally, she’d caught me exiting the bathroom with a wad of toilet paper on my shin for a particularly deep cut, parallel to the bone. She was the most aloof of my cousins, she and Clea, her sister, were a few years older, and while Clea followed me around asking me questions about California, knew more about the people on MTV than I did, tried to sit as close to me on the couch as possible as if she could absorb a foreign essence, Dida was the one who brought me to the pharmacy and showed me which razors to buy. I’d been shaving with the single-bladed boys’ Bics my father bought me, left with no announcement at the entrance to my bedroom in a Rite Aid bag along with boxy menstrual pads. It would take me until college to learn how to effectively use a tampon.
At that moment in time the thought of seeing the rest of my cousins exhausted me. The closest I came to understanding this reluctance was a memory I had of the time they’d all realized at the same moment I did that I didn’t know how to open the door to my grandparents’ apartment from the inside. Instead of a doorknob there was a metal box and two bars running up and down the length of the door, with a keyhole next to a protruding metal half circle that I tried in vain to rotate, then push. I’d finally looked back at the group of them watching, and asked uncertainly if I needed the key. They’d all laughed, and it was true, it was almost the end of the summer and it was ridiculous that I didn’t know how to open the door, but I’d never been first in line out of the apartment, had never left it on my own. Andrea was the one who had stepped forward and slid the metal circle to the side, opening the door.
Andrea’s mother, my mother’s younger sister, was named Settimia, after an aunt who had been the seventh daughter, the father had run out of names. But now the generations were tapering down, the Italians, I had always thought cynically, having finally connected the increase in lifestyle quality with the decrease in mouths to feed, so it was in my family, Andrea and I were both only children. Italy’s birth rate was now 1.2, far from replicating, the city had expanded and contracted, again sucking the world into its borders, the children I saw now in Rome were in no small part the children of parents from elsewhere. But out of these top-heavy older generations, Settimia was the only one who, I felt, didn’t blame me for what had happened, because it was while pregnant, in a new country, at the age of twenty-five, that my mother, as they referred to it, “changed.” I had never heard anyone in the family there use the word schizophrenic.