Vietri’s military records were awaiting me when I returned home one day from a long walk, Loredana had placed the large envelope of thick dark paper on my pillow. I opened it and slid out a single sheet. I read it quickly, wondering if I would need Andrea’s help to understand it, but the information was so sparse that I’d finished my own translation within fifteen minutes despite the antiquated lettering of the handwriting and the low quality of the photocopy. Here were Vietri’s age, place of birth, height, eye color, and the date of his enlistment, his parents’ names: Pietro and Maddalena. I tried to envision the scant physical picture these few words presented, brown hair, brown eyes, 165 centimeters. My height, five foot five. The image was vague, but I held it in my mind for a few moments triumphantly. But this faded. All it told me, really, was that Vietri had indeed been enlisted in the army. Not where he had gone, what he had done, what type of person he was, where he might be now. I let myself melt onto the bed, an act I rarely permitted myself, my days were so unstructured if I admitted midday naps I was unsure where the sloth would end. But surely, I thought, this couldn’t be the only record of his military service. I turned over and reexamined the paper. What I’d received was called a lista d’estrazione, but I remembered there’d been several options when I’d requested it, other words I didn’t know. Had I selected the wrong one?
I rolled myself off the bed, resigned to return to Google, but as I walked softly past the living room, I saw Loredana in an armchair, reading. I hesitated, it occurred to me that I could ask her. She looked up. The idiom between Loredana and myself still had not yet been firmly established, and I tended to present all sentences formally as if opening a topic for debate. Is it true that your husband was in the army? I asked. She took off her glasses, shifting slightly in her chair. It was after the war, she said. This was in the ’50s. It’s how we met, actually. She gestured to a spot near her on the sofa. I’ll tell you the story some other time. Now, why do you want to know about military records? My breath caught, and for a moment my thoughts spun outward, wondering how she had known, what other secrets she’d cracked open. Then I calmed. The return sender on the envelope had been from the archive of the military district.
There’s a man, I began, attempting to become one with my spot of couch, a man who I used to communicate with in Berkeley, when I worked for a bookstore there. He used to order hundreds of books, but he was in Rome. When I came here, I thought I’d look him up, but I couldn’t find him. He’s very old. So now, I spread my hands open in my lap, it’s not really for any reason, but I’d like to know about him. I’d like to know if he’s alive, I’d like to meet him, but if I can’t, I’d also like to know about his life. I, well, I thought the military records might be a way to find out more about what happened to him even if I couldn’t find him. I trailed off, my eyes drawn out the window. I felt unburdened, deeply shaken, exposed, suddenly overwhelmed by a childish desire to run to my room and bury myself in blankets. Loredana reached out and gave a comforting squeeze to my arm.
Loredana withdrew her hand, took a quiet sip of her tea, and I looked away, blinking. There are several forms, she said. The lista d’estrazione can tell you if he was drafted. But there’s something called the foglio matricolare, it will tell you more of what happened, places, promotions, things like that. She studied my face. I can ask my lawyer to request this for you, she said, would that be helpful? The bureaucracy can be complicated, usually the request needs to come from a relative, these things move faster if the request is from a lawyer. I pay him either way, she said. Every month, for anything that comes up. With the way my husband died, some things with Benedetta . . . there were lots of complications. I gave her a questioning look, and she sighed. In the years before she died, Benedetta had some problems with drugs. It was a boyfriend who got her into it, she never stole from me. I gave her a small smile, and then took a breath slowly, looking around the room with its rich colors and complicated lines, wondering if I was becoming a person who could accept help. Yes, I said finally. I would love that.
Giulia texted the next day to ask if I wanted to visit Nero’s palace, the Domus Aurea, with her and Settimia, I must have mentioned my reading on the Roman emperors during our lunch. It had been closed to the public for years for repairs after the walls had partly collapsed after a rainstorm, always just about to reopen, but she had a friend, someone her partner knew, who had offered to arrange for us to join one of the semiprivate tours that went on anyway, apparently the chance of the walls failing and crushing us beneath the ruins was only very slight. This was a familiar move, in my previous summers my aunts had always had the habit of analyzing my offhand comments for interests, and it was sweet, I could see now, it had been sweet, but at the time it had felt like they were trying to tie my identity down in a way I resented. I’d looked in horror as my older cousins had to choose tracks in school by the age of sixteen, while I’d desperately wanted to be defined only by my true, inner self, even if I was unsure who, or what, that was.
I stood outside the metal gate above the slope to the Colosseum awaiting my aunts, feeling as if my chest was filled with a thousand buzzing, winged creatures, feeling like I should run away, feeling like if I didn’t scream or pull at my hair I might combust. But my mother’s frustration had always been directed outward in such ways, I’d long ago learned to direct mine inside. I was surprised by the intensity of my anxiety, but I considered Settimia the emotional heart of my Italian family, now the floodgates would be completely removed. The last time I’d seen her was when she’d driven me to the airport at the end of the summer when I was fifteen, my last summer, and she’d waited with me through the first customs line, a witness as I chose not to use my Italian passport. I now felt ashamed at how flagrantly I’d rejected the idea that I also belonged to this country, but at the time it had felt like a gesture of authenticity. I saw my two aunts crest the hill, Giulia short and energetic, her walk purposeful, marchlike, Settimia seeming to trail her, taller but somehow conveying less of her presence to the world. She moved faster upon seeing me, passed ahead of Giulia, straight to me, straight to my cheeks, which she kissed, and then she hugged me close and welcomed me back to Rome. She looked older than she had the last time I’d seen her, the ten years were there on her face and her hair was a new color, slightly red and garish. Giulia, the oldest of the three sisters, appeared the same, her gray had appeared in her dark hair before I’d met her and had hardly spread in the intervening years, she had performed her aging early and now appeared youthful by comparison.
It was cool and damp underground, and Settimia and I shivered at the same time, absorbing the stream of facts emerging from our guide, a short, energetic man who recalled to me a nineteenth-century church custodian, he had the uncertain social abilities of an archaeologist, the result of a career performed mostly underground, an existence lived between two time periods. He spoke in English, which Giulia must have arranged, and she translated softly to Settimia from time to time following cues I wasn’t able to understand. Settimia had not let go of my arm, she pulled me close as I listened, and I was glad to lean into her warmth. The palace had only existed for a handful of years, within a decade of Nero’s death the walls had been stripped of their ivory, jewels, and gold inlay, his successor had the palace filled in with dirt and rubble, had built a bathhouse on top of the ruins that the duce, who, two millennia later, wanted to be a Roman emperor himself, replaced with a rose garden that threatened to wash away what was left below with every rainstorm. The palace had been rediscovered in the Renaissance when a young boy fell into what he thought was a cave of painted walls. Artists began to climb down on ropes with candles to look at the figures and called the style of art grotesque, from grotto, cave. It was strange, the paths that words took, for this was also the emperor who was accused of burning half the city to make room for his palace grounds, who killed his mother, two of his wives, his brother, and himself, who was said to dip Christians in oil and set them on fire to light the pathways of gardens in the evenings. At last, he was quoted, upon entering this palace where flower petals rained from a gilded ceiling that rotated during dinner parties, where guests were greeted by a ninety-eight-foot-tall bronze statue of himself, at last, he said, at last I can live like a human being. And then it had become a cave. Grotesque referred first not to these actions but to the patterns on the wall depicting human-animal hybrids, limbs turned into branches, humans into lions, cupids’ bottoms into fish tails, and I thought I understood how these creatures could speak to this world. What did it mean to be a human being?
We turned into a room our guide named as the cave room, on the ceiling Odysseus reached out to offer the cyclops the fateful glass of wine. Look how considered this was, our guide was saying, gesturing to the ceiling. His bald head gleamed eerily in the dim light. It had been a bathroom, a fountain ran down the side of the wall, and Nero, committing fully to the theme, had instructed the ceiling to be covered in fake stalactites. So there were a lot of bad things with this emperor, our guide continued in a ludicrously neutral tone, there were a lot of bad things, he said, but look at this planning, this consideration. I wanted to laugh. A Nero apologist.
I’d been absorbed in the tour, my thoughts remained in previous millennia, so when we entered again into the sunlight I was unprepared for Settimia’s determined expression. You’ll come for lunch now, yes? she asked, and I moved my head slightly and started to say that I was expected at Loredana’s, and in truth I was, but mostly I wanted to retreat to my room, retreat from the family, to think about Nero, that archaeologist, why the actions and aesthetic decisions of an emperor dead for two thousand years had been more real to me than the family I’d been standing next to. But I wasn’t prepared for Settimia’s angry tears, for her to let go of my arm and turn at me sharply, wasn’t prepared for the things she shouted at me in Italian in front of the bewildered tourists making their way down the slope of the rose garden to the Colosseum, I wasn’t prepared for Giulia to be the one to pull her back, to mutter softly in her tall ear, to give me a sympathetic smile, Giulia who I’d been the most scared of, I wasn’t prepared to run from Settimia’s anger into the metro, wasn’t prepared for the click of the clasp on my purse on the empty stairs, for the twelve-year-old boy to vanish into the crowd on the platform, my cell phone in his hands, so that I wouldn’t know if they had tried to follow me, if Settimia had called me to continue to yell or to apologize. Instead I was left alone underground, shaking and empty-handed, my breath strange in my lungs, looking around at my fellow tourists and wondering if they were threats.