The first thing about Rome was always the light, and then it was the people. There was a reaction of spaces and crowds, angles and shadows, that remained imprinted on my mind, the way its short structures, thin alleys would open to a wide avenue, another piazza, suddenly drawing the eye upwards. It had been ten years since I’d been in Rome, and in those previous summers I’d been driven around in tiny cars by my uncles, or followed my cousins on and off of buses whose numbers I never thought to notice, and now I stood across from the Termini station with my large backpack, with neither a map nor a guide, unsure which way to walk to get to my hostel.
At the time I thought it would be simple, I would find Vietri at his apartment, explain who I was, and ask him to tell me about the books. I had no other way to contact him, it had been four months since I’d left California, and his final order had come almost six months before I’d left the store. I’d set tasks like this for myself during my travels, on my arrival in various countries. Without an overarching purpose I’d had to give my wandering some form, I wasn’t in search of a spiritual path or chasing surfing spots, and so I found I had to have my own small goals, like beads on a string. So I would search out the childhood homes of authors I admired, would visit the crypts of various patron saints, would witness the conjoining of great rivers, their waters separate in their own currents and colored sediments until they were no longer. At first I thought this would be similar, an afternoon, a conversation, Vietri amazed that someone from the store in California he had ordered all of those strange books from had found him, and was interested in his story.
As it happened, I did not arrive at 147 via Bevanda until my third day in Rome. I’d put it off, sleeping jet-lagged though the first afternoon, on my second wandering the garden paths of the Villa Borghese with a book and a bottle of water, alone, as I’d often wished I were in those previous summers. His apartment was in a quieter, more residential area, the bus ride that morning had taken me an hour from my hostel, and the buildings had fallen squat into a bland postwar architecture as we moved north. The apartments of this neighborhood were thin brick, with more variation than the yellows and salmons of the rest of the city, some were white, some Pepto-Bismol pink, and the balconies slotted on top of one another like crustless white bread sandwiches. As I walked from the bus stop, I noticed the faces around me all seemed to reflect a particular mix of anguish and awe, but in contrast I approached the metal panel of door buzzers outside the gate of 147 with a sense of lightness, the gold nameplates reflecting the sunlight, with black letters, Vietri’s apartment number missing the plate and so exposing the steel hollow behind. My recent travels had given me the feeling that I moved on a different plane of existence than in California, with its friendly openness, the geographical foci of hills, ocean, mountains, instead, those months had been full of dislocations, so that I felt in a near constant state of reorienting which, rather than exhausting me, merely served to put me at a calm sense of remove from my own reality. It seemed to me that few things I’d done or would do could ever truly matter, and I’d come to enjoy this feeling, and take comfort in it, wondering how long I could float above the world until someone called me down with the answer of how to spend my years.
However, when pressing the buzzer in short bursts spaced a minute or so apart yielded nothing, I experienced an unexpected feeling of disappointment that verged quickly into sadness. I was surprised by my surprise, my naivete in believing Vietri would be easy to locate. It was possible Vietri was simply out of town, after all it was August and Rome was half empty, but I’d had a simple vision, of casually dropping by, of finding him home, of talking to him about his books, learning his story, of reclaiming a small bit of the Berkeley community of letters I’d abandoned, and I now watched this vision slip away from me, my useless fingers unable to grab it back.
I stepped away from the metal gate and turned south, back toward the river. I ignored the bus sign on its solitary pole, deciding to walk, first along the row of pines with their top-heavy, horizontal spreads, then the she-wolf rendered in concrete at the start of the bridge, her expression worried, or perhaps pained by her swollen teats and the strange children crouched beneath her, and the enormous fascist eagles perched along the pillars wore expressions of comical grumpiness, and I continued past all of it, still wanting. And it was in this way that I proceeded with my search for Vietri, pursuing a simple goal by direct methods yet drawn somewhere I could not have foreseen, the way that people lost in the woods drift inevitably to the side of their dominant hand, making enormous arcs that result, ultimately, in circles.
The next day another visit to the apartment yielded nothing, though I’d chosen a different time of day, the late afternoon. It was a Saturday, and Rome was blurrier, its movements more languid. I decided, walking away from the via Bevanda for the second time, that I should look for an obituary. The nameplate was missing, if the apartment was empty I might as well know if Vietri was still alive, and I felt frustrated, impatient, I was excited by the idea of a task for the afternoon. I’d thought of buzzing the other apartments in the building at random, asking if they knew this particular neighbor, but it had been so long since I’d spoken Italian, I cringed at the scenario in which I understood nothing, was not understood, or the one where my first question was, do you speak English? Besides, I was of the last generation that did not take for granted the joy of hiding behind a computer screen.
I went into the first internet café I passed on my way back to the hostel. I sat myself before a slightly outdated PC, trying to avoid eye contact with the teenage boy at the computer next to mine, fastidious in his search for photos of dark-skinned swimsuit models, occasionally copying choice images into a desktop folder. I’d never liked the Italian word for obituary, necrologio, I had always found it aggressive, I suppose because it wore its association with death so plainly. I preferred the couching of the English word, the vagueness of the vowel sounds, its Latin root associated death with a downward motion, a gentler worldview perhaps than the Greek word, nekros, which carried as it moved itself through the Latin an association with death by violent means. But in the Corriere, entering a search for his surname, I found only the news of the death of Martina Vietri, a nun in Illinois, in La Repubblica, only an article about the migration of those under forty out of Italy, quoting Alessandro Vietri, a Milanese sociologist. There was no way to tell if they were relations, but I copied links to both articles and saved them in a folder of email drafts. I didn’t know what good saving them would do, I was aware this was an unusual project, but my curiosity was like a beast in my chest, and besides, I had nothing else to fill my days.
Most of the Google results, when I searched for “Giordano Vietri” for the first time since leaving the bookstore, remembering suddenly those long afternoons, were for a small coastal town and a famous pottery company. I’d assumed the company was named for the town, but I tried the name of the company with the words employee list and founder, then business profile, hoping I was choosing the right words in my clumsy Italian, the letters strange through my fingers as I typed them. The article I found was on the third or fourth page of results, somewhere I’d never have looked if I’d had any plans in Rome, any people I’d been eager to meet. The article profiled a new manager of the company, overseeing a new factory opening, and it featured a brief quote from a man who had been with the company at the beginning, a man named Giordano, with no last name given. It wasn’t much, given the number of men in this country named Giordano, but I dragged it into the email draft with the rest of the links.
I stopped by Vietri’s apartment building two more times over the next few days, though I’d mostly given up hope of finding him home. I hadn’t originally planned to stay this long in Rome, knew I should reach out to my aunts and other relations, but I assumed they had abandoned the city for the August holiday, I thought I would wait until they returned to let them know I was in town and enact the brief reunion. I would press the buzzer a few times at evenly spaced intervals, then turn back to the street, heart racing, half expecting to be stopped and questioned. But on my fourth approach to the building I saw two teenage boys walking toward me down the plant-lined side of the building, part driveway, part alley, part courtyard. There was a gray gate for cars, another one, smaller, for pedestrians. The driveway led down into what must be parking spaces below, one entered the building before then with a sharp right into the lobby. They held the gate open for me politely and incuriously, and I slipped inside the building through the propped-open door. The pale orange staircase was quiet, and I climbed it slowly, rehearsing a few sentences in Italian even though I couldn’t believe Vietri would be home, even though his letters had always been in English. As I ascended I remembered the bookstore viscerally, its ladders and stepstools, the feeling of a stack of books against my torso as I leaned back to balance them, the way we assembled Vietri’s books in their boxes before we shipped them to him, like trim size with like, slipping the boxes into enormous loose-weaved M-bags so that they would suddenly resemble parcels abandoned on a train platform in some earlier time, left by some other flood of refugees.
I knocked loudly on the apartment door, waited a few moments, and had raised my fist to knock a second time when the door to the adjacent apartment, just to my left, was flung open. A thin woman, wearing a green blouse that was both flamboyant and devastatingly severe, eyed me suspiciously. Surprised, all I could manage was “Cerco il signor Vietri.” She gave a small negative movement to her head, and I continued in Italian, I came from California, is he home? Does he still live here? Her eyes narrowed, and she still hadn’t spoken. Is he alive? I asked finally, my hands spreading before me. Something in her manner shifted, and it seemed she had made a decision. She leaned forward out of her doorway, and in Italian so rapid I felt sure it was intended to confuse me began a monologue that started as a list of things she could be doing that were better than talking to me about that silly old man, she continued, and I caught words as I could, but he’s not here, he hasn’t been here, not that he was much help when he was here, where had he been with all of their problems, they’d had no cooking gas for a week in June, didn’t I see how the trash piled up, this city, as if it’s not hard enough, didn’t I know how hard it was to raise a child, and, listen, maybe her mother would have known it all, but she’s dead now, isn’t she?
I was feeling knocked askew by the force of her narration but summoned the courage to jump on the pause and ask, is there any way for me to contact him? In response to which question her Italian sped up even more and she began giving me directions to a café with pink germaniums outside, rosa, she emphasized, lurching forward suddenly, and told me to ask there, but how could she promise me anything because who knew about crazy old men and didn’t she have enough problems? As the door swung closed I saw a toddler approaching with tyrannosaur-like unsteady bipedal steps, arms held out to his mother.
The café was only three or four storefronts down from the apartment gate, and this proximity made me think that the neighbor had intentionally complicated her directions. It had been the most forceful human interaction I’d had in weeks, and I felt off-kilter, strangely emotional as I walked toward the entrance. There were pink geraniums framing the door, in pots far too large for the small clumps of flowers. When I stepped inside the café the man behind the counter bellowed DI-ME in the way of all Roman cappuccino makers, but I waited until I had walked, at a measured pace, to the counter before explaining in a soft voice, my Italian suddenly shaky, that I was looking for il signor Vietri and I’d been told to come here.
The man, as he listened to this explanation, was constantly clearing his throat, then coughing in the deep-lung way of decades-long smokers into a white handkerchief with a delicate blue border. He’d bent down into his hand as another cough shook his torso, his large stomach pressed against the white buttons of his white shirt, but as his face angled down his eyes continued to meet mine so that it looked, his irises raised to the top edge of his lids, like a supplication. So it was that when he finally said something, the second half of it was swallowed into the most violent cough yet, and what I thought I’d heard him say was Chia—, before the word disappeared, and I thought that he’d wanted me to clarify, so I nodded and started to explain, staring as I did at the white tufts of hair exploding from his ears, but he immediately turned and went into the back room. When he came out he was holding a large, flat cardboard box in his hands, and as he handed it to me he said, his voice suddenly clear, pleasure to meet you at last, Chiara, and I realized then that he thought that my name was Chiara.
I opened my mouth to correct him, but then, my mouth moving toward the shape of an O and then closing, I found that I did not correct him. Instead, I tucked the box under my arm, thanked the man, assured him it had been a pleasure to have met him, and feeling or imagining all of the eyes of the café on my back, I turned and left the building.
Empty streets usually made me feel vulnerable while traveling, but that morning my mind was racing as I walked, barely aware of the blocks passing until I zeroed in on a bench near the river, running my fingers up and down the ridges in the cardboard, impatient to discover its contents. I breathed in deeply, trying to disperse the adrenaline flooding my system, I could practically feel it at the ends of my fingertips, straining to get out. I knew I could never go back to that café, could never try again to talk to that neighbor. My impulsive decision to go along with the mistaken identity—to steal whatever was in this box, though of course I didn’t think of it as a theft at the time—still, I did know that whatever it was I had done would be irrevocable. I would not be returning shamefaced to confess as my father had once forced me to do at the age of three, when I’d grabbed a foil-wrapped piece of chocolate from the counter of the local drugstore, already melted and useless in my fist by the time we’d made the walk back across the parking lot through the Central Valley heat. Rather than reinforcing any sense of right and wrong in me, this episode, so deep in my early life I sometimes wondered if it had been a dream, made a different resolution harden, I determined that whatever I did, I would not be caught. The box would be all I had to go on.
I sat on the bench, weighing it in my hands. The box was heavy, dense and centered in the way that small animals are, made of cardboard flaps tucked expertly upon each other so that only one piece of tape held it closed. I slit open the tape with the key to my locker at the hostel, and as I slid my fingers inside I hesitated a moment, as if the contents could nip me. In my pinched fingers, out came a book.
It was made of cheap, thin paper, with a long dotted script straining from its baseline in all directions. Inside were pages of maps, charts, lists, occasional illustrations of buildings, diagrams of wells. The maps showed squares arranged along what I assumed were roads, to one side wavy lines I thought indicated water. The calligraphy was beautiful and uniform, and only the smudges of the ink showed me it had been printed instead of handwritten. I found myself reading, though I understood nothing, my eyes traced the lines from right to left, as if I’d passed into a mirrored world. The bench on which I’d sat had no back, was just three roughly hewn pieces of stone, so I sat perpendicular and cross-legged with the book in my lap, my spine curved over it in a position that felt suddenly maternal, as a young couple passed by and I shielded it from view.
As I walked back toward the hostel that day I felt unmoored, by the Arabic I assumed I’d been reading, the Italian in the air around me. There was a sense of uncertainty that had arisen in my mind, was this the Tiber, were we now in the third millennium? Rome had always been a surreal city to me, the clocks all bearing different times, the cobblestones thick as grenades, so different from the smooth pavements of my childhood, the names of the streets camouflaged into one of eight angles on the sides of stone buildings, unlike the aggressively signed streets of Sacramento, the heat murky and strange compared to the dry oppression of the Central Valley. It was also true that all of my previous time in Rome had been spent being inducted into a new family system, so different from the quiet, tense triangle of my father, my mother, and me. It was all cousins, chaos, merging and fracturing alliances, my grandfather a passive patriarch, shuddering in my uncle’s small cars through streets that were of a different genus entirely than the wide-laid suburban ones I’d grown up with. I remembered trying to describe to my cousins riding a bike to the community pool or the library, the way I’d spent my previous summers, the roads flat and calm, and knowing I’d failed.
For the first time I imagined my father arriving in Rome with his Italian wife on the one visit they’d made together before I was born. He would have researched the city and its dangers in his methodical way, would have prepared for razor blades to part open the bottoms of backpacks on the metro, for purses to be swiped by men on Vespas from the backs of outdoor café chairs, for the water to sit mosquito-heavy in the streets after the rains, though he was an admirer of Roman infrastructure, I’d heard him quote, on multiple occasions, the “What have the Romans done for us?” speech from Monty Python’s Life of Brian to explain what civil engineers did. He had made himself ready for this, for evening sunburns, family interrogations, meals made up of the strange parts of cows, digestives that reminded him of mouthwash. But I don’t believe that he was prepared to love the city, to love the family, as he would say simply and mournfully to me decades later, “I had a lovely time.” Those two weeks made it worse, I knew, when his wife of this city, of this family, vanished from him, though it had always been clear to me that he’d kept this love for Rome, and for my mother, estranged from him, and from herself, as she was. He’d never come back to Rome, instead it was me, her daughter, who’d been sent back.