I bought a basket of figs and a couple of children’s books and walked to where I had first met Adam. From there I continued uphill, in the direction I had seen him go, followed by his children, Kareem and Salma. I turned by the church and looked for Number 90, as he had told me. At the building’s entrance there were at least twenty doorbells, each made of polished brass with a name holder beside it. I searched up and down the list more than once and still could not find his name anywhere. I wondered if I had misremembered the house number, but then there it was, midway down the first column of doorbells. I pressed it and nothing happened. I pressed it again and waited for about another minute. I thought of calling, but then decided to take a short walk instead and return in half an hour to try again. After all, I was dead on time. But before I reached the end of the street I heard my name and saw Adam walking quickly after me.
“I’m sorry I’m early,” I said.
“You are not early. I should have warned you,” he said, “about how long it takes to walk up. It’s a large building and we are right at the top. No lift. None of the buildings in Siena,” he said, taking my arm and walking beside me, “have lifts and so we all must lend a hand with groceries, particularly for the old folk.” He took a deep breath and said, “I’m so glad you’ve come.”
Inside, the building was dark and the air cool. He led me down a long corridor. My eyes had not adjusted to the shade and so I could hardly make out where he was leading me. I could just about see the decorated wood beams that lined the high ceiling. I could hear the laughter of children, then saw Salma running after her brother around a light-filled courtyard. Being a year or so older, Kareem found no difficulty in evading her grasp. He was delighted each time she got close. He would let out a giggle that I would come to know as his special laugh, a sort of quick succession of gentle but sparkly crackles, as though joy were fanning a fire in him. They ran over and took turns shaking my hand, their faces red from running, and seemed pleased to see me again, which surprised me, given that they were children and therefore had yet to perfect the tricks of social pretense. We climbed up several flights, Kareem and Salma alternating places so that he could be ahead and then she would run up and sneak past him. And sometimes they both reversed direction and ran down. The flat door had been left ajar. We entered a long rectangular room. On one side there was a large dining table with eight chairs; on the opposite end a bookcase with a large television in the middle of it. Between these two ends a sofa and armchair were placed against the perpendicular wall, which faced the open kitchen. The television was on, tuned to an Arabic news channel. An elderly man sat in the armchair, looking sideways at the television, a cigarette burning between his long, lean fingers. He did not notice us walk in. Adam introduced me to his wife, Noha, who was cooking in the kitchen. She greeted me with genuine and uncomplicated warmth.
“I warn you,” she said, “you will be eating what we normally eat; so don’t expect much.”
When I showed some resistance to staying for dinner, Adam said, “Stay and eat with us,” and when I didn’t immediately reply he added, “Let’s have coffee first and then you can decide. Come, let me introduce you to my dear father.” Adam placed a hand on the old man’s shoulder and, raising his voice, shouted, “Darling Dad, this is our friend Hisham Matar from Libya.”
The man looked at me, mildly startled. Then his eyes softened. I sat down beside him. He embraced me and I kissed his forehead.
“Welcome, my son,” he said.
I did not know what to say. Then I asked him how he was.
“To be honest, not so well,” he said. He spoke with some difficulty, stuttering each word with great effort, and in the gaps between these prized utterances his eyes wandered and peered out, as though hoping that something there, in mid-distance, might come to his rescue.
Adam sat on the other side of me, so that I was now between son and father. He said softly, “He had a stroke but he’s doing better now.” Then to Kareem, who had brought over one of his favorite books and was in the process of showing it to me, Adam said, “Isn’t that the case, Karami?”
I liked this unusual variation on the name. The name “Kareem” means “generous” but the word shares the same root as karama, which means “honor” or “dignity,” and therefore this possessive form Adam had fashioned for his son’s nickname—Karami—which I had never heard before, ingeniously means “my generosity” or “my dignity” or, a third possibility, a combination of the two.
“Isn’t darling Granddad doing better since he arrived to visit us?” Adam repeated.
Kareem nodded, then walked into his grandfather’s arms and smiled openly as the old man kissed him in the neck. Salma followed, as though it had been agreed that such affections would be allotted equally. Kareem was now standing beside me, his hand on my knee, looking with me at the book he had handed to me.
“What’s it about?” I said.
“A cat,” he said and hesitated. Kareem’s Arabic was basic. Every so often he would look at his father and say the word in Italian. “A cat who loses her way and gets up to a lot of trouble.”
“Is it nice trouble?” I said.
He smiled, looked at his father, then replied, “Yes, very nice trouble.”
“I’m very pleased you like books,” I said, “because I brought you one.” I handed it to him.
Noha called out from the kitchen, “What do we say, darling?”
And Kareem uttered the common words of gratitude.
I asked the boy if he could help me to better understand Siena. “For example,” I said, “how do these contrade work?”
I had read about the seventeen contrade, the wards or districts that make up the city, each having its own mayor and administrative body and municipal budget. They compete in the Palio, the horse race that takes place every year on July 2 and again on August 16 inside the Piazza del Campo. I had witnessed on one of my walks a group of teenage flag-bearers cloistered in a dead-end created by an alleyway bending sharply upon itself, practicing for the parades that take place before the race. The drummer, whose march I had heard from a few streets away, was keeping a solemn and steady beat. His friends paced slowly in and out of a circle while turning their flagpoles in a sweeping loop, causing the fluttering silk to ripple and swell. Then suddenly they tossed the poles vertically, high into the air, where the fabric fell, as though made frightened and alert, around its pole. I was close enough now to hear the wind whisper around the banners. The boys often missed and the flagpoles clattered against the cobblestones, but that did not seem to get in the way of their trying again. I did not stop for long, as there was something about the spectacle that seemed private. Mauro, the head of the language school, used to be a flagbearer when he was young. He too had spent months practicing. He told me, with a joyful face, that his contrada, Torre, had won the July race the year before. He described how this ancient event, the Palio, remains the central event in the city. “The whole year is organized around it.” When I expressed a distaste for the lack of sportsmanship involved, of how, for instance, it is permitted for riders to whip one another and do all manner of unspeakable things in order to win, Mauro simply looked at me and said, “But the Palio is not a sport; it’s war.” He went on to explain that, although he too finds the violence and corruption that often surround the race unpalatable, he believes it serves an important purpose in the city. It is, according to Mauro, the main reason why Siena is exceptionally safe. “I cannot remember the last time a person was mugged or stabbed here. I think it is because we have found a way to funnel all of our madness into two days in the year. The Palio is a theatrical war, a display of battle that is really a celebration of coexistence.” He explained to me that the people of each contrada, who, as well as being part of an administrative body, regard themselves as part of a tribe-like social structure and feel a sense of pride toward their streets. “They protect them and help the vulnerable, often carrying the elderly or the disabled who can’t take the steps.”
Kareem looked at his father. Adam answered on his behalf: “At first, we never paid the subject much attention, but then when Kareem was born we returned from hospital and found a blue ribbon tied to the main door downstairs. I had no idea what it meant and so ignored it. A few days later the Mayor of our contrada, together with drummers and boys carrying silk banners, came asking for Kareem. They said they wanted to baptize him.” Adam laughed. “I told them we were not Christian, but they insisted, said it had nothing to do with religion. I told them no thanks all the same. But then the Mayor came and climbed all the way up here to our apartment. He said, ‘Don’t worry, it isn’t a religious ceremony. We simply want to welcome him into our area. We do this for every child born here. A blue ribbon for a boy, a pink one for a girl. Please come and if, at any point, you or your wife don’t like what you see, you can take Kareem home.’ ”
As Adam was telling me this, Kareem went and fetched a large tube of paper from the bookcase and carefully released the blue ribbon fastened around it. He unrolled the thick cotton paper. It was covered with careful, precise calligraphy. On the top it had the contrada’s coat of arms and on the bottom, at the center, Kareem’s name in full, with the Mayor’s signature below. “That’s the certificate,” Adam said. “It was a crazy party. They paraded Kareem in the streets, celebrating their new member, and then the Mayor wrapped him in the flag of the contrada and spoke a few words, addressing the infant directly. He said that from now on they would look after him, that wherever he goes this will be his home.”
Kareem looked proud.
“So does this mean,” I asked Kareem, “that if, God forbid, I were to do something that would upset you, you would go and tell your contrada? Will I be beaten up?”
He giggled sweetly and when I repeated the question he shook his head and said, almost to himself, “No, it’s not like that.”
I had arrived at Adam and Noha’s home at 7 p.m. and did not leave until 1 a.m. The whole evening was so natural and delightful that it felt, and we all had commented on this, as though we had known each other already and were simply picking up where we had once left off but without, as Noha put it, “the tiresome business of needing to catch up.” And everything we discovered about each other’s lives unfolded spontaneously and without suffering the demanding weight of questions. I learned many facts about them—about their lives back in Jordan, how they came to be married, the life they had created for themselves in Siena—but it was not those things that remained with me most vividly but rather the quality of their lives together, the atmosphere they had created in their home, the unpretentious authenticity of their curiosities and the kindness of their human feeling. I walked home that evening holding this to my chest as though it were a precious object I had been given.