I left Capri under cover of darkness, not thinking that thirty years would elapse before I set foot on the island again.
After landing in Naples with Holly that night, we found a cheap pensione near the harbor, then traveled the next morning by train to Rome, where an English uncle of hers owned a gloomy modern apartment overlooking the river on the Lungo Tevere della Vittoria. (He preferred Florence, where he also kept an apartment. We saw him only once, for dinner, in a restaurant near the Pantheon.) Our relationship, such as it was, hobbled along for several weeks. We made each other miserable until, near the middle of October, she asked me to find another place to live. By that time, I was more than ready.
I traveled for two months, in France and England, then returned home for Christmas. Columbia welcomed me back for the spring semester, and I graduated only a year behind my class. The next three decades were—how could they not be?—eventful. My mother died in her early fifties, her heart in tatters, but my father lived on until 1997, by which time Massolini Construction had dwindled to a mini-version of its former self. Needless to say, I never went into business with my father and grandfather.
In a desultory way, I managed to write four books of poetry and three novels—a modest production, although I like what I accomplished, as did a modest gathering of readers. I taught here and there, eventually landing a permanent job at Bowdoin, in Maine. Recently, in the Atlantic Monthly, I published an essay on Rupert Grant, drawing on those months at the Villa Clio for atmosphere. For the most part, I focused on his verse, which I’ve increasingly come to respect. I referred to him as “one of the last English poets whose work one actually memorized” and said that I’d learned the essentials of my craft from him.
I didn’t say, of course, that I’d come to despise him, and that his way of gobbling up those around him had left a sour taste in my mouth. I never mentioned Marisa or Holly, or the problems faced daily by Vera. I never mentioned his narcissism and spite for other writers. As a negative model, Grant had powerfully affected me, and long ago I decided it was better to live my life honestly and lovingly, with respect for those around me, than go to my grave with a trunkload of literary honors.
Some months after the essay appeared, I received a note from Capri. The Grants and I had not been in communication since my rude departure, even though I’d promised to write. Even after three decades, I recognized Vera’s meticulously formed letters in black India ink—familiar because she had written several recipes by hand into my notebook, and I still used them. She wrote:
My dear Alex,
Your piece on Rupert was sent by a friend in New York. It was quite charming. I do hope this finds you well, old thing. Do visit the Villa Clio again if you discover yourself in these parts. We’re a long way from anywhere, of course.
It was signed, “Affectionately, Vera.” I found it puzzling that she had said so little, after all this time, and that she had signed it with affection. Yet the note eased old and deeply rooted feelings of guilt. I’d left like a thief, not even bothering to thank my hosts, however difficult they had been. They had taken me into their lives at a time when I could not have been an easy guest: wearing my troubles on my shirtsleeves, moving uncertainly among various propositional selves—many of which I gladly abandoned as soon as I found my footing in the adult world.
An invitation to a literary conference in Naples put Capri within easy reach only a few months later, and I took this as a sign. Arriving in that dilapidated city a day early, I thought of trying to find Marisa’s grave, but the logistics of that made it seem impossible. I realized now how often I thought of her, and—most vividly—her terrible death. I had been writing poems about that event for many years, yet I still didn’t understand what happened, or whose fault it was, or why she had gone to such an extreme length. That kind of thing moves beyond the realm of understanding.
I boarded a crowded hydrofoil for the island on a clear morning in late September, unsure of what exactly I would find at the Villa Clio. What I knew about Grant in the past decade was sketchy enough. Until the mid-1990s, he had occasionally published poems in places like The New Yorker and the Times Literary Supplement. They were wistful verses, mostly about the persistence of desire in old age—a theme borrowed from Yeats but embodied with an unmistakably Grantian inflection. His last full collection, Love and Lemons, had won a prize in Britain in 1989, prompting a number of lengthy reconsiderations of his career. There had been no new novels for two decades, but a fairly recent television adaptation of Siren Call had kept interest in his fiction alive. He would have just passed his ninety-third birthday a few months before.
Despite the lateness of the season, the ferry teemed with day-trippers, mostly Europeans. Capri had, if anything, grown in popularity since I had lived there. Disembarking at the Marina Grande, I felt dismayed by the profusion of hotels, restaurants, and tourist shops that lined the quays. The yachts in the harbor appeared more numerous and larger than those I’d remembered, most of them flying international flags. I had to wait for nearly half an hour to get a taxi to the piazzetta.
A certain dread mingled with curiosity as I retraced the path to the Villa Clio, although the decades had done less damage to the surroundings than I’d have guessed. The piazzetta absorbed its tumult of visitors with dignity, as ever, and the Camerelle still smelled of laundry soap and cat piss. The sun was brilliant along the Tragara, and I found the view of the Marina Piccola and Mount Solaro as dazzling as before. Apparently the lack of roads on Capri and its steep terrain had prevented the kind of development that had ruined much of the Amalfi coast. Rich people preferred to drive up to their holiday villas in Land Rovers nowadays, even in Italy.
I was let into the Villa Clio by Maria Pia, who had changed in the usual ways. She was plumper now, with ankles like tree stumps. Her silvery hair was oddly unkempt, unwashed, and the hair on her arms was coarsely matted, thick, swirling from wrist to elbow. I remembered the mustache, but the unsightly birthmark on her cheek surprised me. Had I somehow not noticed that before? She dipped her head toward me, in recognition and respect, but there was an element of contempt in her expression, as if she still resented the manner of my departure.
“Venga qui, professore,” she said, as she had before I had genuinely earned that title. I was led into the kitchen, where Vera stood at the counter with her hands deep in a bowl of flour. I couldn’t help but smile. It was as if she’d been standing there for the past thirty years, waiting for me.
“Hello,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. I had sent a note ahead, so she expected me.
“Hello, Vera,” I said, kissing her on either cheek. “Nothing seems to change around here.”
“I have,” she said, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of one hand. “I’m rather a wreck.”
“Not true,” I said, “you look wonderful.”
“What complete bosh,” she said.
But she did. She was smaller than I remembered her, but just as lively. Her gray eyes glinted, flecked with green. Her hair had gone whitish gray, but it shimmered, cut straight above her forehead. Her face seemed remarkably free of wrinkles for a woman over seventy, and she had never added an ounce of fat. If anything, she had grown thinner.
“I need a drink,” she said, reaching for a bottle of sherry. “We’ll have lunch in an hour. You will stay, of course.”
“Of course,” I said.
I sat for a while with her in the alcove, answering a flurry of questions about my life. I had a wife now, yes, and two children—twins, now seventeen. I was a professor, and had written numerous books. She seemed genuinely pleased for me, and wished I had brought my wife, Alice, whom I met while doing graduate studies in comparative literature at Yale, having switched from classics after Columbia.
“Next time,” I said.
I asked about Grant with hesitation.
“He’s not been well,” she said, confirming what I’d heard. “It’s his memory, you see. I don’t know what to call it. Senility? Dementia? He hasn’t recognized anyone in four or five years.”
I asked to see him, and she directed me to the garden. “He sleeps there most of the day, under his tree,” she said.
I remembered that lemon tree, where I had sometimes gone myself to sit in imitation of the master. Going into the garden, I discovered a shrunken version of Rupert Grant, now asleep in a canvas chair, barefooted. He wore ragged trousers and a shirt that looked like a painter’s palette, stained with a variety of meals past. A straw hat shaded his face, and his chin slumped on his chest. There was no fruit on the tree behind him.
“Hello, Rupert,” I said, hovering.
He sniffed several times, then snorted. Looking up, his eyelids quivered, then opened; the eyes themselves appeared cloudy, full of mucus. The lines on his face had become deep rivulets of perspiration, and his hair had grown long and white, resting on his shoulders behind the hat. His feet were knobby and lobster-red, the toenails brownish yellow.
“I’m sorry to wake you, Rupert,” I said. (It occurred to me that I had never felt comfortable using his first name when I lived at the Villa Clio.)
His eyes cleared suddenly, and he leaned forward, studying my face like a text from another era, deciphering, translating. Then he rose, drawing himself up to something of his old height, seizing my wrist with two hands.
“Do you remember me, Rupert?”
He smiled, with a crooked row of tobacco-stained teeth flashing briefly. Then he let go, and sat, and I knew I had not managed to get through to him, not in any important way, and that somehow this was exactly what I should have expected.