“You’ve hurt Marisa’s feelings,” said Holly, coming upon me in the garden late one afternoon. I was about to walk along the Pizzalungo—a wild scarp of land that swirled around Mount Tuoro, with its pine thickets and pink jagged rocks dominating the southeast region of Capri from the Grotta di Forca to the Grotta di Matromania.
“She told you that?”
“She said you were rude to her.”
“I didn’t mean anything.”
“You didn’t mean,” she echoed, shaking her head. “You don’t like her anymore? Is that it?”
“I like her fine,” I said. It was an awkward admission. I certainly bore no ill feelings toward Marisa, but I didn’t want her as a lover. That was preposterous, although I had behaved abominably, in a way that embarrassed me and frustrated her. “It’s not that kind of relationship.”
“What kind is that?”
I wondered if she was being coy. “We’re not really lovers,” I said.
“Lovers,” she repeated, neutrally, as though adding to her vocabulary in a foreign language. In truth, I adored hearing her say that word, and wondered if it might ever be used to describe us.
“I’m going around the Pizzalungo,” I said. “Would you like to come?”
“I suppose. Why not?”
“In another words, you have nothing better to do.”
Holly gave me one of her quizzical looks, wrinkling her nose and drawing her eyes slightly together. I liked the way her eyebrows dipped toward the center. Her forehead was smooth and shiny, and her hairline formed a slight widow’s peak—a feature that appealed to me immensely. “I’d actually like to take a walk with you, and it’s not so complicated as you make out. You turn everything into a little drama, don’t you?”
“Maybe I should write plays?”
Holly sighed. I could see that my self-obsession was boring, and I vowed to change. I must stop thinking about myself, about my writing, about the effect I was having on people. Life at the Villa Clio had worked its evil magic on me, and I was becoming someone I didn’t like.
“Have you been to the Punta di Massullo?” she asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“There’s a house there, the Villa Malaparte. You must see for yourself.”
On the way, she told me about Curzio Malaparte, whose name was unfamiliar to me. The son of a wealthy Milanese mother and a German manufacturer, he had changed his name from Kurt Erik Suckert to Curzio Malaparte as a young man in his late twenties, in 1925. As a soldier in the First World War, he had proved himself as a warrior, winning a Croix de Guerre from the French government. He became a journalist, a newspaper editor, and a famous novelist, author of Kaputt and La Pelle. During the thirties, he formed a close friendship with Mussolini’s daughter, Galeazzo, who spent a good deal of time on Capri. While visiting her, he discovered the Punta di Massullo, a harshly beautiful promontory overlooking a small inlet. Malaparte bought the land from a farmer for the equivalent of a week’s stay at the Quisisana, and used the influence of Il Duce’s daughter to get permission to build there, despite local opposition. He commissioned the modernist architect, Adalberto Libera to build the villa, but it was not completed until 1949, by which time the shape-shifting and opportunistic Malaparte had switched his allegiance from fascism to socialism, with a distinctly Maoist tinge.
We followed an obscure byway from the main path around the Pizzalungo to the Punta di Massullo, at times climbing on all fours over steep rocks to get to the point itself. I was afraid of heights, and the sheer drop-off to the sea made me dizzy. I paused, leaning against a large oak.
“Are you all right?” Holly asked.
I liked her concern—a lot. “Yes,” I said. “A little dizzy.”
“Look,” she said, pointing.
The bizarre villa, with its sharp, futuristic angles, was suddenly visible, large and unlike anything else on Capri. Steps swirled to a rooftop solarium with a white, saillike curve of brick. The villa was said, by its owner, to be “sad, harsh, and severe,” like himself; it seemed wholly incongruous there, a piece of ultra-modernist sculpture dropped from the heavens and snagged on this ledge at a precarious angle. Its severity was thrilling and revolting at the same time.
“It’s pure Malaparte,” said Holly. “Un po matto, would you say?”
“I rather like it,” I said. “Another of the sons of Tiberius.”
“Worse, from what I’ve heard.”
We approached the villa respectfully, as one might a pyramid, then climbed the steep stairs to the door. It opened with a slight push, the lock having obviously been broken.
“Maybe Curzio’s home,” I said.
Holly shivered. “Don’t say things like that.”
Inside, the bare living room (it had been stripped by looters at least a decade before we arrived) swept toward the southeast, with the Faraglioni visible through binocularlike windows. The sea below had by now acquired a coppery tint in the late afternoon light, which shone on the concrete floors. The walls glowed with a silvery hue, and there was green mold growing in vertical lines from floor to ceiling. The ceilings themselves were high, mottled with broken plaster. I could not imagine living in such a space.
Holly told me that guests at the Villa Malaparte included Jean Cocteau and Albert Camus, both of whom admired Malaparte’s fiction. “Nobody lives here,” she explained, “because of the will. When Malaparte died, in the late fifties, he left the house to the Chinese government. It was to become a retreat for Maoist writers. But the Italians contested the will, and it’s still in limbo.”
“I feel him,” I said. “Malaparte’s ghost. And it’s not alien. He wasn’t a bad man.” Weirdly, I felt quite sure of that. Malaparte had been through many incarnations in one life, eventually finding his balance. The spirit of the house was calming.
“He died a Catholic,” she said, “and a socialist.”
I grunted approval. This information confirmed my sense of Malaparte. I could not have felt at ease with the ghost of a fascist. Then again, I wondered if it was Malaparte’s opportunism that appealed to me. He apparently seized what opportunities lay before him, and shifted to accommodate himself to his surroundings, however threatening or complex.
Holly and I stood for a while at the round windows, watching a tanker in the distance as it cruised southward. I was startled by her hand, which had unobstrusively moved around my lower back. Her right thumb wedged in the back pocket of my jeans. In response, I let my left arm rise around her shoulder, tipping my head toward her. But this gesture only seemed to spook her, and she quickly removed her thumb, turning away from me awkwardly.
Ora pro nobis, Malaparte, I whispered to myself. Ora pro nobis.