A Thousand Shards of Glass

13 MY FINAL OPENING FAREWELL

Come! Let us make that bargain. Think of me at my best, if circumstances should ever part us!

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, 1850

Kris’ and my life in Rapallo and Paris was a simple and beautiful one and saying that now reminds me of how some Americans responded when they heard how we lived and where. There was often that first tinge of jealousy, followed by the assumption that we were ‘rich people’ who could not understand what ‘working people’, with their many obligations, go through. ‘It must be nice to be rich and travel the world,’ one woman told us with a spoonful of resentment, while another, with her Calvinist disapproval, said, ‘Well, I’d love to do that but I take my responsibilities seriously.’ I’m still trying to understand that one.

Kris and I were not rich in terms of money, but we understood what so many Americans did not, which is that one does not need to be rich to live a good life. What is needed is imagination, courage and a poet’s heart at taking risks to make it so. Money is always helpful, but not a guarantee. Money does not do. It is heart and desire that finally takes the step.

We initially left the United States in protest because of the increasingly aggressive behavior of President Bush and others following September 11 and because of the American people themselves, who seemed unable to speak about anything except money, business or ‘getting’ the people ‘we’ perceived were against ‘us’. It felt that life in the United States, the poetry of life, was dying and we hungered to live by a rhythm that we had come to know when living in other countries. We wanted out of the consumer corporate state that seemed to have a never-ending line of salesmen who called you at home, offering things or threatening things or asking you to get on this or that website to do one task or another.

The nation of menial tasks and lists was unacceptable to us and we were not going to allow it to rob us of our lives or drown us in a trivial sea. We wanted a simple life filled with daily work done well and time together that was not interrupted other than by the people we loved. We wanted to get far away from what we came to refer to as the American Noise.

Kris left first. She traveled to Italy hoping to find an apartment that we could afford and work well in. In Rapallo she found a small one with a remarkably large veranda that overlooked a gulley filled with lemon and olive trees and, to the left, views of the Ligurian Sea. She telephoned after sending photographs.

‘Michael, the apartment is very small and simple, but the veranda will be a wonderful place for you and me to write and work and to take our meals. It’s only a short walk to the sea and the afternoon vegetable market is only about one and a half miles away. What do you think?’

‘Well, I’ve worked it out. The apartment is six hundred euros a month. The lunches you and I would prepare after going to the vegetable market and pasta shop would run to about six or seven euros a day, and for dinner I found a wonderful bar on the water that serves Prosecco and when you order before 6 p.m. they give you lots of little plates of ham and cheese, olives and vegetables. It costs seven euros for the two of us. So I think that we can live very well for about fourteen hundred euros a month. What do you think?”

And so I left the United States and landed in Milan and from there I traveled by train to Genova and on to Rapallo. Arriving at the station, my beautiful, sun-drenched wife was waiting with open arms, a big kiss and a small bottle of Limoncello, which she dipped her finger into and then put to my lips.

And it was home. Our days began the same way. We would sit on our veranda at first light and have our fruit and yogurt with coffee or tea and then we would set to work. I would begin to write while my beautiful new neighbor across the gulley swept her veranda topless. After a month she would wave and say ‘Ciao’ as the scent of lemon from the trees below was carried on the wind.

After a good morning’s work, Kris and I, with net bags in hand, would walk to the vegetable market. The stall we most frequented was owned by a stunningly beautiful, buxom woman who, unbelievably, was seventy years old.

After seeing me there for over a month, she began to beautifully and wickedly tease me by bending over her produce, which gave a view of her ample breasts.

‘Ciao, Myco. Meloni?’ she would say as I turned red and looked somewhere, anywhere, other than at her and her breasts. This of course pleased her and caused her to laugh and tease even more.

‘Un melone o due?’ she asked, while leaning over the vegetables. I would start to laugh and she touched my hand, smiling provocatively, and she did so shamelessly in front of Kris, which gave Kris great pleasure, especially when the woman asked, ‘Why are you with such a skinny woman? Yes, I know she is very beautiful, but older woman, Myco, oh yes, older woman.’

Kris and I realized that our lovely, playful market lady was the real poetry of living and one of the threads being woven into our lives, making us part of the tapestry that was all around us. We cherished that world and never took for granted the lives we were living.

After lunch we would rest and then go for a swim before returning to review the day’s work, checking it again and preparing it for the following morning. The evenings were magical and sometimes, instead of dinner, we would catch a bus past Santa Margarita to a place we had found that always seemed to us an undiscovered oasis. Once, late at night, Kris and I, with a bottle of grappa, laid on the small beach naked and then swam in the dark and warm water as the reflected stars danced around us. It was a beautiful moment and it could not last.

The next day began like the others. We were deep into our work and the work was going well. I had heard from a publisher interested in my book and that interest had me working harder so as to complete it by the fall. It was a day filled with pleasure and promise and a routine that Kris and I had come to love. That evening we were going to dinner at the home of Giuseppe and Betty Gargano.

Giuseppe and Betty owned the best provisions shop in Rapallo and we had become friends. Through Giuseppe we had learned about dried beans, olives and cheese and the different Parma hams. He had taught us how to make the best minestrone soup I have ever had and he introduced me to some of the old fishermen still working the sea.

That night was one of those evenings that never leaves the heart or mind. There we were, struggling with each other’s languages and yet communicating perfectly. The laughter and wine flowed and never was there a hint that this evening would be our last together.

We returned to our apartment and were still laughing when the phone rang. It was Kris’ mother and she was in a panic. Kris’ father had just dropped dead and could not be resuscitated. I held my dear wife as she cried and then cried myself, not just for Kris or her father and mother, but for our perfect life that I somehow knew was over. We stepped on to the veranda and looked up at the sky filled with stars. We stood there for a long time and were still there when the sun came up.

Kris took a long last look at the sea and the olive and lemon trees and then waved one last time to our lovely, wacky neighbor who, topless, was sweeping away. Within a few hours she was en route to California. I stayed behind to close the apartment that we would never see again and within a few days I was driving to Paris with our belongings and our dog and cat, Angus and Thelma.

In San Francisco, Kris was there to meet me and she could see I was sick and tired and, while happy to see her, heartbroken to be in the land of lists once again. She, too, was heartbroken, but reminded me that we would only be there for six or seven months to help her mother and then we would return to our beautiful, simple life. We never did.

Some months later, after doing what we could for her mother, we began to make plans for our return. One morning, something so small happened that even now it seems like a faraway dream. Kris woke with a headache and that headache was coming from a brain tumor.

For the time that remained, our lives were punctuated by fear and much of that fear came not only from the tumor but also from the constant barrage of demands placed upon us from the business people of medicine in the United States. There were no lovely market ladies with kind, sweet and provocative teasing; there was no poetry, and it broke our hearts.

Between Kris’ treatments we were able to spend two good years going back and forth to Paris and Italy but it was not the same, knowing that we always had to return to the land of lists, but still, we tried to be positive in spite of everything that was put in our way.

On Kris’ last day she asked me to read to her as we had always done for each other.

‘Do you remember that watercolor that I painted for you? The one of the Venice doorway?’

‘Do you remember the quote from Invisible Cities that I included with it?’

‘Of course, my love. It’s right here. The framed painting and the quote. You know, I’ve told you so many times, it’s my most cherished possession.’

I picked up the double frame, looking again at the beautiful watercolor, and read Italo Calvino’s passage from Invisible Cities:

Arriving at each new city the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

‘That’s so beautiful. It’s the story of our lives, isn’t it?’ she asked.

Within a few hours the nurse came in to tell me that I had to tell Kris that it was all right to go.

I never could say it was all right, but what I did say was, ‘My love, your bags are packed and on the train. You catch this one and make a place for us ahead like you did in Italy. I’ll catch the next. I love you.’ A short time later she was on her way.

There are many good and decent people in the United States, but I have come to know that most Americans are sleepwalking. They bypass the misery around them and repeat to themselves and others the same banal and insincere rationalizations meant not to inform, but rather excuse and dismiss. A number of my fellow Americans worked at their jobs and robbed me of the precious little time I had left with my wife, and I don’t know how to forgive them for that. The poetry in my life was Kris, but poets mean nothing in the land of lists and that makes for a lonely and dead place.

I must leave the United States again now, and alone and for the last time, not because of Bush or the war or the medical system or Republicans, but because of the lack of kindness here and the way we treat one another. I will not accept that kind of life and I will not live among people who choose to be blind and unconscious.

The train is coming for me, as it is for us all, and when it arrives, I wish to be in a place where people are laughing and loving and smelling lemon on the wind. I would like to think that the big buxom market lady would again hold my hand and smile just before I board and then whisper, ‘That skinny beautiful girl you love is waiting for you at the station just a little down the track.’

In such a place, with such people, I will think of Kris and poetry but not of lists. I will be grateful for the life I have had and in the hour before I depart, though not a man of faith, I shall say a prayer, not for myself but for my countrymen and women. I will wish for them the smell of lemon and poetry and a simple and beautiful life in a place where people care for one another more than they care for lists. It will be their choice, as it always has been, and I will pray that they choose wisely and with their hearts.