After Auschwitz: A Love Story (19 page)

It's better not to think about that too much. In any case right now I am on a plateau. The doctor agrees, and this journal certainly helps me hold on to what I've been and done, to who I am.

I had a long talk with Erminia, our
donna di servizio
who comes twice a week to clean and wash. I found myself wishing she came more often. She is almost a member of the family. But she still works on her own family's farm, sows and reaps, takes care of the animals. And when she's too old to do that, there are her grandchildren. It would be good to be one of them, I think. She never finds fault and is resolutely cheerful, always telling me how well I look, how handsome, a little as if I were a child, patting my cheek.

I follow her as she waters, the way I used to tag after my wet nurse, a woman I imagine or partially remember, generously built, solid on her two legs, able to pick up fifty kilos of grain, to work all day in a good humor, carrying me in a pack on her back, talking to herself and me about the olive crop. Erminia's two sons don't know how to work the land, she tells me sadly. My mother, in a gesture from another age, put me with a wet nurse until I was three or four and this gave me whatever sense I have of easy-going, loving family life.

Hannah never wanted to have a room of her own. No that's not true. She never liked sleeping with all her sisters and brothers in one bed, didn't like the noises coming from behind the curtain where her parents slept. And here our
attico
has just
one room, one space where you can shut the door. She insisted that I take it. She could work in the living room or, when it was nice, out on the terrace. I took the library, as we call it, without much thought and now am stuck here, impotent, surrounded by shelves of books while she clacks away.

She never used to write so steadily but it's her new project, the one she is doing about the daughter of a Holocaust survivor whose husband, a Catholic, is unfaithful with a Palestinian woman. She says it is about the possibility of peace between the three great faiths. A friend to whom she showed her manuscript said she thought Hannah hated the Palestinian woman and was prejudiced, but Hannah swore that wasn't true. She wants to know the woman and forgive.

I wonder then if it is about us. The Jewish wife has a mother who had survived the camps and is terribly anxious about everything. Maybe Hannah has found the perfect plot to embody our story, except that she is the survivor, not her mother, and Claudia is a Catholic only on holidays.

I can't say it isn't an interesting idea to show how her characters' beliefs affect their love affairs. It is! But if her work obsesses her, consumes her, I can feel it only as a rival. Or as if I am dead already and she is going on with her life with renewed vigor. I said that to her—one of those things you know you shouldn't say but say anyway.

“You are healthy as a horse,” she said. “I'm the one likely to die. You don't have to talk like that to get my sympathy,” she kisses me on the brow. Being able to take the high ground always pleases her. She goes downstairs and comes back after a few minutes with a hot chocolate and a
cornetto.

“I'm not myself this morning,” I say. “I'm sorry.”

“It's nothing,” she lies. But it isn't nothing. It's how things are now. Things trigger me, set me off. Anxiety like a dirty fog condenses into something harsher, hysterical—chokes me.

“Please don't leave me,” I murmur so low that she doesn't hear.

It's Easter. The bells ring out from all the churches. When I was small we used to hide eggs in the garden after my mother and I had decorated them, dipping them in crimson and blue, my favorite colors. She was good at things like this, my mother. Things like egg painting or taffy pulling that had no hint of the practical.

Hannah, with no memories of the Christian holiday, is working away in the living room. Suddenly I hear her push back her chair and close her typewriter. “I'm going for a walk,” she calls to me. I don't suggest going with her because the weather is grim. Every few minutes the sky spits rain on the terrace, then abruptly pours down, flooding the gutters, licking at the glass door. I crawl back into the new bed where I lie safely next to the wall and fiddle with myself, lazily watching the seagulls circling, trying to hold their course in the wind. The wind whips the white wisteria that Hannah planted, which is blossoming for the first time. If it keeps on like this there will be no more blossoms left by nightfall. A cold draft comes through the partly opened door.

Why isn't Hannah here to comfort me? She says walking in the wind and rain scours her brain, giving it a fresh space for ideas. She's gotten to the dead center of the new book. Now there is no question of changing course. She's waited so long for this. When she first came here and spoke up for the Palestinians, people refused to listen. Who was it who spoke of literature as sugarcoating a bitter pill? Someone in the seventeenth century? That's what she's doing now, hiding the medicine. I can tell she isn't quite satisfied, though she doesn't complain. I'm sure it's good but she always wants more. Sometimes when she is reading one of the classics, Dante, Primo Levi, Calvino, I walk into the living room and find her crying because she can never be great.

Last night we watched the pope's Easter procession at the Coliseum on television. He looked like an impotent old man, hands clasped in prayer, one finger pointing upward, dressed
in his gorgeous clothes, high above the thousands trying to get a glimpse of him. Maybe he was thanking God for holding back the thunderstorm, due yesterday. The clergy is in enough trouble. God, your church is besieged on all sides. Maybe he promises more mortification of his flesh. Pronounces himself a willing victim and wishes for a miracle to revive the ancient roots. Looking out over the crowd, I thought the only people who looked genuine were the African nuns.

Hannah came back from her walk exultant and announced that she was going to take a break and go back with me to visit my family's old place, our tower near Todi in Torre Gentile. I think I mentioned it before—we had gone for the weekend and Hannah wouldn't let me drink wine. I haven't done or said anything provocative this morning but it is so easy to make her feel guilty, just by a turn of my head or a hint of dullness in my voice. I'm sure she wants me to see how much she cares for me by interrupting her work just when it is going well, trying to make up for being so immersed in it. But why shouldn't she be? Didn't I do the same thing for years? Of course I did. And I didn't just work at home; even before our separation I traveled regularly to conferences and festivals. She always hated my trips, suspecting that I was having a fling. Even if I did it meant nothing.

It's funny how just thinking of the time when I was the prime mover, so to speak, makes me feel stronger, clearer in my mind, but also makes me want to blame Hannah for my mental troubles. I catch myself doing that and give myself a mental slap.

“I'm packing a picnic,” Hannah says from the doorway.

“It's a lovely idea but…” I gesture at the rain-streaked door.

“The rain is supposed to stop in an hour or so,” she says, “and if it doesn't we can start a fire when we get there.” There are two huge fireplaces, one upstairs in the bedroom, the other down in the rustic kitchen, and a fine pile of cut wood near
each of them. When the fire is lit there is always a musky smell.

My heart always beats harder when I get near Torre Gentile, passing through the beautiful valley with its gray olive trees—most of them replanted by the government after the exodus from the farms. The fields are a mass of yellow mustard flowers and there is an orange moss on the next door roof. The colors modulate nicely—an impressionist's dream. The house itself is gray stone with a massive base from the time when it still had its tower, first line of defense for the little town. Slits cut in the walls for the archers to shoot from are now widened and filled with glass, and a big glass window has been cut into the stone facing the fields of olive trees.

I know that it was built in the fourteen hundreds, but I can't recall when it lost its tower and became our summer home.

Hannah was right. The rain became a fine mist and we lay on fur rugs in front of the fire and looked at the flames or up at the huge beams. I used to cut the logs myself, but now our custodian does it and there are firesticks to make it catch.

We hear doves cooing in the trees. Hannah puts her arms around me and hugs me tight. Then she unpacks the picnic basket. The food—
foie gras,
my favorite cheeses, fresh bread, peaches—and Hannah's warmth carries away my angry thoughts. When the fire sinks down, she puts on a fresh log, spreads pâté on the bread for me, tucks a napkin under my chin—these days I tend to dribble a little—caring for me the way I used to for her. Why do we have to grow old? Each day losing more ground, walking less far, limbs shaky, slipping and sliding, losing the very qualities that made us attractive. I'm beginning to see why some people kill themselves to avoid this.

May 1, the day when the workers of Italy celebrate. We are back in town. The stores will be closed all day, some longer because of other holidays added on. I can't believe I used to be moved by the tricolor, the planes swooping by, leaving behind a
trail of red, white and green. I could see it all from the terrace, vibrant against the blue of the sky. Now the Italian Left is no better than anyone else, almost as lifeless as the American. I think of poor Lucian, exiled to Mexico for ten years, cutting wood with George. All the time sustained by his belief in father Stalin.

The last time I saw him alive his wife was saying, “We've lived too long.” They outlived both their bodies and their friends. Poor Gabriella. She got terribly depressed. But at least she could still get out with help. Lucian was reduced to a crawl, using the walker as extra legs, that plastic bag clearly visible inside his robe, having to work so hard just to keep himself together—pulling the tie of his purple robe closed was just too much to ask.

“I'm going to pieces,” he said, “my hearing, my eyes.”

I thought then that they had made a bargain. He had the physical pain, she the mental. Lucian fought off his own depression by living in his memories. You just had to mention the blacklist, and he'd be off telling his story of how when he had come back from Mexico he was hired under a false name by Harry Cohn the head of Columbia Pictures. Cohn was the only one in Hollywood who met him in person, everyone else insisted on not seeing him, so if they were investigated they could say they didn't know him. Cohn kept Kim Novak as a sex slave, and she used to crawl under his desk and give him blow jobs. Lucian and a pal worked for a whole year on the film with the actors and a whole crew, but then Columbia dropped it. No one wanted to get in trouble.

It didn't matter how many times Lucian had told this story, it always brought a faint glow to his cheeks and brightened his eyes. Rita Hayworth was Cohn's star too but she wouldn't sleep with him.

“Keep it in your pants, Harry,” she famously said. “I'm having lunch with your wife tomorrow.” And here Lucian always laughed.

Nietzsche used to say that memory was overrated: one should live in the present. That would be good if I could do it without anger! Personally, I like the Jungian idea of a world soul, a flowing together of memories. Already I see that happening, my memories merging with Hannah's, my brother's, Lucian's. When one dies the others carry on. That's probably why people are so determined to have children. To carry on. There is a nugget of truth in memories and maybe it won't matter who experienced them first. No best or final. I picture it as a warm cloud filled with images, very beautiful.

But doesn't this flowing together of memories go against the historians who are always trying to dig out details of the past? And didn't someone say the individual is always struggling not to be overwhelmed by the tribe? I am soothed by the collective soul flowering tangibly in the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages. No one pointed to a particularly expressive figure with his pants down or a devil with a long penis and admitted, “Those things are mine.” No, they are ours, our sinful thoughts.

It strikes me like an ache in my chest how much I still want recognition, praise. I go out on the terrace and wait for the lift in my spirits when I step into the dappled sunshine cast by the leaves of a blooming tree whose name escapes me. I let it go. The delicate flowers are reflected in the glass tabletop along with the dark green pine, its base surrounded by fragments of Roman sculpture, a present from an archaeologist friend. The variety of greens and tender flowering plants soothes like a salve. I walk to the edge and look for the young gulls. There are three, one more than last year. I notice for the first time that the parent who is sitting placidly to one side, has black-and-white tail feathers. I hear the chicks squeaking plaintively for food, but they'll have to wait until their foraging parent comes back. One looks distinctly weaker and I wonder if he'll die.

After a few minutes the parent returns and the little ones peck frantically at her beak until she releases the food. I notice
with relief that even the weaker one gets something. When their parent moves away, they follow her, stumbling over the red tiles, up the red side and down into the browner trough that matches their feathers. She leads them like a Pied Piper down to the very edge of the roof. Is she considering leading them like lemmings into the void? Is she already tired of mothering? You see, I assume she is female. The weaker chick takes a few steps inside the nest, lacking the courage to hasten after his siblings. The mother pauses a moment to see if the shaky one will join them. She stands right on the edge with the others. I worry that a strong gust of wind could blow the chicks down. My attention is riveted. I feel totally involved in what could be the survival of the fittest.

Hannah comes to the terrace door and asks if I had done the stretches the physical therapist had recommended for my hip. Yes, I said, annoyed to be reminded of my body. It was true I had done them, desultorily. I look away from her. She can always read my expression and see that I am lying by a slight wrinkle in my forehead or fear in my eyes that change their color from blue to gray. My
bocca della verita,
I call her, after the big stone sculpture of an open-mouthed river god who bites the fingers of liars.