Light Years (35 page)

The act was somehow shameful, an act of boredom and desperation, entered into because everything else had failed. It ended quickly. He lay by her side and put his arm beneath her head, drawing the robe over her at the same time as if she were a shop and he were closing her for the night—a shop one had to talk to. She said nothing. She lay unmoving in the dark.

In Porto Santo Stefano they found a restaurant and sat down for dinner. Only one other table was occupied. “I suppose it’s a little early,” he commented.

“
Sì
.”

He was counting on the meal to replenish some of the joy that had fled from him, as one counts on medicines or amusements. He read the menu, he read it again like a man looking for something which is inexplicably missing. The waiter stood near his elbow.

She was not hungry, Lia confessed. The announcement disheartened him. He began to suggest things she might like.
“Bollito misto.”

“No.”

“They have some fish.”

“Nothing,
amore.”

The restaurant was empty; even the street outside was quiet. He sprinkled salt from the small glass dish by dipping into it with the tip of his knife and then tapping. He tried to drink the wine. He had ordered too much.

She watched him eat and said little. She was like a stranger he had encountered on a journey, suddenly he did not know if he could trust her. He was certain she could sense his nervousness. The waiter was sitting near the door to the kitchen; the owner seemed half asleep.

“It feels as if we were in exile,” Viri said. “The
tagliatelle
is good. Have a taste.”

She accepted. His hand held forth the fork in the deserted room, like a room where an assassination is to take place.

“Do you want to go back to Rome?” she asked.

He felt guilty. He felt he was spoiling everything. “I don’t know. Let’s decide tomorrow,” he said. “I’m a little nervous, I don’t know why. I’m sure I’ll get over it. And the hotel  … Perhaps it’s the barometer or something. Give me a day or two, it will be all right.”

And later, in bed, he saw her approach, raise her arms and take off her nightgown. Even this act frightened him. She slipped in beside him, naked, unhurried.
“Amore
, of course I’ll wait,” she said. “You know that. I am yours,” she said in a voice without hope. “Do what you like to me.”

7

THE TERRORS OF BANISHMENT, OF
a new world. What in the beginning was novel, curious, slowly hardens to intractable life, the laughter fades, it is like a difficult school, one which will never end. He did not recognize the holidays. Even Sundays were meaningless, feared, with everything closed like a book.

Adorato
, she whispered,
amore dolce
. Forgive this relentless courtship. She had little restraint left, she said. She had hungers only an orphan could know. She had begun to lose hope. Somehow it strengthened her. The terror of desperate longing which she had unfurled before him she now withdrew. In its place was a kind of aristocratic submission. She went to Milan with her parents. They saw the opera. She had her hair cut.
The proprietor of the hotel wants his daughter to cut hers like mine
, she wrote. They went to exhibitions, shopped.
Even that does not quite kill the loneliness. I am wistful for you. I smoke a cigar in the evenings. They call me Cigarello, brown and thin
. She came back witty and beautiful. Her eyes were cool. She wanted him, she said. She was living a d’Annunzian passion, one of acceptance, despair. I would like to fit your hand like a favorite soap. They were sitting on a bench in the Villa Borghese, eating milk chocolate from a bed of foil. The color of her nipples, she said later. She had to go home for dinner.
Ciao
, my swan, she smiled.

They were married on a Sunday. Lia’s mother gave Viri an enameled French ring that had been in her family. She believed in him. She was gay at the bridal supper, the greatest of her dreads had vanished. Even the brother was cordial.

They began a second life. They lived on Via Giulia in an apartment on the third floor. One ascended an oval stairway at the end of the hall. It was not large, but it had a study. There was morning sun, a small kitchen, a bath. Lia was very happy. An intellectual apartment, she said.

They were calm, they were at peace in Vecchia Roma, the part of the city he liked. He began to walk among its shops and streets, routes to the Piazza Navona, to Sant’Eustachio. He slept well. He was slim. He worked with Cagli and Rova. He seemed younger, there were fewer lines in his face or, having been deep from uncertainty, they were fading now. Perhaps it was only the light.

The door had two locks. “Rome is filled with thieves,” Lia said.

He stood beside her as she turned the key two, three, four times, driving the bolt ever deeper. There was also a key for downstairs, and two for the car. He remembered how once they had never locked anything except when they went to the city. He remembered the river, the dry lawns of autumn warmed by the sun. He longed for home.

He recognized the state he was in. Was I only free for that brief time, he thought? Looking back it seemed deceptively sweet. His life was closed in by ancient walls, families he was unrelated to, customs that would never change. In the small rooms of the flat, in the narrow streets, all Lia’s faults seemed to leap forth, to present themselves for recognition: her nervousness, lack of independence, her insistence on being loved. He learned that she could not amuse herself, that she was desperate without him.

“I love you,” she explained. “I want to be near you,
amore
. Don’t deprive me, don’t keep me hungry.”

He could not discourage it. He saw in her eyes how much she meant it. Her devotion was too strong, it had a pathetic quality.

They drove to the country for lunch, to a simple place called Montarozzo. It was a mild day, like the first day of a convalescence. She was wearing a navy skirt and a sleeveless blouse. In the fields little girls were playing in communion dresses, white in the sunshine, while their families dined. There were train tracks beyond. Occasionally, drawing glances, there passed a great express.

As usual she ate little, he was used to it. He had finally come to a deep vein of understanding. He was not on a journey, he was to spend his life here, to have this life and this only. Patience, he thought to himself; it will open. The bread was delicious. He dipped morsels of it into his wine like a peasant. This was her sea, this sunlight which fell upon them through the vine leaves. She shined in it. Her hair was short and gleaming, her shyness fell away. The faint circles under her eyes, blue, enduring, made her seem sensual. She was like a refugee, a woman who had seen armies pass, destruction, absurdity. She had survived all this, she had come through alive.

“You are a very good architect. You know, they respect you greatly.”

“Really?”

“They like you very much.”

He smiled vaguely, but he was pleased. “It would be strange, wouldn’t it, having failed in America, if I achieved something here?”

“No. You were meant to come here.”

“I suppose.”

“To discover me,” she said. “Discover you …”

“Yes, like a mushroom. You pushed aside the leaves and there I was.” She seemed calm, submissive. “You have the nose of a truffling pig,
amore.”

“Do you think so?”

“You have intuition,” she said. “It’s very strong, well developed. I’m interested in these things, you know, I study them. I will become a mystic in the end,” she confessed. “When the time comes. When the last hungers of the flesh have left me,” she added with a slight smile.

There was a clairvoyant, a woman who lived among animals, she often went to see. Viri accompanied her. It was in a residential neighborhood, a building like any other, modern, cold. The apartment was filled with plants, birds, bizarre paintings, tanks of fish. There were other visitors: couples desiring children, women with sickly sons. Signora Clara touched them. She spoke to them with the voice of someone struggling, distant. The soft bubbling of the air pumps rose behind her. To Viri she said, “Come, look at this. Do you speak Italian?”

They stood before the dim water through which a pearly stream of bubbles rose. She was wearing carpet slippers and an unbuttoned sweater.

“These are my children,” she said.

The fish hung in luminous shadow, their movements curiously abrupt. She tapped the glass lightly.

“Come, children, come,” she said, and reaching into the tank slowly, affectionately, she took one in her palm and withdrew it. It lay quietly in a bit of water in her hand. “All life is one,” she said.

She lived with her maid. She had a husband and family, Lia said, but she had left them to devote herself to her work.

Within you are two seeds, the woman told Viri: one live and one dead. You love the dead one best. He did not know what she meant.

“She can heal,” Lia said. “She knows everything.”

“She seems cold to me,” Viri said. “Very distant.”

“Yes, she is cold. To understand everything is to love nothing,” Lia quoted.

She made tea for him, she kept his clothing in order, she drew the water for his bath. The shelves of the medicine cabinet were dense with her creams and lotions. In the courtyard the bathroom windows gave on, there was never any change. It was evening. When he came out she was lying there, olive skin naked, slim as a line. He brushed his teeth with Italian toothpaste, he ate Italian meat, he was vanishing day by day into the aged streets, the dark-faced crowds. He boarded the great green buses with their silver numbers and passed, noticing them less and less, the worn columns, the statues weeping black. He was lost among them, the passengers, audiences, crowds, condemned just as they to the humblest of daily acts. He turned corners in sunlight, disappeared in the shade of awnings announcing
TRATTORIA
, lingered before bookshops.

There were hours between afternoon and evening when he desperately wept for his children. He wrote to them feverishly, letters he could barely finish, their faces appeared before him, days they had spent. His hand was like a sick man’s.
Be generous
, he wrote,
know the meaning of joy, carry my love with you all through life
.

He was gentle, composed. They went from meal to meal and from place to place, meals that fell silent over empty cups.

“Kari kiri?” she suggested solemnly, taking up the knife.

He managed to smile. “Have patience with me,” he told her. He could think of nothing else.

And late at night she talked to him. She woke him if necessary, and he lay listening.

“Yes,” she said, “you are frightened, I know you are frightened. I know your habits, I know your thoughts. You have married me for my sake, but not for your own—not yet. That will come. Oh, yes. It will come because I will wait. I am a cornucopia, I am overflowing. I am not sweet—no, not in the way one tastes at first. But sweet things are forgotten quickly, sweet things are weak. I have the patience to wait, yes, as long as necessary. I will wait a month, a year, five years, I will sit like a widow, playing a kind of
napoleone
, because slowly, slowly I will enslave you. I will do it when the moment comes, when I know it is time, that I can succeed. Until then I will sit at your table, I will lie beside you like a concubine—yes, I will give myself to you in whatever way you like, I will raid your fantasies, I will pillage them and keep the pieces to hypnotize you with. I will say, ‘Those things you are dreaming of, I will make them real.’ I will be your Arab girl, I will serve you naked, yes, I will hold food between my teeth for you, I will be your daughter, I will be your whore. You cannot believe what I know—no, never—what I have imagined.
Amore
, the secret is to have the courage to live. If you have that, everything will sooner or later change.”

He rose and went into the bathroom to find refuge. Her intensity, the loneliness of her voice overpowered him. In the mirror he saw a man with the paleness of someone who has just been awakened. He seemed mortal, weak. He saw clearly that something unthinkable was already expressing itself: he was going to become an old man. He did not believe it, he must prevent it, he could not permit it to be—and yet at the same time it was the meaning of his entire life.

She was tapping at the door. “Are you all right,
amore?”

“Yes.” He opened the door. She had put on her robe. “Yes, I’m all right.”

“Come,” she said. “I’ll make you some tea.”

His progress was slow, like the passage of days, but in time he no longer noticed the coldness of terrazzo floors, the shrill ring of the telephone, the taps from which water came without force, as if in the midst of a drought. After endless depression, nights without sleep, realization that the life he had entered was calamitous, without hope, he slowly became lucid, even calm. He was able to read and think. The days dawned quietly. I am through it, he thought. Like the survivor of a wreck, he took stock of himself. He touched his limbs, his face, he began the essential process of forgetting what had passed.

He was in a period of contentment with daily life, of peace. He looked about himself gratefully. It was still not completely real to him, it was a kind of scenery he watched like someone on a train, some of it vivid, going by, some of it bare.

8

IN THE LETTER BOX WAS AN EN
velope addressed in the clear hand he recognized instantly. He opened it in the hallway and began to read, his heart thudding.
Dearest Viri
 … How instantly she spoke to him across the miles, across everything. His eye fled through the lines. He expected always to hear her say she had been mistaken, she had changed her mind. There was not a day, not an hour, that his immediate, undefended response would not have been to surrender. He was like those veterans, long retired, to whom one day there comes the call to arms; nothing can keep them, their hearts come alive, they lay down their tools, leave their houses, their land, and go forth.