The Point of Vanishing (10 page)

“The pizza's very good.”

“Splendid, thank you!” She clapped her hands together. “Well, we certainly hope you'll come back and see us again soon. You live here in Barton?”

“Close by.”

She waited, but I didn't elaborate. “Excellent. I'll leave you to your food.”

I was able to manage only two small slices, half the Coke. I
was surprised I couldn't eat more. My stomach had probably shrunk. As I zipped up my coat to leave, the two of them hovered by the kitchen door. “Ciao, signore,” Bella said.

“Ciao, tutti.”

“But you speak Italian?” the mother said.

I was sorry for it. “Yes.”

“Ah! La prossima volta, parliamo italiano!”

Now they both looked at me far too openly, mother and daughter, their faces a harmony of hungers. I looked down at my box of leftovers. I was ashamed of how much their loneliness pulled on me, how ready they would be to tell their stories, and how ready I would be to listen, and to listen, and to listen.

My fellowship in Italy had only two stipulations: not to enroll in any formal plan of study and not to marry. The Rockefeller was designed for “a journey of adventure and discovery at a vulnerable and pivotal time in one's life,” and apparently marrying or studying would interfere. Tie me to the mast—I was pretty sure I could handle it. I rented a room in a house in the hills outside Bologna. My window looked out on a vineyard, which sloped down towards a two-lane road, and across the road the hills rose in a patchwork of fields—some smooth and green, some striped with the slender rows of grapevines, some just clumped earth from which dust would rise up in the wind. Horses, the size of my thumbnail from the window above my desk, would appear in the afternoon. Long heads lowered to the land, something strangely elemental and hieroglyphic about their four legs walking. At the base of the hills, the road billowed in slow curves, following the narrow stream that ran through the valley.

I sat at my makeshift desk—an old door, with a missing doorknob, over two sawhorses—considering for the first time what I might have to say and how I might say it. I had begun
reading fiercely, unabashedly, trying to figure out how I might write a novel. There was no one to hide my reading habit from anymore, no one I saw on a daily basis, no one for whom I was supposed to play a role. My landlord didn't care what I did in my room as long as I was quiet and paid my rent. She'd leave a pot of rabbit stew for me on the stove; she'd make toast every morning promptly at eight, whether I wanted to eat it or not. She was in her midforties, attractive, utterly uninterested in discussion. Cooking, she said, was part of the rent—but not company. I rarely saw her. Occasionally, I'd notice I'd lost a whole day to a book; even when I stepped outside for a walk, I was still having conversations with the characters in my mind. It was the first period in my life when my thoughts had full license to expand. Nothing going on inside me had to be tamed—I didn't see people, didn't have to organize myself into a person for anyone's eyes. The books piled up haphazardly on my nightstand.
Rabbit Run
,
Van Gogh's Letters to Theo
,
Il Cavaliere Inesistente
,
The Collected Chekhov
,
A Farewell to Arms
—anything I could find on my landlady's bookshelf in English or Italian. I began recording passages in the journal Mom and Dad had bought me for the trip. Such sweet heresy! It had an old-fashioned sun on the cover, a face with rays shooting out in all directions, but it looked to me like a boy with his face pressed to the porthole of a ship. My hope was that the quotations accumulating on the pages behind his eyes would eventually give way to the words behind my own. I wasn't dreaming of best sellers. But I did imagine finding the shape of the world again beneath my pen; I did imagine being able to tell fellow readers how I saw. Which meant, really, I was imagining being less alone.

Day after day, I'd stare out at the neat rows of grapevines, then at my own tangle of words, then back at the grapevines. The room really did look like the room of a writer. The notes by the computer, the stack of books by the bed. I'd sold the
Rockefeller committee on having a
unique perspective
, on seeing
behind the façade of daily life.
But to have a perspective you needed to be seeing from somewhere, to be located, and I didn't feel located at all. I didn't belong to any place. I'd go for long walks. I'd get up to use the bathroom when I didn't have to. Maybe if I read just one more novel, looked up a few more words in the enormous English dictionary in the hall. I was a twenty-two-year-old who needed to be starting in the mailroom, and I'd found myself in the corner office, painfully aware I didn't deserve to be there.

Ilaria, my landlord, hardly blinked when I told her I was moving down into Bologna. Devoting all my energies to being less alone had, in fact, only made me lonelier—and I needed to spend more time with people. I didn't really need to explain; loneliness was something she could understand. Her husband, a dentist, was having an affair with a university student and had moved out months before my arrival. He had isolated her, she said, here in the hills.
Isolata
—the word from
isola
, meaning island. She had a mole just to the side of her mouth, her dark eyes somewhere between alluring and haggard. Every afternoon her tiny red Alfa Romeo would escape down the dusty hillside between the rows of grapes, a cloud of dust trailing behind it. What she did on her outings in Bologna I never knew: maybe she had a lover, maybe she shoplifted the lipsticks she expertly applied while she drove, maybe she watched movies, one after the next, sitting in the dark. We were in her car, driving to the market in town, when I told her. It was January, the air had grown chill. She wore a black turtleneck sweater and sat very straight. I knew she needed the rent money, but she said nothing. Something about her calmness suddenly made me think she did spy on her husband, that she followed him beneath porticoes, waited for him outside apartments. At the very least, it was clear that whatever bitterness brought the bright edge to her
eyes, she had once been very much in love.

“Go the city,” she said. “I understand.”

“You do?”

“You want love,” she said. “You want to know your heart. You can only find this with another person, no?”

Not far past the buried stone wall, by the intertwined birches that arched over the trail, I stopped to listen. Two chickadees were singing back and forth, a two-note song, slow and plaintive:
Fee-bee. Fee-bee.
In between the calls, there was just silence, the sound of my own breathing. The calls seemed to hang the woods like an enormous tapestry, to stretch the air and the trees to their proper proportions. But I couldn't see the birds. At each note, my eyes climbed branch after branch, scurrying higher up, farther back, but there was only the intricate white latticework of the branches. The song went again.
Fee-bee. Fee-bee.
But I saw nothing.

They had been my best neighbors all fall, a rare flash of movement among the leaves, little black and white sparks more curious than the squirrels. On the dirt road, a flying fist would follow me, its jumpy flight pattern so close I could hear the thrum of its wings—the rise, after every floating dip, fired by a wing burst, a tiny fusillade of flight. When I stopped, a chickadee would suddenly alight on a nearby branch and wait, its small round black head, with the racy white bank-robber's mask, adjusting left, adjusting right, a charade of curiosity.
Oh
,
really? Really?
it seemed to say. The more I encountered them on my walks, the easier it was to understand Native American legends of
coyote
or
fox
—each black-capped chickadee a particular companion but also becoming a part of the idea of
chickadee
, some playful and intrepid winter spirit of the woods. I couldn't help liking them. To walk the road, even when no chickadee appeared, was to feel its company, to remember the small, inquisitive
face from the day before. It was my court jester, my Northeast Kingdom little fool. But now, for whatever reason, the chickadee was done showing itself. The white mask had slid off its face, expanded, and become the entire snowy woods.

I jammed my poles in the snow. Damn little birds. My encounter at the café was still humming inside me, and I wondered if that's why I couldn't see. The girl juggling in her silver wig, the mother's hand on the back of the chair, the way they looked at me as I left. It was one thing at the C&C to stand close to the cashier—usually it took an afternoon to settle back into the visual quiet of the woods, to stop having flashes of spiky eyelashes and the colorful array of foods—but something deeper had been stirred up this time, a readiness I'd forgotten about, and it seemed a grave weakness, something that could lead to a derailment of why I'd come to the woods. I felt like the second monk in the famous story about the woman crossing the muddy road. The first monk picks her up and carries her across the mud, so her kimono won't get stained, but the second monk becomes greatly agitated as the two monks continue on their way, “Why did you do that? You have betrayed our oath!” The first replies, “I put her down on the far side of the road, but you are still carrying her.” It's not that I thought of myself as a monk, but if I was going to be
like
one of the monks in the story, I at least wanted to be the virtuous one—the one pure of mind rather than pure of deed, the one who follows the spirit of the law rather than the letter. And the spirit of my own law meant that I wasn't supposed to think about anyone in town, wasn't supposed to think about any kind of relationship. It would be an easy way out, a shortcut to identity, a way of making myself feel good that I wasn't ready for and didn't deserve. I worried I was still carrying the mother and daughter with me. And the woods seemed to agree. They weren't taking me back so quickly.

I looked down at my snowshoes, rested my neck and shook
my head, trying to clear the inside of my eyes. By the time I looked up again, my eyes were soft. Just the tangle of the high branches, the blue palm of the sky. I wanted to calm myself, to let my vision go wide, to feel myself not trapped inside branch after branch, to see without the possibility of any labyrinth. And then there was a streak. A gray blur lifting from one tree to another. My eyes didn't chase. The blur went again, a bit to my left. And there, hunched in a ball against the wind, feathers slightly ruffled, adjusting itself on a snowy twig, was a bird. Tiny black head cocking left, cocking right. My heart rushed. It wasn't so high up after all. My long lost friend! I wanted to raise my arms in greeting! And, with another blur, there was the other one, just a few trees away. I had slipped behind the mask—here we all were together!

Eventually, as I resumed snowshoeing up the hill, my error dazzled me. Instead of just looking for a change in the air, I'd been hunting for an individual chickadee—a little tuft of gray and white and black in the snowy trees—which meant training my eyes only to see one thing and effectively blinding myself to everything else. But relaxing my eyes, and opening my gaze to movement, was to allow myself to see the smallest changes, to see, in a way, what the forest saw: the space between the trees, the lines of the branches, and any movement that might happen there. Maybe this was the way to see, to let my eyes be like ears, simply open to space and whatever might enter it: no limit on depth, no limit on possibilities. I pushed up to the top of the rise and looked out over the vista. The sky was perfectly clear—pale blue above the far white mountains and darkening blue up the vault.

As I stood still, breath smoking in the cold, I had the feeling that the mountains were a true mirror, because they didn't
try
to see, didn't get lost in the vast surface of details. They excluded nothing. There was no part of me they didn't accept. And the
reflection they offered would never shatter: no accident or heartbreak could take it away. It was essential, not relative. They just needed more time to give me a reflection that was a little more solid—something I could take back to the daily world.

“Fuck, come on, man. Real life. Real girls.” Juan Ignacio's voice could have been a neon sign with a woman's legs kick-kicking from a martini glass. I tried to think of
A Moveable Feast
, of the literary buddy stories I'd been lapping up in my room in the hills outside Bologna. The women and the cafés. The conversations and the exploits. Albeit expressed a bit more gracefully, this was why I'd moved down into the city. But it was late March now, and all I'd done since moving in two months earlier was to read, to write, and to wander the city on my own.

“Just give me a minute,” I said.

After checking my hair in the bathroom mirror and finding it a lost cause, I followed Juan Ignacio's long back up the drafty stairwell. Music throbbed from the front room, and through the doorway there were the shapes of people dancing. The apartment was laid out just like ours—the same long, narrow corridor with the same windows on the courtyard. Young Italian families occupied the lower floors of the building, their laundry lines suspended over the courtyard, and international twenty-somethings, mostly students in the Johns Hopkins graduate program for international relations, lived upstairs. I followed Juan Ignacio through a palisade of faces and hands, a receiving line minus the wedding, with lots of German and cigarette smoke. Faces kept peering at me, dazzling and bright, and I couldn't tell if it was with interest or concern. A lit cigarette brushed too close to my hand. Lipstick bunched on a woman's lips. Maybe I really had spent too much time alone in the hills. After securing two cups of wine in the kitchen, Juan Ignacio led me back into the room with the dancing. I was just beginning to
consider how long it would be before I left when I noticed a woman. She was talking with two well-dressed men, her hips still in rhythm but the music nothing that was carrying her. One man, with thin blond hair to his shoulders, was smiling, as though the conversation and the music were all one thing. The other man, who was handsome, looked a bit uneasy and was hardly dancing at all. The woman wore a white blouse open at the collar. Her neck was long, her hair up on her head. She seemed to be enjoying herself but ready at any moment to step through a door and find herself somewhere else, someplace better.