Another Insane Devotion (24 page)

There was no question of taking him with us while we traveled, and for a while I worried that F. would want to call off the trip. She was afraid to leave Gattino at the vet's. She was afraid he wouldn't be cleared for immigration or importation, I'm not sure what to call it. I know he needed to be given a clean bill of health, and there was some doubt he'd get one. He was still frail, and there was that eye. The clinic was crowded, filled with the acridness of caged animals and their outcries of fear, hunger, and anger. An attendant placed Gattino in a cage next to one holding a large dog, bristling with muscle, that barked and slavered. Gattino cried. F. began crying too. I'd seen her cry only once or twice since her father's death, maybe over Wilfredo. But who wouldn't cry, seeing a kitten placed in a cage beside an immense dog that wanted nothing more than to eat his small heart? Even here, though, you could see his spirit. Instead of cowering, our cat (already I was thinking of him as ours) peered out at his tormentor with an intrepid forward tilt of his ears. His tail was lowered, but it wasn't tucked between his legs. It was out behind him, and this made him look as if he were about to launch himself forward like an arrow at a target. At the very least, he would hold his ground.

For the next two weeks, I was F.'s lover again. We drove as fast as you can drive in a little car without scaring yourself into incompetence; out of the corner of my eye, I could see my wife's bare feet propped on the dashboard, and the casualness of her posture reassured me that I wasn't about to get us killed.
We walked hand in hand through the cobbled defiles of hillside towns, up stone steps whose sheerness put us in an allegorical frame of mind. There was usually a cathedral at their summit, and above its spires the same blue sky where Signorelli saw angels swooping. We stood on battlements, looking out at wheat fields and grape vineyards that had provisioned the Borgias while the shadows of clouds lengthened over them, turning the rows of grain a dull bronze. We sat in restaurants whose white linen glowed in the candlelight; surely all those restaurants can't have been candlelit, but in retrospect it seems that way. Each dish was fundamental. It tasted of the elements that had produced it, tomatoes of earth and sun, a roasted dorado of fire and the sea. The waiters masqueraded as layabouts. All evening they looked at the pretty girls on the next terrace or an especially slick motor scooter or a platoon of German tourists uniformly burned the color of raw salmon—at anything but you until the moment you wanted something, at which point they appeared at your side and said, “Mi dica.” We hung out beside fountains that might have been the originals for the fountains where I hung out as a teenager, out past curfew, looking for a girl to be with, and now at last, thirty-five years later, here I was, with her.

Most of the pictures I took in those places are pictures of her.

 

Among literary forms, the lyric is the lover's mode, for that's how a lover experiences the world, as a series of isolated moments bright with feeling, like stills from a movie whose intervening frames have been excised. The world starts with the love object,
and it ends with her. Whatever else it contains—sun, moon, stars, a blue flower, a blanket crumpled on the grass, a dark wood—exists only to reflect the loved one or otherwise call attention to her, or to what she evokes in the lover. The sun and moon are the bodies whose light he sees her by; the stars are the jewels he would give her if only he could climb into the sky to quarry them; the blue flower is what he gives her in their place. The blanket is where he lies with her on the grass on a summer evening, the first fireflies bursting silently in the still air. He sees them out of the corner of his eye. The rest of the time he is looking at her.

The lyric is beset with paradox. The moment it evokes may be brief as a heartbeat, yet it seems to go on forever, an eternity in which Sappho can raptly take account of everything that is happening inside her:

In Gerald Stern's “Another Insane Devotion,” the narrator's sudden, shattering encounter with one of Rome's ravenous street cats frames an entire history of lost love:

One moment stands in for other moments or contains them, hundreds, thousands, a lifetime of moments curled inside that one like the strands of DNA inside the nucleus of a cell. What makes that possible is memory. Memory stretches out for fifty-seven lines the moment in which the poet eats beside the starving creature to which he's surrendered a scrap of his sandwich and packs within that interval days and nights of lovemaking and a lifetime of reckoning and regret. Unless it's literally written in the moment, scrawled between kisses on a cocktail napkin on the nightstand, the lyric is a memory masquerading as the lived present. And its beauty is that it feels like the present: it feels more like now than now does.

A further paradox is that the lyric, although inspired by love for another person, often leaves that person in shadow. All Sappho tells us about her beloved is that her voice is a sweet murmur and her laughter is enticing. Of Stern's we know this: she was married, or was about to be; they floated naked in the sea and moaned in each other's arms; she was going to have a baby; it was his. This isn't much. And yet Stern's lover haunts his poem as Sappho's lover haunts Sappho's, manifested in one poet's outrushing of memory and the other's burning speechlessness. Both poets evoke a hidden object by registering her effect on them. In the same way, by measuring the perturbations in a star's orbit, astronomers can determine the existence of a black hole.

My favorite photo of that summer is one I took of F. in Volterra. There was some wind that day, and her long hair is blowing about her face. It was F. who showed me that if you cover one half of a face in a photograph, its expression changes,
sometimes so dramatically that you seem to be looking at an entirely different face, animated by feelings that are barely discernible in the original. If you move your hand to the other side, still another face appears. In the photo I'm speaking of, F. seems, if not happy, confident in her loveliness. Her gaze meets the camera boldly. But when I cover the left side of her face, the other half turns watchful and melancholy, with a nostril dilated as if from crying. And when the experiment is reversed, the half face that peers out from behind your hand is taut with defiance, as if she were daring you to breach her privacy, and the half smile that tugs at the corner of her mouth is devoid of pleasure.

 

It was Rome that F. liked best. It was more alive than Florence or Siena; it didn't just unroll its past and invite you to sample it. It gave you sexy teenage couples horsing around amid the ruins, a mezzo with no chin and a tubby baritone singing arias in a church. F. marveled at their plainness. She loved it that people so plain could enact desire frankly, without apologizing, eyes flashing, bellies heaving. Yet, even in Rome, she was tormented by thoughts of Gattino. She prayed for him in churches. She called the veterinary clinic to ask if he was eating. She worried that the vet wouldn't be able to get him cleared for travel: there were rumors of bad blood between him and the regional official—the head veterinarian of the entire region of Tuscany—who was supposed to sign the papers. The airline specified that cats could only travel in-cabin in carriers of certain strict dimensions, and nowhere could we find one the right size. The variety of merchandise in the pet shops was jaw-dropping. There were cat carriers covered in soft leather and rip-stop
nylon, cat carriers belted like trench coats. All displayed the Italian genius for design, but all were off by centimeters in one or more dimensions. F. took it as a bad sign. “They won't let him on the plane.” I told her they would. “They're Italians, sweetheart, they don't give a shit about bureaucracy.” But even as I said this, I remembered that they had also more or less invented it. I think it was the Romans who came up with the first initialism.

We drove back to Tuscany and reclaimed Gattino from the clinic. He looked more robust, his nose was dry, and when we presented him to the provincial vet, he stepped out of his new carrier as if he expected to be admired. But the provincial vet looked at him disapprovingly; he didn't look at us at all. The cat, he said, was too sick to travel. Our vet, who had come there with us, argued with him—politely, he was conscious of the man's power. His hands made soft, beckoning gestures. The official kept shaking his head. “No, no, no.” He may have said, “I don't have time for this.” F. looked as if she might faint. I blurted something in Italian: “Senza la mia moglie e me, questo piccolo gattino non ha nessun' amico in tutta l'Italia!” (“Except for my wife and me, this little kitty doesn't have one friend in all Italy!”) Both vets looked at me, but it accomplished nothing. Well, it embarrassed F., and that may have distracted her a little from her unhappiness.

On leaving the interview, our vet told us that he would go to Umbria the next day and have
their
head vet stamp Gattino's passport. It would be no problem, he assured us: the vet was a friend of his. And when he gave them to us just before we left, we saw that Gattino's papers really did look like a passport.
They even had the same burgundy cover the EU uses on the ones it issues human beings.

I spent an hour or so in the sky, gazing down at the profile of the continent and nodding and smiling as the woman next to me, who had turned from brass back to soft, perishable flesh, told me about the grandchild who was about to be produced in time for her arrival. When I told her I was going up to New York to search for a missing cat, she looked at me with what I was pretty sure was pity. Was it pity for someone who was looking for something he was extremely unlikely to find or pity for someone who had no better outlet for his affections than a cat? “Well,
good luck,
” she said. It was as if I'd told her I was on my way to have surgery for a brain tumor. I thanked her.

Husbands have written lyrics, but they aren't really suited for it. The lyric form can't express the state of being a husband, for that is not about feeling but being. A man becomes a husband by saying, “Till death do us part,” or, if he's squeamish about the d-word, “As long as we both shall live.” In either case, he rarely knows what he's getting into. Feeling is brief; being has duration. A husband can feel many things, but he
is
one thing, and he may go on being that thing long after the feelings that brought him to it have passed. What feeling lasts a lifetime, except maybe statistically, the tissue-thin temporal slices of love stacking up higher than those of irritation, dislike, even hatred by so many microns that measuring those
stacks at the end you can plausibly say,
We were happy
? Or
I was
?