L'America (3 page)

 

It is past midnight, September, a thick night of fog, the sort that Lombardy is famous for. The fog shrouds the Pianura Padana, dangerously suspended over the entire plain. From the Alps to the Dolomites, the fog is so dense it would seem you could cut it, so dense it makes the whole world dark. Zero visibility and highway pileups involving dozens upon dozens of cars and deaths, caused by a fatal combination of warm earth and cold air and a plain of land that creates stillness. Cesare can feel Beth; the soft smell of her fills his living room. His parents are out and it is late and she is there. His parents do not like her, or rather they indulge her as a whim of Cesare's. He is a student at the Bocconi in Milan. He fails his exams regularly because he doesn't study. He doesn't study because he doesn't care about economics, as he knows it must come to bear, eventually, upon socks and shoes. He does not want to spend his life thinking about feet.

Elena assures Giovanni Paolo the American is just a phase. Regularly (and in front of the American) he asks Cesare what happened to Francesca, why doesn't she come around anymore? It takes his parents months to learn Beth's name, to stop referring to her as the American. No matter that two years have passed since the Sardegna morning, no matter that Francesca is long since involved with (and intended to) the Agnelli relation.

Cesare's wife sleeps, breathing peace. He hears his son rise, five years old, a year older than Beth's daughter. Listens to the boy tiptoe to his mother's bed, listens to the boy lift himself onto the mattress. Imagines Beth's little girl tiptoeing to her mother's bed, each night, every night. He can hear her, her voice like his son's, howling for mama when she has only gone away for a day. For how long? How long before a child forgets? Cesare's father is dead now, a good ten years, died of lung cancer in bed at home. The last thing he said to Cesare was to put out his cigarette; he said it dismissively, offended by his son smoking a cigarette as he lay dying of lung cancer. Cesare was not smoking; he was not a smoker. Never is the answer. You never forget.

Not so many months after Giovanni Paolo died, Elena died, too; no cause but simple sadness. And here was Beth, cornflower blue eyes, short blond hair tucked behind her ears, nostrils that flare ever-so-gently, with her excitement widening the broad plains of her high and dimpled cheeks. He feels the brightness of her in the room with him, declaring that the fresco can be interpreted however we choose. "That's the brilliance of the artist. He leaves it up to us."

"You're so American," he says.

"
Sei cosi' Italiano
," she counters.

"Benvenuto's father wanted him to play music."

"But he wanted to make art. He did what he had to do."

"He was the director of his own life," Cesare says. "Though in the end he returned to Florence."

"
Campanilismo,
" Beth says. "No matter the depths of his love for Valeria, he would always have yearned for the bell tower of his Florence." She loves that expression,
campanilismo,
he knows, the intensely local patriotism of it.
Campanilismo:
love of one's bell tower, to die for one's bell tower. She loves the concept because it does not have an American equivalent and she loves the differences, the contrasts, of their respective traditions. Now, at the beginning, they do not pose a threat for her, but already he fears the chasm they will make. He will not think about that, though, preferring as always to push aside unpleasant truth, save it for a later date. She smiles, an adorable dimpled smile, pushes Cesare into the velvet armchair, and kisses him indulgently with a hundred small kisses. "Do you think they ever..."

"
Signorina,
" said with feigned shock. Then, "I'm certain they did." And Cesare begins to kiss her, starting at her toes.

She called him from phone booths all across America, standing at the edges of lonely gas stations by the sides of those long endless roads, while James waited patiently in the car, believing that she was only calling home. It was her grandmother's car, a black Lincoln boat with a gold inscription on the dashboard reading
MRS. OLIVER CARTER BRANDT, HI.
She would watch the car lounging heavily in the hot summer sun. She would shut her eyes and wish that she could emerge from the booth as some sort of Superwoman and transform the world, wish that it were Cesare behind the wheel, acting the cowboy or Jimmy Dean, arm draped easily over the back of the long front seat the way he liked to do, his black-framed sunglasses resting on the bridge of his nose. He had loved driving the car, the sheer size of it, cruising the canyons of New York City, sailing the wide highways. The static crackled through the international line connecting them, reminding her of the distance. Even so she could hear his voice clearly, his accent bringing back all of Italy so that it seemed she was headed toward him, not away. It was a dare, that was all, this trip west. She hardly knew James. She was twenty-three years old and had just graduated from college.

It was 1987, a year like any other. The economy was strong, the Dow bullish. Many of those who had not voted for Reagan were secretly delighted that he was president. "America is too big for small dreams," Reagan declared. Indeed this was the year of Milken and Boesky and Gary Hart and Black Monday. The Iran-Contra scandal raged, making indelible the names of North, Schultz, Weinberger, Poindexter. With perspective and distance we know the outcome, the rise and fall, the tide. On October 1, James would be in his first year of graduate school at UCLA, feeling the earth move beneath his feet, Beth a gnawing memory. On October 19, Beth would be working at Lago, a renowned New York City restaurant, entry level, chopping carrots, watching the stories of people losing everything, glad she had nothing left to lose. But back in June things were heady. Gorbachev worked with Reagan to put an end to the Cold War, while Microsoft worked on CD-ROMs. AZT had entered the market. Yoko Ono was promoting peace around the world. Beth marched across this year with all the importance and obliviousness of youth, aware and unaware, the details and facts of the day seemingly irrelevant, relegated to the hazy background of the bright picture of her future that unfurled like a long red carpet for her to stride upon. The only thing that mattered to her was Cesare. He was in her, a ferocious, permanent love, eating her whole and alive.

 

In the beginning, the conversations were the same. "Are you coming?" Cesare would ask. "You know I'm not," she would say, trying on toughness. "You are," he'd respond with his cool confidence—a confidence that loved the conditional tense, the "if" that would make all possible. It was by now that she was supposed to have gone to Italy to marry him. At Christmas, however, Cesare had revealed an infidelity, giving Beth a green silk hat that a milliner lover of his had made. It was an exquisite hat, an oval pillbox with gentle tiers, reminiscent of Valeria's hat. Beth knew its entire story as she opened it, knew as well that the woman would ultimately be insignificant.

But at Easter, Beth did not go to Italy as planned. Then just before Beth's graduation Elena called to ask when she was coming. Beth could imagine tall thin Elena standing at the phone near the villa's kitchen, pressing the receiver to her ear as if to push away the static, her anxious anticipation, not of Beth's arrival but of her son's future. Beth was brave, bold even. She was in her apartment in New York City, fire engines screaming up Sixth Avenue, her roommates taking showers, walking around in towels. "Cesare has another girl," Beth had said to Elena to explain that she would not be coming soon, but also with a hope that Elena would somehow rise to her defense and make everything all right. "
O cara,
" Elena had said with tenderness, missing not a beat as if she had been waiting for some time to say this. "He always has another girl." She sounded exasperated, impatient, not with Beth, but with her son, with the fact that he was impossible, irresistible, that he broke hearts. Beth curled the long phone cord around herself, wrapping it round and round until the plastic pinched her skin. It was not the possibility of girls that concerned Beth most. Rather it was the truth of Elena being able to deliver the message to her.

 

In the phone booth now, Beth could see Cesare as if he were in front of her: his long Roman nose, his thick dark hair, his bright onyx eyes, his preppy clothes—docksiders, rolled khakis, oxford shirt—though the way he tucked the shirt, the fine cuff he made of the rolled legs, the unbuttoned collar, the sleeves pushed up his arms, all had nothing to do with the dull familiar look. After he returned from America all his friends in Città began to dress like him. He would write to Beth, in one of his many letters, telling her of his ability to clone Americans. He taught them to throw a football, too, taught them to sail it spinning off their fingers, taught them tackle not touch in a vast field at Fiori, taught them with a determination and a passion as if something quite important depended on their learning the game. His American-ness, the hybrid nature of him, grew like something magical, some sort of beautiful flower tenuously blooming, evolving until natural selection rendered it obsolete: the football was abandoned in a corner, lost to soccer.

"Are you still dressing like a preppy?" she asked. She remembered his inspiration a few years earlier to translate
The Official Preppy Handbook
into Italian, remembered the smile igniting his face at the idea big enough to build a bridge for them. He was a dreamer, too, she knew, and she would never give up hoping that he would allow his dreams to flourish. In the car, James turned on some radio music, a beautiful country tune that floated from the window, seeming to dress the blue day.

"Made in America," Cesare said.

"I'm waiting for you here," she said, looking down the long road, cornfields as far as she could see, feeling a slight ache at the emptiness, at everything that was not. But she believed, defiantly and somewhere, that he would arrive in the nick of time, blowing in hard on the breeze, hurting her in his arms.

 

She called him first from the outskirts of Hazelville, a little town outside of Pittsburgh that James had wanted to visit because he had been born there. James had been in Beth's graduating class at New York University, a good boy who detasseled corn as a kid, a geologist in the making whose subject was America, a poet at heart. Beth had been impatient with the sentimental notion of the detour to his birthplace. But she did not let him know that. What she did let him know was that she was falling in love with him—deeply, madly. In a field of sunflowers, she told him so for the first time.

Hazelville was a depressing town whose coal industry was long dead and whose character had remained frozen for decades—broad avenues with broad storefronts with long-forgotten names: Franklin's Five and Dime. A town hidden in the recesses and folds of this big land like a mole hidden in flabby flesh. Beth, too, had grown up in Pennsylvania, on an apple farm commune in Snyder County, four hours to the east, where hills rolled into more hills and all of it disappeared into wide blue sky. It was Amish and Mennonite country, the men and women in their plain black clothes with their buggies and their horses trotting over dale and hill. More than once, Beth had gotten stoned with a few Mennonite boys. She was the daughter of a hippie and a dreamer, her mother long dead, memorialized in the name her father gave the farm: Claire.

Beth and James had camped in some woods not far from the road, on the edge of James's birth town. In the middle of the night Beth had taken off in the Lincoln to call Cesare from a truck stop. The engines heaved and sighed; the massive trucks, lit up, sparkling and dazzling in the night, swarmed around her. She was silent, just listening to his voice. The night was cold with no moon and no stars. Knowing he was on the other end of the line was enough; she didn't need to speak. "I love you," he said. "
Ti amo." Ti amo
is different from
Ti voglio bene,
which means "I wish you well" but stronger, something a parent says to a child.
Ti amo
is reserved for lovers. Beth knew the subtleties, the moment in their relationship when one replaced the other. She adored the precision of his language.

Over the course of five years he had written her hundreds of letters. She had carried them back and forth from Italy to America, from her father's farm to her grandmother's apartment, to her place on Sixth Avenue. She would carry them into adulthood, she would carry them for the rest of her life, stacked neatly in a box just the size to hold them closely, folded as he had folded them, tucked in their envelopes, the flap licked by his tongue, a proof, a testimony, a declaration of the absolute.
Ti amo sempre di più,
he wrote.

 

I will tell you the truth: I am andato for you, which in Italian means "I am out of my head for you," which means "I am crazy for you," which means "I am mad for you," which means "I would do anything for you," which means "you can rely on me," which means "my life only makes sense when I think of you," which means "you can do with me as you please," which means "you and only you can decide my fate: if I'll be happy or if I'll have to live the rest of my life remembering the time when you loved me.
"

 

Why do you love me?
Her response consisted of that one question, written on a long blank page. She was not beautiful, she had no style, her sophistication had nothing to do with that of Italian girls, she did not understand his way of life. She could not see herself as he saw her. Generally, she did not lack confidence, but early on she loved him to the point where it was almost unbearable.
Why?
She would ask. It was her perpetual question over the years. She was aiming for logic. Simply: the love was hard to believe. Love is hard to believe. Why do you love me? What is love? Why do people find one love out of all possible loves? What are the forces, the attractions, the causes, the consequences? What are the requirements, the shapes, the sizes, the measurements? Explain it. Why you? Why me?