The Farewell Symphony (15 page)

Day after day I trekked to Lucrezia's and she tore out the seams of my shoddy, iU fitting Italian and found ways to tailor it to my needs and interests. Her apartment was dustless, underfurnished, plandess; she seemed the chubby, cinched-in soubretk in a tragedy, the winsome maid who simpers as she opens the door to let in the Stone Guest. Slowly I filled in the story. She'd been married to an .American professor of Italian and had lived with him at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana; one day, quite banally, he'd divorced her to marry a slim, freckled student with granny glasses from Bloomington, but Lucrezia, unlike an American, was not willing to adapt to this change. She didn't want to work through her resentment in therapy or channel it into lesbian feminism; she vowed herself to a life of mourning, returned to Rome and closed her shutters. She suffered from headaches that made her unavailable on certain days. Tina explained that Lucrezia's "headaches" were in fact paralyzing depressions provoked by anniversaries of key dates in her marriage.

My impatience with her grief was not only that of an American optimist but also of a homosexual pessimist. The American in me was astonished, even ofiended, by her irrevocable decision to take grief's veil and I wanted to line her up for an exercise class, a husband-hunting Caribbean

cruise or a macrobiotic diet. But the homosexual in me, that lone wolf who'd been kept away from the campfire by boys throwing stones, who considered his needs to be perversions and his love to be a variety of shame—that homosexual, isolated, thick-skinned, self-mocking, fur torn and muzzle bloody, could only sneer at the incompetence of these heterosexuals in maneuvering their way through disaster. Of course men betray you, of course love is an illusion dispelled by lust, of course you end up alone.

I SPENT MORE and more time with Tina, who took a sort of big sister's interest in me, as though I were a frail, naive boy. She'd pick me up in her battered Cinquecento and speed me confidently through the narrow, clangorous streets. We'd have dinner in a dim, cheap restaurant looking out across an empty, rain-swept square at a rugged Renaissance palace. We'd eat our plate of spaghetti and nugget of veal in almost total silence. In the center of the square a wide, ancient Roman basin overflowed in the rain, its surface smooth as polished onyx.

Through Tina I started to meet young Italians from good families and they were shocked by my primitive, egotistical brand of leftism. When I told them I was a writer working on a "love story" (I said that just to shut them up, since in the States such a theme would have been unexceptionable), they laughed mockingly. "Ook-la-la, I'amour," they cackled, pretending to be mustache-twirling French rakes, as though nothing could be more idiotic, retrograde, even menopausal, than love. A young woman who defended me said she was sure there must be a translation problem.

What shocked me was their conformity. Everyone was a Marxist, albeit of a sophisticated cultural variety. I didn't yet know the writings of Gram-sci, but when I discovered them ten years later I saw that these Italian kids weren't American-style New Leftists who confused rebellion with revolution or who thought vegetarianism, nudism and Buddhism were part of a progressive package deal. In America there were only two political parties, virtually interchangeable, and even to our ears talk of real political change sounded unconvincing and quixotic. But here in Italy there seemed to be half a dozen parties, each wdth a distinct program, newspaper, geographical stronghold, elected senators, and any ruling coalition appeared to be so fragile that the police and the army were always present, night and day, on every corner, to quell a riot should it break out.

The Farewell Symphonv

I was warned not to talk too freely on the telephone, not even in English, since most phones were tapped.

Tina took me by to meet her father, a tiny, wizened scholar who lived in another apartment in the same family palazzo. I was used to the .American notion that parents are dull if responsible creatures and their children wild and fascinating, but Tina's father was as hopeless and eccentric as she was. He forgot to eat and lived on cheap wine, he turned night into day and wore the same suit aU the time, although every third day Tina convinced him to change his shirt. He was usually morose as he thought about the hundred-page philosophical essay on Time that he'd been writing for the past twenty years, but occasionally he'd throw a rust-colored scarf around his neck and gaily saunter forth in his old Jeep. His girlfriend was an extremely elegant lady his age who imited Tina and me to her palace for a parry. Champagne and canapes were handed around by servants in white gloves, although at midnight the hostess herself put on an apron and made us a spaghettata —the Italian aftermath to an otherwise stiff, French-style reception. This woman—so dazzling in her diamonds and so punctilious in her politeness—took Tina's father's bohemianism in her stride. She sat placidly beside him in the Jeep, a scarf tied around her impeccable hairdo, her tiny black shoes poised on the floorboard with its gaping hole through which the pavement was visible.

One night when I was alone with Tina—the two of us under a lamp, our armchairs and scrap of carpet marooned like a cheap set hastily assembled on an immense sound stage—I was about to break the exhausting silence to say, "Look, I'll come back in a month when I know more Italian," but she spoke first and said, "I love you."

I was amazed by this declaration, which I hadn't seen coming, but if it made me important and desirable rather than an annoying pest, a tongue-tied foreigner, it also scared me. "But you know," I told her, "I like men."

She stared at me with her huge black eyes turned toward me, humbly. She did not wheedle or seduce or whine or even argue her case; she simply presented herself before me, at once Salome and the head on the platter, pure desire and the bloody sacrifice to it.

'"Sonojrocio," I said, "I'm a fag," using the worst word I knew, the most shocking.

That stung her into a response. "Don't say that. You can say whatever you want— omosessuale, invertito —but not that horrendous word. You use it onlv because you don't know Italian."

I tried to explain to her the strategy of adopting the enemy's worst insult, something the new Boston gay commune had done in naming its newspaper Fag Rag, but she merely shook her head as though awakening from a bad dream and returned to the assault: "We are peoples," she kept repeating in English, which I assumed meant we're individuals before we're gendered (a truism I wasn't sure I believed) and that as individuals we're as likely to fall in love vsdth another soul as another body, with a sim-patica woman as a dull man.

I began to think how soon I could plausibly take my leave. We were both drunk, she drunker She let the silence collect in a big cistern ready to overrun. Her instinct was not to permit me to wriggle gracefully out of an awkward situation; does Medea let Jason off the hook, does Phaedra give Hippolytus an easy out?

I stood and she walked into my arms. We began to embrace. My hands traveled over her lean body and pressed her flanks through her skirts. I could feel myself kindling under her touch, but I instandy worried that I'd disappoint her—as a lover and as a husband, for every time I kissed a woman I feared I'd be impotent and insolvent, too flaccid to penetrate her and too poor to support her. When I looked at married men I often sympathized with their obligation to mount their wives, tirelessly, night after night—and to have to pay for the pleasure. In gay life, hustiers were paid to penetrate men; we assumed passivity was always the more desirable role and that the drudgery of activity naturally had to be recompensed.

But now all the wine I'd drunk calmed my fears. Nor was Tina decorous or cold. We grappled as violendy as any two men might have done and somehow I found myself in the dark hallway leading to her bedroom where her bed glowed like a moonlit pond seen at the end of an alleyway of firs. Then she bit my nose, hard, and I thought. She's mad, she's dangerous, I'm getting out of here.

"Okay, that's it," I said. "I'm leaving." I said it in English, quickly, and I didn't care if she understood me or not.

Once I was outside in the hallway, groping toward the light switch and fumbling to close my trousers, a chilling certainty came over me that she really was crazy and might try to kill me.

I didn't wait for the elevator but ran down the five flights and through the rainy courtyard, my feet striking sound ofl" the cold, mossy pavement just as I heard behind me the elevator motor groaning into action and I knew that soon Tina would be pursuing me.

I ducked through the small door set into the portone and found myself

The Farewell Symphony

on a deserted street, beside the ugly fountain that had provoked its designer's suicide. I felt seized by an intense fear: Tina was going to run me over with her car. I started to streak down the hill past the Barberini Palace; then I sighted a street on the other side and I ducked down it, although after Fd run another block I saw to my horror that it was a dead end. I crept back up to the main thoroughfare, hugging the shadowy wall, and arrived at the corner just in time to see a grim-faced Tina hurding by behind the wheel of her tiny, battered car

With a bit more composure I went dowTi to the taxi rank in the Piazza Barberini. I told the driver to let me off beside the square at Santa Maria in Trastevere; I'd walk the rest of the way home.

Yet as he was pulling up to our destination he said, "Do you know this woman who's following us?"

I said to him, "Here's a bit of extra money. Could you just wait a moment while I talk to her?"

He smiled knowingly and suddenly I saw that he thought I was a roguish husband coming to see his Trastevere mistress and Tina was my jealous wife—and I realized that whereas gay life is always aberrant, there's not a moment of straight life, no matter how bizarre or melodramatic, that isn't cozily familiar, that can't be associated with a song lyric or a movie or a poem. Whereas I'd have felt ashamed if my pursuer had been a man, now there was a hint of complicity between the driver and me. Every heterosexual occasion is an institution, every heterosexual sin a source of pride.

I went direcdy up to Tina's car, ducked down and spoke to her through the open window. She was very pale. I said, as a hypnotist might, "You're tired and you're going to go home now and we'll speak in the morning." She nodded slowly.

I crossed the square, which was dim and deserted in the midnight rain. The square was closed to cars but I kept expecting to hear Tina's Cinque-cento gunning its motors as she came crashing down on me. By walking confidendy away from her I felt like a torero who turns his back on a bull, stunned but angry.

My mother, who was working in Germany, came to Rome to spend a weekend with me. When she left I bought a big botde of Chianti and drank it all alone until I passed out. Around three in the morning I was awakened by the smell of what seemed to be burning tar. (In fact it was the nafta heating oil that had been pooling for weeks in the entryway on the floor.) I thought I didn't care if I burned alive, I still needed a ciga-

rette. I lit up and groggily got dressed. I wondered if Tina had set fire to my building.

Then I did exacdy the wrong thing. I threw open the fi"ont door and was knocked back by the billowing black smoke. I ran to the windows that gave onto the street and opened them, thereby creating a draft. Soon the whole apartment was so full of thick, smelly smoke that I couldn't even see the lights I'd turned on. The alleyway was full of noise and whirring lights. A ladder was extended up to my window and a fireman with a smoke-blackened face and brilliant blue eyes beneath a silver helmet came rushing up, smiling.

''JVonposso" I said. I can't. I'm afraid. "Hopaura"

"Si, si," he assured me. And he promised he'd be right behind me as we descended, an offer not to be refused. I remembered how as an adolescent I'd walked along the top of a high wall to please Tommy, despite my vertigo. The fireman, small but brisding with bravura, talked me down the ladder, step by step, his voice low and fatherly. Once I was down he rushed back up the ladder to put out the fire but slapped his forehead when he reached the top because he'd forgotten the hose.

Everyone had a good laugh, as though to say, "That's an Italian for you—everything is theater." There was a crowd in the street who treated me with sympathy and I was so glad to be accepted at last by my neighbours, even if as a victim, that I scarcely regretted that all my belongings were burned or covered with tar. A woman from down the street gave me a glass of warm milk, the best cure, she swore, against swallowed smoke.

For some strange reason my tall blond Venetian waiter appeared out of nowhere; why he'd been on his way to visit me at five in the morning I'll never know. Someone called the countess, my landlady. I thought of the inventory she'd made me sign, the list of every item down to the last egg cup. When she arrived she was in a state of shock to see her whole apartment—new flocked wallpaper, heavy velvet drapes and ecclesiastical library—covered with an inch of tar. My waiter, whom I'd considered so distinguished till now, tried to speak to her, but he was obviously out of his depth and just talked in a falsely elegant circle. His hollow voice now sounded pretentious, his choice of words meaningless, his manner by turns insolent and humble.

"Is this your friend?" she asked with a condescending smile and quite genuine curiosity.

"He's a friend," I said sheepishly, which scarcely explained what he was doing here before dawn.

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The fire, in fact, was my salvation. Susie, my English real-estate agent, took me in for a couple of days until she found me a roommate, Thomas, who lived near the Pantheon. When the contessa refused to return my security deposit, the equivalent of three months' rent, Tina found me a tough woman lawyer who made her pay up the very next day. At last I could make something happen here in Rome.

I returned to my old apartment to see if anything could be salvaged. It was like visiting Pompeii if one were a Pompeiian. In the bedroom I found a very young workman in a blue uniform who was scrubbing down the walls. He told me his name was Decimo. He seemed worried that his boss [il mio principak) would come back and catch him idling. I stood uncomfortably close to him, smiling into his handsome young face, feeling the crazy confidence that desire sometimes conferred on me. Perhaps this all-black version of my once red and purple apartment excited me, or perhaps the smell of coal smoke awakened in me memories of melancholy Chicago winters, memories that were horny because they brought back a sharp recollection of loneliness, a lack, an emptiness I wanted to fill as soon as possible.