An Enlarged Heart (3 page)

W
e went down the long cool hall to fetch our bags. Or rather, my husband went to fetch them. I sat at the table, eating a piece of lemon rind. Ivetta bustled around me, folding tea cloths and swathing cheese and salami with plastic wrap. She would take the food that was left with her, who knew if she was coming back! And if her husband came back to the apartment from wherever he was, why should she leave perfectly good food for him to eat? Let him eat on his own, she said. It occurred to me as I sat at the table that Ivetta was going to Sperlonga to find her husband, perhaps to confront him in a public place. Once, in Perugia, on my first trip to Italy, I had stayed with the boyfriend with whom I had argued. When we returned we would argue for another year, through a winter in Providence, where one week the family in the house three doors down from us, in a house which was a century older than ours and which they insisted on lighting with gas lamps, was bound and held at gunpoint. That summer in Perugia we sat every night in a piazza a stone's throw away from the Etruscan walls.

Each evening as dusk inked in first the lintels of the doorways and then the alleyways between the buildings, the fountain was circled by swallows, who rose like smoke signals over the jet of water that arced from the dragon's mouth: a dragon who put out his own fire. At six every evening, a boy drove his Vespa at top speed straight into the door of a house that faced the square. Night after night, idly, as we did everything then, we discussed the Vespa. Was there a courtyard past the door we could see where he parked it? A long hallway? Punctually, he whizzed past us into the doorway and disappeared. I wonder now why we waited to investigate the boy's wild aim at the doorway—it was a wooden doorway with a Della Robbia Madonna set over the putti and peeling arch—but when we did, one night when it was just beginning to rain in the piazza and so our dusk-lit twilight was cut short, we saw only a stone stairway three feet from the lintel, and then, nothing: a tattered straw mat, unraveling, had been placed just inside the door. When I thought now of Ivetta, standing in her kitchen in her black-and-white Marimekko apron, in Rome, thinking about going to confront her husband, I thought of those stone stairs, and the boy disappearing, as if into thin air, night after night after circling the fountain in Perugia.

My husband had collected our bags. While I waited with him Ivetta went to get her things. These were minimal. In a large straw basket embroidered with a pink straw flower, she had put the leftovers from the kitchen—the salami, the cheese, and half a loaf of bread wrapped in wax paper. She had changed from her house shoes, black espadrilles she wore as mules, with the back of the shoe tamped down under her heel, into a pair of red suede sneakers. In the other hand she carried a large brimmed canvas hat. She assured us that we would love Sperlonga—there is no reason to stay in Rome!—she said, and, anyway, you will be back!

My husband and I looked at each other. He was well acquainted with my unease, traveling. If anything, now I am more anxious. When I am not, or when I pretend not to be, I try to behave as if I were a person who could throw caution to the winds and stay anywhere, not knowing beforehand whether the room would be too small, or too ugly, or on a street I cannot imagine living on for one moment. The inability to travel easily is for me a symptom of anxiety. My character is essentially porous: the view outside the hotel room of the parking lot, past the windows that do not open and are very slightly grimy, could pass into my heart, accumulating grit and sorrow around the idea that not only I, but anyone, would have to stay here forever, with the plastic webbing of the carpet smelling of mold.

My husband and I had traveled before. We had spent three months in Italy, before we were married, in a house with a sleeping porch and narrow hallways in a village above Assisi, where Umbrian hills pressed into a cerulean sky, and I sat on a flat rock below the house and thought about all the wonderful things I would write if I really was a writer, rather than pretending to be one, when in truth I was a woman who wanted to have a baby. All day my notebook sat idle. It was May then, too, and cold, and I wore a very expensive fawn-colored shearling coat I had bought in Venice, with money I had earned at the magazine where I then worked, writing about clothes—one of the only things, then, that I knew a great deal about, along with passages from “The Waste Land” and some Yeats poems, which I liked to recite to myself, and a few lines from
Cymbeline,
which I had decided perversely was my favorite play, not knowing or understanding that it was not a young person's play and that I did not know the least thing about it: “I heard no letter from my master since I wrote him Imogene was slain.”

As it got warmer, small lizards, some the color of spearmint and others a pale corn silk color that was almost clear as glass, darted over the rock and paused on my hand. I exchanged the shearling coat for a mohair sweater which itched, faintly, and kept me awake. We were not married, then, and I did not yet have a baby. We were trying on different houses and places to live, like wind-cheaters. Later, when I did have a baby, I would go back to Italy once more with her father, and with the baby, who was teething, and who tugged ferociously at the harness in her stroller because what she liked to do was to chase pigeons in the piazza, a baby with wide-set eyes who has grown up to hold a paintbrush between her teeth, as her father does, and like her mother, stare into space.

We went down in the elevator with Ivetta. Her car, it turned out—a brown Fiat sedan, with one door that would not open—was parked almost directly in front of the apartment house. The interior was hot, and the pages of
La Stampa
that covered the backseat were yellowed and smelled like burned cloth. I sat in the back, with the straw basket of food, to which Ivetta at the last minute had added some cold bottles of mineral water. My husband sat in the front, in the passenger seat. It occurred to me as I hunched in the back, my knees slightly drawn up under my “traveling” skirt—I still had ideas then about what was proper to travel in, and I was wearing a green skirt and a linen navy blouse with long sleeves, rolled up below my elbows, and flat shoes—that I had never before been a car with my husband that he wasn't driving. At home we had a small red truck. It looked like a large model of a matchbox car. Years later, when I married again, my stepson, who was maniacal as a child about cars, had hundreds of these: for years, my instep held the mark of those cars, from when I stepped on them at night, in the long dark hall of the apartment where we then lived. This truck was a stick shift. It was impossible for me to drive it. When I went up even a small slope in the seaside town where we then lived, down a long rackety road on the way to a studio that belonged to a famous painter, and about which, many years later, there would be a long protracted lawsuit which resulted in the view from that studio being ruined, I felt the weight of the truck behind me. Without fail, my reaction to the feel of this weight was to let go of the wheel and put my foot down on the accelerator. For a long time afterward I had not driven a car, and although I did not know it I was on the verge of a period of many years, more than two decades—in those days the idea of looking back on a decade through which I had lived had not occurred to me—in which I would not drive at all, until I was forced to by circumstance.

It was peculiar to be in the backseat. I could see the back of my husband's head. His black hair curled over the back of his corduroy jacket, which despite the heat he had not yet taken off, probably because his shirt was soaked with sweat, and I wanted to reach out and touch his shoulder. I did not. We did not touch each other very much in front of other people. In the front seat, Ivetta adjusted the rearview mirror, with displeasure. Her husband had driven this car last. He had the Peugeot now, wherever it was. She always asked him to readjust the mirror after he drove the car—the Fiat was her car—but did he? No. He did not.

There was no air-conditioning. We rolled the windows down. The town of Sperlonga is halfway between Rome and Naples, on the Tyrrhenian Sea. We drove south, along the Via Flacca. Umbrella pines lined the road. I had never seen them before but I knew exactly what they were; their limbs were as complicated as the spokes of parasols. As we drove past field after dry field, some gleaming with ginevra, which I found beautiful but I knew from my friend who lived above Assisi that farmers despised (the roots were matted and hard to pull up, the seeds traveled all over Italy and contaminated the fields), we began to see herds of buffalo, grazing, in fields marked off by umbrella pines. These fields were free of the gold clouds of ginevra. The grass was shorn and yellowing under the hot sky. The buffalo were milked for mozzarella di bufala. Strange, Ivetta, said, that we had not seen buffalo before: after all, we were Americans. The bottled water was now warm; we stopped at a
bitiere
for more cold drinks. The bar also sold straw baskets and mats. There was a bag exactly like Ivetta's, with a pink flower, and I immediately wanted it: I wanted to be Italian, I wanted to have the sort of bag an Italian woman carried. The first time I had been in Rome, I had watched women walk slowly up the streets with their neatly tied parcels in Trastevere, in their good skirts and fine shoes, slightly worn, and cardigans: I wore dusty blue jeans and an Indian print t-shirt, and the gulf between us seemed immeasurably wide. I did the calculations in my head. Did I want to spend twenty dollars on a straw bag? It was infinitely less than the number in lira. When we returned to the car I had forgotten about the lira, and my husband had bought a straw hat. It blocked my view out the front window of the car. I leaned back onto the hot leather seat and closed my eyes. When I opened them we were entering Sperlonga.

Don't look! said Ivetta.
Non guadare!
The outskirts of Sperlonga, she said, were embarrassed at the ugly new apartment houses, three stories tall, that were surrounding the old town. She gunned the engine. The sea was white in the distance, the houses were white, the sky was white-blue. It was lunchtime and the piazza was deserted. The houses were painted the pastel colors or whitewashed. The red painted shutters were flaking, so that an undercoat of orange rust-proofing showed through in places, mottled red and orange, like blood oranges. Ivetta zoomed down the Via della Paradisa, a street too narrow to hold the car, and stopped at a wooden door with a knocker shaped like a lion. For the second time that day, we unloaded our bags. I was so tired that I felt as if I were wrapped in a wet map of Italy, a pictogram of skyscrapers and taxi cabs and umbrella pines, straw baskets, and imprecations (for Ivetta had not stopped chastising and questioning the behavior of her husband for a moment during the drive). I was also finally hungry. For a second time that day we walked into a cool hallway. The house was whitewashed, and here and there, square windows had been cut into the walls, giving on to a view of the sea. On the stucco wall of the courtyard directly facing the window was a blue-green eye, with a black pupil, that looked back into the blank windows of the house; the disembodied eye of Horus. The room we were to stay in—for how long? who knew?—was under the eaves. A ladder pulled down from the ceiling. There was a low wide bed under the beams that smelled of rusks. Fully clothed, I lay down on it. Early in the day when we had stopped for the cold drinks I had discovered that once again I was not going to have a baby. The knowledge both depressed me and lightened me. When I woke it was dark, my skirt was bunched under me, and my legs were bare.

We spent five days in Sperlonga. Every day we slept under the rafters until the sun and hunger woke us, and then we dressed in cool, light clothes and went to the bar in the piazza, where pink plastic chairs ringed tiny tables, and drank coffee. I pretended to read
La Repubblica,
from which I could make out, with effort, the headlines. My husband made charcoal and pencil drawings in a small book he carried in his pocket. He liked a particular kind of sketchbook with a hard, marbleized black cover, and as he drew he smoked the small cheroots his grandfather, who came from a town fifteen kilometers from here but which he refused to visit, had smoked. The were called
sports.
Sometimes he drew me, but I was an annoying model: I was restless, and my face set into an expression he found irritating. When we had first met he had drawn me endlessly; we lived then for a time on a pond filled with leeches and turtles, and we would take a green rowboat into the middle of that pond and he would draw and I would read. Sometimes I fell asleep. His great friend then was an older painter (he was younger then than my first husband is now), who had his daughters pose for him as nymphs, which they found not surprisingly to be boring in the extreme. To solve this problem he would nail books to the trees for them to read: the house on the pond where we lived belonged to him, and some of the books had gashes through their pages.

When we were finished with our morning coffee, we shopped for lunch in the market in the adjacent piazza. We bought tiny purple artichokes that Ivetta showed me how to cook, 90 percent of the leaves peeled off like pale green confetti, each denudation making a tiny bird click, and every day we bought fresh buffalo mozzarella from a tiny
latteria.
The animals were milked at dawn, and the cheese was made fresh every morning in a formidably clean kitchen behind the shop. On the second day I had asked to see it, and before I stepped into the kitchen the girl behind the counter took a clean cloth, rinsed it in soap and warm water, and gave it to me to wipe my hands. Later I would think of this when my first child was born, in the hospital nursery where I went to learn how to change her. I had never in my life before that moment changed a diaper. In my dressing gown covered with roses, which I had bought especially, I told the stern nurse—she was British, and had been present at the birth—that I'd washed my hands, and thought of the day in Sperlonga when I despaired of having a child: the mozzarella in the shop had smelled too of milk, and the baby had the same milky smell; and further back, to Eliza Doolittle, who said, “I washed me hands and face before I come.” In that moment I had left behind whatever I had been before to be a mother, which I would be from then on. When the children were small they were terrified of
My Fair Lady:
it was the scene, we realized, of the bath.