Crossing to Safety (29 page)

I came over and bent down and was kissed.

“You know what I’m going to do?” she said. “I’m going to be a really helpful wife. I’m not even going to speak to you between breakfast and lunch. I’m just going to read or study Italian and never peep a word and let you work.”

“You can’t get through a whole morning. Not without Mrs. Fellowes.”

“I can teach Assunta. We can give her a little extra at tipping time.”

“I won’t be exactly unavailable, thirty feet away, or forty if I’m out on the terrace.”

“No, I won’t call on you. You’re going to write the book that will show them all what you might have done long ago if you hadn’t had a millstone around your neck. After lunch we’ll take a nap— nothing’s open till three anyway. After three we can soak up Florence. Charity’s got a list of museums and churches and frescoes and expeditions three pages long.”

“Charity has? I thought we bought the Fiat so they wouldn’t feel responsible for us.”

“They won’t be. That doesn’t mean we can’t do things together.”

“No. But let’s not be
on
them. It feels too good to be free. Charity’s agenda can get binding. Anything on for today?”

“Just our Italian lesson at five. Before that, they’ll be taking Hallie out of the Poggio Imperiale.”

“Taking her
out
? They just put her in.”

“It isn’t working. She’s miserable. She’ll be a lot better off in the American School.”

“As anybody but Charity could have predicted. You tried to warn her. I heard you. So she does to poor Hallie exactly what her mother did to her in Paris. And what did Charity do then? She went over the wall. Somebody should tell her about people who refuse to learn from history.”

Sally laughed. “She says she
did
learn. She learned her mother was right. She’d have got a lot more out of France if she’d stuck where her mother put her. She’s been hoping Hallie would have better sense than she had.”

“She’s so incredible she’s wonderful. It’s good for her to have to eat crow once in a while. Is she eating it gracefully?”

“She’s perfectly cheerful about it. She tried something, and it didn’t work. So she’s trying something else. She even thinks it’s a kind of joke on herself. But she’s really sorry about Hallie. It must have been grisly, not a word of Italian, not knowing a soul.”

“We ought to try to get Lang over here for Christmas, you know.”

“I thought you thought it would cost too much.”

“Maybe we should do it no matter what it costs.”

“You know,” Sally said, “Italy’s good for you. Let’s do it. She’d love it. So would we. So would Hallie. She could use a playmate.”

“She could show Lang the Poggio Imperiale.” I stood up. “How about taking you to the bathroom so I can get to work?”

“Fine. But isn’t it early to be typing? You might disturb the people across the hall.”

“If they complain, I’ll stop. But if I’m going to set the literary world on fire, the only way to do it is to rub one word against another.”

So I was at the typewriter—hard at it, with my back to the morning and my face to the blank wall—when breakfast came. Maybe I had acquired the habit back in the furnace room on Morrison Street, but I found it easier to see what was in my head if I didn’t have distractions in front of my eyes. I was writing up a New Mexico snowstorm, and I had it coming down thick and heavy, muffling the roads and mounding on adobe walls and windowsills and whitening the piñons and junipers when the tapping came on the door.

“Permesso?”

“Avanti.”

The door opened and Silvano came in with the tray on one flat hand, shoulder high. He wore his white gloves. He always wore them when serving food, to conceal his scarred, cracked workman’s hands. He also wore his morning smile, which was gentle and tired. Distributing
buon giornos
to Sally in the bed and me in bathrobe and slippers, still with a few New Mexican snowflakes on my shoulders and hair, he lowered the tray onto the table in the early sun. His look took in, with sympathy, the typewriter and the paper and the wastebasket already half full of crumpled pages.

“Sempre lavoro,”
he said. He affected to believe that I worked harder than he did, but his phrase contained sympathy for us both.
Sempre lavoro,
no fooling. Silvano lived out in Scandici, which he left before six every morning to stand for forty minutes on the jammed bus. For the first half hour after arriving at the Vespucci he would be mopping the marble entrance and sweeping the sidewalk and polishing the door handles. At seven-thirty he would start serving breakfast to fifteen rooms. Then there would be a time of cleanup in the kitchen and another time of raking the back courtyard where several of us kept our cars to preserve them from the
auto topi,
who would gnaw down to the chassis any vehicle left overnight in the street. For a few minutes around noon he would get to sit down to eat in the kitchen. Then he would put on his white gloves and serve lunch.

After lunch, I hope, he got a little siesta like everybody else, but I never knew for sure, and he was always subject to the ringing of a bell. In the afternoon he vacuumed the halls, ran errands, polished more brass. If anyone wanted tea or a drink, he left whatever he was doing and put on his gloves and served it, and afterward carried away the cups and glasses and went back to what he had left undone. If the
signora
or her daughter Albarosa had to leave the desk and telephone, Silvano took over. At seven he was back in his white gloves serving dinner. By nine he was ready to catch the bus back to Scandici.

Unless. The doors of the Vespucci were locked at eleven, and people who were out late had to come in through the courtyard entrance. That meant someone had to stay up to let them in, and that meant, generally, Silvano. I have never felt guiltier than one night soon after we arrived, when we went with the Langs to a concert, then to Doney’s for a drink, then to the river to look at the lights, and then, on an impulse, up to the Piazzale to see the night city from above.

We got in about two, and had to bang pretty loud to be heard. Silvano finally opened the gate, so groggy he had to hang on to it to keep from falling down. His lids closed over his eyes as we made our apologies; he fell asleep on his feet while closing the gate. But his sad smile forgave us, even while we were telling each other that we must never do that to him again. On nights like that, of course, he didn’t get home at all. Once, getting up early to walk in the Cascine before breakfast, I found him asleep in his clothes on the bench by the back door.

During the war Silvano had been unhappily a soldier, and toward the end a prisoner of the Americans. He hated war, trouble, and Tedeschi, who were associated in his mind, and loved the Sunday
calcio
games in the Campo di Marte. He considered himself very very lucky to have a secure job, with people who treated him well, and with every Sunday off. By not having any, or any hope of any, Silvano taught me a good deal about my own upward mobility.

“Sempre lavoro,”
he said to me on mornings like this, shaking his head. It astonished him that I, a rich American who could obviously afford to be idle, and to his knowledge had at least six drip-dry shirts, should be up and pounding a typewriter before seven-thirty. Now he sent Sally his sad, kind smile—
la poveretta,
he called her when he spoke of her to me, wished us both a soft
buon appetito,
and backed out of the door.

“He’s such a sweetie,” Sally said as I was getting her established in her high chair in the flood of sun. “He makes me feel so lucky and so guilty.”

I poured some black sludge from the coffeepot into two cups, and filled the cups with hot milk already beginning to skim over. The
panini,
two apiece, were still faintly warm from the oven, and creased like a cherub’s behind. I broke one and spread it with butter for Sally, and looked through the bowl of little plastic jam pots to see what we had.
“Arancia, ciliegia, e fragola. Cosa vuoi?”

“Ciliegia,”
Sally said. “Hey, you’re getting good.”

“I still mix it up with Spanish. I’ll never catch up to you. None of us will.”

“I ought to be a lot better than I am. I had all that Latin, and I can study all morning while you write.”

“In addition to which you have the gift for it. You’ll be reading Dante before Sid does.”

She looked at me sharply. “For heaven’s sake, don’t even suggest such a thing.”

“Why not? He isn’t vain about how much Italian he knows.”

“Just the same. He’s always comparing himself, or getting compared, to other people. Charity compares him to you, and it isn’t fair. You’re a producer, he’s a consumer, a sort of connoisseur. But this spring, the minute he knew he’d got tenure finally, and was a real associate professor and not some ambiguous sort of lecturer, and we began to plan this trip, Charity was right back on her hobby horse. She started to wonder if maybe, in Florence, Sid could get back to those Browning studies she set him at years ago. She’d still like him to prove to the world that he’s as good a scholar as anybody. I hope I talked her out of all that. I think I did. Because all in the world he wants out of this year of grace is to learn enough Italian to read Dante in the original. Reverently. That’s what he should do.”

“Fine. I agree. That doesn’t change my opinion that you’ll be reading Dante before he does.”

She accepted the jam-spread
panino
I handed her. “If I do,” she said, “let’s just keep it a secret, shall we?”

The bells started up again on Bellosguardo, where Browning had once lived, and where, in some square or other, we had seen a monument bearing his name and other literary names. Let them rest in peace. Sally was right, the way to spoil the year for all of us would be for Charity to start imposing ambition on Sid again. The way to keep it loose would be just to let him be a receptor. He had the appetite, the curiosity, and the energy for it, so long as his feelers didn’t detect a compulsory publication at the end. It struck me that he was a little like Silvano. Now that he finally had tenure, and was safe for life, and was getting his first sabbatical, let him enjoy his safety.

From their villa up behind San Miniato the Langs could make forays into the art, antiquities, color, picturesqueness, history, food, and wine of Tuscany. This week, Sally informed me, was to be Brunelleschi week, starting with the Duomo and going on to San Lorenzo, Spirito Santo, the Innocenti, the Pazzi Chapel, and God knew what else. Fine with me. I would be happy to go along and profit from her impeccable planning.

In the afternoons and evenings only. In the mornings I had other fish to fry. Mornings such as this I could hardly wait to finish the
ca fe latte.
I wanted to get back with my face to the wall and my mental windows wide open. Mornings it didn’t matter where we were so long as I had working space. If the day stayed as fine as it had started, and it often did, I would move out onto the terrace at nine o’clock, and leave the room to Sally and Assunta, the maid.

Assunta did not soothe the soul as Silvano did. She stirred up dust with her turkey-feather broom and stirred up the morning’s placidity with her fierce denunciations of a whole anthology of wrongs and wrong-doers: her worthless husband, her shiftless son, her wicked mother-in-law, the
sindaco
of her town of Settignano, the malignant driver of the bus that had brought her in that morning, the taxes, the prices, the government, the times. She talked to Sally all the while she made the bed and dust-mopped the floor and cleaned the bathroom and changed the linen, stopping every now and then in sheer disbelief of how impossible everything was.
“Pazienza!”
she cried, throwing her eyes and the spread fingers of her right hand toward the ceiling; and again, denying the possibility,
“Pazienza!”

Good advice. In my shirtsleeves, out on the sheltered deck, I turned my back on her life of turmoil and went on complicating the lives of some people I had once sort of known, involving them in, among other things, a monumental Christmas snowstorm that stopped them in their knee-deep tracks and forced them to some hard acceptances and decisions. Later, I supposed, I would come wallowing like a St. Bernard, with a little brandy barrel around my neck, and if not rescue, at least reprieve them. They were people whom, having invented them, I rather liked. I didn’t want to do them in, only make them see a little better. One of them was a little like Charity, in that she thought she saw very clearly without any assistance.

And every morning of a whole year would be like this one.

It almost was. With my face to the wall and my back to temptation and distraction, I spent the mornings in New Mexico, a world of mixed recollection and invention where I moved with the freedom of a god. I controlled the climate. I knew every mesa, pueblo, road, street, and house because I had put it there. I knew everyone’s mind, emotions, and history. I could anticipate, even plan, every event, and predict, even dictate, every consequence.

The New Mexican phase of my life was all order and good management, among people I knew, in a country, climate, and social milieu in which I was completely at home—which did not belong to me so much as I belonged to it by reason of birth and experience. I ran my New Mexico mornings about the way Charity had always tried to run the life of the Lang family—evocatively when possible, arbitrarily if necessary. That, if you can get away with it, is a very satisfactory way to live. When the writing went well, and it generally did, I was without pain during my mornings in Albuquerque-on-the-Arno.

But it was also satisfying to surface—not with the bends, never with the bends; those were only talk, part of the hyperbole of euphoria. No, I surfaced easily, sweetly, eagerly, full of expectation, into this world of origins that was all discovery, and only rarely evocation or manipulation. Sally had been studying it while I was gone, and could tell me about it at lunch.

I suppose I was peculiarly susceptible because of our recent emancipation from debt and duty, as Sally was susceptible because of her long imprisonment. But I would have been susceptible anyway. Anyone who reads, even one from the remote Southwest at the far end of an attenuated tradition, is to some extent a citizen of the world, and I had been a hungry reader all my life. I could not look up at the Arno without feelings of recognition, as if, somewhere off downstream, the river drained into the Rio Grande. I knew names, books, some of the art. I was myself the product of ideas that had been formulated right here. I lived now in a pensione named for the man who had given America its name.