The Apprentice Lover (2 page)

That flash of rebellion, for me, was rare. A good boy by training and inclination, I kept my head down and my mouth shut. But Gallucci, with his tight-assed spiritual smugness, brought out the worst—or the best—in me. It was implausible that he would have asked my mother about me, but she made up this kind of thing, trying to manipulate me. I had, however, become a serious student of her deceptions, and at some point in high school I determined she would not trap me, not ever again.

After a night of sobs that came like intermittent squalls (I slept in the adjacent double bed), my mother pulled herself together, accepting her defeat in this particular battle, although certain she would prevail in the general war. My father, too, had becalmed himself and sunk back into his old, submissive role. The next morning, he apologized at the breakfast table for hitting me. “Don't take it personal,” he had said, over hash and
eggs in a coffee shop on Sixth Avenue, near the hotel. “I kind of lost my temper last night, but I didn't mean anything by it.” My father had indeed meant it, but this was no time to insist on truth-telling. He wanted to make up with me before my departure, and so did my mother. To separate on bad terms in these circumstances would have been horrific for everyone.

After a silent taxi ride along Eighth Avenue, we got off near the docks, overlooking the Hudson. My father, peering warily around at the street bums, helped me find a porter, and I disappeared into the crowd at Pier 49 after the briefest of good-byes—a peck on my mother's cheek, and a firm handshake from my father. (The hard calluses on his hand reminded me that his working life mattered to him more than anything that happened at home. He could be almost Napoleonic at work: directing large numbers of men and machines into action, attracting admiration, even adulation, from his employees.)

The
Genovese
, as my father had noted from dockside, was “not exactly the
Queen Mary
.” It was “kind of crummy” as ocean liners went. This, in fact, would be its final transatlantic voyage, sailing from New York to Genoa in eight days. Nobody had troubled to scrape and repaint the hull in many years, and the general state of neglect showed. But I hardly cared. To get away was luxury enough.

On the aft deck, a small figure in the excited company of passengers, I pressed to the cold railing and waved the white handkerchief my father had stuffed into my pocket when he saw my tears. (“You're gonna do fine, Alex,” he had whispered in my ear. “Everything is gonna be beautiful over there. You got a way about you I never had.” He didn't really know how I would do, but he guessed it was his role, as father, to reassure me. But I knew, and he knew, that I was setting forth into a huge blank space—a world far from anything he or I had known.)

My parents, Vito and Margarita, who had loomed so large through my past two decades, dwindled as the strip of rubbery water between myself and them lengthened, stretched to a point of unbearable tension, then snapped. My stomach hardened, my intestines braiding themselves in knots, as I kept waving (pointlessly, since they couldn't see me now) and the boat passed the Statue of Liberty, which had welcomed my grand-
parents only five decades before. (“I can't tell you what she meant to me, that lady,” my grandfather always said. “There's no words. After weeks at sea, she stood there like a giant. Everybody went down on their knees in the rain, on the wet deck, on their goddamn knees.”)

It seemed ungrateful of me to reverse the journey my grandparents had made with such difficulty. My mother's parents, who were dead, had come from Liguria in 1908. My father's, who were still very much alive, set out from Naples in 1919. I had heard the story so many times from my paternal grandfather, about how packed the ship had been, with people taking turns sleeping in the tiny bunks, and everyone lice-ridden, sea-sick, and worse. They had abandoned their families—poor, illiterate, well-meaning people—and made their way across a vast, threatening sea. “It was bad weather all the way, and the weak ones died,” he told me. He, of course (and that was the point of the story) was not among the weak ones.

If anything, my grandfather—Alessandro Massolini—was the strongest man I have ever known—a figure who dominated his only son, Vito, who had never really found his own way. Indeed, his stint in the Second World War had been the only period of his life when he had escaped his father's massive shadow.

Alessandro arrived in Luzerne County as a young man of twenty with nothing to his credit but an equally strong and recently acquired wife, Anna Rosa, whom he had married without the consent of her parents (because he was from the wilder, poorer south, she from the more respectable north). He had resisted the hard, ancestral voices that kept telling him he was really a peasant, and that he should not assume too much or reach too far. In the Old World, your caste was a given, an invisible stamp you wore on your forehead until death. Defiantly, Alessandro rose above his origins, conjuring Massolini Construction from a handful of tools and one employee—himself. It became the most visible company of its type in northeastern Pennsylvania. He erected schools and office buildings, hospitals, and strip malls from Carbondale and Hones-dale to Nanticoke and Pottsville. Many of the well-known buildings in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre had been his projects.

And there was I, in a family video rewinding, being sucked back to a
geographical and spiritual place my grandparents had never remotely wanted to revisit. “What happened a long time ago is over,” my grandfather said, resolutely, whenever I tried to pry loose memories of the Old Country. “This country is about what's gonna happen next, not what did. What did doesn't interest nobody around here.”

I had my own memories to deal with, too. That I could never go back to Pennsylvania and live out Nicky's life for him was clear; Columbia had made that impossible. Yet college life itself had become unbearable, a path to a preordained, professional future that felt like a heavy weight I had not yet tried to lift. I could not go forward or backward. What I needed was a fresh landscape, and the blank check of time unmeasured by parental or institutional expectations. I wanted a canvas where I could paint myself into the picture, adding or subtracting traits at will, a place where I had no former history from which I had to be absolved. And so I was sailing to Italy.

They say you can't remember pain, but I do. I remember exactly what it felt like to step from one life into another, self-consciously. To stand for hours on the deck of that old ship, in wind and rain, searching the eastern skyline and waiting, with an almost intolerable sense of anticipation, for the first glimmer of a fresh continent, its shadow on the faint blue horizon gradually becoming substance. For better or worse, strong personal winds drove me, and I had all sails open.

S
omewhere between Amalfi and Capri, the sea turned indigo, depth piling on depth. The transition startled, and I imagined myself falling overboard, losing myself in the inky swirl. It seemed I had lost so much already, and what I had to gain was uncertain: the faint amber glow of an island in the distance, a possible mentor, a sense of myself as a writer, and some agency in a world where I was unable to control what happened to me. But these ambitions were hazy, clear only in the retrospective lens of three decades. What I really felt was a vague tingle in my stomach, a generalized fear of the unknown that mingled with a greedy anticipation, a feeling of windows flung open to experience.

I spoke Italian poorly, the little I knew having been gleaned from conversations with my paternal grandparents, and they spoke with such a thick Neapolitan accent that I could hardly make myself understood in Rome, where I'd spent my first two weeks upon arrival. But I was a quick study, and with Latin spread beneath me like a safety net, I could fall only so far. My vocabulary grew with extravagant speed, spreading vines along an invisible trellis of syntax buried deep in my psyche. I listened intently to fellow passengers on the train from Rome to Salerno, and spoke in isolated bursts of colloquial phrases to fellow passengers on the bus to Amalfi, which I always wanted to see. By the time I boarded the ferry in Amalfi, I could—if I limited myself to occa
sional phrases—pass myself off as a young, if somewhat laconic, Italian.

The Capri ferry in 1970 (unlike the current hydrofoil) was a bulky trawler, its straking painted bright Mediterranean blue, with red trim on windows and rails. Each morning it began its journey in the glaucous port city of Salerno, where my father had landed with General Mark Clark's Fifth Army during the invasion of Italy in 1943. For reasons of his own, he rarely discussed the war, though it had consumed five years of his life. The Battle of Salerno, a famously bloody conflict in which he had been among the first to come ashore, was even less frequently mentioned, although once, on a camping trip in the Poconos long ago, I'd managed to pry loose a fair account of this experience. It was as though he'd been waiting for years to tell someone about Salerno. Oddly enough, he almost never mentioned it again after that. “I don't remember more than I told you already,” he would say, when prodded, shutting the door to that conversation.

I had hoped to spend time in Salerno, walking the beach where my father had landed and trying to imagine my way back into his boots. As a child, I often thought of it, and considered him a hero. But some impediment blocked the pursuit now; I found myself averting my eyes from the waterfront as I hurried from the train station to a bus stop. That war was over, with its anguish and euphoria and mixed allegiances. I could not visualize it, except for the endless sentimental films seen mostly on late-night TV. One day I might face that beach in Salerno, but not at this time. I refused to become a tourist in my father's past, resetting my compass for Capri, whose vivid, light-drenched image beckoned—a war-free zone if one ever existed. (Even my father had no will to revisit Salerno, rejecting an offer that once came from the VFW—a package tour for veterans of the Italian campaign. “Once in Salerno was enough,” he said, with unusual passion, “and I don't care if the beach is lined with dancing girls. They can have it.”)

It seemed that, somehow, I shared his disinclination to face Salerno. It might have been painful to stand there, where he had landed and (I assumed) lost so many friends. It would certainly have brought feelings about Nicky to the surface, and I was trying hard to get over them. I
wanted to push the past year out of my head. To forget Nicky, the war in Vietnam, and the turmoil of my last few months at Columbia, when every assignment had seemed irrelevant, an abrasion. I wanted the freedom to read only what I felt compelled to read, and to write what absorbed me. I didn't want anyone judging me, grading me, wondering if “everything was all right.” Everything was not all right, and I was here in Italy to shift the stage. To begin again, free of that past, discarding old selves.

Eager to see the Amalfi Drive, I had taken a bus northward along the zigzag road, with its steep western slope to the sea. The pinkish tile roofs of villas were barely visible from the road, although glimpses of their opulence fed my imagination. An elderly man beside me on the bus—a retired postal worker, as I quickly learned—served as de facto guide, explaining that the Mafia liked this coast above all others, and had pumped lots of money into those villas. “You should see their boats,” he said. “The worse the criminal, the bigger the boat.”

There was barely room for one small vehicle on the road, but the massive blue SITA bus hurtled forward, swaying, the driver blasting his two-tone horn before each hairpin curve to warn oncoming drivers that certain death lay ahead if they didn't immediately scuttle into any available space. The drop on the left, over sharp amethyst-toothed rocks or steep lemon groves, was brutal, but I reassured myself that the driver had traveled countless times along this road before. It reassured me that everyone else on the bus was unconcerned; indeed, the man in the seat in front of me had fallen asleep, his head limply attached to his neck, rolling left and right as we rounded bends.

In Amalfi itself, a town that climbed on its knees from the harbor and busy
centro
to a ruined monastery whose Greekish columns lent to the whole scene a classical touch, I splurged, spending the night at the Luna, a white-washed hotel with a cloistered courtyard and fine views of the coast. As I learned from a guidebook, Richard Wagner had lived at the Luna for a period, writing
Parsifal
on its sun-bleached terrace, so I could not resist the allure. (That Ibsen had spent some dismal winter months writing
A Doll's House
in the same hotel interested me less. I was too young to appreciate Ibsen.)

Though not wealthy, I had enough in my reserves to tide me over
rather comfortably. My grandfather was bankrolling me to the hilt. Nonno and I had always been close, and when he heard I wanted to live in Italy, he opened his substantial wallet like an accordian. “Alessandro,” he said, lowering his voice to an ethnic rumble, “I'm behind you all the way. You're smarter than Nicky ever was,
il povero
. Brains like you got don't come on a platter.” He put four thousand into an account for me, saying another four would be lodged there whenever I signaled. “After that,” he warned, with a kiss on my forehead, “you are on your own,
figlio mio
.”

What he said was only partially true. I was smarter than Nicky in one way: I hadn't got myself killed in Vietnam. Apart from that, I wasn't sure what smart meant, apart from an ability to suck up to teachers and get the necessary grades. But I took Nonno's money. If this was what “family” meant to an Italian-American grandfather, so be it. I was indeed part of the family, and partook of its good fortune. The arrangement suited me fine. Had his name been Jones or Smith instead of Massolini, I'd have probably gotten a fond farewell shake and a kick in my skinny ass.

I promised Nonno that when I became a successful writer I would pay him back, but he just waved his hand, a familiar gesture that had waved off endless attempts at gratitude over the years. “I don't want your money,” he said. “You can sign your book for me,
basta
.” Then he said, “And it better be a good book if it's got my name on the cover.” We shared a name, more or less: Alessandro Massolini. But I was Alex Massolini. More American than Italian—that had been the intention of my parents. “You can't get ahead in this country with a handle like Alessandro,” my father said. “Even DiMaggio was Joe, not Giuseppe. Marilyn Monroe would never have married a guy called Giuseppe.” But Alex Massolini was close enough for Nonno. So the book had better be a good one.

I sat in the ship's bar, reading one of the handful of books I carried with me, an English translation of Rilke's
Letters to a Young Poet
. An English teacher of mine at Columbia had recommended it, and I'd been grazing contentedly in its pages for the past week. In his third letter to his correspondent, written near Pisa on April 23, 1903, Rilke had warned against reading literary criticism. “Such things are either partisan views,
petrified and grown senseless in their lifeless induration, or they are clever quibblings in which today one view wins and tomorrow the opposite.” In contrast, “works of art are of an infinite loneliness.” He recommended solitude.
“Everything
is gestation,” he said, “and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity.” I wanted to achieve these clarities, and to learn the patience to let them gather. Only then would I write something worthy of my grandfather's name.

Since arriving in Italy, I had seen countless replicas of Nonno—wizened old men with faces like baked mud flats, and white hair sprouting from their ears and noses. A small army of dozing
nonni
could be found in piazzas from Calabria to Trieste, an empty glass of wine on the table beside them. They slumped in buses or strolled the tortuous streets of villages they knew well enough to sleepwalk without fear of getting lost. Indeed, the ferry to Capri boasted several exact replicas of the type, including one of the waiters in the ship's bar: a grizzly, humpbacked Amalfitano called Andrea (virtually every male in Amalfi is called Andrea, after the patron saint of sailors). He served me a frothy cappuccino, his hand shaking so badly that much of it spilled into the saucer.

“Where are you going,
ragazz
'?”

“Capri,” I said, pouring the spilled milk from the saucer back into the cup. I was a little offended by his assuming I was
un ragazzo
.

“We also stop at Positano.”

“Well, I'm going to Capri,” I said, feeling good about my Italian, which held up decently so long as I didn't venture beyond the simplest of conversations.

“You are a tourist?”

“Not exactly.”

“But what will you do there?” he wondered, his nostrils opening with the interrogation.

I considered explaining to him about my secretarial job on Capri, but I guessed it would lead me into linguistic corners I could not easily back
out of. I tried to pretend that the notebook on the table was drawing my attention. But this only inflamed his curiosity.

“What are you writing,
signore
?”

“A poem,” I said.

“Ah, we have many fine poets in Italy. You know Dante—
La Divina Commedia
?” He launched into an incomprehensible but highly dramatic recitation from the epic, clipping off the final syllables (thus ruining the rhymes) in the manner of most southern Italians. His performance brought much of the activity around us to a halt, and when he was finished, a birdlike woman in a black dress began to clap.

I listened with a distracted amazement. Would anyone but a college professor in America be able to recite verbatim from a similar text? Did we have a similar text?
Song of Myself
, perhaps?

The recitation finished, he said, “So, tell me. Do you know Capri? The Blue Grotto? The Matromania Cave?” His bushy white eyebrows lifted, and they would not settle into place again until I answered.

I shook my head. The only Blue Grotto I knew was a cheap spaghetti joint near the Columbia campus.

“This is paradise, Capri. They come from all over the world to see it, even China. It is what we call a legend.” While he extolled the virtues of Capri—the pure air, the remorselessly brilliant sunshine, the intriguing people—I finished the cappuccino, feigning interest in his monologue. I had been in this situation with my grandfather many times, so it felt familiar. One had to appear attentive enough not to hurt the speaker's feelings, but not so attentive that elaboration was provoked.

“You will excuse me,” I said, when he paused to light a cigarette. I left him shifting from foot to foot as I gathered my things, joining a cluster of tourists, mostly Germans and Swedes, on the foredeck. How else to escape his conversation?

The sight of the breaking coastline was enough to silence idle chatter as a fine mist dampened our faces but didn't obscure our vision. Cove upon cove opened for us, with whole towns wedged precariously into the cliffs. It was the season for lemons, like bright bulbs in trees that were wrapped in black mesh to keep the fruit from spilling. Occasionally, a villa of substantial size and opulence appeared, clinging like a swallow's
nest to the cliff. Based on what I gleaned from overheard conversations, the coast teemed with famous movie producers, industrial magnates, and Mafiosi. “Carlo Ponti lives there, the film producer,” one of them said, pointing to a sculpted mansion on a jut of land between clashing rocks. I had never heard of Carlo Ponti, but I was still impressed.

On the other side of the ferry, in the open sea that bent to the earth's curve, fishing boats could be seen in the distance, trolling with nets designed to catch the cascades of dime-size clams that were popular on the coast, usually cooked in olive oil and garlic and served with spaghetti. Toward the northwest, a bank of dark clouds appeared without warning, a fierce line marking off blue sky from black. The sea, as if newly alert to a shift in atmosphere, became choppier, the bow parsing the waves more severely. Loud squawking gulls that had trailed us all the way from Amalfi like an elaborate kite continued to buck and weave, devouring whatever morsels were churned up by the ferry's wake. (I thought of a gorgeous phrase from Yeats: “That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.” But what on earth
was
a gong-tormented sea?)