The Farewell Symphony (14 page)

He told me of the one gay bar in town, the Saint James at the top of the Via Veneto, and there I headed the next night. Instead of raucous New Yorkers in jeans swilling beers in a bar with sawdust on the floor and rock and roll in the air, here I found decorous Romans in velvet suits and satin shirts sipping Prosecco from stemware while standing under spotlights or sitting on half-hidden settees and listening to Milva crooning heart-sick ballads. Each drink cost a small fortune and everyone nursed his glass during the entire evening. I started talking to a soldier in uniform. At first he attracted me because I'd made up a fantasy that he was a con-tadino from Calabria, a "peasant" (the very word makes Americans laugh).

But soon enough I learned that if he continued to speak to me in his stilted English he did so because he wanted to pracdce and indulge in cultural chat at the same time. He was a baronino from Florence whose research into William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience had been tragically interrupted by two and a half years of national service; as he primly explained, unfortunately he'd neglected to enlist in an officers' training corps at university, more appropriate to his aristocratic status, and now he was, alas, a common soldier. I said I thought a common soldier was sexier, a remark that eluded him and, when he grasped it, miffed him.

Guglielmo was taller than I and six years younger, but thanks to my youthful looks and American Innocence as contrasted to his European Experience, we came out roughly as contemporaries.

"I'm delighted to meet you," Guglielmo said with his vagrant vowels and odd lilt, as he stared down at me through his tinted glasses, which gave his eyes a sickly, jaundiced look.

"Me, too," I whispered. "I've just been here two weeks but it's hard—"

"It is what?"

"It's difficult to start off, to begin, in a new city."

"Even for me. Also for me?"

"Even."

"Even for me. I'm from Florence. We call it Firenze. Are you art historian?"

"No."

"Journalist?"

"No," I said. "Nothing. I'm nothing. I don't work. But I'd like to be a novelist— romanziere."

"You does not work? Millionaire?" There was a hint of playfulness in his question, the first sign that he might really be an aristocrat.

I smiled mysteriously.

Although Guglielmo could speak English, on our subsequent dates he insisted we communicate in Italian, but instead of complimenting me on my little achievements in threading together three or four words, he criticized me for neglecting to use the pluperfect subjunctive; soon my mental nickname for him became Fossero Fui, two of the forms I could never master. His new family name I mentally spelled as Phooey. When we went to bed he took a shower first and sprinkled talcum powder on his feet, then he mounted me as he smiled a beatific smile of Fra Angelico gende-ness, a million miles away from the I'm-going-to-fuck-you-until-I-take-

The Farewell Symphony

out-your-tonsils New York attitude Fd been conditioned to find exciting. He had lots of manie that I considered tiresome probably because I wasn't in love with him. For instance, he'd decided that he detested newspapers and refused even to read one. He thought that Italians wasted all their time in cafes talking politics and shuffling tlirough several morning and afternoon papers. Like Blake he was an aesthete and a visionary above current events. (But wasn't Blake a printer^ I wondered.) Guglielmo had also made a cult out of promptness, to distinguish himself from all these lazy southern Italians (the south begins at Rome). I felt certain that Blake had not been punctual and could see nothing visionar\' about so much fussiness. And I thought bitterly that only a son doted on by his family would have had the encouragement necessary to elaborate all these caprices. In my famOy I'd remained underdeveloped because unnoticed—a neglect, however, I'd come to like, since it permitted me to invent a simple, all-purpose personality.

He wanted to reprimand me for my boorish American manners and teach me the fine points of Italian cultural history; which he tried to make more accessible by drawing analogies with similar moments in William Blake's life, a personal trajectory I knew no more about than Leopardi's or Alfieri's. Two men together search for a style—brothers, best friends, father and son, mother and son, husband and wife, rivals—and one pairing slips over another like those successive lenses at the eye doctor's that fmally bring the smallest and lowest line of print into focus. Guglielmo's choice was to be a long-suffering father with a lazy and disobedient son who was adorable simply because he was an only child. I thought he'd never ha\'e become my lover in New York, but in Rome I didn't know how to maneuver, I was lonely and no one seemed to like my looks.

Fortunately he was seldom free to spend a whole night away from the barracks, which gave me ample opportunities to cruise the Colosseum. There I met a tall blond Venetian waiter with a distinguished face and a beautiful body. His \'oice sounded hoUow to me, as though he were calling from the other room and the other room was a big, tile-lined bathroom. Like a child, Fd touch his forehead when he spoke and it always resonated. He generated a sort of silent gusto that I found very reposeful. He had ver\' bad breath that I started to think was erotic. It wasn't a passing embarrassment caused by sleep or gariic, say, but a permanent rot that I'd search out, something initially repulsive but fmally exciting, like a very-ripe cheese.

He couldn't keep his right index finger out of my asshole. If I cooked

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spaghetti in my tart's flat with the velvet swags, every time I approached the table with a new dish he'd pull mc onto his knee and shove a hand down the back of my jeans. Later, in bed, if I'd kiss his big, veined hand it would smell of my ass, which I liked. For him my penis was just a laughable little handle he used to turn me over in bed. He didn't correct me when I flubbed the subjunctive. He probably didn't know how to use it himself

An American college friend I'd stayed in touch with had told me to look up his Roman cousin, Tina. On the phone she had a wonderfully low, seductive voice and a schoolgirl's sudden, explosive laugh. She told me to come right over. I'd pointed out it was three o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon, which had seemed to surprise her but leave her indifferent. She'd laughed when she said, "But I don't understand nothing you say."

Her huge, nineteenth-century/)a/a.;^o was near the Qiiirinale, the President's residence, and beside a Baroque fountain so ugly that when it was unveiled all Rome had mocked the sculptor, until he'd committed suicide. A sour-faced portiere opened the small, low door let into two big ones and growled something at me. In the dark, neglected courtyard at the bottom of a seven-story well, a thick-thighed Diana drew an arrow from a quiver on her shoulder. The tip of her cement bow had broken off and the exposed metal armature dripped rust stains down her gathered hunting skirt. The elevator clanked noisily.

Tina opened a heavily barricaded door, shook my hand manfully and led me down a dark hall with a stone floor. I experienced the tension of meeting someone new whose sex and language placed her at a considerable distance from me, which neither love nor talk would ever close. In her cold, damp sitting room with its ineffectual heater and tattered couch and chair marooned in the midst of an immense stone floor, we stood for a moment, eyeing each other. She seemed to be as much a stranger here as I and just as uncertain what to do. She lit a cigarette and sat down and murmured, "Hmmmn" on a falling note, indicating the armchair with her chin.

Stretched canvases were leaning against every wall, their backs turned modestly to the viewer. For an instant I tried to imagine Tina (short for Diamantina, a family name) as a blend of Christa, the plain-mannered European woman, and Maria, artist and intellectual, but these clues soon evaporated as I was faced with Tina's unpredictability.

"Yes, Emmanuele told me to look you up," I said, naming her American cousin. "He seems to be doing very well. Ever the dandy, of course.

The Farewell Symphony

ordering his hats from Lock's in London with his initials stamped in gold on the sweatband."

''Cosa?" she asked, looking at me with huge eyes, liquid as oysters, floating between lids as black as mussel shells. Her cheap Italian cigarette burned between the yellowed fingers of a drooping hand. She shook her head silendy as though to wake herself out of a bad dream.

"I'm sorry," I said. ''Mi displace."

She never let her eyes drift away from mine. Even when she lowered her head, her eyes would still be frxed on me, their whites tinted yellow. She was in a simple grey skirt and white blouse. Her hair glistened wet on the sides where she'd just slicked it back, which gave her a slightly raffish glamor. She scrutinized me so closely that I felt false, as though so much attention must automatically uncover my superficiality or hypocrisy.

The room was cold and dark, the windows shrouded in velvet curtains the color of wine dregs, curtains that had gone bald at the hem and at the height where a hand might have tugged them open or shut, day after weary day. Now they were shut. A floor lamp with a chromium hood and a flex—an old-fashioned dentist's lamp—was lit and trained expectandy on the velvet, as though the curtains might suddenly part and reveal an old chantense.

I started a sentence with the respectful form oiyou {"Lei") and she immediately corrected me, not, I felt certain, because we were already such friends but because any sign of formality went against her bluff" style.

An hour went by as the smoke from our cigarettes floated through the lamp light trained on the velvet curtain. Every attempt I made to communicate, putting my two hundred Italian words together in various unlikely combinations, fell flat and I became nearly hysterical from frustration and the shame of boring Diamantina. She let her large, unhealthy eyes dissect me. As I became more and more hearty and despairing in the production of conversation-manual banalities, each so full of faults that I could distinctly see the big C-minus scrawled in red across my exercise sheet, Tina dropped into ever-gloomier silence. She had a two-liter botde of red wine on the stone floor beside her chair, the cheap kind of w^ne bought at the corner for pennies in an unlabeled bottle sealed with a metal cap, the sort of bottle that suggested it marked a daily necessity, not an occasional festivity. Her teeth were blue from it, I noticed.

Just when I thought I'd exhausted her patience, she said I should stay to eat something. I stood in the doorway of her ancient kitchen with its marble sink and tiny modern stove installed on a site that had once been

occupied by an immense iron oven, to judge from the rust scrapes and stains on the wail and floor. Tina was suddenly efficient in the dimly lit kitchen, no longer a sibyl hanging over the smoke of her cigarette and staring into the void, but now a much younger woman, slim-hipped in her grey skirt, her pale slender arms weaving the air as she spin-dried salad leaves, mixed a vinaigrette, filled a cauldron with water to cook spaghetti. She gave me the name of Lucrezia, someone who could teach me Italian, a friend of hers—another "sad lady," she said in English with a smile. I immediately wanted to know all the details behind Lucrezia's unhappi-ness, since in America curiosity counts as a social grace. Tina was highly evasive in answering me, since in Europe satisfying curiosity of my sort counts as a betrayal. Americans serve themselves and their friends up as stories, laced with pathos and spiced with scandal, the dish piping hot on demand. A European discloses himself, if that word can be used to suggest a series of locks opening and shutting, the whole slow and cautious. For an American a confidence is an ice-breaker and we describe our grandmother's suicide with the same desire to appear amiable that a European employs in commenting on the unseasonably warm weather. We forget what we've told to whom, whereas Europeans tremble and go pale when they decide to reveal something personal. In Europe an avowal counts as a precious sign of commitment; in America it amounts to nothing more than a how-do-vou-do.

My fear of the bus—I didn't know which end to get on, how much to pay, how to signal my wish to descend—meant that I walked everywhere, miles and miles until my legs ached at night and I longed for someone to rub them. The next afternoon I walked along the Tiber for an hour and then found, a mUe behind the Vatican, Lucrezia's address in a 1960s piazza of yellow-brick apartment blocks.

She was small, chubby, tidy, sharp, always laughing, terminally depressed. Her three-room apartment was dark and hushed as though even on a cold, rainy January day she were determined to exclude the summer heat as a form of gaiety inappropriate to her deep mourning. She loved the latest American slang and pronounced it as though in italics; she was very proud of her hoard of argot, which she regularly replenished by translating the latest American novels and puzzling out these novelties with her American students. Sometimes when she laughed she hissed like a snake and this sound drowned out the ends of conventional sentences.

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She lifted her arms away from her body and let them fall back in place, as though she were a duck too fat to fly. Her eyes would be squeezed shut when she laughed. Somehow her laughter struck me as mirthless, even sad.

Her teaching method was clever. She invited me to gossip away in Italian as best I could, discussing what I would ordinarily discuss in EngHsh; when stumped for the next expression, I'd pause. She'd then provide the missing word. I'd write it down in a notebook I kept week after week. Somewhere no doubt that notebook still exists, a record of my frivolous chatter.

I discovered that vocabularies had their own propriety, just as did people, and that they could not be mixed any easier than could the social classes. For instance, the word for a sports fan was tifoso, a "typhoid" victim, since the soccer enthusiast presumably foams at the mouth and shakes all over, but when I said I was ''uno tifoso di Beethoven" (a Beethoven fan), Lucrezia looked at me as though I was mad. Whereas rapidly shifting from one register to another was a source of liveliness in English, it seemed barbaric in Italian, or just, quite simply, wrong.