L'America (16 page)

 

Bea had long since forgiven Beth for falling in love in Páros. "When I realized how serious this was," she said, there was nothing she could feel but happiness and a hope that someday this relationship would mean that Beth would live permanently in Città. Years later, after Bea had abandoned Italy for New York, she admitted that she had been stupid to hope that Beth would have come to live in Città. "It would have been wrong for you and would have destroyed you. Cesare, dreamer that he was, would never have been capable of being anything but a spoiled boy from that town." In the end, after knowing him longer, Bea did not like Cesare. She saw that he was entitled in the way that rich boys from Città were: arrogant and unaware of their privilege. Sure, they had secret notions, but for all their confidence and all their resources, they couldn't break away. But that was later. For now, in Beth's second year of living in Italy with Bea's family, Bea hoped. She hoped along with Beth's grandmother, who helped fund this year because she was determined that Beth lead a "normal" life far from her father's ideas of "joyful" communal living in which talent was liberated from the pesky details of everyday life.

"Hogwash," Grammy would say to Beth. "Someone has to wash the dishes." But Claire did work as far as Beth could tell. If you liked to cook you cooked, if you liked to farm you farmed, if you liked to sew you sewed, if you liked children you taught, etc. It was a thriving farm that fed itself, taught itself, paid for itself—a think tank of sorts, too, from which some quite clever ideas were emerging about the use of alternative fuels. Indeed, by the year 2017 many cars would be using hydrogen and Jackson's role in this transformation would be acknowledged. And though Beth would be sixteen years dead, her daughter Valeria would witness the fruits of this dream, invited with her grandfather to Washington to celebrate the milestone and his contributions, his sheer persistence and determination in spreading the word, putting a face on the idea. Now, however, Beth was alive: she was twenty-one years old, lying in the grass at Fiori with the summer against her skin and a future looming beautifully in front of her. Cesare lay by her side, pondering the idea of a year in America, which he liked very much but only cautiously so because he knew his parents would not approve, that they would want him to finish university first, and even then they would find the year an extravagance and a waste. "Tell me what I would do," Cesare said. He wanted to hear the flood of her ideas for him, how easily they came from her lips like all those soap bubbles blown by a child.

"We'd be in New York," she said. "You could do anything there." The possibility, an ever-expanding universe. "You could study at Columbia's business school, get a job on Wall Street. Your father must have connections." She paused, thought deeply. He could see the answer occurring to her. "Or better yet, you could study American literature, write for a newspaper. You're a brilliant writer." He thought of all the letters he had written to her, the stacks she had at home, neatly preserved in a box, of how she would tell him this, that she loved being away from him, in part, simply so she could receive those letters with their detailed reports of Città, the people, the intricacies of his love for her. "Write more," she often wrote to him, and the knowledge that she liked his letters made him work harder on the next.

It was life at Claire that Cesare liked to imagine. What talent of his could he really offer? Certainly not banking. During Servizio Civile, his job had been to work with paraplegics and spastics and other severely handicapped teenagers. They adored him simply because he was not afraid to tease them, not afraid to carry them about with him with all their complicated equipment, wheelchairs and breathing tubes, and to entertain them with his friends. He had liked that job; it had given him a sense of purpose.

"You could go to Claire if you wanted," Beth said. "You could help out as a nurse, the way you help with the invalids."

"Be reasonable, Bet," he said, and he laughed imagining himself as a nurse. He explained that a career as a nurse would humiliate his family, that there was very little he could do that would not humiliate his family, and as he watched her bright eyes he realized how little she allowed herself to understand even though she tried. "It's already been decided for me," he said.

"But you can change that," she said. And with her will, pure American will, the will of a new country that believed irrefutably that the best was still to come, she persisted. He loved all sports. He could farm. Farming was another career that would humiliate Cesare's family, but he did not tell her that. He did not tell her, either, that the gift of having his life decided for him had made him lazy.

 

During the first weeks of their romance in Città, once they had found each other again after Greece, every time Cesare saw Beth she became light and impatient as if every nerve had wings, so apparent was her infatuation that it was as if she were made of air. Now in the grass at Fiori, he wondered if she would ever leave America permanently for him, or he Italy for her? He wondered if somehow they could merge in their children, create a magical combination of stability and freedom. He was romantic that way. Cesare had been in love a few times, but when he met Beth it seemed to him he had been wrong before and that he had never actually been in love at all. She was a prism, always refracting a new light. His other girlfriends knew the path they had to walk and walked it with elegance and style in their fine Italian clothes, believing in the good alliance of the Cellini bank and Macchi socks. Beth wore jeans and jack Purcells and got fashion wrong when she tried on Bea's hand-me-downs.

"Come see for yourself if the great experiment of America works," she was always saying to him in her persistent way.

"Oh, Bet, I would like to," he said.

"Would?" she said. He was, as were all Italians, good at using the conditional tense. The list of things they
would
like to do was much longer than the list of things they actually did. "
Vorrei, vorrei, vorrei,
" she said, daring, bold, unafraid to draw attention to herself. It was way past midnight and they were eating watermelon with friends at a farmer's stand by the side of the road—long picnic tables beneath bright lights and plenty of other people both old and young, slurping up the fruit, spitting out the seeds. She loved the innocence of all these people gathered over the jolly slices of watermelon so late at night. Cesare had been doing it since he was a child, part of that pattern of his days and years. Classes, siesta, work, study, a stroll before dinner down the arcaded
Corso Roma
in the center of town greeting his friends—friends he had known since childhood. His parents and their parents had played as children, too. On weekends Cesare and his friends played, enjoying big picnics and soccer, windsurfing on the lake. For a week in the winter they took a
Settimana Bianca,
skiing in the Dolomites, a month in the summer at the beach. The Cellinis spent the month of September in Marmi on the island of Elba in a humble beach shack. (For all their money they were not extravagant.) How Beth loved these patterns; she was fascinated by the notion of knowing—day in, day out; year in, year out—what to expect from a day, a life, for five hundred years, like threading time, stitching up all these lives. Beth saw it clearly, this life in perpetuity, and had a great respect for such continuity.

At the watermelon stand Cesare's friends watched them; they always watched the couple, wondering how long this affair would last, making private bets on who would take whom away from what. And, of course, that was the issue here: not a simple year abroad or a vacation to his girlfriend's family. In town one night someone spray-painted,
GO HOME, AMERICAN
on the walls beneath the portico along the
Corso Roma.
America was ugly and new and powerful, dictating to the world in the guise of spreading freedom. But really most of Cesare's friends loved Beth and loved things American: Nikes, Levi's, Bruce Springsteen, Simon and Garfunkel. One friend had her write down all the words to an entire album of Simon and Garfunkel songs so that he could learn them to sing along with his guitar. He spoke no English. Whenever Beth came from America, Cesare's friends would ask her to bring Vibram-soled shoes—Timberlands, L. L. Bean boots—and her suitcases filled with the orders. Cesare taught them all American football and baseball, presiding over his friends with the confidence of a politician, all charisma and charm. Emulation. Cesare, without having been to America, brought America to Città. As a result there was a trend: they wanted to look American, be American, and never leave Città.

Cesare cleaned the paint up so that Beth would never know. But she had known. She had seen it, impossible to miss, a bright blue beneath the portico, when she was shopping on the
Corso
with Bea.

"You're popular," Bea had said, her arm linked in Beth's, standing in front of the graffiti.

"Oh very," Beth had replied. Suddenly she hated Italy. She wanted to go into a store and try on many items, leave them all unfolded and buy not a one, demolishing the unspoken law of trying on only what you intended to buy (which, even so, was an imposition on the sales help). "It's the most absurd idea," Beth had said to Bea. "How can you possibly know if a sweater looks good unless you try it on?"

After occasions like these, Beth would write long, tearful letters to Sylvia, sitting in Bea's dark room with the shutters drawn, everyone else about their business. She would describe the painted sign in detail, complain about how faraway and alone she felt. Cesare's crowd of friends was very different from Bea's so they rarely went out together. Bea was always caught up with some new lover or other, anyway—some dangerous and illicit situation that Cesare didn't find very amusing. Cesare didn't like Bea, she would write; Cesare's family didn't much seem to care for Bea's, though Beth couldn't understand why, knew that there was some deeper social complexity that was beyond her desire to comprehend. The Cellinis never once asked about the Nuova family, referred to them as "the family from Genova" (it didn't matter that a hundred years had passed since the Nuova family had lived there) when Beth mentioned them. By the time Sylvia's response arrived in the mail (soothing letters, mostly filled with details of college life in Boston, escapades with boyfriends that made Beth long to be in college herself), Beth would be vibrant again, the insult forgotten. Then something else would occur and once again she would write.

Of the graffiti incident Cesare said tenderly, "
Non essere triste,
Bet." She thought of all the friends, the meals and conversations, the Vibram-soled shoes, the ease with which they seemed to accept her, understanding it all now as a charade. "It does not mean anything, just jealousy." That's what her father always said whenever someone made fun of Claire, whenever anyone pointed out (her grandmother most of all) that in the United States of America there were over fifteen hundred such communal experiments in living and most of them failed. "Because of sex and drugs and ego," the grandmother would say, stabbing her listener with her piercing green eyes, her white hair rolled up like a crown. "I have two words:
Jim Jones
"

"I can already see that the great experiment of America works perfectly," Cesare said beneath the bright lights of the watermelon stand. Beth lit up like a prize. He wanted to fly away with her right there, to rise up from the table in front of his friends to show them
she wins.

 

When Beth first met Cesare's father, Giovanni Paolo, she thought he was the gardener. Cesare had driven her to Fiori not long after they met again. It was early fall. The woods were thick with fallen leaves and the sky was gray and somewhat sad. Giovanni Paolo appeared from what seemed to be a garden arbor still very green with all the ivy. In his left hand he carried a small rifle and on his right hand he wore a thick black leather glove. The glove seemed odd to Beth, somehow hard, yet also very workmanlike and worn, something a gardener would wear. She imagined it had a mate he had already taken off. He was a small old man with a fringe of thin white hair on his otherwise bald scalp, and a serious demeanor. With some trouble he placed the gun beneath his right arm and, sticking out his left, ungloved, hand for her to shake, said, "
Piacere.
" He did not look her in the eye or even smile, and she assumed this was because the gardener was either tired and shy or rude. The exchange lasted less than a minute before he vanished back into the arbor, so quickly Cesare did not have a chance to say a word. She noticed that this old man's shirt had ripped at the shoulder and that sweat beaded beneath his eyes. Then he was gone. "Why does the gardener carry a gun?" she had asked Cesare.

"You mean my father." She blushed, mortified, and then just as quickly felt insulted. She pictured him zipping up to Bern with that small gun to save his daughter from the clowns.

"He doesn't like me?" she asked.

"He's scared of you," Cesare said.

"Of me?" Beth almost laughed. She looked down at herself, feeling quite small and young but also sort of powerful like an army, a country, Cleopatra. Not long after this first meeting, the father would start asking Cesare, in front of Beth, "Whatever happened to Francesca?" Cesare was always formal and polite with his father and would never have corrected him about Francesca, though Beth would have liked him to. Even when Cesare teased his father over small things or funny coincidences (for example, the pope had the same brand of skis as Signor Cellini and liked to ski the same Cortina slopes as Signor Cellini, the parallels made room for jokes, especially since Giovanni Paolo was not at all religious), he did so with trepidation, as if he did not know how his father would respond, as if he knew he must always be careful. Beth would come to learn that Signor Cellini had supported Mussolini (briefly) in his youth and that now he gave impassioned speeches about the secession of the north from the south.