L'America (25 page)

 

And then they would be at Claire. Beth's father never called to ask her to come, but his gravitational pull was strong nonetheless. At least every other weekend they went to Claire. Sometimes Cesare went by himself. Beth studied the farm's books, helped do the things that needed getting done in the spring with the apples. She and Cesare hauled strawberries to New York restaurants in June, blackberries in July, raspberries in August. Cesare grew to understand how all the various pieces fit into Claire's operations: the goats for goat cheese buttons; the bees for honey; the tourists for a night's stay and cash; the reenactments for cash; the slaughtering of the beef, the pigs, the chickens, and on and on.

At the grandmother's party, Claire, the woman, and Claire the place were both spoken of. On a wall in the living room hung an oil portrait of Claire when she was a girl, a lovely girl with strong eyes and dark curls; her fierce intelligence seemed to emanate from the very paint like rays of sunshine. Looking at it, the ladies would say, "An odd end for the dearest girl." Something they surely said each time they saw the portrait, never accepting or reconciling themselves to her fate, haunted by it themselves even though they had outlived her already by a lifetime.

At Claire there was one snapshot of Claire, taken moments before she was hit. She is smiling, her head turned to look back over her shoulder. She has climbed the wall and Jackson has said her name and she has turned knowing he will take a picture. The smile says, "I've seen what's on the other side of this wall and you haven't. I know what lies beyond. I want to take you there." Sissy Three caught Cesare studying the photograph. "It is not a coincidence," Sissy said, "that this is the only picture of Claire Jackson has." Beth was in New York and Cesare was visiting Claire by himself this time. He had been in America about eight months. He had heard Sissy Three speak on more than one occasion about Claire's dreams. He had not yet been able to penetrate Jackson, to get to a level of intimate conversation. Cesare understood he never would, that Jackson's own daughter never would, that Jackson wasn't designed like that—because of who he was or because of fate. Jackson, for the most part, kept busy with the chores of the farm and with his letters to Washington, working at a vast and dark desk late into the night. On the walls of his office were indecipherable charts and graphs and diagrams. Endless clippings from magazines and newspapers scattered the floor. Jackson still spoke to Claire, and Cesare was beginning to understand that if Jackson's own daughter couldn't find a way to talk to him about the futility of these conversations neither could he.

Cesare looked at Sissy's beauty pouring from her eyes and lips and asked her quite simply, "Why have you devoted your life to the casual dreams of some other woman?" Day in, day out, they ran this farm and made it work. Cesare had come to enjoy working with his hands—milking the goats; picking the early summer apples, the strawberries; fertilizing the fields; talking with Jackson about a day when America would not depend on the Middle East for fuel, predicting the grave dangers of doing nothing. Claire even sold berries to New York restaurateurs, negotiating keenly the price per pint. Sissy looked Cesare in the eye, held him with her gaze, and answered, "We all need to believe in something."

"It's not clear though if this is really what Claire would have pursued," he said.

"Yes it is." She flexed her hands in front of her. They were slender and long and beautiful. Better a farm than hands, he supposed. She could have spent her life believing in her hands.

"How do you know?" he pressed.

"Because I believe in the idea and I believe that her life has to amount to something, that lives have to amount to something," she said. And that is all she would allow on the subject.
She's crazy,
he thought.
They're all crazy.
But then he banished the notion, fearing it would break a spell.

 

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti writes about history consuming itself, regurgitating itself, repeating itself endlessly. We're tricked into believing in history's linearity. But it circles and circles and circles around on itself, learning little, trapping itself like the snake that eats its own tail. Fishing on Claire's swollen spring river, Preveena casting her line easily with the gentlest snap of her wrist, sari drenched and bunched at her ankles, resolved Cesare's confusion unwittingly and quite simply: "Jackson is stuck, like one in quicksand, in the past." She cast again. For a long time they were silent, casting, catching nothing, their flies skipping gracefully across the rapids. Then Preveena said, "Beth, however, is not. Jackson has somehow managed to set her free."

With her words the Polaroid image emerged, fully focused, and Cesare could finally see his life and Beth's with inescapable clarity. He sees Sissy Three toasting Claire at Thanksgiving. He sees Preveena fishing. He sees Beth concocting grand schemes out of pizzas. He sees Fiori. He sees the Cellini fresco with the outsized lovelorn girl. He sees his father in his garden working at the weeds. He sees Jackson tethered to the ground of Claire, chasing the smile of a beautiful girl. He sees history eating its own tail. He sees five hundred years of Cesares and Giovanni Paolos. He sees. He sees. He sees. He sees Claire, the farm, an elaborate homage to a personal past. Fiori an elaborate homage to a personal past. Jackson freed Beth. Cesare's father did not free him. Cesare had wanted to save Beth, or so he had imagined. What he really wanted was to free himself.

 

Cesare had left the Indian and Paul Stuart with the tuxedo, the shirt, the cummerbund, the bow tie, the cuff links, suspenders, and vest, thinking about Beth's roommate with her pink hair and ripped tights and of the Indian salesman who lived in Queens, his family in India, and of all the juxtapositions—dizzying and grand and simple—of Claire. All these worlds coexisting, integral and not, overlapping really, yet independent and aloof, the world in microcosm, all here to find linearity, to escape the past.

In Italy, men do not wear tuxedos. But Cesare enjoyed how American the fancy suit made him feel. Months later, a late summer evening, he wore it out, not for any occasion, just to drive those avenues and through those canyons, his arm draped effortlessly over the back of the front seat as if he were some grand character—a Gary Cooper, say, or a Cary Grant—in some romantic comedy from the 1940s. In New York he had the sense that even if one made one's self, one would still remain anonymous and there was something a little sad, a little terrifying in that: each person his own country held together by private, rather than collective, ambition. By this summer evening Cesare had been in America well over nine months, and though he had pursued many things, really, he realized, he had pursued nothing. He had spent his time stepping out with Veronica and Jane, playing with the Texans, drifting off to Claire to help on the farm, dabbling at one short story, writing those long letters home, roaming the Strand, reading, and receiving money wired from Città, courtesy of the Cellini bank. There was little that he had accomplished in terms of trying to understand if he could make a life here. He did not discuss this with Beth. But she knew. Italy, the predictability of his small town, the soccer game on a Saturday afternoon, windsurfing on the lake, a job held for him for centuries seemed very far away but completely possible.

Somewhere, somehow, for no understandable reason, he wished that Beth were the sort of girl who would dye her hair pink and cause trouble, that he were that sort of man, that together they could throw everything to the wind. Right now, cruising the heart of Wall Street, dark and late and no one about, he wanted to leave—wanted to pick up Beth and drive across America, drive to Las Vegas and get married, drive into a story, a novel, something bigger than both of them.

He drove to her apartment. She was asleep. He sat and watched her as he liked to do. The sirens of Sixth Avenue hollered. Lights swirled through the window. Her roommates were out. He thought of Grammy and her parlor games with her ladies, trying at once to be European while disparaging Europe with the notion of all Italians as carefree bottom pinchers, all Swiss as on time, all French as mean, all Germans as officious. He remembered stopping at the gas station on his last drive home from Claire, a massive truck stop somewhere in New Jersey. The gas station attendants all in a row pumping gas came from a dozen different countries. They had come for the Promise. Now their children spoke unaccented English. Now their children dressed in Levi's and ate fried chicken and Hamburger Helper. Now their children disparaged the countries of their origin as dirty and poor and filled with disease. Now their children were well educated, ambitious. Now their parents' pasts were absorbed neatly into the fabric of this culture—the fabric that permitted all and everyone to celebrate the Chinese New Year, Hindu Holi, Kwanzaa, Yom Kippur, and whatever else there is. Cesare thought of Fiori. He thought of socks and shoes and feet and of how flat the prospect of that work made him feel; he thought of Beth's pizzas and the delight on her face at their success. He wanted to feel in himself Beth's passion and ambition—the ambition she had once made him feel.

"Cesare?" she said, opening her eyes in the dark. "Are you wearing a tuxedo?"

"Do I look like a movie star?"

"My movie star." Red lights from the street striped her face. Her hair was messy, her teeth unbrushed. Then suddenly sitting up: "What's wrong?"

"I want you to get dressed," he said. "The car's waiting downstairs."

"Where are we going?"

"Las Vegas."

"To do what?"

"To get married." He had a good friend from Città who fell in love with a duke from Milan. When she was twenty-four, the duke flew her to America, to Las Vegas, and married her in a little chapel there. It was a surprise. Beth had always found the story very romantic, and Cesare knew that.

"What's wrong?" she asked again. She had the sense that something big was coming. She was afraid. She was wide awake now. She had the urge to yell at him, to tell him he had been lazy, that he had not tried, that he had never given it a chance. She knew him absolutely, knew where he was headed.

And then he said very simply, "I don't know who I am."

 

Much later, the year 1997. Beth is eight months pregnant with Valeria. She's sitting in a row of three seats at a discount store. The store is not far from Claire in Pennsylvania. Beth and Preveena are Christmas shopping. Preveena has asked a saleswoman to check the price of an untagged item she wants to buy: an Italian knitted newborn outfit for Valeria. "It's only worth it if it's cheap," Beth has advised, and Preveena disappears to find the saleswoman. Beth now is sitting by herself near the cashiers. Sun streams through the glass, warming her neck. She's wearing a floor-length sheepskin coat and black pants with large white flowers all over them, boots, and a black sweater that neatly covers her belly. She is tired from the weight of the baby and its incessant kicking.

"Are you Italian?" A tall older man appears before her, looking down at her. He has a closely shaved face spotted with nicks and tracks of dried blood. He sits down. His breath is bad.

"No," she says. But she is flattered.

"You look Italian." She wants to ask what it is about her that appears Italian. She thinks, All those years made me into something that I am.

"
Parlo Italiano pero'.
"

"
Di dov'e' Lei?
"

"
Ho passato qualche anno a Città la Venice quand'ero giovane.
"

"When you were young?" He laughs. "You're young now." She smiles, flattered again. "I grew up in Trieste in northeast Italy but I left after the war. Nearly fifty years ago. There was no work there."

"More time here than there," she says. She turns her head slightly away from his because she doesn't like looking at his shaving scabs and smelling his breath.

"Città is near Milano," he says. "I'll tell you a dirty joke in Milanese, but I won't translate it for you." He begins his joke. It comes out fast in an unfamiliar dialect. The only words she recognizes are "woman" and "snow." When he finishes he looks at her and laughs. "I won't translate it. You're too pretty to hear it." Again she's flattered. "I got a job two days after arriving in America," he says. "Working for the government. I speak four languages: German, French, Italian, and English. In Columbus, Ohio." She wonders what he's doing in a depressed shopping mall in Snyder County, Pennsylvania.

"Do you ever go back to Italy?" she asks.

"Every two years," he says. "I want to go back there permanently. I miss Italy."

"That's one country that is easy to miss," Beth says. A short while ago she ate a clementine and her hands smell of the fruit and the smell alone brings back all of Italy, of eating them endlessly at Christmastime, the silver bowls of them, of skiing in the Alps, in the Dolomites, of bars made from snowdrifts with bottles of alcohol chilling in them, of skiing for a week and never on the same trail, of the huts high in the mountains serving goulash and polenta, of waltzing in ski boots in the early evening, chilled and stiff from the slopes, warming up with hot toddies.

"My wife's American and her sister is handicapped so unless she dies soon we'll never be able to go back. She needs us. She can't move a limb. Completely paralyzed. She can't do anything without us."

Beth wants to ask what happened to her, but doesn't. "I'm sorry," she says instead, and looks around for Preveena. At the register a long line has formed.

"During the war I was in a concentration camp," the man says, and turns to Beth so that she can't avoid looking away from him, so that his eyes latch on to hers. She feels the baby move, kicking her little feet into her belly, pressing her head against her bladder. Beth shifts in her seat. The sun continues to prick against her neck.

"In northern Italy I was in the camp. My father didn't agree with Fascism, wouldn't support Mussolini. My father was killed. He would never tell us who we were. I still have a sister over there. My brother was killed by the Germans. My town has recently erected a statue honoring my brother, and I want to go back and see it."