They were Italian girls, like me—full-blooded Sicilians, actually—and like me they commuted to school, though by subway from Queens. Intimate as we had become, I felt daunted, subdued, by their superb sense of maiden intactness. Such magnificent creatures!—always perfectly groomed, perfectly turned out, an inspiration to be beautiful whether or not I was any match for their glory. Wherever they went—wherever we went, for we would often meet at lunchtime and spend the better part of the day together—heads would “swivel,” as Anita jokingly, even self-mockingly described it, to take in her sumptuous Lollobrigida body and dark, close crop of thick Lollobrigida curls, and Joanne’s astonishing aureole of insanely rose-colored hair. They considered me the brainy one of our peripatetic threesome, but we were still a threesome. Judy—now deep into the Greeks for her inspiration, and I think a little jealous that I had struck out for new territories of friendship on my own—called us the Thesmophoriazusae, for the women in Aristophanes’s comedy who forgather in honor of the Great Goddess and perform secret, feminist sex-rites.
She was not far off, for it was surely their Sicilian devotion that got me to the Catholic Newman Club, to all those lunch hours and soirées where they knew they could legally flirt with Irish and Italian sons of immigrants under the chaplain’s benevolent eye. What kept me going there, besides Tom Galvin and a few wary flirtations of my own, was something, some stirring thing I began to sense in Father Daly’s homilies on Christ’s collective body, as a politics of mutual responsibility. But being friends with Anita and Joanne was not an inspiration to intellectualize one’s spirituality. It was a little, in fact, like discovering a couple of my Spagnola aunts in a time warp. That same self-drama, that hair-trigger laughter and tears and love of glamorous clothes and beautiful men and the romance of romance. That attitude. I loved it—I shared it—knowing we were a bit anomalous, even a bit scandalous, in the world of understated black-garbed Barnard feminism.
The in-betweenness of commuting was some excuse for this half-defiant, girlish alienation, but it was only partly to blame. It may be true that alienation, however expressed, was part of the essential gestalt of fifties Beat. Yet we understood without having to speak of it that this too, somehow, was a subculture not ours to claim, that there was something in it in fact that despised us a little, and, for us, in return, something just that too much too strenuous in trying to be what the college seemed to want to make us—oh-so-worldly-wise, and if politically conscious, conscious with a secret air of being safely monied and above all harm, above all risk.
With more personal ambition than either of my friends, less interest in hurrying to be manned and married, I acutely felt the halfheartedness of all but a few of my teachers toward my future, and returned it. Only Eleanor Tilton, under whose tutelage I had deepened and grown as a student of nineteenth-century literature, seemed to intuit that something Italian in my makeup deserved cultivating. It was she who had introduced me to the Sicilian Verga, author of La Lupa, had watched me flower as I had discovered D. H. Lawrence discovering and so powerfully translating him, so magically interanimating my two literary worlds of language and longing. She never told me she disapproved of my friends—she was above such sanctimony. Yet for her, perhaps, as for other would-be mentors, though it might be differently signified, there was an Italianness to approve and disapprove. There was Maristella Bové, Barnard’s new director of Italian studies, for example, a recent aristocratic emigree and paragon of cultural refinement, an Italian Ingrid Bergman compared with my flamingly full-breasted Mae West girlfriends.
But Miss Tilton was not so taken with “class”—in any sense—as to miss how easily the binaries of Italy north and south and pre- and postwar immigration might caricature such difference. She knew I was already studying Italian, learning to read it and even speak it with a quick comprehension and fluency that astonished even me. She spoke to me one day of a visiting foreign student taking a history degree on a special fellowship from the University of Rome: “I think you’ll like her.” She may even have said, “I think she will be good for you,” though I have possibly imposed that bit of conscious didacticism. My guess is that she saw no swifter route to the completion of my education, for Margherita Repetto was an active socialist, daughter of a Socialist member of the Italian Parliament.
We arranged to meet. No one answered when I knocked on her dorm room door, but then I heard a chanted “Allo!” from the far end of the hallway, followed by Margherita’s little body, wobbling with precarious speed and virtually invisible behind a tall stack of books—the entire holdings of Butler Library on Hart Crane, as it turned out. A midterm paper, she explained breathlessly. I was awed. A small bouquet of flowers, a handful of the first anemones of the season, was trapped in one fist, her room key in the other. She managed to negotiate the lock without my help, which she brusquely refused.
Inside, she dumped the books on her bed. Filling a glass of water from the sink, she placed the flowers in it atop her bureau, and pausing reflectively, gazed wistfully into their great black eyes, saying: “Flowers are so curious—so strange.” I cannot explain what this phrase wrought in me, except that she uttered it in such deliberate, studied English, striking such a tone of old and weary grief, that I somehow saw those astonishing clusters of red and purple velvet as I had never seen them. For this I immediately loved her—for what seemed to me a tragic wisdom, that could summon such fugitive beauty out of a distantly remembered sadness and joy. I longed at once for the love and approval she would never return, the love, the approval, of the Italy of my desire.
Damian—Damiano—seemed to appear in my life, perhaps just before Christmas in the middle of my senior year, like a darkly radiant annunciatory angel.
It was the day I gave my first recitation of Italian poetry, and opened for myself a fleeting career acting classical literary theater at Columbia’s Casa Italiana. The poem was a medieval lyric by Iacopono da Todi—a long, dire, vivid melodrama of the Crucifixion, operatic, full of multiple, anguished voices and images of dark passionate suffering. I loved it. I sang it. I had found Italian. And, finding it, I had somehow found my own voice.
I could see him at a small distance afterward, fixing me from head to heel with the haunting, unblinking onyx gaze of a crucified Christ. He brought me a small glass of red wine. “You were very good,” he said.
He was tall, taller than any man in my life had ever been. He towered over me, olive and dark and seductive, a long Valentino metaphor for Romance languages. This was in fact his field. He was brilliant in it, as I discovered, unconscionably, egotistically so, very near to finishing a master’s degree on existentialism in three literatures. He was also Napoletano, born and raised in Mussolini’s Italy in a village near the historic town of Caserta, scant miles from my father’s Sperone. His own father was gone—I was never sure where. Venezuela, was it? Or some other country of the dead? His mother, migrating to America after the war, had raised and educated him and his younger brother on her own. He later showed me photographs of himself before he’d left Italy, wearing the dark shirt and short Italian pants of a boys’ paramilitary brigade. Even at thirteen there were those same deep, pinioning eyes, staring angrily into the camera against the sun, refusing to be blinded.
Perhaps I could only adore a man as brilliant as Damian, and as cruel, as careless of his power. I didn’t understand this then, I simply adored him, with a sudden, fatal, hungry, inexorable passion. When he came to see me play Nerina in Tasso’s Aminta and told me, my face still flushed with delight and triumph, that my interpretation had been ravishing, yes, but deeply flawed, when he said I’d carried off my role as a confessing adulteress in Machiavelli’s Mandragola like a slut to the manner born, when he told me I was stupid as a cow, when he said I was the most rational and intelligent woman he’d ever known—I loved him because of this, because he could be so suddenly, unbearably cruel, so unbearably kind. Because of his unspoken Italian certainty that I would suffer—that I would gladly die—for him.
And I would have, if perhaps not gladly. I imagined it. I found myself composing Romantic verse drama, captivated at the time by the lurid poetry of Shelley’s Cenci, staging my own self-murder in the suicide of my heroine, flinging myself down a granite staircase in an ecstasy of self-heroicizing self-surrender.
His mother