He grins back. “Great teeth,” he says.
John, the love I had so ironically left behind me in New York, had so much wanted me not to leave him, had begged me not to. I had inescapably pictured his suffering a thousand times, the image of mine before he’d rescued me, hunting me down like the hound of heaven. Somewhere out on the Atlantic crossing, I thought, I must have swallowed his wounded eyes, and they were liquidating inside me now like capsules of cyanide.
He’d been a fellow student in the Columbia master’s program, a Greek American writing his thesis on Forster. When I thought of him, sometimes I’d think of A Passage to India too, of Forster’s lyrical digression on the Adriatic, the Mediterranean, on an Italy perfectly poised between East and West. It had seemed a promise of return somehow, a reference point of safety. But now I saw it had become a trick, a mental trick, an evasion, because sometimes in reality—if this were reality—I felt nauseously unbalanced, dazed, agoraphobic—missing to myself. As if I were here in Italy inside a dream somebody else had dreamed, moving against an architextile of incompatible centuries. I felt it now, even now, electroplated in the gold of this Perugian sunset, as if the four of us were huddled together at some twentieth-century mike, plugged into time like a wall socket, waiting to hear what we would say.
Father Browne said he was going to the Vatican Archives in Rome to look at U.S.-Italian immigration documents and “find out what those guys were really thinking about.” I felt the self-satirical bite of this and laughed, but I also found myself watching him as he spoke, as he stretched back against the rear legs of the café chair with the cassock buttons on his chest straining, and from time to time pushed his square jaw up and out, and then shoved a restless forefinger behind his stiff Roman collar and gave it a little tug. He whipped somehow into a flashback of growing up Irish in Hell’s Kitchen, as if a true historian had to start with Genesis, with the kid who played sandlot baseball with another kid on Tenth Avenue—a kid named Rocky Consaniero, with an eeeeaasy centerfield arm, who could throw you out on a base hit every time. Consanieeero, he said, dragging it like a poet.
“Baseball got you here?” Paul couldn’t believe it. He drove his hand through the tracks in his Santa Monica beach-bleached hair and went on about Vivaldi and opera. Anna followed, speaking out of her own cowl of dark hair like a sibyl, remembering the colors she used to go back to look at, again and again, among the Italian paintings in the museum. And now—“Look at this,” she pleaded, waving her arm as if she were lifting a curtain off the piazza’s palette of sunset on old stone. A flash of longing to paint came over me. For a drowning instant I was almost dizzy with the memory of my own hands.
But Father Browne had suddenly turned the conversation to food, and was amazingly describing his first Italian family dinner—“eucharistic,” he called it, uttering the word with a disbelieving awe. I too am there, but the family he is describing evanesces, and instead I see my father, rising with imperious, almost fearful dignity to carve the roast, gracefully moving the knife against the whetstone of the long sharpening steel, swinging them across each other with a frightening skill, a rasping and hypnotic sound, slicing the air repeatedly in a movement swift as light. I feel the last bliss drain from my body, down my legs and through my beautiful buttery yellow heels, in a sudden insane bafflement as to what has bracketed this place to my life.
Absurdly comes that unbidden visitation of love again in a line of poetry: Amor che a nullo amato amar perdona. . . . I knew my Dante now. Long passages by heart. This is what his Francesca had said: the law that had commanded her to love her lover, Paolo, forever—the law of love. But I had known it, it seemed, all my life.
The priest with the golden eyes cannot read the drowning message in my mind. I see him again, envy him, connecting this, this dream, with everything he has left behind him. I think you could trace a perfect line, like a cord, running from this piercing quattrocento sunset beauty back to his mean Hell’s Kitchen streets.
I do not know him. I do not know him at all.
Luigi Barzini did come again, days later, bringing his famous bittersweet take on Italians, the one he would eventually make a book of, imaging his countrymen with a eye to the future cultural export trade. I did not think he was speaking to me. He breezed in and out, taking his aura with him, leaving us to the mercies of a windy academic from the Education Ministry who led us down the byzantine byways of the Italian university system for more than an hour.
I was downhearted. But I was not always downhearted, and didn’t always resent our forced introductions to an Italian culture I barely recognized. And I didn’t always injure these magnificent October days in Umbria, stringing themselves so obligingly out on the week like glistening blue beads, with my little grief. We could still stroll along a Corso backlit in orange autumn sunsets, as the sun-warmed streets turned cooler and the lecture halls colder, as the lectures on Christian democracy got more and more drowsy. Father Browne could still make us laugh. On good days I could even make him laugh, as in the class in conversational Italian where I needled him about his Church Latin accent, and he beamed as if I were finally catching on to the basic malicious subtext of human relations.
There was this funny thing about him, that he had at least ten years on most of the scholars in the Fulbright cohort, yet lacked our pseudocynical boredom, pentup, postadolescent offspring of Beat that we were, trying to pretend to be above shame at being citizens of the country Italians called “Usa,” in a word that was the third-person singular of the verb to use, above berating our national psychoses around McCarthyism and Little Rock, our mindless devotion to psychoanalysis and Valium, as if we shouldn’t have to be accountable for them. Father Browne was no chauvinist. But his peculiar fractured reverence not only closed the age gap between us, it introduced something harder to name. Was it that sense of history? That urgency, not precisely missionary, to engage the world? He seemed to have an expectancy about him, a sense of the future along with the past, that made him seem younger than we were, as if he had actually swum out ahead and was lying poised and smiling out there on some big cresting wave about to break.
He joined Paul and me at the National Gallery one day, split between flattering my best Barnard art history spiel with his attention and skewering the other Americans wandering through the galleries saying immortal things. Paul stood in front of the paintings he liked, taking deep, meditative breaths, as if Pinturicchio could be inhaled like a reefer, until he finally lagged so far behind that we lost him. When he didn’t appear outside, we decided he could catch up with us at the café.
It proved a major move: the first time I had walked with Father Browne alone, woman with cassocked priest, on an Italian street. We were unavoidably self-conscious and took an outdoor table in spite of the chill in the air. “Macy’s window,” he said. “He can’t miss us.” Neither could anybody else, and that was the point.
“So tell me about John,” he coaxed, when the waiter had served the Campari. My father used to say, quoting his mother, “The tongue goes where the tooth hurts.” I didn’t need much coaxing. I fumbled in my bag for the cablegram that had demanded I come home, wired to me aboard ship. The paper, so tightly folded for so long, had already begun to crack at the seams. He opened it as gingerly as an archivist, then passed it back. “Sounds ambivalent to me.”
“You don’t know John,” I said. He hadn’t seen the letters. Pleading, menacing. Four of them.
He drove an incredulous hand through the electric fur of his hair. “Does he have