A Place I've Never Been (24 page)

“What?” Grazia asks.

“ ‘La Glamorosa.' ”

Fulvia waves her cigarette in annoyance. “It was my mistake to tell Dario too many stories when he was young.”

Laura, looking distressed, says, “I'm sorry, Fulvia, I didn't mean to mention all that.”

“You think just because I'm dying I've become sentimental? I'm not sentimental.” She blows out smoke dramatically. “No, ‘bored' is a better word to describe my feelings about Dario these days. Bored with his
myth
. He was a naughty boy, and I loved him, but I am as bored with him as I am with Marina's movies.”

“I saw Dario do Marina once,” Alba pipes in. “It was marvelous, he looked just like her.”

“Fulvia,” says Rosa, “you are not really so callous.”

Fulvia extinguishes her cigarette in an empty bottle of cough syrup. “I at least have no delusions. I say the truth. If people don't like it, they can leave my house.”

“Excuse me,” Marco says, and walks out of the room, onto the balcony. Everyone watches him.

“Well, well, well,” Grazia says, after a few seconds.

“Who is Dario?” Nicholas asks.

Rosa, who is drying her hands on a dish towel, stops suddenly.

“I have to use the toilet,” Fulvia announces, rather grandly.

“Speaking of Dario?” Laura asks. Grazia suppresses a laugh.

“Very funny,” Fulvia says. “Rosa, can you get over here and help me? There's not much time.”

“Yes, yes,” Rosa says wearily. “Giuliana?”

“I'm coming.”

Even though she can barely walk, Fulvia refuses a wheelchair. She says she prefers being carried around, “like a queen.” “Careful! Careful!” she scolds Giuliana as the two women pick Fulvia up from the sofa. “Don't be a clumsy girl.”

“A mother of three, and she still calls me a clumsy girl.”

“When you start supporting yourself, then I'll call you a clumsy woman,” Fulvia says as Rosa closes the bathroom door behind them.

“La Glamorosa,” Alba is saying. “That must have been part of his act too. Like when he did Marina Albieri.”

“La Glamorosa!” says Alberto, Grazia's boyfriend, who up until this point has been busily engaged in cleaning his pipe. He grabs a tablecloth from a pile on the cabinet, drapes it over his shoulder, and starts singing.

“That's a Patty Pravo song,” Laura says. “Did Dario do it? My Brazilian husband was so in love with her in 1968.”

“You have a Brazilian husband?” Nicholas asks.

“Perhaps,
caro
. Unless he's dead. I haven't heard a word from him since 1972, nor do I care to.”

Though Nicholas has been living with Marco in New York for just under a year now—Marco is employed by a large international drug company; Nicholas works at a bookstore—this is the first time they've traveled to Italy together. Of course, Nicholas was nervous about meeting Marco's large, strangely shaped, and strange-sounding family—fearful that they wouldn't like him, that they'd find him boring, bourgeois, or
parochial. Fulvia especially. Everything Marco told Nicholas about Fulvia scared him. Marco had grown up with Fulvia and her children, and when he was sixteen and she was fifty, she'd taken him as her lover. It didn't matter that Marco was the son of her best friend, Rosa, or that she'd changed his diapers; what she wanted, he said, Fulvia took. They lived together in Fulvia's apartment in Paris for just over a year—the only year in their lives that Fulvia and Rosa didn't speak, and don't speak, about still. (That was considered the major calamity, the split between Fulvia and Rosa.) In those days Fulvia liked Marco to make love to her while holding her wrists together behind her back, and once he did this so tightly her wrists turned blue and started to bleed. Being a boy, he began, almost immediately, to weep, but Fulvia managed to calm him, wrap her wrists in gauze, and get by herself to the hospital, where she had to do quite a bit of talking to convince the doctor that what he was treating was not, as it appeared, a suicide attempt. Of course, the truth sounded so improbable that finally the doctor believed her.

It was Fulvia who told Marco he was gay. Announced it to him, in fact, quite casually, at a restaurant.

“And how do you know that?” a flustered Marco had asked her. (He was just sixteen, and easily unnerved.)

“A woman knows these things about a man,” Fulvia said. “Anyway, am I right?”

“I'm not sure.”

“I'm right,” Fulvia said. And she was. “But don't worry over it,
amore
. It's your nature. It's good. Just start sleeping with other boys and don't feel guilty.”

Marco was nothing if not obedient. He went off to find a boy, and found many. Eventually, for reasons mysterious to everyone except the two of them, he married
Grazia, who was not thirty but twenty years older than he was. They lived together for a few years. Then Marco moved to New York with Laura, whose son he'd adopted, and Grazia moved to Milan with Alberto. Fulvia took as a new lover the doctor who'd treated her wounds and was eager to try out that sexual position her fondness for which had brought her to his hospital in the first place. His name was Caino, and he spent his summers in Capri, with his wife.

Almost instantly after Marco went off to find boys, Rosa and Fulvia became friends again, which was lucky, since summer was coming, and everyone was in an uproar about what would happen with the house if Rosa and Fulvia were fighting. Later, Grazia insisted Fulvia had timed it that way. An affair was an affair, but the summer house—that was a different matter.

Technically, it's Fulvia's house. She inherited it from her parents, who died in the war—they were both Resistance fighters—and since their youth, she and Rosa and all their husbands and children have shared it. When Fulvia dies, it will become Rosa's property—“the least I deserve,” Rosa joked, after the pronouncement was made. “After all, Fulvia, have you once planted a seed or painted a wall or boiled a pot of water? I was the
casalinga
, summer after summer. It should have been mine years ago.”

“Don't forget who found the furniture.”

“Don't forget who dusted it.”

“Puttana.”

“Don't call me a
puttana
,” Rosa said. “
I've
only had
two
husbands.” And Fulvia laughed. “Come here,” she called to Nicholas. She cleared a space on the sofa in the living room, the sofa from which she conducted the business of the house, then slapped
the space like a baby's bottom, shouting, “Sit! Sit!” Nicholas sat. “Now tell me, are you having a good time here? Are you enjoying your new Italian relatives?”

“I'm loving it,” Nicholas said. “I can't tell you how much I wish I'd grown up in a household like this. I think about Marco's childhood and I get envious—mine was so boring by comparison.”

“Don't say that!” Fulvia clucked her tongue. “I know what it looks like to you. You think it was all warmth and singing,
la mamma
and
il papà
and pots of pasta and wine pouring out of the bottle onto the floor. But there was more to it than that,
caro
. Corruption. Curelty. Not to mention the drugs. You know all our children used heroin—even Marco.”

“I know.”

She beckoned him closer. “I'll tell you a secret. Every one of these people in this house, every single one, I'd just as soon they would leave today and never come back. Except for Rosa. Without Rosa I'd be dead. Rosa walks out that door, I die.”

“Ridiculous,” Rosa muttered from the other sofa, where she was reading the newspaper.

“Rosa is the only person I love,” Fulvia went on. “If God had had any sense at all, he would have made us lesbians. But, unfortunately, we're both too fond of
cazzo
for that. A pity. We would have treated each other better than any of our husbands. No, don't think the men had anything to do with it.
We
built this family, Rosa and me. We raised all the children together, didn't we, Rosa?”

Absorbed in her paper, Rosa only murmured a concurrence.

“Ah, I'm getting boring,” Fulvia said. “Now,
caro
, tell me about you. Your dull
family.”

“Well,” Nicholas said, “my mother's a schoolteacher, and my father's—”

“A schoolteacher! I was supposed to be a schoolteacher when I was a girl! Can you imagine? Me? I can't. Anyway, I lost the chance for that glamorous career when I married Carlo. I had to settle for being a famous journalist and cultural arbiter. Sad, when I could have been a schoolteacher.”

“Cagna,”
Rosa said, under her breath.

“Porca,”
Fulvia muttered. They both giggled.

On the balcony, Marco stands, his back to the house, the household, Fulvia. In the distance, at the bottom of the hills, are the famous hot springs: a spa with pools, and down the road from it, a waterfall where you can swim without paying. At Nicholas's insistence, they went at midnight the night they arrived, even though Marco was jetlagged and would have preferred to wait until the morning. But Nicholas was emphatic. He'd been hearing about the waterfall for too long. Now he saw: Naked men with big muscles and bulging stomachs stood under the dark heavings of water, their eyes cast up to a sky thick with stars. Women and babies. Grandmothers, their breasts distended. There was a strong, ugly smell of rotten eggs. “The sulfur,” Marco explained, pulling his shirt off. “Smells like farts, doesn't it? But you'll grow to love it soon.”

And Nicholas has. Since their arrival a week ago he's gone every afternoon to the spa, lying limp in the hot pool, or allowing the pounding weight of an artificial waterfall to beat his back. In the evenings he goes back to the natural waterfall, sometimes for hours. There are a big pool and a small pool at the spa. Near the big pool is a little fountain, a
perpetual trickle, with plastic cups and a sign extolling the water's health-giving properties. At first the thought of drinking the stuff repelled Nicholas, but by the second day he was ready, and lined up behind a family of fat Germans for his first taste of the acrid, sulfurous water. He could barely get it down, but once he had, felt purified.

“There's not a wrinkle on my body,” Fulvia boasted, the one afternoon she felt well enough to go down to the spa. “And I'm ninety-seven years old.”

“Fulvia, don't be absurd,” Rosa said. “Everyone here knows you're just ninety-six.”

Even so, when Fulvia pulled off her bathrobe, people gasped or turned away. She laughed. “You think I've been making it up, the dying part?” she asked, pulling loose the gathered leg-holes of her bathing suit. “Skinny, yes. But even at the hospital the doctors couldn't keep their hands off me. Such
skin
. And you know why? This water. Help me, will you?” And Marco and Nicholas eased her in. Instantly she fell silent, and dropped her head back into the water, so that her hair floated out like strands of seaweed, her mouth open.

“Stay with me,” she said. “I'm so skinny I might go down the drain.”

On the porch, the rain has stopped. Small puddles reflect the peeling stucco that covers the old house. From where Marco stands, there is a good view of the spa, the brightly suited bathers standing out like colored beads against the green water. Nicholas touches Marco's shoulder, and Marco flinches before turning.

“Oh, hi.”

“Are you all right?”

Marco stretches. “Yes, all right.”

“Why did you leave the room?”

“I just didn't feel like listening to Fulvia and my mother chatter.” He puts his hands on Nicholas's shoulders. “So how are you enjoying my—shall we say—family?”

“I'm a bit perplexed,” Nicholas admits. “Everyone seems to be married to someone who's dead, or in South America, or living with someone else, and they don't care.”

“Marriage Italian style,” Marco says, laughing. “Haven't you read about it in books? But there's an explanation. In a country where divorce has only been legal for fifteen years, people just get used to finding—shall we say—alternatives. For centuries we couldn't divorce, and now that we can, nobody sees the point in taking the trouble when probably if you get remarried you'll just end up divorcing again anyway. Why, look at Fulvia. I can't even remember who she's married to. The men she married, the men she lived with, they all blend together.”

“It's just different than what I'm used to,” Nicholas says. “I mean, my sister's divorced. A lot of my friends too. But in America, even if you get a divorce, at least it's a big deal. You don't just leave a marriage behind like a shirt that doesn't fit you anymore.”

“Why?”

“Because it has emotional ramifications.”

“A marriage is a legal document. A legal document does not have, as you say, emotional ramifications unless you give them to it.”

Both of them lean over the railing, staring down at the plain.

“Who's Dario?” Nicholas asks.

“Ah, the Dario question,” Marco says. “Dario was Fulvia's son.”

“But why isn't—”

“He's dead. He killed himself seven years ago.”

Nicholas catches his breath. “I didn't know,” he says.

“Of course not. I didn't tell you.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Marco says. “Why don't you ask Fulvia? Fulvia will be more than glad to give you the whole story. All the gory details, including the shit.”

“Shit?”

“Ask her.” Then Marco turns and goes back into the house. Nicholas follows. From the front door he watches as Marco gets into Grazia's little Fiat and drives off.

“Coprophagy,” Alberto is saying to Alba. “That's the technical term for it.”

“I've never heard that word before.”

“So you've learned something new for the day, haven't you? And what a thing to learn.”