A Place I've Never Been (25 page)

“Sit down,” Fulvia says, making room for Nicholas on the sofa. “Sit down and Fulvia will tell you the whole story.”

Nicholas sits down. Fulvia is flanked on one side by Rosa, who is knitting, and on the other by Grazia, who is running her fingers through her pale blond hair. Giuliana and Laura mill about, pretending not to listen.

“My son,” Fulvia begins, “was a strange young man. He liked to wear dresses and eat shit.”

Nicholas blinks.

“A coprophagist,” Grazia says. “He had a whole philosophy about it.”

“Why, look at him!” Rosa says. “The poor boy is shocked. Oh dear, Fulvia, it's like you're the worldly
principessa
in some Henry James novel, corrupting the innocent American. But there it is. He asked.”

“Well, if he's shocked, he shouldn't be,” Fulvia says. “Worse things go on in New York. And every day.”

“I've just never heard of someone eating—”

“It's not an ordinary practice,” Fulvia says. “Then again, Dario was not an ordinary young man. He had theories.”

“For him, it was the ultimate transgression,” Grazia says. “The ultimate sin, the ultimate, unspeakable, unforgivable sin. And once you'd done it, well—you pierced through—what was it he called it?—the membrane of ordinary morality. You entered a kind of ecstasy, a freedom. You committed the final transgression, and it felt wonderful.”

“My son was full of shit—if you'll excuse the expression. He just wanted to shock.”

“He'd read a lot of the Marquis de Sade. There was a scene where the nobleman who is the hero, after doing every imaginable thing, every vile thing, announces that he is going to take the village idiot into a room and once there do something with him so unspeakably obscene the other people in the book won't ever in their dreams be able to imagine what it is. Then he leads the village idiot into the room and closes the door. The others wait. After about ten minutes, he comes out and announces he's done it. He's done the unspeakable thing with the village idiot. Then they all sit down and he gives them a thirty-page lecture on hedonism.”

“Really, Grazia, you were rather too taken in by Dario—”

“Dario was fascinated by de Sade. He wanted to know what it was the nobleman and
the village idiot had done. He wanted to do it. You see, he was determined to show all of us what a joke our bourgeois lives were. He wasn't ashamed of being homosexual. He was a beautiful boy, Dario, and he looked beautiful in dresses. Sometimes he sang.”

“La Glamorosa,” Rosa says.

“Dario,” Fulvia says, “liked attention, and never felt he got enough from me. That was all there was to it. He wanted to impress me. But I never attended one of his evenings.”

“He said the taste of shit was ambrosial,” Grazia continues, rather dreamily. “He wanted me to try it, but I thought I'd throw up. I never did, that I knew of. But once he gave a party and baked a big
torta di cioccolata
. And he put it in it—the shit. And everyone at that party kept saying, ‘But
Madonna
, this is the best
torta
I've ever tasted! So delicious! Dario, what is your recipe?' ”

“Really, Grazia,” Rosa says, “must you remind us?”

“Well, anyway,” Fulvia says, “to make a long story short, Marco became Dario's lover. Don't ask me why; Marco was very impressed by him. He even went on stage once and made love. That was when Dario was performing.”

“Performing?”

“Yes, it was the early seventies, when even intelligent people were behaving like fools. Dario would get on a stage, recite some of his ludicrous texts, lift up his dress, and squat—”

“But Fulvia, you're too hard on him!” Grazia says. “You were never there, you never saw. It's true, seen from today, it was a bit strange. But what he read was—brilliant. And when you watched him—what he did—it seemed beautiful.”

“Grazia, you're a stupid
vacca
. You'll fall for anything, even today when most people
have gotten their brains back in order. I never understood what Marco saw in you, except you allowed him to get away with his own stupidity, which I never did.”

“Fulvia, please,” Rosa says.

“Oh, shut up, Rosa, I'm dying. I'll say the truth, for once.”

Grazia stands. “You really think you're the queen, Fulvia. And like a queen, you assume that just because you're cruel, you're right. But you're not always right.”

She turns and marches out of the room.

“Che sensibilità!”
Fulvia says. “Hand me a cigarette.” Nicholas obliges. “So, to get on with the story: As time went on, the fashions changed. Fewer and fewer people came to Dario's performances. He was—how would you say it in English—‘a flash in the bedpan'?”

Nicholas doesn't laugh. He is looking at the door through which Grazia has just passed.

“Of course,” Fulvia says, “there were drugs. And even though nobody was listening to him anymore except stupid Grazia, he was still having his delusions of grandeur. He thought he was the Savior, the Messiah. Naturally Marco became sick of this soon enough, and left him. Dario was alone. The drugs were getting bad. Finally he took an overdose. They found him in the morning. He wasn't trying to get attention, for once. He just wanted it over.” She blows smoke.

“Fulvia acts cold,” Rosa says. “But that's just her way of hiding her pain.”

“Oh shut up, Rosa. Don't speak for me. I act cold because I
am
cold.”

“Marco never told me any of this,” Nicholas says.

“Marco made a big exit, going to New York. He said he never wanted to have
anything to do with any of us ever again. It doesn't surprise me one bit that he never mentioned Dario to you.”

“Dario was a disturbed boy, but he had something,” Rosa says. “He had charm and a certain real genius. A kind of genius. It was just that everyone mistook it for another kind of genius. He acted like a messiah, and everyone was looking for a messiah, so that's what they turned him into.”

“You're too kind to him, Rosa.”

“You're too cruel.”

“Perhaps. But I made him.” Fulvia takes a drag from her cigarette. “Now, for God's sake, will someone empty this ashtray? And close the window! I feel a wind coming up.”

Years before, during the war, when they were girls, Fulvia and Rosa lived alone in the house near Saturnia with an old crone and her cretinous son. They were being hidden, protected. Fulvia's parents, they thought, were still alive; Rosa's were fighting it out in Rome. One night the two girls sneaked out of the house to take a swim at the waterfall. It was winter and there wasn't any heat; the hot water warmed them up. A pair of soldiers surprised them, where they were splashing, and the dread they felt, those first few moments, looking into the soldiers' faces and wondering if they were Nazis, was worse than anything either of them had ever imagined they might have to feel. They covered their breasts with their hands and waited to see what would happen next. “You think they speak English?” one of the soldiers said. He was tall, blond, with fair skin. He seemed to be making a noble effort not to look at their bodies. The other soldier, who was shorter and more muscular, couldn't keep his eyes from Fulvia's breasts. “I'm not sure,” he
answered. Then he stepped forward, and clearing his throat, said, “We are Americans.
Americani
. We've come to liberate you. From the Nazis.” The soldier spoke slowly and very loudly, as if he imagined an increase in volume might help to bridge the gap between languages.
“Liberazione,”
he tried. “The war is over.”

“We understand English,” Fulvia said. “But is it true? We cannot believe it. The war is over?”

“Maybe you could bring us our towels,” Rosa said.

“Oh yes,” said the shorter soldier, and taking the towels from the tree, threw them out to where the girls were standing, knee deep, in the water. Rosa and Fulvia covered themselves. They were both laughing, yelling, really, with joy and disbelief. Could it be true? The war over?

“Come in the water!” Fulvia said. “You must come in the water! The war is over!” She flung aside her towel and traipsed onto the shore toward the two soldiers, who stepped back. “Oh no,” the taller soldier said. “We can't.” But the shorter was already taking off his shirt. “Hell, Wayne, why not?” he asked. “Shit, the war's over.” Soon he was naked, splashing in the hot water with Rosa and Fulvia, while Wayne stood staring on the shore.

“Come on, Wayne!” called the shorter soldier. “Get your clothes off!”

“Yes, come on, Wayne!” Rosa called. She jumped out of the water and started tearing at the soldier's uniform with wet hands. “Well, why not?” Wayne said finally. From the village on the hill, a sound of screaming was starting up. The girls climbed onto the soldiers' shoulders and battled each other for a while, and then the four of them broke into pairs and moved together to opposing shadowy regions. In one corner of dry grass
and moonlight, the shorter soldier, whose name was Nelson Perkins, Jr., called Fulvia “La Glamorosa” and after they made love gave her chewing gum. In another, Wayne Smith asked Rosa to come back to America and marry him.

Fulvia thought Rosa was crazy, and told her so. “You're nineteen, the war is over, you have everything ahead of you! How can you waste it all on a silly American? You'll go mad with boredom wherever it is he lives—what is the place called, Canvas?”

“I love him,” Rosa said stoically.

“Love him! You hardly know him! Trust me, Rosa, very soon you'll find another man to love—an Italian, preferably with some power and intellect. If you'll pardon my saying so, your Wayne has eaten too much
granoturco
; they say it makes them feebleminded.”

“Shut up, Fulvia. Why must you always know what's best for other people? You're envious of me, that's all.”

“Envious!”

“Because my soldier loves me, and yours couldn't care less. Wayne told me, Nelson said he thought you were—what was his word—‘uppity.' He said you were uppity.”

“Rosa, you are a fool.”

“Fine, if that's what you think. I'll go. Then we'll see.” And she went. They got married in a Presbyterian church in Kansas City. Then, for almost a year, Rosa lived—irony of ironies—in Rome, Kansas, the wife of an auto mechanic, while Fulvia—fueled, some said, by rage over her parents' death—worked her way through a number of powerful men and eventually got a job interviewing people for a newspaper. She later wrote a column in which she expressed her resentment at the assumption that she'd only gotten where she was because of who she'd slept with; at the time she'd done it, she
pointed out, sleeping with them was the only way for an intelligent woman to get powerful men to listen to her in the first place. Then she named the men. The article, like much of what Fulvia wrote, caused a stir, and had people arguing for a month. All this while Rosa—just nineteen—tried to make a go of it in Rome, Kansas, got pregnant, had a miscarriage. Her arrival had been greeted by an article in the local newspaper, a clipped copy of which she still keeps stowed in a kitchen drawer in Saturnia:

Wartime Romance

Rome Boy Marries Rome Girl

Private Wayne Arthur Smith, 20, son of Mr. and Mrs. Ludlow J. Smith of Ellsworth Street, Rome, Kansas, was married yesterday to Rosa Signorelli, 19, of Rome, Italy. The bride and bridegroom met in Italy, where Private Smith was stationed.

Private Smith, who is employed at Sam's Service Station on Mott Avenue, is a graduate of Rome Regional High School. He and his bride plan to make their home in the new development on Warren Drive.

The bride's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Luigi Signorelli of the Appian Way, Rome, Italy, did not attend the nuptials.

So Rosa ended up living in a blue asbestos-shingled house near a wheat field. Every day Wayne got up near dawn and drove his pickup truck to the garage. Rosa played bridge with his mother and sisters, made elaborate
torte
for the church bake sales, which, because they were not frosted pink, no one wanted, and searched futilely for foods that would at least approximate the tastes she'd grown up with—good, green olive oil, fresh pecorino cheese, ripe tomatoes. But the oil was like soap scum, the tomatoes pale orange
and mealy, the cheese the consistency of pencil erasers. Rome, Kansas, the late 1940s: It might seem a strange place for a sophisticated Roman girl, the child of intellectual leftists, to end up. And yet, how many more couples like them did the war produce? Differences become detectable much more slowly when there's a language barrier; also, in the flummox of the aftermath, the joyous, wrecked catharsis that marked the end of the war, such differences might have seemed romantic, exciting, there might have appeared something deeply challenging about the prospect of crossing such barriers and thereby—in a small, private way—healing the broken world. They went off to America, in love, got married, in love; it took Rosa nearly a year to realize what a mistake she'd made.

Fortunately, she was not the kind of girl who digs her grave and lies in it. The first time Wayne blackened her eye she was gone. It wasn't hard; she didn't feel settled; the whole marriage had seemed like a dream, a sojourn, some sort of penance for the war. She was young, she healed easily; as soon as she got back to Rome—the real Rome—she would just start afresh, it would all seem distant and quick and nothing to be regretted. These days, she remembers with visceral clarity that windy afternoon she stood at the bus depot in Rome, Kansas, make-up covering her blackened eye. Wayne was at the garage; he didn't even know she was leaving. She had just enough money to get her to New York; once there, she planned to wire Fulvia, who'd just married a rich industrialist from Milan and would certainly provide fare for the boat. There is an illusory calm about this memory; a sensation of peace and clarity, of having finally come to her senses, which cannot be accurate, since, looking back forty years on the incident, Rosa realizes she must have been panicked and terrified that somehow he'd find her and drag her home. The bus glides down the long, straight road, its headlights seeming to warble and
shimmer in the gasoline fumes. It pulls up to the depot, enveloping her in dust and the smell of diesel fuel. She lifts her little suitcase to the driver, steps up. Light, free, young. On the bus there is only one other passenger, an old woman with a back stiffened by church chairs. The woman is wearing a high, elaborate hat covered with flowers in candy tones of yellow and red. Rosa looks at the hat and she finds she can't help but laugh. She laughs and laughs. The woman looks at her, surprised, then enraged. Rosa can't stop laughing.