A Place I've Never Been (27 page)

Rosa turns again from the sink, marches into the living room, stands over her friend. It seems, for a moment, as if she's going to say something terrible, unforgivable; indeed, even Fulvia looks as if she wonders if this time she's gone too far. But whatever it is Rosa is about to say she apparently chooses to keep to herself. Her shoulders sink. “Marco, help Fulvia into her bedroom,” she says. Then she leaves the room.

“I think we'll go down now and you can join us later,” Alberto says. “Alba and I. Anyone else want to come?”

“Go ahead,” says Grazia. She doesn't look at them.

“Fine. Ciao, then,” Alberto says, and before anyone else has a chance to ask for a ride, he and Alba are out the door. Laura goes to put the children to bed, and then only Nicholas and Grazia are left at the table. He watches while with small and vicious fingers she tears the peel of a clementine into tiny pieces.

At the falls, lowering Fulvia into the water proves to be an even more complicated business than it was at the pool. “Careful, you
caproni
!” she chastises, as they ease her in. “Slowly! Ah, yes, that feels wonderful.” Immersed, she leans her head back, her body wraithlike in the dark water. “Stay with me, Nicholas,” she says.

“Of course.”

“Fulvia, it's too cold,” Rosa says. She herself is still dressed, and standing at the edge of the water. “You shouldn't be here.”

“Oh get lost, Rosa. You and Marco. Let me talk to the
ragazzo
.”

“Don't tell me what to do,” Rosa says, and Nicholas notices a surprising, new inflection of hurt in her voice.

“Come on, Mamma,” Marco says. And he leads his mother around to the other side of the little pond under the waterfall, where Alberto and Alba are cavorting.

“You know, I only feel good when I'm in the water these days,” Fulvia says. “Too bad I'm so weak, otherwise I'd be here all day. I've been swimming in these springs for sixty years, since I was a very little child. Even before the hotel existed, Rosa and I used to come and swim here. And once, at the end of the war, we met an American soldier. He looked a bit like you: same freckles.”

“And he called you ‘La Glamorosa,' ” Nicholas says.

“Yes,” Fulvia says, wrapping her arms around her chest. “His Italian was bad, but creative. He was at least trying to speak the language, which is more than I can say for most of those soldiers. And what a lover he was. My God!” She laughs, then stops laughing. “Dario was shameless about using my life in his so-called performances. For that I forgive him.”

“But not for much else, I gather.”

“Oh, I don't blame Dario. Dario was merely disturbed. No, I'll tell you who I blame. Them.” And she points across the water, at her swimming friends. “They'll deny it now—all except stupid Grazia—but every one of them was there, at Dario's performances. They all sat in the audience, in those cafés and clubs, their hands on their laps, watching my son make an idiot of himself. Now they speak skeptically, like it was some craziness of other people. But you can mark my words, when Dario ate his shit on stage, the people in the audience cheering him on were these people: serious intellectuals, bourgeois, from good families. The way Grazia talks about him—that was how they all spoke of him, in those days. That's what makes me so angry: If they hadn't been so taken in, they could have stopped him. They could have saved him.”

For a moment, she almost looks sad.

“But if you wanted to stop him, why didn't you talk to him?”

“Would he listen to me? I'm his mother.” She laughs and shakes her head. “No, I couldn't do it. These people, my friends, they could have just stopped paying attention to him. That would have been all it took. Unfortunately, they liked watching him think he was a messiah too much. And soon enough he really believed what he started out pretending to believe. That's all it takes, you know. You convince one person, you've convinced yourself.”

The contrast between the cool air and the hot water makes Nicholas's teeth start to chatter, but Fulvia doesn't seem to notice.

“People will drool at anything. They'll drool over a boy in a dress eating shit until something else comes along to grab their attention, which is exactly what I predicted, and
exactly what happened. Soon Dario was threatening to kill himself ten times a day. Every time I came over, every time Marco came over, when we left, he'd threaten to kill himself. Of course, by that time, no one else was bothering to visit him. Dario was alone in the end. For that I can never forgive them.”

“Even Rosa?”

“Even Rosa.”

Little wavelets of water are splashing around Fulvia. She leans back, regal, silent. The wavelets get bigger. It's Rosa, who's put on her swimming suit and is walking in the shallows toward them.

“Have you had enough yet?” she says. “Because I for one, am ready to go to bed.”

“Rosa, why must you always spoil my fun? I never hired you to be my nursemaid. Now go away.”

“Oh fine!” Rosa says. “In that case, why don't we settle the bill now for thirty years of cooking, cleaning, taking care of your children—”

“Rosa, I said go away!”

“—wiping their asses, wiping
your
ass, I don't even have to mention Dario's ass—”

“Shut up, Rosa!”

“What do you think the total ought to come to, Fulvia? Well, I'll have my lawyers call you to settle, because I've had enough of it, I'm sick and tired of being your dishrag and listening while you rave on as if anyone cares anymore, and treating me like a worthless piece of garbage. And now, saying I didn't try to help Dario. I might as well have been his mother, since you never lifted a finger for the boy.”

Fulvia, still immersed in the water, puts her hands over her ears and screams—a
single, sharp, hoarse tone, ascending in pitch and volume.

“What's going on here? Are you two at it again?” It's Marco, who's come over from the other side of the falls.

“And you!” Rosa says, turning on him. “Why should I listen to you? You, who let her take you into her bed when you were a boy? The shame I felt, the betrayal.”

“I will not listen to this!” Fulvia shouts, hands over her ears.

“All jealousy, of course,” Rosa says. “Jealousy because I at least had two normal, healthy children, while Fulvia was blessed with a junkie daughter and a son who, if there's anything worse than a child who's a junkie—well, he was determined to find out what it was and become just that.”

Suddenly Fulvia thrusts out an arm, grabbing Rosa by the leg, pulling her down. Rosa screams and tumbles. Obscenities fly back and forth in the air, until finally the two women lie in a heap, wet and muddy, weeping. “Don't talk that way about my children!” Fulvia is saying. “Don't you dare say such things about my children!”

“Why not? You do.”

“I loved Dario. I did everything for Dario.”

“And now you speak of him like you wish he had never been born!”

“That's my right!”

“How?”

Fulvia sits up, rubs her eyes. “I'm a dying woman, Rosa, it's not fair to interrogate me like this.” And Rosa falls silent.

“Are you two finished?” Marco asks, sounding annoyed, and they look up at him. Rosa starts to laugh.

“Imagine,” Rosa says, “being chastised by your children.”

“I suppose the day had to come,” Fulvia says. “They couldn't be more foolish than we are, so I guess that means they have to be wiser.” She coughs and presses her fingers against her temples. “I'm tired,” she says. “Rub my shoulders, Rosa. Oh, Rosa, I'm tired of hurting.”

“You see, she
does
need me,” Rosa says. “And I'll take care of her. She knows I'll take care of her.” And turning from where she's sitting, in the wet sand, Rosa begins to massage Fulvia's shoulders.

Fulvia closes her eyes, giving herself over to the strength of Rosa's hands. Across the pond, Alberto has Alba on his shoulders; he is singing, and strutting, and she is screaming for him to put her down. The waterfall pounds gracelessly around them.

When Rosa's massage is finished, she and Fulvia share a cigarette. “I tell you,” Fulvia says, “he looks just like him.”

“Fulvia, your memory's playing tricks on you.”

“Looks just like who?” asks Nicholas.

“The American soldier. The one I met here at the end of the war.”

“Fulvia's feeling romantic tonight,” Rosa says, handing the cigarette to Fulvia.

“He had freckles, and he came from Ames, Iowa,” Fulvia says. “His name was Nelson Perkins, and he gave me chewing gum.”

“Fulvia looked him up once, when we were in New York. She called information in Ames, Iowa. She actually found him.”

“I said I was the little Italian girl he met at the springs of Saturnia and made love with
and gave chewing gum. And now, I said, I was a cultural critic, and I was in New York City to write about the ballet. I don't think he remembered me. He sold cars, he said. Oldsmobiles. He was married and had some children. He sounded nervous, like he was afraid I'd had a child and was going to ask him for money.”

“Fulvia was sad, though she pretended she wasn't.”

“No, I wasn't.” And suddenly she turns and takes Nicholas's face in her hands.

“You look just like him,” she says, smiling. “Really, you could be him.”

“One American looks like another to Fulvia.”

“And here, in this pond, we swam, and he told me I was a glamorous Italian girl and he had saved me from the Nazis. Maybe you can too,
caro
. Save me.”

Her face is suddenly radiant, her hands warm against Nicholas's cold cheeks.

“But I don't know how,” Nicholas says.

“Yes you do,” says Fulvia. “It's simple. Just pick me up on your shoulders and carry me away.”

Novels

The Lost Language of Cranes

Equal Affections

While England Sleeps

The Page Turner

Martin Bauman; or, A Sure Thing

The Body of Jonah Boyd

The Indian Clerk

The Two Hotel Francforts

Stories and Novellas

Family Dancing

Arkansas

The Marble Quilt

Collected Stories

Nonfiction

Italian Pleasures
(with Mark Mitchell)

In Maremma: Life and a House in Southern Tuscany
(with Mark Mitchell)

Florence, A Delicate Case

The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

Copyright © 1990 by David Leavitt

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eISBN: 978-1-62040-707-3

A Place I've Never Been
was first published by Viking in 1990
and was included in
Collected Stories
, published by Bloomsbury in 2003
This electronic edition published by Bloomsbury USA in June 2014

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