Western Alliances, page 23
“The only thing false, by which I mean conniving and untrue, was you and Rachel trying to scrape me off the deal with my own mother.”
“You should send us a thank-you card for sparing you from being swindled.”
“It’s the thought that counts—or in your case, malice aforethought.”
“We will sue you.”
Roberto was calm. “It will cost you more than five thousand euros to go to some European court with a lawyer. You’ll have to explain how you were made fools of by my mother and why you were so enthusiastic about scamming an old lady.”
“I’m telling you as a friend—”
“Merle, you are not my friend.”
“I’m saying something friendly nonetheless. You don’t want to cross us. You want to write us a check this week, and bygones will be bygones.”
“I like bygones. As in, wave goodbye because your money is gone.”
Trastevere
Claudia texted to say, at last, she now deigned to have an audience with Roberto.
Roberto dressed a little better for his second trip to Grand Hotel de la Minerve, but he understood his socks, their filth, the holes, would discourage any assessment of him as a responsible adult who could feed and clothe himself. On the way down the Viminal Hill, he ducked into Upim, the Italian department store, and bought their largest pair of men’s socks, and it was as he left, as he passed the frames and photo department … that she appeared: Bothild Stern. Two or three of her. It seemed his mother had simply used the stock photo of the grandma that came with the five-euro frame she bought, passing her off as Bothild. He laughed about that all the way to Piazza della Minerva.
On this night, Claudia was more energetic on his behalf, but when it came time for her own pleasure, it was a repeat of the original process, he perfectly still, she satisfying herself with him in the role of inanimate object. He forgot to turn his phone off, and it dinged; he reached out quickly to the nightstand to extinguish it, and it broke her concentration … She startled, lost her breath.
“Your sudden movement … I thought you were…”
Going to hit her? he wondered. Was this the level of trauma she was dealing with? Poor thing, if so. He would cooperate without complaint with whatever she felt she could enjoy. Soon she had achieved what she wanted, and she fell to his side, wrapping both her hands around his bicep, snuggling.
“What’s your next project?” he asked out of politeness. She told him, but much of it involved sociology terms of art he was not familiar with. He stared at the ceiling politely while she worried about her project, her ever finding a permanent university home. After she ran out of steam, she asked, “Do you have a European project?”
He mentioned the several-years-in-the-making Notebooks, a commonplace book as the British say, notions and musings, a bible for the expatriate who had loyalty to nowhere and nothing on earth but his sensibility, heightened and tempered by travel and wonder.
“You will raid the junk-filled attic of Europe,” Claudia examined. “Schools of art, trends, incomprehensible notions to the modern mind that came and went.”
“Yes, exactly. Mostly, I write about language and what it implies about the cultures that speak them. I want the final draft to be thousands of pages but never dull.”
“Mmm, good luck with that. I feel the audience fidgeting after a half hour of my very best presentations.”
“I’m thinking of something like Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades. A collage of splendid found objects. Musings, extrapolations, whimsies. Have you read W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn?”
Claudia edged off the bed, then stood, then began to dress, retrieving and untangling clothes from the floor. “Just a friendly suggestion. Maybe you should have as your model a work that more than a few hundred people have read. I mean, the Benjamin, not the Sebald. A few thousand have read that one.”
Roberto felt dismissed—not for the first time—concerning his Notebooks.
“Your family is from Friuli, perhaps,” he said a moment later.
“Why do you ask that?”
“You are Claudia Ciobanu, not Claudia Ciobano. I wondered if you were Slavic. Or even Romani, some generations back.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Or simply Romanian.”
She was concentrating mightily on putting on her shoes.
“You mentioned back in Switzerland that you had family die in the Holocaust—”
“You guess Gypsy but not Jewish. Interesting.”
Roberto had felt the temperature of this conversational turn become chilly, but he pressed on. “You have a cross around your neck, so I did not think Jewish. It has been dangling in my face a few times—hard not to notice.”
She patted the bed as if to say enough of the topic. “My father has Romanian roots, but no, I am no Zingale. You want me to be descended from the dregs of Europe? Would that excite you?”
New topic. “Are we dining?”
“Of course,” Claudia said. “Where do we go for our last Roman meal?”
“I know a place in Trastevere that has never disappointed. Well, me at least.”
Claudia’s hair was in all directions; she must have decided to go out with it untamed and Medusa-like. She had put on a sleeveless light dress, white with a pattern of pointed green leaves; she was sylvan, something rustling from the jungle. “There are two kinds of people who find themselves in Rome,” she said. “Tevere people, and Trastevere people. What is there across the Tevere for me? Nothing. A corrupted church, some slatternly altar boys and the geriatric cardinals who molest them, and a crumbling neighborhood that hides its poverty by copious gallons of ocher and orange paint. My retinas will turn the white pages of the books I read blue for a week after a walk there in the bright sunlight. I am the via Veneto, the Spanish Steps, Piazza Navona. Tevere, per piacere.”
Roberto countered, “I am a Trastevere person. Tevere people are snobs; they walk among the Roman ruins and Renaissance palaces and feel Rome notices them, which it does not. It barely has noticed the Caesars, the popes. In the alleys of Trastevere, I can imagine a Roman life where one eats and sleeps and brushes one’s teeth. I am not goaded there by Rome’s monumentality; I do not feel my lack of … grandeur.”
“But you are the future author of The Notebooks of Roberto Costa. And I too will find fame in what I publish. Grandeur is our destiny.”
“Hmm. All the more reason to go out among the plebeians—while we still can.”
It was pleasant enough to walk; they would take a taxi back after stuffing themselves. Claudia turned heads. Maybe it was the difference in height, but other couples smiled at them; men sitting outside in unfashionable cafés followed them with their eyes.
“The street has noticed us,” Claudia said. “They are thinking, Who is the rich signora who has purchased such a gorgeous gigolo? I bet he has a cock long as a python. Perhaps, she will bankrupt herself for her lover. Perhaps, she has a husband, back in Milan…” Roberto enjoyed her scenarios as they aimed themselves for the Tiber and the old Roman bridge that led to the Isola Tiberina.
“Once I publish my Notebooks,” he began again, “I will become a recluse. No sequels, no follow-up, no interviews. I will be like Thomas Pynchon. I will be … like Emily Brontë, one great work, but no death by consumption.”
“Why not die young? It would make your career.” She let go of his arm and took his hand.
“I will be famous for publishing a thousand essential articles. Future scholars will have to give over their entire lives to reading every word I have written.”
Upon the banks of Trastevere, Roberto realized where they were. “We have four blocks to the restaurant, but do you want to see something?” he asked.
“What now?”
“Stefano Maderno’s one-hit wonder. One of the greatest statues carved in the baroque era, but he could never equal it. After a while, he gave up trying. It’s in Santa Cecilia.”
Indulgently, she let herself be led a few blocks into the Trastevere tangle of alleys. It was not yet six, and the church was still open.
“Many of Rome’s old monuments to the martyrs are wholly bogus,” Roberto narrated, remembering the passage from his Notebook. “But there seems to have been a Santa Cecilia. From a good family with a big house. Forced to marry a Roman, she refused and was put in an oven but was not cooked—thanks to the angels.”
“Angels used to come to a woman’s rescue. They’ve been on strike for a few centuries, I think.”
“So like in all the martyrdom stories, they beheaded her. She was like fourteen or something. Well, they started digging below the church in her honor and they found her tomb, labeled and everything…”
Claudia and Roberto walked toward the altar. There was a gilded glass-enclosed casket ahead that held Maderno’s statue.
“And when the pope had the casket opened, Maderno, the sculptor, was in attendance. Like other saints, Cecilia hadn’t decomposed. There was the twisted body of a teenage girl martyred fourteen hundred years ago. Her head had not been detached from her neck, though the blow was fatal. The scene so transfixed Maderno that he captured it perfectly in marble.”
All alone in the church, they approached the sculpture. Roberto admired the young woman’s just-maturing body somehow communicated through the marble robes, the hips, the new breasts … and the openness of the hands. “I think the hands,” he said, “are particularly fine…” He turned in time to see Claudia fleeing from the church.
He found her out in the courtyard of the church, shaking slightly.
“His Cecilia,” she said, “is every woman, every victim, passed around by a legion of soldiers, dragged forward to be raped or sold off—and if she refuses? You know what you do to disobedient women. What they do to them in conservative Islamic countries … Nanking, the women of the Balkans, every tribal conflict in Central Africa—right here, when Rome invaded Sabine and raped and abducted the women—ha, that is celebrated in works of art. Poussin, Rubens, David. It is as it ever was. Povera Cecilia,” she concluded in Italian, composing herself. She slipped her arm into Roberto’s arm.
Roberto spoke gently. “I wouldn’t have brought you if I knew it was going to upset you—”
“A woman brutalized and slain for not fucking someone privileged who had power over her. No, why should you imagine that would disturb me?” She talked steadily, bitterly. “I was a teenager in Torino. I was cutting through the old center one night when two men grabbed me, laughing, shoving me back and forth, first to one, then the other. And each time I was thrown into one of the men, he would grope and plunge his hand into me, my breasts, put his filthy fingers in my mouth. You wonder why I have the sexual limits that I do—that incident is why. But, please, let us speak on anything else…”
She broke off holding his arm and chose to walk ahead of him for a block or two. When she was in danger of passing the trattoria he intended, he called out; she turned with a smile and was determined to find equanimity for the rest of the evening. Roberto, throughout dinner, let her caress him under the linen tablecloth. He was affectionate, reaching frequently for her hand. It did occur that she had previously explained that there was an older man who abused her, who was responsible for her sexual challenges … but both things likely happened. Both scenarios were not even unusual; if it was Wednesday, they were happening right now somewhere. If Roberto had learned anything about the precarity of being female, it was that all women—mother, niece, grandmother, sister, schoolteacher, professor, titan of industry—were simply doing their best to exist between manhandlings, assaults, gropes, molestations, rapes, liberties taken. A day without a hand where it shouldn’t be, many women would declare a good day.
Ludo, hearing of the failed Adriatic road trip, wanted to re-create it with a new foursome—Ludo, Lucrezia, Mira, and Roberto. Or at minimum, they wanted Roberto back to socialize in Lombardia. They had texted him twice—when was he returning? Roberto had intended to call Ludo and beg off. He pictured instead a long, loud, smart, wild affair with Claudia, imagining books and art crowding their unmade bed, up at 3:00 a.m. doing shots of grappa and arguing the merits of Giordano Bruno as a cosmologist, Umberto Eco as a semiotician … but now, Roberto thought he might prefer the sillier, happier people to spend the next week with.
They taxied back to the hotel. Again, she did not invite him to stay over so the ascent of the Viminal Hill and the health-compromising staircase of the Pensione Capri was his fate.
“You will visit in Milan one day?” she asked so airily, it was hard to suppose that she meant it. She was leaving for there tomorrow. “As I said, my apartment may not be entered, but we can meet up somewhere.”
She had a lover, Roberto suspected. “I am off to Milan as well,” he said.
She offered no encouragement of them taking the same train, so he didn’t push it.
He mentioned he would be with friends in Milan, visiting Ludovico and Lucrezia and their academic friend Mira. Claudia seemed to have no interest in an architect and a gender theorist, so the idea of a group dinner seemed out of the question.
“And this Lucrezia?” she asked absently. “What is she a professor of?”
“She’s not an academic. She’s a model. She was a lot more famous a few years back—”
“What is her name?”
“Lucrezia Pappalardo.”
Claudia suddenly erupted. “My God, you know her? I have an addiction to fashion magazines—Italian ones, at least. To better perfect my self-loathing, I suppose.”
Roberto mentioned how they had—admittedly, drunkenly—proposed a road trip through the former Yugoslavia to Athens, and the Greek islands beyond.
She laughed. “Perhaps I will come along! You can drop me in Belgrade for my Slavonia project research. How on earth did you meet Lucrezia Pappalardo?”
“I was with French friends, fashion week in Milan, and we met. She thought, given my height, I was one of the tribe of models. It was five years ago, so we were kids, staying up all night in some club—”
“You were lovers?”
If they all were to meet, then there was no point lying about it, but Roberto predicted the news would provoke something. “Yes.”
Claudia’s eyes seemed to cloud over for a moment. “Ah, one of the world’s great beauties.”
“And a train wreck.”
“Perhaps she thought you were a train wreck too. If you could not satisfy her.”
“I satisfied her. Five years ago, my problems had not begun in earnest yet.”
“So this flawless creature knows what it is to be fucked by you.”
“Yes.”
Claudia regained herself, smiling again. “I am like a schoolgirl fan seeking an autograph. I would very much like to meet her.”
Plesno Grozno
Lucrezia saw a cat. Her project had evolved: who cared about the provinces of Italy when the book could go international! International Cat, she pronounced, was the new title. She would make up little stories about each cat, who would have a name in the language of the country featured. Children will love this book, she assured Roberto. A clean, well-cared-for orange-and-white tabby was preening in the sun near a postcard tree in Pirano, and Lucrezia gave pursuit. Here, kitty-kitty … Soon Roberto was directed to block an alley and corral the cat back toward Lucrezia. But the mission failed as the cat energized and fled inside a nearby café, presumably its home.
Ludo emerged from the newsstand with a Michelin map of Istria; Roberto looked over his shoulder at the peculiar geography of Slovenia. This all used to be the kingdom of Venice, then it became the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then the Italians were allowed to keep Trieste on a narrow finger, with the amalgamated country of Yugoslavia owning the Istrian peninsula … until its breakup, which led to its being subdivided again, between Slovenia (which got a twenty-eight-mile sliver of Adriatic coast) and Croatia, which got the lion’s share, most of the Roman ruins, the seaside resorts, one of the world’s best truffles by the metric ton. For those who thought crossing borders, collecting passport stamps, paying for toll stickers every few hours was “tres internationale”, the Istrian peninsula was the road trip for you.
“You done playing with your cat?” Ludo asked, without interest. “Where are Mira and Claudia?”
They departed Milan the afternoon before, deciding to cross Northern Italy and call it quits here for Night No. 1 in Pirano, Slovenia. Lucrezia and Ludo got to ride in the two-seat roadster though Ludo said he wanted all the other participants, in rotation, to keep him company as the days wound on. Roberto longed for his turn in the gorgeous car with the gorgeous AC again … while the other car, Mira’s Golf, tightly held Mira and Claudia in the front, and a very compressed Roberto in the narrow back seat, sealed off from all air circulation. Mira drove haltingly, a combination of the decrepitude of the model and her lack of finesse in gear shifting on hills. “I am a girl of the flatlands,” she reminded him; there was barely a hill to practice on in Holland. There was talk of renting a larger car for greater comfort, but it was too much expense (and even steeper when one declared you were taking the car to the Balkans, insurance-wise), and so to keep the trip from collapsing, Mira had said okay, sure, they could take her car. Roberto assumed Claudia would change her mind about coming along given the travel conditions, but she was surprisingly serene.
Once everyone was rounded up, the party drove their two-car caravan up from Pirano to the ragged white Karst mountainscape of interior Slovenia, en route to Hrastovlje—a Roberto request, seconded by Mira—with one of Europe’s best-preserved danse macabre, or a plesno grozno in Slovenian, which was more fun to say. Predictably, Ludo would speed ahead and take the curves like Michael Schumacher at the Nürburgring; Mira would chug along on four cylinders and find Ludo idling at an intersection turn he didn’t want her to miss.
Again today, Mira and Claudia were in the front, and Roberto was stretched out awkwardly in the back seat. The women went on about the baroque nature of German professorships—one had to have a national and a regional appointment, an impossible political chore for a foreigner … Speaking of teaching, Roberto decided that perhaps it was time to dust off his antiquated CV. Roberto had worked up a several-week conversational English class, the sort of thing one sees on flyers in coffee shops where you tear off a tab with the phone number. Everyone who had been taught by him seemed to like their instruction, his energy and commitment. Maybe that was a skewed sample. He ended up sleeping with every woman and two of the men he had taught. Maybe he would ply his trade in Malta, in Moldova, that Norwegian outpost above the Arctic Circle—an excuse to explore somewhere new, a region on his map yet to be checked off.
