AVERAGE SINNERS

by

ANNE-CHRISTINE HOFF

Under the Direction of Reginald McKnight

ABSTRACT

This novel is loosely based on the murder of an Italian journalist, Mino Pecorelli, who in 1979 was shot dead in broad daylight on a busy Roman street and whose murder initially touched off an intense, but brief investigation. The case was dropped for political reasons, and only reopened again in 1993, twenty four years later, when informers in the Maxi Trial told authorities that a well-known Italian senator, Giulio

Andreotti, had asked Mafia captain Gaetano Badalamenti to arrange the hit as a personal favor. My story opens just after the reopening of the Maxi Trials in 1992. My protagonist, Paolo Taviani, has returned to Rome to take over Occham's Razor, a bookstore he has inherited from his former employer, Carlo Levi. The story deals with

Paolo's psychological conflict: Should he involve himself in the reopening of his uncle's trial, or should he stay out of it? Because of his American wife's renewed Catholic faith and her growing friendship with her religion teacher, Father Dante, my protagonist Paolo is always reminded of the moral implication of both decisions, while his distrust of organized religion spurs him to be cynical about both the trial and his wife’s faith.

INDEX WORDS: Italian history; Catholic history; Mafia history; Sicilian history; mother/son relationships, Italian politics; generational conflict; cross-cultural boundaries

AVERAGE SINNERS

by

ANNE-CHRISTINE HOFF

B.A., Barnard College, 1995

M.A., New York University, 1997

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ATHENS, GEORGIA

2005

© 2005

Anne-Christine Hoff

All Rights Reserved

AVERAGE SINNERS

by

ANNE-CHRISTINE HOFF

Major Professor: Reginald Mcknight

Committee: Judith Ortiz Cofer Thomas Peterson

Electronic Version Approved:

Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2005

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the following people, without whom this novel could not have been written: The University of Georgia Graduate School, for generously funding my research in Rome with a graduate student travel grant; my advisor, Reg McKnight, for encouraging me when I wanted to give up; my parents, Gerhardt and Lisa Hoff, for being both exacting and generous with their comments, for prodding me through the book’s many stages, and for their generous financial and emotional support; my sister,

Elisabeth, for dropping me off at a Minneapolis coffee shop when I needed to work; my friend, Anna Bighta, for chasing that guy towing my car, for pointing out the humor in the word “creachy-creen,” and for the occasional Scrabble game and the many cranberry and vodkas enjoyed in each others’ company; my boyfriend, David Lee, for reading both my shitty and my later drafts without passing judgment (I thank you) and for sending me

“Buy Things,” “Commencement,” and other songs that kept me inspired; Tom Peterson, for smiling when I walked into Room 254 for my defense; Iyabo Osiapem, for being so

150% together and for being at the main library enough to remind me what could be done, if only I could get my shit together as well; for my students, for forgiving me when

I was scattered or anxious and for reminding me that even if I didn’t grow up to be a fiction writer, I could still be considered “cool,” so long as I continued to tell jokes in class; and Dr. David Roberts and Michael Mewshaw, for returning the e-mails of a stranger. I thank you all with my whole heart.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... v

LIST OF TABLES...... vii

LIST OF FIGURES ...... viii

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

PART I...... 23

CHAPTER

1 BLACK KNIGHTS WEND THEIR WAY BACK...... 24

2 JOB WAS RIGHT TO ASK...... 34

3 LIVIA SPITS WHEN SHE PASSES A MAN OF THE CLOTH...... 47

4 LITTLE OLD LADIES DOUSE THEIR GIRDLES WITH H ...... 62

5 THE SHADOW RISES FROM BENEATH THE CATACOMBS...... 71

6 CARLO EARNS A SNACK CAKE...... 78

7 SUPERMAN CANNOT SAVE YOU...... 90

8 SEWING THEIR MOUTHS SHUT WITH NEEDLE AND THREAD...... 103

9 CLAUDIA’S GRANDSON WILL SACRIFICE RAMS FOR RAMADAN...... 114

10 RELAYING TRAGIC SNATCHES OF CONVERSATION ...... 121

11 NOT TO BE ONE OF THE LADIES BETTERMENT LEAGUE ...... 133

12 NEITHER GOOD, NOR BAD...... 140

v 13 THE FIRST MASSIVE FLOCK OF STARLINGS ...... 150

14 A COFFIN WITH NO AUTOMATIC FEATURES...... 159

PART II ...... 167

15 HAVING AN EROTIC LIFE OUTSIDE OF A MAN...... 168

16 THE F—ING HOT WATER IS ACTING UP ...... 177

17 ATTRACTIVE, YOUNG GIRLS MAKE HIM NERVOUS...... 190

18 LUCK IS A FIGURE OF SPEECH...... 197

19 A HAT CAN BE A LIBERATING THING...... 203

20 YOU DON’T KNOW ME EITHER...... 219

21 SECRETS MAKE HER POWERFUL ...... 227

22 HER CONFESSIONS WERE NO MORE THAN WHISPERS ...... 242

23 INDIGNATION IS A USELESS EMOTION ...... 255

24 WHAT DO YOU DO WITH PALM LEAVES?...... 265

25 IF MATRICIDE WERE A PART OF THE FAMILY LEGACY...... 276

26 LIKE BEING DEAD!...... 285

27 THE LAMBS HEAR LIVIA’S WHISTLE ...... 297

28 THE SIMPLE STORY IS MORE FRUSTRATING...... 311

vi

LIST OF TABLES

Page

Table 1: CONCETTA FAMILY TREE...... 17

vii

LIST OF FIGURES

Page

Figure 1: MAP OF PRATI...... 18

Figure 2: MAP OF ROME...... 19

Figure 3: MAP OF SICILY ...... 20

Figure 4: MAP OF ITALY ...... 21

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INTRODUCTION

The nature vs. nurture debate, whether genetics or environment shape human character, continues to generate controversy in many forums today. While the scientist tries to determine how much DNA encoding affects abstract traits such as intelligence and personality, politicians of the left and the right lobby for legislation that will either teach young children that a gay gene determines an individual’s sexual orientation or that sexual orientation is a choice, depending on their own view of the debate. The storyteller, too, explores this question, only in the novelist’s case, the method of exploration is through dramatic situations, not scientific experiment. In 1880

Emile Zola, in his influential work The Experimental Novel, called the question of whether heredity or surroundings determine human character the novelist’s “great study”. He wrote, “I consider that the question of heredity has a great influence in the intellectual and passionate manifestations of man. I also attach considerable importance to the surroundings (19).” Later he argued that this reciprocal effect of society on the individual and the individual on society should be the novelist’s chief occupation: “Man is not alone; he lives in society, in a social condition; and consequently, for us novelists, this social condition unceasingly modifies the phenomenon.

Indeed our great study is just there, in the reciprocal effect of society on the individual and the individual on society (20).”

But if individuals and society truly do reciprocally affect one another, then, not only can the individual’s religious and philosophical preoccupations affect culture, but the culture’s

1 accepted religious and philosophical convictions, to a certain extent, determine the individual’s

beliefs. Therefore, for a novelist, a character’s philosophical and religious convictions, as well

as his doubts, can influence, and in some cases, even shape the philosophical and religious

convictions not only of other characters, but also of the writer and the reader both.

The question of whether environment or genetics shape human character is central to

what the novelist does. By taking fictional characters and placing them within dramatic

situations, much as a scientist might raise lab temperatures for a culture, the storyteller heightens

dramatic tensions to see how these characters react. If nature dominates, the individual will triumph over his environment, maintaining his genetic predisposition. If nurture dominates, his environment will transform him into a product of that environment. More often than not, as Zola suggests, both the environment and the individual reciprocally affect each other.

The title of this work, Average Sinners, comes from a statement made by Giulio

Andreotti, Italy’s most well-known politician, who once remarked that “In Italy there are neither angels nor devils, only average sinners.” The central question of the novel revolves around the issue of how characters operating within a cultural system dominated by cynicism can rise above their milieu to champion their ideals. The novel’s characters are meant to be both sympathetic and yet almost entirely motivated by their own self-interest, with the exception of Sandy, Paolo’s

American wife and her brother Joey, who as Americans have had little direct experience with the

Byzantine world of Italian politics and can, therefore, afford to be more idealistic. By exploring

themes such as the effect of power on human relations, the difficulty of intimacy, foreignness or

the trouble of being an outsider, generational and cultural misunderstanding, whether is it better

to maintain one’s ideals and endanger one’s loved ones, or protect the people one loves most and

compromise one's ideals, the book first examines the relationship between surrounding and

2 character, and ultimately suggests that, although surroundings have a profound effect on

character, the individual can and should decide how much his surroundings will determine his

morals, ethics and personality.

Real-life characters and historical events

In 1989 and again in 1991, I had the opportunity to live with a Roman family, who would

serve as models for the book’s characters and family dynamics. Because I wanted certain

historical events to serve as the starting point for the ethical questions of the work, the fictional

characters of Average Sinners have grown into amalgamations of the real-life Roman family I

lived with and the characters they might have become if they had experienced the dramatic

scenarios, based as they are on real-life historical events, around which the plot revolves.

The story is loosely based on the murder of an Italian journalist, Mino Pecorelli, who was

shot dead in broad daylight on a busy Roman street in 1979 and whose murder initially touched off an intense, but brief investigation. The case was dropped for political reasons, and only reopened again in 1993, twenty four years later, when informers in the Maxi Trial told authorities that a well-known Italian senator, Giulio Andreotti, had asked Mafia captain Gaetano

Badalamenti to arrange the hit as a personal favor. To many, Pecorelli’s death represented the human toll of the battle between ideologies of the left and the right, a battle the fall of the Berlin

Wall in 1989, to a certain extent, made redundant. My story opens just after the reopening of the Maxi Trial in 1992 when my protagonist, Paolo Taviani, returns to Rome to take over

Occham’s Razor, a bookstore he has inherited from his former employer, Carlo Levi. The story deals with Paolo’s psychological conflict: Should he involve himself in the reopening of his

3 uncle’s trial, or should he stay out of it? Because of his American wife’s renewed Catholic faith and her growing friendship with her religion teacher, Father Dante, my protagonist Paolo is always reminded of the moral implications of both decisions, while his distrust of organized religion spurs him to be cynical about both the trial and his wife’s faith.

Many who have read the work have commented that Paolo is far too retiring. Why must he always be intimidated? Why must he continually apologize for himself? But this, too, is not accidental. In a country of dominating matrons, growing up in the context of ever escalating tensions between right and left, Paolo opts to remove himself from the political, and to a certain extent, from the sexual scene. To wish him to be less retiring is to assume that his character is not his destiny and that his environment plays no role in making him into the man he is to become. His failure to find a place for himself, despite his obvious intelligence, is also meant to reflect his zeitgeist. For those unwilling to radicalize, for those not passionate about either the principals of the left or the right, or for those not well-connected to the scions of the rich, education, the typical means of social mobility, is also alienating. Thus, when Paolo tells Anna

Levi that his career in law “wasn’t going anywhere,” he not only speaks for himself, but for an entire generation of alienated intelligence for whom the prospect of free discussion within the academy no longer exists. But in the controlled “petit-bourgeois” world of Occham’s Razor, he is able to engage in an exchange of ideas, and because of this, Occham’s Razor provides Paolo with not only a financial means to live his life, but also a philosophical one, which is represented in the plaque Levi left Paolo: “The acquisition of knowledge is an end onto itself.” To discuss

Averroes and Aquinas’ philosophies is not simply a way to pass the time, but a means of understanding the world. If Paolo can take that notion with him, then he has gained an identity,

4 and not because, as he mistakenly assumes, he is lucky, but because his experiences in Occham’s

Razor will guide him even after he leaves Rome for New York.

Historical Basis of the Novel:

Jewish history in Chapters 12 and 13

A novelist can only hope to develop a convincing conflict between a character’s innate

personality and his or her environment through detail. E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel,

called those complex characters grounded in detail “round characters,” but very little has been

made of the concept of “round settings”—settings which are complex enough and richly

described enough to develop and test the characters of the individuals living within that setting.

Having studied Italian literature as an undergraduate, I was somewhat familiar with the

work of the Jewish-Italian writers Natalia Ginzburg, Carlo Levi and Alberto Moravia. The writer Carlo Levi did, in fact, own a bookstore, although he is not the model for my fictional character Carlo Levi, but the rich and long Jewish-Italian literary tradition did influence my decision to make Levi Jewish and also to make him represent an alternative culture for Paolo, one which is far removed from his mother Livia’s somewhat ruthless and superficial world of

Italian cinema and theater. But I also wanted to get away from the stereotype of Italy as a country of clowns, fashion plates and poets. I wanted to depict characters who were a part of

Italian history, but whose secondary Jewish tradition grounded them in an even more ancient tradition. Carlo’s erudition and his wife Anna’s personal experiences during the round-ups of

1944 were one way to counter that stereotype of Italy, which in the last ten years has been exported and commercialized to an alarming degree.

5 Most of the Jewish history in Chapters 12 and 13 is based on Alexander Stille’s historical

work, Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism. Anna Levi’s experience during the round-ups in 1944 is a composite of the experiences of six Jewish women interviewed by Stille in his work. Carlo and Anna’s distinct way of facing this part of Italian

history was also meant to ring true to the history Stille depicted in his book. While some felt that

in witnessing they were relieving themselves of a tremendous burden, others found they could

only move beyond the past by not discussing what happened. While Carlo and Anna’s reaction

falls in line with how, stereotypically, men and women deal with distress, in Stille’s work

survivors’ reactions did not always break down so neatly along gender lines.

Sicilian and Mafia History

Chapters 4 and 7-10 all deal with Sicilian and Mafia history. This history comes from

many places, but a work that I found particularly illuminating was the former mayor of Palermo

Leoluca Orlando’s Fighting the Mafia and Renewing Sicilian Culture, which provided me with

much of the background to write these chapters. (Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily was also

useful.) Orlando’s work provides first-hand accounts of the Second Mafia War and explores the

psychological importance of General Carlo dalla Chiesa, detailing how Dalla Chiesa’s arrival in

Sicily gave the Sicilians a momentary glimpse of the possibility of a new and less corrupt future,

but how Dalla Chiesa’s assassination, Andreotti’s reelection and the rolling back of the positive

gains of the Maxi Trial devastated the hopes of average Sicilians.

In Chapters 7-10, Paolo’s grandfather, Giorgio Concetta, writes letters to Paolo, missives

which I felt could be a means to understand how historical context affected the individual. In

6 this context even Giorgio’s letters to Paolo can be seen as a sign of resistance, a means to preserve community and to report to the outside world, even in such a modest way as reporting to one’s own grandson what is happening. But when Giorgio ceases to correspond, opting instead to garden in his private space rather than use the public spaces that Bagheria and Palermo once were known for, he expresses the fact that he has given up and that the Mafia has won.

Roman and Vatican History

Because both the fictional characters and the people they were based on had grown up and lived in Prati, a neighborhood not five minutes from the Vatican, I knew they had absorbed much Vatican lore just by virtue of where they lived. The mysterious death of Pope John Paul I, occurring as it did just months before the real-life death of Mino Pecorelli (as well as the fictional death of Luca Concetta) could not have escaped their notice. And in light of that fact, I wrote Chapter 6, the chapter in which Carlo, Alberto and Paolo discuss the various conspiracy theories surrounding Pope John Paul I’s death, and Carlo outlines why he now believes the pope was murdered. Even though this chapter does not seem to relate to the developing plot of

Chapters 1-5, it is meant to solidify Luca’s involvement in yet another Roman scandal, as well as to open the possibility that he was murdered because of his willingness to publish Freemason names.

Reading Paul Williams' The Vatican Exposed also affected the final shape of my novel, for the reason that it changed my views on the Vatican’s place in recent world and Italian history.

In his work Williams delineates how before Pope Pius XI's ascension in 1922, the Vatican’s finances were in such shambles that the Holy Roman Church did not even have enough money to

7 make the most rudimentary repairs to the papal palace, but in 1929 Pope Pius XI’s signing of the

Lateran Treaty with Mussolini drastically changed the Vatican’s political and financial status.

By providing the Vatican with complete jurisdiction over all Catholic organizations in Italy, the treaty exempted these Catholic organizations from taxation and state audit; and by establishing

Vatican City as its own sovereign state, the state of Italy gave up its legal rights over the Vatican.

Mussolini also provided the Vatican with a payment of $90 million in cash and government bonds, and so gave the Vatican the equity it needed to turn its finances around. Not long after the signing of the Lateran Treaty, the Vatican Bank founded IOR, (Institute for the Works of

Religion) a church organization which it ran like a corporation and which proved highly lucrative, and the Vatican Bank became the largest real estate holder in the world, as well as one of the world’s most profitable banks.

I also found in my research that the Vatican, because of its status as its own sovereign nation within another nation, had acquired carte blanche to do as it pleased. And this carte blanche first became evident in the early eighties when, after the Sindona scandals, the state of

Italy, whose economy had directly suffered because of the billions Sindona lost on speculation, opened an investigation of the Vatican Bank’s dealings. Much of the laundered money, it was thought, had been deposited in the Vatican Bank and then re-deposited in off-shore accounts.

The Vatican responded to the inquest by closing its gates and refusing to allow the state of Italy’s prime suspect, Bishop Marckincus, to be investigated.

Religious and Philosophical Preoccupations of the Novel

In Sandy’s character I wanted to explore a personal preoccupation of mine, as a Catholic,

8 with what I perceived as the church’s inability to face its own inner demons and correct itself.

The work was written during the height of the Boston Archdiocese child molestation scandals, and in my studies of Pecorelli’s life, I found a kindred spirit who also believed the church a worthy subject for discussion. Like Sandy, I felt a spiritual need to find meaning in human existence, so I admired her ability to overlook the church’s many, many failures in her search, but more importantly, I wanted her search for meaning to raise questions in Paolo’s mind about what moral imperative should compel those who reject religious faith. Does he who is so quick to dismiss the church for its faults have the right to live solely for his own interests? Even in a society without faith, what ethical requirements should drive human beings? Furthermore, if a man or a woman finds “happiness” in religious faith, as Sandy claims to, do the faithless have the right to belittle the belief, which the religious hold so dear, as naïve or childish?

Sandy’s religious preoccupations were also a way to explore my own struggle to find meaning in human existence. I had been raised a Catholic, but could not find a way to integrate my feminism with the church’s exclusion of women from any important decision-making, its insistence on operating as a closed system above the law, as well as its mystifying ability to ignore, and even be threatened by, contraception and other scientific advances designed to improve the lives of women. As a child I had been deeply religious and even dreamed of becoming a priest. Later when I understood the social reality that this profession was prohibited to me, I began to turn away from the church, but would every few years, spasmodically, try to renew my faith. When Andrew Sullivan, the social critic, came to speak at the University of

Georgia last year, he acknowledged he had tried to attend Mass, but each time he would almost make it to service, he would find he was “too angry,” and turn around again. That was the kind of anger I felt I understood; that touched me.

9 Sandy’s experiences with Dante are surprisingly positive. Her relationship to Dante is close, and he takes her seriously enough to discuss abstract concepts, like the concepts of freewill and predestination, and the Biblical depiction of God. Dante is also one of the few major characters in the story who is much more talked about than heard. In fact, apart from one phone conversation between Dante and Sandy about free will, he never actually speaks in the novel. The reader only knows and hears about him through Sandy and through Paolo, both of whom can only see him through the prism of their own experience, Sandy because she is too isolated and too much in need of a male teacher/guide in her life, and Paolo because he is too insecure about their class differences and her feelings for him, which convince him she is losing faith in the marriage.

Even though Dante is more heard about than present, he plays a major role in the story, not only because he has been spying on the couple in order to appeal to his superiors, but also because he is a sexual enigma. His conversations with Sandy are, for the most part, abstractions.

He never carries on a conversation with Paolo, who as her husband would, presumably, be interested in the extent of their friendship, but he also sees nothing inappropriate about praying with Sandy or taking her alone to the catacombs beneath a basilica. If he is truly that removed, then he is a testament to the debilitating nature of the church's celibacy policy.

Father Dante’s character might seem unrealistic or even overblown, but he is actually based on a personal experience I had at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, a Trappist monastery in

Conyers, Georgia, in December 2003. I had decided, partly out of curiosity, partly in order to understand how the church creates “Catholic” character, and partly to find models for Father

Dante, to spend a weekend at this monastery just outside Atlanta. On the first evening of the retreat, they informed us that, from five to seven p.m., we could meet with a Trappist monk to

10 discuss our spiritual concerns or for confession. When I tried to discuss a relationship difficulty

I was having at the time, the clergyman unearthed an anecdote from his early college years which was only remotely related to my problem. He also appeared to be visibly uncomfortable with my relationship question. In his defense, I was not a student of his, or someone he had had any prior acquaintanceship with, but in my mind I felt I had experienced an important dimension of the awkward gender dynamics within the Catholic Church. For those women who genuinely seek spiritual guidance, these gender dynamics heighten rather than reduce sexual tensions.

Personally, my disappointments with the Catholic Church led me to explore other

alternatives and philosophies, such as psychotherapy and Judaism. Both as philosophical and as

ethical systems, psychotherapy and Judaism share an inward-looking, work-driven way of

improving the self which appealed to me. This exploration grew into two other important

aspects of the novel: 1) Paolo’s resigned acceptance of psychotherapy and prescription drugs as

a means of coping and 2) Paolo’s attraction to Judaism, which grows through his exposure to

Carlo Levi at Occham’s Razor.

Judaism

Levi behaves differently from the Italian men Paolo knows. By dressing down and

dismissing the church’s emphasis on form over content as “perplexing,” he demonstrates a

Jewish emphasis on actions over faith. He is more than willing to perform good deeds

(“mitzvahs”), such as driving his pregnant niece to the hospital and keeping true to his word to

hire Paolo. When the two discuss Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, Levi introduces Paolo to

the concept of studying metaphysics as a privilege one has to earn. Through this, Paolo learns

11 the concept of studying as a privilege. These are the values Paolo has learned in Occham’s

Razor, and yet the values of Occham’s Razor continually remind Paolo of his own alienation from his own religious tradition. For the first eleven chapters of the novel, the reader learns little about Levi or what the values of Occham’s Razor actually are. But in Chapter 12, when Paolo has tea with Anna Levi, and in Chapter 13, when the reader meets Carlo Levi for the first time,

Paolo is working through his own identity crisis of Chapter 11, and in recalling his memories of

Anna and Carlo Levi, he provides a window for the reader into the crucial aspects of his identity formation.

Paolo’s identity crisis in Chapter 11 shows that he doubts his own authenticity, primarily because he lacks any religious tradition to subscribe to. In this chapter Paolo quotes the last four lines from W.D. Snodgrass’ poem “April Inventory”: “I haven’t read one book about/A book or memorized one plot./Or found a mind I didn’t doubt./I learned one date. And then forgot./”

These lines remind Paolo that he has not acquired knowledge as he promised himself he would do once he left Occham’s Razor. He still hopes that Levi can guide him as his teacher, but having rejected his mother’s theatricalism and his father’s Catholicism, he lacks an identity with which to compose his letter to Levi, and, moreover, he can never be fully a part of Levi’s world because he is not Jewish. Through Levi’s final act of generosity, bequeathing Occham’s Razor to Paolo, Levi shows that he accepts Paolo even if Paolo is not Jewish. This is why I included the discussion of Maslow’s Theory in Chapter 5. For Paolo inheriting Occham’s Razor allows him to move out of Stage Four, and into a more fixed, and therefore more stable identity.

12 Psychotherapy

But even this identity, rooted as it is in his newly acquired status as a proprietor, is not

stable. Paolo’s secrets—his family’s silence about Luca and his refusal to help Superman launch

a counterattack against the ruling Christian Democrats—propel him into periodic bouts of

depression and insomnia, which can only be treated through psychotherapy and anti-depressants.

But while he is in these sessions, he feels impatient and complains that Dr. Renato is “missing a

certain dimension.” He dreams of seeing her in a swimsuit and wishes she were more rooted to

the physical world. To Paolo, Renato always sounds like a recording in a “disembodied person.”

If anything, her detachment prompts him to dismiss psychoanalysis. He begins to talk of a

shadow world and the dead as spirits who do not die, but Renato’s professionalism will not allow

her to engage these musings. Not only have Sandy’s religious leanings affected him more than

he allows himself to admit, but the continual presence of death and dying, in the form of the

recent death of his grandfather and the many physical and temporal markers of his uncle’s

murder, reiterate that no one knows what follows this existence.

These sessions with Renato are again meant to work through some of my own

disappointments and discoveries about psychotherapy. On a number of occasions, I have tried

counseling and therapy, to the extent that on a student’s stipend I could afford either, and while I

acknowledge the need for this profession, I do feel that a few factors limit the effectiveness of

psychotherapy.

1) Its desire to join the ranks of the hard sciences and to offer “objective” detached analysis, the

benefits of which are highly dubious;

13 2) Its lack of any agreed upon ethical, religious or philosophical conviction without which patients

are naturally prone to distrust or to see the therapist as someone out to “make a buck”;

3) Its method of continually asking questions, while sometimes effective, in cases where the patient

and therapist do not trust each other, can easily block patients off, or make them feel as if they

are circling the same terrain, but not getting anywhere;

Its desire to join the ranks of the “hard sciences”

In my own case, I discovered psychotherapy's awkward stepchild status when compared

to the hard sciences after I began to read its literature at UGA’s science library. The psychology

books that adopted a humanistic or individualistic approach tended to be more legible, while

those psychology works which focused on empirical data and/or statistics were, more often than

not, dull. For Paolo, Renato's dress and demeanor signal that she overcompensates for her

professional insecurity through detachment and over-professionalism. In Chapter 18, for

example, Renato insists that while she is a therapist, she puts aside any personal feelings she may

have and tries to do her job, but her job of analysis leaves Paolo’s spiritual convictions of a

shadow world both unanswered and unquestioned. She keeps no personal mementos on her desk

or on her bookshelves; she alphabetizes her book collection and arranges her journals

chronologically. She dresses in power suits. For Paolo this is a sign that she has unquestionably

accepted psychoanalysis’ feelings of inferiority next to the hard sciences and that she

overcompensates through her detachment and over-professionalism.

14 Its lack of any agreed upon ethical, religious or philosophical convictions

This aspect of psychotherapy did not develop out of my own personal experience, but rather came from my readings of a therapist, Howard F. Stein, who described the many impasses patient/therapist relations encounter when the therapist neglects to be upfront about the underlying principles of his or her practice. Again and again, Stein's patients, particularly those frustrated with their own progress, accused him of capitalizing on their misery. Paolo, too, resents Renato's wealth, which he believes she does not deserve since she does not produce anything. He complains that her office is so richly furnished, and earlier in the novel, he accuses her of financing her summer vacation and her son’s private school through the referrals she receives from her father, the parliamentary analyst for whom the Kickback Scandals, which have brought down so many powerful politicians, have been such a blessing. He never does recover from his basic distrust of her. As part of the protocol of being an analyst, she never speaks of her own personal experiences. Her professional obligations require her to “be professional,” with all the ambiguities such a stance poses, particularly when issues of ethics and religious and philosophical preoccupations come up during their sessions, as they invariably do.

When the method of continually asking questions blocks a patient off

Another aspect I wanted to explore was how this lack of any agreed upon conviction negatively affects patient/therapist relations, particularly when the therapist continually uses the method of asking “probing” questions. Because Paolo does not feel he knows Renato, her questions often come off as interrogations, and he often closes himself off to her by quipping that he is “sick to death of explaining”. This distrust forces lock-outs and strikes where Paolo will

15 cease to respond to her. If tensions escalate, the situation can become unbearable, as it does in

Chapter 3, when Paolo gets up to leave, and Renato tells him that “if he leaves, he can expect to never come back”. What surprises him more than anything else is how similar the questions

Sandy poses following her Catholicism class are to those he faces during his therapy sessions, and yet the church, because of his personal experience with its clergy, arouses much more hostility and anger in him than psychoanalysis does.

Finally, it is neither psychoanalysis, nor Judaism, nor Catholicism which offer Paolo hope for the future and convince him to become a better person, but his relationship with Sandy, who supports his need to testify and who, once she learns how Luca died, also supports the way

Paolo handled his murder. He finds he is able to forgive her for the abortion, because not only is he himself culpable, reminded as he is of his momentary infidelity with Natasha, but also

because he can not conceive of his existence without her. Finally, the novel is meant to

articulate the human need for deep and binding commitments to one another, commitments

which ultimately enrich our lives, making us better people.

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Their eyes have never looked into infinite space Through the lattice work of a nomad’s comb; born lucky, Their legs have never encountered the fungi And insects of the jungle, the monstrous forms and lives With which we have nothing, we like to hope, in common. So, when one of them goes to the bad, the way his mind works Remains comprehensible: to become a pimp Or deal in fake jewelry or ruin a fine tenor voice For effects that bring down the house could happen to all But the best and the worst of us…

--W.H. Auden, “In Praise of Limestone”

22

PART I

23

CHAPTER 1

BLACK KNIGHTS WEND THEIR WAY BACK

Long before Cosa Nostra assumed its reign, their black hooded forefathers—dark

knights—whispered subversive doctrine on the streets of Palermo. “The church is a cesspool of

corruption!” “That Spaniard, Charles II, is an incompetent fool! He’s pawned off the great city

of Palermo to sycophants and toadies!” Traveling through channels under the city, they wended

their way back to catacombs—the genius of the Carthaginians—and plotted their revenge. As a

boy, I loved these stories. I begged my father to repeat them again and again and again. As a

man of 34, I still see the black knights rising up from beneath the catacombs, only this time they

don’t seek retribution from the church or the state, but from their very own sect, from their

fellow black masked knights. Their leader may be a traitor, yes, but he’s a valiant traitor. His face, if he were to slip his hood off, say, to blow his nose, would be resolute—crystal blue eyes, determined jaw-line, straight and white glistening teeth—a composite of Paul Newman, Clint

Eastwood and Gregory Peck. Our black masked knight would have no need of money, no regret and no fear. As a boy, my father told me these stories to comfort me. As a man, I tell myself the same stories to fall asleep at night—even if I myself no longer believe them.

In 1992 the myth of the Beati Paoli, as it was then called, had long since fallen out of the hands of Cosa Nostra—even Cosa Nostra had fallen out of the hands of Cosa Nostra. The Maxi

Trial had just ruled in favor of the state, convicting more than 300 mafiosi, some to life in prison.

24 In those days, I had the impression that, for the first time, no one—or at least very few people— had any idea what they were actually doing. In America Mia Farrow accused Woody Allen of molesting their son, and Woody, in turn, ran off with Mia’s sullen daughter, Soon Yi. The newly-elected Bill Clinton delighted Republicans by pushing the so-called radical policy of allowing gays in the military. From the balconies of the House and the Senate, snorts and laughter were heard. In Italy, a great deal had changed, too. Jeff Koons, the artist, and Ilona

Staller, a porn star, were either divorcing or running for office or both, it’s hard to remember which. The Christian Democrat’s Sicilian chairman, 64-year-old Salvo Lima, had just increased his bodyguards to five as a pre-election precaution. And my wife Sandy had just advanced ordered a three-year supply of birth control pills after visiting her stepsister June in Colorado, who had just given birth to her third child, a boy. Sandy observed this event with total and unequivocal fear. The exhaustion, the sleeplessness, the crying convinced her that her sister had relinquished her own life for the sake of the next generation, and Sandy wanted to make sure the same would not happen to her, at least, not for the next three years.

We moved into Via Cicerone on February 3, 1992—two days before Alessandra

Mussolini, the twenty-nine-year-old granddaughter of Benito, announced her intent to run for office on the neo-Fascist ticket. The apartment was above my mother Livia’s, a not-so-out-of- the-ordinary living situation in Rome, but one which my wife was not pleased with. I felt that she exaggerated her displeasure. Our neighborhood Prati was one of the best neighborhoods in

Rome. Our apartment was close to shops, department stores, theaters, banks and the subway.

We lived directly on the bus-lines, ten minutes from Piazza Navona, ten minutes from the

Vatican and fifteen to the Spanish Steps. The building was on a main thoroughfare. I found

25 comfort in the name of the street: Via Cicerone. The word cicerone means ‘a traveler’s guide,’ and even though I had grown up on this street, I did feel as if I needed some guidance, and that the name was portentous. In my view the only way I could accept returning to Via Cicerone was to behave as if nothing had ever happened—as if I had left Italy by chance, and returned by chance also, as if I were one of those Italian men in ads I had seen in America, singing opera in the shower, calling my amore to fetch me a fresh towel from the laundry, and lathering up.

Maybe, if I was lucky, I would be able to act that way—flippant, carefree, a mass of charisma just waiting to reveal itself.

Soon after our return I began to have elaborate dreams. In the most common one I was an ambulance driver in Palermo whose job it was to pick up dead bodies at the Palermo Hospital, where, for bureaucratic purposes, hospital personnel were paid not to certify their dead loved ones and, then, to arrange for an ambulance to pick up the body and have it delivered to the family home to be officially certified. I read once about a shoot-out in which two rival ambulance companies resorted to violence after they both arrived to pick up the same body. In my dream I was one of those ambulance drivers. In the dream all was white—the road, the hospital gates, the fountain, the entrance and the building’s exterior—and as I pushed the dead body into the bed of the van, another ambulance driver from a rival company pulled out a gun and shot, hitting me right in the heart, but rather than die, I continued loading bodies into my ambulance. Dr. Renato even interpreted this dream as wish-fulfillment, and claimed that I sought out situations to transport my own personal dead from one stagnant place to another. In her view I seek such things at my own peril, but I don’t see it that way. I responded typically by denying her interpretation. “The dream is a typical fear dream,” I said. “I fear death, like so many others—both in my waking and sleeping hours—and yet I never die. Freud thought every

26 character in one’s dream was a version of oneself. Perhaps that driver shooting me is another me, the one who wants the glory and the reward, who does not want everyone staring at him and saying, ‘My, how you fucked up this time!’”

Dr. Renato–spawn of the great Dr. Cesare Renato—Teodolinda, wearer of suits. Dr.

How-Can-I-Maintain-This-Grim-Professionalism-And-Still-Dress-Sexy, Dr. I’m-Taking-A-

Memo-For-My-Next-Book, Dr. I-Never-Have-Erotic-Dreams-About-My-Patients. Dr. Here’s-

A-Classic-Case-Of-Transference, Dr. Let’s-Review-What-Happened-In-Our-Last-Session, Dr. I-

Never-Refill-The-Candy-Jar-Until-It’s-Fully-Empty, Dr. I-Think-You’re-Making-Progress-And-

My-Rates-Are-Going-Up. Invader of my dreams, surrogate mother, mammary gland extraordinaire—Renato, dear, lovely Renato. Those great statesmen of Italy—diplomats, parliamentarians—the men I rode in the elevator with—how sad that they were unaware—

Renato Senior’s case studies, his guinea pigs—the source of his fame and his downfall. Dear

Teodolinda: Your father’s book, The Neuroses of Power, I was impressed by it, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind that he had betrayed his patients’ confidence in order to write it.

Renato: So, tell me about your mother?

Me: What’s to tell?

Renato: I think a lot.

Me: Such as?

Renato: Tell me about how you saw her as a child.

Me: She was—what more can I say? Kids don’t see their mother as anything. Their mothers just are.

27 Renato: And how was she?

Me: Her father named her Livia Drusilla after the Roman Empress Livia, Augustus’ first wife—a woman who was an expert on poison and murder—that should tell you something.

Renato: Come, you exaggerate.

Me: You’ve never met my mother.

Livia Drusilla, a pauper, born in Apuglia 1937—pawned between her dancing entertainer of a mother and her staid peasant grandparents—dreamer of dreams we dreamed of doing, but could not bring ourselves to do. Her father—a fat industrialist businessman, a man of means and many chins—took one look at my mother and declared her Livia Drusilla. Legend has it she was born without so much as a shriek; they say she lay in her bassinet without uttering a sound.

Good old Livia, she was taking it all in, even then. So still and yet so omniscient—in a ward of at least 50 screaming babies, there she lay—still as a stone.

Renato: Telling—and yet hard to believe. Haven’t you any more positive way of looking at her?

Me: That is positive, doctor.

She could not gain weight. Even after the war, dresses hung off her dirty shoulders. At

four-and-a-half, she tap-danced for the soldiers in Napoli for small change. At eight, she

primped for her Little Miss Tuna of the Sea Competition. At fifteen, she wallpapered her walls

with the Tuna of the Sea paper she won in the Young Miss Tuna of the Sea Competition. At

eighteen, things seemed to be looking up: she became an extra on the set of Quo Vadis. Livia

Drusilla—born of ignominious background, bearer of titan tits, mercenary mama, lover of

28 powerful men, dreamer of dreams we dreamed of doing, but could not bring ourselves to do.

Livia Drusilla, my mother—her stars were in ascent, but her tubes were not tied, and not long after the beginning of her ascent, I was born. And doctor, I cried. I could not keep still when I was born. I cried, I got hungry, I shat, I peed, but, mostly, I cried too much and too often. I cried far too well, doctor.

Renato: Ok, ok, so you cried. All babies do—must you make an issue of it?

Me: But Livia Drusilla—she dreamed great dreams for me. I was to fulfill the dreams she had to give up, doctor, can’t you see that?

Renato: Your description of your mother is skewed by your own narcissism.

Me: Perhaps.

“Your son will grow up to be a great piano player”—just before that I had seen the gypsy woman clasp her runny-nosed husband to her bosom and tell him to stuff it. She drowned the room in incense, red-shaded lights and crystal balls. 40,000 lire—the woman cost my underpaid mother, and for 40,000 lire, what did she tell her? “Your son will grow up to be a great concert pianist.” And this was to be followed by many hours sitting on a hard piano bench, playing scales, Fur Elise, The Surprise Symphony, many lires spent on Mr. Bernstein’s weekly lessons— and everyone, Bernstein, myself, the fortune teller and company, we all knew I hadn’t an ounce of talent, everyone except Livia Drusilla, that is.

I am getting ahead of myself. I haven’t told you anything about how I came to run

Occham’s Razor—once the greatest lending library the city has ever known, a central meeting

29 place for thinkers, a kind of Shakespeare and Co. for Mediterraneans which would stay open late, but shut its doors for three precious hours every afternoon. Levi envisioned a bookstore beyond politics, non-sectarian, a stunning product of his will to get beyond labels. Fascist, Communist,

Socialist, Green, Red, Black, Orange—every political color was welcome. By the time I started working there, Levi could no longer afford to lend books out, and so he had turned it into a for- profit business riding off its reputation from years past. Because I grew up in Occham’s Razor, to me it was my own safe refuge, but to my Uncle Luca it was a foreign place. He first called it a

Jew’s Harp, then, later a Jew’s Fart. He grew anti-Semitic, imagined Jews as ravenous devourers of the world, and I never quite understood why.

When I first started working for him, Levi lived in the Jewish ghetto on the east side of the Tiber, two blocks from the synagogue, while I lived on the west. As he aged, the demands of his densely-populated four block neighborhood wore on him. I helped where I could, did some of his grocery shopping and ran a few of his errands (jobs for which he insisted on paying me), but he still complained that using public transportation, grocery shopping, laundry and the other chores in an amenity-less neighborhood consumed his time needlessly. I left Italy shortly before he moved to his new residence near Piazza Bologna because, in February 1982, at twenty-four, I became engaged to an American girl whom I had met while completing my military service in

Perugia, and moved to America with her. In October of that year, my mother Livia called to tell me that the synagogue had been attacked, a child had been killed, and thirty-seven Jews had been injured; but Levi, typical of his absentmindedness, had overslept that day and had not attended.

After that the carabinieri began to guard the synagogue around the clock, as they still do to this day.

30 Sandy hung the collage in the middle of Occham’s Razor a week after we came back to

Rome. She said that it was mine, and that I should acknowledge Luca’s last gift to me, and I agreed. Why shouldn’t I hang it in Occham’s Razor—especially while I worked to rebuild the bookstore’s client base? Besides, my wife had inherited an elaborate collection of Japanese ink drawings she wanted to hang in our apartment, and as compensation for living in an apartment above Livia, I gave her full decorating rights. After all, without her inheritance money, I would not have been able to afford therapy, which would have left me with no one to help me work through the neuroses my wife and mother’s close proximity aroused in me. Opposite the collage

I had hung a photograph of Carlo Levi, and below it a plaque that read “The very practice of knowing, the acquisition of knowledge, is an end in itself”—a plaque Levi had hung in the bookstore when I was just a boy, one which I was loathe to take down again.

Shortly thereafter Sandy’s brother, Joey Dobernchek, settled into an apartment on Via

Orazio, two blocks from our apartment on Via Cicerone. He had just broken up with his girlfriend, a New York socialite. He claimed he had never loved her, and said he wanted to start fresh (by fresh, he meant he would move two blocks from his baby sister). I couldn’t help but think him an emissary of Philip Dobernchek, CEO of the Flying Squeal Corporation, a great pharmaceutical corporation, producer of Viagra and the most lucrative anti-depressants. Before

Sandy and I married, Philip Dobernchek, a stern, drastic man, attempted half-heartedly to cut her off. But once he realized the useless comfort of grown sons like Joey, and that, practically speaking, there was not much he could do to stop our marriage, he slowly reclaimed her, all the while keeping as great a distance as possible to myself, the man he called Count No-Account,

Prince Amerigo No-Name-Ucci, and other names which I will not repeat here. Sandy’s Aunt

Sippy was the only Dobernchek who actively supported us by giving us money and finding me a

31 job at the Bank of Italy’s New York office. As an art enthusiast, she had a romanticized view of

Italians, claimed we were a nation of poets, chefs, lovers of life–a way of seeing that we as a people have profited from and are reluctant to dispel.

Their father’s capital allowed Joey to buy an apartment on Via Orazio, and to start his own import/export business run out of his apartment. Even though Joey’s connection to Rome was vague, I knew it had something to do with a girl he met in the eighties, at the same time I met Sandy. The girl finally ran off with an Australian, but, for whatever reason, his connection to Rome stuck, and his Italian was by now good enough to conduct business in, pick up girls with, and to converse with my mother Livia (who distrusted him for his entrepreneurial mind: “I mean it’s one thing to start an enterprise like Occham’s Razor, which promotes learning and culture, but another to run a kind of international flea market whose sole purpose is to make money for its owner while he figures out what he really wants to do for a living.”)

Sandy needed only mention Aunt Sippy’s Japanese prints or Joey’s apartment for both of us to be bombarded with bizarre images of Philip Dobernchek’s paternal indifference. Sandy claimed his wealth imprisoned him, and said he was afraid to pick up the phone after reading about an incident where terrorists rigged the phone to explode upon human contact. Last year when Sandy and I called to wish him a Merry Christmas, Aunt Sippy had answered. “Do you want to speak to Paolo and Sandy?” “No,” he had answered. Not “Maybe later,” not “I’m tired now, but I’ll call you later,” but simply no. I often imagined him as an octopus reaching across the Atlantic to suck any kind of happiness out of my wife. How I abhorred his treatment of her, but what could I do about it, especially when Sandy was unwilling to see him as the megalomaniac that he was?

32 By Italian standards I am neither fiery nor passionate but when compared to the Philip

Doberncheks of the world, those impossibly efficient products of the marketplace, I become a

scalding fire king of love and sympathy, earth father, androgynous mass of warmth and comfort.

Dobernchek, although wealthy enough to live comfortably through many million retirements,

continued to be miserable, suspicious and humorless. I often wondered what would have

happened had Sandy and I had a child. Could this have warmed her Uncle Scrooge father’s

heart? He seemed to demand both the complete incapacity and the total independence of his

children. I think he would have relished nothing more than to have them both out of work and

living in his brownstone at Sutton Place again, where he would alternately abuse them for their

incompetence and totally ignore them. The end effect would have been the same: Joey and

Sandy would have been psychically wounded in a way which not even the most loving spouse could repair.

33

CHAPTER 2 JOB WAS RIGHT TO ASK

They say April is the cruelest month, but late February/early March can be pretty damn

cruel too. In my case depression, much rain and the pre-Lent carnival marked this part of the

year. In the evenings I would walk two blocks north to Piazza Cola di Rienzo; find a

comfortable bench next to the bookstalls selling old black and white prints of Italian film stars,

postcards, and such; and watch parents dote on their tiny tesoro, parading around the wide

sidewalk dressed in the latest Disney costumes, an Aladdin, Nemo the Whale or Fido the Mouse.

I would feel terrifically old thinking of how Sandy feared having children, but how I would have

liked nothing better than to see our family grow. I feared she secretly hated me, but dreaded the

thought of losing her.

Sandy had recently read about Saint Eusebio’s Day in January, the day of insuring Italian

pets in heaven. She could not believe such a day actually existed, but she loved the madness of

the custom enough to want to read more about Italian traditions. As she found out about the

lives of the saints, she began to develop a romantic view of Rome as a place for dreamers and

magical superstitions. We had missed the Christmas witch who delivered coal or candy to the

children on the sixth of January, but Sandy read up on this and other traditions. She took a series

of tours which further outlined the history of the city. The Borgias and the lives of the artists

Borromoni and Bernini fascinated her, but she also adored stories in which inexplicably miraculous things had happened. 34 “Italy’s heritage is fantastical and mythic,” she claimed, “whereas America’s is rational

and pragmatic.”

“Oh, come on, you have your Easter Bunnies and your Santa Clauses, just like we do.”

“Yes, but American children have to stop believing early or else they’re thought childish

and stupid.”

“You still believe in God, don’t you, and I don’t find you stupid.”

“Believing in God and believing in Santa aren’t the same thing.”

I’m convinced it was to spite me that she signed up for that class on Catholicism at the

Institute of the Nazarene on Via Orazio. This was her way of letting me know she would always

be her own person, no matter whether we were married or not. But the coup de grace was the

particular pride with which she showed me that ridiculous ash streak on her forehead from some pontiff or another, like some love tattoo after an illicit affair—and she knew I absolutely loathed these people, having gone to school with the numerous bastard children of Vatican City, and my mother Livia, having for two or three years been the lover of a disgustingly overweight Vatican banker who sent her expensive chocolates and flowers (The chocolates were usually thrown out:

Livia did not eat sweets, and I, knowing their sender, could not bear to eat them.).

I heard very few particulars about the class. Only once did I happen to walk past the

Institute of the Nazarene as it was letting out, and this tall, Rasputin-like man was cupping my

wife’s hand, and, in a low earnest voice, reciting the Lord’s Prayer:

Give us this day our daily bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil.

35 My wife, and I was disappointed in her for this, responded by uttering a hushed, and in my view, overly-modest “yes,” as if they had shared this Biblical moment but had not had the decency to keep their prayer within the classroom walls.

Renato: Earlier you complained that your wife did not have enough hobbies, and yet now that she’s developed this keen interest in religion, you re-coil from her and from it.

Me: No, not from her, from it.

Renato: Is there some reason why you feel you shouldn’t trust your wife?

Me: Not her, doctor. Them–all those seedy little celibates. I don’t buy it for a moment.

I’ve heard stories, doctor. My classmates were the sons and daughters of these so-called celibates.

The more that she sensed how ill-at-ease I was with her religious fervor, the more dead set on it she became. She even bought one of those silly wooden crosses the Franciscans wear.

Before going to sleep at night, she would kneel by the bed and pray, her lips moving, eyebrows furrowed, as if she were engaged in an intense conversation. Once while we were making love, I started to go down on her, but she locked her legs, and with a strength I thought beyond her, she yanked me up by the underarms, so we would have to do it missionary style.

“Not only are you having hand sex with your religion teacher, but now you want only to have missionary sex with me. What next?” I asked.

But the reality was that the dream of her having hand sex, or any kind of sex, with

Brother Rasputin was just that, a dream. Sandy was absorbing the most regressive, most sickly elements of her environment. I felt a peculiar joy worrying for another human being, apart from

36 myself, and so, in some subconscious way, I was grateful to her for eliciting a protective instinct in me: I wanted to save her from them, in the same way she sought her weekly salvation in her

Brother Rasputin’s class.

I mentioned earlier that Sandy, because of her aversion to bearing children, was conscientious to the point of obsession when it came to remembering her birth control pills, a source of tension between us. She kept her pills in a pink traveling case beneath the sink, but I was either too timid or too thoughtful or both to check whether she was still taking these pills. I had never gone through her things before, primarily because Livia had so often gone through mine as a child, and I did not want to invade another person’s privacy, as mine had been intruded upon while growing up. Now the thought occurred to me more often than I like to admit that I could easily check up on this, for now that she was a card-carrying member of the Holy Order of

Rome, she may have decided to abandon her former godless ways, but again I dared not ask nor snoop; instead, I simply wondered.

In the middle of March, the news came that the politician Salvo Lima had been killed on a busy street in Palermo. This meant nothing to Sandy, but to me this seemingly far-off act of violence was the sign I had dreaded and always secretly waited for. I should explain that Salvo

Lima had, for years, not only been the Chairman of the Christian Democrats, but he had also been the intermediary between political power in Rome and Cosa Nostra. Other people saw his death as a sign that the Mafia would not accept the Maxi Trial verdict without retaliation. I myself took Lima’s death as a sign that a black list had been drawn up, and now, one by one, the names on that list would be scratched out. For years Cosa Nostra had for practical reasons adopted a style of killing known as the “Lupara Bianca.” In this method the victim was first

37 strangled (the cleanest form of killing, since one didn’t have to worry about blood stains in a strangling). The body was then dumped in a tub of acid until the victim’s epidermis, muscles and internal organs effectively dissolved. Whatever remains were left after this could be poured down a well or a drain. I had a morbid fear of this form of death. To be physically dissolved was to have all concrete evidence of one’s existence wiped out. To be vaporized in this way was to be removed from this earth, as if one had never existed. Someone like myself, an irritation more than a cancer, was likely to be removed in this way, whereas a political figure like Lima, who functioned as a symbol, would need to be killed in a more operatic gesture, to show one more time the state’s utter ineptitude, both in terms of its ability to run the state and in its epic grandeur (Francis Ford Coppola could direct Cosa Nostra’s films, but who directed the state’s?).

So statesmen like Lima could die, gasping for breath, sheer terror giving way to resignation, while Cosa Nostra, with its many weddings and births, would constantly replenish itself.

Renato: What is it about Lima’s murder that bothers you so much?

Me: Besides the method, the timing and the significance, not much.

Renato: But it’s not as if you have any daily dealings with these people–your fears are totally irrational.

Me: I should think my irrational fears would please you. Old Cesare’s probably sending you clients as we speak. He probably can’t fit anyone else into his schedule, and so all his sick statesmen descend the one flight to you. This Lima attack will probably finance your next summer vacation and your son’s private school.

Renato: I thought we were talking about you.

Me: We’re always talking about me.

38 Renato: Did you think we would talk about me during your therapy sessions? That would be a waste of your money, I should think.

As might be evident here, I was beginning to treat Renato badly. It jarred me to know

that her father held the dubious position of parliamentary analyst and that taxpayers paid for his

position. As a result he had daily access to some of the most Machiavellian minds in politics,

which made me question how easily I could separate her father’s clients from her father and her

father’s politics from her. Would it be fair to assume that Tedolinda had absorbed her fair share

of the Lion and the Fox? I began to notice the downward curve of her mouth as she jotted down

notes during our sessions, the jutting and accusatory nature of her knees, the angular and

opportunistic shape of her shoulders. I grew irritated with the ueber-professional design of her

office, which overlooked a very nice row of sycamore trees and a walled-in private garden, and

yet she kept the blinds drawn and displayed no photographs on or around her desk. In her

bookshelves were rows of psychoanalytic journals, all alphabetized and coordinated by subject, but no personal mementos. All of this seemed to say to me that Renato was perfectly happy studying other people’s minds but would not allow her patients to do the same to hers.

In my journal I had methodically recorded the date and subject matter of our sessions. In the first three, Renato grilled me about Livia Drusilla. In the fourth and fifth, she wanted to know more about Sandy’s religious fervor, and in the sixth (which happened to fall on the Feast of St Joseph’s), she interrogated me about my reaction to Salvo Lima’s murder. Never once did she relay any real information about herself, her likes and dislikes, her private life. She wore a wedding ring, but never mentioned a husband.

39 Our sessions never ran over the 45-minute psychoanalytic hour. If we ran out of things to talk about, we would sit and face one another in silence. She kept a gold-faced clock between us, which neither faced me nor her, but ticked in an irritating way, like some kind of intensely objective referree between opposing teams. In the middle of the third session, (I was recounting my poor treatment before Livia ) I got up to leave.

“If you walk out, don’t expect another appointment with me,” she said.

This threat did what it was supposed to: I sat back down immediately and continued recounting to the best of my abilities.

Since Joey had just moved into his new apartment on Via Orazio, and since Sandy was still not working, I decided it would be a good idea to get the two of them together. It was my

secret plan to rekindle their old close bond in the hopes that Joey’s physical and emotional

presence might pull her out from under the influence of Brother Rasputin. Joey’s physical

bearing might even remind Sandy of her father. And if that didn’t work, Joey might simply be

alarmed enough to confront his sister directly. Even if this caused her pain, I was convinced it

would help, since any attempt I could have made had already been rebuffed with expressions

like, “You don’t understand me” or “Leave me alone, I know what I’m doing.”

The evening did not go as well as I had hoped. When Joey arrived at our place, he

wanted to know whether we had seen Don’t tell mom the babysitter’s dead–a new release in Italy

which he had missed seeing in the U.S. because of his break-up. Sandy immediately suggested

that the two of us should go, and for a moment I thought I would be stuck seeing the film with

Joey. But finally I convinced the both of them that it was their duty as American tourists to

experience Italy, not waste their time seeing American films over popcorn and coca-cola. Over

40 St Joseph’s beignets, a specialty of St. Joseph’s Day, as we walked on Borgo Pio, we looked at the passageway meant to carry the Pope from St Peter’s to the Castello Sant’Angelo in times of civil unrest, and I began to feel uneasy. Wouldn’t I need just such a passageway if things continued in this vein? We passed souvenir shops carrying black and white baby Jesus figurines, miniature busts of the Pope, rosaries, cherubs and other kitsch, and all I could think of was how

Sandy had sold out to these cheap traveling salesmen. By this point we had reached the Piazza del Risorgimento. Cheap stalls began to sell figurines from the Vatican museum, plastic figurines of the discus thrower, the Belvedere Apollo, boxer shorts with the privates of

Michelangelo’s David silk-screened on them, Trinity crosses, t-shirts of Raphael’s School of

Athens. A crowd of carabinieri shepherded the hordes of people along Via Porta Angelica, and

Joey, in this context, asked how Sandy’s class was going.

“We discussed evil–what it is and where it comes from,” said Sandy.

“And Brother Rasputin had an answer to that question?” I asked, more bitterly than I had wanted.

“Why do you insist on calling him that? His name isn’t Rasputin: it’s Dante.”

“Dante, what? Don’t tell me Alighieri.”

“No, just Dante–I don’t know his last name. Actually I don’t usually call him by his first name either. I usually just call him ‘Father’.”

“The man I saw holding your hand was no father. He was about our age, Sandy, and the way he was looking at you was anything but fatherly.”

“So, what did he say?” asked Joey.

“About what?” asked Sandy.

“About evil.”

41 “He said there were a number of possibilities, but that his own personal belief was that no mortal could examine the mystery of God’s divine plan.”

“Oh, that’s convenient.”

“Yeah, then he told us about the prophet Job. He had also wanted answers on suffering.”

“And did he get them?”

“No, instead God told Job to stop asking, then asked him, ‘Where were you when I founded the earth?’”

“God asked him what?”

“Where were you when I founded the earth?”

“I hate to say it,” said Joey, “but God sounds like an asshole. I mean why couldn’t he just give Job a straight answer.”

“I asked that, too, but he insisted God had Job’s best interest at heart, but disliked Job for asking.”

“So, Job is supposed to accept losing all his property, his wife and kids as God’s will.”

“Yeah, I mean God tests everyone, and it’s our job as Christians to rise to those challenges.”

“Don’t include me in all that horseshit. It’s your job as a Christian to listen to Brother

Satan and put ash on your forehead and give up certain kinds of sex–that’s not my job. I may have married you, but I don’t have to take up the cross for you.”

I realized right after I said it I had gone too far. After all, Joey had come out with us knowing little about how deeply her religious zeal had driven a wedge between us. When I was single, I had experienced couples exploding like this in front of me, and had never liked the awkward position it put me in. Later I would have to make both sides feel justified, an

42 experience that usually left me feeling cowardly and bereft. Joey had wisely opted out of the situation. He was walking towards a souvenir shop and motioning to us that he had seen a shop on the right he needed to look into. This left Sandy and me alone to confront one another.

“You know,” she said, “ever since we moved back to Italy you’ve been different.”

“I’ve been different? You sprint after the holy sacrament as soon as we touch down to

Fiumicino. You’re ready to buy all this bullshit about evil, and you wear that fucking cross as if it’s your lover’s token, and I’ve been different?”

“Yes, you–you’re cynical. You automatically assume I don’t know what I’m doing, as if some kind of elaborate brainwashing has taken place. You don’t even consider that I have a brain, and I’m still using it, even if I now believe in God in a way which makes me feel happy and whole.”

“This is just an escape. You don’t even know what you’re saying, and that Brother Dante character is a con-artist if I’ve ever seen one. You don’t know these people. I went to school with a guy who’s now Bishop of Lazio–the most sexually maladjusted figure I have ever known.

Last year, he was accused of molesting six altar boys. In one year, six, mind you—that meant he had to be keeping those boys pretty busy since there are only six altar boys in his service.”

“I think it’s therapy that’s changing you,” she said, “You’re always different on

Thursdays after your sessions. I thought she was supposed to help you work through your anger, but you’re always more angry and more irrational on Thursdays. It’s as if you take inventory every Thursday and find out you’ve been short-changed. I think you’re jealous that I’ve found something in my life which makes me happy while all you’ve found is more medication and more anger.”

43 “Me, jealous? Jealous of what—your ability to be hoodwinked? Jealous of Brother

Dante–who can’t even answer the most reasonable question of them all, which is ‘If God is so great, they why does all this terrible shit happen’? Jealous that in two weeks you’ve negated the hundreds of thousands of dollars your father spent on your Barnard education? What precisely have I got to be jealous of?

“Jealous of what I just said–jealous that I’ve found something which truly makes me happy while you’re still looking.”

“I don’t think this religion stuff truly makes you happy, and I’m willing to bet that within a year you’ll be disillusioned.”

The expression of total conviction on her face as she held out her hand was, at once, startling and terrifying. Just then Joey came out of a small bakery on Via Porta Angelica. He was carrying a small white bag in one hand and eyeing the both of us, as if questioning whether we were through fighting or whether he shouldn’t do some more shopping. He will do me no good at all, I thought. He is far too compliant and good-natured to get involved in anything as harrowing as convincing Sandy the philosophy she has adopted is disastrously faulty and that, essentially, she needs to be re-programmed. The healthy glow, the blonde, happily messy hair, the clean-cut navy Pea coat, the colorful scarf, the loping, friendly gait, the effect was both carefully free and studiously prep-school. In a purely superficial way, his presence gave our married group of two a kind of style and easy flair which Sandy and I alone could not pull off anymore. I compared the two of them and realized Sandy had not inherited her brother’s light features. Her figure was compact. She wore her dark brown hair cropped. She favored the same kind of classic style of dressing that her brother did, pea coats, cardigans and penny loafer pumps, but usually dressed in more understated, and thus more Roman, colors. If I had been a

44 mugger choosing between the two of them, I would have always chosen him. His gait, his style and ease could not have more transparently conveyed the wealth from which he came had he carried a banner declaring it. I extended my hand to meet hers.

“Deal,” I said.

“You’re going to lose,” she said.

“No,” I said, shaking her hand. “You’re going to lose.”

So, my plan to get Joey to work Sandy out of her religious agitation had backfired. She was more ardent and more religiously actively than ever. The first time I saw her praying in the morning I was so convinced I was having a bad dream that I stretched out my arm to see if she was real. The touch of her skin on my fingertips stopped my hand, but she was so deep in concentration that she did not even open her eyes. Later when I asked whether she remembered my touching her, she said she had thought it was the touch of an angel. The touch of an angel, ladies and gentlemen.

“Angels, Satan, witches, saints, what next, Sandy? Where in Christ are you?”

I was glad I spoke these words because they allowed me to channel any rage I may have felt. Violence is not something I have much practice in, but I felt my hand compelled to rise up, and the desire made me afraid for myself and my emotions. All at once it seemed an eternity until my next session with Renato, and I bitterly regretted my past behavior with her. I saw the times I had been abrupt, cold, or belligerent as self-destructive attacks of hubris. Four weeks before Renato had coached me that, in moments of intense rage, I was to record my emotions in a log book or on a tape recorder, so we could discuss it in our next session. I had tried using a tape recorder but felt silly and opted for a log book instead. My rage turned out to be time-

45 consuming, so to save paper and time, I usually tried to express my feelings right away before they could bake or fester. I could judge the intensity of the feeling by the length and grammatical failings of the entry.

46

CHAPTER 3

LIVIA SPITS WHEN SHE PASSES A MAN OF THE CLOTH

March 20th, fell on a Friday that year: I felt wholly unprepared for it. The day before had been the Feast of San Giuseppe, the evening on which Joey and Sandy and I had gone out for beignets, and Sandy and I had made our wager on the longevity of her faith. The Friday before

Salvo Lima had been brutally murdered on the streets of Palermo. I worried someone who knew

Uncle Luca might try to call me and avoided any direct references to what had happened. I hoped and prayed no one would remind me of it and, by some miracle, no one did.

On Saturday Sandy and I decided to buy a dog. Mutually. I knew Sandy would not agree to a child just yet, but she might go along with a dog, especially if I promised to care for and love the dog equally, something I knew I would do because I have always loved animals. We brought

Ivan home that afternoon. For hours we watched him play with an old pair of sneakers, tugging on shoelaces, biting the heel firmly, ear flopping to one side, growling at the shoe, as if it were his mortal enemy. Sandy had not prayed that morning, and her smile appeared less maniacally enthusiastic than it had been in the past few days. The solution now seemed obvious: She had needed a dog, not logic, not her brother’s presence, but a simple animal to remind her of the world of just being, a place beyond good and evil. If only she would take off that ridiculous wooden cross, then we would be most of the way there, I thought.

The next morning Sandy did not wake up to pray, and I felt hopeful. Livia Drusilla came by late in the morning, insisting we all go together to the Porta Portese market. Livia was

47 unmoved by the dog, even when Sandy held him up and asked her to pet him. “Well, let me

know when you’re ready,” Livia said, closing the front door. My wife had not had the nerve to tell Livia to her face that she couldn’t go to Porta Portese because she feared the crowds might scare Ivan. She also didn’t want to leave him alone in the apartment for fear he might tear up the place. So I went downstairs to report the news to my mother.

“What—doesn’t want to go? Tell her to put on her coat, and bring the dog. The three of

you be down here in ten minutes. I’ve already called a cab,” said Livia.

My mother had been testier than usual lately for a reason. In January the man-child she

had been dating, a Moroccan bartender named Habib, had let her know she had worn him out.

He would go back to dating younger women again, for, according to him, the more unschooled

they were, the less willing to teach, which was precisely what he was looking for. Livia had not

cared too terribly much for Habib, but it still galled her that he had broken up with her, since she

was the more beautiful and refined of the two of them. (“The more unschooled, the better!—

what does he want? A milkmaid? A Turkish peasant? And this, coming from a guy who makes

his living shaking cocktails,” she had said.) The news would not have galled her half so much,

had it not come as it did, precisely five months following her 54th birthday. The astrologist she

consulted daily had once told her the numbers 5, 4, and 5 would usher in a new period in her

life—one in which she would have to give up certain aspects of her sexual being in favor of

developing other equally important parts of her personality. Livia Drusilla, who was used to

turning heads, had decided then she would try to accept this new role, and even embrace her new

daughter-in-law. Together they would go on shopping outings for curtain rods, kitchen

appliances, even lamp fixtures, if need be, for, in becoming an actress, she had neglected that

part of herself, and Maria Rosana, her most trusted astrologist, usually guided her in the better

48 way, said Livia. If only the girl, Paolo’s wife, were more open, if only she would speak more freely about her past and her experiences. Livia Drusilla felt that after ten years, she hardly knew her. It was hard not to feel judged in her shadowy presence—for Paolo’s mother had grown up in the Roman style—her rasping laugh, her smoker’s voice, her free, slightly vulgar style and her vigilant, combative struggle for free discourse were almost always painfully at odds with the style of my wife. But Sandy would not go, so I descended the flight of stairs alone, terrified again that Livia would pull me back into her world where I would be pushed to cow and regress.

“Where is she?” Livia asked.

“Not coming.”

“Why?”

“The dog”

“That lame excuse again—come on, let’s go. The cab’s waiting.”

When she felt down, she dressed flamboyantly. She must have felt very down because she was wearing one of those beret caps, a plaid mini skirt and four inch stiletto heels. She had flipped her red hair out, and extended her black eyeliner far past the meeting point of her two lids which made her eyes more almond-shaped, and her overall expression more cat-like.

“Ma, I thought you said you were planning to lay low for a while. What’s with all this theatrical face paint?”

“Oh, my child, you still have so much to learn—with the way my face hangs nowadays, I can’t afford to spook the human race that way.”

“You ready?”

“Yeah, let’s go.”

49 What I wanted most to keep from Livia was the fact of Sandy’s religious conversion, for

Livia, having dated that Vatican banker, held an even lower opinion of the church than I did. It

had been her habit, ever since dating that banker, to spit whenever she passed a woman or man of

the cloth. In the past few months it had become clearer that Livia mistook Sandy’s shyness for

coldness; her reserve, for judgment. So I was thankful when, riding along Lungotevere, Livia decided to talk about my half-wit half-brothers, Lorenzo and Pietro, rather than starting in immediately on my wife.

“See, the thing is, Paolo, Lorenzo and Pietro have never worked, like you have. Their father never even thought about making them earn their keep. Now he wonders why they’re so lazy. Didn’t I always give you small chores to do for me—picking up tuna and olive oil from the grocery, visiting your Aunt Claudia after her operation? You see, Paolo, and now you know how to take on responsibilities. Now you’ve got a wife and you’re building up Carlo’s business, but

Lorenzo and Pietro…look, it was out of my hands…One day their father wanted to acknowledge his children…Paolo, I visited them at Roberto’s place in Sacrofano. The boys could barely string two sentences together!”—She gestured to her nose—“Now, if Roberto called you wanting to know what I was doing out there, you tell him I was tending to the children he’s too busy for...They asked about you, Paolo. They want to know when you’re coming out to see them. Didn’t I feed all three of you boys a good healthy Mediterranean diet? Didn’t I go heavy on the fish and vegetables? And now look at you: you’re beautiful! But the boys look too thin,

Paolo. Couldn’t you go out to see them every once in a while? They look up to you so much— ten years in America, successful, handsome. They don’t really understand your marriage to what’s her name, but then a lot of us don’t. I think Lorenzo’s got a new girlfriend. He showed

50 me some kind of expensive watch, a Bulova, I think, that she gave him. Paolo, if you could also

talk to him about wearing rubbers.”

“Ma—”

“No, I’m serious, Paolo. As soon as I start in on the topic, he stops listening. He doesn’t

want to hear it from me, but from you it’d be different: he’d listen to you. Look, Lorenzo’s

nineteen—if he gets the girl pregnant, then what? Then I have her mother calling me, and we’ve got a real mess on our hands.”

Nineteen years before, Lorenzo and Pietro’s birth could not have come at a worse time for me. Livia had decided to use the government pension (luckily, my father and Livia were only separated) after my father’s death to send me to an expensive American school. Lorenzo and Pietro’s father, Roberto Civetta, had convinced her to send me to that school—that school,

which permanently separated me from the country in which I was born. He had made his fortune

producing game shows in Italy, and then branched out to produce feel-good films in Cinecitta

and Hollywood too, and so naturally his word was law. That school was its own tiny Vatican

City, a country within a country, with its own laws and hierarchies. Is there any greater torture

than having one’s unmarried pregnant mother waving across a crowded room? Even the Pre-K

students knew she was Roberto Civetta’s lover: Prati was that small, that insular.

“America’s where the future is, Livia. The boy needs to feel comfortable in both worlds.

Start him young. Turn him into one of those kids who is fluent in three or four languages, so he

feels just as comfortable in London as in Rome.”

And now I wander between two worlds lonely, neither fully in one, nor in the other. This

is something to discuss with Renato, but I have a feeling she would not understand. Even the

most cosmopolitan Italians don’t seem to. They look at you with envy: “America”—big eyes,

51 awe written large, expressed in every syllable. So how can I disappoint them by telling them I

feel more kinship with the black knights than with those individuals located in time and space?

The taxi driver had decided to take Lungotevere, even though Viale Mura Aurelie would

have been faster. He had thought me a foreigner because of my accent, and Livia, he had rightly

assumed, was too concerned with talking to me to notice the route. I could have made a scene,

but ever since Roberto Civetta had acknowledged his children, he had been sending money to

Livia. Never enough, Livia claimed, but judging by her clothes and her holiday gifts, the amount

he sent her was more than enough—so she could afford the cab, and for that matter I could too,

though I knew Livia would never let me pay.

On the left thick sycamore trees lined the sidewalk running along the Tiber River. On the

right Regina Coeli, a medieval prison, housed many of Italy’s worst felons. As a boy it had

fueled my fantasy with its magnificent scale, its anachronistic Spanish tiles and stucco buildings, its stucco domes for the guards. I used to imagine my Uncle Luca locked up in there, hanging banners out of the prison windows: “Paolo, come visit your uncle more.” “Paolo, I didn’t do it.

I’m innocent.” “Tell my nephew to call me.” In America, I sometimes dreamed of this prison.

In the dream Regina Coeli was a kind of purgatory, a place between worlds, an unreality for those in limbo. In reality it was the place for those awaiting trial in a country with no writ of habeas corpus. One could be held in prison for years before a trial. It was not unusual to hear of a suicide within Regina Coeli due to a postponed trial date.

“Paolo, honey, what are you looking at?”

“The prison, Ma.”

“Don’t look at it, Paolo. It’s bad luck. Look at the Janiculum right behind it, sweetie.

Have you taken Sandy there yet?”

52 “No, Ma.”

“Well, maybe, next weekend. She should be getting out more, dear. Show her the view from the top of the Janiculum, and she’ll never want to leave Rome.”

“Maybe, next weekend.”

“Take her to the Botanical Gardens. She hasn’t heard the cannon go off at noon at

Piazzale Garibaldi, has she? Or gone inside Bramante’s Round Temple? She’s a strange girl,

Paolo. The other day I ran into her in the stairwell praying to herself and rubbing a little wooden cross. She almost bumped into me, Paolo. And you know I’ve never been anything but friendly to her. I said hello, told her she should stop by sometime so we could have coffee, and she looked positively spooked by me. She had that look you have when someone wakes you in the middle of the night, and you don’t know where you are.”

“Hey, even I’m spooked by you sometimes, and I’m your own son.”

“Very funny.”

“Ma, that stairwell’s dark. The light’s gone out on one of the floors. She was probably genuinely tired, and just wanted to get home.”

“That time, Paolo, when we went to the Campo dei Fiori market, she seemed to be fine.

Then all of a sudden she had a terrific headache, and had to go home—said she was sick and had to lie down. I had three boys, Paolo—without so much as a break, kept on going, never took naps in the afternoon, and right after delivery, I got back out there. What weight I gained, I lost it all again by keeping active—that’s the only formula, Paolo. The girl’s like Lorenzo and

Pietro, dear: she’s been coddled too much.”

“Let’s get out and walk. We’ll be faster,” I said

53 Livia paid for the cab, as I predicted. A black dog bellowed obsessively from the lowest

deck of the Tibertine Island. I heard the squeaking of busses, the cursing of drivers. I watched

the comparative happiness of the pedestrians, a child holding a Mickey Mouse balloon, lovers, a

woman, so poised, so confident next to her less impressive mate. The Roman women seemed to

be less circumspect than New York women. Did I dare say, less troubled? I looked over at

Livia—it was true her fury was usually directed outward. Would it be fair to say that American

women’s fury was usually directed inward? Sandy disliked Italian television for the rampant

number of bimbos who made their way onto its airwaves, addressing their television viewers as

“dear friends,” wearing long evening gowns with tear drop necklines, some man, usually twice

her age and half her height, co-hosting and adding that voice of reason and authority. She

claimed the feminist movement had missed the country completely. “One only has to watch

television to know this is true,” she said. But on a day like today it didn’t matter because you were in Rome—the sun was shining, the city was beautiful, and you were—

“Sandy’s probably fallen asleep and the dog’s probably done his business everywhere.

The dog’s not toilet trained yet, right? ”

“Ma, please—“

“I’m just saying, Paolo, you may want to think about getting her on a more regular sleeping schedule. Every time I come by she’s napping.”

“That’s my fault, Ma. I’ve been having some trouble sleeping at night. I think my rattling around keeps her up at night.”

I didn’t want to remind Livia that Friday had been the thirteenth anniversary of my Uncle

Luca’s murder and that every year around this time the cycle of nightmares would begin again, leaving me more often than not clinging to Sandy, my pillow drenched in sweat, unable to fall

54 asleep again. They are curious dreams in which I always played a more active role in life than I had in reality. In my dreams I have kept my head up while being pissed upon by government officials. I have shouted down statesman. I have lived through bullet wounds to persevere. I have given speeches off the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia—to wild cheering. But I have also cowered before the last blow to the head. I have screamed hysterically as leeches were placed, one by one, from my neck to the groin of my body until I myself could no longer see my own skin. These were the flip side of those delusions of grandeur I had dreamed in New York.

“Oh, what have you got to be worried about, dearest? Your life has never been so good—the bookstore’s given you direction. By marriage you find yourself a wealthy man.

You’ve never looked so good or been so healthy. Don’t forget you were a scrawny, ugly kid.

You stuttered through your pre-teen years. Girls thought you were strange, and now look at you—you look like a movie star.”

“I know, Ma. I can’t help it, I worry. Ma, you know I don’t like to talk about myself.

Can we talk about something else?”

Livia pressed ahead of me, as I trailed a few steps behind. We walked along the quiet, pedestrian-friendly Via del Moro, past quaint family restaurants, small bookstores, a shop selling blown glass, decorative beads, and lantern holders. At times like these I knew my mother well enough to let her be. She was going through one of her many mood swings, this one most likely prompted by the way I didn’t appreciate all that I had been given and most of all by the way I didn’t appreciate her. I knew she felt Sandy had subdued me, making me less recognizable to her, and yet I was the only son she did not have to share with another parent. Her visits with

Lorenzo usually upset her more than the slight changes in my character did. The quiet gave way to the noise at the Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere. A gypsy told someone’s fortune over a red

55 table-clothed card table. Tourists discussed the meaning behind the gold mosaics of crowned virgins holding lanterns. Artists hawked their wares—leather boxes, candles, hats, change purses, scarves, hand-woven purses. Livia stopped at a hat designer’s stall, and I drifted off to a vendor selling candles made of sand, a girl with a cute smile, a dog collar on her left wrist and a tattoo of a gnome holding a rose on her forearm. A sign that read “Lights of Sand” hung from her table.

Natasha would later remind me of our first encounter at one of the stalls that Sunday.

The incident had made a weak impression on me. Three weeks later I would not remember her.

In retrospect I remember she was selling these pathetic little candles made of sand. I initially went over to her table because I felt sorry for her. No one else was standing around her stall, and on a day as sunny as that late day in March, it would have been hard to blame the weather on her merchandise’s failure to create a stir. I did notice the tattoo on her forearm (it was of a gnome holding a rose), the dog collar around her wrist, and her smile, which at the time I found innocent. I also noticed that she seemed genuinely nervous in my presence. That was vaguely flattering and also somewhat worrying (what in the world would there be to be nervous about?).

She mentioned her need for a paying job that would support her designs. “These are not my designs,” she assured me. “I’m just watching this table for a friend.” We had hardly had a chance to exchange a few words before Livia hustled me over to her, yelling from across the square. I have always hated when Livia yelled in public places, so I quickly handed her my card and told her I could use some sales help, if she was interested. She wouldn’t come by Occham’s

Razor for another three weeks, by which time I would have completely forgotten her.

56 The Porta Portese flea market begins at the Sublicio Bridge close to the center of Rome and ends at the Testaccio Bridge on the south end. This open market might perhaps be the longest continuous collection of junk in all of Europe. Hagglers, pick pockets, Italians, Arabs,

Africans, men, women, dogs, cats, babies, fortune tellers hawk their wares of silk scarves, stolen cell phones, wigs, make-up, leather, lingerie, incense, carpets, furniture, and an assortment of other junk too numerous to mention. Livia and I were at the northern end of the flea market in an Oriental rug stall when she mentioned the thing I had been dreading all day. I remember

Livia stopped in front of an antique, and slightly warped, mirror framed in gold, and stared, first at her reflection, and then past her own reflection, at me. I knew from the expression on her face she was planning to ask me something important. It was as if she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it because she looked away for a moment. She tilted the mirror up toward the sun and asked.

“Does Sandy know about Uncle Luca?”

“Very little, and I don’t want her to know.”

“Does she know about what happened to Paolo Sr.”

“I told her he was killed in the line of duty.”

The sunlight reflected into the mirror, creating a glare that struck Livia dead on. Livia had always hated how sunlight made her face look. In fact, she refused to meet most of her boyfriends, especially the younger ones, by day. If she were acting in a show, she would personally take the lighting manager out to lunch, then gently ask him to be kind to her. She leaned the mirror back against the chair it had been resting on and turned back to me, her green eyes glistening.

“You know your Uncle Luca had an anniversary on Friday.”

“I know, Ma…Did Aunt Claudia call?”

57 “Not this year.”

“Why not?”

“Catering function in Palermo.”

“I didn’t know she worked in Palermo.”

“Yeah, she converted your Grandpa Giorgio’s kitchen, so she can work out of there too

now.”

“She inherited Grandpa Giorgio’s house?”

“All three flights of it. She’s renting the second and third floor out to students, and she

kept the ground floor for herself.”

Grandpa Giorgio had become another one of my heroes when he had refused to pay the

Mafia protection tax and lodged formal complaints when his basic services, water and electricity were cut off. Grandpa Giorgio’s moment of rebellion ended when an anonymous gang broke his dog’s legs and left the animal crying in the street. Giorgio—a great animal lover—offered two times the protection tax to make up for his moment of confusion. When he died one year ago, in

1991, just days after his seventy-fifth birthday, the service was modest, and my mother, Aunt

Claudia, and I had split the costs. Very few neighbors from his district had come to his funeral.

“What’s the matter?” Livia asked.

“Nothing.”

I had not spoken about it on Friday, and I certainly wasn’t going to talk about it now.

Even Livia hardly ever spoke about Luca and my father’s deaths. In three breaths, she could launch into conversations about hemorrhoids, rubbers, and carpal tunnel syndrome, but never three breaths about our family, murder and the mob. The three subjects did not exist for her and

certainly didn’t exist in any kind of correlation.

58 Renato: So why are you so upset by this news? Your Aunt Claudia must have inherited the

house a few years ago. Why didn’t you take an interest in the inheritance then?

Me: Because back then Sandy and I were not thinking about having children. Back then I had

pushed all this stuff out of my mind. We had more than enough to live on. I didn’t want to get involved, and I knew my mother wouldn’t take up my position. She won’t haggle with my father’s family; she’s afraid they’ll see her as a money-grubber.

Renato: Have you seen your aunt since coming back to Italy?

Me: No, and I don’t plan to see her. She should have at least offered one of the apartments to my mother. Livia could use the stable income. Instead, she grabbed them all for herself while everyone else was busy mourning. She’s already completely re-decorated my Uncle Luca’s apartment in Laurentina. Once I went over there to see if I could find some of his old things, and she’d already thrown all of his stuff away except an old wooden box with some papers in it.

When I asked if I could look at that, she blew me off, said she didn’t know where the key was.

Renato: Mourning? You never mentioned your grandfather’s death before.

Me: All I’m saying is it’s another way of saving face, pretending like this thing never happened.

What gets me is that the family always talks about the importance of sticking together, but in

reality they don’t act like people sticking together. My father and Luca were different from

them. They had ideals—that’s what makes me miss them most. Now it’s every man for himself,

59 even though everyone still goes through all the formalities of remembering birthdays and anniversaries...except all the anniversaries they should be remembering.

Renato: What do you mean?

Me: Nothing.

Renato: Now, you started it. Come on now. Tell me what you really mean.

Me: Last Friday, on the thirteenth anniversary of my Uncle Luca’s murder, I had a dream about my uncle. He was locked up in the Regina Coeli, hanging banners out the window: ‘Paolo, come visit,’ ‘Paolo, get me a good lawyer,’ ‘Paolo, I need a woman,’ that kind of thing. I looked around and I noticed I wasn’t alone: Livia, Aunt Claudia, and Sandy were with me. Livia yelled back at him to shut up; Aunt Claudia bowed to him mutely; and Sandy wanted to know whether

‘they let women stay in that beautiful church.’ The next time I looked up at my uncle’s window he had turned into the Virgin Mary and was crying tears of blood.

Renato: This one’s not so clearly wish-fulfillment. Sounds like you still have some issues of guilt.

Me: But wait, it gets weirder. From within his prison cell, he yelled to me one more time, ‘Open the box,’ and threw me a key, but, as soon as it fell to the ground, it became a snake, and I was afraid to touch it.

60 Renato: So what do you think it means?

Me: No, what do you think it means?

Renato: Keys are usually associated with finding one’s way into a place that had previously been closed off, but in this case the key can not be trusted because it may be a false sign. Just as that might not really be your uncle up there, that key may not really hold the answers. You’ve admitted to loving and respecting your uncle. Did you ever have any reason to distrust him?

Me: No.

Renato: Your aunt’s muteness is passive and useless; your mother’s is belligerent; your wife’s, nonsensical. That leaves only you to help. In the dream it seems that’s what the man in the cell has counted on, and that’s why he’s specifically addressing you.

61

CHAPTER 4

LITTLE OLD LADIES DOUSE THEIR GIRDLES WITH H

In the late seventies Tomaso Razzo had not yet become the Capo dei Capi, the Second

Mafia War had not yet broken out, and I was in my early twenties. From my grandfather I had learned a few things about the Mafia’s way of doing things. He had taught me about the protection tax. This tax, though far less lucrative than the drug trade, provided a kind of social security for mobsters who could use the money either to pay relatives of those Mafiosi in prison or killed or to pay off the attorneys of those arrested.

Three men headed the Sicilian families at this time—Silvio Buontempo, Giuseppe

Buonafortuna and Tomaso Razzo. Silvio Buontempo was the youngest and most glamorous of the three. In the looks department, he had a clear advantage over Razzo and Buonafortuna. His dark brown hair was thick and wavy, and his eyes were large and brown. He drove a high speed

Maserati, and headed the cosmopolitan Palermo families. But his good looks had not made him any less ruthless than the other two bosses. It was said that once, after arriving late to a

commission meeting, he had explained, “Sorry I’m late, I had to get gas and strangle Gianfranco

Russo.” Buontempo worked solely with Giuseppe Buonafortuna, the boss of Cinisi, whose

district had, through the heroin ring, grown in importance because of its proximity to the airport.

Buonafortuna had not had much luck in his looks. He had small beady eyes, thin wispy hair, and

a long, horse-like face. He had made his reputation by slapping an Italian Member of Parliament

62 across the face for not performing up to his abilities. The third capo, Tomaso Razzo, headed the

Corleone families. In looks Razzo had fared the worst. He had even beadier eyes than

Buonafortuna. He was fat and stocky, and had large clumsy hands. He had risen through the

ranks by becoming a trusted ally of Luciano Leggio during the First Mafia War, even saving his

life at one point. The Palermitan families, it was said, humored the provincial Corleones out of

need rather than out of any real affection.

By some fluke, my Aunt Claudia had married into the Palermo sect. I genuinely liked

Aunt Claudia’s first husband, Giuseppe“Rings” Crimi. He called infrequently, but when he was in Rome, he usually took me out to lunch and gave me money. They had two sons, Vito and

Antonio (Nino, for short), and a daughter Giulietta. Their son Vito I couldn’t stand. An arrogant poseur, he exaggerated the number of women he had bedded and shrank when you asked him simple questions of geography, music or biology. The younger son Antonio was quieter. He didn’t say much, but he idolized his older brother. Their daughter Giulietta was the darling of the family. She had the most dazzling green eyes and raven black hair. When Luca was alive, she had flown up to Rome with her mother at least twice a year, but after his death I didn’t see much of her or Aunt Claudia. At eight, she was still a shy girl, but we all hoped she would grow out of this once she realized her magnificent strengths. Aunt Claudia’s husband, Giuseppe

“Rings” Crimi, never bragged about his ties. His son Vito made up for this (probably to prove what a big man he was, and my insignificance in comparison) because he could not keep quiet about the subject.

The seventies were heady times for these Sicilian businessmen. Heroin trafficking had made many people rich. Little old ladies doused themselves in perfume, lined their girdles with

H and spent a week at the Ritz in Manhattan. My Aunt Claudia bought better clothes and a new

63 car, Vito bought a motorcycle, and Uncle Giuseppe built a pool. As profits continued to roll in,

Aunt Claudia redecorated and expanded the house. Finally, she even plated the bathroom in gold. All this seemed to happen overnight. One day they were like us, and then suddenly they weren’t.

I have mentioned before that three men headed the Sicilian families, Silvio Buontempo,

Giuseppe Buonafortuna and Tomaso Razzo. The Palermitan bosses, Buontempo and

Buonafortuna could not agree with the Corleone clan on one thing: Buontempo and

Buonafortuna sought as much as possible to stay out of the law’s way, whereas the Corleone clan, headed by Tomaso Razzo, wanted to curtail the dangers interlopers posed by eliminating them completely. At this time the Commission held the ultimate authority to sanction killings of either “excellent corpses”—local politicians or law enforcement officials—or “most excellent corpses”—the bodies of major personalities, civic leaders, important politicians, or powerful businessmen. The beginnings of the Second Mafia War were in this seemingly small event.

When Razzo requested the death of a well-known colonel in the carabinieri and found it not forthcoming, he decided to kill him anyway. Other law officials followed: the deputy police chief, a judge, even the president of the Sicilian region.

All these killings happened almost at the same time as my Uncle Luca’s murder. I was like a crazy person at this time. Hardly one thought would enter my head before another pushed it right out again. Many respected intellectuals formulated theories surrounding my uncle’s death, and I, so introverted as a child, took it upon myself to publicly accuse both the state and the Mafia of killing my uncle. Livia was in the process of suing Roberto Civetta for child support, and my half brothers Lorenzo and Pietro, were by now seven. In some misguided way,

I think they thought me their surrogate father. The very little money I made at Occham’s Razor

64 all went back to Livia. As soon as I came home from the bookstore, Lorenzo and Pietro would run into the living room to show me something they had learned or to tell me about something they had seen on TV or heard on the radio. Livia, I think, forgot herself. She could not see me as her son—a man who needed distance from her—but assumed I would now become her partner/husband/lover, someone who by virtue of my relation to her, would never be able to run out on her.

When the media arranged interviews with me, I freely voiced my outrage. A Rai Uno reporter, Nando Piersanti, asked how I could be so convinced. “Because my Uncle Luca predicted his death, but before he died, he had the foresight to turn over some very important papers to me. The Mafia and the political elite were behind my uncle’s death. These papers are in the hands of the justice system now and will soon reveal the truth.” This statement was only partly true: Luca had once, in a very maudlin state, after a few glasses of wine, spoken abstractly about getting in too deep, but said he had covered his ass.

“Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out,” he had said, quoting his favorite line from a Robert Graves’ book. “I’ve made some provisions for you, Paolo, and I want you to know your Uncle Luca tried. Promise me you’ll make sure the truth hatches out, Paolo.”

I do remember promising him, although I have often tried to forget it. At that time he had also given me an envelope, but I had never had the courage to open it. Instead, when the authorities came to me asking what I knew, I simply handed this manila folder over to them without looking inside.

Livia was furious with me for taking it upon myself to lash out against the state and organized crime. Her view was that as absolutely corrupted as both were, my first duty was to

Livia, Lorenzo and Pietro. She begged me to play down my accusations against Luca’s

65 murderers: “At least until things settle down, dear,” she said, stroking my cheek. My boss,

Carlo Levi, expressed the same concern, but for less self-interested motives: “You’re young, you’re handsome. Let them take care of it. Don’t try to take all of this onto your shoulders alone. An army of 10,000 couldn’t carry the weight, so why should you carry it alone?”

But of all the reactions, Aunt Claudia’s most visceral reaction startled me most. In late

1979, she left a message on my answering machine, “Paolo, honey, this is your Aunt

Claudia….You’ve been talking to the press a lot recently….Giuseppe and I saw you on the news last night…Paolo, dear…I just want you to know if you ever mention the M— word again, I’ll kill you myself. I mean it, Paolo, with my own two hands. Now my son Vito goes to school

(lie), and my husband Giuseppe runs a business (lie): they can’t afford to pick up your dirty laundry, Paolo. Now what happened to Luca was a terrible tragedy—terrible, but our family just has to buck up and move on.” Beeep. Before Aunt Claudia made me aware of using the word

Mafia, I had not even realized I had said it, or that they had been watching, but over time I began to learn to hold my tongue. I could list off the brave and indignant who had rallied for change, and who were now all dead, and, in short, I was afraid.

Not long after this, men associated with Buonafortuna and Buontempo began to disappear, victims of the Lupara Bianca method I mentioned earlier. The Sicilian refineries were growing more and more profitable. Some said Buontempo would have to kill Razzo for disobeying the Commission’s orders. Others worried Razzo would try to kill Bontempo. But when Buontempo was murdered on the way home from his son’s fifteenth birthday party, we all knew. Again the code of not killing a boss had been broken, and again a Mafia war was about to begin. This meant little for me personally, but Aunt Claudia, Vito and Giuseppe clearly had reason to be afraid. With Buontempo dead, the Palermo families were exposed. They spoke of

66 retaliation, but Buonafortuna, the boss of Cinisi, did not think the Palermo/Cinisi families were ready yet. Buonafortuna flew to Brazil to consult Toto Banigno, his former associate, but never returned.

What followed was perhaps the most bloodless, but cruelest Mafia war in history. Razzo had no human feelings—his only love seemed to be power. He worked by subterfuge, pitting brother against brother, and actively recruiting the younger and more capable ‘soldiers’ of the

Palermo/Cinisi faction. He and his henchmen perfected the ‘Lupara Bianca’ method. Whole families were wiped out. Toto Banigno lost twenty-three relatives. I lost my Uncle Giuseppe and my Cousin Vito, both of whom disappeared in May 1982. Claudia sold the house, and she and Giulietta moved into Luca’s old apartment on Via Luigi Lilio in the Laurentina district outside of Rome.

Here I should insert a few words on Toto Banigno because his role in the Palermo families had been unusual. Banigno had never been made a boss. According to the

Commission, his private life lacked discipline. In the mid-seventies, he had left his wife for his mistress. He had then had two children with her and had finally married another woman. The

Commission viewed this as a violation of their code of the sanctity of family, and passed him over as capo. So while in rank he was strictly speaking a soldier, in charisma and personality, and in his understanding of the Mafia, he was a boss. Banigno worked closely with the

American Mafia to streamline their imports and exports, but in the early seventies he was expelled from the country and moved to Brazil. He bought a ranch and lived comfortably there until he was again forced to leave, this time for drug trafficking. He met my uncle on a couple of occasions while serving his sentence in Ucciardone prison in Palermo. The details of their meeting have, unfortunately, been removed from my uncle’s diary, and Aunt Claudia, who knew

67 about it, refused to speak of it. In pictures Banigno appears very much the picture of a Don—

tailored silk suits, dark glasses, lithe and lanky figure, gelled hair. His most often quoted line from his trial in the seventies has nothing to do with his business dealings. In his trial he swore on record that his greatest crime against humanity had been wearing Hugo Boss cologne, a scent he had grown to despise.

The state understood that a war had been waged, but so long as only Mafiosi were targeted, they did little to stop it. The city by this time had ceased to live and breathe as a city. It functioned as a chaotic mass of millions of separate units fighting for their small piece. There was no nightlife to speak of. After eight the shops closed, the city died, and the Mafia war continued to rage. In a three block area, as many as five bodies might turn up in a given day.

When Fernando La Terrazza, a Member of Parliament, was killed in broad daylight, the state realized something had to be done.

They called in General Bernardo Superman from the North—a carabiniere, imposing and lock-jawed, a fearless sort who ate bullets for breakfast. He had been wanted dead by the Red

Brigades for years, but he was now not only miraculously alive, but he had also broken the Red

Brigades by convincing key members to inform. General Superman had also found the so-called

“Extremely Secret Papers” after the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro a year before the death of my uncle. I find it difficult to imagine, but my uncle met with General Superman on a number of occasions, and, according to the family of Superman, the two were almost friends. In their private lives, they could not have been more different. My uncle, strictly speaking, was not

always a saint. He loved to gamble, especially on horses. He had a drug habit—amphetamines,

cocaine, sometimes heroin. He frequented brothels. But he had spent some years in the secret

service, and, through this, he had developed an understanding of the police forces, the military,

68 the judicial, and the executive branches of the state. He had also grown familiar with the men and women who occupied key positions. When he left the secret service, his rolodex could already have easily provided him with enough stories for many lifetimes over. Luca never told me exactly why they knew each other. He never even expressed the reverence most Italians did when speaking about the general. All I knew was that it had something to do with the so-called

“Extremely secret papers.”

For the paternal side of my family and for the city of Palermo, I mourned the loss of

Superman. Palermo itself had, by this point, become a polluted and congested depressed urban center, a city that boasted the largest consumption of cement in the world, a city in a state of disrepair where basic services, like water, electricity and heat, were unreliable not just once a month, but once a week. Historical landmarks in the city center were torn down only to be replaced by block, high rise buildings. Projects commissioned in the seventies were never completed. The city’s urban planning, was, it was widely known, run by the Mafia. Roads began and then abruptly ended. People in Palermo were fed up, and a figure like Superman, an outsider with an illustrious reputation, offered them hope that the battle against the Mafia could be won, so long as it was waged by a man as capable and honest as this one.

The general’s stay in Palermo lasted just a hundred days. In that time he visited schools, he strolled through the mythic town of Corleone linked arm in arm with the mayor, he met with both businessmen and drug addicts. He refused the armored car offered to him and drove around in an old beat-up Renault. I read about this from Rome, and thought, “I’ll be damned. The man will change things if he keeps this up. It is possible that one man can change things,” and the thought filled me, a non-Palermitan, with hope. Claudia, by then bitter and cynical, declared

69 Superman “a walking corpse,” and even made a wager with her neighbor that he would not live through the month.

To my great dismay, Claudia won this bet. General Superman and his young second wife were shot on the streets of Palermo just a hundred days after they had arrived. The city erupted in grief. Angry civilians pelted politicians trying to attend his funeral with 100 lire coins:

“Thieves, criminals! Will 100 lire do it? No, probably 50 would be enough!” It was

Superman’s death which convinced me this was no country for the young, but let me set the record straight: I did not marry Sandy for a green card or to escape from Italy. I married Sandy for the simple reason that I was in love with her, and, therefore, afraid of losing her. I am sure I would have left Italy even if I had never met her.

70

CHAPTER 5

THE SHADOW RISES FROM BENEATH THE CATACOMBS

Two years later Sandy and I were walking along the Brooklyn Heights Promenade a few blocks from our apartment on Orange Street. We had been married for a year and a half, and had reached a point where we understood each other’s habits well enough to accept them. She would use six to ten cups in the course of a day, rather than washing one cup and then reusing it. She wasted paper towels. She left the lights on. She liked it hot at night, while I preferred to sleep with the windows open. But I had grown to love the curl of her body in mine, the slight wheezing sound she made while sleeping, and the sweet look of surprise in her eyebrows while she dreamt. It seems an odd thing to marry a person for the way that they behave while catching

Z’s, but to me it was about more than sleep. It was about her private self and mine. And the reason why we so clearly needed one another had everything to do with our sleeping, our dreaming selves, and nothing to do with the world outside of that. I suspect that many married people find the routine of married life distressing, but this was what I went in for. This was why

I had married in the first place.

Above the steel gray waterfront, above the charcoal skyline of lower Manhattan, the bluish-orange hue of the sky made it seem like summer, even though the fall would soon be here.

Sandy had had trouble registering for classes at Barnard College the week before. She had run around frantically trying out all the classes she thought she was interested in. On campus they

71 called this “shopping for classes,” which amused me. At La Sapienza, you took what you needed to pass exams. Professors laid the material out for you, and you absorbed as much as you could. Whether you passed by studying on your own or by attending lectures was your own business. But Sandy shopped. She tried out all sorts of professors, and then in a mad rush, she sprinted to the Registrar’s Office to make her bids: organizational psych, developmental psych, human motivation, abnormal psych and an Italian class at Columbia taught by a Dante scholar from Milan.

“Four psych classes in one semester? Don’t you think that’s overdoing it?”

“Well, this is my junior year. I want to get into my major.”

“So what are they teaching you?”

“Something called Maslow’s theory.”

“Sounds like a dog trick.”

“Maslow’s theory says that human beings have five basic needs. They need food, water, shelter, sex. They need to feel safe, protected from physical or emotional harm. They need to feel autonomous. Finally, once all these needs are taken care of, they can concentrate on their greatest need, their need to become what they set out to be, to succeed in their work.”

“So, what happens if you’ve got three out of five?”

“It doesn’t work that way. Maslow’s theory arranges human needs hierarchically. So, if you’ve satisfied your need for hunger or your thirst, that need no longer motivates you. And your needs are dynamic, so one minute you can feel you’re becoming whatever you set out to be, and the next you feel like your life is going nowhere, and you were seriously deluded to think you could ever be anything but a street sweeper.”

“I think I’m stuck in stage four. What do I do?”

72 Sandy laughed, and I noticed again how straight and white her teeth were. It always made me feel a little ashamed to look at her teeth, a little bit more aware of the class difference between us. Two dachshunds waddled closer to long row of benches, entangling themselves in their retractable leashes. We passed dark brownstone mansions set back behind thick brick walls, Virginia creepers and other shrubbery. One of these mansions was said to belong to

Norman Mailer, but neither Sandy nor I ever found out which one. Sandy had bought me a satellite dish for my birthday, thinking it would help me not to miss Italy so much. I would have never found out about the Mondo cousins or Davide Ciancimino had I not been watching the

Italian station we were now able to get through satellite. Three days ago on TV a squeamish

Davide Ciancimino had been handcuffed and taken away, and the slick, but paunchy Mondo cousins were ushered out of their mansions and into squad cars. Sandy had once explained that in Carl Jung’s theory of the origins of myth and archetypes, each culture develops its own collective unconscious out of which a nation’s myths and archetypes develop. Lately I had been feeling more anxious, and I wondered whether I was tapping into this collective unconscious. I felt as if as far away as I went, I would always be subject to the shadow, that dark figure who had never been fully tamed and would eternally rise up from beneath the catacombs.

“Maslow says stage four preoccupies most young people. We never feel noticed, and because of that, respect and recognition are important to us. Older people can be more consumed with becoming because they don’t have to worry so much about being noticed.”

“Sandy, tell me again about Jung’s shadow. I forgot how it went.”

“The shadow is the dark side; it’s a projection of our own darker impulses. We don’t know what to do with these impulses, so we create an exotic other or an evil villain, someone we can truly cast as strange, and say, ‘Now, there, now that is evil. The collective unconscious is a

73 whole nation’s dark side—the porn industry, topless bars, drug addiction and alcohol, that’s all the shadow side of a nation’s psychological make-up.”

Sandy climbed onto the benches dividing the esplanade. The wind blew and a piece of her darkly cropped hair flew into her mouth. Her long, loose khaki dress, the kind of dress a

sensible girl would wear, blew in the wind also.

“Sandy?”

“Yes”

“Did I ever tell you about the lunch Uncle Rings invited me to?”

“No, but who’s Uncle Rings?” she said, stepping over the wrought-iron bench arm and

onto the next park bench.

“My Aunt Claudia’s first husband. Every Sunday, when I stayed with my grandfather, he

took me, my cousins, and grandfather Giorgio to a famous restaurant along the coast. For my

eighth birthday, Rings bought me a suit, and I spilled something on it. I was very upset about

that, but he said he would buy me another one. Then his son did something even worse, and he

embarrassed him by calling him stupid. He told all of us he wanted to take him back and get a

new kid.”

“He said that in front of his own son?”

“Right there in front of him, and I never liked my cousin Vito much, but right then I felt

bad for him. It was terrible, awkward.”

When we reached Montague Street, Sandy stepped on the last bench, and with a quiet

“geronimo,” she jumped down, shaking her head at the same time. We walked past the Café on

Montague where a waiter was bussing dishes and then past Old Bossart Hotel. I thought about

that lunch with Uncle Rings. Why had he favored me over his own flesh and blood? We had

74 gone left onto Henry Street. The Pavilion Theater was showing Moscow on the Hudson for the third month in a row. We walked past the unisex Diva Salon, the Plaza Cleaners laundry, and the Henry Street Ale house bar. Sandy said she thought Developmental Psych would be a better class than Human Motivation, while I thought how I had never really understood Giorgio and

Rings’ hostility to one another.

“I think I would rather take Human Motivation,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because Human Motivation gives you a way to read other people’s behavior. It gives you a blueprint to navigate through from day to day.”

“So taking Human Motivation would have helped you understand that lunch with

Rings?”

“Sure, you know on that day my uncle introduced me to a man who just three days ago was arrested for his associations with organized crime. I admired Rings. Adored him. My grandfather couldn’t stand this; he was furious with me. Wanted to know why I held such low- lives in high esteem. I was totally confused by all this. Rings said he was sorry if introducing his grandson to men like Mondo called attention to the fact my grandfather was a failure, and the lunch ended pretty shortly after that.”

“So, who was he?”

“You mean the guy I met?”

“Yeah?”

“Giuseppe Mondo—he and his cousin are probably the wealthiest men in all of Sicily.

They started out as tax collectors after the war and made their fortune skimming 10% of everything they collected for themselves. That gave them enough capital to get into real estate

75 and then into drugs. They are very much a part of the old establishment. They’re close friends of the former mayor, now a member of parliament and close personal friends of Giuseppe

Amabili.”

“Who’s Giuseppe Amabili?”

“Just the most powerful politician in the country. He’s like baseball or something in the

US. He represents things. He can’t be pushed out. He’ll outlive all of us. Everything shady going on in politics he’s a part of, but he’s so smart he gets away with all of it, and that’s why he’s so respected.”

“Do you respect him?”

I didn’t answer, and Sandy, perhaps to make me jealous, smiled at a young recruit from the Jehovah’s Witness center on our street. He was wearing the traditional white button down and black slacks. Our building was the last in a uniform row of brownstone buildings. It was said Harriet Beecher Stowe had used it as her headquarters to organize the underground railroad for slaves before the Civil War. She walked up our front stoop, talking.

“So, what’s going to happen to him?” asked Sandy.

“He’ll hang on. Another group of Mafiosi will replace the group whose just been arrested. He’ll work with them as well as he worked with the last group, and he’ll outlive all of us. Keith Richards, cockroaches and Amabili.”

Sandy rummaged through her coat pockets for her keys, then looked at me, realizing she had given the set to me.

“You got ‘em?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, pulling a set of keys out of my pocket. “I got ‘em.”

76 Our apartment was on the ground floor of a three-story walk-up. The kitchen had been renovated: marble countertops, brand new light fixtures, glass top burners, Krups bread making machines. It always smelled like someone had been cutting lemons. French doors divided the bedroom from the living room. Beautiful bay windows overlooked the garden. At first we had slept on the floor. Then, we bought a futon and kept the rest of the apartment unfurnished. Little by little Sandy furnished the apartment: a black leather couch, an expensive coffee table, modern bookshelves, an entertainment center, subtle lights. I felt, at times, like a visitor or a guest speaker in the polished world of an Architectural Digest magazine. I had grown up in a three-bedroom apartment of hand-me-down furniture, endless clutter, kitchen sinks full of dirty dishes, spaces that melded into other spaces, washing machines that wound up in kitchens, and bathroom odors that wafted into living rooms.

Sandy sat down at the dining room table. She called to me from the living room.

“So, is that how Amabili rose to the top, just by being shrewd?”

“No, it’s more than that. He’s always been at the right place at the right time. He’s survived, and that’s more than most can say”

77

CHAPTER 6

CARLO EARNS A SNACK CAKE

I would have never qualified for my job at Bank of Italy if I had not been the son-in-law of Philip Dobernchek. I had no advanced degrees and only five years’ experience as a clerk in a bookstore. At first I worried I would not measure up, but no one talked about my performance at work. Instead, our lunch-time conversation revolved around the Roberto Calvi and Michele

Sindona scandals. Two years before, in June 1982, a banker by the name of Roberto Calvi had been found hanging from an orange noose at the Blackfriars Bridge in London, his legs dangling in the Thames, four pairs of eyeglasses and $20,000 in one pocket, and two bricks in the other.

The Coroner’s Jury had ruled his death a suicide, and since that time my employer, Bank of Italy, had been trying to find out what had happened to the $1.3 billion still missing. My job entailed reviewing the accounts of a New Jersey bank, checking for discrepancies between the official books and the account balances. I could handle it, and I took no little pride in doing it well.

While my boss, Marco Bolli, kept his distance as long as I performed in the way he expected, the other two men I worked with, both Italians, one called Carlo, the other Alberto, each graduates of

Columbia Business School, tended to work hard when Bolli was around, but wanted me to slack off with them the moment he left the office.

Carlo was a compact, muscular Neapolitan with quick, darting dark eyes, black hair, and pronounced temples. (When he was chewing a sandwich, his jaw reminded me of a cow’s). He

78 had been living in the United States for ten years already, and had done his undergraduate degree

at Columbia. He spoke English with almost no accent. One noticed the tracery of protruding

blue veins forming ecclesiastical patterns along his arms. He was a fanatic about weightlifting

and claimed he could bench press two men of my size without a problem. Although he was

orderly about his office tasks, he could be lazy about his cubicle, leaving cabinets open, cracker

wrappers and important papers out. He was quick to make jokes, but impossible to get to know.

In the three years that he worked with us, he had invited me to his Greenwich Village apartment

once, and then only for a quick drink before rushing me along. He was a voracious reader. In

the course of a week, he could go through a biography on Richard Nixon, a fiction novel set in

the Crusades, and a non-fiction work on the history of racquetball, another sport he took up and

then dropped soon afterward. His romantic life was under lock and key. I had the sense that he

had decided to be asexual and hyper-athletic because it was easier. His parents were still happily

together in Naples, so no family saga could be blamed for his indifference.

My other colleague, Alberto, lived with his aunt in a railroad apartment close to the East

River on 88th Street. Each day he rolled this enormous white cello case into his cube for his daily lessons or practice sessions at the 92nd Street Y. He had started, but not graduated from the

Manhattan School of Music, then transferred to Hunter College, completing his B.A. with a double major in finance and music. Originally from a middle-class Turin family of five boys, his father was a math teacher, and his mother taught music. His aunt, the one who lived in that

Upper East Side apartment, clipped coupons, collected antiques, especially clocks, and worked part-time at the 96th Street library. He loved crossword puzzles and acrostics. Once when we

were going out for a drink, it began to rain, and as he wanted to pick up an umbrella before we

got soaked, I had a chance to see his apartment. There were no bookshelves in any of the rooms,

79 only yellowed books stacked along walls and into corners. All the clocks made a tremendous racket. Kitty litter had spilled all over the bathroom floor. His aunt was stretched out in a red armchair snoring, wearing a pink bathrobe and pink slippers, a pair of scissors at her side, her mouth half-open; in the lamp light, her face, long and drawn. Like his aunt, he was tall and thin, with thick, dark hair, a prominent chin, and sunken eye sockets. He had laugh lines at the corners of his mouth, thin, concentrating lips, and the pale, sallow skin of his aunt. He was a harmless sort, but one who one also felt could drop off at any instant without upsetting too many people. The job was much too easy for him, and, in fact, within two years he accepted a position as a researcher for one of the media groups further downtown.

A few months after I started working there I can remember Carlo laid down a book about the pope and began to talk about what sounded like his ridiculous fantasy.

“Now you didn’t hear this from me, but the last pope, the forgotten one, didn’t die of natural causes. Most people don’t know that, but, then, most people have the attention span of a four-year-old. Can you even remember Pope John Paul I? Does he conjure up a picture in your mind? Just to remind you, he was pope from August to September of 1978—do you have any idea why he was killed? For the same reason, Calvi, Alessandrini, Concetta, Rosone and all the others were killed! Do you have any idea why Calvi, Alessandrini, Concetta, Rosone and all the others were killed either?”

When Carlo mentioned my uncle as one of the sacrifices to the Vatican and the Mafia’s money-making ventures, I forced myself not to react; instead, I stoically looked him in the eyes, nodding in a measured way, and when there was a free moment, asked, “How do you figure?”

“You realize people no longer exercise their long-term memories, Paolo? Poll one thousand people and only a handful can remember what they had for breakfast yesterday, much

80 less what the pope was doing four years ago. So I can’t blame them for not remembering, but just so you know, it was the press who started this soft-spoken religious man on his way to his own funeral. Il Mondo—you know, the economic journal?—they started it, too, by publishing a string of open letters to the pope about Vatican Bank. ‘Is it right for the Vatican to operate like a speculator?’ ‘Why does the church tolerate investment in companies whose only aim is profit?’

‘Why is a branch in one of the great tax havens of the capitalist world?’ ‘Why does the church teach equality but evade taxes?’ All good questions, but questions that anyone who wants to live and flourish within the Vatican walls shouldn’t be asking. The pope read these and other articles. By his second day in office, he had already announced his intent to launch an investigation into the Vatican’s finances.”

Carlo usually knew his facts and figures well, but on this score he seemed to have internalized the data. His muscular body was perched at the edge of his chair. With one hand, he folded and refolded a peel from a banana he had just eaten. In a deep orange dress shirt and beige jeans, his skin tanned, he looked healthy, despite the cold November weather. He cut an even more dapper figure when seated next to Alberto, whose pale Turin complexion, large pores, pock marks and rosacea were aggravated by stress (on bad days he would shave over these marks and nick himself). Alberto scraped the crumbs from his Chex Mix off the table and into his hand; brushed these crumbs back into the remaining milk left in the cereal bowl; and seemed to take a mild interest in what Carlo was saying.

“These 33 days after the pope’s assumption were as intense as 33 years of some people’s lives. One week later Pope John Paul I found out Bank of Italy was investigating links between

Roberto Calvi and the Vatican Bank, and the government judge, Emilio Alessandrini, gave him the pope a preliminary report. It looked as if Bank of Italy would undertake a criminal

81 investigation against Calvi and the leading Vatican officials, like Marckinkus, but the investigation was brought to an abrupt halt. Five gunmen murdered Alessandrini at a stop light in Rome. Now how much of this is news to you?”

I muttered something about having been apolitical in the seventies.

“I remember the pope’s death, of course, and I vaguely remember the legal investigations, but I was just not that interested, to tell you the truth. I had other things on my mind, then. I was focused on the south, where my father’s side of the family came from.”

“But you remember when Alessandrini was shot, don’t you?”

I shook my head and said no, while to myself, I thought, yes, and Alessandrini, Rosone,

Superman, Moro, Giuliano, Ambrosoli, and Piersanti—and as each body piled onto the last one,

I became more and more inured to the smell of putrefaction, cared less and less about the cause of things, more and more about not becoming one of those illustrious corpses.

“What about Concetta, do you remember him?”

Do I remember him? Not enough and too much, Carlo. Whenever it has really mattered,

I have searched long and hard and seen nothing resembling the man who you probably associated with that name. When it hasn’t mattered, I have seen him in everything, in the sun and the rain, even in you, Carlo; even in your personal crusade to expose the truth, I have seen him. I remember him, but it does not help because it inspires nothing in me but bitterness for having been left, for having been dumped, and bitterness, when it rises out of us, it must, like the regurgitation of last night’s dinner, be swallowed back down again, or else it will feed upon itself and scare even the crows away.

“Journalist, right?”

82 “Yes, the most hated journalist in Rome among the powered elite. Not quite a

muckraker, that wouldn’t be fair, but as close to that as you can come without being a yellow

journalist.”

“He was shot, right?”

No one had dared ever talk to me about conspiracy theories before. Everyone I knew in

Rome knew who my uncle was and would never have dared trivialize his name or our

relationship with theories about his death. And since I only ran in circles of people whom I had known for years and years, I was never a witness to any of these theories. Until now. It occurred to me that Livia’s giving me her maiden name had been a blessing, for it had allowed me some much needed anonymity.

“Yes, four months after John Paul I’s death. Did you know there are accounts, Paolo, of the pope discovering Concetta’s newsletter in his papal office? They say he read a list of 121

leading clerics and laymen who were also members of the Masonic Lodge and decided he would

need to strip all of them—cardinals, bishops and archbishops—of their titles and offices,

excommunicate them. Since the list included many closest to the highest office, a pogrom would

have ensued.”

Exposing Freemasons, had Luca wanted to die? Even he must have known the cost of

publishing such information, but why had he gone ahead and done it? The Freemasons

compromise one’s loyalty, he had once said to me, because they require you to disclose secrets

about your work colleagues and build loyalty to the institution. This, according to my uncle,

explained why Mafia soldiers could not make good Freemasons because they could only be loyal

to one institution at a time, but he himself had never said anything about his membership.

83 Instead, it was Claudia who had told me Luca was a freemason; to demystify, to show that he

was just as imperfect and corrupt as everyone else.

“According to rumors, stories of a coming purge spread throughout Vatican City.

Cardinal Villot and Cardinal Marckinkus smoked their way through 145 cigarettes each in the

next two days. First, the pope summoned Cardinal Baggio, the secretary of state’s personal

assistant, was told he would be transferred to the sleepy backwaters of Venice. Then, in the

afternoon the pope had tea with Cardinal Villot and told him all the bank officials with ties to

Marckinkus, Sindona and Calvi would be dismissed and reassigned to menial positions outside

the Vatican. Villot apparently accused the Holy Father of being too harsh and the Pope, then,

reminded him of some historical precedent, an earlier cardinal who was dismissed for being a

freemason. That meeting ended at 7:30 that night, and by 9:30 the pope shut off the TV and took

his leave of his assistants. That was the last time anyone ever saw the pope alive again.”

“So that proves nothing,” I said, “only that the pope’s death happened at a time of upheaval within the church…it hardly proves that he was murdered, though.”

“What exactly do you remember from the pope’s death?”

“Just that he died peacefully in his sleep.”

“You heard nothing, then, of Sister Vincenza who had to be hustled off to an isolated convent and cut off from the press.”

“Nothing,” I said. “Who was she?”

“She was the one who found him, you see, found him sitting up in bed with his glasses half off his nose, his fingers clutching a file, paper strewn among the bedcovers, his lips pulled back in a grimace, his gums exposed, his eyes popping out of his socket.”

“What are your sources? Where have you heard this from, The National Enquirer?”

84 “Paolo, the physical distortions of the body have never been made known, for obvious reasons.”

“So why are you telling us now?”

“Because it’ll come out some day, and because I never said I wouldn’t repeat the story, only that I wouldn’t reveal my sources.”

“Why didn’t she say anything?”

“Fear, I guess, but let me continue, or else I won’t have enough time.”

“Alright, go on.”

“Cardinal Villot, the cardinal who had taken tea with the pope the day before, was the first to arrive. He was cleanly shaven and dressed in full ecclesiastical attire, even though it was only five a.m. And what do you think he did? He began to place items from the pope’s room into a brown satchel: a vial of the pope’s low blood pressure medicine, the papers scattered on the bedcovers, a file folder he had been clutching in his hand, the pope’s glasses and slippers.

Villot even opened the pope’s desk, removed the pope’s appointment book, and with it, the list of papal transfers and the pope’s last will. None of these items were ever seen again.”

“I think you’re telling me a story concocted out of your own fantasy. With two witnesses there, I doubt that Villot could have gotten away with taking so much.”

“Consider that the entire case has never been investigated. No autopsy was ever performed. Consider this, and you will be less skeptical, but let me proceed. It unnerves me when I’m constantly interrupted.”

“Alright.”

“Well, where was I? Dammit, I lost my train of thought.”

“You were talking about the cardinal taking items from the pope’s bedchambers.”

85 “Ok, sure. So the cardinal phones the Vatican physician, Dr. Buzzonetti, and begins to

administer what’s called ‘the sacrament of extreme unction”—and, no, this is not some new kind

of hair gel—it’s the anointment of the deceased’s head with holy oil. As he was doing this, he

told the sister she would be sent to her Motherhouse in Venice where she would be out of

communication with the press. The Vatican doctor comes in, examines the body, decides the

pope had had a coronary, but he hasn’t suffered in his last moments.”

“This still sounds like a tale you’ve cooked up entirely in your own head.”

“Think it a tale if you like, or think it fact. It’s up to you. My only concern is that you

store it somewhere. You know stories like this must be retold, regardless of whether they are retold as myth or as history.”

“You’re a pedant.”

“Maybe, but let me proceed…do you know the ritual that follows the death of a pope?”

“No, afraid not.”

“Well, a cardinal or some other high-ranking ecclesiastical figure must tap the pope’s forehead three-times with a small silver hammer and ask, ‘Are you dead?’ Once this is performed to everyone’s satisfaction, the highest-ranking official announces that the Holy Father has ‘passed onto the greater glory’.”

“Doesn’t sound very scientific.”

“Just wait…you haven’t heard what happened next. Two morticians appeared, began injecting the body with embalming fluid. They then manipulated the pope’s distorted jaw, corrected his grimace, and closed his eyes.”

86 “Surely, if John Paul’s body were injected with embalming fluid, the papers would have

written about it. You have an extraordinary imagination, Carlo. Have you ever thought of

writing fiction?”

“No, I have a very bad imagination, almost none, but I’m a good listener, and I can tell

when I’m being lied to. Now let me finish. Cardinal Villot told Father Magee not to mention the

papers strewn across the bed or the items he had placed in the satchel. He also instructed Magee

to say that John Paul had died while clutching a copy of The Imitation of Christ in his hand. An hour and a half later, at 7:30 am, Vatican radio made the announcement that the pope had died of heart failure, but the story fell apart because a copy of The Imitation of Christ was nowhere to be found. Magee and Villot both had to admit that the story wasn’t true and that he held sheets of paper containing his personal writings in his hands, not The Imitation of Christ. The fact that the

morticians had already injected the pope with embalming fluid without draining the body was

also a problem because Italian law states that no embalming should be undertaken until 24 hours

after death. Heart specialists around the world were amazed to find the Vatican doctors made

their diagnosis without an autopsy. Paolo, you must really not have been paying much attention

at the time. The press were all over Sister Vincenza once they found out that she, and not Father

Magee, had found the pope’s body. But this again was not what caused a ruckus. The fact that

she had been confined to a cloister was what made a lot of people suspicious. On October 14th, almost one month later, the Vatican issued a statement, disapproving of ‘those who in recent days have indulged in the spreading of strange rumors,’ and just like that—poof!—the matter of the pope came to a close. No death certificate was ever made public, and no post mortem was ever performed.”

“Incredible,” said Alberto.

87 He had been silently listening and eating his chicken and rice in sporadic paroxysms of hunger. I, too, had finished my spaghetti. Only Carlo, in the telling of his story, had left most of his hoagie uneaten. I threw the snack cake in Carlo’s direction and told him he had earned it.

Alberto shrugged and admitted that Carlo’s version sounded more likely than the Vatican’s.

“Why?” I asked.

“Too many revisions,” he said. “I don’t trust people who are endlessly revising their stories.”

“So you remember when this Sister Vincenza was sent away?”

“Yeah, sure, I followed the story. My whole family did until it disappeared out of the headlines.”

“What did you think had happened?” I asked.

“I didn’t think he had been murdered. I thought he had died in his sleep reading some smutty novel. I thought perhaps he and this ‘sister’ had been lovers, and the Vatican officials had covered up the story for the sake of propriety.”

“Not likely,” interrupted Carlo. “This pope was devoutly pious, much more so than, the previous one. He meditated on religious readings. It had been his custom for years.”

Carlo looked at the both of us, and I knew he was preparing his next exegesis, the one that would, point by point, take apart Alberto’s arguments. It had made my heart race to know that even in obscure and not so obscure parts of the United States people still told tales involving

Luca, and I still could not admit that he was a relation. What kind of cowardice possessed me, and why had my mother encouraged this sort of thing? Neither of the men knew any more about me than what met the eye. They knew I was married, and I was from Rome. They knew my

88 mother was a costume designer with plans to find work in Hollywood. Beyond that, they knew nothing, and that was precisely the way that I wanted to keep it.

89

CHAPTER 7

SUPERMAN CANNOT SAVE YOU

My mother, my wife, even my aunt, to some extent—they all seemed to want nothing

more than for me to go shopping with them. Sandy would have been perfectly happy if I would

have just held her hand as we, aisle by aisle, strolled through IKEA or Target or Circuit City, as

she added and took away items from our cart. Her fluctuations in consumption seemed to be

wholly dependent on her assessment of our mutual worth at the time. Self-assessing, self-

validating, self-abnegating, self-abusing, self-reusing—I was getting a little tired of the role of the self in all this shopping, and, as I thought about it, I began to realize I didn’t want to become a new consuming creature, or for our identity to be forged in each one of these excursions. So it was always good to hear from Nonno. Whereas our shopping routines unmoored me, Grandpa

Giorgio’s letters had a way of quietly planting some roots through time and space. Every week I was getting a letter from Nonno, and every week I sat down at my desk and wrote him back, and the routine communication did me good, that is, until the letter came with the news that Nico

Superman was trying to find me. That one I let sit in a drawer with no response.

Paolo, my dear grandson,

I’m afraid I have some distressing news. Nico Superman, General Superman’s son, has tried to contact me. He has just finished a manuscript on his father’s death. In it he very

90 overtly accuses Amabili of conspiring to kill his father. Now not only is he trying to get his book published in Italy, but also in the United States. When he visits the US in January, he wants to set up a meeting with you I know you are starting over now, and I wanted to protect you as well as I could, so I asked him for his address and told him you would contact him if you were interested in seeing him. I was civil but firm, and he seemed distressed by my response. He remembers how outspoken you were right after Luca’s death, and I think he was hoping someone equally damaged by the Christian Dems would align with him now. His argument is quite convincing. He reasons the time is ripe, with Caponetto in power and the Maxi Trials underway, to launch a counter- attack against Amabili. He believes the informer Banigno will also severely damage Amabili’s credibility, although he could not say why. Frankly, I was surprised (and a little put-off) he was willing to tell me all this over the phone, but I think he did it in the hopes I would pass along this information to you. I hope it does not upset you too much. I so wanted your old life in Italy not to interfere with your new happiness in the States.

With love and affection, Your grandfather

General Superman’s son had a point, of course: Giuseppe Amabili’s position was weakened. When the Sindona case closed a few months before, the prosecutors had not only found the banker guilty of ordering the murder of Giorgio Ambrosoli, the Bank of Italy’s lawyer, but they had also reported that none of this would have been possible without the help of

Amabili. Before the lawyer had been murdered, he had even recorded a threatening phone call in which the killer had referred directly to Amabili and alluded he had his support in the matter.

Two days before Foreign Minister Amabili had barely survived a parliamentary vote on charges that he abused his office in an oil tax scandal ten years ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Caponetto openly vowed to lead the fight against organized crime. We had lived under a steady succession of governments that if not openly encouraged, at least tacitly tolerated the men who held so much power in the south, but now everything was changing.

The government was even building a state-of-the-art facility to hold the hundreds of defendants, dozens of lawyers and the relatives of victims who would testify. The “Bunker

Courtroom,” as it was called, would be an appendage to the Ucciardone Prison in order to avoid

91 the risk of transporting the luminary Mafiosi through the city of Palermo. Huge blocks of reinforced concrete would enable the courtroom to withstand a direct hit by an anti-tank missile.

Hundreds of holding cells had to be built, so that each defendant could be housed within his own cell in order to keep Mafiosi from communicating, conspiring with or killing one another. The fact that the new facility had been built at tremendous expense to the state lent further credibility to the notion that the state was committed to combating organized crime. In other words, Nico

Superman’s conceit that now was the time to wage war against the Christian Dems and Amabili was more than valid. The Socialist prime minister had everything to gain by weakening

Amabili, and I’m sure would have supported any measures Superman and I were willing to take to further sully his already fallen image.

Even though Sandy’s father’s checks continued to supplement our lifestyle, they also, I felt, undermined our credibility as adults. The amounts her father sent us were paltry in comparison to his vast fortune, but I still felt at times pressured to meet her spending expectations. She had not grown up in the self-indulgent way one would expect of the daughter of a multi-millionaire, but she had never wanted for anything, and, in four years’ time, that is when she turned 25, she would come into her own fortune legally.

Philip Dobernchek had married his first wife when she was eighteen and divorced her by the time she was 24. In the interim she had borne him four kids, and with each child her husband’s visits became less frequent and her lithium dosage more necessary. Seeing how cruelly he himself had discarded his own first wife, he wanted nothing similar to happen to his own daughters. For this reason, he had added a caveat to their inheritance. If any of his daughters produced a child before her 28th birthday, she would become ineligible to collect her inheritance for another fifteen years. In a decade and a half, the interest on her inheritance would

92 add at least a half a million dollars to her final sum, but that would hardly compensate for the fifteen-year delay in receiving the money. For this reason, even in the eighties Sandy was extremely careful about keeping up with her birth control pills. About washing the dishes or taking out the trash, she could be absent-minded, but about this, never. Now at this time I had just turned 27, and I, too, was not so keen to rush fatherhood. So, Sandy and I agreed, before we considered kids, she would finish graduate school. She had always wanted a career, and I didn’t want children to keep that from happening. Besides, there was always the inheritance to think of.

Later in the week, Nico Superman’s letter came, and with it a copy of the manuscript he would publish by the summer. After the New Year, he would be visiting New York to see whether he couldn’t negotiate a deal either with Columbia University Press or with myself.

Dear Signor Taviani, I write you now in the hopes that you will consider meeting me during my stay in New York in early January.

I feel it is vitally important that we speak. Your uncle and my father suffered for justice. In their lifetime, we saw their desire to see Italian society change, and we also felt the hope that came as a result of that desire. Your uncle and my father, I believe, briefly resurrected the possibility that things could change. Since their deaths, however, that hope has been latent again.

The Maxi Trial and Caponetto’s vow to fight organized crime give us a window of opportunity, though. The former Mafioso Banigno’s testimony will also do much to reveal the close link between our government and organized crime. But your uncle and my father’s death are still considered mysteries in the Italian annals. Our mutual desire to uncover the truth could not only help us lay to rest our loved ones, but could also give us a chance to resurrect that hope. Together we could send a message to certain politicians that they, unlike the Mafiosi, are not above the law.

Yours truly, Nico Superman

93 I read the letter through many times, and with each read, I felt less inclined to involve

myself in the judicial affairs of Nico Superman. He talked of Luca and the general as if they had

been comrades-in-arms, but in reality they had only been slight acquaintances, and Luca’s muckraking outfit had little to do with Superman’s heroic defense combat for the state of Italy.

My work now as a research assistant had even less to do with overturning the state or giving the people hope. It wasn’t that I hated or even disliked him. It was that I felt he had tapped the wrong man, someone who was meant to be a middle-class white collar worker and not a revolutionary. I could search high and low in my biography, but I would never find any evidence of my ever having been a maverick. Rebellion was for people like Livia and Luca, but not for me.

On a rainy Thursday afternoon, as I passed through my building’s automatic revolving

door, trying to button up my raincoat and open my umbrella at the same time, I heard the voice

of Mr. Nico Superman shouting to me from under the steel marquee of a New York City high-

rise. The January wind seared past me, busy professionals jockeyed to go home for the day, and,

turning, I saw a tall, imperious, commanding figure. This was the son of a boyhood hero of

mine. I was in the presence of a man much taller than myself. My instinct was not to bask in his

glory, but to stand at attention and, at the same time, be ready to flee at any moment. My mind

began to race, and, to my surprise, it began to race not with the reasons why I shouldn’t, but why

I should meet with him. Thoughts I had been trying to drown out for the past four years swept

past me. Vito Ciancimino and the Mondo cousins were in jail. The Christians were cleaning up

the roster in Sicily. Sicilians were rallying behind anti-Mafia investigators like Falcone and

Borsellino. The name of an upright man with no connections to the Mafia had been put forward

94 as the #1 choice to be the next mayor of Palermo. And finally, last but not least, neither Livia nor my grandfather had written another word about my Mafioso cousins, Vito or Nino.

“Alright,” I said finally. “Ollie’s, tomorrow at one.”

“Alright,” he said.

The restaurant smelled of wet umbrellas, muddy shoes, and Moo Goo Gai Pan. Nico stood by the entrance in a crumpled plaid shirt, faded blue jeans and a clumsy sports jacket. I found the indifference to his physical appearance appealing, especially for a man from fashion- conscious Northern Italy. The noodle shop, Ollie’s, was crowded and noisy enough for us to have to speak in raised voices. On one side the windows looked out on brick Barnard dormitories and the wide, elegant 114th street’s descending to Riverside Drive, and on the other side, was Broadway, the iron gates of Columbia University, the imposing brick buildings with rusticated masonry, a security box for the 24-hour security guard. Undergraduates jaywalked across busy four-lane Broadway, dodging careening taxi-cabs, clutching bio-chem lab assignments. Superman insisted on a seat away from the windows, and I realized, for the first time in the past six years, I was in the presence of someone who had learned to live with the same fears and anxieties that I did. His father had been so revered in Italy that it seemed surprising how unglamorous, how, at once, bird-like and hulking, how Barney-Buzzard-like a man his father had been, with eyeglasses that were outdated and too large, balding, with a small head that didn’t seem to fit his very large body, but there he was, a hero nonetheless, unafraid, commanding the ultimate respect from everyone who knew him. His son seemed to have the

95 same buzzard-like quality, but with these spooked intense eyes that his father had never had.

Perhaps the result of living through one’s own father’s murder? Did I bear the same spooked mien? Were we both watching this violent theater, this phantasmagoria, a spectral cast of images, both murderers and victims passing through our dreams at night? No, I thought. You are healing, but this man opposite you is wounded beyond repair.

“It’s so good to finally meet you. I trust you have had a chance to read through my manuscript.”

“Not yet, I was hoping to read it as soon as I have some more time,” I said.

This was a lie, but I didn’t want to read his manuscript. There were certain things I would just as soon not know.

“That’s too bad, because I was hoping you would have a better understanding of why I wanted to meet with you.”

“Well, I’m here now,” I said, feeling uncomfortable. “You’re father was a great man,” I added after a moment.

“Yes, we were very close, and we stayed in contact until the end. My father believed he had been transferred to the south, so the Christian Dems could get rid of him more easily. He thought he had been set up to die.”

“And you believe that too?”

He did not have a chance to answer because at that moment the waitress came over to take our orders. I cannot remember what Superman ordered, but I remember he did not even look at the menu. I realized then he was ordering the same thing he had eaten the day before.

The food clearly was not the issue for him; meeting with me and unburdening himself were.

96 When the waitress was gone again, he continued. I was glad he was speaking in Italian; that way no one around could eavesdrop. I felt like I was in a bad B movie, a minor actor in some bizarre sub-plot. As he continued talking, I understood he thought he was the lead character in Arthur

Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, desperately trying to get the truth out.

“Luca Concetta and my father met on at least six different occasions in the last months of your uncle’s life. I know this because my father noted the times and places of these meetings in his diary. He doesn’t include much on what happened during these meetings, but it is my understanding, from speaking to my mother-in-law, and, from the things she herself heard from my mother before she died, that your uncle and my father met because they were the only two men in possession of a secret that could have permanently damaged the credibility of the

Christian Democratic Party, especially the credibility of its leader Amabili.”

“I’m not sure I understand what you’re talking about.”

“In the seventies, you’ll remember, my father was still wholly taken up with the Red

Brigades. After Moro was kidnapped and finally murdered, you remember, my father’s anti- terrorists carabinieri raided that apartment in Milan and found a cache of letters the president had written before he was killed, many of which lashed out at his own party and the Christian Dems he thought had betrayed him.”

“And my uncle?”

“Your uncle was an extremely well-connected man. I don’t know how, but somehow he managed to get a hold of those papers. That meant that my father and your uncle were the only living beings who had a copy of those papers, and they knew it. My mother-in-law–my mother has since died, as you know–tells the story that one night in an exhausted manic state of energy

97 not long after my father’s squad had found the papers, my father called Amabili’s right-hand

man, Moretti. He even drove over to Moretti’s house at three in the morning and gave him a

copy of the letters to give to Amabili and kept a copy for himself. Now Amabili, to this day,

denies this visit, as does his right-hand man, Moretti. All of us who knew my father knew he was straight as an arrow. If he said he went over to Moretti’s house at three in the morning, then damnit, that’s where he went. The fact that these papers were never published doesn’t look right.

Makes it seem Amabili and Moretti both got rid of those letters because of what they contained.”

“And what did they contain?”

“More information on the Sindona affair, some profit-making from the oil crisis, some out and out accusations that Amabili was responsible for the president’s death, more accusations about the CIA’s backing of the Christian Dems, the usual back-scratching and profiteering accusations. They were the usual accusations, but they would have been all the more lethal since they would have come from within, and they would have been uttered by Moro, a man who, it would now be clear, had been murdered because of his party’s indifference. Even the Socialists, for years, the archenemy of the DC, had argued more fiercely and more vehemently to have him saved. Now I don’t know whether you read Luca’s scandal sheet–”

“No, I tried to stay away from it. I didn’t even read the Italian mainstream papers back

then. I don’t know what I read, I guess a lot of fantasy novels and American lit. Anything

realistic, I stayed away from.”

“A few weeks before your uncle’s death, he wrote a short blurb that hinted that he knew

enough about Amabili’s crimes for Amabili to be worried. That was a usual tactic he used to get

paid off. Sometimes he would accept a bribe and not run the article. Other times he would run

the article anyway. After all, he needed enough copy to sell some newspapers.”

98 “How come you know so much about my uncle’s business?”

“I don’t know half as much as there is to know, Paolo. Your uncle was a cipher, to my

father and to me also.”

“And what makes you think Amabili had something to do with your father’s death?”

“Just before he left for Sicily, my father met with Amabili. At this meeting, when

Amabili asked my dad point-blank what his intentions in Sicily were, my father told him he

wouldn’t be concerned about Amabili’s constituents. He would reassure the Sicilian people that

the Mafia had not won, that the state was still strong enough, and he would not be intimidated.

Amabili became so faint and looked so sickly that my father had to get him a drink of water.

While sipping his mineral water, this little ghoulish creature then proceeded to recount the tale of the death of Mafioso Inzerillo’s nephew, a man who thought he was safe in America and wound up dead in a car trunk somewhere in New Jersey.”

“So the man’s heard a mob story or two. I bet he could tell you a good one about the two priests in the confessional booth, too.”

The plan was ridiculous. Even the son of General Superman could not touch Amabili.

He was the Eternal Giuseppe. He was Giuseppe Caesar, to those who revered him, and

Beelzebub, to those who despised him. He had dined with Margaret Thatcher. President Ford considered him a close personal friend. Five of the past six popes blessed his administration personally. He had held every prominent position in the cabinet, Minister of the Interior,

Minister of the Defense, President of the Republic, Prime Minister, Minister of the Budget,

Minister of Finance, and he would one day be a Senator for Life. His circle of supporters included former Fascisti, boyhood friends, and the most sacrosanct, the most pious clergymen.

99 He took the holy sacrament every day. Following his daily church visit, he would assemble his posse to honor and adore him. One of his most loyal followers even quipped this man’s party wasn’t a democracy, but a theocracy, and Giuseppe was its god.

“Do you remember Pio La Torre?”

“The head of the Sicilian Communist Party, shot a couple of years ago, of course, how could I forget him?

“Well, before Pio La Torre was killed, he had put a proposal on the table to make membership alone in Cosa Nostra a crime. That concept would have permitted investigators to ignore banking secrecy laws and check suspects’ assets. It would have even allowed investigators to seize criminal assets gained through violent means. My father came to Sicily early in order to push that proposal through. He was assured he would get state support and he was continually thwarted.”

“Mr. Superman, I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s just that I’m building a new life here. I can’t really get involved.”

“You’re an egocentric, Mr. Taviani. You only care about things that touch you. Well, I hate to break it to you, but this touches you, your wife, your parents, your cousins, your girlfriend, if you have one…Are you familiar with Article 416?

“What?”

“Have you heard of Article 416?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“After my father’s death, Article 416 and the La Torre law passed with an overwhelming majority. For the first time ever, the words ‘Mafia’ and ‘Mafioso’ appeared in the Italian penal

100 code. The state could finally check suspected Mafiosi’s assets. It could arrest a person it

suspected of belonging to Cosa Nostra. Without Article 416 and without the La Torre law, the

Maxi-Trials would not be taking place next year. Now the state saw a window of opportunity in

my father’s death. It knew it had to prove itself to the Italian people again. Now we, you and I, have the same window of opportunity because the very politician who has opposed every positive change in the fight against organized crime is still waiting in the wings to reassume power and to re-establish the status quo. That’s why it’s crucial we strike now, Mr. Taviani.”

He was shaking with emotion and leaning into an already sturdy table. I watched his cup of ice water as he jostled the table with a sudden erratic motion. What could I do? I could not help him. He had been right earlier when he had said I was an egoist. Far beyond the borders of my own country, my emotions rarely roamed. Livia, Claudia, Sandy, even to some extent my grandfather could not go with me into that dark Byzantine underworld of tribunals and courts, magistrates’ offices, and forms to fill out. The writing on the wall was an acronym that read

YOYO—You’re on your own. Only this familiar buzzard of a man would, like a steamroller,

roll on in the name of justice. I could see, looking into his flaming eyes, the steamroller would

be going to that netherworld with or without me. This Don Quixote and I bound to be his

Sancho; but I could not go.

“My uncle wrote a scandal sheet about politicians in Rome. What did he have to do with

all this, Nico? He hadn’t been back to Sicily in at least 20 years, not since starting with the secret service in the sixties.”

“Yes, I know, you think all this improbable, but I remember just after your uncle died, you were less skeptical. You came out to the press, saying that something had gone very wrong, and the government and the Mafia were to blame. My father admired you very much when you

101 did that. When he heard you had some kind of an envelope, he said something to the effect of,

‘He should hold onto that envelope. That will protect him when nothing else will.’ What did you do with the envelope, by the way?”

“Gave it to the magistrates.”

“Did you make a copy?”

“Sure, but my aunt has since destroyed it.”

“I see.”

102

CHAPTER 8

SEWING THEIR MOUTHS SHUT WITH NEEDLE AND THREAD

The Maxi Trials were unlike anything we had ever seen before. Streets were cordoned off to protect the judges, witnesses and prosecutors taking part in the trial. Roadblocks were set up throughout the city. Journalists from every country descended, speaking a cacophony of languages, navigating through the new maze these roadblocks presented. Helicopters hovered low in the sky like dragonflies on a warm, summer night. Serpentine lines of the curious and invested, my grandfather among them, waited in the heavy rain, passing the more than 3,000 soldiers and two army tanks outside the Bunker Courtroom, through security checkpoints and into the spectators’ gallery.

Giorgio Concetta, father of Luca Concetta, sat with Nico Superman and his family and

Silvia Rocco, the widow of a prominent judge who had been killed in a car bomb a few years before. He said not a word about what conversation passed between these three families, but those from the south, Rocco, my grandfather and all the others in the spectator’s gallery, must have felt an electric sense of triumph, having been so long lorded over by the Mafia for all those years.

In America the talk was of the Space Shuttle Challenger and schoolteacher Christa

McAuliffe, who at 37, with two children, a husband, and god knows how many students, had

103 decided to go up in space. Livia phoned me from California as soon as she heard it had exploded.

“Can you believe this? A husband who’s not cheating on his wife, two kids with no birth defects, an ok job as a school teacher, and she decides she wants to fly to the moon—only in

America! Just wait ‘til Sandy and you have a nice family at home, and she breaks it to you she wants to visit Jupiter!”

“Ma, it’s a national tragedy. How ‘bout some sensitivity here?”

“Sensitivity, hah! Paolo, this place is nuts. Top to bottom nuts. I mean I’m making money out here, but I don’t know what I’m doing here. General Hospital just hired me to do some work for them. The accent’s got immediate appeal. I’m supposed to be crying over this crazy schoolteacher, and those friggin’ astronauts, but, you know, I could care less.”

“Yeah, I know. I’ll talk to ya later.”

“Later, dear.”

For a year Giorgio went every day to watch the trial. Brave of him, since the occupants of the thirty steel cages surrounding the courtroom were the most powerful, thugs, bullies and cold-blooded killers certainly in Sicily, if not in the world. Friends of Cosa Nostra who were also in the visitor’s box might inform the defendants of Giorgio’s attendance. Cosa Nostra may have behaved extravagantly, but they did not appreciate too many spectators gloating during their moment of defeat. If it was established he was an outspoken enemy of Cosa Nostra, and if the defendants were finally acquitted, the amount of the protection money he had to pay might even double without explanation. Everyone supporting the state had something to lose. Seven judges had passed up the opportunity to preside over the case. The eighth, Antonio Calvini,

104 lived now a half-life of bodyguards, sequestered off houses, quarantined from the natural everyday world certainly for the next year, if not indefinitely. Two full sets of judges and jurors were seated on the dais, so that in the case of the death, natural or otherwise, of any one of the jury or the judges, the trial would still go on.

Giorgio claims the daily spectacle in the beginning reminded him of his school days when one buffoon’s antics could derail the teacher’s lesson plan completely. The stars appeared one by one. There was Pepe “The Pope” Sarvino, known for his lavish barbeques on his estate,

Angelo “The Lucky” DiGrasso, who had escaped two attempted car bombs planted by the

Corleonesi, and” Graziano “The Bull” D’Amico, renowned for his ability to strangle men without enduring an aerobic workout. In a country with no writ of habeas corpus, all of the defendants had been detained in prison before the trial ever started.

Cosa Nostra’s teams of lawyers, in an attempt to force preventive jail time to elapse, had instructed their clients to disrupt the process as much as possible. One Mafioso stapled his lips closed. Another used needle and thread to sew his mouth shut. A third did a strip tease within his jail cell. Another swallowed six-inch nails. Luciano Leggio, the reputed godfather, was flown in especially for the trial from his maximum-security prison in Sardinia. In an Adidas sweat suit and Adidas sneakers, he paced around his cell like an animal.

Then, the 364 defendants and their teams of lawyers demanded the magistrates read out loud the 800,000 pages of evidence to the court, so they would know exactly what they were being accused of. The court agreed, but stated they would not subtract the time it took to read the evidence from the preventive jail time, and Cosa Nostra’s lawyers dropped the plea.

The two witnesses who made the biggest impressions on Giorgio were both from

Buontempo’s clan, Stefano “The Crank” Natoli and Toto Banigno. Both had provided crucial

105 evidence in the US Pizza Connection trial and were now living in the US under the Federal

Witness Protection Program. “The Crank” had risen in the ranks by what was known as “the chauffeur method.” He had personally assisted Buontempo through the years when he had led his double life as both a man of the establishment and a Man of Honor. Even now he remained extraordinarily loyal to Buontempo’s memory. He had been arrested on his way to kill Guido

“The Onion” Manco for betraying his former boss. It was already extraordinary he had survived the Second Mafia War. Some say his paranoia insured his survival. Others say it got in the way.

There had been two attempts on his own life since the beginnings of the Second Mafia War.

Those two had convinced him to install an electronic device to start up his own car from far away. When this still didn’t satisfy his need to feel safe, he built the most state-of-the-art security system around his city villa, hired a team of bodyguards, and trained killer attack dogs, to boot. According to Giorgio, the Mafia lingo he spoke was impossible to understand.

“Now, Paolo, I got the gist of what he was driving at. The man wasn’t explaining nuclear physics. He was telling us the usual stuff: vendetta, bullying, kidnapping, extorting, drug trafficking, but without his translator, the words were incomprehensible.”

His testimony told the Mafia’s story from the bottom up, from the point of view of a low- level soldier who had bought and sold heroin since the seventies. As a piccioto, he knew how the business had grown to satisfy the demand in the US that the Woodstock generation had for chemical experimentation. He understood how some of the best chemists in Europe refined the morphine that came in from Turkey or the Far East, as well as how the Men of Honor shipped if off again to the US. He had lost twelve relatives during the Second Mafia War, and, like a man out for revenge, he named one Mafioso after another.

“Is Pietro Masino a Man of Honor?”

106 “Yes.”

“Is Franco Masino a Man of Honor?”

“Yes.”

“Did Ciaccio Carroso traffic drugs?”

“All his life.”

Around and around, one by one, he pointed them out. He must have named over a 130.

And the silence in the room! Not only did he reel off the names of Mafiosi, but also the locations of all the refineries in Sicily. His testimony made it clear Palermo, not Marseille or

Rome or Paris or New York, was the home to the largest, most efficient heroin refineries in the world. It was like a curtain lifting on the largest criminal empire existing, and it was happening in sleepy, inefficient Palermo.

After naming half the establishment, he walked again around the bulletproof glass, heard himself referred to as a “worm” by his former colleagues from within their cages, and, stoically, in light of his assured death, allowed himself to be led away peaceably and without resistance.

For the first time ever, the gigantic scope of the Sicilian operation was being exposed, as well as the tremendous money to be made. It was as if we, non-Mafiosi, had missed some worker’s utopia where they, the soldiers, determined the cut and enjoyed the profits rather than reaping all the rewards for their bosses alone.

“We made our own terms,” “The Crank” chimed. “We put in a 100 million lire, and, presto, it became 300. We decided when to distribute and where. We forgot real estate development because all the money was in narcotics. How could we look elsewhere? “

Giorgio wrote me that he felt acutely jealous when he heard Natoli’s testimony. The man seemed inarticulate and vengeful, and yet he was the one living in the city villa with bodyguards,

107 attack dogs and a state-of-the-art security system. (“Paolo, how can I be happy with my measly

chess games with Clemente, my pension and money from the store when I hear about these

people skimming 600,000 lire a month for ‘protecting’ me and taking in those kind of profits?”)

Hearing Natoli’s testimony confounded him. Giorgio didn’t know whether to admire his ingenuity and industry, or despise him for selling a lethal product and capitalizing on a seller’s market. When “The Crank” outlined the international scope of the business, its dexterity, its superiority to all the other drug trafficking organizations in the world, Giorgio even wrote that he felt a touch of pride for the island the mainland still thought of as a bastard child.

“We had wanted to secede from Italy and become a part of America. And now we had become our own independent nation—a nation run by thugs, mind you, but an independent nation, nonetheless. This thing is bigger than we ever thought, Paolo. The Sicilians control all of it. The French, the Americans, the Bulgarians, all of them answer to our underworld. And if

Razzo’s men hadn’t killed The Crank’s relatives, this Maxi Trial might have just been little more than a ripple,” wrote Giorgio.

A little Sicilian woman named Rosa Letizia also intensely interested my grandfather.

Each one of his letters opened with a brief update of what she was doing and how she was doing it. Ever since Razzo’s men had killed her son, she had protested his death by putting up a shrine to him in the middle of her furniture store. Day after day she opened The Letizia Imports Co, but her customers—instructed by the don not to patronize the shop of this disgraziata—never came.

In the next two years, she never sold another piece. She even set up a desk and stool outside the

store, so she could get some sun during the working hours. To men like my grandfather, she was

a sign of resistance, and he adored her for it.

108 When he saw her again at the opening of the Maxi Trial, he was struck by how much she had aged. Earlier her hair had been grizzled, but now it had become silvery gray all around. She wore it pulled back in a low bun at the nape of her neck and dressed like a widow, in a long, black dress that fell to her ankles. As the trial proceeded, she held onto a framed photograph of her son. Her presence, Giorgio felt, was testament to a quietly growing fissure between the myth of the Mafia’s respect for women and the reality of their disdain.

“You’ll see, Paolo,” wrote Giorgio in his letters, “we Sicilians will try to change things through violence, and the women, by just parading through the streets, will do more than the dozens of illustrious corpses ever could. One woman I know, Patrizia Cecci, is banding together just such a group to canvass door to door. She wants to form her own coalition called “Women

Against the Mafia.” My own daughter never thinks this way, but this old woman and this Cecci,

Paolo, they’re something else.”

Once the star defendants had talked, once Lucciano Leggio washed his hands of the whole filthy matter, accusing the state, in typical Mafia form, of more corruption than the indicted, the 1,337 witnesses began to take their places. One by one, they made themselves comfortable behind the bulletproof witness stand. The rats, as they were called, were a new phenomenon. There was no practical incentive for them, no witness protection program that would take them out to bucolic Wyoming, no Federal Bureau of Investigations to find them jobs, no reduced sentences even. Red Brigade informers would have their sentences cut in half, but

Mafiosi informers were considered scoundrels, disloyal to the cause, and so could expect no leniency. So why were they doing it? Why were there suddenly so many of these pentiti

(“repentants”)?

109 Banigno explained it as a need to stop an organization that had lost its bearings. The old

Mafia would have asked permission of the Commission before killing. It would have limited its murders only to other members or men who blatantly obstructed its business or intended to harm the organization itself somehow. But the new Mafia terrorized civilians, alienated its American partners, and created animosity within Sicily. The old Mafia would never have harmed women and children, but the new Mafia would stop at nothing to maintain its power. The myth of the old Mafia may have never really existed, but when Banigno’s testimony was finished, many of those in the audience believed in it. Again before thousands of journalists the world over,

Banigno recounted the hierarchical structure of the organization, the Cupola that had absolute power over policy, money, life and death, a global, regimented and vertically structured organization, with family bosses at its base, capo-mandamenti heading every three families, and each capo-mandamento answering to the Commission in Palermo.

About six months into the trial, Giorgio wrote me that he had heard Vito’s name mentioned in the worst possible context. A pentito had become an informer, only to get his revenge on my cousin Vito, a man he described as sub-human and unworthy of the title “Man of

Honor.”

“Any man who smashes a little old woman’s head with a hammer does not deserve to be a Mafioso. Now I’m a man who has committed a crime or two in my day, but I draw the line at murdering defenseless old ladies,” he said in his testimony.

There were other crimes: He had crushed the right hand of an up-and-coming pianist; he had beaten up a priest teaching kids how to resist the Mafia; he had given a florist a concussion for sending wilted flowers to his girlfriend. Now my grandfather had lived a long time, and

110 nothing shocked him. He knew Vito. He remembered that, at seven, Vito had decapitated frogs.

But to bear the last name Crimi, the same last name as a journalist who tried to bring down the

political house of cards in Rome in the seventies, and to be the grandfather of a sociopathic killer

linked to the vicious Corleonesi in the eighties put him in a strangely divided spot, genetically

speaking.

“Paolo, I did not want to be like those hypocrites who pretend themselves into another

reality, but there I was, with Nico Superman on my right and Silvia Rocco on my left, smugly

and comfortably in the victim’s position. We expressed outrage at the same statements and

agreed on just punishment. But as Vito’s name began to come up again, I felt torn. Should I

admit my relation to the man these pentiti were beginning to call “the beast”? Should I tell

Claudia of the crimes Vito had, most likely, committed? Should I try to see Vito? Perhaps he needed me now; perhaps he felt lost and abandoned. In the end I waited until I got home and told Alicia of Vito’s crimes, as a kind of confession. I still don’t know why I could not face

Superman or Silvia, but I can’t explain it, Paolo. I felt unclean next to them—hypocritical and unworthy—and since that pentito mentioned Vito, the first time, I have tried not to sit with them anymore.”

A few months after my grandfather found out about Vito, he learned Nino had decided to become an informer and would be testifying publicly. Giorgio had not known about this before because the Bunker Courtroom, in an effort to minimize the spectacle, did not hand out trial schedules beforehand. So, when he heard the announcement that Nino Crimi would witness that day, he was hearing the news for the first time, like everyone else in the courtroom. Seeing Nino again did stir his soul, it seemed, mostly because Nino’s demeanor had changed so drastically.

111 “Paolo, his eyes seemed shrouded in some kind of film. Outwardly he appeared the

same, but those eyes were like some cataract of the soul, some disease that appeared to have

spread inwardly.”

Nonno by now sat alone and apart from Superman and the judge’s widow, Silvia. On the

second or third day, he noticed my cousin gesturing to a woman a few rows behind him. She

looked very much the wife of a Mafioso, wearing too much make-up, an enormous emerald on

her finger, and a green tailored suit. Later Nino would refer to her directly, and her role would

become clearer, but at the time my grandfather already imagined she was his wife.

So many relatives of Buontempo’s clan had been killed, so it was hard to understand why

Nino had survived. With Vito, we knew the Corleonesi needed men without feelings to carry out

orders. Vito enjoyed killing, so he happily obliged them. But with Nino, two and two didn’t add

up to four. Why had he survived when no one else had? His secret weapon was sitting a few

rows behind him in a green suit, gold heavy jewelry and thick make-up: He had married the

daughter of a Turkish Mafioso. It was like some Hapsburg Dynasty of the underworld, with

Sicilian Mafia families marrying into Turkish Mafia families and American Mafia families

marrying into Sicilian. Those international partnerships were the trademark of Buontempo’s old

regime. By marrying a Turkish underworld princess, my cousin Nino had saved his life. My grandfather wrote me that he had become an overseer of the morphine pipeline from the Far East by orchestrating the transactions with his father-in-law. He was responsible for paying off the longshoremen and seeing to it that the morphine made it safely to the refineries.

“After your Uncle Rings’ death, he became the morphine middleman, but he never did become a Man of Honor. He had always been a smart S.O.B. We knew that about him, didn’t

112 we, Paolo?” A letter dated March 12, 1987 ended this way. I didn’t hear from him for a few weeks after this, which made me feel like I used to feel when a Miami Vice episode ended with some huge explosion and Crockett unaccounted for. I tried to call him, but he was never home.

So, I waited and waited and waited, and then, at the end of the month, finally an update came.

My dear Paolo, I’m sorry I haven’t written in a few weeks, but things have been hectic again. I’ve been in contact with Nino’s wife Yasmin and with their little son Alper. She is still debating whether to move back to Istanbul where it will be safer for her and her son, and I am visiting every day to see that she and Alper are well.

Nino apparently will spend the next decade in prison. The trouble began a few years ago when the supply he had organized to be shipped from Turkey was seized in the Suez Canal. This ship, the H.M.S. White Rain, contained 4,000 kilos of heroin. As Nino explained it, that is two-thirds of the annual supply for all the heroin addicts in the United States—quite a heavy load and probably worth hundreds of billions of lire. One of his partners disappeared shortly after this, and Nino turned himself in, fully aware he was next on the hit list to be killed by Razzo. I have not spoken to your cousin, Paolo. He knows where to reach me if he needs my help, but I’m growing to like Yasmin and Nino’s son Alper. I still haven’t figured out what to do about Claudia. To find her sons and lose them again, I think it would be too much for her. What are your thoughts on this? I’m eager to hear from you.

I remain, Your loving grandfather Giorgio

113

CHAPTER 9

CLAUDIA’S GRANDSON WILL SACRIFICE RAMS FOR RAMADAN

Over a year later, the courts reached their verdict. Eight years for Giuseppe Mondo (his cousin Giordano had died in hiding in France), life sentences for Tomaso Razzo and my cousin

Vito, and life sentences for Pepe “The Pope” Sorvino, and Angelo DiGrasso. The courts had doled out over 3,000 years of prison time in total, sentencing Razzo and my cousin Vito in absentia, while Pepe “The Pope” Sorvino and Angelo “Lucky” DiGrasso would start their terms immediately. On the night the verdict was reached, Giorgio went home, packed his bags, and drove north to see my aunt Claudia. He didn’t write me for a few weeks after that, but I knew from his actions, he was worried about what Cosa Nostra would do next. Through Livia I heard he was doing fine, tutoring Giulietta French and staying in Rome indefinitely.

That same night Piero Ferrara, a low-level Mafioso, was shot on his doorstep, clutching a bottle of champagne he had bought to celebrate with his family. A former mayor who had complained about the Mafia’s influence on the DC roster, Lorenzo Fanciulla, was assassinated in his car, a draft of his manuscript on Palermo’s political world on the car seat next to him. Cosa

Nostra was not at all happy. For years they had relied on Judge Massina to throw out the prosecution’s charges or, at least, reduce their sentences, but, for once, Massina could not sit on the case, and the judge who presided could not be bought.

114 The day the verdict was reached, Sandy and I were celebrating her 24th birthday at a neighborhood Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. Between sips of red wine and bites of calamari,

Sandy was pontificating on the important subject of whether or not we should camp out to see the U2 Rattle and Hum show.

“I just think if we’re going to try to get tickets we should try to get the best seats we can.

I mean, think how cool it’ll be when we’re close to the stage in Madison Square Garden.”

“Yeah, but you know how I feel about my sleep. Why don’t we get up early instead?

Besides, at Madison Square Garden, the acoustics will be great wherever we wind up sitting.”

We had had a scare recently about Sandy’s birth control pills. When the stress of graduate school caused her face to break out, her dermatologist, newly anointed into the world of

HMOs, had rushed through the many side effects of her topical medication, one of which was that it reduced the effectiveness of her Ortho Tri-Cyclin. So, when Sandy’s period didn’t come, she panicked and blamed me for being a man and being careless. She even accused me of wanting to get her pregnant so as “to further fuck up her life.” To complicate matters, the medication did nothing to improve her acne, so she had to visit another doctor “who didn’t care” and “didn’t understand.” She was getting more and more angry. At times, I blamed Barnard for this new anger; at other times I tried to put myself in her shoes.

“Why don’t you start seeing a therapist? You’re always talking about how you want to get your emotions straightened out,” I told her one day in exasperation.

“She’ll just tell me it all goes back to my father. She’ll give me more work to do. She’ll tell me I have to ‘work on’ that relationship. That’s total bullshit. I work hard enough on my damn relationships. I don’t want any more homework. I don’t want a therapist’s help. I want all

115 the men in my life to magically turn into women. I’m sick of the way we don’t talk to each other. You just see me as this wife-y character. You don’t really see me.”

“Well, do you think it all goes back to your father?”

“Who knows? Maybe.”

“Well, don’t you want to find out?”

“No, I don’t want to think about him. He screwed up my life. I hate him.”

Sandy’s mother, Inge, had met her father during a four-month internship with the United

Nations. By the end of the internship, she was engaged and, within the year, married to Philip

Dobernchek. By the following year, she was pregnant, and he was repeating the pattern of neglect he had begun with his last three wives, traveling constantly and impatient when he was around. When she was thirteen, her mother died, and Sandy was sent off to Choate Rosemary

Hall, a boarding school she hated. Sandy’s father bought her mother the most expensive tombstone and repeatedly referred to her as a saint and again as “that beautiful milkmaid.”

Sandy once told me that her mother’s death gave her a place she held in her father’s heart as

“that dead woman’s daughter.” Inge was much more powerful dead than she had ever been alive, and Sandy, through her mother’s death, had risen to a mythic status also, but because her ascension was based more on myth than reality, their relationship became one of form over content. Or so it had been explained to me by June, Sandy’s half-sister in Colorado.

“Look, it’s no secret you’re marrying a woman with a ‘father complex.’ At fifteen Sandy wanted to know just what she had to do to earn her father’s love, and I told her, ‘Sandy, honey, how ever high you wanna jump, it’ll never be quite high enough. You just get used to that.

Anorexia, bulimia, obsessive compulsive, paranoia, narcissism, we’ve all had our fair share of complexes because of how we were raised. Now anytime you feel out of control, you call one of

116 us. Don’t reinvent the wheel, and don’t starve yourself to stay a little girl for him. How much of his decisions are made in an effort to please you? Ask yourself that. If you’re at all honest with yourself, you’ll see, hardly any. So fuck him because no matter how high you can jump, it’ll never be quite high enough.’ But, you know, she still struggles with it all, Paolo”—she told me, turning her attentions back to me—“She can’t get over all the inconsistencies—the 90/10 you have to do in a relationship with him. She always wanted things to be fair, but once she gets over that, she’ll be most of the way there.”

One day she told me would start going.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll pay whatever it costs.”

In March a letter came from Giorgio confirming all my worst fears. Falcone had been passed over as the new head of the anti-Mafia commission. Yasmin and Alper had moved back to Istanbul, leaving Giorgio alone in Palermo. Claudia seemed to be having some kind of manic episode, clutching desperately to her maternal role, even though her sons barely acknowledged her (Nino, more so, now that he was in prison, with a wife far away.) Stefano “The Crank”

Natoli had illegally reentered the country and was now in a holding cell in Sicily, explaining just why the desire to kill Vito Concetta had struck him now rather than later. The letter was written in Giorgio’s blunt style, a way of writing that reminded me of my own.

Dear Paolo,

Livia probably told you I left right after the verdict was declared. I have been staying with Claudia in Rome and haven’t regretted this time away from Palermo in the least. Even as a spectator, these trials have drained me. In the past few months, I’ve had a chance to talk to Claudia and to spend some time with my granddaughter. I think it’s done me some good. Your cousin Giulietta asks about you, Paolo. She always wants to know how you’re doing.

117 Alicia tells me Giovanni Falcone has been passed over as the new ‘godfather’ of the anti- Mafia pool even though his predecessor, Antonio Caponetto, apparently retired believing Falcone would inherit the position. Rumors have been spreading that Falcone is a careerist, making a profession out of his anti-Mafia philosophy. Alicia tells me the man chosen to take over the anti-Mafia pool, Antonino Meli, is irascible and old, and has almost no background in Mafia investigations. Two factions are now developing within the Investigating Magistrate’s Office. Falcone’s faction wants to drive the stake home, and Meli’s sect, the more powerful one, pretends to push to normalize the situation while it dismantles the anti-Mafia Pool. They have assigned Falcone a purse-snatching trial just to spite him. They are rolling back all the innovations that Rocco Chinnici brought with him from the mainland. Do you remember when he was shot in 1983? Now Meli wants to put a stop to pooling information. He is also doing everything he can to stop cooperation between magistrates and the Federal Bureau of Invesigation, so these men will be as isolated as they were before they began pooling information. Borsellino and Falcone, having grown up in the center of Palermo, know precisely what it is they’re combating. If one wanted to make a career of something, there would be other ways, my dear grandson. There are simpler ways, aren’t there?

Speaking of simpler ways, Yasmin and Alper are staying with Yasmin’s father. His business has been quite seriously disrupted by the Maxi Trials. The rumor is they are trying to set up refineries in Turkey and ship directly to the US, but organizing the new routes will take some time, maybe years, none of which helps to generate revenues now. Mind you, I heard none of this from Yasmin. The daughter and wife of drug traffickers, figurati, she has learned to be ultra-discreet. No, of all people, this news comes from Clemente, my old chess partner, who got it from a priest working on the docks and in the prisons. While Nino does his time, she’ll be flying back and forth to see him. I think the hope is that, as he teaches her more about the business, and, as the heat from the Maxi Trials wanes, she’ll fill in for him. According to Clemente, Sicily’s Turkish connections don’t want the responsibility of farming and refining the morphine. They would prefer to simply deal with collecting and shipping alone, as badly equipped as they are to deal with refining.

Since Nino began his sentence, Claudia has been seeing him once a month. I tell her about Yasmin’s stunning beauty and their son Alper, and she just gets snappy. “Imagine, naming a child Alper. What kind of a name is that? Don’t tell me she’s teaching him the five pillars of faith!” Claudia’s grievance has nothing to do with the fact Yasmin comes from drug dealing stock or that the emeralds on her hands and wrists may have been bathed in blood. No, Claudia’s problem with Yasmin has everything to do with her basic fear of Islam. Now that she knows she has a circumcised grandson, she pictures him sacrificing rams before Ramadan or following the call of the minaret and pulling out the prayer rug, knowing nothing about the Stations of the Cross or the Sermon on the Mount. She—our Claudia, there is no one more secular, as you know—practically spits with revulsion. I’m very glad the two have still not had an opportunity to meet. The air would be so thick with Claudia’s prejudices that Yasmin could never hope to get past it all.

118 I hope you are sitting as you read this, Paolo. Do you remember I wrote you about an informer named Stefano “The Crank” Natoli? He was the one who named all those Mafiosi and then, under oath, swore to the exact location of all the refineries in Sicily, the witness we all thought would now be safe under the Federal Witness Protection Program. Well, I swear I saw him two weeks ago in front of a small church near Livia’s, San Gioacchino’s. He had flown back to the United States right after his testimony, and he was Cosa Nostra’s most wanted man, more wanted than Banigno even. Only he had directly pointed out Mafiosi who were now serving life sentences. And then I remembered that, when they picked him up before the Maxi Trial, he had been caught en route to kill Guido “The Onion” Manco, the capo of a satellite Cosa Nostra based in Rome. After the service, I went home to Claudia’s to watch the news, sure I would hear something about a hit on Guido Manco, but I heard nothing. Now I read in the papers he’s been picked up in Palermo, and he’s being charged with carrying an unlicensed weapon here. I’ve heard he was on his way to kill Vito, even though Vito is not supposed to be in the country. But the carabinieri who picked up Natoli won’t charge him with the attempted murder of a man who is not even supposed to be on the island, and—the most ludicrous part of all—apart from the fact Natoli will be sent back to the US without spending any jail time in this country. No, the most ludicrous part of all, far more ridiculous than any of the above—there are now charges being brought against Falcone about this, who they say put Natoli up to returning to Italy to kill Vito and Manco. Falcone! The man only deals with these people in a legal capacity. A man who lives in the army barracks and moves only with a troop of bodyguards, why would he ever orchestrate that kind of thing? It would be in complete contradiction to every previous action of his entire life and career. It’s too ludicrous to even discuss. I realize, as I am writing this, that it sounds as if I am disappointed that Natoli wasn’t able to carry out his task and kill Vito. No, that is not it at all, Paolo. Your aunt Claudia was beside herself. She’s coming around to realizing the monster that Vito is, but she can’t seem to undo the years she mothered him. She can’t simply see him as sub-human. So, we all try to tiptoe around the reality of Vito’s descent. She even sent a letter to a boyhood friend of Vito’s, Pietro Cardinale, begging him to find out whether he was ok. She has heard nothing back, and I am less than eager to hear he is fine, but I would never tell Claudia this.

I remain, Your loving grandfather Giorgio

For days after this, I walked around lonely and confused. Who was I to root for? Did I really prefer justice to the only blood family I had left? What had Falcone ever done for me in a pinch? Would he lend me money if I lost my job? Would he babysit my kids, if I had any? The

Concettas and I no longer lived in the same country, and yet I knew, if anything ever went

119 desperately wrong, it would be my family of thieves who would bail me out, while the Falcones and Supermans of the world would be content to watch me squirm.

120

CHAPTER 10

RELAYING TRAGIC SNATCHES OF CONVERSATION

More than two years passed, and in those two years, my relationship with Sandy went through many more ups and downs. In retrospect I can see clearly when and how she betrayed my trust, but at the time I viewed her through an idealized prism and drove myself with an overwrought desire to please her. Graduate school made her more self-conscious and more anxious, but also more grateful. The acne she worried about never did go away, not once during her three years of graduate school, and madman that I am, I adored those blemishes not only for making her more wholly mine, but also for the flaws that I could see up front, rather than the ones that were hidden from view. When I felt optimistic, I thought it possible to live entirely in a bubble of happiness, and I guarded that happiness and dreamed it to be made of an impermeable substance, but out there in the world I knew life was going on. I knew that the state was rolling back the positive gains from the Maxi Trial, Caponetto’s fight against organized crime would be futile, and his five-year tenure as Prime Minister would eventually come to an end. I also suspected Superman would one day try to get back in touch with me. I did not, however, have any idea that he would try to do this so soon. His letter came in March 1990.

Dear Paolo,

As you are probably well aware, the Investigating Magistrates Falcone and Borsellino are doing everything they can to keep the state from rolling back all the

121 advances made during the Maxi Trials. We saw this in July of 1988, when Borsellino called a press conference, and announced that the Palermo Magistrates’ Office was trying to dismantle the Anti-Mafia pool. Now we are also finding Borsellino and Falcone fighting internal dissension, and more problematically encountering daily anonymous death threats from someone who calls himself “The Crow.” Obviously, these are not the ideal working circumstances. Each time I have spoken to Falcone and Borsellino they both contend that, until the people actively support them, and until we demand our politicians atone for past crimes, nothing will change. Paolo, you, too, are a part of the populace, and, as you have suffered more directly from past political crimes, you could do much to shift public opinion simply by reminding the people, who are prone to forget. There is power in numbers. As you know, I have been organizing my own campaign. The publication of my book has also helped to raise public awareness. If you were willing to join our crusade, Paolo, I can not guarantee we would succeed in driving out the old guard, but I know we, you and I both, would greatly gain in our sense of self-respect. We could free ourselves from forgetting the past, and call on others to do likewise.

Last time we spoke, I told you about my misgivings about the state. My feelings about this are now stronger than ever. In June a scuba diver’s bag filled with 57 sticks of dynamite was left on the rocks near the Mordello coast where Falcone was swimming. The mayor of Palermo has publicly accused elements of the state of Falcone’s attempted assassination. I have thought a great deal about this, and have decided I, too, believe Falcone’s attempted assassination was state-supported. The Crow’s anonymous letters warned Falcone his life was in danger. They were also found to have been typed on a typewriter within the Magistrates’ building by moles supporting the DC.

When we met in January three years ago, I called the period before the Maxi Trials a “window of opportunity.” Now that the DC will be called on to form the new government, I fear that window of opportunity is closing. If we allow Amabili to assume power again, we will permit murderers to pass their power back to Cosa Nostra. The system of nepotism and “client-ism” will be re-instigated. The advances we have seen, modest though they were, will be fully rolled back, and it will be as if there had never been any Maxi-Trial at all. You may say this is pessimism on my part. You may contend I am all black clouds and gloom, but we need only go back to the Mafia Trials of the sixties to see how the Octopus can assume other forms, re-group and emerge more powerful than ever.

We should not underestimate the power of politicians to affect policy. Five years ago Prime Minister Benjamin Caponetto made a pledge to lead the fight against organized crime. That pledge allowed the Bunker Courtroom to be built and the largest blow against the DC and the Mafia in history to be struck. Caponetto’s government may have been the longest lasting, but, when, in the midst of the trial, we almost witnessed a regime change, all of us in the spectator’s gallery held our breath, your grandfather included. He was able to maintain power through March, and Cosa Nostra managed to punish the Christian Dems by instructing their constituents to vote for the Socialists and the Radical party rather than the DC. Just as that was a sign that the Mafia demanded the DC to make good on its offer to protect Cosa Nostra’s interests, the recent attempt on

122 Falcone’s life is a sign that the state is trying to make good. It is a devil’s bargain, and the DC will only be able to extricate itself from the deal when it finally loses power. We should not forget that the DC is considerably weakened. One year and a half ago, the judges and jurors ruled that the Mondo cousins should be given six years in jail. A few years earlier Salvo Lima left Palermo to serve on the European parliament. Both of these developments must make the Men of Honor unhappy. Both Lima and the Mondo cousins were valued members of Buontempo’s faction and were only allowed to live because of their value as go-betweens. Now Cosa Nostra sees it’s not enjoying an even return on its investment. The Maxi Trial has strained the relationship between the DC and the Mafia. Right now, the Mafia has no choice but to trust the DC, but, if the DC loses power, Cosa Nostra will appeal to other factions. This is why I write to you now, and not later, Paolo. The DC is weakened, but not vanquished. We cannot allow it to regain power, so that it can again abuse it. We must strike now. If Amabili forms the new Italian government, I am convinced he will do everything in his power to stop the gains made by the Anti-Mafia pool. He has no choice. Not doing as much means the death of either himself or his sons, and he would not relinquish the lives of himself or his sons freely.

My predictions are that, if we do not expose Amabili for the self-serving Machiavellian that he is, the violence will only escalate. His supporters within the Magistrate’s Office will separate Falcone from Borsellino, so that they, too, will be isolated. Amabili, then, will do everything he can to get the mayor of Palermo out. He will try to raise local support, but he will also accuse Orlando of careerism, in the same way Falcone and Borsellino have been accused. They will demoralize the three of them, and then they will kill them. The DC used the same tactic to kill my father seven years ago. Magistrates, carabinieri, informing or distrusted Mafiosi, they will also be its victims. To stop this cycle of violence, we (you, I and the Italian people), need to be outraged. We need to foment a popular movement. Speak out about Luca. Write to the editors of newspapers. Demand to know what is happening with the trial. Why has nothing happened for over ten years? Find out who’s in charge and point the finger at that person. If you demand that the trial be reopened, it will raise questions about why investigations have stopped, and, if the people are reminded, they’ll be less likely to forget in the future.

Nico Superman

I read the letter through and placed it on a pile of unopened mail that was sitting on my desk in the living room. Above the pile Sandy had taped my Cancer forecast for the month of

March (“Members of the opposite sex are likely to be attracted to you this month. Expect seduction attempts around the fourteenth and some backhanded compliments from members of your own gender around the 23rd”) as a test to see whether any of these predictions would come

123 true. None did, and by the 24th Sandy and I took the horoscope down. Superman’s letter stirred me more to anger than outrage. Its sanctimonious tone and the author’s tiring rhetoric made him seem compulsive and obsessed, a man for whom ideals threatened to make him a bore. For me there was only one thing more tiresome than a bore; an ideological bore; and only one thing worse than an ideological bore; a reasoning ideological bore. By the fifth paragraph of his letter

(“We should not forget that the DC is weakened”), I knew for sure that Nico Superman was all three—a reasoning ideological bore—the worst of all possible worlds. I did not throw his letter away. Instead, I kept it at the bottom of a pile of unanswered mail and, mostly, forgot all about it.

By the end of March, a series of terse phone messages came from an old friend of mine,

Massimo Golino. Massimo had been a freckled, skinny boy with fine dark brown hair who had not gone to the American International School with me, and who, because we went to different secondary schools, only became my friend one summer when everyone we knew disappeared, leaving us to entertain one another by going out drinking. It was at these outings that I learned that he had a girlfriend who worked as an au pair in New York, and that he found out that I, too, had a “girlfriend” in New York, a woman whom I was pining for, pathetically reading and re- reading her every letter. He confessed that a four hundred dollar phone bill to his girlfriend

Silvia had almost gotten him thrown out of his father’s house, and I admitted that I masturbated holding a shoestring Sandy had sent me by parcel post.

His father owned a jewelry store near Trevi Fountain where Massimo occasionally worked, but, more often than not, where he used his time to play on his portable Game Boy. He was not academically minded, but that didn’t bother me since I didn’t want intellectual

124 conversations; I wanted someone around to reassure me that this long distance “thing” was not pure insanity. Together we convinced each other that our girlfriends had not run off with any old guy and reminisced about our military service in Perugia. Unlike me, Massimo had been called to fight, and on the day Italy sent troops to Libya, every girlfriend Massimo had ever had since grammar school phoned to wish him Godspeed, even though he was never sent and wound up working again in his father’s store. When I got engaged to Sandy, he doubted I could handle what I was getting into.

“Paolo, these only children of independent means, they’ll bury you.”

“She’s not an only child.”

“Alright, these children of independent means. I wouldn’t do it is all I’m saying.”

Because of the time difference and because my own attempts to catch up with him were haphazard, weeks passed before I caught up with him. By then I had heard from Livia herself that she had picked up and flown back to Rome, a fact that perplexed me. I mean, I didn’t really know how she was doing in California, but I knew that she was making enough money to live comfortably, lying out by the pool every day (or so she said), living with two male models

(“platonically”), and designing costumes for General Hospital, contract work she said was highly lucrative, even if a bit uncertain. I also knew that during her time in the States, she never demanded care packages and only occasionally bitched about the restrictions on smoking out in

L.A. (but she also told me she was cutting back). At first I suspected that her return had had something to do with a man, but Livia said no.

“The lease, Paolo. The sublease was running up, and I couldn’t find another tenant. I had to come back; I had no choice.”

125 I could call her up now and hear for myself how she had re-recorded the answering

machine message—the background sitar music, the breathy, sultry voice, the pregnant,

suggestive pauses—but I did not see this as anything more than a passing preoccupation; slightly embarrassing, yes; dangerous, no. But Massimo would not call without cause, and I felt relieved that it was Massimo, a good friend, and not some gossip. If anything, he tended toward understatement and would not call simply to propagandize or agitate. When I finally got in touch with him, he had moved out of his parents’ house and married a hairdresser named Laura.

He told me that his family was doing well, and that he had run into Livia a few times.

“Look, I would’ve let it go completely, but you know I care about you, and I think I owe a lot to Livia. You know, I think she jumpstarted my sexuality. When I would see her hoofing it down Via Garibaldi, I felt like I was waking up, like she was waking me up, Paolo.”

“Alright, Massimo, I know she meant a lot to you. I just don’t understand this. Things

seemed to be going well for her. She told me three movie moguls were trying to win her

affection.But what is it? I know she’s still angry that the twins chose to live with their father.

She told me that she can’t compete with the staff he’s got out there, a maid to clean up after

them, a cook to fix meals, even a driver, if they don’t feel like getting behind a wheel. ”

I was overanalyzing, and I knew it was to fend off whatever it was Massimo was about

to tell me. The tone of his voice and the call itself worried me, and so I felt a double urge to

keep reasoning things through. Massimo said nothing, choosing to wait out my maundering

speculations.

“So what is it?” I asked again.

“Now I know what I’m going to say is going to upset you, and I’m telling you this as a

friend.”

126 “Alright, Massimo, I know.”

“Last week, last Saturday actually…I planned to play soccer with some friends…planned to pick up one of the guys who rents a room not far from Piazza Farnese. He told me he would meet me on Via Giulia, but when he wasn’t there, I parked the car and began to walk to his building, and while I was walking, I passed by the fountain…you remember the fountain?”

“Yes”

From the tension in his voice, I knew that whatever Livia had done, she had done there. I no longer wanted to postpone his telling me what it was. Instead, I wished that he would get it over with and come clean.

“So what did she do? What happened, Massimo?”

“Paolo, you’re not going to like hearing this.”

“I know, but go on.”

“She was bathing.”

“In the fountain?”

“Yes”

“And?”

“And she was calling to people…well, not to all people, to men mostly. She called to me, too.”

“And what did she ask you?”

“It doesn’t bear repeating, Paolo.”

“Come on, Massimo. What did she ask you?”

“She asked me if I wanted to—”

“To what?”

127 “To fuck, Paolo”

“I see,” I said, “and did you take her up on her offer?”

“No, Paolo.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course, I’m sure. She’s your mother.”

If it had been a Saturday, which it must have been for Massimo to be able to play pick-up

soccer with his friends, then not only had Massimo passed by, but everyone trying to get to the

Saturday market at Campo di Fiori had walked by, many of whom must have known Livia, and most of whom must have delighted in seeing someone in a mental state even more precarious than their own.

In the week it took me to build my courage up to call my mother, I nursed Sandy back from the terrible flu she had caught at Albert Einstein. We had both at first thought this was the

Epstein-Barr virus, the reputed “yuppie disease” which caused chronic fatigue, fever and swollen lymph nodes. I also believed at the time that she wasn’t sick, so much as “sick of”—sick of

Albert Einstein and psych grad school, sick of her classmates, sick of mock counseling. When I left in the morning for work, she would beg me not to go, clinging to me and telling me she was scared to be alone, and I would set the TV in her direction, program it to automatically record my

favorite shows, and leave her just the same, but in the evenings I brought her egg drop soup from

Happy China and enough videos to last through many flus, and she would eat her egg drop soup,

and we would watch film after film. Once, at evening’s end, I came home and found her

surrounded by an entire box of discarded tissues, tears streaming down her face.

128 “I love you so much. You’re so good to me. You do know how much I love you, don’t

you?”

“Of course, I do. You’re my dearest, sweet one. How could I not know that you loved

me, and how could I not love you back in return? If it’s the job that’s getting to you, you can quit and find something else. I think you’re overwrought from that commute. Why don’t you find something closer to Brooklyn?”

“No, I like it there, I’m going to stay. I think I’ve just been spending too much time alone lately. Just watch Frazier with me. Just lie here with me and watch Frazier.”

I did as she asked, and knew that if she had asked me to watch a hundred sitcoms in a

row, I would have done that also. I was in love with her and ready to take on even bad television

to prove it. So why did I not tell her about Livia? Why didn’t I confide in her then, when she

had just professed her love to me, and in a way asked for my confidence? Was I still trying to

prove to her that my family was not as insane as was commonly made out? Maybe. Or maybe I

looked at those brown, round eyes and saw in their hunted quality something still too innocent

(even though I know now there is no such thing). Perhaps I was still playing at being reasonable

and sane, the offspring of the reasonable and sane. I only know that I wanted to hold her

suspended in that emotional place where she had been when she asked me, “You do know how

much I love you, don’t you?” And when she ate her egg drop soup, I wanted those tears of

gratitude to stream down her face. I waited until she got well enough to go out again to call my

mother, for I would never call Livia with Sandy on the other side of the apartment listening. She

insisted on going out to get the paper and coffee, and I waved her off and scuttled back to my

office, preparing to make my big call.

“Livia?”

129 “Yes”

She sounded defensive, old and bitter, downtrodden and grumpy, and I remembered then

I had forgotten the time change in my preoccupation to call when Sandy was out.

“Paolo here”

“Yes, I know.”

“Is everything alright?”

“Of course”

“I don’t know, I just heard—”

“You heard what?”

“Massimo sa—”

”Massimo’s been talking to you?”

“Yes, he’s worried, mother.”

A woman like this, I thought, should not be reminded of her embarrassing sexual exploits. Should not be shamed into facing her aging body and her fading looks. A woman like this must be treated with dignity. My mother is not to be carted off in the paddy wagon, like some latter-day Blanche DuBois.

“Well, what business is it of his! Why doesn’t that kid get a job instead of sponging off his father? Paolo, you mustn’t believe everything people say. Most people love to gossip. Have you noticed when people relay the most tragic snatches of information, they have to fight down their smirk? And this, this bit of fantasy you’re telling me now has every element of the best kind of gossip—sex, lunacy, disappointment, perversion. Paolo, you have to be very careful about who you believe.”

130 “Mother, it’s Massimo, not some little old bitty from the B & B downstairs. He says he saw you taking a swim in the fountain at Piazza Farnese.”

“Well, maybe Massimo thinks he saw what happened, but I haven’t been by that fountain in years. I’m much too busy to wander over there for kicks.”

“Promise me you won’t do this again.”

“Paolo, honey, I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

Her denial was crude, and I knew she was lying. What would it take to make her admit to it? Less pride. Some success in her work. A romantic interest. No, she would never confess, but would she do this again? Why had she done it in the first place? What had she been thinking?

“Mother, I know you do know what I’m talking about.”

“I don’t care to discuss this with you.”

“Well, if not with me, then with whom? You’ve alienated everyone else, and if you think your career’ll take off if you traipse around Rome acting like a deranged lunatic, you’ve got another thing coming.”

“I was not acting like a deranged lunatic, I knew this would happen. You got married, and all of a sudden you think you’re the big grown up who can lord it over me, your poor, pathetic, old mother. I see where this is going, you want to keep me in line for her. You’re quite the nouveau riche husband now, and you don’t want anyone embarrassing the family name. No, now I’m upset, Paolo. You call at two in the morning, carry on about some practical joke, about someone playing a joke on me, because you don’t want to share the family name, but you’ve never cared about that silliness before.”

“Ma, I—”

131 “No, Paolo, I’m going to sleep now. Don’t you call here again this evening to talk to me

about this business. I don’t want to here another word of this out of you. Promise me that.”

“Alright, I promise.”

“Good boy. Now say hello to Sandy.”

“Alright, mother”

“Sweet dreams”

“Sweet dreams”

I got off the phone and realized it was a little after eight in the morning, rather than

bedtime. She had done it again. I had intended to take her Piazza Farnese debacle and throw it

back in her face, to shame her into never doing it again, and now, instead, she had shamed me for

being a social climber, for calling late at night and accusing her of ludicrous sexual

improprieties. Masterful. Typically masterful. And the irony is that as soon as she uttered her first words of defense, I knew that all Massimo had accused her of was true, and I also knew that none of us, neither he nor I, would ever have the courage to confront her on it again.

132

CHAPTER 11

NOT TO BE ONE OF THE LADIES BETTERMENT LEAGUE

Somehow I knew I had to face the swift unraveling of my relationship with Sandy. There are comfortable and uncomfortable silences, and this, our noiseless existence, in which we impersonated two people slithering along walls, existing, parallel, and residing within one home.

Nonno hadn’t written to me in almost three months. His silence was out of character, and I wondered whether the reason for this was that nothing good had happened, and at his age he could no longer afford to get worked up over things he could not control. For a while it had seemed good things would happen. The mayor of Sicily, Leoluca Orlando, had traveled to New

York and, in an interview for 60 Minutes, had told Dan Rather that the Mafia was becoming not just a Sicilian or an American but an international phenomenon and that it had close ties to the ruling Christian Democratic Party. The New York Times and USA Today picked up the story.

Orlando came back to Italy only to be reprimanded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for speaking badly about his country. Amabili had been reelected, and so for the eighth time, he would decide on his cabinet, the Christian Democrats would again be the ruling party, and he would be sworn in as prime minister. Whenever I tried calling, Giorgio would not pick up.

Instead, his housekeeper Alicia would insist he was in the garden, either transplanting or re- seeding a garden that was small and easily contained in the first place.

133 Sandy had not been herself for months, not since she began counseling at I.S. 120 in the

Morrisania neighborhood in the South Bronx. She had selected I.S. 120 from fifteen schools, even suburban schools in expensive districts like Scarsdale or Westchester Country, and of all these schools, she had chosen I.S. 120, a middle school where 98% of the student body qualified for free lunches. Sandy once told me she felt a stripping down of herself each day as she marched through the metal detector; she felt she was moving closer to deserving the life she had carved out for herself. “Not to be one of those people,” she said, “Not to be one of those ladies from the Ladies Betterment League.” Later she left an excerpt of the poem she was referring to on my desk. “The Lovers of the Poor,” it was called.

Cutting with knives served by their softest care, Served by their love, so barbarously fair, Whose mothers taught: You’d better not be cruel! You had better not throw stones upon the wrens! Herein: they kiss and coddle and assault Anew and dearly in the innocence With which they baffle nature.

“But you’re practically an orphan. I don’t know why you always insist on this fantasy that you grew up like a socialite, constantly supervised and corrected. You weren’t a part of the

Ladies Betterment League. You weren’t a part of any league. You may have more disposable income than other people, but I don’t really see you as a debutante, conspiring to dehumanize the lower classes.”

“You don’t?”

“No, you like fine things, and you happen to have the money to buy them. There’s no shame in that.”

“But I went to boarding school, don’t you understand, and then I went to one of the most expensive colleges in the country.”

134 “So?”

“So, I’m one of those spoiled rich kids.”

“And counseling at I.S. 120 is going to change that?”

“Yeah, it’ll bring me down to earth.”

“Sandy, if you were anymore down-to-earth, you’d be subterranean.”

“That’s one of the nicest compliments I’ve gotten in a long time.”

But this was before she had begun the daily routine, the two hour subway ride, the

pilfering for supplies that did not exist, the frank terror of facing kids day after day, sweet kids,

some of them, who she knew would never make it. Then there were the few who she hoped

might make, it, only to hear this one had gotten pregnant, that one had joined a gang, this one stopped applying himself and cut school, that one started selling weed. For the first weeks, I heard a lot about these people. One student, Tekeisha Eberhart—Sandy thought she had a talent for writing. She gave her therapeutic assignments: Write about your father. Tell me about your home life. Explain to me why you don’t get along with your grandmother. And these assignments would come back polished, sensitive, attuned to detail, insightful, “character- driven” in her fiction writing jargon. Her syntax was not exactly sophisticated, but she had a sensibility and could develop sophistication. She had innocence and wonder, and that, to Sandy, made her writing more intriguing than that of, say, George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde.

Counseling that one student, Sandy felt, made up for all the other fits and starts, the “low ceiling of their possibilities,” the no-shows, the attitudes, the mumblers, the dullards, all of whom she faced day by day.

135 “Encourage her to submit her work in the high school literary mag. Ask her to adapt her assignments, so she can use them for a scholarship application,” I said. “She needs to know you’re rooting for her. Her English teacher may not know she has this talent.”

“Tekeisha Eberhart, eleventh grade, will be leaving I.S. 120 and transferring to P.S. 166,” the memo read. Later Sandy read about the accident in the papers, and felt so dumbstruck, so useless. Why Tekeisha? Insecure and angry, she had become confident, freer. As much as she could love, she felt she had loved Tekeisha. Who would know her now? How would she navigate through this complex micro city, this experiment in human behavior and developmental psychology? Who would recognize what she could do? P.S. 166 was overcrowded. She would be in classes with thirty other students, learning, without a mother and without any reason, with no explanation for why her mother had been taken from her. “Jamelia Eberhart, 33, was shot dead on April 22, 1991 at 11:30 pm in her apartment on Gerard Avenue by an .assailant who allegedly knew his victim. The crime was said to be a crime of passion. She is survived by a daughter, Tekeisha, and her mother, Chara.”

Once Sandy called P.S. 166 to see how she was doing, but the counselor could not find her file and didn’t think she had even been to counseling. The waste of that made Sandy think of her fixation with stripping herself of her elite education: What good was she doing anyone if she could not accept that this was who she was? And yet P.S. 166 was an exaggeration, a dose of reality beyond what was required to keep a person grounded, and she was no longer as interested in her own reality, as in that of the 3,000 students attending I.S. 120.

This happened back when she still talked to me, about three months ago. There was only one person I knew who seemed happy. Carlo Levi—his piece of mind, his passion for books—

136 he seemed to be the only person I knew whose profession filled him with joy and assured him of

his competence. Books provided him with a purpose. They lifted up his spirit, expanded his

sense of what life was for. I sometimes thought I was actually getting stupider year by year. The

more I learned, the more I understood how little I knew and how incompetent I truly was. There

were internal epiphanies, and I kept them private, guarding them with my life. Then in April I

read a poem by W.D. Snodgrass called “April Inventory.” It seemed he had captured my

thoughts exactly. I was not a scholar, nor a teacher, but I understood this sensation of turning the

wheels without necessarily moving forward. I taped a few of the lines above my desk and asked

them to speak to me, to simply express my reality. I am not in love with language, but, like a

buzzard, I sought out the innards before the meat.

The tenth time, just a year ago, I made myself a little list Of all the things I’d ought to know; Then told my parents, analyst, And everyone who’s trusted me, I’d be substantial presently.

I haven’t read one book about A book or memorized one plot. Or found a mind I didn’t doubt. I learned one date. And then forgot.

I tried to write Carlo Levi a letter, but I felt all mixed up inside. I couldn’t really picture

to whom I was writing or, for that matter, who was writing. After two years of not

communicating, the prospect of summarizing the time overwhelmed me. Was I someone he

even remembered? If he did remember me, what did he think of me? I felt I had lost my identity. I had been so quick to adapt that I no longer recognized or could even impersonate the character I had left behind. At first I tried to write a non-letter, riddled with clichés. “Hi, how are you? Thinking of you. Good to see you. Can’t wait to see you. Hope all’s well.” But that

137 didn’t seem to work either. How could I put a letter like that in the mail to someone who had been as important to me as Levi had been? Then I wrote down all my memories of my two years with Occham’s Razor. Do you remember that bee we spent all afternoon trying to get rid of? Do you remember teaching me about Vico’s theory of why humans created God? Do you remember the Socratic society, and how every Thursday, they shuffled to the back, coffee-filled thermoses in hand, to discuss Socrates’ perfect society, and where and why Plato had failed to live up to his master’s teachings, and how you watched me peek through the curtains, listening in and said,

“You’re old enough now. You should join them. I can rearrange your schedule, so you’ll be free on Thursday nights.” And then you watched me close the curtain and shake my head. Now what does that person, that boy, have in common, with this person, the man, who wants so badly to reconnect with you now? And what do you, my mentor, have in common with the man who will open my letter and read it, safely free from any responsibility, knowing you will, most likely, never see me again?

Dear Mr. Levi,

I’ve tried to write you a number of times before, but have, I’m afraid, never been happy with the results. My sincerest desire is to communicate with you, but without seeing you or hearing you, I find it hard to write to you.

I can not lie to you: I have been very lucky. My job and my personal life have challenged me in a way I have never been challenged before.

The second paragraph sounded like gloating; the first was hyperbole. “My sincerest desire is to communicate with you.” I sounded like somebody folding into the deepest, most abject bow. I hated myself. Why couldn’t I write this damn letter? Why did I have no identity with people

138 who didn’t have to like me, that is, who weren’t related to me? I was a useless sack of shit. I couldn’t answer the question.

139

CHAPTER 12

NEITHER GOOD, NOR BAD

Southeast of Via Cicerone on the eastern banks of the Tiber lives the oldest Jewish community in Europe. Each of the Roman Jews’ five parishes can trace its ancestry back to

Titus and the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E. The Via del Portico d’Ottavia, the street that marks the border of the Jewish ghetto, was once the site of Titus’ victory parade.

Historians report that Titus dragged hundreds of Jewish slaves behind his chariot and carried the spoils from the Temple of Solomon as he publicly announced the conquest of Israel.

My former employer, Carlo Levi, had never lived in the historic Jewish quarter. Levi’s father owned an office supply store in Nomentana, a northern suburb, but he and his family attended the orthodox Italian synagogue on Lungotevere. In 1938, when the racial laws barred

Jews from professions like medicine, law and academia, Levi’s father Michele was able to keep his store. Later he applied for and was granted discriminated status, so that he could keep the store open five days a week as always.

Michele Levi had a dark complexion and a round wide, accepting face. Were it not for his typically Jewish last name, he could have easily been mistaken for an Italian of southern origin. From his father, Carlo Levi had inherited the same wide, round face and a dark

140 complexion; from a distant uncle, two large ears which were more pronounced when his hair was cut short, as it was in the summers. His nose was long and straight, more Roman than Jewish.

When the Italian state passed a law ordering Jews to do manual labor for minimal pay,

Carlo was among those hauling dirt under the Ponte Garibaldi Bridge. The bridge was a popular site for hawking combs, bags, perfumes, books and other trinkets, and was close to the Jewish quarter. When the Germans declared Rome under German martial law in September 1943,

Michele handed the deed to his shop to a Christian acquaintance. Some Jews who had done likewise came back after the war to find their possessions taken, but Michele Levi had been lucky. Refugees had neither appropriated the space nor looted the store.

The joke circulating Rome at the time was that even the statue of Moses had gone into hiding and was temporarily staying with friends. Those who were not hiding were helping those in distress. The Levi family had split up after the German invasion. Carlo and his younger brother Simone lived in a pension in a suburb on the southeast side of the city, while Carlo’s father hid in the basement of their Nomentana apartment building. Carlo’s sisters, Rosa and

Maria, and his mother left Rome altogether to stay with their aunt, who, because she had married a Catholic from Gubbio, enjoyed the benefits of an Italian surname.

I tried talking to Carlo about the experience of the Jews during the war on one or two occasions, but I got the sense right away that this was a topic he was utterly closed off to discussing. His wife Anna, on the other hand—even though her experiences had been much more traumatic than her husband’s—seemed to need to talk about what had happened, especially with non-Jews. She once told me she felt it did her good to be heard, simply to be heard, and as

141 long as young people allowed themselves to hear, she felt some hope that the next time something like the October round-ups happened, things would turn out differently.

It was in 1981 at their Nomentana apartment that Anna Levi first told me her story. Our history professors had talked about the October round-ups as if it were one in a long procession of unjust events, but usually we thought of it as a historical episode, and so detached ourselves from the event. It seemed to pale in the context of a city’s history that began almost 3,000 years ago, where slave and slave fought to the death and vestal virgins were buried alive if they lost their virginity. In this context 1,500 Jews sent to Auschwitz or Buchenwald hardly seemed newsworthy.

Anna Levi’s family, the Serenis, could trace their roots back three centuries, to the area around the Via del Portico d’Ottavia, a section of Rome historically prone to flooding and close to the Tiber. The day Anna told me all this she wore her shoulder length hair pulled back in two barrettes. She had brown eyes flecked with green and dark brown fine hair. She was pudgy, but cheerful. Her front teeth were crooked, and, when she smiled, the imperfection was appealing, endearing and somewhat clumsy. I had not planned on having coffee with her. Carlo and I were supposed to meet in Nomentana, drive out to our suppliers on the north end, load up the boxes, drive back to Occham’s Razor in the afternoon and unload them, but his pregnant niece’s water had broken, and she would need a ride to the hospital instead. So there Mrs. Levi and I were, in an apartment of hardwood floors, Oriental rugs and simple Queen Anne furniture, an apartment that, in other words, apart from the mezuzah on the door and the menorah in a glass cased bookshelf, was very similar to the many other middle-class suburban apartments in this neighborhood. She brought out a tray of cookies and coffee and laid it in the middle of the coffee table. I noticed then how clean the apartment was and thought again how the Levis, if

142 they had had children, would have had more coffee stains and less solitude. She told me where she had grown up, and I did the math. She would have been 19-years-old in 1943. Then, we talked of the terrible heat wave, and she asked how my studies were coming.

“I’m not studying anymore. There was too much bureaucracy, and I don’t know enough important people. I would have gone through the whole ordeal and wound up right where I am now.”

“It’s hard to say,” she said, stirring a lump of sugar into my coffee. “Tell me, do your parents approve of your decision to quit law?”

“My father’s dead,” I said, “and my mother, well, she never really did like the idea of my becoming a lawyer. She’s, um, sort of anti-establishment.”

“I see…You seem like a bright man. Don’t you find it boring to stand in a shop all day long?”

“I bring a book with me. I don’t mind.”

“If only I could get Carlo to give you more responsibilities. Carlo’s getting older. He doesn’t want to admit it, but that’s just the way it is. You would be interested in taking on more than a cashier’s role, wouldn’t you?”

“I guess so, yes.”

“I’ll talk to him about it. You know, Carlo’s never been much for leisure. He’s not comfortable just hanging around, but I don’t think it’s good for his health to be rushing around, fighting the traffic, not at his age. You know, we have a lot of old friends. It’s not as if we would be twiddling our thumbs, staring at each other, but Carlo has a low tolerance for the members of his own community. Sometimes I think he even considers the bookstore his last refuge.”

143 I resisted asking her about herself and wished that her husband would come back soon.

One of the troubles of working for an independent is that the personal tends to invade the professional. So I found myself listening to Anna’s lamentations, while Levi escorted his pregnant niece to the hospital.

“I don’t think that’s true of just Carlo,” I said. “I know a lot of people who need their time at work. Without that, they would suffocate.”

“That would not be me, Paolo. 43-years I worked in a clothing store, and that’s enough in my opinion.”

“But Carlo said the store is yours. That must change things, doesn’t it?”

“Well, the circumstances by which I inherited the store were not exactly optimal. May I share them with you?”

Her courtesy made me more disposed to listen. It was as if she didn’t want to impose her story on me, but if I were amenable, then she would not mind quite so much. How often had I felt cornered, the victim of someone’s need to unload? How often did I feel my neighbor’s narrative as a kind of assault? I nodded and smiled, made every gesture to indicate I would listen.

“My father was a street vendor. He sold hair supplies—brushes combs, barrettes, rollers, you name it. When the race laws barred Jews from peddling, my father lost his source of income. He was reduced to peddling odds and ends he found around the churches. Can you imagine he walked me every day to and from work? It was horrible. My brother and I were so ashamed”—she got up then, a preoccupied expression on her face—“Please tell me if I’m boring you with all this. Carlo and I do not have guests to the house very often.”

“No, no, not at all,” I said.

144 Her dark hair and her large tragic green eyes reminded me of the Biblical Leah, the

unfavored wife of Jacob, the mother of six of the twelve tribes of Israel. She was said not to

have been as pretty as her younger sister Rachel, but she was given to kindness and, therefore,

more attractive. Anna Levi was almost sixty years old, but she didn’t seem old. Nor had she

adopted the shrill, rasping demeanor that one so often sees in this city of elderly women. She stood by the bookshelves, the menorah above her head and the photo albums below. She reminded me for a moment of Livia when she is remembering the past, running from one sentimental tangent to another.

“I’m just looking for a photograph of them, my brother and father.”

“Are they still alive?”

“No, they were killed in the massacre at the Ardeatine Caves. The Christian we were staying with informed on us.”

She said this distractedly. At the same time she pulled a photo album from one of the bookshelves. I had been taught about the Ardeatine Massacre in school, but I had never met anyone who had known someone killed in the massacre. It was as if someone had just told me their relative had been thrown to the lions. She had called the woman a Christian. Did she think of me as a Christian, too?

“Do you have any other family?”

“Two sisters, yes; and my mother, she’s still alive. Actually, Carlo’s now driving my niece, one of my sister’s daughters, to the hospital.”

She brought a brown leather album back to me, opened it with care and looked over at me again. I tried to smile back at her, but I felt embarrassed and looked away.

“My father,” she said, “and there is my brother.”

145 The man she pointed out as her father had a friendly, round face, olive complexion,

chubby cheeks, and a flat forehead. He looked very similar to the woman standing next to me.

Her brother was a skinny boy, no more than twelve-years-old, wearing a light beige suit, poised

on a bicycle.

“You said earlier that you didn’t inherit the store in the most ideal way. What did you

mean by that?”

“My employer was a good man, a distant relative of mine. On the night of the round-ups,

he separated from his family, his eight children and wife. He went into hiding, expecting that the

Germans would only take able-bodied males, but when he came out of hiding, he found out that

all of his eight children and his wife had been taken. He never saw them again. His store had

been looted, and a family was living there. He knew he had to start all over again, but he lost his

will. By then, I was already engaged to Carlo and felt more hopeful about things. But I never

quite could get over the way the store had come to be mine. It’s made us a nice living, but it has

unpleasant associations.”

“But I’m sure he wouldn’t have wanted to sell the store to a stranger.”

“Possibly.”

“Tell me, were you there the day the Germans demanded the 50 kilos of gold?”

“No, my father would not allow us to go anywhere near the synagogue. He was sure it

was a trap. The neighborhood was so close-knit, so we did not need to actually go over there, we heard hour-by-hour reports from our neighbor, Rosa Di Porto, the nosiest gossip in the entire community. She was the one we relied on most of all: gossiping was like a vocation for her. She would just yell from the courtyard below. ‘They’re up to five kilos!’ ‘The goyim are bringing what they can!’ We were very touched by gifts from the non-Jews. Even the pope offered to

146 loan us the money, though he made sure we knew it was just a loan. Richer than Croesus, and all he can offer is a loan when our very lives are at stake, that bothered me. But Carlo feels very differently about the church. He had better experiences with them.”

“I didn’t know.”

“He didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

“Pontificio Seminario Romano Maggiore took him in based on the recommendations of his old teachers and a parish priest.”

“He never mentioned it.”

“Sure, he has the highest of opinions of the church. Says they never pressured him to convert, gave him the best food, even washed his clothes for him, went to the pharmacist to fill his medical prescription, wanted to accommodate his need to keep kosher.”

“And were you also so lucky as to be under the protection of the Vatican during the round-ups?”

She smiled then and shook her head.

“Not exactly, no. We were lucky, but not quite that lucky. On the day of the round-ups, we heard screaming from the street. We were still in our apartment on Via del Portico d’Ottavia.

I recognized the voice as that of Franca, a well-known character in our neighborhood. My sisters, brothers, parents, and I managed to flee out the back way. My father took us directly on one of the old churches where he had been collecting things on Via dei Coronari. So, we stayed there for a while. The only trouble was that the priest wanted us to go to Mass. We tried to stay busy by teaching the children or helping out with the meals. My sister and I went out one day, and when we came back, one wing of the church was bombed out, so we were asked to leave.

147 We tried to stay at another convent, but they wanted money, and we didn’t have any. So we

slept wherever until a beautician took us in. Her husband had been fighting in the war, and she

had a small son. I never really did feel good about staying there. And thinking back on it, I think she was the one who turned my father and brother in. The Germans hadn’t had much luck finding Italians willing to turn in Jews, so they had started offering a reward, 5,000 lire for male

Jews and 3,000 lire for female Jews. But thinking back, I’m quite sure because her son had been playing ball with a German soldier on the day before my father and brother disappeared. And, in fact, the night they disappeared, we were too scared to go back there. Have you heard these stories before, Paolo?”

“To be honest, you’re the first Jew who has ever talked to me about the deportation. I think Carlo doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“Yes, his attitude is that it happened in the past, and it’s time to move beyond it. But I think if you’ve lived through it, it’s something you never really quite do get over.”

I felt that I understood what she meant by this. I had lived through experiences that I could not process either. Levi and I both believed in moving beyond distressing events of our past. It was hard for me to gauge how successful he had been, but I knew that I fought daily with my stories, the ones I didn’t want told, which were like great waves, and seemed, at times, to threaten to consume me. I asked her about her feelings on the state of Israel, and she said she felt she was an Italian Jew, not a Jewish Israeli. She told me why she had chosen not to have children. She said this was Carlo’s and her second marriage, and they had decided neither felt up to the emotional upheaval of children again.

“I have two cousins who were taken to Auschwitz and survived. One of my cousins now works for the gas company, in the same office where her father worked, where he was

148 denounced. She never married. Paolo, there are some Jewish men who wouldn’t marry a woman who survived the camps. They think of it as a sure sign she’s been compromised.”

As she spoke, she grew excited, and I realized Levi’s wife, very measured herself, could not retell the events of those days without in some way reliving them. She had condensed the most intense days of her life into a five to ten minute synopsis, but she was still not over it.

When she looked up, her eyes met mine in a way that seemed less hardened than openly desirous of compassion.

“And Carlo and you still choose to live here?”

“That was a long time ago. The beautician who denounced my father’s been sent to jail.

We have to be happy. We have to feel blessed. On holidays we set up folding chairs on Via

Portico d’ Ottavia, and it’s as if we live in a small village in the middle of the capital. We know many good people like yourself.”

It surprised me when anyone counted me among the “good people.” Usually, I felt the person who thought me good really did not know me. If they did, they would have known I was average, neither good, nor bad, but somewhere in-between. Just then the front door opened, and

Levi stood there, holding two plastic bags stuffed with linens, his shirt drenched in sweat, his pants crumpled. He sighed and tried to smile, but, exhausted, managed only a smirk.

“I didn’t have to drive her after all. Enzo made it just in time.”

Anna Levi closed the photo album and got up also. Carlo and I then headed out the door.

I followed a few steps behind him, as he told me about his niece’s contractions.

“You will have to come back and visit us again,” she said as I left.

“Yes, I’d like that,” I answered.

149

CHAPTER 13

THE FIRST MASSIVE FLOCK OF STARLINGS

On the day I first met Levi, the first massive flock of starlings arrived from the north.

This event was in all the papers, but somehow I had missed the story. They came every year, and every year I was senseless enough to think their shrill birdsong a call to arms. Mentally, I prepared myself to be chased down, eyeballs pecked out, like that character in the Hitchcock film. Thousands of birds cut in and out of the wind, like highly skilled, self-powered boomerangs across a massive area of bus lots and pedestrian and no parking zones in front of the white, monolithic Termini Station. I had decided to quit law and knew that I would soon be penniless. I was anxious to find a job—any job would do. I imagined I would wait tables or sell retail clothing. The starlings’ squalls sounded like a troop of monkeys. Today in our neighborhood some residents actually carry umbrellas to avoid their droppings. They transformed the pine trees lining Termini’s pedestrian walkways into a 24-hour convenient store, a chaotic dormitory of squawking birds. I have heard the Vatican involves itself in plots to feed these starlings contraceptive bird food.

I passed Diocletian’s Bath, a boat-like brown blob, a remnant maintained for history rather than beauty’s sake. I passed vendors selling t-shirts and luggage, and walked on towards the Piazza della Repubblica. Its dimensions seemed too grand for my current state. Under the arcade, past the bustling McDonald’s, past the roaring traffic, past the Fontana della Naiadi, I

150 have never felt so entirely alone. What would I do? What would become of me? Whatever

money Livia made we spent, and even Roberto’s contributions never quite seemed enough. I

walked past the Benetton and Stefanel clothing stores on Via Nazionale, turning right on Via

Torino. A performance of The Magic Flute was letting out. The audience, kids in puff parkas, glittery women in furs, intellectuals debating the merits of the performance, spilled out of the entrance. I didn’t feel jealous of them. I was an outsider; I belonged nowhere. Where was my place? Where was I meant to be? Opposite the Teatro dell-Opera I saw a display in the window of a small store called Occham’s Razor. There were the works of Italian fiction writers, like

Paolo Scandeletti, Aldo Merini, Enzo Biagi, and Mordecai Richler, psychoanalysts like Aldo

Carotenuto, the latest Stephen King novel, and in the other window, law textbooks—penal law, international law, administrative and domestic law textbooks.

I felt deeply skeptical about most everything at this time, but I had always enjoyed reading, especially literature and philosophy. There was no sign in the window asking for assistance, but I decided to go inside and ask the book vendor whether he was looking for help.

He was a little, olive-skinned man with brown friendly eyes and a receding hairline. He wore

unfashionable large, rectangular frames and a loose, equally unfashionable burgundy cardigan.

“It’s late,” he said. “I’m about to close up, but come back tomorrow. My employee tells

me he’s planning to study abroad. I may need someone, but I just don’t know yet.”

The next day, Carlo told me he could offer me the job, provided I could commit to thirty

hours a week. The U.S. Treasury Secretary had arrived in Rome the previous morning for

meetings on economic cooperation between the two countries and left the following morning,

declaring Italy’s economic and political situation “precarious”. With the promise of a job, I felt

like I had climbed onto the last boat bound for some economically stable, cultured place. When

151 terrorists are shooting your professor’s kneecaps, and your classmates are firing pistol shots at riot police, you may think things are bad, but nothing can compare to studying penal code without knowing what it is you’re studying. My eyes would rest on sentences without absorbing any meaning. I would go to lectures and sit at a two-person desk, scribbling away, watching some hapless professor slide the blackboard partitions left and right, droning on from his dais.

The sight of whining graffiti only infuriated me more. There seemed to be no shortage of dissatisfaction. There were the anarchists, the anti-fascists, the anti-communists, the anti-papacy, the anti-men, the anti-women, the anti-Semitic, the anti-southern, the anti-northern. What could

I possibly add to this immense spectrum of human anger and dissatisfaction? Let them protest.

In the meantime, I would earn myself some money.

“And these are the philosophical texts, beginning with Longinus. I have arranged this section chronologically. I once tried to make things alphabetical, but placing Socrates next to

Said didn’t seem quite right.”

From October 31, 1977 until September 8, 1982, I traveled between the introspective and timeless world of Occham’s Razor and the harried, corporeal existence my mother Livia had created in our home at Via Cicerone. Without the one I am sure I would never have survived the other. I needed the sustenance of routine and the pride of work well done, but I could not live by work alone. In the time between my initiation as a book vendor and my departure from Rome, I have seen the kidnapping and murder of one prime minister, the premature and unexpected death of one pope, my favorite uncle’s violent murder, the death by poison of a man known as “God’s

Banker,” the beginning of the Second Mafia War, and the assumption of the first Polish pope in history. Had I not felt myself a part of Occham’s Razor, I am sure I would not have survived, for

152 this place was not simply a bookstore, but a way of seeing that required training and time before

one truly understood its power.

On the surface one would have thought it like any other bookstore. It had fourteen-foot,

medallion-embossed ceilings and exposed pipes. It was divided into twenty-one sections,

Sociology, Psychology, Astrology (a popular one), cooking, foreign language, books, gardening,

literary criticism and theory, philosophy, fiction, drama and collector’s first editions, which were

wrapped in plastic and laid flat by the register. Along the walls were framed photographs of important Italian and other writers, Anais Nin, Natalia Ginzburg, Joyce Carol Oates, Alberto

Moravia, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright and others. In crates by these photographs we had sorted copies of science fiction comic books, promotional posters of old opera performances or films. A wooden folding sign out front announced “Libri” in case the display or the words “Occham’s Razor” painted on the glass did not indicate well enough what the store sold. Levi sat behind a long desk covered in papers.

Opposite him were two large blue comfortable armchairs for sitting. I sat at a smaller desk on

his left, and behind us were the shopping bags that occupied much of our day. They were full of

used books that had to be inventoried, priced and shelved. I was not the most efficient of

unpackers. Often I would become engrossed while reading the jacket, or I would want to know

whether Carlo had read the particular work, and he, in trying to remember, would then engage in

a long digression about another work he had read that was similar and, most probably, better than

the work I held in my hand.

A few weeks after I started working there, I found a book by the Jewish Medieval scholar

Maimonidies called The Guide of the Perplexed in one of the shopping bags. When I asked Levi whether he had heard of it before, he became excited and flustered.

153 “You would not believe this, but a Vatican priest recommended that book to me. He had

read it because his philosophy instructor at the seminary recommended it to him. Later I read

Averroes and Aquinas on my own, and it started making more sense to me.”

Levi’s movements, though calculated, were agile. You always felt that he would spring

in your direction, particularly when he was excited about an idea.

“So what’s it about?” I asked, pointing to The Guide of the Perplexed, which was still in

my hand.

He sighed, said “um,” and then added, “Well, it’s about the limit of human capabilities, really, our inability to know God. Maimonides dedicated the book to one of his former students,

Joseph, I think. Joseph wanted nothing more than to know God, but Maimonides wouldn’t teach his favorite student metaphysics. He insisted his student was too young, and said he would have to learn physics first. Maimonides thought one needed experience before one could study metaphysics. His best students had to learn math, then astronomy, then physics, and then metaphysics. It’s funny I’m just remembering the other book this priest gave me, William of

Occham’s On the Power of Emperors and Popes. I learned about the concept of Occham’s

Razor through this priest. My parents would not have approved of me reading this kind of stuff.

They would have wanted to know to what end. Neither ever finished liceo. You’ve heard of

William of Occham, haven’t you?”

“I’ve heard the name,” I said, “but I don’t know much about it really.”

“His book Sentences got him charged with heresy, and while he waited on his trial in

Avignon, he wrote treatises that charged the cardinals and the bishops with abandoning the

message of the apostles. He charged the pope flat out with hubris and pretending to be God.

There was a line of his I memorized once. Now let’s see if I can remember it, ‘Against the errors

154 of this pseudo-pope I have set my face like the hard rock, so that neither lies nor slurs nor persecution of whatever sort nor the multitude, however great, of those who believe or favor or even defend him, will ever at any time be able to prevent me from attacking and refuting his errors as long as I have hand, paper, pen and ink.’”

Levi stood up as he finished the quote, and I began to clap. In primary school we had memorized poetry. To this day, I could recite certain lines of Ungaretti, but I had never known anyone to memorize obscure lines from obsolete texts. That a Jew would memorize the anti- papal decrees of a Franciscan friar seemed doubly intriguing. Levi waved his hand around, as if to brush off my applause. He started to say something else, stopped and then added, “And the store is named after Occham too, you’ll notice.”

“I noticed… but what exactly is Occham’s Razor?”

“Do you remember from your math class the concept of the least common denominator?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Occham’s Razor is the same concept applied to philosophy, theory, politics and writing. It’s the idea that one should not multiply ideas beyond what is necessary. Obfuscation, hyperbole, flowery diction, they have no place. I’m a fan of Occham, you might say. I believe many of the problems in the world could be solved if people would use language as a way to communicate rather than manipulate. I hope I don’t offend you if I say that I think the Catholic

Church still doesn’t use language in the way that it should.”

“You don’t offend me, Carlo. I’m not a religious man.”

“Don’t misunderstand me, but you have to understand, as a Jew, I’m not used to this emphasis on form over content. I sometimes listen to the papal speeches and feel confused. I find much of his talk doesn’t address the issues.”

155 If Levi was looking for me to explain the meaning behind the Catholic faith, he was looking to the wrong person. No one could have been quicker to dismiss papal speeches. No one could have felt less respect. The clergy’s relationship to women was fraught with tension.

The priests considered themselves intermediaries between God and human beings while actively dividing their flock. The elaborate vestments, the rings, the miters served to alienate. Who were those people behind those robes?

“I didn’t grow up religious, Carlo. I’ve never been baptized. My grandfather attends the services every week, but my mother won’t set foot in a church. She had an affair with a Vatican finance minister once, and it left a bad taste in her mouth. Her faith is astrology. She has her chart read daily by a professional. She swears her marriage wouldn’t have failed had she known my father was a Pisces.”

“I see,” said Levi. “Is your father not religious either?”

I wanted to answer Levi’s question, but in reality my father’s faith, like my father’s likes and dislike, were unknown to me. It was as if he had been erased, as if he had never existed. He had provided me with the sense of security, but not much more. I could remember the feel of his large, warm hand in mine. Once he had taken me to the Santa Maria Maggiore, a basilica in

Esquiline, on the day of the Festa della Madonna della Neve. I can remember craning my neck up at the gilded flat ceiling, admiring the Byzantine mosaics and the Cappella Sistina decorated with marble and precious stones. I can remember his large, warm hand in mine, and the feel of the white flower petals on my face, blinking as I watched their unpredictable fall, like the starlings, those white petals cut back and forth in the wind. I have never felt so powerfully the presence of a holy spirit, a ghost of some sort, ceremonious, safe and yet awe-inspiring too. My father even convinced me that it had indeed snowed.

156 “My father died when I was ten years old. He was a bodyguard. One day he forgot to put the lock on his gun and shot himself. He was a good man and a moderately devout

Catholic.”

Levi’s dark, rectangular frames hovered at the rim of his nose. He touched the inventory log set squarely in the middle of his desk.

“And you were a young boy then?”

“I was ten-years-old,” I repeated, “but I’ve had plenty of time to get used to it, and I think

I’m used to it. Even when I was a young boy, even when I had two parents like everybody else, I felt different.”

Without expressing any emotion, he pulled his glasses off his nose, put one plastic arm in his mouth and looked away.

“We have that in common, I think.”

“Really?”

“Yes, that’s right: I had absolutely nothing in common with my parents. Zero. Zilch.

They were perpetually disappointed in my sister and me. Why was I not a more diligent Talmud student, they wanted to know, but they themselves had never learned to read, much less study

Talmud. I wanted parents who could lead by example, but in my own parents I found no models.”

I folded the shopping bag and placed it in the corner, impressed with its contents:

Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, Averroes’ Commentary on Aristotle, Armando

Verdiglione’s God and about thirty other books, all in good condition.

“It’s a good stash,” I said, acknowledging it.

157 “Good,” said Levi. “Now if only people would stop bringing the fiction they don’t read, then we would be all set.”

Levi did not read fiction on principle. He said he wanted to be immersed in a world that truly existed, and hated the idea that fiction invented alternative worlds. It surprised me that he perceived the fictional process of invention as falsehood, but after he explained Occham’s Razor to me, I realized he considered fiction an art contrary to the principle of Occham’s Razor. Not only had it invented one lie, but millions of them, and it had strung all these lies together and called it a book. The very idea of it, he thought, was an indulgence, an unnecessary literary form where non-fiction would do just as well.

158

CHAPTER 14

A COFFIN WITH NO AUTOMATIC FEATURES

Fourteen years after that conversation with Levi, Sandy and I followed a gravel pathway through the barren hills east of Bagheria south toward the shore. It was the first time we would see my relatives together in one place in almost seven years. The deep blue of the Tyrhennian

Sea reflected the intense blue of the sky. Seven people attended the funeral, eight if you count the priest who presided and who Giorgio regularly played chess with. My mother Livia met us along the pathway, greeting us effusively. The wind from the sea blew her hair in such a way that it looked as if she had styled it to stand up straight. The hill descended steeply, and below us the craggy rocks of Capo Zafferano resembled the prow of a ship. I studied Livia’s eyes, but I could see nothing frantic or paranoid in them. They were not dull either. Her face was more lined, but she had not caked her make-up on in the overdone way she favored when things were not going how she wanted them to. From her appearance I thought she was almost fully recovered. Livia tried to link arms with Sandy and me, but the walkway was not large enough.

“Claudia’s all out of sorts. She’s angry with me for not coming earlier. She says Giorgio was clinically dead for five minutes, but for days before his death he was plagued by spirits who chased and kicked him. She says his death was terrible. In his final moments, he begged her to separate herself from the ‘dark side’. He wanted her to promise she would raise Giulietta in the proper way,” said Livia.

159 Sandy muttered something about following behind, and Livia stopped for a moment. I

looked in my mother’s direction, and realized she was wearing a long black prairie skirt and a

black blazer with no bra or undershirt underneath.

“Did he mention my name?” I asked.

“Paolo, how could he think of anything but what he was going through? He asked for

Luca. He even called for him, but he was in too much agony to think of anyone else. He felt

these spirits were ripping his body to pieces. Claudia stayed by his bed through the entire thing.

Now she says she’s scared not just about death, but she’s also afraid when she goes to sleep at

night. Says she even promised Giorgio she would change and become an observant Catholic.”

“You’re not serious,” I said.

“Shh, they’re up ahead. Don’t say a word of this to any of them.”

I hung back to take Sandy’s hand again. It bothered me that Nonno’s final hours had

been so painful. He had been a good man, and I felt linked to him in a way that made me wonder

whether, if the spirits had tormented him, they would also torture me. In a letter he had once told

me he lost his faith at twenty-five, and, although he knew pious men and women, he himself would never set foot in a church after that.

Before the ceremony his coffin had spent the night at the Chiesa di Santi Pietro e Paolo, where, from the hours seven to nine, friends and acquaintances could pay their respects, but only two visitors came, two of his old customers. Each recalled a time Giorgio had allowed them to pay for a certain drug in installments, knowing that they had just received a pay cut that would make paying for the drugs impossible. Many were scared again. The Christian Dems had done well in the polls, Amabili was back in power, and, even though the favored openly anti-Mafia candidate for mayor of Palermo had won the popular vote by a wide margin, he had not been

160 named mayor. Instead, the candidate who finished twenty-third was made the “sindaco” of

Palermo. When Claudia was married to Rings, she had attended funeral processions that wrapped through entire towns, funerals where the most respected tenor on the island would be called to sing. She had never formally or publicly mourned her husband’s death. I wondered whether her desire to do Giorgio’s funeral right had something to do with this. Now that the family was split up, now that Nino was in jail and Vito was wanted by the state, she would have a greater need for order and, in the argot of the pop psychologists, closure.

“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy

Spirit be with you all.”

“Amen,” said my relatives.

The cemetery seemed to hang precariously from the middle of a steep hill leading down to the sea. The gravediggers had already dug out the earth and placed the coffin inside. The heat was unbearable, but all I could think of was how impressive the island was and how I would like to live in a place that could offer so much to look at and enjoy. The priest stood at the head of the coffin in a black vestment. He had a beautiful sadness about him—basset hound eyes, hanging jowls, and the large, heavy sacks under his eyes. He spoke in a thick dialect that reminded me of my grandfather’s way of speaking. The sweat shone off his receding hairline and ran down his forehead, stopping just at his somewhat bushy eyebrows. Around the coffin were four mounds of dirt and shovels, which would be used to deliver my grandfather back to this earth. The cool winds we had heard so much about lifted the salt from the sea to our nostrils.

“In the waters of baptism, Giorgio Concetta died with Christ and rose with him to new life. May he now share with him eternal glory,” said the priest.

161 Sandy and I stood behind Livia close to Father Clemente. Next to me a tall, amber-haired

woman folded her arms over the torso of a dark-haired boy of no more than seven. Claudia also

had her arms around her own daughter, who was busy scratching an itch on her leg with the heel

of her shoe. Next to Claudia, Alicia, a pudgy woman with a round face and large cheekbones,

fanned herself with a program. Neither Sandy, nor Livia, nor I had a program, so we would not

know when to begin the recitations. We would just have to follow everyone else’s lead.

The last funeral I had attended, Luca’s, had been performed at the Protestant Cemetery in

Rome. Too rotten even for my putrid corpse, he said of the Catholic Church. Although I have lived my life as an atheist, the religion that best suits my temperament is Protestant, the religion

of protest, he said.

“In life Giorgio cherished the Gospel of Christ. May Christ now greet him with these

words of eternal life: Come, blessed of my father!” said the congregants.

“My brothers and sisters, we have come together to renew our trust in Christ who, by

dying on the cross, has freed us from eternal death, and, by rising, has opened for us the gates of

heaven. Let us pray for our brother, that he may share in Christ’s victory, and let us pray for

ourselves that the lord may grant us the gift of his loving consolation.”

The sweat had begun to run down my back. I could feel the sticky moisture of my hand

in Sandy’s. Behind me, in the valley of Bagheria, large gardens had given way to irregular

amalgamation of highways, tasteless mansions and villas. The priest was wrong: My

grandfather had not cherished the Gospel of Christ. If anything, he had only tolerated the gospel

for the sake of those he knew who were pious. Claudia took her index and middle finger to smooth her bangs out of her face, and I felt a burning rage at that small evidence of affectedness.

162 I watched Giulietta scratch her leg with the heel of her shoe again, then, push her glasses closer to the bridge of her nose, as if mimicking her mother.

In America one could order a deluxe coffin by phone, and, in less than a day, a fully- loaded metal casket would be sent to you, equipped with comfortable soft bedding and an ashy down pillow for the deceased. From what I could see, the coffin Claudia and Livia had chosen was a plain mahogany box with no automatic features to open up the torso half for viewing. To my mind it was right that death should be final like this and that we were not able to see Giorgio rouged and dressed for a formal viewing. A man yelled from the shore, and a young boy answered back in a high and energetic voice, as the priest began his final commendation.

“Before we go our separate ways, let us take leave of our brother. May our farewell express our affection for him. May it ease our sadness and strengthen our hope. One day we will joyfully greet him when the love of Christ, which conquers all things, destroys even death itself.”

The words had the opposite effect on me than the intended one. I felt angry that I was numb to the loss and wanted to shout or cry. I wished that our family were more like those peasant women who hurl themselves into the casket, screaming and shouting to God for answers.

Livia had told me Claudia was beside herself, but looking ahead at her, I could see little emotion, only a clenched jaw and cold, green eyes focused on the priest. The priest sprinkled the coffin with holy water and incense, and Giorgio’s housekeeper, Alicia, began to cry. I watched her shoulders rise and fall, and from where I was standing, it was hard to tell whether she was laughing or crying. The priest, then, spoke in a loud voice: “Saints of God, come to Giorgio’s aid! Hasten to meet him, angels of the Lord!”

163 I heard the attenuated voice of Giulietta and the more robust voices of Yasmin and

Claudia saying, “Receive his soul and present him to God the most high. May Christ who called you take you to himself. May angels lead you to the bosom of Abraham.” The priest added in a loud, confident voice, “Into your hands, father of mercies, we commend our brother in the sure and certain hope that together with all who have died in Christ, he will rise with him on the last day. We give you thanks for the blessing which you bestowed upon Giorgio in this life. They are signs to us of your goodness and of our friendship with the saints in Christ. Merciful Lord, turn toward us and listen to our prayers: open the gates of paradise to your servant and help us who remain to comfort one another with assurances of faith until we all meet in Christ and are with you and with your brother forever. We ask this through Christ our Lord.”

“Amen,” said the three women.

“Amen,” Livia, Sandy and I agreed.

The priest then passed a shovel to Claudia, one to Yasmin, one to Giulietta, and a fourth to Yasmin’s son, Alper. Claudia’s green eyes were shining, dilated, and quickened by the last four days with Giorgio, as she pitched the dark soil into the grave first. The dirt fell like snow on the box, and I thought again how she did not know how to express sadness. But I knew she could not cry. She hadn’t cried to see Giorgio tormented by spirits, real or imagined, in his hospital bed. Livia claimed she was distraught, but I had my doubts.

“In peace let us take our brother to his place of rest. May the angels lead you into paradise. May the martyrs come to welcome you and take you to the holy city, the new and eternal Jerusalem.”

Once the grave was fully covered, Livia stepped back, and the priest invited us to join him for a drink in a nearby bar. We sat at a long picnic table, in a garden behind the cemetery,

164 above a partially collapsed wall of tufa stone, looking out over the olive trees that stretched out to the sea. On the other side a gaudy mansion surrounded what remained of a hill of wheat. The warm African air blew a powerful aroma of jasmine flowers and mint herbs in our direction, and a colony of ants filed across the marble tiles with singular focus. The beautiful, amber-haired

Yasmin walked around the bench and sat next to me and opposite her seven year-old, Alper.

Sandy sat on my other side, opposite Livia. Giulietta and Alicia faced Claudia at the table’s end.

And the priest, holding a liter of wine in one hand, sat opposite me and between Livia and

Yasmin’s son, Alper.

“Livia tells me Giorgio saw spirits before his death,” I said, breaking my promise not to say anything. “Father Clemente, you’re a priest, so you must have some experience with death.

Tell me, does this kind of thing happen often?”

Father Clemente did not answer right away. While he was thinking, his eyes rested on the area between Livia’s lapels. He stared for a moment as if the fact she was not wearing a bra were a novelty, as if he were confused by this; then, he answered.

“You know, I hear stories of people asking for road maps, telling their loved ones they need to prepare for a long journey, or demanding their best walking shoes be brought to them.

It’s not often I see someone kicking off spirits, crying out to Christ for help. Your grandfather’s death surprised me, but it’s not part of my vocation to question a man’s final request.”

“So why, then, did you say during the liturgy that he had led a life according to the

Gospel?” I asked.

“I didn’t. I said that he cherished the gospel. It’s not the same thing. And in my view if

Giorgio cherished the Gospel in the last five minutes of his life, we still believe he cherished the

165 Gospel. The point is not to study the sins of the deceased, but to comfort those who are still alive. To tell them their loved one is in a better place, and he will one day join them.”

His answer, both candid and cynical, rang true to me. He was admitting that he did not know what followed this life and that the funeral service was a pragmatic gesture meant to reassure the living and nothing more.

“Father, it’s nice that you’re thinking of us, but it’s hard to be comforted by things one doesn’t believe in. It’s hard to believe in things, period, but particularly hard to be comforted by what seems like just a myth,” I said.

“Well, let’s talk about something else. We’re here to celebrate a life, too. Livia and

Claudia, you both pulled that off magnificently. And to think we only had one day to prepare!

Tell me,” he said, turning to the girl. “Is it true that God dove beneath the sea to pull out eyes as green as yours?”

Claudia nodded to me in affirmation of what the priest had just said. A few wisps of her black hair clung to her face like nettles. She had been sweating through the service like all of us, and now her skin appeared sticky and her eyes, green and fiery. I was glad the conversation had taken a different turn. I didn’t want to know anything more about my grandfather’s passing, nor anything more about the man he had cried out for in his final moments.

“This must all seem very strange to you,” I said to Yasmin.

“To be frank, I’m not a very pious Muslim. Religions seem to me too easy. Being reunited with Muhammed would also not be my idea of heaven. I would be one of many wives, and he would spend all his time proselytizing rather than with me. But I think the point of a funeral is to show your respect for the man who died. I liked your grandfather very much, so I’m willing to ignore the things I can’t relate to in order to show that respect.”

166

PART II

167

CHAPTER 15

HAVING AN EROTIC LIFE OUTSIDE OF A MAN

Only the seven of us and a handful of others knew about what Giorgio had been through in his last moments. Whereas Luca’s murder had put the spotlight on us, and we had had no choice but to face the public, this time we grieved privately; we grieved alone. At times my grief felt like a terminated relationship and wore down my drive. At other times I truly believed

Giorgio was still trying to write me letters which I could not receive. Each signed off by saying,

“Forza!” because he wanted me to gather strength and keep going. And in these letters, he also insisted that it was right and natural that he should die first, and that he had willed himself to die because he had been ready.

I could also not wrest the image of Livia bathing in the freezing fountain of Piazza

Farnese from my head, even if I had seen how gracefully she handled Giorgio’s funeral. Anyone can put up a front for a few hours or even a day. Once in November she had called to ask what I was doing for Independence Day, a trivial holiday months away. What kind of symbolic meaning had she given this holiday that it of all holidays was the one she wanted to know whether I had plans for? She wanted to know whether I had become a member of the

Metropolitan Club in New York because I had mentioned eating there once with Philip.

“Are you still members of that club?”

“Philip is—” Soon after I heard the dial tone.

168 Now that I was back in Rome the family was doing their best to open their arms to me.

Claudia had sent over a strawberry cheesecake in February. Giulietta and my brothers had called

to invite me to the movies once and to a soccer game another time. All of us had yet to meet in

one place, though, and this time Claudia was the one determined to see all of us facing one

another at a dinner table. It was April by now, and the elections were coming up. The pundits

were saying it would offer the people their first real opportunity to change the style of

government. In the papers they said everyone would be talking about it, but I didn’t see anything like that. People were preparing for Palm Sunday and Easter, visiting the Mostre delle Azalae, the Azalea Show, and the Festa di Primavera, the Spring Fest, gawking at the 3,000 azalea vases dotting the Spanish steps. Daylight savings time gave us longer daylight hours, and Romans were spending more time outdoors, people watching, walking or just socializing. So, it was easy to ignore bad news and hope it would go away. “Mafia gunmen kills senior police inspector, leading expert in fight against organized crime”—I read the headlines, but in my head I erased it just as quickly.

Palm Sunday also happened to be World Youth Day. Catholic kids across the world passed a cross from one nation’s youth to another. Whose idea the cross-passing was, I’ve no idea, but it seemed like a good one, especially since the Pope was interminably about to kick it.

Sandy had gotten up early to see the open air mass in St. Peter’s, while I stayed home and played with Ivan.

In the afternoon we drove out to Claudia’s apartment in Laurentina, south of Rome. I had been back there only twice after Luca’s death, once to help Livia clean out his things and a second time to put up a ‘For Rent’ sign in the window. I had liked Luca’s sort of chaos and the comfortable sense it gave you of a life just slightly outside of his control. Luca’s place had

169 always been musty and lived in, but Claudia had redecorated, and in the process she had given the apartment an aseptic feel. She had stripped the floors and put in marble tiles in the living room and kitchen and full-body mirrors along the walls. Claudia’s version of a too well-ordered reality had never failed to make me feel claustrophobic.

When we got there, the party had split into two groups. The “grown-ups”—Claudia,

Livia and Romano, half-drunk, passed the sauce for the roast around. Claudia and Livia rallied back and forth about the pros and cons of putting sherry in. Claudia believed the cons outweighed the pros, while Livia held the opposite view. In Giulietta’s room, a sparsely- decorated cave with sliding, mirrored closets and hardwood floors, Pietro, Lorenzo and Joey followed the hashish being passed around the circle. Their eyes were glazed and bloodshot.

Giulietta stood with one hand on her hips in the center of the circle. She had filled out, and the red polyester shirt she wore was just retro enough and just tight enough to show off the shape of her breasts. She wore plaid slacks low on her hips, and, as she spoke, those hips seemed to undulate like waves. She wore no shoes, and her black hair was piled on top of her head like some peasant girl from a 50s film depicting the hard life of the contadina. She had recently started working in a lingerie shop on Via Nazionale not far from Occham’s Razor. My brothers,

Lorenzo and Pietro, were earnestly asking her about what particular types of lingerie were the bestsellers this year. Giulietta, who I remembered as a shy girl, held forth on the new styles, the return of the corset, large breasts and the pros and cons of the underwire bra.

“In the month that I’ve been working there I’ve only had one customer ask for the conical bra, and that was a photographer preparing for a shoot. My clients think the conical bra is off-

170 putting to men. They talk about them as guns or dual penises. Visually, it’s jarring for men.

Now women will ask for corsets all day long and in all colors.”

Pietro looked almost identical to his twin brother Lorenzo, apart from one small difference. Pietro never had had his wisdom teeth taken out because his father had given him the money up front, and with the money Pietro had bought himself another motorbike. Not that he didn’t already have a motorbike and not that the purchase of a second one would go unnoticed.

His molars have since crowded out his bottom teeth, and his smile is just slightly goofier than his brother’s because of that. I had to remind myself that Giulietta was not related to Lorenzo and

Pietro by blood. They eyed her with enthusiasm and admiration bordering on lust.

“So, how do you feel about the underwire? Why now?” asked my brother Lorenzo.

“Look, when we lost the corset, we lost some of the body armor that made women feel protected, and the underwire is just another way to get that back,” said my niece.

“I don’t know,” interrupted Sandy. “I actually feel more protected in a sports bra.”

“Sure, but do you feel sexy in a sports bra? Look, the main question is that. I mean a lot of women wonder who they’re doing all this for, for men or for themselves. Look, I know the underwire is uncomfortable, but, you know, if it’s going to make you feel sexy and ‘armored,’ then it’s worth it. Take me—I don’t have a boyfriend at the moment, but I still buy myself sexy underwear because I like the idea of having an erotic life outside of a man. I spoil myself. I keep my own private secrets with myself.”

“So, you’re saying you’ll go through all this discomfort, and you’re not even doing it for men?”

“Yes,” she added.

171 “Personally, I don’t trust a woman who’s so little interested in the pleasure of men. If

she’s that involved with her own body, what does she need us for?” said Pietro.

“No, no, no. You’re misinterpreting my words. I can have both. I’m not dependent on a

man for my erotic pleasure. I can enjoy lingerie and my own body without necessarily needing a man to admire my body also.”

At that moment there was a raucous outbreak of laughter coming from the “grown-up” side of the apartment, followed by the deep baritone utterance of the words “too much masturbation” I, being, closer to the door, strained to make out what my mother and the others were saying. From what I could hear, they were ganging up on my mother’s new boyfriend, blaming him for men’s tendency to come too soon, and Romano, new to it all, must have been admitting to his ongoing addiction to onanism. But the laughter sounded good-natured enough to mean no one’s feelings had been seriously hurt. Back on our side of the apartment, the discussion had turned to weighing which push-up bra best suited which female form.

“It very much depends on the shape of the breast. Flatter-chested women in push-up bras can be ridiculous. Women who have no breasts to speak of, even worse! So can women with breasts that are too large. Tits that spill out of their cups—that’s no good either. More than a handful spilling out of the cup, that’s just distasteful. Really, I think the push-up bra is best- suited for the midsized breast that’s trying to be a little perkier, a little happier.”

The last time I had seen Giulietta she had had no front teeth. She had worn her long brown hair pulled black in a rubber band on top of her head. Her lips were perfectly shaped, red and suggestive. Her father’s favorite, she sat next to him at every meal. He had cut up her meat for her until she was old enough to cut it herself. Uneaten dessert portions she gave to him.

Their Scottish terrier, Egbert, sat beneath her feet at the table. The meat she did not want she

172 passed on to him. The boys took this favoritism as a matter of course. They squabbled over the remote control, wrestled and fought until Vito was twelve or thirteen, and he started ignoring

Nino completely.

“I think you’re wrong,” he said finally. “Large breasts can look great in a push-up bra.

The problem is women buy bras that are too small. Then, they run into problems when they try to stuff it all in there. That’s no good, and it defeats the purpose of wearing a bra at all.”

There was another measured silence, and then Lorenzo, who had been taking more than his share of the hash, let out a kind of short howl that forced everyone to focus their eyes on

Pietro’s brother.

“My problem with women is just what you’re talking about. Women buying expensive lingerie for themselves, women in dark glasses flirting with me, women feeling me up in bars, and then nothing! All smoke and no fire! Never hear from them again. They have to study or go to Abruzzi or some other strange place!”

Pietro, who was much more successful with women, knew that this had little to do with his appearance and everything to do with his brother’s clumsiness; he could not resist the opportunity to slight his brother for his crooked teeth.

“Look, just because they’re not exactly falling in love with you, I mean, look in the mirror. You’re not exactly the handsomest man in the world. Paolo,” he continued, turning to me,” tell him that’s his problem. His technique, he’s not handsome and he’s not suave. Tell him.”

I did my best to remain neutral, but as my other brother Lorenzo’s eyes fell on me, I couldn’t help but see these four large dog-like eyes as they had been growing up when we still

173 lived at Via Cicerone, always looking up at me, always admiring! And I could not help but want to impress them, to merit the role of wise, oldest brother they had given me.

“Tell him yourself. As far as I know, he can be very suave when he wants to be. And he’s right that the women he likes tend to be all talk, whereas the women you like apparently are of a different mentality.”

Pietro raised his hand in the air, indicating he was fed up with diplomacy. “Pass me that hash,” he said to my wife, who was holding the cigarette without really inhaling or passing it along. She looked stunned for a moment and then passed it back to him.

“So, Paolo, you’re telling us it used to be different. You’re telling us women used to be less talk.”

I could not see myself as having ever been like them. At 19, in 1976, I had still had Luca there warning me of the dangers of floating from one new experience to the next, reminding me of the taxing nature of finding a profession and developing oneself, even in his negative way advising me of the importance of finding a person to share your life with as the best way to consolidate your energies and build on them. Amabili’s austerity measures had made it plain I had to work harder than the person next to me and be glad for every paycheck. It had made a serious person of me, while some had become even more carefree. Chasing women had seemed a waste of time, and I was never interested in flirting games, like the ones my cousins were preoccupied with. Their generation never thought of politics, but they were obsessed with every last minutia of their relationships with one another. Their private lives were their public lives, and their public lives were all about impressive declarations about the push-up bra or the thong.

But was my generation really any different? We had all found ourselves taken in by some other personal reality that made being public impossible. Three-fourths of us had kids who proved the

174 perfect excuses for every venal, selfish action benefiting only ourselves at the expense of the community at large. And what of Livia’s generation? I could still barely make out the chattering in the other room, which had died down and was barely audible. “Well, just put some more sherry in. That oughta jazz things up a little.” There was some rummaging; then, Romano’s voice: “Where’s the sherry?” No, that generation was even more hopeless than my own. At least, we had made a last ditch effort to change things before bowing out through drugs, alcohol or mainstream yuppie lifestyles. In reality, I could not even take credit for my generation’s courage. All I had done was shirk political discussions and dream of escaping to some place non-political, perhaps to America, before every other place in Europe became America, before I could find my fifteen and nineteen-year-old cousins analyzing the nature of their plentiful and somewhat cynical relationship, delivering treatises on the many forms of eroticism.

While Lorenzo and Pietro were arguing over who was better looking, my cousin Giulietta stalked toward Joey, her eyes fixed on the digital clock behind him. Sandy watched Giulietta with a measure of skepticism.

“The only one that hasn’t been reset for daylight savings,” she said. She, then, kneeled on the ground and even the twins could tell something was up. Geisha-like, she leaned over him and her breasts, enticing, dangled just above Joey’s legs.

“Better do this before I forget,” she said.

If Joey was stunned, he managed not to show it. I was growing to respect his ability to stay cool under pressure. The twins by now were no longer engaged with insulting each other.

Instead, they were staring at the American, and then at the American’s sister, and I knew exactly what they were thinking: Why did my wife have to have a brother and not a sister? They were

175 again outnumbered, and I think they knew Giulietta well enough to know she would no longer give either one of them the time of day, at least so long as the American was here.

Just as we had all honed in on Joey’s reaction to being quietly humped in the name of re- setting the clock to daylight savings, my mother Livia called from the kitchen that the dinner was ready. I watched as first Lorenzo, then Pietro, and then Sandy averted their stares, rising slowly, all commenting on how beyond hunger they found themselves at that moment. Joey, who was still locked in under my cousin, did not move, and my cousin herself began to count the numbers on the clock out loud, as if she were doing some form of exercise.

“9—10—11—What time is it exactly?”

“7:45.”

“Oh, I have to go all the way around again.”

The four of us hearing this did not know exactly whether to leave them alone or wait on them, so I, to deflect the awkwardness, began to pick hairs off Sandy’s shirt, and Lorenzo and

Pietro waved the marijuana hash toward the windows. As Claudia’s daughter bent back into a kneeling position and rose, I felt as if I were watching something intimate, almost post-coital. It embarrassed me enough not to want to look in their direction.

176

CHAPTER 16

THE F—ING HOT WATER IS ACTING UP

That Easter season was the beginning of a nation’s unraveling. Sandy, as if to ward off the nation’s descent, took Ivan to every Easter service possible, from the Stations of the Cross at the Colosseum on Good Friday to the Easter Vigil in St. Peter’s Basilica on Saturday to the

Easter morning mass in St. Peter’s Square, while I stayed home and read the newspapers. Every day the Kickback Scandals in Milan revealed new politicians taking bribes. None of this was very surprising, but what was novel was how angry people were becoming. Editorials called for more resignations; more people organized. Eventually even the mayor of Milan and the entire city council were asked to resign, and all the major parties were linked to the scandal.

When I was not distracting myself with the newspapers, I was thinking of our dog Ivan’s trouble with socialization. He had been making progress, but now, it seemed, more things scared him than ever before. We tried to introduce him to umbrellas and vacuum cleaners, but it didn’t help. Getting him to take a bath was a major ordeal because he would whine and bark and kick and squirm. We tried confining him to the kitchen until he was toilet trained, but even that was hard because he would always try to get out. He had chewed up three pairs of Sandy’s favorite heels, and he still needed to be taken to his “toilet area” every forty-five minutes.

I sympathized with Ivan’s anxieties. He was always so excited to see me or Sandy he would pee wherever he was standing. The politicians indicted in the Kickback Scandals in a

177 strange way reminded me of Ivan, too. Articles in the paper described Renato’s father’s parliamentary psychoanalytic practice as booming. Psychoanalysts had even coined a new term to describe their neurosis, the Mama Party Syndrome, an anxiety provoked by a politician’s realization that he had been misled: for decades, he had believed the party would love and protect him no matter how egregious his crimes. Businessmen who had been indicted were taking to their rooftops, briefcases in hand, and like penguins, were diving to their deaths. Those who defended the indicted argued that the rules had been more elastic when they joined politics, and now, midway through the game, the rules were changing.

“Just put his feet on the floor,” said Sandy. “That’s the way to stop him from jumping up so much.”

“But he keeps doing it anyway. I put his feet on the floor, and he jumps up all over again.”

“We have to give him more positive reinforcement.”

“No, then, he’ll just think you’re praising him for jumping up.”

“I don’t mean positive reinforcement about that. I mean when he goes to the bathroom in the toilet area.”

“Look, he can’t control where he goes right now. We’ll just have to keep taking him to the can every forty-five minutes.”

Sandy, honestly, was looking pretty battered by nights with Ivan. It was simply impossible to keep the dog from crying, and, then, she faced the test of will whether or not to take him to bed with her. Some nights he would pee in the bed, some nights he wouldn’t, but you could never be sure which night it was. I, in the meantime, was sleeping on the couch.

178 I had just signed the deed to Occham’s Razor and picked up the key, but we were still

negotiating on the space on the second floor, a space we eventually wanted to convert into a

vending area/coffee shop. For over a week, I had wanted to drive over there and take a look.

Now Claudia had called to ask me whether I wouldn’t come over to her apartment in Laurentina to look at some of Luca’s old paintings and photographs. I wasn’t really too interested in going through Luca’s old things, but Claudia had informed me she would also give me an extra box of power tools she didn’t have any use for, and that made the trip sound more worthwhile to me.

In the afternoon Joey surprised us both by stopping by unannounced just as I was getting ready to go out there. Sandy was sure he had stopped by for her, but Joey, in pressed jeans and a freshly laundered shirt, was looking for me. He seemed sort of sheepish about whatever it was

he wanted to ask me. I thought he might never get it out, and so I asked him what was on his

mind.

“Nothing, really. I was just in the neighborhood.”

“Well, you caught me at a bad time, Joey. I was just about to go out to my aunt’s.”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you about, Paolo. I think I left my wallet out there the other

night. I’ve got some time off. Why don’t I come out there with you?”

Poor Joey always seemed to have some time off. He had been in Italy almost five months

already, and the import/export business he claimed he was starting never really seemed to get off

the ground. In all my experience, I had never run across trust fund babies not in some way

crippled by their parents or grandparents’ financial success. Joey’s reaction to Giulietta, his both

interest in and revulsion with her, only proved that he had never had to work in any potentially

degrading or mind-numbing job to pay bills. The fact that Giulietta had turned her work

experience into something she was truly interested in and knowledgeable about had intrigued

179 him, but her area of expertise, lingerie, and her cynical way of looking at its use as a product, all of these things would still be foreign to him. On the way out there Joey talked of his new apartment and the dishwasher and washing machine he had ordered but wasn’t having any luck installing.

“Who’d you get their number from?”

“From the phone book.”

“You can’t just call some random person from the phone book. Your repair and installation guy has got to know you. Look, I’ll ask my mother. I’m sure she’ll know someone.”

“If it’s not too much trouble...”

“No trouble, I’ll take care of it.”

The apartment Joey had bought was on Via Orazio, the same street where Luca had been shot thirteen years ago. Joey’s apartment was further south closer to the Tiber, and Luca’s death had happened closer to the Vatican. Each time Joey mentioned his apartment I thought of this, and each time I resisted the urge to express the thought. What would he do with this information? What use would it be to him? It would serve no use at all, just as it had not really been a past fact I could do much with or use in any constructive or positive way.

As we walked toward Claudia’s building, I was thinking of Luca and how often I had walked alongside him on this walkway. He had never really fixed me a snack. I had always just gone into the kitchen to fix my own, and it hadn’t bothered me to fix my own. If there wasn’t anything to eat, he would give me money to buy a pastry or a sandwich at the café on the other side of the courtyard. I knew for sure I didn’t want those days back, because I had been miserable back then; it was that I could not wrap my head around the fact that he was gone.

“Joey, you never met my uncle, did you?”

180 “No, Paolo.”

“I think you would have liked him. He used to live in this apartment.”

“Oh.”

“Claudia said she may not be there.”

“Will anyone else be there?”

“I don’t know.”

The collection of apartment buildings was at the top of a very large and shady hill. Each

was octagonally-shaped, made of brick, with a balcony facing another section of the city. At

first Luca had lived in a smaller apartment whose balcony faced Rome. Later, when a larger

apartment became available, and after the windfall from various kickbacks and bribes, he moved

into that apartment, and, for the first time his balcony faced away from Rome.

No one answered the door when we rang. Bringing Sandy’s brother with me, I felt more

able to handle my thoughts of Luca. It seemed I was more grounded in the present. Luca would

have adored the Kickback Scandals in Milan, but probably would have not have been part of

uncovering the scandal, since his connections did not really extend as far as Milan, but what

would he have thought of Joey and Sandy? He had never been xenophobic, but he spoke no

foreign languages and had never really been outside of Rome, much less Italy. He never really did know what to do with children. It seemed as if he was always in some way hurrying along my maturity, asking me to hurry up and grow up. Not that Joey and Sandy were children, but growing up rich, they had never really needed a profession. That changes a person, allows for some idealism and, yes, even some innocence.

I pushed the door open and called for either Claudia or Giulietta. The apartment smelled clean and feminine. An orderly semi-circle of shoes fanned out around a secretary stand. A

181 small bowl and a pair of keys lay on the secretary. On each side, reflected in the full-length

mirrors, I saw myself and behind me the handsome, tall and rugged frame of my sister’s brother.

Next to my brother-in-law, I looked squalid, underweight and hunched over, someone who

worried too much and did not exercise enough. I had spots and a greenish complexion; my

brother-in-law had none, and his skin glowed a nice, bronze color. I could hear the shower

running and a muffled woman’s voice singing. The black tool box, the wallet, and the power

drill lay on the dining room table. A couple of paintings leaned against one of the dining room

chairs. I heard someone say, “Oh shit,” the shower turning off and, then, turning back on again.

I called again, “Giulietta? Claudia?”

“Paolo, I’m in the shower. The fucking hot water’s acting up.”

“We’re in the living room,” I answered.

Joey studied the portraits on the mantel in the living room. I was just hoping they looked

halfway normal. Hopefully, Vito and Nino were not wrapped in swaddling clothes, with AK47s

at their sides, or Claudia hadn’t put up any family snapshots with the Buonanno clan.

“We? Who’s ‘we’?” Giulietta shouted from the shower. She sounded tense and

uncomfortable, and I imagined this to be a side effect of showering in midday Arctic waters.

“Joey and me.”

“Joey’s here?”

“Yeah, he came with me.”

“Hang on a second,” she said. “I’ll be right out. I want to show you both something.”

Joey held a framed photograph in one hand, but he was not looking at it. Instead, he was listening. If he had been a dog or a horse, his ears would have been cocked in that direction, but

as it was, he was just listening and standing still.

182 “She wants us to stay,” I called to Joey.

“Well, then, we’ll just have to stay,” he said.

On his face was the largest, most satisfied grin. I had decided long ago that I liked his face. Much of it was covered in facial hair, but it was a friendly, open face, and yet it seemed vulnerable because of this openness. This was the other reason I liked it. I liked to see this openness, even if it is accompanied by a kind of vulnerability. I like a face that can still feel, and that is not so totally calcified as to only wear one or two expressions. Joey’s face could contort into a multitude of expressions, even if he had been socialized to hide these many faces at first..

Sandy once told me Joey had made straight A’s in his philosophy major at Stanford. You could see this in his face, this sensitivity bordering on naievete.

When Giulietta came out of her room not long after that, her hair was still wet, but she had combed it behind her shoulders. She wore a pair of tight velour shorts and a red tank top, which accentuated her cleavage and nipples (but I tried not to notice.)

“Did you find what you wanted?” she asked.

Joey’s satisfied grin had morphed into one of nervousness. He had put down the photo and now had nothing to do with his hands. He slid them into his pockets, but, then, pulled them out again. He stared at her, and, then, looked away again. What was happening? He had played it cool the other day, but now he was having some kind of meltdown.

“Hello, Joey,” she said.

“Hello, Giulietta.”

“How are you doing?”

“Fine, and you?”

“Fine.”

183 The conversation was simple enough, but beneath the words my brother-in-law wore the

most pained expression. I was worried for him and watched for signs of my cousin’s awareness

of this, and her ability to use it to her advantage. She was not indifferent to him. After all, she

had gotten dressed in a hurry and come out into the living room especially to see him, but she

could flirt with him and maintain her cool, and that to me indicated she liked him well enough

without liking him too much. I was standing there like a doofus, absorbing the awkwardness of the conversation, but not doing anything to facilitate it either. There was too much delay between statements, and that made the whole thing even more awkward.

“How’s Ivan?” asked Giulietta.

“Too anxious. We can’t seem to get him to relax. He sees other dogs or even new people and automatically he starts urinating.”

“Sandy said you were going to sign him up for a socialization class.”

“No, I talked Sandy out of it. Waste of money.”

My fifteen-year-old cousin appeared to be the only one of the three of us functioning halfway decently. Socially, she knew how to keep things going. Emotionally, she seemed even- keeled. She remembered names of dogs and conversations she had had a couple of weeks ago.

But Joey and I, how much we invested in the smallest things, how full of yearnings and desires.

I had recently listened to a mystic on a late night radio who said that we should pay close attention to our desires because if we look at our desires closely, we’ll notice that almost all of our desires are merely a means to attain something else. If we find a desire that we seek as an end in itself, that desire comes closest to showing us our true personality. The trick was, according to the mystic, to re-mold our desires, and, thus, to refashion our personality. I thought of this mystic watching Giulietta and Joey. I watched Joey’s eyes and realized that in those eyes,

184 it was clear Joey wanted her for the sake of wanting her and not for the sake of attaining something else, and I agreed with the mystic: those are the purest kinds of desires. I was still standing there, looking first at her and then at him, wanting to wipe that look of intense longing off Joey’s face. His longing felt pendulous and heavy. I wanted to lay it out on the floor and roll it around, just to acknowledge it, so that Giulietta could decide what to do with it. Giulietta appeared to be deciding, but what she was deciding surprised me. She seemed to want to talk around and over it, to crowd it out of the room, so that new words could replace it.

“And, Joey, how are you? How are things going with you? How are you settling in?”

“I’m trying to. Thank you for asking. Paolo’s going to help me get better contacts, so

someone will come out and install the dishwasher, but on the whole…”

She was looking around and then down at her watch, as Joey tried to form a coherent

thought. He watched her look around and then added, “Giulietta, if you’re going to work, maybe we could give you a ride.”

I felt as if, watching him, as if I were watching some nineteenth century courtier, someone in a ruffled shirt and knickers, bowing and clicking his heels. I didn’t mind giving

Giulietta a ride, but I also wondered about the oddness of his inability to answer her question without first having to offer her something in return. He had moved directly to her aid. I realized I did not know him very well after all. He had sounded almost jaded when he talked about his break-up with his ex-girlfriend. I had never known him to be knightly or chivalric, but this was not saying much, for I was beginning to realize I knew him hardly at all. Giulietta

smiled. I half expected her to curtsy, but she didn’t.

“You don’t mind?” she said, looking at Joey. “Are you sure?”

“Sure, I’m sure. It’s no problem,” he said.

185 He was forgetting me. They were flirting and he was forgetting me; but, then, why else

had he insisted on coming with me except as an excuse to see her again, to talk to her and be

with her? I will drive them around this time, I thought, but the next time he will have to face her

alone, as we all eventually have to face our desires alone.

“I don’t mind either,” I said, and the delay between this statement and the two previous

ones was awkward enough for the two of them to turn in my direction and look at me.

“I’ll just get my stuff and change,” said Giulietta. “I’ll just be a second.”

While she was gone, Joey thanked me profusely for letting him come out with me and

asked me whether I was sure I didn’t mind. He had been so preoccupied with his conversation that he sincerely had not noticed I was there. His mind was exchanging confused messages with

his libido, and his heart was intercepting and re-encoding (So basically I don’t think even he

knew what the fuck he was doing!).

Going back into the city, Joey insisted on sitting in the back, and his long limbs were all

scrunched up, and his shoulders stooped forward, and he was chattering nervously. I thought of

the fine figure he had cut in the full length mirrors in Claudia’s apartment. Now it was as if he

was trying to shrink himself to accommodate her. With all of his physical beauty, he was just as

human and subject to the same perpetual insecurities of the rest of us. That comforted me some.

Leaving the city had been simple enough, but returning, and especially trying to get to as

congested an area as Via Nazionale, would be a bitch. Joey had been right to offer her the ride.

He would have the perfect opportunity to get to know her better. We were passing Mussolini’s

Fascist experiment, the EUR, a section of the city a team of Fascist architects had built in the

thirties, with street names meant to conjure up images of grandeur, Viale Europa, Viale

Beethoven, Viale Astronomia, Viale Shakespeare, Viale della Musica, Viale della Architettura,

186 and built in the boxy, angular style Fascist architects favored. The Luna Park on the north side attracted bored teens, but the tree-lined streets were still clean and modern. I don’t know whether it was the sight of the EUR or a desire to provoke her new love interest, but Giuletta was soon talking about Alessandra Mussolini’s latest bid for a seat in parliament. (She had recently lost her seat to another popular neo-fascist.)

“I think what she did, posing nude like that, was very clever. She knows how to make people take notice, and people trust her more because they know she’s not afraid of anything.

Frankly, I think she would have won, but she just got in there too late. She’ll win the next time, though.”

Joey leaned forward. He wore a blank expression, and he frankly looked a little turned off with more talk of sex.

“Who are you talking about?”

“Mussolini’s granddaughter, Sofia Loren’s niece,” I said.

He nodded, but he didn’t say anything. Giulietta crossed her cleanly shaven and tanned legs. The action seemed intended to make Joey take notice.

“You don’t know Alessandra Mussolini? Paolo, you must point these people out to him.

She has her own talk show. She’s very pretty, a neo-fascist, and people took notice when she posed nude. They wanted to vote for her.”

Joey said nothing, and, then, after a pause, he asked, “Did you vote for her?”

“Of course.”

Joey was silent again. I wanted to say something, but two small trucks, one behind and one in front, distracted me. The one in front would break without warning, while the other behind continually rode up my rear and then braked suddenly.

187 “In Italy the people don’t expect morality from their politicians. In fact, it’s good if a politician’s reputation is, well, if he has a good sexual reputation, or even if he knows something about the nightlife, or if he’s seen with actresses and even porn stars. We trust a politician like that to be clever and—how do you say?—sveglia—sharp.”

“Yes,” interrupted Giulietta, “we think of sex as power and power as power. We don’t see the two things as a contradiction.”

“So, would you pose naked if you were asked?” he asked.

“Yes,” she answered, “if I thought it would help my cause, of course.”

“And the Pope would he pose naked for the church?”

“He already has. Don’t you see him in the dirty magazines?”

Joey smiled, but through the rear view mirror, I could see the particular setting of his jaw, which made it seem as if he were disturbed. I wanted to ask him whether it was the idea that a woman would do whatever it took to gain power, or whether it was the importance placed on sexual prowess, or whether it was the fact that Giulietta didn’t see stripping as exploitative, and if she didn’t see it that way, was it really? Maybe, it was only exploitation when the person performing the act didn’t get as much as they thought they deserved. But if everyone had a price, and if every action performed was done in order to get something else, then, there was no room left for genuine intimacy or genuine feeling? I had been so busy wondering what Joey’s thoughts were on the matter that I hadn’t stopped to consider my own. I had chosen intimacy over satisfying an ideal of cleverness, but this was mainly because that ideal did not at all suit my temperament. Apart from that, I had never envied the lifestyle of the politicians or the cassanova.

188 “We’ll have to take you out to the jazz clubs in Testaccio. Do you like jazz?” I asked, as

we passed the Testacchio district.

Carlo had once told me that the residents of Testacchio had rolled his grandmother in a

barrel down the Monte Testacchio, a hill made of decades of Roman waste like dishes, pots,

pans, clothes, furniture, during the pre-Lent carnival. Since that time, the hippest nightclubs and bars had been built around Monte Testacchio, and the neighborhood itself had enjoyed a renaissance. Joey insisted he liked jazz and then mentioned a club in New York he had regularly

gone to.

“Will you be coming out with us, too?” he asked my niece.

“Yes, if I’m allowed.”

She sounded like a kid again. Who was going to stop her? I thought. Her mother? She

was actually such a sad kid, if I thought about it. No one ever stopped her from doing anything,

and I did not know her well enough to play that role either. The rest of the way we talked little.

We drove past the park where the Circus Maximus had once been, past the Coliseum, north

along Via Cavour to the Santa Maria Maggiore Cathedral where my father had once taken me on

the day of the Rose Petals. My Peugeot four-door, then, climbed the Via Quattro Fontane and

before long we were on the Via Nazionale, not far from Cuddles, the lingerie shop where

Giulietta worked.

189

CHAPTER 17

ATTRACTIVE, YOUNG GIRLS MAKE HIM NERVOUS

We had arranged for all the unsold books to be stored outside of the city until the space was finished and the furniture was in place. The cheap, dark plastic floor tiles would have to be replaced, and the fluorescent lights would also have to go. When I had worked in Occham’s

Razor before, neither had ever bothered me, but now that I owned Occham’s Razor none of it seemed quite good enough. I had hung Luca’s collage on the wall where the registers had once been. There Levi and I had spent most of our time, emptying shopping bags and offering commentary on whatever was going on in the world. Beneath it was the framed print of Levi’s creed: “The acquisition of knowledge is an end onto itself.” These two mementos may have been mere representations, but with both Levi and Luca dead, I needed something material in

Occham’s Razor to remind me of them. Luca’s collage was a series of unrelated images: red paint splattered the right hand corner, the inverted text of three print articles, merged and overlapping in the middle, a bright red hammer and sickle, some text about the Red Brigades. I had picked this print out of all the ones Claudia had given me because it seemed an art work that alluded to a time past and Luca’s bold place in that past. I wanted it in Occham’s Razor, for the same reason I wanted Levi’s aphorism in there: as mementos of people whose lives, flawed though they were, were important to me.

“What is it?” asked Joey.

190 “A collage...my uncle’s,” I answered.

“Don’t you want some more cheerful stuff in here? People come to bookstores to escape

their troubles; they don’t want to feel like they’re in a library, they want to kick back, they want

to relax,” he said.

“If you want to put flowers on the walls, you’ve got the wrong store. Occham’s Razor’s

not going to be about escape.”

“A hammer and sickle? In a nice new store, acquired and maintained through capital,

isn’t that a little hypocritical? You know no one reads that depressing left-wing shit anymore.

No one wants to talk about how bad things are going for the masses, either. That’s just not worth talking about anymore.”

“Look, they’re still going to be able to buy things. We’re just not putting any fluffy, decorative crap on the walls.”

“You know, it would probably be a good idea to get a chair and a table in here. That way at least you’ll have something to sit on while you’re getting things set up. There’s no reason to be in here right now. I mean, who wants to spend hours sitting on this dirty floor?”

He was right: Most of the work that needed to get done had everything to do with cleaning and organizing. Someone would have to come through here with a broom, or else it would always feel like a place you wanted to just shut the door to and forget about. The main thing was planning, figuring out what needed doing and then just setting out to do it. If this is to be a success, I will have to focus on it. I couldn’t just expect to be told what to do, like I had done when Levi had been alive.

“Paolo, there’s someone at your window. Do you know her?”

191 A girl, thin and small-breasted, wearing fitted Capri pants, sneakers and a fitted sleeveless shirt, peered into the window. She had cropped sandy blonde hair and freckles. I didn’t recognize her, even though I had met her once before.

“She must have me mistaken with somebody else. I’ve never seen her before.”

“She thinks she knows you. Should I let her in?”

“Yes, yes, let her in. Of course...”

Joey pulled the lock and opened the door. Within seconds I felt as if she had flitted into

Occham’s Razor and insisted. What she was insisting on, I was not sure.

“Yes?” I said.

“My name is Natasha. You gave me your card in Piazza Trastevere. You told me to call you in a few weeks, said you might have a job for me, then. I was selling the sand art and the candles. Don’t you remember?”

I shook my head no. I did remember, but I didn’t want her working in my store with me.

Attractive, young girls made me nervous. I could not deal with their kind of distraction. She slid a backpack off her shoulder, intending to pull out the card I had given her that day in the piazza.

Why had I been so friendly to her? It wasn’t like me to initiate conversations with strangers.

Livia had been trying on hats and shouting across the piazza. It was her brash yelling that had made me want to get away. I had not wanted to be cold, and so I had given her my card, but I had never expected her to actually come and find me.

“Actually, I think I do remember,” I said.

She looked up at me, holding the partially open backpack in her hands. “Good,” she said.

“What about you, though? Are you reliable? Do you have a reliable way to get here?

Where do you live?”

192 “Oh, I’m very reliable. I live in Testacchio, but I’m moving out. I’ll be moving to

Trastevere by the end of this month. That’s why I need this job.”

“What’s the rush? Is someone chasing you?”

“No rush,” she said. “I live there with my mother. I’ve lived with my mother since I was

born, and I think I’m just ready for a little independence.”

“Apartments are expensive in Rome. You’ll need money. Bookstore jobs don’t pay much.”

“It’s just a studio. A student lived there, but now she’s studying abroad for a year. I may share it with a girl I know, or if I can afford to, I may live there by myself.” She’ll need money, I thought again. I did not want to hire someone who needed money too much. This was a new part of me, distrustful of others, miserly; I wanted to pay her as little as I had been paid, so that she would know what it was to feel unsure. It was an attitude that had brought out so much bitterness in my youth, the haves relishing their have states while doing nothing to help the have- nots, and now I found myself becoming one of them. Fourteen years ago, when I had walked into Occham’s Razor, I had been anxious, insistent, needy, and yet how desperately I had tried to seem professional, hardworking and reliable. Our similar backgrounds made me want to be harder on her rather than easier. I really did not want her working with me. I wanted to forget that period in my life, but her presence would force me to remember.

“Look, you couldn’t do much right now.”

“Are you sure? It looks like you could use a lot of help.”

Joey would not always be here with me, and once Joey wasn’t here, we would work alone together. It was a bad idea, it just was. Even Joey knew it.

193 “No references,” he said in English, so she could not understand. “Paolo, I don’t mean to sound cynical, but she’s not related.”

“I know, Joey, but I am going to need help, and no one else has applied.”

“Well, you haven’t advertised.”

“Once we get everything set up, we’ll do that kind of hiring, but right now I’ll be glad for the extra hand.”

Besides, flat-chested women get things done, I thought to myself. Livia was flat-chested, and when I was a baby, she had bowled over pedestrians with my stroller. I need someone like that in Occham’s Razor, and I don’t want to test my relationship with Sandy in that way. I want her to be an escape from work. Besides, Sandy is a person of abstractions, but Natasha, well, she seems practical.

Sandy knocked on the window pane of Occham’s Razor. A cross wind from Via

Nazionale blew her black bandanna over her head. She had put Ivan in a baby carrier, and he whimpered and barked from within the baby carrier wrapped around her neck. Her blue eyes scanned the store, as she knocked repeatedly.

“We’re almost there now, schnookums. Mommy’s going to put you down soon, and you can roam around. You were very brave today. Daddy’s going to be very proud of you. No, I can’t see Daddy. I’m looking, but I just don’t see him.”

She had been so adamant about her birth control. She had wanted us both to be secure in our identities, but now that I felt secure in my own person, I was becoming less sure about hers.

Her identity seemed to be in flux. She was going motherly on me.

“Joey, it’s Sandy,” I said.

194 Neither one of us moved. It was as if we had been caught doing something we weren’t supposed to be doing, as if she had become our mother, too.

“Paolo, sweetie, open the door. I’m here with Ivan.”

“Ok, sweet pea, I’m coming,” I said.

I opened the door and Sandy, holding our dog, entered the space. She looked about the room and frowned. I think she had not expected it to look like such a hole in the wall. She still expected the kind of clean and large spaces she was used to from before she got married. She was an exceedingly clean person. (Actually, before I met Sandy, I showered only twice a week.

My mother Livia still believes bathing too much dries out the skin and is bad for the scalp.)

Dirty spaces were not something she was used to. She had no smell at all, and I have never known her to sweat, not in the way that Livia or Claudia or the other women in my life sweat.

My bathing habits were almost completely overhauled under her influence.

“Why do you have him in that thing?” I asked, partly to distract her.

“It frees up my hands. You know, we, Ivan and I, needed to get out of the apartment.

Ivan got tired and kept looking back at me to see if I was still behind him. I just didn’t want to walk down Via Nazionale without him close to me, and so this was the best way for us to travel.”

She unhooked the baby carrier and laid Ivan down on the dark, tiled floor. I waited for

Natasha to ooh and ahh about how cute our puppy was, but she only looked at Joey, Sandy and then at me, and made no comment on the dog.

“Hello,” said Sandy, nodding and introducing herself. “Joey, you didn’t tell me you had a new girlfriend.”

“No, I don’t. This is…I’m sorry, what’s your name?”

“Natasha,” I interrupted.

195 I don’t know why I put my hand on her back as I said it; afterward I realized that this must have looked a little strange to Sandy. Her blue eyes gave me an angry stare. But I haven’t done anything wrong, I thought, and felt equally indignant.

“Natasha’s interested in working in the bookstore,” I said, trying to clarify.

“Yes,” said Natasha. “I’m moving into my own apartment, so I need a job, a steadier income. If Paolo would give me a job, I could feel surer about things.”

She looked at me as she said this last line, calling me by my first name in front of my wife. It felt like the first time another woman had called me by my first name since I had gotten married, uncomfortably personal. Couldn’t everything to do with the women in my life who were neither mother, wife, nor relation be professional? Ivan had wandered to one of the corners and was sniffing around. He would pee in here, too, like he had peed everywhere else.

“You know,” said Sandy to Natasha, “improving the bookstore was my idea. My money supports us totally right now. Paolo worked in a bookstore when I first met him. You would have that in common with him, if you started working here.”

Natasha’s jaw was clenched, and she glared at Sandy. I felt as if I was watching a test of wills, until, luckily, she flinched and looked away. “Well, I’ve got to be getting along. Let me leave my card with you.”

Joey and Sandy watched as she pressed her card in my hand, and I smirked awkwardly.

Most men were able to handle business relations with women, but I was not casual enough. As she shut the door behind her, Ivan trotted toward the front door, barking as if a friend had just left him. Sandy turned away, disgusted, and Joey wanted to know whether either one of us was getting hungry.

196

CHAPTER 18

LUCK IS A FIGURE OF SPEECH

Renato’s father’s book, The Neuroses of Power, had been published the week before. It

would make the bestseller list by the end of the week and would remain there for the next

fourteen weeks. Already members of parliament were banding together to file their lawsuit of

breach of patient/doctor contract. I had not yet picked up a copy, but I had read a review of it in

the paper. In the name of research, Renato Sr. had studied the behavioral changes of a handful of

his parliamentarian patients who were almost all having the same nightmare: they were having

dinner with their family in an expensive restaurant when the police burst in, handcuffed them,

and took them away, to the great shame of their family. Many were also suffering similar side

effects: eye and nose twitching, sleeplessness, moodiness, depression, drastic changes in

physical appearance, whether by growing a beard or removing facial hair, even new speech

impediments.

I was very anxious to know how Renato’s father’s newfound celebrity had affected my psychiatrist’s practice, but because Renato steered the conversation in another direction, I never did have a chance to ask her. She had put in a bright red wall-to-wall rug that matched the

Rothko painting and taken off her wedding band. (Was she getting a divorce?) The sycamore trees outside her office windows were now in full bloom, and Renato finally had pulled the shades, so I could look out at the trees and the park across the street. It was strange to have a

197 relationship with someone who knew everything about you, while you knew almost nothing

about them. It made me invent all sorts of narratives about her life outside of our sessions. I

imagined her passionately hurling dishware across the room in protest of her husband’s

indiscretions. Then, I thought, no, she would be married to a psychiatrist like herself, a tiny man,

and they would discuss cases over the dinner table and only do it when they absolutely had to.

No, she would stay single well into her thirties, growing more concerned about her biological clock, until one day taking a younger lover and shocking everyone by marrying him. Now, they were divorcing and he was trying to take her money. I did not think she was happy. I always felt there was a mixture of pain and regret in her eyes. Had she given up her one great love to pursue psychiatry? It could not be easy for a woman to be too analytical or intellectual.

“Have you been keeping your journal?” she asked.

“I have nothing to say. I start to write something, but then I don’t really feel like I want to commit the thought to paper. Yeah, that’s what it is. It just feels like too big of a commitment.”

“Are you still having nightmares?”

“Not exactly, no. They’ve changed recently. I dream about Occham’s Razor. Last night

I dreamed the ceiling tiles in Occham’s Razor were falling on us, and I had to get everyone out before the roof caved in.”

“So, you’ve become more at ease with Luca’s memory?”

At times she felt like a disembodied voice to me. I mean, I knew I was looking at a woman, and that this woman had a body, but her style of psychoanalysis, the large office, the fiery red carpets, and the cold, orderly furnishings, she reminded me of the opposite of the girl who had wanted a job at Occham’s Razor yesterday, the girl who was full of plans, desires and

198 schemes and who was recognizable to me and threatening, too. I think what set me off most

about my meetings with Renato was her perfunctory tone, as if she were doing a job, adding the comment at the appropriate moment, but not really there. What was the point of telling her how

I was feeling? There were other ways to dispose of our disposable income.

“I don’t mean this to sound insulting, but I feel like I’m not getting anywhere.”

“I think you’re making headway. When you first came to me, you were only sleeping three to four hours a night, and you were having nightmares. Now you sleep through the night, and your nightmares are less frequent and no longer about your uncle. It’s up to you what you want to do, but I think you would be making a mistake to quit now.”

“Renato, I have to tell you I’m sick to death of explaining.”

She looked at me as if waiting to hear more. No, I thought, that is it, that is all I’ve got. I knew I was behaving like an ass, but I also wanted her to do a better job, to ask better questions.

I was fed up with detachment. How many days and nights are taken up with explanations, articulations and extrapolations, and to what end? I could feel very well in the moment, but no longer saw the point of unpacking stale old feelings and examining them. She looked me in the eyes again. I saw the curve of a smile cross her face.

“I’m interested in exploring why you feel the need to make this relationship more like your other intimate relationships.”

I have been staring at her pointy knee caps for four months, but I have never seen her legs uncrossed. Only rarely, perhaps once or twice have I seen her smile or her jaw relax from its tight clenching. Did she have hips? The dull rust jacket she wore covered her midsection.

Would she wear a two piece or a one piece bathing suit, and did she have hips? I felt as if these two questions were even more pressing than finding out how she felt about her father’s book or

199 about her failed marriage. A body is important, I thought. It roots us to the physical world.

Denying the body or detaching oneself from it is a danger, but in being so professional this is

exactly what she was doing.

“Renato, I don’t think you understand. Sometimes I feel like a darkness hangs over my

life; it’s hard for me to explain because I’m not even sure I understand it, but it’s like a force, a negative force, pulling on me. I’ll be 35 next month, and sometimes it’s as if the past fifteen years of my existence have been blighted by this cloud. Do you know what that means? It’s like a part of me is already dead. It troubles my sleep, makes me feel apart from other people.”

“Maybe you still haven’t done enough mourning.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that, maybe it’s something you have to make more public. Maybe you have to decide what you think happens to the dead, whether they can see you or hear you and how this fits in your own loss. Otherwise, you may always feel unresolved about things.”

“Renato, you don’t know, you weren’t there. I know Luca’s death brought him no peace, but I also know that he spread that dark cloud to everyone else who touched him. Most people who knew him don’t talk about it because they have to function, so they can’t feel. But I sometimes think that, well, that all the darkness passes from spirit to spirit, and that, when Luca was murdered, something closed inside me, and I don’t think I can open it again.”

“I detect a spiritual slant to your view today. Frankly, it surprises me. You were so skeptical about Sandy’s Catholic faith, so I had assumed you weren’t a believer.”

The clock Renato had placed between us ticked. Her large and modern office wreaked of opulence. How can a person make such a comfortable living without producing anything? How can the posing of so many questions yield so much material comfort? She had followed in her

200 father’s footsteps, and that had made things easier. You’re one of them now, I said to myself.

You don’t have to feel like the underdog anymore. You can let your resentments go. She pulled

her hair behind her ears and clenched her jaw. Just as she is testing me, I am testing her, I

thought. Did she also think of herself as a fraud? On bad days, maybe? I knew a place existed,

and that place had taken my uncle. Since then I had felt bereft and temporary, but those who felt

permanent, who were they?

“Renato, I’m not talking about the Catholic Church. I’m talking about a place beyond

this life that still affects what happens in this life. Certain deaths—murders, suicides, and violent

deaths—change the make-up of the physical world and the kharmic make-up of everyone who

knew the person who died. We feel linked to that person and that has nothing to do with

attending mass on Sundays or putting ten thousand lire in the hat being passed around.”

“I think you expect too much,” she said finally.

“Dr. Renato, have you ever thought you could fly?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“When I was six, I was so sure I could fly I broke my arm trying. I jumped from the top

of the monkey bars and crashed right onto my side. Even now I sometimes think I can fly above

a situation and just watch it. Do you know what I mean? Dr Renato, am I really unlucky? I

thought that Sandy would change my luck, but now I think she has just allowed me to cover up

the wound, so that other people can’t see it.”

“Luck is a figure of speech, Paolo. It’s a way of explaining rising and falling fortunes, sickness, unhappiness, winning lottery tickets, but that is chance, not luck. Gamblers are not lucky, so much as skilled. You expect too much of psychiatry, and you’re wrong to see it so cynically. You consider my professionalism a sign of lack of feeling, but while you’re my client,

201 I put my feelings aside, and try to use my training to understand where you want our sessions to go and whether that direction will ultimately be helpful to you.”

The buzzer on Renato’s half-moon clock sounded. Renato stood up and offered me a hand. I looked down at the fiery red carpet and tried to imagine Renato cursing and trying to get the stain out of her Kelim rug; or at her father’s book opening, giving her son a juice bottle; or pushing a stroller through a crowded grocery store in sweat pants and no make-up; or at a crap table, betting double or nothing, spitting into the die and tossing. The last image was the only one that I could only in grainy, unfocused black and white. In it Renato had no face.

202

CHAPTER 19

A HAT CAN BE A LIBERATING THING

A few days later, while Sandy marched off to her religion class at the Institute of the

Nazarene, I heard the news on television that Giovanni Falcone, the most important investigator in the anti-Mafia commission, and his wife had been killed by a car bomb in Palermo. Before his death he had coaxed the confession out of some key turncoats, leading to the arrests of more than

300 Mafiosi. That same night the politicians closed ranks to elect Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, a devout

Catholic, as the new president, and the Italian economy tanked. Carlo Ciampi, the governor of the Central Bank, warned that another fiscal collapse would call Italy’s membership in the EU in question. I had never known so much bad news could make me feel so good. The Mafia was challenging the state, insisting that it was in control, and the people were turning against them.

Later that evening, Sandy came home cursing that night’s guest speaker, and I felt again that things were looking up.

“What a fucking idiot! We had this guest speaker tonight, and he was the most confused moron I’ve heard in a long time. He made God sound like a stealth bomber, Big Brother nut case. I mean, here we are talking about divine providence, and, then, this Brother Francesco comes in, and he doesn’t leave any time for Q & A, he just rambles on about God being in control of everything.”

“What was the talk on?”

203 “Why things happen, you know, why good things happen to bad people, and why bad things happen to good people.”

It was just what I had been discussing with Renato on Thursday. Why were some people lucky, and others not? Was there a way to make oneself lucky? If so, how? Renato’s responses had been reasonable but inadequate, and had left me cold. Could, then, I really blame Sandy for turning to the magic of the church? Could I really blame her for turning to Father Dante when the people in her immediate surroundings were so full of questions, but so lacking in answers?

“I could tell Father Dante was annoyed because he kept asking the speaker to elaborate, but after a while he realized there was no elaboration, that was it, and then he didn’t say anything else. God controls the winds and the lightning, the snow and the rain. God directs the stars in their course”—She made large, expansive hand gestures—“There is nothing that passes unless

God has ordained it to pass. Oh, and this was classic…even a simple thing like going to

McDonald’s for dinner will not happen unless God has ordained it to pass.”

“But these are all the things you liked about Catholicism a couple of months ago—what happened?”

“God gave Job all these trials, right? He hardened the Pharaoh’s heart, so he wouldn’t let the Israelites go. God does everything for his own glory. He’s just a bully, and it’s all about his will and his glory.”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you earlier. That’s why I hate the Job story. You told me God took away all of Job’s possessions, his wife and his kids to make sure Job was paying attention. What kind of a God does that? But, you haven’t forgotten the bet, have you?”

“What bet?”

“The bet we made at the Feast of St. Joseph’s”

204 “Oh, that one, no, I haven’t forgotten. This is just a temporary setback. This guy was just pretending to have answers when he didn’t have any, that’s all.”

Sandy had by now almost completely redecorated our apartment. Even though the apartment had the exact same layout as Livia’s place, it had by now become its own distinct entity. Thick black wooden entertainment center, the Japanese calligraphy prints, the sturdy black CD stand, Sandy’s 434 CDs, alphabetized and catalogued according to genre, the eggshell colored walls (which Sandy had had painted in the first week), the copper rack holding the

French no stick pans, the cast iron pots, the minimal black framed queen size bed shipped from

New York, the black leather Ottoman in the corner, the dark stained hardwood floors. By night the smell of fresh breads and pastries seeped through the apartment’s dark shutters from the bakery below. When I could not sleep, my favorite sound was the hiss of the #64 bus down Via

Cicerone because it meant someone else was up, too, and like me, he was returning to the same place he had driven past many hundreds of times before.

Livia’s apartment, one floor below, was roughly the same size, and yet the only thing the two apartments had in common was the care both women had taken with their various collections, Livia with her video collection, Sandy with her CDs. Livia loved things cramped.

In the living room she had taped a Doors Poster on one wall and furnished it with a futon and two rust-colored beanbags. In my old room, where once there had been metal beds and an old globe, now there was a makeshift plywood table with a sewing machine on it, a long coat rack of her designs, fabrics everywhere, and an old Sony boom box in the corner. She never had had any dirty dishes in the sink because she hated doing dishes so much that she used paper plates and plastic cups. The entire apartment had had the same wall-to-wall beige carpeting since the seventies. When I was ten, she assembled her own bookshelf and put her then small collection

205 of videos on it. Since that time, two more bookshelves followed, but no books were ever placed on them because Livia did not read. I have never once seen her read a book from cover-to-cover.

Really, I’m not even sure she knew how to read. I think finally this was the reason she never really did make it as an actress. She could not sit still long enough to study her lines. But costume design required consultations and collaborations. Finally, she did not have to really study, and no one would ever know.

Sandy collapsed into the couch, propping her feet on the glass coffee table.

“Did Ivan miss her Mommy? Has Ivan been a good little boy for Daddy?”

Ivan wagged his tail furiously, his backside knocking against the coffee table in time.

“Have you taken him out?”

“Not yet, no, Sandy, I’m afraid he might hurt himself. Can you move the table back or something?”

Sandy pushed the table further away from Ivan. The phone rang, and I, by then in the kitchen, picked up.

“Hello”

Sandy picked up in the living room.

“Hello.”

“Hello, Sandy?”

“Yes.”

“Father Dante here.”

“Oh, Father Dante! How are things?”

“Fine, very well, thank you. Yourself?”

“Good, good.”

206 “Sandy, umm, I’ve been thinking—”

“Yes?”

“I didn’t really think Brother Francesco answered your question as well as he should have.”

“Really? So, you’ve had a chance to think about it?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And…I think Pontius Pilate’s decision is a case in which his free will was limited.

There are times when one’s power to choose is more limited than at other times. The God that we worship believes in degrees. Your question made me think of a court case in New York, I don’t know whether you followed it? A gang of boys raped a jogger and left her battered body there in Central Park. The defense argued that the boys could not be responsible for their actions because they came from broken homes, had no money and lived in the projects. Coming from that background, their actions were understandable. But the notion of divine providence makes

Catholics hold the exact opposite view. God’s providence forces us to assume responsibility.

Genetics, environment and education have nothing to do with that responsibility. This is the

Catholic concept of free will. You have to look at these things case by case, like you’re doing.

Blanket statements are just too easy to find holes in.”

I had not eavesdropped on a phone conversation in almost a decade. The very concept of tapping my wife’s calls made me feel freakish and pathetic. Just then, Ivan came into the kitchen and began pulling on the phone chord in the kitchen and barking. I could barely hear anything.

“Paolo, could you hang up in the kitchen?”

207 Ivan growled and lunged from one side of the kitchen door to the other. I hung up the phone. Ivan stayed in the same position, poised for attack. He was playing, but to me it seemed like he was trying to keep me from getting into the living room of my own home, behaving as if he didn’t know me.

“Ivan, play nice. Nice!”

He barked again.

“You know that’s not the only incident I have trouble with. To be honest, Brother

Francesco’s lecture touched on some things I’ve been struggling with lately. You know, Father

Dante, it’s always so good to talk to you because, well, I feel you won’t judge me or see the questions themselves as a sign of lack of faith. You know, when I was a kid, I can remember studying the Exodus, and it just boggled my mind that God could harden the Pharaoh’s heart like that. The plague of the locusts, the plague of the frogs, all these plagues that caused the

Egyptians so much suffering, it was just so hard for me to wrap my head around loving a God like that…No, I never did. In fact, I think I left the church because of not being able to understand.”

Sandy had taken Ivan for a walk, but where had she put his leash? We had wrapped the entire leash in aluminum foil because otherwise Ivan would have chewed up all the leather.

Where had she put it? Under the bed? No. Next to the coat rack? No.

I walked back through the living room one more time, scanning the area beneath the couch and the entertainment center. The leash was by Sandy’s feet under the coffee table.

“Yes, yes, I know. That’s what they always say. Even if God hardened Pharaoh’s heart,

Pharaoh still chose not to let the Israelites go. But all that just sounds like an excuse, doesn’t it?

208 Sandy was nodding, and I was trying to pry the leash free from the leg of the table. In the

meantime Ivan had found a strip of leash not covered in aluminum foil, and he was tugging on it,

growling and barking.

“Paolo, can you take him outside? I’m on the phone.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do. Ivan, let me put your leash on.”

Ivan barked again, stretching his back legs as if ready to spring forward. I couldn’t

believe it. I was tired of the dog already, and we had only had him a couple of months.

“Father Dante, could you hold on a sec?”

She laid down the phone, gave me a look like I was incompetent, yanked the leash away

from Ivan and clipped the latch around the collar; then, in the same breath, she picked up the

receiver again and continued talking.

“No, no, you’re not interrupting me at all, really. You know, I don’t get a chance to talk about these things as much as I would like. Yes, I totally agree. No, I haven’t seen that movie in a while. I can’t even remember what it was about.”

I have never so badly wanted to get out of a space, and I have never felt more superfluous. The dog had shifted the distribution of power in Sandy’s favor. She knew how to handle him. He loved and trusted her more. But I had never done anything to hurt the dog. I did not want to sleep with him at night, but that hardly constitutes abuse. Why was I suddenly so suspect, so outside, in both the dog’s and Sandy’s eyes? Alright, so sometimes when Sandy left me alone with Ivan, I didn’t really play with him. Once in a while, I even—let’s be fair— ignored Ivan to read the papers, but what was he, a prince? And what was I, his handmaid?

209 On Via Cicerone Ivan and I passed an attractive couple, in similar long Burberry coats and designer eyewear, walking their corgi dog, leaning into one another, as if talking intimately.

I wondered whether this thing that I thought we had, whether it was a sham. It had been such a perfect escape. It had been a way to explore another consciousness, another place, not spend my life unpacking shopping bags and sorting titles in Occham’s Razor. But by now I desperately wanted to see Occham’s Razor again, to clean it up and sweep the dirt out. I could not wait to set up my office in there. Maybe I could buy a broom at Campo dei Fiori and take a cab from there to Occham’s Razor. I never quite had gotten into the habit of taking cabs. We could be millionaires many thousands of times over, and I think I should still go by foot. Ahead was the

Palazzo di Giustizia, the baroque stone building at the southern end of my street. There

Giovanni Falcone had worked in the last months of his life. His transferal from Sicily had isolated him from the other anti-Mafia investigators and made his assassination easier. Ivan trotted ahead, ready to hurl himself to his death by crossing Via Belli without stopping. I yanked on his leash. Why had I taken this route? This way depressed me. It seemed more important than ever to make it to Occham’s Razor. I had not done a solid day’s work since moving to Italy.

Errands and time-fillers had taken up my entire existence. I had this image, then, of Renato pushing two chairs closer and closer together. Finally, giving up, she sits on my lap, breathing her cigarette breath on me, “Maybe you haven’t mourned quite enough. Maybe you need to mourn a little more publicly.”

At the Ponto Umberto I, the statues of Bernini’s winged angels rose above the rails of the

Ponto S. Angelo, their backs turned toward me. A half-moon lit the Tiber. My eyes followed the curved Via Zanardelli, the dark-shuttered, Spanish-tiled, dilapidated palazzi, the shrunken cars, the bell-towered churches, the domed-roof buildings. Bernini’s angels faced away from

210 me, their backs turned on me, and Renato was pushing my leather chair closer and closer to hers.

I passed so many elegant people, and felt again as I were too ugly and too average to be one of them. Sandy would see through me very soon. In fact, she had already begun to see through me.

I must have walked like that for a while because when I regained an awareness of my surroundings I was in Piazza Navona, and Natasha was yelling out my name.

“Paolo! Paolo!”

In rolled-up jeans, a black parka vest, and canvas sneakers, she smiled broadly. Her brown eyes insisted on eye contact, and I remembered again why I had given her my card that day. She made you feel needed. She insisted on needing you. She began to chatter. Ivan had liked her the other day when she visited Occham’s Razor, and he wagged his tail again now.

“Paolo, it’s so good to see you. I’m watching a table again over at Campo dei Fiori. I’ve got some of my own things for sale, too. You’ll have to come over and take a look. I’m really not even supposed to leave the table, but I was dying for a cup of coffee and a pee, so I got another vendor to watch my stuff. Let’s just hope he doesn’t close up and leave all my stuff to be pillaged. How are you, Paolo? Walk with me. You look tired.”

“I’m fine,” I lied. “It’s good to see you.”

Behind her head the yellowish-brown baroque Church of Sant’Agnese in Agone loomed.

From out of the Fontana del Moro, the sea gods blew their horns. A pigeon landed on the statue of a tight-bunned, standing Moor pivoting in our direction. Kids chased each other around the fountain. A mime stared past a group of people trying to make him laugh. A skinny old man in shorts, boom-box ducktaped to his basket, biked around the Fontana dei Fiumi with a crazy look on his face. I bent down to pet Ivan, and asked Natasha what it was exactly that she made.

211 “Accessories, hats, scarves, belts, I design all my own things. I get the ideas from old films, name the style after my favorites.”

“And who are your favorites?”

“You mean actresses?”

“Sure.”

“Still living or dead?”

“Whichever. Like, what hats have you got now, anyway?”

“Let’s see, there’s the Marlene Dietrich beret in white, the Twiggy cap in red, the Sofia

Loren beach hat in yellow. I’ve got some men’s hats, too. You might look good in my

Humphrey Bogart felt hat or my Marlon Brando “The Wild One” cap. You should check it out.

You know a hat can be a very liberating thing. It can free you to try on another personality.

Maybe you’ve always felt you’ve been misunderstood. Maybe you’ve longed to be the strong, silent type.”

“What makes you think I’m not the strong, silent type?”

“Your eyes,” she said, and tapped my shoulder again. “Come on, walk with me. I’ve got to pee, and I don’t want that guy watching my table to get any ideas.”

At the café, I waited, petting Ivan and holding her bag. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was doing. I mean, I knew I was being flirted with, but I wasn’t quite sure why I was willing to follow her all over the square. I only knew that it was as if I was starting fresh, beginning something, but at the same time, continuing something familiar, like a conversation about nothing I had been longing to have, but hadn’t quite managed, at least not in the last few months.

When she came out of the café, she was shaking her head.

212 “No toilet paper and no soap. One of these days I’m going to write a guidebook to the best and worst toilets in the city. I figure with all my experience I should by now have a full database that includes all of the center and at least five other districts. Walk with me.”

As she linked arms with me, a portrait artist shouted to us that he would paint the “two lovers’” portraits. Hordes of teens, dressed in vests and jeans like Natasha, huddled in sex- segregated circles. Emissaries sent word from one group to the other, while the other group looked on.

“So,” she said, “tell me your deepest darkest secret.”

“My deepest, darkest secret? Hmm, let’s see…I don’t really buy retail. You probably thought I did, right?”

“Lame! I mean a real secret. Tell me something you’ve never told anyone before. Hurry, in five minutes this moment will be over, and it’ll be too late. Besides, one day, Paolo, people will stop wanting to know your secrets, and then what?”

We passed the Pasquino, a Greek statue on the south end of the Piazza Navona, so worn out. It looked as if it had been under a lake for a couple of millennia. At the height of papal times, when freedom of speech was discouraged, people hung banners and maxims around the

Pasquino’s shoulders, criticizing the pope. Now it was known as one of the “talking statues” of

Rome. Usually some underweight, half-sane person was rattling on about the bourgeoisie in front of it. Or some shaggy-haired teenager was ranting against the American imperial power.

Or, once in a blue moon, some kid or another would stand next to the statue and try to rap.

“Look,” she said. “We’re passing the Pasquino. That means it’s time to talk.”

“Can we just drop it? You’re making me uncomfortable.”

“Paolo, aren’t you going to see my creations?”

213 A vendor knelt beside the small sacks of potpourri laid upon a white cloth, her blonde

braid falling over her shoulder. Two tourists sniffed a bag of potpourri. A woman made animal

figures out of palms. Ivan heard the barking of puppies, stopped and began barking himself.

The animal shelter would be giving away their puppies up ahead at Piazza San Pantaleo.

“He doesn’t like crowds,” I said to Natasha.

“So, pick him up.”

As I tried to pick up Ivan, a woman bumped me from behind, and I lost my balance for a

second. When I finally did manage to pick up Ivan, he was squirming and kicking.

“Would you have time to get a drink with me?” I said.

“I can have my hats packed up in a half an hour. Where should we meet?”

“La Vineria.”

It had all happened so fast. I had wanted to get Ivan out of the crowds, a young, cute girl

had flirted with me, and I had almost lost my balance, but before I had had time to think myself

out of it, I had invited Natasha on what sounded like a date. I watched her follow the crowds

south toward Corso Vittorio Emanuele, and I almost, just almost, shouted after her, “No, I didn’t

mean that. I meant I have to get home. Sandy will be wondering where I went.” As she became

smaller and smaller, I knew it was too late, and the more dumbly I stood there, being brushed by

people on both sides, the more I was beginning to remind myself of that talking statue Pasquino, silent while other people threw angry maxims around my shoulders.

A half an hour later, Natasha had not yet showed. Ivan was curled up beneath my feet napping. Inside a busy crowd of people pushed their way toward the bar. In front of me a street band played “Oh when the saints,” and street vendors packed up their tables. I had ordered a

214 carafe of wine and started drinking. I was feeling more relaxed, happier. It was the first time I

had been out since coming back to Rome. It felt good to be a part of a city’s relaxation, and, for

the first time in a long time, I was glad that we had come back.

When Natasha came up to the table, she was modeling her “Wild One” cap for me. Her

dark blonde hair was completely covered up by the cap, and without looking closely, she could

have passed for a boy. She had freckles on her nose and under her eyes. Her brown eyes flashed

with excitement. She moved quickly, as if it had been a strenuous activity to pack up all the hats

and get here in thirty minutes.

“Where’d you put them?” I asked.

“I use my mom’s car, cover everything up with a blanket, so no one’ll steal them.”

I poured her a glass of wine. All of my anxieties about the nature of this meeting started

to fade away. It felt like a meeting between two old friends, faintly sexual and yet still

comfortable. She sat down in the chair next to me, so that both of us could look out at the

piazza, and then she just began chatting, free-associating whatever passed through her head.

“You know I used to have a problem with stealing. …I mean I wasn’t exactly a

kleptomaniac, but I was close. I once walked out of a department store with an entire set of

china, and I don’t even have my own kitchen. I didn’t even want the china. Can you believe

that? I started with rings at flea markets, umbrellas people left behind, and I gradually worked my way up. Actually, most of the clothes I have on now aren’t paid for.”

“But you live with your mother, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, didn’t she question when you came into the apartment with new things all the time?”

215 “My mother thought I was sleeping around. She still thinks I’m sleeping around. That’s

why I’m moving out. She’s after me all the time. My mother’s a very miserable woman, but is

that my fault? She wants me to be her salvation, to go to school and study, but I’m fed up with

that way of life. Once, just to prove it to myself, I decided to act like my mother wanted me to. I

made top marks and then I said, ‘There, now I’ve showed you I can do it’, and I quit school

altogether.”

“So, you never graduated?”

“No, but I may still do it. I don’t know yet. I’ll see how much I like working. If I don’t like it, I can always go back.”

“You’re not going to walk out with half my merchandise if I take you on at Occham’s

Razor, are you?”

“I don’t steal from people I like, just from department stores or from people I don’t like or don’t know.”

She thought the thought and then uttered it. What was the point of telling me about her kleptomania? To make her more interesting, to prove she wasn’t like everyone else, to shock me? She could take care of herself, but how different that was from the way she had looked at me when we met at Piazza Navona, as if she desperately needed me, as if her life depended on it.

“You know, I once went to Greece by myself with 20,000 lire in my pocket. I stayed there a week and came back with 1,500 lire even. It’s a great feeling of freedom to be in another country. You feel so inside out, and I love that. I love having to rely on people’s kindness and being surprised when people treat you well, even if they have nothing to gain from it.”

Was she really that romantic? Did she want me to see this as a challenge? If she liked stealing and being unknown, wasn’t all this her seduction? Did she want to steal non-material

216 things, too? To be anonymous and know things that no one else could know? Did she really only want to steal from people she didn’t like and be unrecognized for it?

“What about you, Paolo? Have you ever gone somewhere without a lire to your name, just for the sake of doing it?”

Natasha took a sip of wine and waited. She would want something more spectacular, someone who could identify with her rebelliousness, but I had nothing of the kind to tell her.

Too docile and too pliant, always too docile and too pliant.

“Um, well, I really didn’t vacation that much when I was growing up. My mother liked to send me to my grandfather’s in Sicily, but I stopped wanting to go there because there wasn’t too much to do there, and I didn’t know anyone my own age to hang out with.”

“So, you’ve never just gone somewhere just to do it, just for the hell of it?”

I was starting to feel uncomfortable with her emphasis on the words “do it.” In the square people were lining up to see the nine o’clock shows at Cinema Farnese.

“I didn’t have enough money when I had the time, and now, I guess I don’t have the time.”

“So, you’ve got the money now?”

“Well, yes, I guess I do.”

The street vendor selling aprons of naked women had cleared off his table. He called to another vendor, who had been selling parkas for 30,000 lire, asking where he had parked. In the center of the square, the statue, a Darth-Vader-like Giordano Bruno, in a cowled habit, stared at his feet.

“You know, my mother’s wrong about my being unclean. It’s not like I’ve had hundreds of men,” she said.

217 “Maybe she’s just worried about you.”

“Worried about me? She’s worried about herself! She’s so insecure about her life and her parenting that she thinks everything’s riding on this.”

“So, you’re not interested in men?” I asked.

“It’s not that I’m not interested, it’s just I don’t think it’s worth the effort. Sex ruins people, it ruined my mother, and I’m out to protect myself, but she doesn’t know what she’s doing, so I can’t respect her.”

“You’re harsh. What…do you wear leather underwear or something?”

“Cotton, why?”

“I don’t know.”

I honestly don’t know why I said that. I liked that she was smart about sex, and that she wasn’t flirting with me now. I felt like she was being honest with me, and it seemed the first genuine, non-combative conversation I had had in months. It seemed like we were communing, but she was also doing me the favor of not demanding. She made me feel needed. She made me see the world through fresher eyes. She was not Sandy, and I loved that.

“Look, Natasha, I’ve got to be getting back home, but I would love to see you again sometime, like this, just us.”

I dropped 20,000 lire on the table. She looked up at me, surprised, and again needy, as if she wanted more encouragement, a compliment, something, anything to make her feel noticed.

“And you look great in that cap,” I said.

The carafe of wine was still half full when Ivan and I turned north down Via Baullari, finally ready to take a cab to Occham’s Razor.

218

CHAPTER 20

YOU DON’T KNOW ME EITHER

By the time Ivan and I had returned from Occham’s Razor, Sandy had been fast asleep.

Her copy of The Name of the Rose was bookmarked at page twenty on the night stand, and by the book was a notebook, a diary she had begun to sort out her many frustrations with the life I had given her. I fell asleep in my clothes imagining Sandy’s large and generous cursive becoming an angry, heavily-slanted scrawl. In the diary she accused me of everything from sleeping with my mother to marrying her for her money. I dreamed I was a soldier for Tomaso Razzo who worked out of Occham’s Razor. I killed a man, dropped him in a well, collected the money, and then went to fuck a girl. When I looked down, I noticed my clothes were soaked, and I knew that the water from the well had splashed up so high that it had soaked me through and through.

“Paolo?”

“Yes?”

“Dear, I’m at a loss, I’m sorry for calling so early”—Livia. Not crying, but sounding as if she was on the verge of crying—“It’s Claudia, she and Giulietta are leaving Rome. They read

in the paper that two relatives of an informer were shot yesterday, and they know that Nino is

wanted, as are his relatives. I tried to tell her I would come right over, but she didn’t want to see

me.”

“When did this happen?”

219 “Yesterday”

Sandy twisted around and curled herself back into the fetal position. I got up, walked

through the bedroom, shut the door behind me as softly as I could, and moved through the living

room into the dining room.

“You’re changing rooms, aren’t you, so Sandy can’t hear? I don’t understand why you

have to treat her like such a princess, as if she’s going to melt if she hears about a situation that isn’t all roses.”

“Ma, she’s sleeping.”

“Paolo, I’m planning on seeing Maria Rosana this afternoon, so I can see what she advises.”

“Don’t see her. What if she tells you something you don’t want to hear?”

I had always suspected Livia went out of her head last year because the astrologist had told her something disturbing about the future, and once she had known it, she had felt that her free will had been handed over.

“But I feel so helpless not knowing how to help her? If I go, maybe she’ll tell me something useful. Maybe when Claudia calls, I can give her some better advice.”

“It’s not really your business. Claudia’s been through this before. She knows how to take care of herself.”

In the background I heard Livia turning the tea kettle on. It bothered me that we were engaged in the same tasks enough for me to postpone making my coffee. I opened the front door, picked up the paper, and placed it on the long black dining room table, skimming the headlines and seeing Livia’s story in the bottom eighth of the paper. No photo, no thirty-point font headline. “Informer’s cousin and nephew shot dead in downtown Palermo,” the headline

220 read, and the two brothers were not remotely involved in the Mafia: one owned a pizza parlor; the other was an insurance salesman.

“Paolo, you’ve been keeping your windows open upstairs again. What in the world were you and Sandy talking about last night? I heard some words going back and forth about Pontius

Pilate and King David and the Beatitudes. Is this how you pass your time now, discussing the

Bible? I thought maybe some Jehovah’s Witnesses had moved into the apartment when I wasn’t looking or something.”

“You must have heard Sandy on the phone. She was talking to her instructor. But what are you doing listening, anyway?”

“How can I not hear? I try to turn on the radio to tune it out, but if the windows are open,

I can still hear every word.”

“Now there’s some information I would just as soon not have known. Look, I gotta go.

I’ll talk to you later.”

Claudia had never been my favorite person in the world. I had never really forgiven her for telling me to keep quiet about Luca’s murder. No one had told her to date that bully. No one had forced her to get knocked up by him at eighteen. But she had loved the rush of saying she was Ring’s girlfriend and then the rush of being Ring’s wife, the mother of Ring’s children. But for Giulietta, I still had some feelings. It wasn’t her fault her mother was a self-serving jerk, or that her father had picked the wrong side in the Second Mafia War. For Giulietta a normal life, working in fashion design or lingerie, would be the best possible solution. I did not hear Sandy come into the living room, but I must have felt another presence in the room because, when I turned, she was standing not far from me.

“I waited up for you last night. Where were you?”

221 Her straight dark brown bob haircut had grown out some. It reached her shoulders, and was cut in a bob. She wore white satin pajamas with light blue piping. She looked thin and tired, preoccupied about something to the point where it was wearing her out.

“Where were you?” she asked again.

“At Occham’s Razor.”

“Paolo, I need to talk to you about something, and I hope you won’t lie to me.”

“Why would I lie to you?”

She knows about the drink, I thought. Jesus, I have no alibi. Drinks, late at night with a young girl, but it was just a coincidence. I didn’t plan to have drinks with her. Why should I consider myself a criminal? Besides, I’m not sleeping with her, and this “spiritual” bent she’s cultivating, how is that any different? How it that any better? At least I don’t flaunt my flirtations with other women like she does.

“Don’t bullshit me.” Her body language reminded me of those early men found in the

Alpine glaciers. “Don’t act like I’m stupid, Paolo.”

“Alright, what’s your question?”

“Last night Joey called to tell me he and Giulietta had had a date. They were planning to go to one of those clubs in Testacchio you recommended, but when he got there, she didn’t answer the door, and two men carrying guns accused him of being a journalist for a foreign press. Said journalists made them sick. Said one of their favorite activities in the world was beating up journalists. And then wound up escorting him to the elevator. Never did hurt him.

But before he left, he noticed the light on in Giulietta’s room and a man sitting on the balcony, holding some kind of weapon in his lap. Paolo, what’s going on?”

222 Nino has sent up some of his men to guard Claudia and Giulietta, I thought. Was that possible? Did he even have men anymore? Or maybe it was Vito. Would he have enough influence to dissuade Razzo from acting out on his own mother and sister? Clearly, I knew just as little about this whole thing as Sandy did. Or, at least, I did not know anything worth knowing, just enough to unsettle me and not enough to put me at ease.

“Damn Claudia and damn Giulietta! I don’t care, and I don’t know. Sandy, this doesn’t concern us. What does this have to with Occham’s Razor? What does this have to do with our lives? Tell Joey she’s not right for him. Tell him Giulietta and Claudia are moving away, and they won’t be back for awhile. Ask him to do her a favor by not telling anyone else about any of this.”

“Paolo, do you know how that sounds? Do you know what you’re saying?”

“Yes, and that’s another thing. Neither you nor I know anything, and that’s for your own safety and for the safety of Giulietta and Claudia, too. We don’t know anything, you hear me?

We don’t talk to journalists, and we don’t get ourselves or anyone we know into a dangerous situation.”

“Paolo, you’re scaring me!”

“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s just about time something touched your fairy tale world. You think it’s all roses, Sandy. You think there isn’t any badness in the world. It can’t all be a Vatican address in Latin.”

“I still think I have a right to know. What’ll I tell Joey? Paolo, he likes her. No one has asked me, but if someone did, I couldn’t even answer the simplest questions about your family because you don’t tell me anything. Do you know how strange that is? Do you know how distrustful that makes me?”

223 The kettle had started to boil, and I was glad to have an excuse to get out of her presence.

She had become more introverted, terrified of speaking in large groups, uncomfortable with the language. She once told me she felt as if she were being wasted, as if they could not get to know the “real” her, but Father Dante talked more abstractly. He didn’t treat her as a “foreigner.” He appreciated her questions. I removed the kettle, shut off the burner, and was just looking for the coffee press when she came into the kitchen.

“What’s going on? I won’t talk to any journalists, but I still think I need to know.”

When I touched the body of the tea kettle, the pain raced through my finger. The skin toughened up and turned purple.

“Sandy, I can’t tell you right now. Why do you want to know so badly?”

Her bare feet touched the tile floor. She’ll get a cold, I thought, but I did not say anything. Pouring the coffee into the press and waiting, she stood before me, looking in my direction, indignant. She had been the only sanctuary left, the one place I could go where none of my past could seep in. I had controlled it, but letting her in would mean even here, even in our home, it could come in. Why did she want this? But she already suspects the worst. She has already called you a selfish creep, and the longer you keep her out, the more she will hate you.

But why does she want to know? For what reason? To what end? We’ll have to move back to

New York. I’ll have to give Occham’s Razor up; I’ll have to work in the bank again. I don’t feel ready to run a bookstore in a foreign country. I want to speak in my own language.

“It’s coming between us. I don’t know you. I don’t know anything.”

“You don’t want to know. None of this is worth knowing.”

224 “You think I’m too innocent? Well, you don’t know me either. I’ve kept a secret from you as well. I think it’s driven a wedge between us, but I’ve been afraid of letting you know for fear of how you would react.”

She doesn’t love me anymore. Why did I marry her? I should have known better. I don’t think she would be capable of having affair, but, then, how could I be sure? Maybe she and Dante have been spooning after class. That is so disgusting a thought that I won’t even allow myself to think it.

“Before you look at me like that, don’t think whatever I’ve done hasn’t hurt me greatly.

Don’t think it was easy.”

Pouring the coffee into the cup, I could see my hand shaking from anger, from intense feeling. I felt as if I desperately needed to see Renato before I lost control.

“I can’t talk about this now. I can’t hear this now. We’ll talk about this in a few days, when we’ve both had a chance to calm down.”

The doorbell rang, and I laid down my cup. As Sandy got up, I rose, too. I don’t know why I bolted toward the door, or what I expected to find there, maybe an emissary of good news or a friend, but it was none of these. Livia glided through the door frame in black spandex tights, a black t-shirt, with two glittery lips silkscreened across her chest, smelling of cigarettes.

“Paolo, darling, it’s me,” she said. “Look, I forgot to ask you something over the phone.

Hello, Sandy dear.”

Sandy nodded back, half-way standing, leaning against the dining room table, as if she had to go to the bathroom, smiling at Livia, still and smiling. It seemed the only pose she could manage for my crazy, helpless mother.

225 “Paolo, honey,” she said, stepping around me, “I’m going to need some help with the

designs for Ugo’s play. I’m just thinking I may not be able to handle it all myself. That new

girl you just hired, Joey told me about her. Look, I was just wondering if I could borrow her.

Tell her she doesn’t have to know how to work a sewing machine. Tell her I’ll show her

whatever she needs to know.”

Livia took in the newspaper, the dog by Sandy’s feet, the clean and non-erotic sleepwear,

the copper rack in the kitchen, the expensive non-stick pans, the Japanese prints. She frowned as

if none of it suited her. She walked into the kitchen, flinched again at the sight of the Calendar of the Saints on the refrigerator.

“So, do you think it’s a go?” she asked.

For a second I couldn’t tell whether she was talking about my marriage or about the apartment decors.

“I’ll tell her,” I said, but my voice sounded faint and beaten down.

“Thanks, dear. Oh, and dearest, you need to sleep more. You’re looking worn. Sandy, make sure he gets more sleep.”

She brushed my cheek and frowned again. Sandy smiled and nodded at Livia. The door shut. She and I looked at each other for a moment. I, then, walked past her to the bedroom, deciding I would have my coffee out that day, as she got up to prepare herself a cup of coffee.

Neither one of us felt much like talking.

226

CHAPTER 21

SECRETS MAKE HER POWERFUL

Ivan lay quietly in the back of the Peugeot. Sandy had rolled down the back window to let him stick his head out, but he only leaned his head out once before pulling back inside to curl up in the back seat. She and I were quiet, too. I knew the day before she had gone on a fieldtrip with her Catholicism class to the San Clemenza church. I had thought Father Dante would be lecturing them on the history of the structure and why the twelfth century basilica had been erected above the fourth century church. When I had pressed her, she had told me she had talked to Dante about high school, about how she had wanted to become a nun. She had told him she had once feared for her eternal soul. “And what did Dante say?” “Not much, he wanted to know more about you. He’s very curious about you….I had to tell him I didn’t really know much more than he did.” But why was she telling him personal things about herself at all? Why weren’t they discussing the foundations of the damn church more and speaking less about themselves?

She had told me that no one else had shown up. Or, someone had shown, but had left shortly after because of an emergency. So, they had followed the subterranean trails beneath the church together, alone, as Sandy discussed the personal business with a single man. Had the low altitude affected her judgment? When he offered her a hand over the many puddles, or to cross the metal gangways, had she accepted it? I resented him even more for wanting to know more about me. Even the most shameless usually try to keep a clear image of the husband at bay. But

227 this Dante had gall. He wanted not a less clear image of the man he was harming, but a clearer

one.

We parked on a small side street just before Monte Testacchio. Behind us was a sienna-

colored arcade of shops and restaurants. An old repair shop built into the hill gave off an aroma

of artificial bananas. A high, sienna-colored wall stretched to the end of Via Caio Cestio. Sandy

was dressed in black flat shoes, black cropped cotton pants, a tight black t-shirt and a black knee-

length trench coat. It had been drizzling earlier, but now the sun was out. It felt unseasonably

warm for an early November day. I opened the door to the back seat long enough to clip the leash onto Ivan’s collar, and, feeling more adroit, watched as he bounded out of the car. Today was the Giornata dei Defunti, and I had decided today would be the day I would finally tell

Sandy more about my uncle Luca.

The cemetery where Luca was buried was divided into two halves. On the northeast side was a spacious park, interspersed with gravestones that faced the Piazza Porta San Paolo and the

Pyramid of Cestius and a medieval tower. The newer section, where Luca was buried, was on a gradual incline, overgrown with shrubbery, cypress trees, pines, ficus trees, weeping willows and cacti, designed on a street grid, comprised of headstones, vaults of all shapes, styles and sizes.

Some cats roamed freely. Others had made particular tombstones their home. I hoped Ivan was too young to chase them, but Sandy wanted him to roam free, and so, as soon as we entered the cemetery gates, she unhooked his leash, and I watched him trot off, paw over paw, turning back once to see if we were still looking.

I wasn’t sure I could even find his headstone. I remembered it being closer to the southern wall and Campo Boario, the street south of the entrance. I remembered cypress trees planted on each side of a gravel pathway, but more than that I could not say. Some roses were

228 still blooming around a headstone embossed with a winged cherub who appeared to be lifting both the headstone and the grave up to the heavens. Ivy covered many of the graves, as if making a bed for the dead, but I could not find Luca’s grave. Sandy walked ahead, asking again what it was we were looking for.

“My uncle’s grave,” I said.

“Is this the secret you were planning to tell me today?”

“Yes.”

“And how did he die?”

“He was shot.”

“Oh—and what did he do to be shot?”

“He was a journalist, a polemicist, and he offended some powerful people. In fact, he offended so many people that no one really knows who exactly shot him. Whoever it was tried to make a point: they shot him in the mouth.”

“Oh—”

We walked along the gravel pathway in the direction of the high sienna wall. The cemetery seemed an oasis, even though it was in a busy and densely-populated section of the city.

“I’m not sure I understand,” she said.

My eyes were fixed on the thin line of her Achilles tendon and her long graceful strides in those flat shoes.

“Why didn’t you want to tell me this? It’s not as if it’s something to be ashamed of?”

We were now walking through a more open section of the cemetery. Low shrubbery lined one side of the pathway; a long line of headstones, the other.

229 “Sure, it seems that way to you. Do you know what I was doing on the day he died? I

was driving over to his house to help him move furniture. Look, it’s difficult to explain. I didn’t want to go. I was mad at him for making me change my plans, and he had to coax me to get me to go out there. We had had a big fight over it. I told him he needed to hire professionals because the furniture was too large and too valuable, and we didn’t have any moving equipment.

No dolly, no levers, nothing to make the job easier. Besides, I had already made plans. ‘No, you’re coming over and we’re moving this furniture today.’ ‘Look, if you don’t want to work, if you’re too lazy, just say so.’ I said I would come out, but he had better have a dolly there, or else we were both going to pull out our backs. He said he would go out and buy a dolly and be back by the afternoon. ‘I need this stuff out of here today. Otherwise, they’ll be nowhere to put the new pieces on Monday,’ he said. I know it sounds funny, but if he hadn’t gone out to go get that dolly, and if he wouldn’t have decided to stop by his office on Via Orazio, he wouldn’t have been shot. He died in nobody’s arms. He died with no one around.”

“But that’s not your fault. Whoever it was, if they had wanted to kill him, they would have found a way. So, maybe, he would have lived another week, but eventually they would have killed him.”

“Maybe,” I answered, “but it still doesn’t help. It’s like losing a parent. I needed him, and he abandoned me. Do you know how that feels?” I asked.

“My mother died when I was in middle school, remember?”

We were now walking side by side. I knew that she was right intellectually—talking about it made it real, made it tangible—but not talking about it had made it mine, something I could control, a secret I kept with myself that no one except my immediate family could know about, and that they, equally scared of its potency, would not let out for fear of themselves

230 unraveling. Luca had not been afraid of death. He had once told me he wouldn’t worry about

death because it might happen at any time, and that didn’t bother him too much. Outrage and

anger propelled him forward. To think how much his death meant to me that I had clutched it so

close to my breast for fifteen years and that now, letting it go, I was worried again that she

wouldn’t be able to see it or understand it, and she would think that she could. She would think

he was close to me, but she would never be close enough to me to understand.

“So, there was never an inquiry?” she asked.

“There was an inquiry; there were even two witnesses, but they dropped out. One left the city, and the other said he had been mistaken.”

“And you didn’t put pressure on the courts for a re-trial?”

“What could I do? I tried at first. I talked to the press, accused a prominent politician, but my family stopped me. They said it was too dangerous.”

“You did the best you could. If they had wanted to kill him, they would have found a way.”

I nodded, but inside I knew I had not done the best that I could. If I had been doing the best that I could, I would have pushed harder. I would have passed out fliers at Piazza Navona, written angry editorials to La Corriere della Sera, re-fashioned myself into a mini-Luca—angry, confrontational and unafraid. But even then I had been too much myself—too passive and too docile, always too passive and too docile.

“I wish you had told me earlier,” she said.

“I couldn’t. Your life seemed so untainted. You yourself were so untainted. I was sure you would not want me anymore. Why did you marry me? That, I’ll never understand.”

“You loved me, Paolo. No one else ever had.”

231 We were silent as the gravel crunched beneath our feet, her hand warm in mine, walking close to the auburn wall, heavily shaded by trees and shrubs. We found the gravestone in the last row. Some artificial flowers lay in a vase beside it. An inscription on the stone read “Luca

Concetta: January 22, 1942-March 20-1979.” Other families had planted flowers, geraniums or other bushes around the headstone, but Luca’s headstone looked bare. Ivy had grown to the edge of the pathway, but nothing had been planted specifically for Luca. I should come back and plant something, I thought. A geranium or some azaleas, and then I turned and saw the dark figure of my mother Livia from far away, holding irises in her hand and wearing her black blazer again, the same one she had worn for Giorgio’s funeral again, with no bra underneath and with a long décolletage running down her bony and flat chest all the way to her rib cage. I looked without thinking at Sandy’s black t-shirt stretching across her collar bone and then again at Livia, who was by now waving and smiling. What was it with Livia and death that she always insisted on distracting herself and others from it? Why did she not find that outfit inappropriate? She took long strides, smiling.

“I saw Ivan on the other side of the cemetery. I think he thinks he’s a cat. He was chasing a bird. He shouldn’t be let loose, you know. What if he takes a crap on one of the gravestones?”

“He won’t,” I said. “We made him go before we came here.”

“A puppy that young, you never know,” she said, sighing. “They think of it as staking out their territory, don’t they?”

“Mother, what are you doing here?”

“Give your mother a kiss. Sandy dear, you too.”

232 We both did as she asked. Sandy even stood on her heels to kiss Livia. We seemed to be standing in the only sunny spot in the whole south end of the cemetery. From far off, I could just barely make out Ivan. He seemed to be holding a pine cone in his mouth and trotting in our direction. He will want to be played with, I thought.

“I’m visiting Luca. What are you doing here?”

“The same,” I answered.

The sun will give me no peace, I thought. Yesterday Father Dante had been allowed to spend the entire day with my Sandy. He had had time to spend with her, and today, on our day,

Livia was interfering, and the dog would want to be played with.

“Mother, I was trying to tell Sandy about Luca, about what a remarkable person he was.”

Livia looked at Sandy critically as if she considered Sandy unworthy of knowing, as if she had enjoyed keeping a secret between her and me. Those eyes seemed to say that Sandy could never be inside. As much as she tried, she would always be outside.

“Yes, he sounds like a very strong personality,” added Sandy.

“Too strong, dear. Too headstrong, too stubborn, too nosy and too angry. Never married. He had no interest in having a family, and look at him”—She pointed to his headstone—“he died like a dog.”

“Don’t say that, not here. It isn’t right. He died for his convictions. He believed in uncovering the truth. He believed the media had an obligation to educate people. He died trying to get the truth out, which is more than most people can say.”

“Child, how old are you? Died for his convictions? Died trying to get the truth out? He died because he went kamikaze. Everyone advised him to quit pushing. I told him it was pure insanity. We all told him it was too dangerous, but he just had to go full steam ahead. Delivered

233 his head right on a platter! Sandy, you talk my Paolo out of ever trying anything similar. Don’t let him romanticize that man!”

“So, what are you doing here then, if you don’t want to honor his memory?”

“Who said I wasn’t honoring his memory? I’m here, aren’t I? I just don’t want you to romanticize. Luca had many virtues, but idealism was not one of them. He knew very well what he was doing. He knew the danger he was in, and he decided to push even more. He went too far, and now I miss the son of a bitch.”

She laid the irises on his grave. She had said this last line coldly, but still I believed her.

She was not sentimental, but I knew that her relationship with Luca had been close. As far as I knew, they had never slept together, but they had understood each other. Would she have married him if he had gone on living, and how would I have felt about it if she had?”

“Sandy, he told you that they shot him, right? Did he tell you where?”

Sandy nodded.

“There could be no wake, you see. His face was too disfigured. None of us ever had a chance to say goodbye. We never saw his lifeless corpse. One minute he was here, and the next minute he was gone. My best friend! And he left me like that, from one day to the next.”

“Mother, you make it sound like he had a choice in the matter.”

“Of course, he did. The stupid bastard! We all warned him. On the other hand, coming from a family like that…Aquarius, maverick, if he had a thought in his head, there was no talking him out of it…and coming from Bagheria, with a sister like that, well, what more can I say...what kind of rage festering in his heart? And, of course, he was looking for an outlet, but why did he have to go kamikaze. Such a stupid shit.”

234 I watched the two of them from behind. Livia had set her hair-sprayed and dyed red hair.

She wore large round sunglasses on the top of her head. Sandy had pulled her bobbed dark brown hair back into a ponytail. Her small button nose, her pink lip-gloss seemed smaller against the profile of Livia’s shaded eyelids and mascara’d eyelashes. Two lines of cherry rouge streaked across both cheekbones like war paint. I heard the sound of panting, and, turning, I saw

Ivan trotting toward me, a pinecone in his mouth. Sandy tried to put an arm around Livia’s shoulder, but Livia brushed it off.

“Don’t touch me, dear. I think I need a minute,” she added, forcing a smile. “Paolo, honey, why don’t you and Sandy go tend to your dog? He’s looking as if he needs someone to play with.”

“Mother, I think we’re going to go,” I said. “I just wanted Sandy to see Luca’s grave, just so she would know more about us.”

“Well, dear, are you satisfied?” asked Livia.

Sandy nodded, but from the way her lips were pursed, and her body language was tense, she appeared to be anything but satisfied.

“Yes, mother,” she added.

It was the first time I had ever heard Sandy call Livia ‘mother,’ and it seemed to touch

Livia enough to make her smile.

“You’re a dear girl. Now be good,” said Livia, stroking her cheek. “Paolo, you too. Be good, and take care the dog doesn’t shit in the cemetery park, ok?”

We both kissed Livia goodbye, and made our way back to the north entrance.

235 If I would have to blame anyone, I would blame her father for making it seem as if his request was perfectly rational, when in reality it made no sense at all. He claimed it was for

Sandy’s own good, but how could this be, when she had suffered and even converted to

Catholicism from this sense of loss. I know this not because she told me, but because it all made sense time-wise. She had done it in March 1990, two months before we had flown to Giorgio’s funeral, and over a year before Levi’s death; and between then and now, she had never quite been herself. Angels, saints and magic—immaculate conceptions—resurrected prophets— walking on water and other miracles—magic, like the magic of conception—she was searching for some way to tap into the magic, to have the magics; she was looking for some way to reject her father’s pragmatism. Why, then, had she not tried to get pregnant, especially now that there were no financial constraints on her?

When we first met, she had never had trouble having an orgasm, and then for a while, yes, she could no longer climax, but I took this as some fault of mine—I was not trying hard enough, my paunch turned her off, I had gone off sex—when, in fact, she could no longer climax after that terrible spring when Livia had gone insane, and my Sandy had done what she had done and lost her belief because of it. It all made sense: When she came to Rome, she hoped to find the magics, or if not the magics, then that elusive orgasm, but I still could not give it to her.

Perhaps she associated me with the terrible thing she had done.

And while she lied to me, I did everything in my power to prove my worthiness to her, covering up Livia’s illness, waiting at Happy China for her egg drop soup, watching Frazier with her, listening patiently as she explained what was wrong with her degree and with her internship, or with the other grad students, who were either too competitive or too emotional or too unfeeling, always too something. But to pull off such a feat, she would have needed to be sly

236 and quick, and I had never seen her this way, but then, I doubted I had ever known her. And if she felt I had decided who she was, wrote the script, and she merely read the lines, she could have said no. She could have corrected my perception of her, modified it to make it closer to reality. I would have listened, but here again we are stuck in the world of abstractions and useless speculation.

“So,” I said, “what’s this big secret you’ve been wanting to tell me?”

“It was nothing.”

“Come on, you can’t expect me to believe that. That’s not really fair. You said you had something you needed to tell me.”

“No,” she said.

Since that night when she told me, I’ve been acquainting myself with the other Sandy, the one I never knew, the fearful one who loves, but who can hurt just as easily, and who may cause pain to protect herself, but who also feels nothing when she inflicts this pain, because her primary preoccupation is saving herself, first and foremost, and everyone, including her husband, comes second. If I had not asked, she would have played that role and gone on playing, but we had shared an intimacy that afternoon at the cemetery when I had told her about Luca, and she had defended me, affirming that I had behaved well, or at least well enough. Afterward we had enjoyed a Chinese dinner, a game of Frisbee and then a few videos. So I should not have asked,

I knew right after I threw out the question that no good could come of it, but exchanging our secrets was part of the bargain, and before I could retract the statement, it was out there. The

Channel 3 late night news cut on as soon as the videotape rewound, making bleak pronouncements about Sicily: “In the Sicilian town of Gela, 79,000 businessmen who refuse to

237 pay the Mafia protection tax run the risk of being killed. The tax can run upwards of 400,000

lire a month. The latest victim, Gaetano Giordano, achieved celebrity for refusing to pay.”

As she performed her usual evening rituals—the washing of the face, the application of

creams, the brushing of teeth, followed by the usual bodily functions—I began to understand she

had no intention of telling me. If I hadn’t pressed, she would have just shut off the light and not

said another word about it. There might have been some pawing at each other in the dark; some

moaning even, but she would have been worlds away. Fuck it, she had been worlds away ever

since she had done what she had done (but could such an act affect a person so deeply, or was

this more projecting of my feelings on her?). I only knew what I knew—what she told me and

what she failed to say; how the touch of her hand had grown colder and how the dog, her

precious Ivan, adored her as she indulged him. Even the words she finally uttered sounded

nothing like Sandy. They were scripted, but there was more truth in those theatrical lines than in much that she had said in the last four months.

“There was a time when you were as strange to me as Sant’ Eusebio’s Day. At that time

I hated you, you’re right to think I did. I didn’t want your child then, an alien thing, a Martian

being, a Dago shit; I would have bought the coat hanger myself and yanked the creature out, if I

had thought I could have done it without killing myself, but I wasn’t sure. So I took your money

and told you I was sick with Epstein-Barr virus, and needed tests, and you believed me, and from

one week to the next I sucked that being out of myself, caught the flu, discovered I didn’t have

Epstein-Barr after all, and miraculously recovered. And you were so preoccupied with Livia,

you never knew. Your princess angel, right?”

“But it was mine, right?”

“Yes, it was yours.”

238 “Why are you telling me this?”

“You said you wanted to know.”

“Well, I don’t want to know”

The strangeness and cruelty of her confession made me think of my mother. Livia kept

all her babies, I thought, despite the fact my father could have given her nothing that she did not

already have, and much that she did not want—a matronly figure, the stigma of marrying

beneath her, the irrational and egocentric needs of a toddler—but she had wanted to bring new life into the world. In fact, she once told me she had wanted it since the age of six, when she and her sister had first stuffed pillows under their shirts, pretended to have swollen breasts, and tried on appealing names for their respective newborns—but not Sandy. Was she unnatural? While biology gave women the capacity to bear children, Sandy never talked of this as a privilege, and once when I had asked her if she had ever played at being pregnant as a girl, she had looked at me as if I were asking the most outrageous question, as if the Doberncheks were beyond such frivolity. But if she wasn’t unnatural, then what, then, the blame lay squarely on my shoulders, then where else could it reside but on mine? “I would have bought the coat hanger and yanked the creature out, if I had thought I could do it without killing myself”—from whence the intensity, from whence the anger? She could have negotiated with her father, had she cared to.

Within months of being within the legal age, within days of receiving her inheritance money, and she dreams of yanking the child growing inside her out with a coat hanger! No, this was more than a legal matter. In this case, she genuinely hated the idea of a part of me growing inside her.

Prince No-Name Ucci, Count No Account, would not inseminate his princess, his fox-trotting heiress who controlled every aspect of their lives, from their finances to their family planning, and when she claimed my child would have been “an alien thing, a Martian being,” she saw my

239 body as alien and contaminating. She had had the abortion without telling me. She had felt the need so intensely “to suck this being out of herself,” and that made me surer than ever that she thought of me as the gutter trash she had married as an underhanded way of getting back at her father for his coldness and his indifference. Before telling me, she had hemmed and hawed,

“Paolo, it’s nothing, please!” “You’re lying. Now what is it?” “I’m scared.” “Come on now.

Don’t be scared. Just tell me.”

This secret act of hers had made her feel powerful, though, even if she would not concede as much. Now that she was disclosing the event she had kept to herself all these years, I began to wonder what other secrets remained hidden. “I’ve done terrible things, Paolo, I’m not a good person”—when someone tells you this, you are always waiting for the other shoe to drop, always asking yourself what terrible thing will be done to you next, and what has she done to you already without your knowing. My secret had had to do with something I had failed to do, but hers had everything to do with what she had failed to feel, and not just for anybody, but what she had failed to feel for me. That was her secret, that she had not felt these things for me for a very long time, at least three years, and every time I had thought she did feel them, she had only been pretending. How much better I could have handled not knowing, for even if I had not known, I would have speculated—Was it the apartment, the job, my mother, her religion?—but I could have gone on speculating and not have felt half so downcast and defeated. No, it was me, I revolted her, and she rejected my seed because of it.

That night I listened for the squeaking of #78, the night owl bus, as it passed every half an hour beneath my unhappy window; Ivan writhed in his sleep, dreaming dog dreams; and one floor below Livia paced her apartment, fretting about I knew not what; and in our room my

American princess lay curled beneath the eider down, fast asleep, stirring only every so often to

240 turn on her back or her side. Who are you? I thought, as I walked into her bedroom to watch her placid, pale face. Who are you, and why can you behave in such a way, and then drop off and go to sleep? “I didn’t want your child then, an alien thing, a Martian being, a Dago shit”—if the same words had come from my lips, I would have been charged with verbal assault, but from a petite woman with doe-like brown eyes, the words are a figure of speech and not to be taken seriously. From a face as serene as hers, from a background of Choate and Barnard and Albert

Einstein, the words merely express anger, they are non-literal and non-biting, but if I were to tell anyone what had been said to me, they would question my judgment. Why stay with such a woman? Why stay with someone who clearly hates you? they would say.

241

CHAPTER 22

HER CONFESSIONS WERE NO MORE THAN WHISPERS

Two months had passed since Sandy had told me about the abortion. In these two months, more and more Mafia turncoats had come forward to inform on Tomaso Razzo. The press had bandied about Vito’s name as heir apparent to replace Razzo if he were ever to be arrested. While four former Mafiosi claimed they had seen Senator Amabili at Mafia functions, two others testified that in underworld circles he went by the name of “Uncle Giuseppe.” Since the day Sandy had told me about the abortion, I had gone back inside myself, keeping a distance from other people, who I imbued with a tremendous power to hurt me. When the news came that

Tomaso Razzo had been arrested, any relief I felt I held inside. The worst kind of pressure, the pressure of absolute power over insignificant me, had been taken off. And although I felt unburdened, that relief was tempered by a realization that Vito might well be named the next

Mafia don. He will cut off his mother completely when he becomes don, I thought. He will kill his own brother. He will be worse than Razzo, but, without the threat of the don, and without

Amabili in power, I could push to re-open Luca’s case. The Mafia would have no reason to protect Amabili, and the dark months of my childhood could, in that way, be rounded up and put away for good.

For Sandy’s part, she, too, had gone back inside herself. She was wearing that cross again, and praying whenever she had a free moment. I had even seen her praying before coffee

242 in the morning or after coming out of the bathroom at night. She carried on the most involved discussions with her God. It was as if she had her own personal companion with her, a truer and better companion than I could be. Again, I felt as if I were engaged in a losing battle. How to compete with God? Back in the day when we conversed with one another, we could have discussed specific religious topics, but now it seemed too late.

So, when Sandy suggested we meet Livia at the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele for the benediction of the animals, I agreed, but only for the dog’s sake, not because I truly believed

Sandy even cared for the dog. I couldn’t help it: Knowing that she had aborted our child changed the way that I saw her. She thought only of herself. She had never learned to consider other people’s needs. And to think she had done such a thing after we had publicly vowed to cleave our hearts into one. But what could I expect? I demanded too much of people, wanted them to hold to impossible standards, and when they didn’t, I could never quite manage to see them again, not fully, and not in the way they themselves wanted to be seen. What I struggled with most was looking her in the eyes. And when we were out in public, this was excruciating because other people expected us, for some reason, to act as if we knew each other, and I would have to strain, to force myself to look at her, in a way that would make me visibly tense.

In centuries past pilgrims would travel hundreds of miles to have their cows, sheep, donkeys, ducks, even their mice blessed, and the celebration would go on for days. The service would be held inside the Church of Sant’Antonio Abate, and all the animals would be allowed inside, with all the chaos such a decree entailed, but now, because of traffic, the church had moved the celebration to outside Sant’ Eusebio at the corner of Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele and

Via Napoleone III. Through the course of the day, over 7,000 people showed up, with Livia being one of the first, arriving at 10:30 a.m., as she did every year, so that the priest could once

243 again bless her Persian cat, Nefertiti. Once when I asked her how or why she thought this

meshed with her interest in astrology, she told me she was keeping her options open, and she

wanted to do the same for Nefertiti.

When Sandy and I arrived an hour later, Joey’s Irish setter Gwendolyn was sniffing the

backside of a Welsh corgi, as Joey tried to explain where he had parked and Livia nodded,

cradling Nefertiti in her arms. The line by now extended all the way beyond Via Maniani, one

block southeast. Carabinieri wearing theatrical blue capes and shining black boots were

stationed at every angle of the small piazza in front of Sant’ Eusebio Church. A white marble

statue of a Madonna holding Christ with one arm stood high up at the top of the stairwell, as if

she were the only true officiate. Nuns in old-fashioned wimples watched from between high

arches. A watercolor drawing depicted St. Anthony, the saintly protector of animals, holding a

staff with which he blessed the many animals surrounding him. It was kitschy, but what could

you do? The demand for the ceremony probably outweighed the church’s desire to organize, and

the result was a slapdash watercolor painting and a few priests ready to toss some holy water

around, but where were they? If the organizers appeared disorganized, they were only barely trumped by the people gathered for the occasion: men with camcorders knocking into old ladies, old ladies with deep imperious voices and badly dyed hair trying to find the end of the line, little kids in search of their parents, adult-like and obedient young dogs of every type and breed,

Dalmatians, terriers, golden retrievers, dachshunds, mutts, poodles, etc. Livia was wearing some sort of tweed knickers, riding boots, a tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, and a wool driving cap over her hair. She held Nefertiti in her arms, stroking her fur, as Nefertiti purred and shut her eyes.

244 “Mother,” I said, “what are you wearing? Are you preparing for your next horseback riding show?”

“I designed it myself, dear. I’m calling it ‘a Touch of England’. Your friend Natasha has loaned me the cap.”

Joey wore his usual dark navy pea coat, jeans, and a clunky but expensive pair of

Timberland shoes. Although he once told me the only stable part of his life was his way of dressing, he had also told me he admired flamboyance and style in other people, particularly my mother. He thought that she and I looked like one another, and, more surprisingly, thought alike.

“You’re both idealists, I think.”

My mother, an idealist? I racked my brain trying to understand what had given him that idea. Was it the fact that she had never re-married, her fascination with astrology, her love of clothes?

“She loves invented worlds, the movies and movie stars. In that way she’s like me, and I think a little like you, too. You’re both dreamers, you and Livia, and it’s only by default that you became realists.”

Sandy never liked attention. For that very reason our wedding had been an ordeal for her.

She liked dressing simply. At Sant’ Eusebio’s that day she wore flat shoes resembling ballet slippers, a straight cut long black coat with a dark burgundy wool scarf and straight cut Levi’s jeans. Livia never openly disapproved of the way she dressed, but once she asked me to tell

Sandy to wear brighter colors and show more skin.

“She has pale skin, Paolo. She looks sickly and depressed when she wears black. When

I was in my twenties whenever possible, I always broke out some cleavage or raised a slit higher.

245 Showed some leg. It cheers things up, Paolo. Tell her the rest of the world needs that kind of cheering up. She’d be doing them a public service.”

“Mother, she doesn’t like that kind of attention. It embarrasses her.”

“Tell her there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Once she starts, she’ll get used to it.”

I never did pass along that message, but that day in front of the church I watched Livia touch Sandy’s scarf and coo what a nice material it was. My mother always thought of herself as a very good liar, but, in fact, she was a terrible liar because in her eyes you could see the disingenuous twinkle, and even though I was still furious at Sandy I had known that such compliments really feel more like a kick in the stomach than anything else.

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you,” said Joey.

“I know,” I said, “Sandy told me my cousin stood you up.”

“Come on, you know it’s more than being stood up. She’s your cousin, right? So, tell me something: Is she really twenty-four-years-old ‘cause she doesn’t always act twenty-four.”

“Divide that in two, and you’ll be closer to her age.”

“Come on, seriously!”

“Seriously”

I couldn’t tell whether he was laughing from shock or amusement, but when he laughed, at six foot four inches, tall, squinting and nodding, he looked like some kind of gigantic Asian bear. The other night when he had called, Sandy had said he was genuinely distressed or, even worse, in love, but now maybe I had gotten lucky, maybe he had dropped the whole idea. He is smart enough to know whatever it is, he should not go there.

His dog Gwendolyn had moved from the rear of the Welsh corgi to Ivan’s midriff. He didn’t seem to be smelling Ivan as much as just hanging around. Our cocker spaniel will be

246 smarter than Gwendolyn one day, I thought smugly. They may share the same long droopy ears, but between the ears, ours has more gray matter, I thought.

“So, where did she go? Don’t tell me you don’t know,” he said. “I’m beginning to think your family has come kind of a racket going. Is there something you’re not telling us, Paolo?”

“They don’t keep me abreast of their motions, Joey, but, look, I’ve learned not to ask too many questions. My aunt and Giulietta are both extremely private people, and I think the best thing for all of us would be for you to respect that privacy.”

“I have your permission, then, to control my emotions and to cease to ask questions, commander.”

“Ok, smart ass, I’m just advising you. Doesn’t mean you have to heed my advice, or anything.”

The piazza in front of the Sant’ Eusebio Church was overflowing with little people in light colored parkas. All the dogs were on leashes, sniffing around. Across the street the tents and small kiosks had begun to open up, preparing to sell international fare, Asian rice, halveh,

Arabian incense, Indian curry. One person’s parrot could only repeat the words, “Bahk! Termini

Station, take your first left.” I tried to review the things that had happened, and what these things might mean to Joey as well as to me. In the papers they had claimed the residents of Corleone were rejoicing that Razzo’s reign was finished. Some had set off fireworks; others were too afraid to come out. Editorials warned the capture of Razzo would touch off a power struggle, just as the death of Luciano Leggio had started Razzo on his rise to power, so this vacuum would initiate someone else’s rise. Would it be Vito, though, or would it be someone else? How surprised Joey would be if I were to tell him that he might someday have the chance to become the brother-in-law of the capo di tutti i capi. Wouldn’t his classmates at Choate be startled to

247 know his children could someday choose to be a part of the Crimi crime family if they wished?

But this was all speculation; this was assuming Claudia had re-contacted her son. And since she

was cutting herself off from Livia, there was no real way of knowing. My mind was wandering,

thinking of these possibilities, but while I was daydreaming, Joey was counting on his fingers

and muttering numbers to himself.

“12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 26, 27, 28…So, when I’m thirty-four, she’ll be of legal age,”

he said.

“Look, she’s not really twelve, ok. She’ll be sixteen in September.”

“Fifteen and a half, I can deal with that. So, that means when I’m twenty-eight, she’ll be

legal…So, I’ll wait for her, but how can I get in touch with her to make her wait for me, too?”

“You’re such a romantic, Joey. Shit, things don’t work out that way anymore. You’re just supposed to fuck around until you get tired of it, and then settle down with somebody you halfway enjoy. Haven’t you heard?”

This woman will devour him, I thought to myself. The favorite child of a father who died knowing his body would be left in acid. His remains dropped down a well. She has learned to make her own most personal memories dissolve at will. Neither she nor Claudia have spoken publicly of Rings for the last ten years, not as a man, nor as a father. They took his spirit, and, like his murderers, waited for the splash before moving on to new lives. How is this possible?

Livia would claim I do not know either one of them well enough to judge, but I know a few things. I know neither one of them have remained loyal enough to Rings’ memory to bear a certain sadness in his loss. Callous, I thought. They both had become too wise and too callous.

“Joey, I don’t mean this to sound insulting, but I think you’re in over your head. My aunt and my cousin, in fact, that whole side of the family, they don’t operate in the usual way. What I

248 mean is, they’ve been through a lot, and because of that, they’re not equipped with the same

emotional markers that you and I are. Frankly, I don’t know that they’re capable of the kind of, well, I just don’t know whether Giulietta’s in the same place that you are. She has a certain toughness, and I think it’s no secret that she puts her own interests first before anyone else.”

The honking came from a red Ford escort illegally double-parked on Via Napoleone next to a fresh fruit stand. Joey had stopped listening halfway through my inarticulate speech, and now he was nudging me in the rib, asking, “Hey, isn’t that the girl who stopped by Occham’s

Razor the other day?” I squinted to see Natasha standing by the table of fruit, talking to the

vendor, who looked to be weighing and bagging some oranges for her. She was dressed in

combat boots, red plaid tights, a black corduroy mini skirt and wool green tunic sweater. I

looked over at Sandy and then at Livia, who was waving in Natasha’s direction. Oh my God, I

thought, I gave Livia permission to hire that insane girl who within the first thirty seconds of

meeting you unpacks her kleptomania and full stats on her sexual partners, her troubled

relationship with her mother, etc.

“Yes,” I said, “it’s Natasha, but maybe she won’t see us.”

“Natasha! Natasha! Darling, we’re over here.”

Natasha jaywalked, forcing her way into the road until the oncoming cars slowed down

and, then, stopped completely. She had a distinctive walk, swinging her hips from left to right,

pulling herself along as if a string were attached to her belly button, and smiling, relishing the

attention that such hip swaying would have on the crowd waiting in front of Sant’ Eusebio. As

she came closer, I was able to see that her sweater was cable-knit and had purple leather piping

around the shoulders, neck and waist. I knew this sweater well. Last year Livia had tried to

palm it off on me, and I had to explain to her that men couldn’t wear green cable knit sweaters

249 with purple piping without throwing their entire sexual orientation into question. Natasha waved and greeted our group, and, with an easiness that Sandy would have found impossible, she gave

Livia a kiss on both cheeks.

“My sweater looks almost as good on you as it does on me, dear.”

“I’m double-parked, so I can’t stay. I’ve got the fabric in the car.”

“How do they look? You got the most expensive taffeta, I hope. That skirt has got to make everyone believe Dorothy has moved up on the social ladder.”

“They only had one kind of taffeta, but the quality looks good. So, 5:30 today?”

“Ok, dear, but remember I’m counting on you. You better go see to your car. I wouldn’t want you to get a ticket.”

All four of us, Sandy, Livia, Joey and I watched Natasha half-run, half-walk, forcing herself once again into the traffic, giving the oncoming cars two choices: either to yield or be responsible for involuntary manslaughter. The blades of her back muscles poked through her sweater, but her posture was ramrod straight. She seemed so positively free, so in control, so adult. Sandy’s blue eyes ran from Livia’s approving face to mine, searching in mine for even the faintest hint of lust. I doubt, though, that she would have found anything like an expression of lust in my face because between trying to read her face, my mother’s and Natasha’s, I had so sublimated any inkling of sexual desire that were Natasha to have crossed the street completely naked, and were I to have been put under a lie detector test about my desire, I think I would have easily passed. Besides, having my mother there put a serious damper on any sexual fantasies I might have entertained.

“Such an extraordinary girl,” said Livia, “so quick and so savvy—she reminds me of myself at her age. Do you know that she’s offered to design costumes for the chorus herself?

250 I’ve decided to let her, too, because I’ve got too much to design as it is. It’s so unusual for a girl of her generation to know how to use a sewing machine. Sandy, you never learned, did you?

Never had home economics in school, did you?”

“Not exactly, no. We had microeconomics in ninth grade and macro senior year.”

“Shame,” said Livia, “and you probably don’t even know how to sew on a button, do you?”

“A dry-cleaning business in my neighborhood—they did alterations, too—they sewed on buttons for me.”

“Did you hear that, Paolo? In America they have people to sew on buttons for the rich.

Can you believe that?”

“Mother, it’s not a crucial skill anymore. Most people can survive without knowing how to sew.”

“Well, I couldn’t,” said Livia. “Do you know I make three times as much from costume design as I did acting? Sandy, in Italy actors are glorified slaves—badly paid, badly treated, disrespected. Do you know I got rave reviews for my performance of Medea, but when do you think they paid me for the last two weeks’ performance?”—she cupped her hand around her mouth, then, enunciated every syllable—“HALF A YEAR LATER! Can you imagine?”

“Mother, you know that the theater company had financial problems. It’s not as if they took your money and cruised around the Galapagos Islands.”

“We had a contract, Paolo! The company had a legal obligation! What was I supposed to live on? But do you think that concerned them?”

“Mother, you’re shouting.”

251 Joey and Sandy were standing closer together, staring at Livia and me as if we both

inhabited another reality from them. Sandy had grown up in the school of thought that said that family disagreements should only be discussed in private. She made exceptions for her brother, though. He alone could observe our fights, since she thought of both of us as family, but

quarrels between Livia and me, she had no idea what to do with. She once told me her own

parents had never once fought in front of their own children. She couldn’t even think of one

time that Inge had contradicted her husband publicly. When I asked whether she could

remember her father contradicting her mother, she told me she couldn’t really think of any one

time her mother had asserted herself enough to be contradicted.

“But how could they possibly agree on everything? There must have been some things

they didn’t see eye to eye on.”

“Not really,” said Sandy, “and actually they were perfectly content adapting their every

viewpoint to each other.”

“You mean your mother adapted her viewpoint to your father’s.”

“No, I mean they felt they didn’t have enough time as it was. My mother got sick when I

was eight, and after that, they just couldn’t see the sense in fighting for territory. They just had

to make peace.”

Just had to make peace? Now there was an alien concept to me. But, then, they both

lived far from their own parents, remote from any potential conflicts, with children they had

trained, in the Old World fashion, to be obedient. Making peace was not a possibility for me,

particularly when Livia insisted so doggedly on interfering and critiquing my and my wife’s

every move.

“Paolo,” said Sandy, “do you think you can handle this on your own?”

252 “Um, sure, I guess I could.”

“Good, I think I need to see Father Dante today; I need to go to confession.”

“But it’s Sunday. Priests don’t meet for confession on Sundays,” I said.

“He’ll make an exception for me.”

“Dear,” said Livia, “you’ve got to stop with this foolishness. The Catholic Church is for children, for bambini. They’re not standing on any firmer spiritual position than you. In fact, if you inhale a little, you’ll see that what they’re standing in smells a lot like shit. Sandy dear, there are no spiritual fathers. You have to give up on that idea.”

Sandy made a face. “I don’t agree,” she said, and knelt down to pet Ivan.

The way Livia talked to Sandy was intimate, more like the way she would talk to a close friend than a relative. It made me nervous. With Sandy you could never quite be sure that she wouldn’t take advice like this as condescending and misguided. After all, Livia didn’t know the first thing about Sandy’s religious notions. She knew nothing about Sandy’s doubts, or that her entire relationship with Dante was founded on the doubts the two of them discussed together.

Livia did not know that Dante thought doubts perfectly natural, or that he loved 1950s American jazz, Ella Fitzgerald and Cole Porter, liked moo goo gai pan, and usually forgot his keys in the door and then spent hours looking for them. She only knew that he was a man of the cloth, and for that reason she was sure he wanted to get into her daughter-in-law’s pants, and also that he was a phony.

“I’ve got to go,” said Sandy, handing me the leash.

She was walking away from Termini and San Giovanni Lateranno. I yelled to her that she was going in the wrong direction, but she didn’t hear me. Then, I watched her get caught in a tangle of people waiting to have their animals blessed. She’ll take a cab, I thought, and confess

253 to Dante. The dogs were tangled in leashes themselves, and had begun to bark at each other as if to blame one another for the knot they were tied into. She was trying to step over the leashes, and she even spun around once to release herself from the mass of dogs. I watched her trip over one of the cords and stumble, saw in my mind the tall and bearded Father Dante take her in his arms, say, “body and blood of Christ,” and remove his habit without awkwardness to stand before her. She was first fully clothed, standing on a cold stone floor, and then beneath him, in a small, cell-like room, lying on a brown monastic bedspread of a wiry cot completely undressed.

Neither Dante nor she felt comfortable enough to indicate, whether verbally or non-verbally, their joy and pleasure at what they were about to receive. He entered her, and while he was inside her, he asked for her confessions.

“The doctor inserted a tube inside my uterus and sucked out a creature of God,” she said.

“Tell me more,” he said.

The cot creaked, and all of her confessions were no more than whispers for which she was absolved. She had taken the body and blood of Christ inside her, and he had fully forgiven her sin, lifting her up to heaven.

254

CHAPTER 23

INDIGNATION IS A USELESS EMOTION

Two more months passed, and, in those two months, Amabili continued to deny that he had anything to do with the Sicilian Mafia, as informers continued to dredge up more evidence to the contrary. Politics floated seamlessly from the underground crime world to the lofty rule of law and back again. Occham’s Razor blossomed, every day looking less like an abandoned, mouse-infested hovel and more like a first-rate bookstore. Carpenters had put in herringboned, pinewood tiles and thick, sturdy pinewood bookshelves, fine mahogany railings on the banister and loft railings. They had painted the walls a fresh white and built a loft space. The high- embossed medallion ceilings and exposed pipes were again visible, as they had been when Levi had been alive. Once they repainted the walls and put in the new floor, it had stopped smelling musty and started to smell new.

On the morning that Livia and I had breakfast together, my mind was on two things, both of which had little to do with the actual breakfast. It worried me that she had gone to so much trouble to prepare eggs, toast, cold cuts, salami, prosciutto, sweet apricot marmalade and coffee.

What did she want to ply out of me? What was she ingratiating herself for? On the table she had also laid out the newspapers, but I had already found out from an obscure tabloid that had picked up the story. Flavio Moretti, Amabili’s closest aid, sick and about to die on his deathbed, had admitted to paying my uncle thirty million lire to suppress an article Luca was planning to write

255 that would have tracked Amabili’s finances back to the Mafia, a revelation that would have permanently damaged Amabili’s credibility and ruined his political career. I couldn’t understand why Moretti had disclosed this secret now. Why now, fourteen years after Luca’s death?

Sputtering, coughing, fibrillating, hawking, teetering off into the world of the dead, had he really intended to clean his slate, so as to join the righteous, who were also passing into the cumulous cloud world of our imagination? This man, Moretti, apparently used to go fishing with hand grenades, so I had a hard time believing he had done it for our sake. What had Amabili done to him? If he hadn’t confessed, I would not be suffering these murderous thoughts, not be here now worrying, wondering what to do with all my anger. If Moretti had not decided to unload on the rest of us, I would not be considering pouring this scalding tea on Livia’s head.

The strangest thing about the events of the last two months was the way in which they were forcing me to question everything and everybody. The mass murdering don, Tomaso

Razzo, had lived in an upper-class suburb of Palermo for twenty-three years, even shopping at the local grocery store. His children had attended the local public school. But no one had dared even think of arresting him because he had been protected by the state. Within my own family, I knew some people were doing the protecting, while others were being protected. Either Livia,

Claudia or both had had full power of attorney to read and study the bank bills. One or both of them had surely seen this strange thirty million lire deposit. Perhaps if I were to ask Livia now, she would tell me she had had to use the money to pay for Luca’s funeral because the expenses had been higher than she had thought they would be, but the funeral had been a modest affair, and Luca had always been good about paying his premiums.

The second event had transpired the day before at Occham’s Razor when I had lapsed something serious in the storeroom. I had come in and seen Natasha bent over, picking up a

256 clipboard. I had, by then, hired another employee who was labeling the shelves. The fact of his potential intrusion made me want her more and not less. She had the most fantastic assortment of leg-wear, and on that day she wore purple and black plaid stockings, a tight, light black sweater, some kind of minimal undergarment underneath, and a plaid kilt. And just as I touched her back, I knew that the action would be so electrically charged as to give away my intentions and desires completely. I knew and yet there I was, with one hand on her back and the other on her less-flat-than-I-assumed right breast.

“Where do you get it?” I asked.

“What?”

“The leg-wear?”

“I steal it from the market.”

“I love it. It’s so erotic,” I said.

I had the smell of her on my hand for the rest of the day, and, when I came home, I washed my hands no less than three times, and then got a glass of milk, noting the Calendar of the Saints on the fridge. That calendar will never include me, I thought, and that’s their tough shit. Then, I sat down on the couch and wondered why I had given into a desire that, up until two weeks ago, I had never acted upon. In the past week, I had imagined Sandy and Dante in every possible position: upside down, with him hanging from a burlap harness (The pain of the burlap was something he relished, while she loved the head rush of seeing things from a new angle); in a garden, sharing an apple, a snake wrapped around his genitals, some bendable twigs wrapped around hers; in a manger in the hay, Dante lying on a manger scene, breaking the figurines and enjoying the pain of this. In my imagination the intensity of their lovemaking in the manger was of such a force that a spontaneous fire erupted, and Dante had to single-handedly

257 rip his habit in half and use it to shield her from the flames. Together they would have to run through the fire, winding up in the worst position of all: on a white foam bed in the sky, with angels smiling down on them (This one I observed from my own flaming hot fire solid hell home base). But from these many mental scenarios, I could not extract even one scenario involving

Natasha and myself. It was just not a part of my imaginative life. In fact, I was beginning to worry that outside of Dante and Sandy, I had no real imaginative life of my own. In the play

Macbeth, Lady Macbeth continually washes her hands to try to cleanse herself of the guilt she feels in having convinced Macbeth to murder Duncan. I was beginning to understand that character’s desire, but she had designs on Duncan. She had carefully planned and thought out the evil she intended to do. But my wrongdoing was entirely dopey. I had stumbled into a dark storeroom, happened upon a co-worker bent over, and, for once, rather than turning around and hightailing it, for once, without any premeditation, without any evil intent at all, I had found myself touching that co-worker’s back, then a breast, then a mouth. And from there I had gone to washing my hands, trying to remove the guilty, pungent scent of genitalia from my hands.

Just then Livia took a bite out of her toast, tilted the paper in my direction, pointing to an article in the arts section.

“They’ve cast Rosa Leone as the lead for that RaiTre production of La Ciociara. That woman has no hips and a squeaky voice. The lead has got to be womanly, Paolo, and she can’t squeak. Claudio D’Amico’s directing? I just saw Claudio, and he didn’t say anything about it.

The way I’ve become a nobody in this town, Paolo. I should have never tried to unionize

Medea. Blackballed! Do you realize your own mother’s been blackballed?”

My mother had gotten into the habit recently of wearing tights around the house and sweatshirts with some flippant, pithy saying silk-screened on them. She had not yet put on her

258 make-up, and her thin hair was pulled back into a tiny runt of a ponytail. She looked austere, underfed, and stark. Her skin didn’t hang or sag in any obvious way, but without her hair coiffed and loose, she looked bony. When she held her teacup, the very knobbiness of her knuckles reminded me just how much and how quickly my mother had aged.

“Mother, you know you shouldn’t read the arts section. It’ll only make you mad.”

“You never read my reviews, darling. You were away in America when they said I brought the character to life. My most powerful performance, they said. I made the play new and modern. I intrigued Orlando Russo, the film critic, enough for him to send me an ode. That fat sow, I would have never gone out with him, but, Paolo, promise me one thing, dear. When you have children, promise me you’ll have a boy. Or if you have a girl, you should have a pretty young thing. That and nothing else. Pretty and empty-headed and young, young, young, that’s what she’ll have to be. It’ll break my heart to have a granddaughter slowly lobotomized by a culture like ours.”

“You’re exaggerating again, Livia.”

It was hard to stay angry with my mother at times like these. In fact, when she was beaten down, she was most lovable. It was a side of her I rarely saw, and one that most everyone else never saw. She would tell perfect strangers on the subway about the theater company that wasn’t paying her. She loved to tell the clerk at Video Sogni about her successful son who had married an American and come back to Italy to start his own bookstore. But there was this core part of Livia, this side others never saw, that was so full of righteous hurt, and that hurt complicated her relationships with other women. She had raised three boys—the star of her own production—but of other people’s productions, she had starred in only a handful—Little Miss

Chicken of the Sea 1952, an extra in the epic Hollywood production of Quo Vadis, the five-year

259 on-again off-again love of the famous director, Roberto Civetta. If she was spinning her

biography in the right way, she could make it sound like she had decided, voluntarily choosing to

leave acting because it no longer interested her. But on a day like today, when she was beaten

down, it was easy to see that rather than choosing to leave acting, it had chosen to leave her.

And she had never quite been as much of a star as she was in 1952 when they crowned her Little

Miss Chicken of the Sea and gave her four rooms’ worth of Little Miss Chicken of the Sea

wallpaper, never quite that much of a star ever again.

“Paolo, honey, are you still seeing that shrink? I think it’s good for you, if you are. You

need to talk to someone. You’ve always been so closed up. And I hate to say it, but your Sandy

is not helping matters. She’s not fully grown, Paolo. Where’s she always running off to? Every

time I see her she’s either thanking me or nodding or fleeing. It’s nerve-wracking, Paolo. I can’t even have a discussion with her. I try to talk to her about her God and her faith, and she just runs off in search of a priest to confess to. Makes me feel like some kind of contamination.”

“You told her that her entire belief system was shit. You insulted her intelligence. You called her belief in God something for children. Mother, she already doubts her Italian, but when you attack her to boot, she won’t open up to you. She’ll shut down. Try easing her into a conversation instead of assaulting her with one.”

“Paolo, she’s been here over a year. If she’s not comfortable with me or with speaking

Italian yet, she’s not going to get there by my easing her into it. Do you think I had a chance to

be eased into speaking English when I was in the states? I just had to make a fool of myself.

That girl is far too self-conscious.”

“Mother, can we talk about something else? I mean, do I grill you about Romano’s

catatonic states?”

260 “Romano’s not a catatonic, dear. He happens to work very hard at his job, but he’s not a construction worker by trade, and it exhausts him. You’ve never seen him perform, have you?

He’s fantastic, serious actor. Don’t let his passivity at family dinners fool you. Are you talking about that Palm Sunday he fell asleep at the dinner table? That was because he had just come from his moonlighting job. You didn’t know he held two full-time jobs at that time, did you?”

“Ma, I didn’t ask you for a treatise in Romano’s defense. My point is that I leave you some space. I don’t start criticizing because I have no idea what goes on between you and

Romano, and I don’t think it’s any of my business.”

Actually, I had a pretty good idea what went on between Livia and Romano. She told him what to do, and he—too tired and too much in awe of her—did as she asked. He was the perfect companion for her. He loved cooking, domestic harmony, renting movies and ordering take-out, and she—coming down from Habib and the constant parties, dancing and drinking involved in dating him—had agreed to go out with him, even if his teeth were crooked, even if he was a borderline narcoleptic, because she was just that lonely, and she needed someone who would calm her down and let her know that it was alright to stop moving every once in a while.

Livia brushed the crumbs off her t-shirt and her black tights. She was shaking her head, obviously dismayed by the shift in the conversation.

“Have some more eggs, dear,” she said.

She had poached eggs and made a béarnaise sauce especially for me. Something was up.

Livia did not usually go to all that trouble. What was it she wanted from me? Maybe she just wanted me to overlook the news about Flavio Moretti. Or did she want me to admit that things weren’t working out between Sandy and me? To tell her I, too, thought she was too selfish, too self-conscious, and too spoiled? Livia should have come to me two months ago. Yes, I would

261 have said, Sandy is all the things you say she is. She’s horrified by you and me; by the way that we live, and are. She’s so horrified she’s aborted your future grandson. And you’re right: things aren’t working out, so I’ve decided to get out before…but how could I get out? We had woven our lives together. And what had I really sacrificed for her? I could not think of one thing I truly valued that I had given up for her. Thinking of the life I had lived before, I had a vague sense that, before meeting her, I had not been fully human or fully alive. Occham’s Razor had been our project. Her money, her father’s money, but our project. How could I, then, blame Livia for keeping Luca’s bribe money? He was dead, wasn’t he? She had needed the money, just as I had needed the money to make Occham’s Razor into the kind of bookstore I was interested in running. But what Livia did was different because I had loved Sandy. If I hadn’t loved Sandy, I wouldn’t have been able to marry her. Yes, I thought, it was totally different.

“Mother, are you grilling me about Sandy to try to keep me from reading the article about

Moretti? You know what I’m talking about. Moretti gave Luca thirty million lire to keep him from running his article. He had it in his account when he died. You took that money and used it for whatever you felt you needed at the time.”

“Paolo, your persecution complex has gotten to be unbearable. You always had to be the victim of other people’s ruthlessness. And it’s not because of me you’ve become that way. I’ll take no responsibility for this! You know, even Luca was never paranoid. He would have been the first person to recognize crazed accusations as crazed accusations, and he knew his enemies from his friends, but not you, Paolo, you think your friends are your enemies, and your enemies are your friends. It’s unbearable, I tell you.”

She got up to clear the table, collecting the dish I was still eating from, but it didn’t matter because I wasn’t hungry anymore. Livia had always had impeccable posture. Her mother

262 had sent her to finishing school after she won Little Miss Chicken of the Sea, and they had taught her that presentation and posture would be the determining factor as to her success as an artist.

Even when she was at home, she walked as if some kind of board or brace were attached to her back. She didn’t lose this aspect of her personality, then. She still stood perfectly straight, running dishes from the dining room to the kitchen counter. It wasn’t in her eyes that I could tell, either. Because when she was angry and indignant, her eyes flashed a kind of rage that was hard to distinguish from mendacity. But I could tell that she was lying from the pitch of her voice, which was too high. She protested too much. She had taken the money, and back then, she could have probably listed 115 reasons why doing so had been the right thing, but now, fourteen years after the fact, her indignation was in the idea that her own son could dredge up this past incident to accuse, when she, in her mind, had done this thing for him.

She never did admit to taking the money. Later, I would find the old bank statements showing withdrawals into the millions. He had given her power of attorney before he died. I never could find out whether that was because he had anticipated his death, or because he was planning to leave Rome and needed Livia to handle his affairs for him. And she never would tell me. If she had only come clean: “Yes, I took his money, but that’s because he asked me to. He knew your grandfather would never take anything from his own son, and he didn’t want Claudia to get a hold of it.” But all I could get was indignation, a useless emotion. “Crazed accusations,” she had said, but none so crazed as the revelation that my own family continued to believe a myth about his last days, not for the sake of eulogizing or improving upon his memory, but for the sake of their own precious memory, their need to preserve a myth. And these were the people I loved most in the world. Then, Livia would have said I couldn’t understand because

I was too young. Now, Livia would say I can’t understand because I don’t know what it is to

263 have to compromise, because I don’t bend. But if Luca had wanted her to be provided for, if he had wanted her to have the money, then, why could she not come clean about it? Why did she always have to respond with that righteous indignation that was a wall to my every question?

264

CHAPTER 24

WHAT DO YOU DO WITH PALM LEAVES?

I decided after my lapse with Natasha in the storeroom that day, I would not fire her. Too

many men did that kind of thing, and I did not want to be one of them. From that point on,

while Natasha still worked at Occham’s Razor a few days a week, I tried to be there less and

less. Three weeks had passed without any opportunity to speak about what happened that day in

the storeroom, but her very presence in the store put such a pressure on me, a feeling of

something outside of my control, that I would begin to have trouble breathing, sometimes even

wheezing like an old man. It became noticeable and my other employee, Renaldo, on one or two

occasions even asked whether I was ok, whether I was sleeping enough, getting enough vitamins.

When I looked in the mirror, I saw another person, someone who had a secret to cover

up, and the reminder of that secret stood before me a few times a week. What did she think of

me? Manipulative bastard? Weak male? Power-hungry dominator? Sometimes when I was

sure she was not looking, I would try to search for clues in her body language, her clothes or her

eyes; but in her clothes, I could see only signs that she was just as free-spirited and optimistic as

she had always been. Colored stockings, bright plastic hoop earrings, luminous corduroy mini- skirts, patent leather doc martin boots, but what did it mean? By her clothes, our lapse in the storeroom meant nothing to her. And her spine was just as ramrod straight as it had always been.

She wasn’t skulking into the store, as if ashamed. And her eyes? Well, I could never really get a

265 good look at her eyes anymore. It was just too dangerous. The likelihood she would sense me looking at her was just too great. Other times I would remind myself that I had been inside her, and that would startle and amaze me. Could I fire her for making me feel uncomfortable? Could

I fire her for allowing me to take advantage of her? What dated notions were these that said I had taken advantage of her? She had been the one hanging on me from that first night we met each other in Piazza Navona. And my wife? What would Sandy think if I told her? I didn’t think she would be terribly surprised, but then what? Would she ask me to fire her? But even if

I did fire her, I could not ask Livia to dismiss Natasha, too, without being interrogated as to why, and that interrogation could never happen. I could already imagine how her face would light up at any news of the crumbling of my marriage or the possibility that I might just wind up with the daughter-in-law Livia would have wished for.

No, I had to trust an eighteen-year-old girl to keep this secret we shared, and I had to trust that she would not get pregnant. I would not be that unlucky because I was not an unlucky person, not since I had married Sandy and not since I had inherited Occham’s Razor from Carlo

Levi. These two events had transformed me. Though I was still Luca’s nephew, and though we had never found out who was responsible for his death, I was and would always be lucky.

Perhaps I should talk to Natasha directly, explain my situation to her, tell her that I have been having trouble with my wife lately, tell her that this kind of behavior is not like me. No, that would make her feel slighted. Or maybe I should just out and out pay her to keep quiet about this. Could I gently threaten her? What was the going rate for bribery these days? Oh, if Luca were alive, he would have given me some straight advice on this. Levi also had had a way of listening without judging. But who could help me now? Love-struck Joey? A priest? Dante?

266 Now that was too ridiculous for words. No, the only thing to do was to wait it out or perhaps write her a letter to apologize.

In the news two aids to Amabili now had admitted to covering up a dinner with my uncle for the last fifteen years. They had told my uncle not to run the story, and, there at the dinner,

Luca had set his fee, 30 million lire, an astonishing sum for one measly article in Luca’s not- always-reputable weekly. They still remembered details from the dinner, the fish that had been served, the jokes about the headache pills Amabili had sent Luca. I had seen their elegant faces on television, their long, distinguished noses and lithe, athletic figures. “It was like opening a door one was not supposed to open. I suppressed it,” one had said. If I had had their postal addresses, I would have written them consoling letters and perhaps even taken up a correspondence with them. We three had experienced the same phenomena: We had each realized we had stretched our necks a couple of meters beyond everyone else’s, and that the head is a detachable organ connected by an equally detachable neck.

I wracked my brain trying to recall where I would have been on the Thursday two weeks before Luca’s death. Was I at Occham’s Razor? I did work a few evenings a week, but I could no longer remember which ones. If only I had kept a journal, but journaling unleashed unchecked demons and made me ashamed afterwards of all that self-pity. I knew I had dropped out of law school on October 31, 1977, and worked with Levi almost a year and a half by then.

But if Luca had asked me to go along with him to that dinner, I would have gone, and I never would have breathed a word of it to anyone. He would not have found me disappointing him in his time of need. Why had these two aids decided on this confession now? Was it because a dying man like Moretti was capable of anything? Because it would not be long before, in his final gasp, in his last epic fury, he might decide to “out” his co-conspirators, and so, in

267 anticipation, they had decided to preemptively inform everyone, knowing that to confess now

would be embarrassing, but not politically devastating; but to wait and be “outed” by a dying man with nothing worldly to gain, that would be much, much worse.

I started walking toward St. Peter’s, proud of the architecture, the Renaissance buildings, the engineering, the sturdy wide sidewalks and squares, passing the many palazzi, the burnished colors, the sienna reds, the mustard yellow, and the ocher, the beige. I liked the faces I passed— their tolerance, their humor, their good-natured smiles. But it was a holiday, and people were always like this on holidays. If I unburdened myself on any of them, how many would listen?

Livia did it all the time, but not me; it had never been my style. So I would talk to Sandy.

Wasn’t this the whole idea of marriage—that one should have someone to confide in, to trust, especially at those times when one’s trust in the rest of humanity had all but wasted away? A

day off from the usual recriminations. A relaxing my usual judgments. I was just a singular “I,”

and, if 99% of the world had decided to follow the tide, who was I to try to swim against the

current? To what end? For what purpose? For Luca perhaps, but Luca was dead. If we fail,

the bitterness in my heart will be a poison. Justice was an abstraction, another fantasy of the

child. And what would become of me if we failed? I passed Balli shoes, Andrew’s ties, Banco

di Roma, Max Marx, the most elegant and expensive shops, the wealthiest banks in all of Rome.

The life of ease opposed the life of truth. I had always thought that wealth would make a better

person of me, and while in some ways it had—I could be more magnanimous, if I desired—in

other ways it had made me more fearful of losing that ease and comfort.

Looking out over St. Peters, the square with its epic football field proportions, I felt

suddenly silly. Why was I here? Did I really think I would find my Sandy in these crowds, and

if I did find her, could I tell her that I was just a singular “I,” and that shrines like St Peter’s were

268 not just tributes to the ingenuity and industry of man, but that they also made me feel silly?

Should I tell her that I embraced the enemy of ease? The crowds reminded me of those horror

films when the lights go out, and everyone must find their way out by groping. She had said she

would come home and change before going out, so why had I left the apartment? I was

forgetting what people were saying to me (it happened when I was under stress). Not far from

the obelisk, I saw the back of a woman about 175 cms tall, with straight bobbed brown hair. She

wore flat slipper shoes, jeans, and a black trench coat and leaned against the obelisk while a man

held up a camera to take both their pictures. Were Sandy and Father Dante sharing a moment? I

wondered as I looked more closely. Another attack of my imagination. It was not Sandy. Her

hair was too thick. Another extrapolation designed to weaken me. Sandy was not sleeping with that man. The possibility—whether I knew the answer or not—the mere possibility, was enough to weaken me. But I could not shut her in the apartment. This was not the fifteenth century we were living in. I could only trust and live without complete assurance. I must stop thinking of these things, I thought. The possibility alone is enough to break me.

There was a note on the dining room table when I came back to 44 Via Cicerone: “Paolo, gone to St. Peter’s with Ivan. Back in a couple of hours. Love,” I sat down on the couch, thinking of the fact that she had gone out and that we would not be enjoying Palm Sunday together, and I realized I could not remember what Palm Sunday was meant to celebrate. It had been that long since my father had taken me to service. I could remember a man dressed up as

Jesus riding a donkey, and I could remember being given a palm leaf. “Paolo, a sad day is coming for Jesus, but you will see, he will die and be resurrected,” I can remember my father telling me this. I knew I was supposed to feel sad, but I felt gypped by the green palm leaves. I

269 could not eat them. I could not suck on them like candy. I could tickle people with them, but who? My father was not ticklish, and my mother did not go in for those kind of games. It was a crap holiday. How Livia and my father could have ever conceived a creature like myself is beyond my understanding. My mother and her pious part-time security guard/part-time policeman? A man who never was hers and who she never really wanted? I often think that, for my sanity, the best thing was my father’s early death, for to have the two of them whispering opposing philosophies in my ear from an early age to adulthood would have pushed me into such confusion, would have made me even more reticent, more mind-boggled than I already am. As it was, I had only the dimmest recollection of falling white petals at the Santa Maria Maggiore, the palm leaves my father had asked me to hold while he put his contribution in the donation box. If he had lived, I might have chosen to live with him over Livia. I could be sure that the magic of the church would have, at a certain point, worn off, and the world of my father would have begun to seem a little too small.

They will purge parliament, but first men like Bruno and Russo will preempt these purges by voluntarily confessing. I hated Moretti for opening his mouth in the first place, but I hated

Bruno and Russo more for their weak confessions: “I suppressed it. It was embarrassing, something I would rather not deal with.” And thank God, Luca had not died for men like these.

As I opened the door to our apartment, the scent of eau de toilette, Natasha’s favored sporty scent, invaded my nostrils. Natasha? I heard Livia’s voice. Had Livia invited that freckled girl over on the day of a holiday, too? I tried to prop the door open just enough to listen, but the lock was stuck. I heard my mother’s voice again.

“Paolo, is that you? Paolo, honey, what are you doing up there?”

“I forgot something in the apartment.”

270 “Ok, dear, Natasha’s down here. Why don’t you come down and say ‘hi’?”

“What?”

“Come on, dear. You can’t be in that much of a rush. It’s a holiday, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but I’ve got plans.”

I had to push hard to un-stick the lock, but I managed. Every social interaction tested my instincts of fight or flight. The reheated spaghetti I had just eaten felt heavy in my stomach.

Since when had social interactions become so debilitating? She would stop by to see me. Would she want to have sex? If the elevator did not have glass paneling, I would have been able to take the elevator, but with the paneling, there would be no way I could pass by Livia’s apartment without being noticed. But where was the danger in being seen? All I would have to do would be to wave and then get on with it. But even this, even the simple gesture of waving to my mother and Natasha in a passing elevator, was too much. My mother and Natasha were in the hallway. I started toward the window, hoping to see either Natasha or Livia walking down Via

Cicerone, but then I heard a knock at the door. Could I not answer? Hide? No, I was being silly. I would just have to open the door and be civil.

There is a certain style of dress that mixes elements of innocence and pornography. A style of pigtails, argyle and pleated skirts, of tattoos and toe rings and hot pink ‘hug me’ skirts, of lace up boots and tight velour shorts, a style that coolly knows while pretending not to know.

Livia admired this style because it was both transgressive and regressive, and Livia had always liked the results of mixing those two opposing viewpoints. Natasha did not wear pants. No I don’t mean she didn’t wear anything on the bottom half of her body. I mean she always wore shirts; tight skirts. For someone who called sex a means of giving up power, she certainly loved reminding others of her lack of free will. She does nothing for me. She could hang from the

271 ceiling naked, and she would still do nothing for me. But how should I tell her this without hurting her feelings?

“You’ve been avoiding me, haven’t you?”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Why don’t you come in?” I said. The words sounded horrifying.

When she was inside the apartment, I offered to take her jean jacket, which she very gingerly pulled off and handed to me. Underneath she was wearing a tight pink sweater, bangle earrings, and patterned pink stockings. I can not describe to you the confusion inside me as I poured out the whiskey she had asked for and mentally revisited the events of three weeks before. Presumably, I had come to “know” this woman in the Biblical sense, but I felt by any other standards, I hardly knew her at all.

“So, how are things going?” I asked.

“Fine.”

“And the job? Occham’s Razor, how do you like it?”

“I’m getting the hang of it. It’s as if it never happened, isn’t it?”

I wasn’t sure whether she was talking about the incident or something else, but the intensity of her gaze made me think the former.

“Yes, well,” I said, “it’s too bad, but you understand I can’t…I made a mistake. You see,

I’ve been having some trouble lately. My wife, she doesn’t—“

“Don’t tell me. She doesn’t understand you.”

“No, no, that’s not what I was going to say. Sit down, Natasha. Have a seat. Let me get you your drink.”

272 She will need an alleviant, I thought, pouring out an ample portion. Sitting at the far end of the dining room table, I noticed how very tiny she was and what a delicate frame she had.

Maybe she was an anorexic? She had lost weight. Was she trying to lose weight for my sake?

God, I hoped not.

“So,” I said, as I gave her the drink, “no, it’s not that she doesn’t understand me. I was just going to say she doesn’t like living in a foreign country. It disorients her, and now for orientation she seeks out the Catholic Church. She has a very personal relationship with her instructor at the Institute of the Nazarene.”

“How close?” asked Natasha.

“Well, I’m not quite sure. All I know is that whatever goes on over there does not include me. I also know he’s sometimes the first person she wants to discuss things with, and that they have, on one or two occasions, met privately.”

“So you fucked me to get back at her?”

“No, not exactly. I don’t know why I did what I did. I guess I wasn’t sure then, and I’m not sure now. I mean, you’re an attractive young woman, of course, and I think you stimulated me in some way, but as to why I did what I did, I’m still not sure, but I hope you can forgive me.

I’m not really the philandering type, and I never really have been.”

“I see.”

“I remember you once said sex was a giving up of power—do you still believe that?”

“Yes, I mean look at me. I’m visiting a married man who more or less has told me he wants nothing to do with me. Would I be here if I had had a little more forethought three weeks ago?”

“Now you’re playing on my guilty conscience, aren’t you?”

273 “No, I’m just stating a fact. Sex has been a disappointment to me, like many other

things.”

“You know what? I like you. I really do. You’re frank and you’re smart. I think you’re

going to do just fine. Listen, have you got enough money?”

“What are you trying to do, bribe me?”

“No, I’m just asking…I...I…I’m sorry. I guess I wasn’t thinking.”

“Well, just so you know, I pay my own way. I earn my own money, and I make my own

clothes, so don’t think you can buy my silence.”

“All right, fine.”

I did like her, and I could see why Livia had taken such a fancy to her, too. She said how

she felt. She didn’t mince words. Never played the fool, and I also liked that she refused to cast

me as the villain, even though a conventional script would have called for it. There was only one thing that troubled me: that last thing she had said about buying her silence. Did she mean she intended to talk about this?

“Natasha, I hope you know I am sorry, but I’m also married, as you know. So, I was hoping you would be considerate of that. Well, I was hoping you might keep this between us.”

“I knew you were going to say that.”

“You did?”

“Sure.”

“And?”

“And I don’t see why I should keep this thing quiet. What exactly do I get out of it?”

“Well, I told you I would give you money if you needed it.”

“Money doesn’t interest me.”

274 “So what does?”

“A better job, access to education, respect, my own apartment.”

“So, you do want money?”

“Not necessarily, I just want what money could give me.”

“If you want a better job, you’re talking to the wrong person. There’s only so high you can rise in Occham’s Razor. But if you want a raise, I could look into that.”

“Yes, I do want a raise, and a promotion.”

“Alright, but you’ve got to be able to handle the new responsibility. If you can’t, you’ll go back to being a clerk.”

“Should we shake on it?”

“Yes.”

How much testosterone could race through one tiny delicate female? I thought, as I gave her my hand. She didn’t just want money. She wanted it all: power, money, sex, love. There was something remotely diabolical about this rampant unleashing of her desires. She would get her revenge on me, maybe not now, but someday. She was my mother all over again. Out and out opposed to the truth-tellers, and yet ready to rake in the rewards for any private truth she shared with anyone desperate to keep this truth silent.

275

CHAPTER 25

IF MATRICIDE WERE A PART OF THE FAMILY LEGACY

Once again Sandy had gone out to hear the open air mass at St. Peter’s, leaving me at home to contemplate how I had betrayed her. I was not the only one, though. When I turned on the TV set, satellite zapped images of more serious and far-reaching betrayals into my home.

The people had to decide on eight ballot proposals, the most important of which proposed dismantling the system of proportional government altogether. Editorials blamed proportional representation for giving the political parties the power to parcel out the country’s wealth and create fiefs of patronage.

Amabili had testified before a committee of fellow senators, and these senators would eventually decide whether to end his parliamentary immunity from prosecution. At the same time more Mafia informers indicated Amabili had ordered assassinations (most notably of my uncle) and met with the capo di tutti i capi. By the end of last week, 82% of Italians had voted for political change and endorsed a proposal to scrap the current system and replace proportional representation with the majority voting used in parts of Europe and the US. Over 1500 investigations were under way on official thievery. Triumphant op-eds declared the referendum and the investigations the first step to forcing politicians to clean up their act. And me, I felt like a bit of a traitor myself. I had bailed out, opting out of the Italian mess through marriage and then never quite being able to follow through, never quite feeling worthy, never quite believing

276 this new life was real or mine, always prepared to sink back into a life of low ceilings and even lower morale.

When Sandy came home in the afternoon, I felt like someone receiving gifts for no reason. I did not deserve the good things that were happening, both political and otherwise, because I had not fought for them. Seeing Sandy, then, reminded me of my own cowardice. Her cheeks were flush. She had pulled her hair back in a low ponytail at the nape of her neck. She knelt down to unclip Ivan’s collar, and Ivan, who was still wagging his tail from all the excitement, heeled merely because she asked him to.

“Where did you learn that?”

“I’ve been picking it up. He even heels on command. At intersections he won’t go until you give him the sign. It’s a little tedious because you can’t be inconsistent, or else he’ll get confused. All the pet books say this is the time to teach him obedience because he’s still young enough to absorb new ideas.”

“Don’t you think you’re overemphasizing obedience?”

“Jesus, he’s a dog, Paolo. When was the last time you saw a dog reason with its owner?

They can only do yes or no. They can’t do maybe.”

As she managed to unclip the leash, she made a face, inhaling and asking whether I smelled something. I was sure at that moment that she was smelling Natasha’s perfume and that she would soon begin throwing vases or dishes or anything else breakable to remind me of what a lying sack of shit I was, so I simply turned away and insisted that I couldn’t smell anything ever since I had started taking so many anti-depressants.

“You don’t smell the stove? What’s the matter with you? You’re so spacey these days.”

277 She walked past me and smiled in a long-suffering way. She turned off the stove and

then passed me once more to change clothes in our bedroom. I stood there thinking about how she was right: I didn’t go out anymore. I had no interest in learning or meeting new people. I only wanted others not to bother me, so that I could stay in my home, read newspapers, watch

TV, leaving the “engaged” life to other people. I lived in my work but not in my day-to-day

interactions. Even a dog socialized more willingly and more happily than I did. I should learn

Japanese, I thought. I have always liked water sports. Maybe I should join a sports club and

play on a team. Sandy was now back in the living room. She was wearing a trendy Adidas

sports suit and looking for the remote control.

“Where’d you get that?”

“At the market on Via Sannio.”

“Alright,” I said, making a face.

She didn’t like my “alright,” so she walked past me without looking, asked whether I was

going to take a nap anytime soon.

“No, I thought I’d watch television.”

“Well, I’m watching television,” and I could already see her scanning the room to find

the remote before I could.

I had already decided I would say nothing about Natasha’s threats and her visit just an

hour before. If Sandy accuses me, well then I’ll point to the Calendar of the Saints, the cross

around her neck, and to her private tours with the sucking priest, as I had now named him,

recalling that on two separate occasions I had seen him sucking in his already thin cheeks to

appear even thinner. The apartment may smell of Natasha, but Sandy will only smell smoke.

She does not think me capable of deception. She underestimates me because she can, I thought.

278 Then, a terrifying thought occurred to me. Perhaps she doesn’t underestimate me at all. Maybe

she wants me to go to bed with Natasha. Maybe she had met Dante in St. Peter’s, and then they

had gone to a nearby hotel and she had let him play with her rosary. In any case, the thought was

horrific, and I now looked at her Adidas sweatsuit in a new light—trying to seem like a sweet innocent flea market bargain hunter when in fact she was a megalomaniac incapable of love.

“Why don’t you use coasters?” I repeated.

“I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think about it.”

“Yeah, well, there are a lot of things you don’t think about.”

She muted the sound and stared at me, her anger audible in the silence.

“Is this about me or about you?”

“What?”

“Or is it about your uncle?”

“What?”

“I saw a newspaper headline on the way back from St. Peter’s. Amabili lost his parliamentary immunity. They’re going to prosecute him.”

“What newspaper?” I asked.

“I don’t know. One of the big ones.”

A few days ago investigators had found checks that led back to a Roman gang, a satellite of the Sicilians, made out to a gang member and paid out the week after your uncle’s death. One of the gang member’s wives testified that her husband saw Amabili on TV and said, “Who would believe, seeing him in suit and tie, that he commissioned the murder of that journalist?”

Even though evidence continued to be unearthed, I maintained my neutral stance. Besides, long ago I had decided not to allow myself to hope for change, for such hope was always followed by

279 disappointment. Men like Amabili have for forty years fostered the most desirable connections in the country; they could always find some loophole. There was always someone who could be bought. I had been a sucker once before, but I would not always play the sucker.

Of course, Luca would have been overjoyed to hear that Amabili had lost his immunity, but I couldn’t see this as good news. Emotionally, there would never be a right time.

Emotionally, I would never be prepared. The last time we had gone through this, they had spun

Luca into this hysterical, narcissistic, sexually-paranoid, maladjusted, lying ingrate who had worked his way into the Italian secret service only to betray all those who had helped him along the way. They had transformed him into an overly ambitious man without talents who had destroyed prominent men’s careers simply for the joy of seeing that destruction. The person they had been describing was not my uncle then, and I knew it would not be my uncle this time around either. The worst part of such a trial was knowing that they were getting it wrong but not knowing how to set their record straight. Not being capable of counter-arguing. Why not hire the best prosecution for this purpose? Why not use Sandy’s money to do so? She had already put up most of the money for Occham’s Razor. Ivan had climbed up next to her, placing his head in her lap. And if she finds out about Natasha, what then? I wondered. To the divorce courts ASAP?

“On second thought, I think I will lie down,” I said.

“Alright, suit yourself.”

In my bedroom, alone, I thought of many things, but first I thought of our furnishings.

We had easily spent 130 million lire (about $13,000) on the furniture in this room alone. The gray-stained oak bedside table, the king-size bed with the slightly-angled headboard, the mocha- stained six-drawer dresser, the black-stained armoire with the sleek steel handles, the black table

280 with steel legs and locking casters, the virginally white Egyptian cotton sheets, the 100% goose

down comforter and pillows. The comforts of such expense, the immediate affirmation that I

was superior to others. I did not want that assurance to be laughed at, and all the dark skeletons

in my family history to be once more dragged through the mud. What would I do to keep from

losing all this? I wondered. Earlier I had offered Natasha money; then, a promotion. Would I

have someone kill Natasha if I were certain to get away with it? If I could sidle up more

effectively to Claudia, I could have had ask Vito to help me out, but she herself was no longer in

any position to help me. From Lake Como, hiding from Razzo, what could she do? Twenty

years earlier, when Rings was still alive, if they had used the Lupara Bianca on Natasha, she just would have disappeared. It would have been as if she had never existed. It would have been tempting if it had been more easily accomplished. And for Amabili it would have been extremely easy: One phone call and the entire debacle could have been laid to rest for good. He had killed my uncle. I was sure of that, but unsure of my own moral superiority. Without power, one is never tested.

When my mother called, I was already nodding off. I could hear her asking me why I hadn’t come down earlier, but I can no longer remember how I had answered. She had, then, told me that Claudia and Giulietta had come back because seeing Razzo’s arrest on television had convinced them the retaliation was over. I didn’t argue with her, but inside I thought to myself, Well, what if Claudia is wrong? How can she be sure? Vito is a man capable of cutting off contact with his mother completely—a spiritual death for a mother—so what makes them think he wouldn’t passively watch as her life is taken? But Claudia has smartly given birth to two sons, one of whom will rise to become the boss of the underworld, while the other will surely be killed within the year for becoming an informer. I closed my eyes and saw that couple

281 at St. Peter’s. The bearded, somber man photographed the dark, thin smiling woman climbing onto the obelisk and leaning out, her left hand outstretched toward the camera. Her bright white teeth gleamed. She smiled at me, but I refused to return her smile, certain that it would only bring rejection. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again, this couple had vanished.

Livia pointed a bony finger in my direction and asked me to come to her. At first I couldn’t see very well, but when I looked more closely, I realized she had slipped and fallen into a sand pit, and with her finger she was pointing at me, wanting me only to pull her out before the snakes came.

“No,” I said. “I can’t. I have to go and be shorn at 6:30, and if I’m late they’ll slaughter me.”

“You have killed your own mother,” she said. “Let it be known that matricide is now a part of our family legacy.”

I closed my eyes again and when I opened them, I myself was one of the sheep being prodded through a corral. The corral opened onto a wide sand ring where the sheep were first shorn and then directed to another corral to be slaughtered. This panicked me because I did not want to die, but I also feared being shot while trying to get out. The others will inform on you, I thought to myself, and told no one of my suspicions that we would all be slaughtered. The corral was built to prod large animals rather than sheep along. Above me I could see nothing but the sturdy wooden railing on both sides of me. The other sheep I knew were too stupid to be of any use to me, but a black crow standing on the corrugated metal gate might be of service.

“Crow,” I said above the din. “I’m not ready to die. Help me.”

“What for?” he said. “Where were you when the rancher’s son wanted my neck broken?”

282 “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I wasn’t around, but if you don’t help me, I will die here.”

“Give me something of value.”

“What?”

“Anything.”

“Alright.”

So I cut off my hooves and gave them to the crow, and in return the crow saw to it that I escaped. Again I closed my eyes, and this time when I opened them, I stood on a beautiful grassy knoll overlooking the sea. All four of my hooves were in tact, and my sense of well being was immense. The crow had followed me to this place, and he, too, looked out at the sea and commented how beautiful it was.

“Yes,” I agreed. “But, Mr. Crow, why did you give me my feet back? I thought that we made a bargain.”

“Yes,” he commented, but did not answer.

The waves crashed into the rocks, and for the first time, I realized that one could not survive a fall from such a high precipice. The sea gulls cawed overhead. The horses galloped just up to the ledge, stopping only as the earth gave way beneath them. A dilapidated fence marked the place where the tide had earlier ripped into the cliffs, taking a large chunk of someone’s land back into the sea with it.

“I have taken your hooves and replaced them with someone else’s. Don’t think too much about this anymore. Consider it a gesture of good will and nothing more.”

283 “Alright,” I said, but the crow’s black eyes distressed me so much that without another thought to my survival, I leapt from the sandy cliffs to my death. When I woke, I had still not hit the rocks.

284

CHAPTER 26

LIKE BEING DEAD!

Opening night followed just a week after my Easter dream about the sheep. Livia had invited Claudia and Giulietta, and, in turn, they had volunteered to do the catering. Occham’s

Razor looked almost unrecognizable. An escalator delivered guests up to the café where they could feast on fresh cakes and deep roasted espresso. Thirty-two sections divied up our inventory of over 10,000 books—travel, maps, cooking, literature, military history, references, philosophy, sociology, magazines. Whatever the customer could dream up, we tried to carry it, and if we didn’t carry it, we would order it for them. Herring-bone tiled floors, pine railings, paneled pine ceilings, an information desk of paneled wood where one of my employees was already taking book orders and fielding questions—the place smelled like a new library, one with fewer rules and longer hours.

Occham’s Razor was not the only reason to feel optimistic. One week had also passed since the referendum had let voters know they would soon be able to directly elect their senator rather than basing this election on an overall party vote. In the past week I listened to the radio and read the papers, and everywhere it seemed that people were optimistic about the future.

They had demanded and been granted a new sense of accountability between the voters and the politicians.

285 Anna Levi, Carlo Levi’s wife, had surprised me by coming to the opening night celebration. She wore beige slacks, a burgundy cardigan and sturdy dark flats that could have been men’s shoes. Her grizzled hair was cut short, and her large blue eyes fixed on a biography of Princess Diana she had picked up and was flipping through.

“Mrs. Levi, what do you think of the new digs?”

She beamed, happy to see someone she knew, and I gave her a kiss, and as I did, I could see the Star of David around her neck, the same locket she had told me before she had taken off during the occupation. What advice would she have given me if I had asked her about Luca?

More hard realism, like Livia’s advice? Or would she say that the idealism had no place in the world today? Or would she tell me about the many times the Jewish people had risen up to defend their faith and their God, even though doing so meant certain death?

“Mrs. Levi, you’ve never met my wife, have you?”

“No, Paolo, I haven’t.”

Sandy was on her best behavior that night. Even though we had not spoken all day, she was playing the happy wife, smiling by my side, extending her hand to shake Mrs. Levi’s.

“Sandy, Anna Levi, Carlo’s wife.”

“We’re so glad you could make it…So, can we enlist you to help with sales?” asked

Sandy.

“No, no, I’m afraid I gave that up four years ago. I used to have a clothing shop on Via

Belli, but I sold it. Carlo and I wanted to start planning tours of Israel for Italian Jews interested in learning more about their faith. Would have been easy enough to get a grant to support it.

You know there’s a lot of money out there for that kind of thing, and Carlo was planning to give

Paolo the shop before he was killed anyway. He was interested in organizing walking tours in

286 Rome and even some vacation tours in Israel. Before he died, he had even found enough people

interested in getting the first tour going, and he thought well enough of Paolo to trust him with the bookstore. He wouldn’t have sold the store, just wanted to give it to Paolo. You know we made enough from the apartments he inherited from his father. We were very lucky. The family taking care of the apartments during the German occupation, they were good people. Didn’t even steal the silverware or an antique. Said they couldn’t take payment, just trying to do the right thing, that kind of thing, and that’s really been the steadiest income for both of us, and still is.”

“Well, Paolo is going to send you a regular income as well.”

“What for? What for, dear? I didn’t want the bookstore. Had no interest in managing it.”

“Well, all the same, we wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to start a bookstore from scratch, and Paolo wouldn’t have been interested if he hadn’t had such a good experience working at Occham’s Razor.”

I was not expecting Anna Levi to be so forthright about how she earned a living or what her interests were. Sandy and I had never talked about sending Anna a regular income, but since it was my wife’s money, and she had made the suggestion I would assume she would be suing her inheritance money for this monthly stipend. How much should we send, and should we start right away? We won’t be making money for a few years yet, and maybe never, but this was irrelevant to Sandy, and perhaps it was irrelevant, period. She knew more about her finances than I did. She controlled more of the assets, and she understood how much we could spend and how much we had to reinvest to keep earning. I would let her handle these things, even if I was

‘playing the wife’ by letting this be the case. Controlling how the money was spent was

287 anathema because again it cast me in the role of gold digging controlling husband who marries rich heiress and then takes over, and that I could not handle.

“So, are you planning to still run the tours without Carlo?” asked Sandy.

“We already are. Eight days in Jerusalem and in Galilee, one day at the Red Sea, and we had a blast. Carlo would have loved it. You know we make it structured, but not too much.

Two tours a day, with time for shopping and relaxing and exploring. I couldn’t do it all by myself. Another couple organizes it with me. Oh, look at me, still calling myself a couple. I guess I’m still not really used to being alone. Or maybe I don’t really feel alone. You know it’s strange. Carlo’s been dead over a year, but I still think of him as alive.”

“Paolo, we should go on one of these tours. We love history. I’m taking a class on

Catholicism now, and I love Roman history and seeing the sites here. There’s so much to see.

That’s my favorite part of living here in Rome, but Jerusalem, now that would be something new.”

“Well, yes, but dear, we’re not Jewish,” I added.

“Well, you may feel strange at first. Most of the tours are skewed toward Jewish history,” said Anna.

“I’m interested in Jewish history,” said Sandy.

“Anna, my wife tends to take great religious leap of faith. I’m still recovering from her last conversion. Honestly, I don’t think I could take another one. Sandy, how many religions do you need, anyway?”

“As many as it takes.”

“Well, I wouldn’t worry about that, Paolo. Judaism is notoriously difficult to convert to.

We don’t want anyone to have to go through the pogroms and the persecution unless they’re

288 absolutely sure this is what they want. Ruth, the mother of David, was a convert, but most people stick to the religion they were born with. Besides in Judaism, conversion isn’t necessary.

A person can go to heaven without being Jewish.”

“Anna, you know I don’t believe in heaven. I believe you die, and that’s it.”

“Paolo’s very pessimistic about what happens after death,” Sandy added. “He thinks we disintegrate into nothing. End of story.”

“Do you really?” asked Anna.

“Pretty much, yes,” I said.

“I see. Well, you both would be welcome to come on the tour, but I have a feeling it wouldn’t mean that much to you. I mean I’m sure it would mean something to you, but the focus of the tour is on reaffirming one’s Jewish faith. They have Christian tours, too, though. Those tours go through Bethlehem and other historic Christian places. That might be better for you.”

“And what about secular tours? Haven’t they got anything for heathens like myself?”

”I’m sure they do, Paolo. I’ll have to ask the next time I’m in Jerusalem.”

“Sandy, why don’t you introduce Anna to Livia? I just want to catch Roberto before he leaves?”

My mother’s ex-lover Roberto Civetta was motioning toward the door. His two sons had migrated upstairs where they were probably flirting with Natasha and ordering one of everything.

I just wanted to speak to Roberto before he left, and what I wanted to talk to him about needed to be said in person rather than over the phone. I had spent a long time thinking through the people who had surrounded us in March 1979. One of those people would have been Roberto Civetta, for, though he was then still married to Maria Cutugno, then, he was also still seeing my mother.

The twins were living with us, and he would drop by to visit them and leave her money. The

289 only thing I needed to know was how much he remembered from the month of March. Once I knew this, my curiosity would be satisfied.

He had sharp green eyes, shoulder length hair, black three-day-old stubble. He was wearing a crumpled blue suit, even though he could have afforded better. He had never cared too much for his physical appearance. He considered himself an artist and, therefore, had no use for the pretensions of fine dress. Livia talked of him now as the father of her two boys, but at the time, he had been one of those rare things for Livia, a man she admired and wanted to go to bed with. There were photos of the both of them in convertibles. Livia wearing some Isadora-

Duncan-like-scarf of bug glasses, Roberto dapper again in another crumpled blue suit. She spoke badly of him only when he missed payments or forgot to stop by. That she spoke of him at all showed he ranked more highly than my own father ever had. I used to wish very hard that he could be my father, and then feel very guilty about denying my real father, and by association, my real uncle and grandfather. But if it were true, if he could be my father, then, I could be the son of a movie producer rather than the son of a policeman. I could be a lovechild instead of some convenient fuck. But it had not happened that way. Lorenzo and Pietro were the love children, and I was, well, I was what I was.

Livia, Anna and Sandy were by now standing close to the refreshment table, looking back at me. All these women were nodding their heads and laughing. I would have to ask Sandy later what they had been talking about. Roberto was talking to an elderly man, a guest of Livia’s, someone she knew from the Pirandello production. The director, maybe? How could I get

Roberto away without being terrifically rude. I would have to stand around and make conversation with them. I had no other choice.

290 “Paolo, this is a marvelous accomplishment. We’re so proud of you. You remember

Stefano DiCarlo, the great theater impresario?”

“Yes,” I nodded.

“Yes, we’re both in awe of how quickly you turned around and got this whole thing

running. But you’re not doing this all alone, are you? I told Stefano you have a partner. That’s

what I understood anyway.”

“No, I don’t have a partner. I’ve hired some people, but otherwise I’m doing all the

managing myself.”

“Don’t you find that tedious?”

“Sometimes.”

Roberto’s friend, Stefano Di Carlo, was not only a theater impresario; he was someone

Roberto relied on for advice on all things. Twenty years ago, when Roberto had come to Stefano asking whether he should divorce his wife and remarry Livia, Stefano had advised against it.

“It’ll take you ages. You’ll lose at least half your fortune. By the time you marry her, you may find you don’t even love her anymore. You may even hate her, after all you’ll have been put through to marry her.” Roberto never explained this story to me. It was Livia who told me that this impresario friend of Roberto’s had dissuaded him from marrying her, and that now she would resolve to be steely about single motherhood. She would act as if she had chosen it, instead of it choosing her. This was the beginning, too, of Livia’s conspiracy theory period. She was sure the men in the business organized secret cabals, collectively deciding whether to cast or discard her, bribing one another, organizing and advising one another, designing everything ultimately to work in their favor, so that they (and not she) wound up with the fortune, while she

291 would always be the one trying out, trying to get in the show, waiting on payments, the one

shafted.

When Stefano excused himself, Roberto and I were left alone with one another. I was

dying to ask him whether the gift from Amabili had been headache pills, as Amabili had claimed,

or suppositories, as both Amabili’s aides remembered. Was Amabili trying to use irony to dish

back to him some of the headaches Luca had been giving this powerful figure? Or was all this

just hearsay? Had Amabili given my uncle none of the above? Were these two men

remembering badly, as many of us had so many years after the fact? Roberto was mildly

political, but he was also wise enough to know when too much politics could do him harm, but

he had met Luca on many occasions, and he had been at the funeral. I distinctly remember

seeing him there (Had he brought his wife?), standing with the twins and Livia. Claudia and

Rings had sent a beautiful bouquet of flowers, and Claudia had promised to fly up by the end of the month, but she never did.

“So, have you been reading the paper at all? It’s crazy what’s going on.”

“No,” I said, “I try not to follow it.”

“Yeah, me too, but you know it’s hard not to see what’s going on.”

“Yes, well…”

“You must have heard about those two men confessing and Moretti’s bedside confession.”

“Yes”

“So?”

“So”

“So, what do you think of it all?”

292 “Well, you know, now you’re asking my honest opinion, right?”

“Yes”

“Well,” he shrugged, “the timing of it is curious, of course, coming as it does right on the heels of Amabili’s loss in the elections. It seems to me they’re planning to take him out while they still can, but they’re trying to save their hides at the same time. There are some people within Amabili’s faction interested in saving themselves, rather than going down with him.”

“But is it true about the dinner?”

“Look, when people come up with that many details about an event that happened fourteen years before, I usually believe that something extraordinary took place.”

“So, you do believe some kind of dinner took place.”

“Yes, of course, don’t you?”

“I don’t know. But you saw my uncle right around that time, didn’t you? Do you remember him talking about those headache pills he supposedly got from Amabili?”

“I thought about that, too, but no…I don’t. I do remember Livia getting a large bouquet of condolence flowers from Amabili the day after his murder. Come to think of it, they were the first condolence flowers that she received.”

I tried to utter some kind of reply to this, but I found myself unable to say anything without betraying my shock and anger. I began to nod like some kind of meditating mutant, nodding, with my eyes shut and my jaw locked. Why? Why had she not said anything? Why had she been so content to take what these people were dishing out? Had she called Claudia and had Claudia convinced her? But if I had known, I would not have stayed quiet. I would have been willing to fight, but instead I was told as little as possible, told to shut up and sit down.

Even Levi had let me know fighting was hopeless.

293 “Paolo, you look sick. Paolo, I thought you knew. Look, it was a long time ago. Don’t blame your mother for this. It was a different time period. There was less to be hopeful about, more corruption. We had no models around of outspoken resistance.”

“Except for Luca”

“Yes, but look what happened to him.”

“My mother never respected him, and she still doesn’t. In her world ideals are worth shit.

They’re for the stupid people.”

“Come on. What are you saying? Paolo, what are you planning?”

I could see my mother, one hand on the up-escalator railing, the other holding her drink.

Sandy stood beside her, for once looking relaxed, and Anna next to Sandy. Were they all planning their next trip to Jerusalem together, this one a historical tour of Biblical women, their lives in and around Jerusalem? Roberto watched me from behind, but did not dare chase after me, and I was watching Livia’s mouth open wide, as she began to laugh. I could see the shining gold caps on her molars, the ones she had never replaced, the laugh lines around her eyes, forehead and mouth, the lines which seemed to form some kind of mask of decay over the younger face beneath. And I wanted to rip that mask off. I wanted to wrench those gold caps off, no matter how much pain she would suffer, no matter whether those deep rooted molars came out, too. Instead, what I did was grab her by the wrist, and with Anna and Sandy watching,

I began to pull her toward the revolving door. I wasn’t planning on kicking her out. I intended to go with her, to re-visit our own personal hell together.

“Paolo, what’s the matter? What’s happened?” she yelled.

“Nothing’s the matter. Nothing’s happened,” I answered, pulling her all the more firmly by the wrist.

294 Later Sandy would tell me that all the guests stopped what they were doing. Even the

musicians momentarily stopped playing to watch me yank my mother through the revolving doors and out onto the sidewalk. Livia’s expression was more than astonished. She looked as if someone were pulling on the back of her head, bug eyes, not really terrified as much as shocked.

I knew this would not last. As soon as she got over the surprise of it, she would be fighting back, while I was relishing this moment. For once I had power over her rather than the other way around.

“Are you insane, child?” she asked, as I released her wrist.

I crouched down opposite her, hands on my knees, catching my breath, thinking that for the first time, I knew what evil was. Evil was people like Livia—silencing others “for their own good,” disrespecting the truth-tellers, laughing their way to their next material reward. Evil was those with no long-term memory who try to instill their singular amnesia onto the collective for their own good. I wanted to say so many clever things, but none came to me, so for a moment I just stood there hunched over, breathing heavily, scowling over at her.

“Well, what is it, dear? What the hell is the matter with you?”

“You knew, you fucking knew.”

“Knew what?”

“You let Luca’s case die because you couldn’t be bothered, and you wanted everyone else to feel the same way. You just wanted me to shut up and get on with my life. You manipulative, lying, you’re so sleezy, and yet you mask all your sleeziness in your love of the family. You use that as a bargaining chip. ‘Don’t say anything. Think of your family. Don’t say anything. You’ll embarrass us.’ But do you know how it feels not to say anything. Do you know how it feels to say nothing? It feels like being dead, Livia. LIKE BEING DEAD!”

295 “Paolo, you knew that was a trying period for all of us. You know I lost Luca, too, and I didn’t want to lose anyone else because you see, you can’t win against them, Paolo, and that’s what I thought you didn’t understand, and that’s what I thought you didn’t understand. You were twenty-one-years-old. I didn’t want you martyring yourself to them. I mean, martyring yourself to art or a bookstore like Occham’s Razor, or even to a wife or a dream—now that I could handle, but to those cannibals, no. It was hard enough seeing Luca do it. To watch you go on a similar path would have been more than I could have born.”

“You never understood how much the truth meant to me. You never understood how much not knowing became this gaping hole in my life. You knew. Fighting them would have been something positive, and even if we had lost, it would have been so much better than denying that it ever happened. Because denying that it ever happened, well, that was like dying. Not telling me these things was like letting me die. I had a right to know.

Damnit, you weren’t doing me any favors, and you weren’t thinking of me. You were thinking of you. It’s always been about you, about you first and foremost. Never about Luca or about me or about truth.”

296

CHAPTER 27

THE LAMBS HEAR LIVIA’S WHISTLE

Livia and I had never fought this way before. It was as if thirty-four years of grievances were erupting, as if Livia were hell-bent on running for her life before the molten lava of my dissent engulfed her. Always she had either dismissed me or simply stopped listening, and as soon as I realized I was not being heard, I would back down and become silent. This time had been different, though. This time I had not only scared her, but I had had the last word. She never apologized to me, but she felt bad enough to drop flowers by the apartment and even to leave a Johnny Cash CD in my mailbox. These gifts made me believe that she really had taken the money out of fear and that she really did feel ashamed of that. I never regretted that outburst because it cleared the air, and I never felt anger or pity for her again, either. All at once I just felt that I understood her, and that I accepted her.

Not long after the opening, Pietro and Lorenzo’s birthday party gave me my first chance to see Roberto’s new farmhouse. Persian rugs covered rustic marble tiles, enormous wrap- around leather couches formed entertainment islands, equipped with PlayStation and the latest video games. A maid cleaned up after the twins and served them meals at mealtime and snacks between meals. Expensive enormous wrought-iron light fixtures hung from the dark ceiling beams. Two black Jaguar XJ7s stood in the driveway. Outside the uncovered, and as yet

297 unheated, pool guests sat in lounge chairs, daring each other to jump in. Two perpetually barking shepherd dogs blocked entrances and exits, dumbly standing between interiors and exteriors like large deaf and mute bears. Beyond the pool a low stone wall fenced in a vast stretch of land.

Both of my brothers had told me they spent many happy afternoons in the shed (also renovated and converted into another entertainment TV center). There they could invite their friends over, smoke hashish, and listen to music. That was the first difference between them and myself at that age: they had had friends. But when I was nineteen, my best friend had been twice my age and related to me.

The friends Pietro and Lorenzo had invited were all inside “the shed,” where apparently something nefarious was taking place which the grown-ups were not privy to. Livia and Claudia dangled their legs at one of the pool, laughing and whispering, not looking around, just absorbed in each other’s company. Romano nodded, uncomfortably paired off with Roberto, grinning, clutching his drink. I once asked Romano whether he had ever worked with Roberto, and he had responded, “Only in my dreams.” Romano’s work had all been in the theater. He would have needed someone to invest in dental work for him, and he was far too hulking and bulky to play a leading man. I was just about to go over to join them, but I saw Pietro in the kitchen, and in his right ear something metallic, shining and dangling. Streaks of blue ran through his wavy brown, and now shoulder-length, hair. Identity crisis? I walked into the kitchen, with its humming, enormous black Frigidaire, and greeted him.

“So?” I said. “Are you making a statement?”

“No statement.”

“Are you giving the establishment the finger?”

298 “No, not really.”

“So, what are you doing, little brother?”

“Just thought it would be cool. That’s all. Just wanted to try this out before I go off to college.”

“You look kinda weird to tell you the truth. So, did you hear about Uncle Luca’s case?”

“Yeah, a little bit. Why?”

“What do you think?”

“It’s all lies, you know. I don’t believe any of that crap. You know I can’t wait to get to

America because they don’t care about any of that stuff over there.”

“Oh, and you think things will be better when you get to the States.”

“Sure, no one cares about this shit over there, and look how much happier everyone is. In

California they have sex all day. You know American women, they mean business. They don’t flirt that much, but they’re really horny. You just look at them the right way, and they’ll drop right on their back.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know. Besides, I’m sick of being expected to marry the first girl I sleep with. You know my last girlfriend broke my balls with that shit. I took her virginity, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“Well, that’s a whole ‘nother story. But she broke my balls talking about how I should meet her family, dreaming about us having kids and what not.”

“So, you think American women don’t want to get married.”

“Naah, they have feminism, you know, so they’re trained not to admit it even if they do want it. Right, Sandy?” he yelled to my wife, who was now standing behind me.

299 “Oh, don’t talk to me about feminism,” she said, making a face, “I went to the most feminist school in the country, so feminist that, for a while, women there insisted on spelling the

English word ‘woman’ with a y, so that there wouldn’t be a man in the word at all. They wanted that complete a divorce from the male gender. And I was married when I went there, so as far as they were concerned, I was already a goner. I couldn’t say beans about my private life before people started to roll their eyes and catalogue the long list of offenses I had just committed against the sisterhood by aligning with the enemy.”

Pietro gave Sandy a goofy grin, while I wondered whether he had been talking to Sandy about his girlfriend troubles. Was this how he had found out that American women were horny?

I couldn’t think the thought. I had to push it as forcefully as possible out of my head.

“Pietro thinks American women have sex all day, and that feminism has taught them not to demand anything else from men. What do you think of that?”

“He’s right about the second part of the statement,” said Sandy.

“Shit, and that was the part I didn’t care about that much. Hey, but wait a minute, so these feminists demand sex of men? I might be able to get used to that. I mean, of course, I’d feel very used, but I think I could learn to adapt to that. Where did you say your college is?”

“It’s in New York, you doofus, don’t you remember when I lived in New York and

Sandy went to Barnard?”

“No,” he said, grinning.

My brother—charming, absent-minded, carefree, pleasantly oblivious to everything—he would make friends at Pepperdine. He might even influence people. He would never study, but it wouldn’t matter. Who needs to study when you’re so damn charming, or when you’ve got so much damn money? Roberto had, at first, told him he would buy him a car as soon as he

300 finished his first semester, but after much cajoling, there would now be a car waiting for him when he got off the plane. A Bronco or a Ford Explorer, some kind of SUV that would “pull chicks.” I checked my internal barometer, and, for once, I felt calm and relaxed. I wasn’t angry.

I didn’t feel jealous. I didn’t begrudge them my lost and unreachable childhood, the one that had been not once, but twice taken from me by the loss of two male role models. I felt something like admiration and love for my little brother, his blue hair, and his spear-like silver earring. He had the freedom to experiment, to joke, and not to worry, and that might even make a better person of him than the one that I had become.

Claudia and Livia were traipsing through the living room, and from the way neither could walk in a straight line I knew that they had been drinking, and were probably already drunk.

Livia was talking to Randolph, Roberto’s’ six foot six sheep dog, asking him to please explain the newest fashion, stretch pants for men, to her.

“I mean, it’s one thing on a woman, but quite another when it gives away every last detail of a man’s private life.”

It surprised me that she thought that way. I had never known her to be squeamish about any such disclosure, especially when it came to males in tight clothing, but Livia’s views often reflected her moods. If she was feeling charitable about the male sex, she might wax poetic about Speedo suits. Who knew? But right then as Randolph blocked her way across the threshold, she saw the dog’s panting, his lethargy and his obvious obstruction to her path, and she had to turn back to Claudia, who was right behind and half-drunkenly add:

“I don’t know what these men are thinking. Especially in Rome where we have so many tributes to the phallus, thanks to Mussolini. Now designers have invented stretch pants for men,

301 so that we can spend all our days worshipping male genitalia. You know, it’s obscene!

Roberto,” she yelled, “how do you find the bathroom in this place?”

Roberto, who was showing off the acoustics of his new Bose speakers to Romano, did not answer, while Sandy, who had heard the question, called to Livia, “I’ll show you.” Pietro had by now wiped the milk from his upper lip. I thought he might excuse himself to smoke up in the shed, but instead, more seriously than I expected, he asked whether Livia was still having those problems.

“Mental problems?” I asked.

“Yeah, those.”

Almost two years ago Livia had been found swimming in the fountain at the shady, and probably somewhat cold, Piazza Farnese. The propositioning of men was nothing new for Livia, and it did not surprise me, but doing it from a fountain, imitating Anita Ekberg’s dramatic wading through the Trevi Fountain, that was an event I would just as soon forget. It was also the first moment that I realized how very much my mother needed me, so much that her very sanity depended on it. In some twisted way, I was the closest person to her. But what about the twins?

I thought, looking at my younger brother, maybe now that they were growing up they had begun to understand what had been at stake then. Maybe Pietro knew that Livia wanted one of her sons to care deeply enough to rush over to that Piazza, pull her out, and dry her off, rather than simply shrugging and saying, “Oh really.”

“None that I know,” I said. “God, I’d almost forgotten all about that. Where the hell were you when it happened?”

“Where the hell was I?” said my brother. “Where the hell were you? Besides what the hell was I supposed to do about it? It wasn’t my problem.”

302 “So, it was my problem?”

“Well,” he said, without answering. “You were the only one talking about it. I just thought you were making shit up.”

“Oh yeah, that sounds like something I’ve been known to do. You’ve known me your whole life. When have I been known to make shit up?”

“I don’t know. I heard you’re screwing one of your employees. Doesn’t that mean you have to make shit up to cover up for it?”

I tried to say something, but the rest of my body wouldn’t cooperate. I knew right away how Pietro had picked up this information. Natasha had, most likely, met either Pietro alone or he and his brother after the open house. Maybe she had even slept with one or both of them. But she had definitely told my brothers about our so-called “torrid love affair.” And now Pietro wanted to use this information to show me that I could no longer take the moral high ground, for

I had used and abused a young and innocent girl, and now I had ruthlessly discarded her. But, I thought, it isn’t true. I haven’t been attractive or interesting to Sandy in a long, long time, and she had sought out her own ways to find satisfaction (admittedly, mostly non-sexual) in other ways and with other men. I couldn’t believe I was being accused by someone who wanted to go to California to “get pussy,” but this was not to be questioned, for he was a young man, and this was what young men did before they became responsible, or some such shit. Again, I wished I could be more like the Mafia dons, throw Pietro against a wall, grab him by his throat and say,

“Don’t you ever question what I do in my private time, you cock-sucking boy.” But this would have been a reaction as alien to me as camping or improvised touching or discussing my emotions for all to see.

303 “Look, that’s complicated,” I said finally. “I don’t know what stories you’ve been hearing, but you know everyone has their own version of events, and I would be very wary of trusting people you’ve known for a few hours. You’ve known me your whole life, Pietro.”

“Alright, shit, lighten up. I was just trying to get the heat off.”

“Well, go outside and enjoy yourself. Take the heat off with them and not with me.”

“God, you’ve become such a tight ass.”

He put his cup in the sink. After he walked out, I stood alone in the kitchen, staring at the magnets on the refrigerator. “Whose ass do I have to kiss to get some respect around here?” one of them said. Another said: “I found Jesus. He was behind the sofa the whole time.” Smartass magnets can do wonders to cheer a person up when he feels his personal dangerous secret has spread to two loud-mouthed kids who will no doubt, under the influence of varied and sundry narcotics, spread the same dangerous secret to all their loud-mouthed friends. It was only a matter of time. I will tell her, I thought. When the moment is right, I will be brave and tell her the truth. I walked out of the kitchen, through the sunroom and back into the den, where

Romano and Roberto were now sitting. Roberto had piled a collection of CDs in front of

Romano, and he was nodding his head and saying, “I’m telling you. Listen to the acoustics. It’s worth every penny.”

And Romano was still grinning and holding on for dear life to his almost empty glass.

An Al Green CD was playing a sound crisp and clear enough to know that Roberto had sunk many million lire into this state-of-the-art speaker system. Roberto’s last real exchange with me, apart from greeting me at the door when Sandy and I had arrived, had been at the Occham’s

Razor opening. When I had sat down next to Romano, he smiled and looked in the other direction, as if trying to dissociate my appearance now with my theatrical behavior on the night

304 of the opening. I think he didn’t know what to make of me anymore. Loose canon? Whistle-

blower? Lunatic? Truth-teller? Or freak? One thing I think he knew was that I had stripped that event of its formality. And if I had done it then, then, what was to stop me from doing this again now? Perhaps it was for this reason that he had decided to preemptively discuss what it was he thought I had come over to Romano and him to discuss, Amabili, my passion he presumed, when in reality I would have just as soon sat back and listened to the two men compare their thoughts on the acoustics of Al Green.

“So, Paolo,” he said, turning the volume down, “have you been watching the Amabili trial?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head.

“You know, my wife tapes them. She says this last bit was incredible. They brought in

Razzo’s driver, and he testified publicly that he drove Amabili to another Mafioso’s house, where he witnessed our favorite prime minister kissing Razzo on both cheeks. It’s, you know, so incredible that it seems entirely believable. Who would make that kind of shit up?”

“I don’t know,” said Romano judiciously. “He has so many enemies. There are a lot of people who would love to see his downfall.”

“But they’ve already seen it,” said Roberto. “They saw it in April with the elections.

Without the vote from Southern Italy, he had no chance to begin with.”

I put my drink down on the large and low glass coffee table. I wanted to believe these men and even to love them, but neither would have been willing to discuss the subject were it not for Amabili’s now negligible influence over Italian politics. Both Roberto and Romano might have crumbled behind closed doors about Amabili’s corruption, but in public, they would have only professed admiration for his shrewdness as a politician. But now that he was fallen, they,

305 along with half of Italy, would feast on his carcass. Did I want to be a part of this feasting?

Could I really loathe this man, as much or as intensely as I felt revolted by my own family’s indifference to his thieving.

“Well, you know, it’s always the chauffeur or the nanny. That’s why I drive my own car.

I don’t trust anyone that totally to let them overhear my conversations.”

“Roberto, what the hell are you doing in your car, anyway?”

“Well, you know, you can never be too careful.”

Romano put his drink down on the table and sat back.

“You know, I still kind of admire the guy. I mean, who else could get away with so much? Even now he’s so good at playing indignant. ‘Never seen any of them before in my life,’ he says. Then, they produce a photo with him and Lima and Razzo and Buonnatale. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I met a lot of people at those fundraisers. Do you expect me to remember all of them?

Now, this chauffeur turns up, and he says he won’t even deign to legitimize an accusation so ludicrous. Now I’m just waiting for the next photo or video to turn up. And you know, I do admire a person who can keep lying, even though he’s full of shit. Shows he’s got some skills.”

“Well, no one ever doubted that he had skills. We just never trusted him to be working in our interests, that’s all.”

“You know who I trust even less than Amabili, all those people who rise to his defense.

‘He’s an honest man. He’s a careful man. He meets with his constituents every Sunday, even makes them salami sandwiches.’ These are the people you really have to wonder about. Have they not been noticing the cynicism and gloating of a statement like ‘Power wears out only those who don’t have it.’ Many of his same devotees could only wish to have as much power as

306 Amabili. Do they ever think about why his spiel is just a little tired? Or why they themselves

feel just a little tired?”

“So many frustrated angry people in this country, looking for a scapegoat for all the

things they never were or never could be. They know government is corrupt, but don’t know

which figurehead to knock out of the way or who to punish.”

“Come on. Don’t trivialize it. You know, these people aren’t just complaining. They

have some real reasons to be pissed off. A handful of families, banks and conglomerates buy

these politicians; the politicians, then, buy the votes, say they’ll represent the interests of the people, then get in office and blather about this great nation and our Italian family. In the meantime they stick it up the ass of the worker all the while.”

“Ok, Vladimir Lenin, we get the idea.”

Livia stood behind me, leaning provocatively over the midsection of the couch, her flat chest unable to form the cleavage she had hoped for. She had changed into a bright, floral sundress, a dress she wore with an enormous straw hat and high-heeled white shoes. An outfit too young for her, but she had put it on anyway.

“What are you boys talking about?”

“Amabili.”

“That old doddering fool, what the hell are you talking about him for?”

“Time Magazine wants to name him ‘Man of the Year’. No, they don’t. They’ve never

even heard of him. Besides, ‘Man of the Year’ has got to be sexy, and Amabili looks like an owl

or a mouse. His ears are too big, and his glasses consume his face.”

“But he’s powerful. Don’t you think he’s sexy? Wouldn’t you go to bed with him?”

307 “A hunch-backed gnome, are you kidding? I have enough to shudder about when I think of some of the men I’ve gone to bed with without adding Giuseppe Amabili to the list.”

“Claudia,” Roberto called out the back door to my aunt, “come here. We want to ask you something.”

“What is it?” she yelled back.

My aunt’s long black hair, her Bermuda shorts, her black flowing sleeveless shirt, her skinny, bird-like legs. I had to remind myself once again that she could not yell at me anymore, that I was fully grown, and if she decided to yell, it would be perfectly fine to yell back. She had so succeeded in terrifying me as a child, in blatantly favoring her daughter and her sons, openly ridiculing my mother for her career and my father for his cluelessness, and I must admit I still shrink before her. Still found it almost impossible to carry on a normal adult conversation with her. Maybe she had even hit me back then, but for now I couldn’t remember.

“We’re taking a survey. Time wants to name Giuseppe Amabili man of the year, but to be man of the year, he’s got to be sexy. What do you think? Would you go to bed with him?”

“Depends, would he still be prime minister?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Then, sure, why not? Afterward, I’d ask him to finagle some pardons for my sons, and

I’d hook Giulietta up with his son.”

“You wouldn’t, Claudia! You make yourself out to be beyond redemption.”

“But I am beyond redemption. Anyway, the boys are outside waiting, and the cake’s already out there. Who all wants cake?”

As my hand rose, I thought of a birthday party many years earlier when Giorgio was still alive. Who wants cake? And we had all jumped, rushing Aunt Claudia with our yeses, throwing

308 our hands up in the air, stopping all things between the air and the momentum. And Uncle Rings had passed the party and joked that we acted like a band of starving Ethiopians. Aunt Claudia had not liked that he was leaving the party to go out, but Rings had laughed and said she was too possessive. I looked again at Claudia—the enlarged poses, the waxed eyebrows, the gold earrings, the carefully nipped and tucked chin, the flesh-injected eyes, the thousands and thousands of dollars that had gone into her many and numerous face lifts. Her skin was stretched to a point where her eye sockets were strained. The skin of Livia’s face, I thought, comparing the two women, it doesn’t hang either, but she has creases around her eyes and lips, grooves along her forehead when she grimaces or laughs. Livia had never complained of this—the thousands and thousands of dollars her friend had put into her own face, while she, the actress who depended on her face, had left the profession, and caked her visage in foundations, rouges, mascaras and lipsticks, but never the knife. For a woman of ostensibly so few values, I wondered why she had drawn the line at this.

No one was out on the patio when Romano, Roberto and I made it outside. Giulietta, the twins and their friends had scattered all across the lawn, and were running zigzag from one side to the other, clapping their hands, and yelling “Via, via, via.” It would have been a sign of premature insanity were there not some object of their shouting. Up on the hill three small sheep huddled together close to the low stone wall, circling around one another, bleating without cause.

A couple of other sheep were on the patio, and my brothers and cousin (who obviously had little experience with this, though probably more than me) were trying to shepherd those others back to the three confused animals on the hill. The scene that followed could have been avoided if any of us had had more success in rounding up those lambs. Randolph roused himself from the

309 door passage and came out to see what the ruckus was all about. He treated this as some kind of national security issue, butting up against the two on the patio and even biting the behind of the smallest one. Finally, it was the two women, primarily Claudia, who brought some order back. Claudia grabbed the fireplace poker and rushed toward the sheep. “Randolph,” she screamed, and the pitch of her voice was enough to make him lose his grip. With the poker she probed the sheep, whose bleats sounded more like indignant wails than harmless measures of self-expression. The dog, shamed, followed behind her for a bit, but seeing that she had no use for him, turned back and sprawled out on the patio like a big, white helpless bear. While Livia, in her white heels, marched beyond the sheep over the low fence and then began to whistle in different pitches, high, medium, and low. Those sheep on the hill stopped their useless circling.

The first jumped back over the wall. Then the second. And then the third. Her shining red head descended beyond the horizon followed by the lambs’ woolly pelts and pink noses. I doubted I had seen a sight so beautiful in all my life. The sun was going down, and my middle-aged mother marched out of sight, with five beautiful empty-headed lambs behind her.

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CHAPTER 28

THE SIMPLE STORY IS MORE FRUSTRATING

I will tell her tonight. The bookstore will open its doors on Monday, and I will tell her

tonight. It was good to know that I was not among the sheep Livia directed and led. The

carabinieri had allegedly linked a bombing at the Uffizi Museum in Florence to the Mafia. La

Repubblica had printed photos of my uncle’s body after the murder, pictures which I found

tasteless. I wondered whether perhaps the editors of this newspaper thought they were only

doing their job, informing the people. To see a body one has no personal connection is one

thing, but to see the body of a close personal friend, confidant and hero. This body in the photo

was still tanned, still ostensibly alive. It was a personal defeat, a personal slight, and fifteen years old though it was, this slight felt intensely personal, like an assault on my own body. This ought to be illegal, I thought, putting the paper down.

The black knights, the original Mafiosi, those dark knights would have been beloved by me too. But now revenge has little to do with it. Abstract concepts like justice, even less.

Power, how stultifying, how dull and how utterly predictable. One year and a half later, and the retaliations from “the state within the state,” whose assets equaled if not surpassed those of the government, continued. After all, who was responsible for the more robust part of the Sicilian economy? Who satisfied the world’s demand for illegal substances? Whose organizational structure was the envy of every other business of its kind around the world? Who worked within

311 the state discreetly, financially backing its favorite candidate, loyally promoting and using its

influence to convince others to vote likewise? Who, when the people again failed to see justice

served, who took the law into its own hands? The myths surrounding them had been so

powerfully ingrained. Even if for an instant I considered that they were perhaps incorrect, the

myth so quickly subsumed the reality that the reality, the truth, soon became an illusion. But bodies, bodies proved nothing, for whoever was killed was an anonymous other who probably deserved whatever he had had gotten. He deserved death for the crime of despising the myth.

How else to explain it, except that disbelief was, in and of itself, a crime? And had I not known through Giorgio’s letters that a mafia trial had taken place, I could have easily imagined that there had been no movement, no outrage, no people flinging coins at statesmen and calling them thieves. And if I believed that, it meant the myth had never been countered. It meant the myth was the only reality, and my reality, my personal reality, that body that I had once known as a living and breathing human being did not exist.

I now had my own office set up in the far corner of the first floor of Occham’s Razor, an office with no windows because I did not wish for distractions while I was working. But my new space still needed something. I wanted Luca’s collage to be in the same room with me while I was working, not because I cared for remembering, but because I didn’t. Only the back of the store was lit, and as I was walked through the aisles to my office, I felt that I was not alone. What was the saying that Levi had taught me, the one that had gotten William of Occham in trouble with the pope?

Against the errors of this pseudo-pope, I have set my face like the hard rock, so that neither lies nor slurs nor persecution of whatever sort will ever at any time be able to prevent me from attacking and refuting his errors as long as I have hand, paper, pen and ink.

312 For as long as he had hand, paper and ink, I thought to myself. To refute errors and to

attack. But they had printed photos of his deformed and mutilated dead body. I had never seen

the same done of Martin Luther King or Gandhi’s body. What were they warning us of? The

possibility that we might wind up like Luca if we too decided to “set our faces like hard rocks.”

Or were they warning the perpetrators by saying, “We haven’t forgotten what you’ve done. His

death will be vindicated?” Was Luca’s body a kind of rallying cry, like the bodies of Palestinian

boys paraded through Ramallah, armies of insurgents swarming around the pallbearers? In any

case, the warning was not having the desired effect on me. Now I have believed in spirits, and

even Dr. Renato knows that I believe in an alternative shadow world, even if I cannot rationally

conceive of some afterlife of pearly white gates and angels playing harps. But the shadow world

I have never doubted, just as I know that there exists a shadow government which takes the law

into its own hands, rules by a said code of honor, and finally determines every public policy by

instilling terror in all those who disobey. The shadow world does not live beneath us in the

catacombs of Palermo, nor in the catacombs of Rome, Florence, Turin, Genoa and Milan, but in

the casual conversations, the streets, the hierarchies of deference. What was I doing with

myself?

The collage had always been crooked on the wall, and even now, as I reached up to pull if

off its hooks, it was not straight. What would it look like straight? I readjusted the higher left

side and stepped back. What had Luca liked about this silly design? I was not sure I understood what it intended, but then again it didn’t help that I could not read the text. A long column of black print in six point font, illegible and like some kind of slash mark cutting from one side of images, faces mostly unknown and superimposed on one another. It didn’t look much better straight than it had crooked. For all his rage Luca had little taste, I thought, carrying the oblong

313 frame by the cord stretched across its back through the dark aisles toward my office. I could have carried it by holding both sides. That would have been safer. I could have turned on the light. But instead, with my loping gait, I shuffled back to my private room, wanting only to shut the door, put the collage up, and be completely alone. But whoever had framed the collage, most likely Claudia, had not screwed the slats in tightly enough, and the glass plates as I bobbed back to my office slid further and further out of their border. Oblivious, I kept walking without realizing that a plate of glass had fallen out, and that some glass bits had even pierced my foot.

The halcyon lights were buzzing, and the soles of my feet were bleeding.

I noticed that the backboard was also coming out of the loose frame. Did someone loosen it? It had been fine when Joey and I had hung it up in April. I held the plates and the print flat and walked back to my office, taking care not to step on the balls of my feet, which I was sure now lodged enormous plank-size splinters. Once I dropped the plates on my desk, I sat down and inspected my foot. There were only two splinters, one just barely glistening and just wedged in the ball of my left foot, and the other at the big toe knob of my right. I had taken off my shoes to celebrate the expensive hardwood floor, and the fact that I could now walk barefoot in Occham’s Razor without collecting motes of dust or stepping on rusty nails or vast stretches of the cigarette ash various workmen had ground into the floor. I tried to take the splinters out, but my hands were too clumsy. I would need tweezers.

In reporting what’s more frustrating than the endlessly complex story is the infinitely simple one.

This had been one of Luca’s favorite sayings, and here I was rifling through unpacked boxes and drawers, thinking of tweezers, not Luca, but for some odd reason it was Luca’s aphorism I thought of with two splinters in my feet. Luca had never liked and never trusted

314 stories that dropped into his lap, nor had he trusted simplicity either. I knew at some point I would have to face the many loose plates and the now longer rectangular frame, but I would have just as soon left everything on the desk, wrapped my foot in paper towels and gone home. But I didn’t. For once I stayed in this space of memories, and it seemed that Luca was again by my side. He didn’t care about the splinters, though he probably would not have cared had the sharpest blade of glass sliced my foot wide open. These were mild paper cuts, and the splinters would probably come out on their own anyway. Since the birthday party, Livia had taken on a kind of mythic aura, becoming in my mind a sort of powerful woman goddess endowed with supernatural powers that could subdue animals and make them follow her, and Uncle Luca (the image of whose mangled body I could fish out of the wastebasket at any time, if I wished) now seemed a part of the space, as if even the splinters in my feet were there to remind me. I will leave them there, I thought, and I will lift these plates off my desk and touch, with my own two hands, the collage that Luca, for whatever reason, liked enough to hang in his living room, and that I myself picked out of a collection of ten paintings to hang in Occham’s Razor. I flipped the print over, so that it was now face up. Again, those strange frogs in the right hand corner, again the minuscule text cutting diagonally across. I could make out some of the words. The text was blurred and out of focus. It didn’t even look as if it was in Italian. I could enlarge it, but I would still not be able to read it, and yet, I thought, lifting the print out of its frame and holding it up to the light, just maybe I might. The copier was outside my office. I heard the floor crunching beneath my feet, but did not feel pain. This is silly, I thought to myself. I’m trying to communicate with a dead man through an illegible column of ink in a collage. The collage dropped not from the sky, but from a wall in Occham’s Razor. It sliced my foot wide open, and I found, what else, but blood, the blood I am now tracking through my newly remodeled and

315 precious bookstore. I must have spent at least an hour playing with the font size, the light and dark contrast, and the colors. In the end I had a pile of copies and a crumpled collage at my feet, all of it illegible. The cell phone was ringing in the office. I ran to pick it up, stepping again on the balls of my feet.

“Paolo,” said Sandy through the phone. “I’ve got to talk to you. I’ve been an idiot. I fucked up. I mean, it’s not what you think, but…you were right. That priest is, he’s—I’m not sure I understand it, but I went to drop off a book he had loaned to me, and when I got there, he was talking to another clergyman about you and about me and about your uncle, about all of us.

I don’t know, it’s like he’s been spying on us, or using me to spy on you. That’s why he was always asking about you. Can you meet me in an hour? I don’t wanna go back to the house.”

“Alright, I’ll meet you at the benches in front of the movie theater on Via Cola di

Rienzo. I luhuv you.”

The word “love” had come out all wrong. I could not say it. I had never been able to say it like other people could, but I felt that I needed to express the feeling, even if I could not express it properly.

“You do?”

“Yes”

“You luhuv me?”

“Yes”

“Well, I luhuv you, too.”

It was the first time either one of us had used the phrase in a long time. I hadn’t heard someone say those words in over a year. Maybe this is what we had been afraid of. Not being loved, where were we? A bullet wound to the heart would make no difference to anyone except

316 ourselves, but if we loved, it was possible to love, and if it was possible to love, it was possible to live without fear. We could live without fear, but we would have to be fortified. We would have to strengthen each other. I put down the phone and walked back to the copier. The papers were all around my feet, the grainy images I kept producing and reproducing that told me nothing. I would go back to my office, find the paper I had initially intended to bring back to the house, and go to meet Sandy like I had promised. Again, I heard the crunch of my feet as I stepped across the floor. I noticed a white piece of paper folded twice and tucked between the frame and the collage. At first I thought it was a warning note from the opposition, a warning—a paranoid thought flashed—perhaps a sheet of paper laced with some kind of toxic chemical. I was not going to leave my office like this. Nor was I going to force someone else to touch it. I would have to touch it, and so, prepared for the worst, I pulled this folded sheet of paper out, unfolded it and saw to my wonder Luca’s crabbed handwriting and a three-page letter addressed to me. I almost would have been content without reading it. Somehow it would have been enough to know that Luca had thought of me. I was, as usual, scared that Luca might have asked me to do something in the letter that I had decidedly not done. Or maybe he would criticize me for being spineless. Was it a letter from Luca the journalist or from Luca the ghost? I wondered.

Dear Paolo,

If you are reading this, then I probably have not survived. Of course, like everyone else, I would have liked to live a long life, but some things are outside of one’s control. Besides, I had many chances to give up the investigative journalism I am used to doing, none of which I took. You may be wondering why I have made so many enemies. Conflicting interests would, of course, be the most direct way of answering that question. Conflicting fascinations, if you want to think less literally. I have observed our statesmen and the Vatican clergy for many decades. What fascinates me is how universal corruption is to all these institutions. I think in some way you’ve understood this already, and I think this realization has contributed to your wise decision to remain on the sidelines as an

317 observer because, as you know, power corrupts the weak as well as the strong, whose ultimate goal is only maintaining what they have.

But I have not written this letter to lecture you, but to explain to you why I have given you this collage and what purpose I hope you will fulfill through this gift. My own life has been an exhilarating test of my will to resist the principles invested in silencing you and me. I had never intended to be a renegade of this kind, but if one decides to say nothing, only the status quo profits. Obviously, silence is always in the interests of the party at risk of being exposed, but did you know that silence is also usually in the interests of most second and third parties also, especially those debating whether or not to speak out against the first?

So, why am I writing to you now? What is it I want to teach you now that my life is almost at its end. There will always be other voices trying to steer you in one direction or the other (Your mother, for example, is particularly good at this.). Take heed of their advice only in to much as it broadens your options. Be careful to drive past all those who wish to steer for you. They are crippling; their very sincerity will only confuse you more.

Paolo, as to the question of whether or not you should marry, I am probably the least likely person to advise you. But in my last forty-five years, I have seen the people around me choose to marry. Your life up until now has been atypical. Your mother, myself and most others in our circles are psychologically ill- equipped to be married. In my case I know my capacity for intimacy is so limited that I will not allow myself to become close to someone I will inevitably hurt. Livia I think has remained single for other reasons. She is blessed with an abundant capacity for intimacy, but very little tolerance for weakness, a problem when dealing with the male sex (who are by and large vulnerable to intolerance of this kind, intolerant of Livia’s intolerance). At any rate, what I am trying to tell you is that for those of us who cannot marry, it is a source of pain and frustration. If you can marry, do it. It will shield you from life’s unpleasantness as well as its dangers.

As to your grandfather, he has told me on many occasions that he wished he had never married, but his parents and the people in his parents’ generation pressured him so much that he felt that he had no choice. He was twenty years old when he married, and he had never even had a conversation with his wife before their wedding day. Needless to say, my clearest memory of their relationship is of the two of them climbing into their separate twin beds and shutting the lights out. I could never conceive of my mother having sex, and in fact I think she was totally ignorant before she married. (Ask Giorgio about this and you will find him mute, but ask him just the same. It could be illuminating.)

Paolo, I have put the money in Livia’s hands, and she has promised to see to it that you are taken care of. I think you have a great future ahead of you. Continue to work hard, and I’m sure you will be rewarded. Follow the path that

318 interests you most, rather than the one that others think you should follow. Keep your family at arm’s length. For your own sanity, develop an identity outside of what they want or expect you to be. Remember that you can learn the most about other people by studying their fears. Keep this in mind in Livia’s case. Her intolerance is her weakness. Her talents and charms will help her to become a better actress, but without acknowledging her own vulnerability she denies reality. Continue to observe her and protect her as best you can, for beneath the harsh exterior she needs your human contact desperately.

Finally, about the collage, I have given it to you because I believe in you. I have waited this long because I did not want to endanger your life. By now, the reign of the two subjects of these articles will be drawing to a close, and you will be old enough and mature enough to understand why I have waited so long. So you may be wondering, what is my purpose? What does he want me to fulfill through this gift? Paolo, my story is not so atypical as one might think. See to it that the truth is brought to light. See to it that you tell my story, for if not you, then, no one, and if no one, then the status quo and the mythmakers who most benefit from the myth will have again insured that only their version gets told. Write it down, Paolo. Tell someone who will tell someone who will tell someone.

Be good and Godspeed, Luca

She had not given me the money, nor had she told me about Amabili’s sending flowers to us the day after his death. She had played the whole thing skillfully, like always. Why, then, had she not been happier about my selection of a mate? Was it really all about maintaining her control over me? Did she herself know? I stood by the copier, sifting through the trash, looking again for something that would indicate what exactly Luca meant when he had said that the reign of the two subjects of these articles would be drawing to a close soon. The discarded pieces of paper in the trash were illegible. I drew one copy toward me and noticed that the text was still illegible, but inverted. Perhaps Luca had purposely inverted the text. I looked once more at the original, now creased in places and resting on the photocopier plate of glass. How could I read the text? I would need a mirror, or maybe the articles were detachable. It was so obvious, and yet an hour before I had no idea what to do. Maybe Luca had printed both articles onto

319 transparencies. I picked at the edges of the larger article that cut across the collage, expecting nothing to happen, but, surprisingly, the text lifted easily from the page, and I was holding in my hand a transparency on which Luca’s original article, “Excommunication for all,” was printed.

In it Luca had cited that papal decree that stated that membership into the freemasons was an excommunicable offense, and in the same article, listing at least one hundred names, five bishops and at least twenty well-known advisors to the pope, arguing for the excommunication of five archbishops and at least thirty well-known advisors to the pope. The article was dated three days before Pope John Paul I was found dead in the papal chambers, September 28th, 1978. Then, I did the same for the illegible column running down the right side of the frame, picking again at the corners of an article that had been glued to the print. It will rip, I thought. I will ruin it and not be able to ever read it. I used the tip of my nails to push the corner up; then, I pulled the corners of an article that had been glued to the print. It will rip, I thought. I will ruin it, and not be able to ever read it. I used my nails to push the corner up. Then, I pulled, certain that this was too easy and would never work. “The simple story confounds us much more than the infinitely complex one.” Luca had pointed this out, and there again he had been right. Again, I placed the transparency on the photocopier’s glass plate, and within seconds a clean copy fed out of the machine and into the tray. I was holding in my hand a copy of, arguably, the most sought- after article of the last thirty years, dated two months before Luca’s death and it was—as we had all suspected—about Amabili. The girlfriend of that member of the Magliana gang had talked in the last few weeks, mentioning a check her boyfriend had cashed written by Amabili himself.

Dozens of figures like these had apparently profited from working with Amabili, but what tasks had these men performed in return? Luca’s style of writing was, and had always been, blunt.

The names were there, easily located both on the page and in life—Peppe Calvo, Gianni Settimo,

320 Giuseppe DeLuca—all these checks led back to the Magliana gang. How many hits had the

seven-time prime minister put out, and upon whom? It was too late for him now. Razzo wanted

him dead, and I, although usually indifferent, felt the hand of my uncle directing me and asking

that I care more. But even Luca, most likely, had never known who had killed him. Only the

checks could indicate, and if Amabili’s checks could also be audited, then we might even see

some insults. I walked back to my office, my bare feet crunching beneath me, sat in my brand

new leather chair and flipped through my Rolodex. Nico Superman, there are men like this out there who inspire men like me to be slightly more idealistic. I dialed. I would let him know I could provide him with whatever copies he needed, and then I would go to Sandy and let her know what I had done. I thought again about what Luca was asking me to do. Tell my story, he had said, but the story I would eventually tell would no longer be his. Experiencing these past fourteen years, understanding that justice might never be served, or might only come to pass years from now, experiencing this for myself, it had become my story, too, and the story that I would eventually tell would not be about Luca, but about Luca, myself and everyone else who had been left to wonder, all those closest to the victim who, because of this closeness, suffered the most, because we would never know and because we realized that too many people did not want us to know. The phone was ringing. I heard Nico’s deep baritone voice on the other end of the line.

“Nico?”

“Yes”

“Paolo—Paolo Taviani.”

“How are you?

“I’m good. I feel good, Nico.”

321 “I’m glad. What’s up?”

“Nico, I’ve found something I think you might be interested in.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, I’ve found my uncle’s articles, the ones that were never found. They’re worth taking a look at.”

“Can you bring them over tonight?”

“Tomorrow, Nico. I’ll bring them to you tomorrow.”

322