Advice for Italian Boys Read online

  “You’re a nice boy, Nick,” Jessica said when he pulled up in front of her house. Gloom or disappointment or something else tugged the pitch of her voice an octave lower.

  She surprised him then by inclining toward him, raising her wide face and pressing a kiss full onto his right cheek. Her eyelashes were trimmed with clots of black stuff and spangled with pearls of moisture, and her lips were wet and cold and rough. Jessica’s kiss had the sharp, quick, inevitable sting of a mosquito bite, one that both extracted a taste of blood and injected a virus or germ.

  “Just wait here until I get inside, okay?”

  At home, it took Nicolo many swipes with the soapy corner of a wet towel to remove all traces of purple lipstick from his skin, and it took longer, several years, to get over the shame and horror of that kiss, his first from a girl, bestowed in something like pity. Bacio di bocca spesso cuor non tocca, his nonna might have said. A kiss from the lips may sometimes leave the heart untouched.

  In the same instant that Nicolo, mortified, infuriated, white-faced apart from the purple smear near the hinge of his jaw, was passing through the front door into the house, Nonna was in her bed, being tossed by the winds of a dream.

  A half hour earlier, in the kitchen, before they went to their separate beds, she and Paola had been discussing Nicolo.

  “He shouldn’t be out so late. When I was a girl, people understood that young people are better off under their own roof than out in the streets.”

  “You don’t need to worry. We know where he is and who he’s with.”

  “And with a girl. I can’t understand why her parents allow it.”

  “It’s only little Jessica Santacroce. He’s played with Mario and Jessica since they were babies. It’s good for him. Good for them both.”

  “When I was young a girl was kept in her parents’ sight until it was time to get married, so there could be no doubt that she was honesta.”

  “That may have worked then, but times have changed. You have to let them make their own mistakes. That’s how they learn, from their own experiences, not from ours.”

  Filomena doesn’t hear the door open and close as Nicolo comes home. With age her eyes have softened and dimmed, while her dreams have become more vivid. They are now more sharply detailed than any of the hours of her waking world. She falls into her dreams headlong, eager for the places they take her—far in distance and in time—and open to the insights that they sometimes bring. Tonight, in her dream, she is a girl again, fifteen or sixteen, supple and slender as a birch sapling, with her neck as broad and white and fine as a dove’s, wearing a full grey skirt, and a yellow blouse tied, loosely, by a string so that it falls open an inch lower than her collar bone. She is slowly walking along one of the narrowest streets of Arduino, Via Arnaldi, a passage that winds lazily west and south, in the direction of the communal well and wash-troughs, and then past them, connecting to the old road north of the village. She allows the backs of her fingers to trail lightly against the stone walls of the houses to her right as she walks. If she wished, she could stand in the middle of this narrow cobbled lane and reach out and touch with her fingertips the wooden window boxes filled with dusty geraniums on two facing houses.

  Filomena recognizes every house, and she can name the people who shelter in them. Here the Brunos: Domenico, Giulia, their three daughters, gentle Eva, simple Franca and sharp Luisa. Next door, old Serafina Cornucci, who lives alone, her back so bowed with years and a lack of vitamins and protein as a child, and since, that her chin is almost level with her waist. Across the passage, the Fortunati family: father Rafaele, mother Marta, Marta’s parents, and their seven sons, including little Angelo who will die soon of an earache that will travel like a blindly burrowing worm from the uncaring world fatally into his soft, defenceless brain.

  The health-care worker that Mussolini sent to Arduino at the start of the war was on an extended vacation of six months when Angelo fell ill, and he said afterward (alarmed that his unapproved trip to Milan might be found out by his superiors) that he could not be blamed because he had not been there to oversee the child’s care, although in fact he would have counselled the same treatment: warm mineral oil poured into the ear, and a candle held close enough to the boy’s head to singe his hair in an attempt to draw out the infection. Poor Marta, who had already lost her only daughter at seven months when she returned from the fields and fed the hungry baby too quickly. The milk in Marta’s breasts was overheated from her labours and baby Pina never woke up from the heavy sleep the hot milk induced.

  Filomena extends her fingers and runs her fingernails gently against the coarse stones, smoothing the edges, which are jagged from a morning spent weaving linen under the exacting scrutiny of her stepmother Annalaura. Later she will try to steal a little olive oil from the bottle in the locked cupboard in the kitchen to rub into her hands and cheeks and brow to keep them smooth. Pane vietatu genera pitittu—forbidden bread sharpens hunger. She is famished lately for forbidden things—olives, scraps of cheese, underripe tomatoes. She has learned the knack of opening the lock with a hairpin, having taught herself one afternoon when she was home minding her father’s and Annalaura’s three large-toothed and unobservant sons. Filomena is gleeful that she has deciphered the trick of it; she feels joyous, victorious, each time she thrusts the prongs of the pin past the tumblers to the back of the chamber, and then draws them forward so that they click into place and the hasp of the lock falls heavy and free into the bowl of her criminal hand. If this happens on a day or week when her stepmother had been short-tempered or demanding, Filomena takes care to dribble one or two drops of the oil on the ground near the side of the bed where Annalaura sleeps. Spilled oil makes a stain of bad luck that can be undone only by tossing an equal amount or more of salt on the mark and making the proper sign with one hand—the first finger and baby finger outstretched. Annalaura has a squint. She won’t see the mark and so will not know to take the necessary precautions to undo the hex of Filomena’s ill will.

  Filomena’s dream carries her now past the bread ovens, which smell of yeast and charcoal and faintly of the sweat of thousands of long mornings of hot labour, Arduino’s women pressing and kneading the dough into submission, and then past the bare, wide raked-gravel yard where barrels and cartwheels are taken to be mended, and along the road that runs beside the woods, which are sparse at first, and then dense and dark. The road passes through a row of Lombardy poplar north of the cemetery and into a stand of much older, crooked cedar trees with their flat, pale green needles, and their branches scaly and gnarled like the hands of old women. She is meeting Orlando here, the eldest of the Fortunati sons. He asked her if she would like him to teach her how to kiss and she told him yes. She believes that this information will be useful to her, not with Orlando, whom she has no feelings for—he is handsome but stupid—but for someone else whom she hasn’t met yet, a stranger, someone from another town, maybe even another country, even though she has been advised by Arduino’s older women that she should choose, when the time comes, from among the boys of her own town. Figghiola non d’amari furesteri. Ca su comu le genti di passaggiu. Oi le vidi e domuni li spedhi. Ogn’ unu s’indi va pe’ lu soi villaggiu. Young girl, don’t waste your time in love of outsiders. They are like birds of passage. Today you see them and tomorrow they will have fled. Everyone goes back sooner or later to his own village.

  She is humming a tune to herself as she walks, in this dream, which feels more and more like a memory and not the usual nighttime concoction of scraps of sense and nonsense.

  Giuvanottellu no lungu e no curtu.

  Giuvanottellu fatt’ a voglia mia.

  Quandu cammini tu tremma tutu,

  Peggiu di na folgia a menz’ a via.

  Young man, you are neither too short nor too high.

  Young man, you are made exactly to my desire.

  When you walk, everything you pass is knocked askew,

  And I tremble like a leaf that has fallen onto the av
enue.

  She reaches the first gravestone, looks over her shoulder and then steps off the road. She passes several trees and then stops and presses her shoulders and the small of her back against the bark of a broad cedar trunk. She raises her nose into the air trying to catch its scent, but cannot distinguish its sharp, clean odour. The season is spring and the air is vivid with the teeming scents of vibrant, opportunistic growth. At her feet green things that have no name, or at least no name she has ever learned, are sprouting and spreading rampantly and tiny flowers are pitching out of the dirt, shoulders first, with their bell-heads hanging like shamed children. She is young and green herself, and more tender than the first shoots of the chicory that Annalaura sends her out to gather in the mornings from the cold spring soil.

  She turns and puts her arms around the tree, embracing its solid waist, opens her lips and runs her tongue lightly against its folded bark, which surprises her by tasting like nothing at all. She had thought it might taste like mushrooms or apples or sawdust. Then she feels Orlando’s arms reach around her, enfolding her between the trunk of his body and the tree. The long curls of hair on his forehead fall forward into her eyes. Capiddhi luonghi e mentalità curta—long hair but not too bright—Filomena thinks. But he will do for this purpose. Orlando uses his rough chin to push the fabric of her blouse lower on her neck and he kisses her there at the top of the long ridge of bones that divides her back. His lips move up her curved neck and into her hair. They feel like a warm, suckered creature crawling along her skin, trying to make its way into her tingling skull. This, this is more memory than dream, as clear as broth in the soup of her dream. Orlando’s mouth feels hotter on her skin than the sun when she is in the fields, and the pressure of his lips and the probing sweep of his tongue and the spiced moisture of his breath sends a shock coursing through her, like the first splash of icy water from the basin on a winter morning. She draws in a breath that expands her chest against her shirt, and she opens her lips wider and forces her tongue into a crevice in the thick skin of the tree. Orlando, who is not much taller than she is but has impressively broad shoulders, whispers something that she doesn’t hear—he has chosen the ear that was left damaged after she had measles and a three-day fever when she was eight years old—and then he takes her earlobe between his teeth and tugs so that her head is tipped up and to the side.

  “Prisoner,” he teases her. “Slave. No one can see us. I can make you do whatever I want and there would be no witness.”

  He slides his hands from her shoulders up to her neck; he presses against the soft skin under her chin and his thumbs push and rub against the base of her skull.

  I am young and green, Filomena thinks, staring up into the maze of needles that shift and settle and fret against one another above her head, making a noise like fabric against the skin of the sky.

  Orlando moves in closer; he plants his feet in the soil so that they bracket her feet and his thighs press against hers. All four limbs are bare and dusty from the dry road. He nuzzles around her like a calf forcing its mother’s milk and she feels as liquid as cream and as soft and yielding and full of salt as newly pressed white cheese in its woven willow basket.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Nicolo’s muscles look pumped up and vigorous even when they are at rest. When they are working, they function as smoothly as the wheels and gears of machinery shown in Soviet art from the 1930s, in which rounded, rolling cogs and gaskets pull and push together with commanding ease and inevitability. Nicolo wears a suit uncomfortably; his body is too sprung and sprocketed for wool, however finely spun, cut, pieced and tailored. His neck feels constricted in a tie, and his thick calf muscles wear away the elastic on high socks after a few wearings. He is most comfortable in the gym’s logoed shorts and a laundered T-shirt smelling of sun and wind and pollen and grass from being hung out to dry on the line in the yard behind his family’s house. He was not, for a long time, at ease, even alone, when he was wearing nothing at all.

  What Nicolo likes about working out is the sense of incremental, purposeful progress. He is not apprehensive of pain; in fact he welcomes it, invites it every time he adds a new set, or notches the load that he is lifting upward by another kilogram. His aches, which are more or less constant, are real but shadowy; the pains in his muscles and tendons live in the background of his life, like the flat, painted scenery behind the action in a play. In the foreground are pleasure, satisfaction, even exhilaration. When Nicolo strains to shift a weight for the tenth or twentieth time, he experiences—usually all at once and unexpectedly, he can never predict it exactly—a sharp responsive surge from some specific, favoured, unnameable point in his body. This throbbing buzz comes rushing to him as a reward, as pure and true as heavy coins dropping into a metal coffer, quickly filling it to overflowing. The pain is the immediate, resounding affirmation of years of effort and ongoing achievement, a building up, a putting together, like the pieces of a puzzle, the construction of a person. His goal is to attain complete mastery over his corporeal machinery. He is not seeking what many of the other men and women at the gym are striving for, a flawless body, but rather a useful one, one that is quick, reliable, solid, strong and flexible, one over which he has complete and sole command. He has absorbed from his father and mother the idea that the body is like soil, to be used and worked and made productive, and that the soul thrives best when its owner is too busy working to have energy left to wander or be led astray.

  One or more students usually linger behind after his classes. Some of those who stay to help put away the mats and weights and balls do not do so out of a sense of vol-unteerism, but because this provides them with an opportunity to exchange a few words with Nicolo. Usually they start with a comment about the class, most likely some self-deprecating reference to the difficulty of the crunches, or to the pain they expect to feel the next day.

  “You just about killed us today, Nicco,” one might say with an exaggerated expression of pain. “I’ll barely be able to walk tomorrow.”

  This is only a lead-in, however. What the loitering students really want from him is advice.

  “It hurts right here behind my knee when I do those deep lunges. Do you think that’s normal? Should I see someone about it? A doctor or physiotherapist? Or do you think it’s just age? The knees go first, right?”

  “Would it help to build up my stamina if I went to Roberta’s stretch classes? Have you heard if they’re good for someone like me who’s just starting out?”

  “No matter how hard I try, I just can’t get my hamstrings warmed up properly and I get these cramps, real sharp, like shooting pains, right here. Any ideas what causes that?”

  “Could you show me again how to do that kick? The one that starts like this? I get lost when you do that half-turn and then I end up a step behind.”

  Nicolo may be in a hurry to get to his next class, or to go home, but he almost always pauses and takes whatever time is necessary to consider these questions and to try to answer them. He listens, considers, and pulls from somewhere in his brain’s accumulation of whole, half and partial truths something that suits or can be adapted to suit the circumstance. He is not, as it happens, qualified to give some of the advice he is asked to provide. He knows, for example, next to nothing of nutritional supplements, diets, massage therapy, racing hearts or torn ligaments. But he comes from a culture in which to be asked for an opinion is a sign of respect, and in which giving counsel does not depend on any particular expertise or education apart from having lived one’s life in such a manner that one is seen as successful or fortunate or resilient. Nicolo has absorbed an understanding that the well-off and the lucky, the people who come from solid families, have something approaching a duty to provide their insights to others faced with difficulties.

  One of his students, a short and tightly wound woman named Monica Faye, was the first to ask Nicolo to provide her with one-on-one training sessions. Monica came to Nicolo’s nine-thirty boxer-fit classes on Mondays, Wednesdays and
Fridays, to his Tuesday and Thursday ten o’clock Pilates classes, and to other classes as well, trailing the odour of organic deodorant, buttered toast and hot chocolate. Monica appeared to have been put together from random scraps of her ancestors’ mismatched genetic material. She had abbreviated legs that were fat at the calf, square at the knee and thin as a sapling through the thigh, a short, rounded, can-like torso, long, graceful, freckled white arms—the arms of a dancer—blunt hands with perfect oval nails, a theoretical waist and cello-like hips. Her bottom was narrow and flat, her neck extended and as supple as a goose’s, and her breasts almost unmanageably large. Her pale, broad face ended in a sharp point at the chin and she had a widow’s peak at her brow; the overall impression was of a lacy, freckled cartoony heart. When she was at the gym she pulled back her thick, curling hair—brown mostly, with a few arbitrary strands of red and orange—with a leopard-print hair band, and she wore bright-coloured stretchy leotards and tights instead of the more common shorts and a shirt. It was her habit to march up to the front of the studio to comment to Nicolo on his classes as soon as they were over. She would approach him while other students were putting away the equipment and provide him with a few minutes of feedback, her hands balanced on her hips, fists turned out, her flat-planed face tilted to one side like a comic valentine. The other students always fell away deferentially. Monica had, despite her lack of height, the weighted presence of a general and the mien of a commandant.