A Very Italian Christmas Read online

  In secret I tried again two or three times to call Maria Blini, then I stopped. I continued to think about her, but more often like some kind of exotic mirage. My relationship with Caterina was solid and had been for years: a lack of stimulation was mixed intimately with tenderness, boredom with reciprocal knowledge. We were not unhappy together in the cozy climate of Christmas and far away from everything else.

  Then on the evening of January 3rd I was in my bedroom reading Polidori’s Breath of the Cicadas with Blonde on Blonde by Dylan playing at low volume on the turntable, when Caterina’s mother came to me to say excitedly, “Marco Polidori is on the phone!”

  I got up to answer, almost bothered by the idea that two distinct areas of my life should come into contact in this way. But Polidori’s voice was even warmer than the last time we had seen each other; the pleasure of talking to him again made thoughts and desires begin to flow in me once more.

  He said, “Happy New Year, you old bastard.” I answered, “Happy New Year to you, too, old bastard,” In the living room Caterina’s mother, father and brother all turned their heads, but I was pleased that they knew I was on such friendly terms with Marco Polidori.

  He asked me if I had been working on my novel; I told him I hadn’t. He said he hadn’t been able to do anything he had wanted to either, he had been too busy with holidays and his children and a huge New Year’s Eve party that Christine had insisted on throwing. It was strange to talk to him after having spent ten days reading his books; my mind was full of his settings, the rhythm of his sentences echoed in my ears; I felt as if I was seeing everything illuminated by his observations.

  Polidori said, “Why don’t you come down here, instead of staying in that Swiss old-age home? Bring your wife, it would be a pleasure for me to meet her. It will be another whole year before there are days like these.”

  There was an urgency in his voice, as if he knew that the circumstances he was referring to would never materialize again in the same way; deep down there was a hidden sense of delusion that I might not decide to take advantage of them while it was possible.

  So I said to him, “All right, thanks,” even though I thought that Caterina would want to spend the last two days in the mountains, and that her family would be offended to see us leave before our decided departure. But his tone was infectious, and I was agitated at the thought of having to stay where I was.

  Polidori replied, “Great, Roberto,” and he seemed very happy; he explained to me how to arrive at his house in the country.

  It took us nearly seven hours to make our way from Pontresina to Florence in our beat-up old Volkswagen, and another hour from Florence to the tiny village in the hills that Polidori directed us to. When we arrived it was dark; we went into a bar to call him, exhausted by the difficult drive of hundreds of miles, our heads and bodies throbbing from mechanical vibrations.

  Christine Polidori answered the phone with her usual courteous tone; she gave me her husband right away. Polidori said, “We were about to send out a search party, we thought you’d lost your way.” He told us to stay close to the bar, he would come and get us right away. He said, “I’m really glad that you’re here, Roberto.”

  We waited in the bar for about ten minutes, then we went outside to wait for him in the piazzetta where we had left our car, just outside the walls of the city. It was a small medieval town with its stone buildings perfectly preserved; it seemed very beautiful under the nighttime lights, but we didn’t attempt to visit it for fear of missing Polidori. Caterina stamped her feet in the cold, looked around, and said, “When is he coming?” I explained to her that he was never very punctual; “I can see that,” she replied. But she was curious to meet him; she had left her parents’ house in the mountains without any qualms.

  I was very glad she was with me, as she had been for almost all of the travels of my adult life, and at the same time I felt less liberated than I would have wished to. With her next to me it seemed more difficult to be different from the me she knew so well: I felt as if I had a witness and guarantor by my side for a version of me that I would have liked to change, and this thought unnerved me. But I loved her, and bringing her with me compensated in some small way for my feelings of guilt regarding Maria Blini, and for all of the territory that Maria Blini had taken over inside of me: for the diversity of occasions and desires and possibilities that Marco Polidori had opened up in front of me and that I wished to explore on my own. We walked back and forth across the piazzetta, our eyes following the infrequent headlights that appeared along the road without communicating our thoughts to each other.

  I was also wondering if Polidori’s lack of punctuality stemmed from his artistic nature or if there were other reasons for it: if he used it to create a slight feeling of insecurity in those who had to wait for him, discouraging any requests of him that might seem too direct. I wondered if by chance we had ended up in the wrong town or at the wrong bar, or if I would have to call him back.

  But in the end he appeared and as soon as I saw him I assumed a perfectly casual air, as if I could have waited another hour for him without being upset by it at all. It wasn’t something I did knowingly; it was an instinctive reaction to what I thought he might have expected of me.

  He pulled up in an old Land Rover covered in mud instead of the usual unbranded green automobile he drove when he was in Rome. He was wearing a lined, waxed field jacket and farmer’s boots. They made him look quite different than he normally did, but he did not look like he was wearing a country costume; he maintained his usual slight distraction about material goods.

  This time he apologized for being late: he said, “Sorry, but I got a call just as I was heading out the door. This bombastic imbecile of a mayor insists on giving me an honorary citizenship of the city of Bordeaux. Who knows why, what on earth do I have to do with Bordeaux?”

  He took Caterina’s hand in the gallant way that I had already observed when we were at a party in Rome; he said to her, “You are even more beautiful and more Milanese than Roberto describes you to be in his book.”

  “That’s not her in the book,” I insisted, much too weakly.

  Polidori replied, “Very well, but she is very beautiful and very Milanese all the same.” He continued to look at her in the same way one would admire a work of art; as if his admiration was as noble as the object he admired, without being at all insistent or intrusive.

  Caterina said to him, “Now you are embarrassing me,” but she smiled in a way that showed she was pleased by his compliments, and the tone of her voice was more tender and frivolous than that of the young woman doctor she normally used in public.

  Polidori greeted me as well, saying, “You old bastard, it’s good that you came.” We gripped each other energetically in that man-to-man hug we had codified when we first met, the time he came to pick me up at my residence in the hills outside of Rome.

  Then he said, “All right, I’ll lead the way.” He looked at Caterina again, and asked her, “Would you like to ride with me, and Roberto can follow?” He said to me, “Do you mind, Roberto?”

  I replied, “No, no,” and at any rate Caterina was already heading toward the Land Rover, turning back only for a second to look at me.

  We drove away from the town and followed a small country road for a few miles that curved and rose and fell according to the undulations of the land. I kept the red rear lights of the Land Rover in sight, and I wondered what Caterina and Polidori were talking about. There was snow on the hillsides, and lights here and there from small villages and isolated homes, but it was too dark to see anything else.

  After about seven miles or so Polidori left the paved road and turned on to a hard dirt road that rose between a line of cypress trees on either side. I had trouble following him up the steep hill, the old Volkswagen slipping and sliding in the mud laced with wet snow. At a certain point the car stopped altogether; I slammed on the horn like mad, afraid that Polidori and Caterina would drive away and leave me where I was. Pol
idori drove back and pulled out a steel cable and hooked it to my car. He did it quickly, with a manual dexterity I did not expect; he said, “It happens all the time, don’t worry.” Caterina peered at me through the back window with a level of curiosity she might have had for a stranger; even if I had almost never been jealous of her in seven years, I felt a flash of anger that she chose to go with Polidori instead of with me. Polidori slid back behind the wheel of his Land Rover and pulled me to the crest of the hill like a load of scrap metal.

  We stopped at the top, but could not see anything of the house except for the external lights on a wall of lightly-colored stone. We got out of our cars and immediately two enormous, white dogs arrived to greet Polidori and to growl deeply at me and Caterina. Polidori said to them, “They’re friends. Friends!” and he touched my arm and Caterina’s arm to demonstrate. He pressed their large muzzles against our legs. The two dogs sniffed us and Polidori said, “Don’t worry, they only maul enemies,” and he opened the front door.

  Once inside the outer walls we realized that it was not simply a house but an ancient monastery that had been remodeled, with a loggia, a garden and elegantly arched windows that looked out over the greenery. After such a long trip on the highway and the last miles in the dark and muddy cold, it was a kind of vision: a dream with harmonious and proportionate lines, illuminated by warm light. Caterina and I stood in the entryway with the same stunned expression on our faces; neither of us could find the right words to express our thoughts in that moment.

  Polidori realized this and he played it down; he said, “When I bought it twelve years ago I thought I had made an incredibly idiotic choice.”

  “Because it was so run-down?” I asked him, trying to regain my confidence.

  “Pretty much,” he replied. “It was dead, really. It’s a place that needs to have a lot of life in it in order to be happy. It must be full of light and sounds and human and animal warmth, and then it’s all right.”

  It was not a large monastery, anyway: there must not have been very many monks or nuns originally, and this rendered the space even more cozy. Polidori had restored it without letting himself be constrained by rules: there were colorful rugs on the floors and large modern paintings on the walls, and an efficient heating system. He led us down a corridor, toward a room from which came voices and music. Every few steps, Caterina would comment, “Incredibile.” Polidori asked, “Do you really like it?” as if he was not already sure about it himself.

  His family was in a large living room, full of light and of sounds and human and animal warmth, exactly as he had said. His three children were running around the room and playing with an electric train set, Maggie, the nanny, and his wife, Christine, were sitting near a large fireplace; a boy with dark, shaggy hair was reading on a couch, there were three more dogs of various sizes in addition to the two large, white ones that had followed us in; and music was emanating from a magnificent stereo.

  Christine Polidori got up to greet us; Polidori introduced her to Caterina, and he introduced the other people in the room. The boy with dark hair was his son from his first marriage, and his name was Roberto, too. He was very different from the three new children who were blond and almost Nordic, but his eyes and the shape of his nose were those of Polidori; it was shocking to see them standing next to one another. Polidori noticed the expression on my face when I realized that the boy had the same name as I did, and he smiled. The boy looked at me without pretending to be cordial; he did not shake my hand. He was maybe seventeen or eighteen years old; he had a wild and diffident air about him and was dressed in old jeans and beat-up tennis shoes, almost contrasting on purpose with the evident respectability of his three younger siblings.

  Caterina and I exchanged some semiformal conversation with Christine, then Polidori took us to our room. Along the corridor he said, “It’s such a relief you’re here. We had some unbearable guests until yesterday morning; I felt like running away and leaving them on their own.”

  Before taking us upstairs he gave us a brief tour of the monastery-house: he showed us the kitchen, a music room, a gym, and a small covered swimming pool; there was also a room with fragments of a fifteenth-century fresco on the ceiling. He opened the doors as if he did not wish to brag about these spaces that filled us with so much admiration. At a certain point he said, “I don’t know if you can tell, but twelve years ago I really believed in it, when I was just beginning to fix it up. I was trying to put together a kind of ideal house, I think. Now it’s Christine who takes care of it, and she does a very good job, it has become hers.”

  But it was easy to see that he was not at all indifferent to the house, as he would have liked us to believe: all we had to do was look at him while he showed us a secret passageway or an interesting window, or the small hothouse where the aromatic herbs were grown.

  Caterina was completely taken with him, and there was no longer any trace of the bias she demonstrated in Milan when I told her about the first time I met him. She smiled when he spoke; she asked to know more about the architecture of the ex-monastery; she listened to him with an attentiveness that she had hardly ever shown toward me. Polidori, on his part, spoke more to her than he did to me, and found infinite fascinating details to describe to her; he would place his hand lightly on her arm to show her something. As we entered the library he said to me, “Do you know, Roberto, that you have a very charming wife, you undeserving old bastard?”

  I answered, “I know,” although just a second before I was thinking how much I would have wanted to be there with Maria Blini instead, combining the unlimited fascination I felt for her as a person yet to be discovered with that of the place. I was pleased that Polidori was so enthusiastic about Caterina, and it made me nervous, too: I was tense and tired from the trip, and confused by my conflicting emotions.

  In the library the shelves were filled with every kind of technical book: dictionaries and encyclopedias and historical and geographical atlases, instruction books for automobiles and cameras and pistols, manuals on how to raise rabbits and how to cultivate freshwater pearls, writings on pediatrics and horticulture and beekeeping, volumes about magnetic waves and iridology, about the history of the crusades and the Tartars and the area of Tuscany that we were in. Polidori saw that I was looking at some telephone books from foreign cities, and he said to me, “I use them for names, every once in a while.” There weren’t very many novels, and almost all of them were old; very few were published after the 1950s.

  Our room was beautiful, with two arched windows looking out over the loggia where the Italian garden opened onto a vegetable garden that led to a field that ran all the way to a dark forest. Polidori showed us everything we might need and then left us alone, telling us to come downstairs whenever we were ready. As soon as the door closed Caterina looked at me with shining eyes and said, “Marvelous.”

  “Polidori?” I asked.

  She replied, “The place, you boob. But Polidori, too, yes. He’s much better than I thought he would be.”

  “Why? How did you think he would be?” I asked her, as I looked at the antique wooden bed and I imagined being able to sleep there with Maria Blini.

  Caterina replied, “I don’t know, more the important author, full of himself. And also more obsessive: the great seducer. Maybe because I had The Mimetic Embrace in my mind and I thought the main character was a kind of self-portrait.”

  While my feelings were conflicted I was proud that she knew I was his friend and that he respected me as an author, and that I had access to his private life including invitations to his house in the country.

  Dinner was very good, almost all of the dishes were made from food grown on the grounds, with everything being prepared by a Tuscan woman. There was no trace of the punitive rigor present when I ate at their house in Rome, still the atmosphere was not relaxed. There was a web of tension between Polidori and his wife and the English nanny and the children and young Roberto: glances loaded with resentment, sentences full of thi
nly veiled anger. The children played with their food, the nanny scolded them in her coarse Cockney accent; young Roberto ate with his head down like a stranger who had been taken in off the street; Polidori’s wife complained of the Italians’ inability to produce a legible train schedule; her husband looked at her with hatred. Caterina seemed oblivious; she tried to make conversation in her polite way, even when no one was listening to her. This made me so nervous that I kept interrupting her, furious at her lack of perception and at the intertwined tensions of the others; I cut her words off midway.

  Polidori attempted every once in a while to make us feel at ease; he would make an observation or a joke or find a story to tell, but perhaps this was the only audience in all of Italy that was insensitive to his talents as a raconteur. His son Roberto seemed particularly hostile to him. He leaned on his elbow in a way that horrified Christine, and when Polidori spoke to him he did not reply. Caterina asked him which school he went to, making me nervous with her renewed efforts to be polite. Roberto Polidori answered in a half-whisper “high school” without meeting her eyes.

  Polidori said, “Ever since he was six I’ve been telling him that high school is useless, it would be a thousand times better for him to follow a specific course of study.” Christine said, “Specific in what way, when he is still so young?” The nanny squeaked at the children, “Don’t leave the table until you have permission!” Caterina commented, “What a beautiful piece of furniture you have against the far wall.”