“Don’t you have a copy?”
“No.” He slurped some more coffee. Hell. Eight hundred pages is a lot to copy.”
“Don’t you have it on disk?”
“I don’t use a computer.” He nodded at me sagely.
“Why not?”
“Joyce didn’t use a computer. Neither did Hemingway, nor Fitzgerald. What’s good enough for them is good enough for me.” He wiped some water off his face and looked over at me with a look of comprehension. “You think I’m ignorant, don’t you?”
“Naïve. And maybe a little ignorant.”
“Name one person that isn’t or wasn’t ignorant.”
“Plato?”
“Yeah, but he was born in 500 B.C.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
Travis laughed. “There wasn’t that much to know then.”
Travis only had four hundred dollars left. He’d spent most of his money getting out to New York; the rest was being whittled away by food and accommodations.
“I have no idea how I’m getting back to Texas,” he said.
“Come up to Maine. It’s cheaper to get there.”
“What’s in Maine?”
“I live there. We kind of have a little artist’s colony. One guy’s a musician. The other’s a philosopher.” I don’t know where I got philosopher, but Johnny was short on words and it had occurred to me that perhaps his mind was working overtime. It had also occurred to me that he might not be that bright, but I kept this to myself.
“What do you do?”
“That’s a secret,” I said in a husky monotone. Secret even to me, I thought.
“Who funds the thing?”
“Boris,” I said. “But that’s a secret too.”
“But you just told me.”
“But I haven’t told Boris.”
No doubt the whole thing sounded suspicious and Travis was not a stupid guy, but I sensed that he felt his adventure on the east coast was just starting and he wanted to make the trip count for something. A guy like Travis would rather become destitute than return home without a good story. I could satisfy that need. I wrote the address down for him. I told him to wait a couple of days and he nodded and thanked me “kindly.”
Silvano’s apartment was only four blocks from Boris’s. I wondered if he’d been able to find any daffodils. He was the only person who knew that they were my favorite flowers—cheap in the spring, then gone. I liked the way they bowed their heads, their lack of posture, their drunken wagging in the breeze. I liked the way the two green leaves were always raised in a shrug, questioning and futile. I remembered that my apartment with Silvano had always been full of daffodils.
That apartment was in the Oltrano, just west of the Ponte Vecchio, which made everything smell moldy, but I loved it. Perhaps we were together for only six weeks, but my memory had logged it as an eon. In the afternoons I walked around the neighborhoods with the sole purpose of losing myself, always disappointed to find that I recognized that certain angle of alleyway or the conglomeration of pots and flowers on a particular set of steps. Sometimes I’d buy shoes or go into one of the old churches just to feel the silence, which I had once thought was God and now recognized as history and large amounts of stone and stained glass. One time when I came home, Silvano had filled the house with roses. I thanked him politely, but Silvano saw that the flowers made me uneasy.
“They’re beautiful,” I said, “but I feel like I’m in a hospital. I feel I am sick.”
The next day the roses were gone and in their place were vase of vase after vase of lilies. These too were beautiful, but after some uneasy silence I confessed.
“I feel I am dead.”
“What do you want?” he asked, hands on temples.
“I like daffodils.”
“Why daffodils?”
It was some Wordsworth-inspired melancholy “bliss of solitude” thing that had lodged in my head in high school and was yet to be displaced with some more sophisticated poetry/flower association. I looked at Silvano, while trying to find the necessary Italian for the explanation. After a significant silence I said,
“They’re yellow.”
Silvano accepted this, as he accepted all my simple, present tense, declarative Italian. The truth of the matter is that Silvano had not fallen in love with me, but rather with a much simpler person. And this because I was only capable of expressing myself to him in the most basic, unadorned ways. To his credit, I did always sound like a lovable moron, a contented idiot who possessed some variety of pure soul. I was aware of this at the time, but not capable of explaining it to him. I respected Silvano and wanted him to know why we—despite our marriage—were not going to last. I managed,
“You love me because I like daffodils because daffodils are yellow. But I do not like daffodils because they are yellow.”
And this was the last thing I said to him before I disappeared. Until I saw him in Boris’s living room. I hit the buzzer.
“Silvano, ecco Katerina,” I said. He buzzed me in.
I walked down the hallway looking for apartment 5L. It wasn’t hard to find. Rigoletto was blasting out the door, something Silvano always played when he felt tragic or deformed by his years. I knocked on the door, but he couldn’t hear me. The door swung open under my rapping. Cosimo, Silvano’s Italian greyhound—a five-pound dog with tiny paws and the delicate snout of a rodent—sniffed my hand and wagged his tail aggressively, unbelieving. Had it been so long? Silvano was seated at the end of the table smoking a cigar. On the table was a vase with a half-dozen daffodils in it. Silvano picked up the remote and turned down the music.
“Just when Gilda was about to do her aria,” I said in English.
“Yes, but unlike you, the story is more to me,” he said in Italian. He never used even isolated English words, offended by the sound of it, the lack of forced meter. He smoothed his mustache and I wondered why I’d come. “For you coffee or wine?”
“Wine,” I said. I sat down at the furthest chair, hidden by the daffodils, and moved in such a way that the vase obscured Silvano’s head. His head was the vase. Silvano gracefully pushed the vase aside with a walking stick that I’d noticed him carrying the night before.
“Where to begin?” said Silvano.
I searched around for words. Funny how quickly languages deserted me. Even my English seemed worse after being on the road trip and in Mexico. My Italian was almost gone.
“Wine immediately. After, talking,” I said.
“Do you remember Rigoletto?” he asked. He poured me a glass of wine and brought it over.
“We take the train to Milan. We eat at Wendy’s.”
“Like a child, you wanted to eat there.” Silvano’s mood was fluctuating between sentimentality and complete bitterness. “And later we went back to the hotel. You were crying because you felt bad for Rigoletto, that he was destroyed and had lost everything. I comforted you and asked you to marry me. And what did you say?”
I winced. “I say yes.”
“Was it because of Rigoletto?”
“I don’t know.” Why did I do anything? I remember feeling bad for deserting my father and wanting to make Silvano happy because of this. I looked at him, his long silver bob, his perfect mustache, his cashmere turtleneck. “Maybe. Rigoletto is a good opera.”
Silvano sighed and whistled through his teeth. “You want to marry this Boris?”
“No.”
Silvano laughed. “He says that you do. He says that it is essential to your happiness.”
“Is his Italian good?”
Silvano shrugged. “Better than yours.”
I knew that.
“But he speaks like a communist.”
I had no idea what that meant. “That’s very true,” I said, but only because I’d remembered how to say it.