Odd.
“The Call”? As in my essay, which Romei had read — he’d said so. Was he borrowing my idea? No one else I knew of had compared Vita Nuova to the hero’s journey, or maybe it was coincidence.
The first pages of Vita Nuova recount Dante’s call to love. His first vision of the eight-year-old Beatrice (in delicate crimson) causes his spirits — vital, sensual, natural — to exclaim (again in Latin): Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi! “Here is a god, more powerful than I, who comes to rule me.” This god being Love, the not-always-reliable mentor who accompanies Dante through much of his journey.
Nine years later, Dante again encounters Beatrice. This time she greets him, which so overwhelms him, he has to retire to his room. Thinking of her, he falls asleep and has a vision: Love — a terrifying figure! — force-feeds Dante’s burning heart to a semi-comatose Beatrice, then carries her off to heaven. This time Dante’s call to love prompts him to write; he crosses that threshold by writing a sonnet (about Beatrice eating his burning heart) and sending it (“anonymously”) to poets of note. His response, in other words, is to become A Poet. What would be Romei’s “call,” I wondered, and what his response?
I went to Joe’s to find out.
PART THREE. DECEPTION
16. A MOST SPIRITUAL COMMUNION
Joe made me a double, offered it to me with a wink. I stepped over his infant twins, who were crawling among the regulars like puppies, begging sweets. I smiled at the Old Jewish Couple, the corpulent actor, removed the Reserved card from a front window table, and nodded at the boutique lady, who looked smashing in her painted silk blouse, and the Barnard student, absorbed in her Gramsci.
I looked at Romei’s pages more carefully. They seemed to correspond with the first four “chapters” of Vita Nuova, chapters that comprise a mere six pages in my Italian edition. In these opening pages, Dante promises to transcribe events from his “book of memory”; Romei instead says he’ll rely on the “book of the mirror.” I guess this meant he’d look at his past subjectively. Not a radical or even an interesting claim.
But he also said he’d “write of her that which has never been written of any other.” Now that was interesting, for it is with these words that Dante ends his tale. By making this promise up front, Romei says: Sorry, Dante, the superior poetic has arrived and it is mine. In saying so, he challenges Dante to a duel, naming me, of all people, as his second — to watch his back, tend his wounds, and bear witness to his victory.
I considered getting a chocolate bomb, decided against it. Instead I left my belongings on the table, and ran across to the Love Drugstore to get a hard-backed notebook.
Door Number Two: Notes for a New Life, is what I wrote on its cover. And on page one: “The Call.” Then I shut the notebook and began to read.
•
The first thing we learn about Romei in “The Call” is that he’s blocked: he can’t write. He’s wandering through Rome, regretting the emptiness of his mind, the impermanence of his income, when he sees, is struck out of his self-absorption by, Esther in the park. She sucks delicately on a finger, is absorbed in a notebook, the sun streams down onto her bobbed brown hair.
Romei suffers often from unrequited love: there are women all over Rome with whom he cannot bring himself to speak. In Esther, however, he senses a weakness (una debolezza) that makes it possible for him to approach, a helpless carnality, a vulnerability that finds expression in tentative gestures, a tendency to put hands to face. He stands over her, blocking the sun (rather as, in my story, Paul Celan stood over my young protagonist Rose). Gold shines from her bright brown eyes.
What are you writing? he asks, in English.
A translation, she replies. Song of Songs, in her spare time, something in rather short supply (she gestures toward a child flying circles in the grass). Her expressions are particular, unforgettable. She has few perfections, yet somehow her parts — her fleshy nose and thick ankles, her sweater set (a Beatrice-inflected crimson), her chewed fingernails and readiness to satisfy his curiosity — add up to a compelling whole. Modest, yet direct; anxious, yet eager to please; decorous, yet wanton.
Why does she do this? Romei wants to know.
It’s the only thing she knows how to do, she says, as if apologizing.
Why the Song of Songs?
Because it’s the greatest love poem ever written, she says. Mutual, mysterious. Embodied and erotic, suggestive of a most spiritual communion (comunione, with all its religious undertones).
I don’t remember that, he says. In fact, he’s never read the Song. The priests of his childhood forgot to mention it, and as an adult he finds himself drawn to classical and medieval verse. Esther intuits his ignorance, “reminding” him that the Song concerns the innocent, impassioned love of a man and a woman.
Here, she says, placing pages on her knee, I’ll show you. You read the part of the boy. I’ll read the part of the girl.
He stands there stupidly.
I have not guarded my vineyard, she says.
He sits down quickly, close enough to read, approaching her “threshold,” or so he says.
My dove, hiding in the shadow of the rock, he replies. Let me see the sight of you, for your voice entices me. You are lovely to behold.
They continue, “the lover, the king” and his “sister-bride,” sitting ever closer on their bench, becoming drunk on poetry, seduced, the narrator says, much as Paolo and Francesca, swirling in the winds of Dante’s Inferno, were seduced by tales of adultery.
Pretty story, the child murmurs, falling asleep at their feet.
One imagines one knows what will happen next: Romei will cross Esther’s threshold — but in fact, we don’t know: this was all he’d sent.
•
I returned home, presents in hand, to find Ahmad reading a fat Indian novel on the couch, Andi leaning into him, reading a Nancy Drew. I was reminded, not for the first time, of their resemblance — not just their brown skin and shiny black hair, but their bright, smart eyes, their quick features and watchful expressions. I smiled, remembering how Aunt Emma, my father’s sister, had listened to the story of how I’d met Andi’s father in Delhi, looked back and forth between Andi and Ahmad, as if to say, You can’t kid a kidder.
My family, my beautiful family!
Ahmad’s sons thought him a monster, or so he’d been told — he wasn’t allowed to see them, not that he went back to Pakistan much. When the youngest is eighteen, he said vaguely, he’d get in touch. They’d understand: a parent never stops loving his child.
Until that time, I thought, he has us. He’ll always have us.
You saved me, he said more than once. You saved me, was my standard reply, taking us in when I was pregnant — but it was more than that.
My father and I had waited for my mother at the airport, ready to return home after our first sabbatical in Rome. She must have been delayed, he said, white-faced. We’ll get on the plane, she’ll be on the next one for sure. At Kennedy, a light snow falling, we met the next flight, and the next.
I’d thought all losses permanent till Ahmad came back into my life.