Copies of the Italian edition of my novel were stacked on a side table at the restaurant, one copy upright, showing the cover. In a private room on the second floor, reserved by Vittorio for the dinner, a long refectory table was set for a dozen people.
I had climbed the stairs warily, watching for Ubaldini, but only one person was there, Vittorio’s young assistant, Dialta, setting out place cards, smiling to see that I was the first to arrive. She poured me a glass of wine, and we waited. I did not know whether to stand or sit. Some more people came, two journalists, and then Vittorio with an attractive woman. Vittorio introduced me to the others. Tito Frasso, the young green-haired man from Vittorio’s lunch, slipped through the door, padding in on his orange sneakers, in the same leather vest but a different T-shirt. He approached me and said hello. It occurred to me that he dressed that way, absurdly, defiantly, creating a street style all his own, because he didn’t have much money.
I wanted to sit, I hated the delay, but I knew that an Italian dinner was a ritual, and the delay itself was part of the ritual, like the chitchat, the predinner drinks that we sipped standing, the laughter, the teasing. Everything that seemed inconsequential was part of the observance — nothing could be hurried. All this time I glanced around, wondering about Ubaldini.
At last, Vittorio sighed and said, “Allora…” The word was like an order, as people maneuvered to take their places at the table. I was seated at one end, Vittorio at the other. A chair stood empty near Vittorio, the linen napkin folded like a nun’s cornette on the plate before it.
“I am so excited to read your book,” the woman on my right said. She was a journalist, she would be reviewing it. “Is your first book?”
“No.” I could not bring myself to tell her it was my thirty-fifth.
“Parla Italiano?” asked the woman on my left.
I said no, I didn’t dare, and she smiled and sipped her wine, and the woman on my right told me of her trip to Eritrea: “Magnificent! Africa! But so sad, so poor.”
I said, “I used to live there.” But still she went on describing it to me.
And while she spoke, and the waiters served the antipasto, an old man came through the door, nodded at Vittorio, handed his coat to a waiter, and, sizing up the table, stepped to the empty chair. I would not have guessed it to be Ubaldini. He was slack-jowled, horse-faced, and his ill-fitting suit was too loose. He was smaller than I remembered, and with distorted features, his ears and hands much bigger. His only affectation was a stylish pair of glasses, tortoiseshell, with pinkish lenses. He tugged them down, surveyed the table, said something to the woman next to him — a pleasantry, I guessed, and a word to Tito Frasso, who sat across from him. When he smiled he showed his discolored teeth to their roots. Then he ate, daintily, in the Italian way, poking his food with a fork, not betraying any appetite.
After the antipasto came the soup course, the fish course, the pasta course, the meat course. I heard about Eritrea and the Red Sea, and poverty in Africa, and the animals — fantastic; and the dancers in Kenya — fantastic; and Somalia — a tragedy. More wine, more water, more bread.
Ubaldini kept his head down and picked at his food. I watched him closely as he ate with concentration, from time to time lifting his napkin to dab at his lips, and as he dabbed, meeting the gaze of the young man in outlandish clothes, and smiling at him with yellowish teeth, as though sharing a secret.
Waiters came and went, plates were gathered, glasses filled. The dessert was served, tiramisu, and the cheese set out.
As the coffee was poured, Vittorio rose and thanked the guests for being there, speaking in sonorous Italian; and then for my benefit he spoke in English, and the temperature of the room went down with the sound of the foreign language, the air becoming slightly stale.
“Tonight, my friend, our distinguished author, has joined us for the occasion of his new book — yes,” and he paused for the light clapping. “And he has agreed to say some few words.” He motioned to me. “Please.”
I pushed my chair back and stood up.
From the moment Vittorio began speaking in English we seemed to slip into an amateur theatrical, a play in which we were unsure of our lines. I spoke haltingly, as Vittorio had done, but the slowness threw me and made me less certain of what I was going to say next.
“Fifty years ago I visited Italy for the first time,” I said. “I was just a boy, really, but it was here, in the beauty of Italy, that I began to write…”
I did not say that it had been an autostop summer of obstacles and temptations. I described my arrival, my first impressions of Italy, the sunlight, the smells of food and hot oil, the glow of old stone, the texture of ancient marble, the way the whole of Italy had been sculpted and formed, every hill, every field, every town — none of it wild, all of it showing the evidence of the human hand, where eating was on everyone’s mind; not books but food.
I glanced at the dinner guests as I spoke, and my gaze returned to Pietro Ubaldini, whose elbow was propped on the table, his hand idly cradling his head, his fingers stroking his cheek, listening attentively.
Then I risked it. “One day I was traveling from Venice by autostop. I was picked up by an Italian man in a car. We talked and talked, and finally we disagreed. He dropped me suddenly by the roadside at nightfall, abandoned me on one of the branching roads of Italy.”
I looked squarely at Pietro Ubaldini. Still he stroked his cheek and stared through his tinted lenses.
“He didn’t know me, and I’m sure he forgot me. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, he did me a great favor. When you’re young the world seems unknowable, and so it seems simplified by its obscurity. You have no idea how precarious the road is, or where it leads, and it’s not until much later that you understand its complexity and how you found your way. Sometimes it is with the help of kind strangers, but more often perhaps, perversely, by the hostility of strangers. It was rejection that got me to Urbino and a job and a sense of myself. I arrived there through a series of accidents, one road leading to another. I didn’t know where I was, only that I had to keep going. I knew one thing — that I couldn’t go back. I was open to any suggestion — taking chances. I had to. I had no money.”
As I spoke, Ubaldini stopped looking at me and began to look at the young man, as though I was offering encouragement and a promise in my own story to the young man, who was listening with rapt attention.
“I see it now as a series of expulsions. Each person I met believed he was frustrating me. It was not the great literary culture of Italy that made me a writer. It was the opposite, its philistinism. You say you want to be a writer, and Italy orders you another glass of wine and says, ‘What’s the point?’ Italy’s love of comfort, its taste for good food and leisure, its joy in talk, its idleness, its laughter, its complacent teasing cynicism”—and here I paused for the people at the table to savor this description and bask in it—“all these traits make it the enemy of art.”
“Oh, no!” Vittorio called out, and Ubaldini nodded at the young man Frasso.