ess.” No real English word existed for it, thank God.
Downstairs, a cork came out of a wine bottle.
They were going to fall into bed and make love any minute now, those two kids. At least someone was having a good time. No point whatever in trying to stop them, unless Amelia could appeal to Gwyneth’s probably nonexistent Catholic morality. Should she mention the necessity of contraception? They’d just laugh. She came downstairs to see them pouring two glasses of the cheap blood-dark Chianti you could buy for almost nothing in this region. Just as if she weren’t standing there, they raised the glasses to each other’s lips.
Gwyneth’s hard little face, bravely glassy-eyed, turned toward Amelia, and she smiled in the way that young people do when they know they’ve been dealt a good hand.
“Going out, darlings,” Amelia said. “Just for a minute. Have to buy cigarettes. Be back soon.”
“Well, don’t be long,” Gwyneth commanded with her charming Brit-Euro accent, putting the wineglass down on the counter and raising her finger in a comic admonitory fashion. “Food’ll get cold. Hurry back.” She leaned away from Jack for a moment so that he could admire her bella figura.
Jack, handsome in his khakis and soft blue shirt, turned toward his mother.
“Momma,” he said, “what’s this about cigarettes? You don’t smoke.”
“Well, guess what? It’s a perfectly good time to start.” She tried to straighten her hair, which probably looked witchy after so much futile desk work. “After a day like this one, I need a new affectation. I need to be bad. I need to be bad right now. If they’re selling cigarettes, I’m buying them.”
“Then you better buy a lighter and an ashtray too,” her son reminded her.
—
She had leased an old Fiat from a man the villagers claimed was a part-time burglar. It was probably a stolen car. After starting the engine, she turned on the radio, hoping to hear Donizetti or Bellini, or at least somebody. Instead, they were playing Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time,” a mean-spirited irony considering how the day had gone. The gods laughed easily in the late afternoon, watching human futility fold up for the day. All poetry, good or bad, made the gods laugh. To the gods, poems were sour useless editorials, like bitchy letters to Santa. The Fiat coughed and hesitated as Amelia first passed by a vineyard, then, on the other side of the road, a painterly haystack. One old bespectacled man, holding a walking stick, ambled along the road, going in the opposite direction. He doffed his cap at her, and she waved at him. A single blue-flecked bird, chirping in Italian, flew overhead. But nature was unforgiving. The sun, lowering toward the west, recited one of the lines that Amelia couldn’t translate: Féyitçate fyr tristo, eertch tye mne muttplitz.
By the time she reached the village, after negotiating three hairpin turns and avoiding death by collision from an errant truck out of whose way she had swerved in a last-minute effort to save her own life, she could feel the sweat in her palms oozing out onto the steering wheel. No water came from the fountain in the town square: the pump had been broken for weeks, and there was no money to fix it. The air smelled of burnt rope. A brownish liquid flowed in the gutter. She parked her car, turned off the ignition, and waited until the motor coughed and sputtered and dieseled its way into silence. An American couple sitting in the square’s sidewalk café gazed at her with tourist-interest, as if she were a quaint item of local color. Amelia hurried into the general store, where she was greeted by the owner, Signor Travatini, a timid man who had a tendency to avoid her gaze; he was probably in love with her, or maybe he was planning on hiring someone to rob her.
“My dear Carlo,” she said. “How are you? It’s been a terrible day.” Italian, with its languorous vowels, was sheer pleasure after a day’s struggle with the Botho-Ugaric dialect.
“Yes,” he said, looking out toward the village square and her car. “Yes, and the sun has passed its way through the sky once again. Things are not translating? Sometimes they do not. Sometimes they stubbornly stay what they are. I am sorry.”
“No. Things are not translating. I need some cigarettes,” she said.
“Ah, but you do not smoke.” Everyone here kept track of everyone else’s habits, and the villagers all knew her by now.
“After such a day as I have had, I think it would be a good time to learn.”
He shrugged. “You are correct. As we get old, we need to acquire new vices. God will not be interested in us otherwise. We must wave our arms at Him to get His attention. It is the end of the day, so I will speak to you in confidence. I myself have attracted God’s attention by acquiring a new…how do you say this in English? Ragazza.”
“Girlfriend.”
“Yes. I have acquired a new girlfriend. Perhaps I am being too bold in saying so.” He stared at the cash register, harmlessly confabulating. The man was in his midfifties, and his pudgy wife, Claudia, dressed in black, sometimes lumbered into the store to do the accounts, and was known everywhere in the village for her terrible tongue lashings. Like Imyar Sorovinct, Carlo Travatini had earned a right to his fantasies. “My girlfriend loves me. And of course I adore her. She tells me that she admires my patience and my skill at lovemaking, despite my advanced years. The years give us older men a certain…technical skill. Forgive me for being so crude.” Amelia shook her head, disclaiming any possible shock. “Why do I tell you this? I do so because our love, hers and mine, is an open secret. I will not, however, give you the young lady’s name, because I should not wish to appear to be indiscreet. We Italians are not noted for our subtlety or discretion. We are announcers and are combustible. We announce first this, then that. In this announcing manner I have written poems for her, my beloved. Would you like to see my poems? They are of course not at the level of Montale, but…” He began to fumble in his pocket. Amelia stopped him in the midst of his harmless comic charade.
“No, thank you.” More love poems! They came out of the woodwork everywhere and should be outlawed. There was far too much love, a worldwide glut of it. What the world needs now, she thought, is much less love. “How wonderful for you. But, please, no.”
“All right. But I beg of you, do not mention the beautiful young woman to my wife, in case you should see her.”
“I shall say nothing,” Amelia told him. “What cigarettes do you have? I would like an Italian brand.”
“Well, we have Marlboros. Sturdy cigarettes in a crushproof box. And L & M. That is a good brand also.”
“Both American. No, I want an Italian cigarette.”
“Well, let me see. I have MS.”
“MS?” She felt a moment of pity.
“Yes. MS. Of course. It is a brand of cigarette we have here. Monopoli di Stato. You should know that by now. Filtro? Or Blu?”
“Blu, please.” He brought down a pack on which appeared, in rather large letters, the Italian phrase for “Smoking kills.”
“You should not do this,” he said, putting the cigarette pack into her hand with a tender gesture, brushing her fingers as he did so. “It is no way to get God’s attention. You should get a boyfriend, perhaps?”
“Also, I need some matches, please.”
He reached under the counter and brought some out. He shook his head as she paid him for the cigarettes. “After all these years,” he said, “I do not understand you Americans. Forgive me. I have been listening to the news on the radio just now. Iraq, Afghanistan. You are unexplainable, indefinable. So friendly and yet so warlike. This contradict