SUMMER
1. It wasn’t my intention originally to settle here. In the dead of July, summer’s dog days when the ground’s terraces are so many blasted weeds, fodder for a brushfire, I sometimes wonder what I’m doing here. It was the house that drew me, almost a ruin when I found it, its owner-architect Rodolfo still alive, although a ruin himself and a cautionary tale.
In those days, I was a metropolitan. Somehow the rumor reached me of this village and house, at the edge of civilization as I knew it, or more accurately at the very edge of that edge or even a step or two beyond it, the terraces descending into the wilderness that separates an agrarian interior from the thicketed tumble of the coast. There are paths to the sea from here. Small beaches can be found amid inhospitable outcroppings, if one is prepared to descend to them.
The house is oddly divided from the grounds, its main terrace a full story below, and two more terraces below it, one long and narrow, the other shorter, but with a path extending to a road of sorts below, where an old tractor and assorted gardening tools are stored. From all of them, the sea can be heard but not seen. The house sits on a plinth, backed by a hillside. The sea is in the air. It’s immensely far from everything else, I felt, and this feeling continues.
Rodolfo owned an old Benz diesel. My BMW is only slightly newer, but better maintained by Castello di Otranto’s sole mechanic, a cousin many times removed of the last czar. Despite the sea lying less than a kilometer away, the car’s body hasn’t rusted. Like my predecessor, I drive it into the village once a week to shop. On the first Monday, generally, I have my hair cut. In the spring and autumn, when the weather is perfect, a medical doctor visits and sees all comers. I present myself.
My ailments are minor. I had cancer before I came here, but it was treated and hasn’t recurred.
I bought this house from Rodolfo partly as a project, as it needed to be restored and finished, and partly as a place to write. I suppose too that it was to separate myself from my past life, which can make even a metropolis, as my city proclaims itself a little dubiously to be, too small. My whereabouts are known, though, and of course I correspond.
So, the post office also figures in my weekly journeys. Everything is done by post as there’s no wireless connection to the house, not even a telephone when I first arrived. I was glad to forego those urban devices. News is impossible to evade altogether, but here it lags events. At the barber’s, I at least hear updates to his prejudices, which are numerous.
2.
While I restored and completed the house, I stayed in the village proper. This was long before I decided to move here and exile myself. I came for a few days every few weeks, riding with the builders to the house to review their work. Owing to its remoteness, it went slowly, and Rodolfo’s idiosyncratic plans, mostly hand-sketched, were also a problem, but the builder’s capo, Antonio, had known him and worked on his house before he ran out of money.
The house is divided in two by an inner walkway illuminated from the roof. Beyond it is a
third space, clearly intended by Rodolfo as a love nest. The front room, where Rodolfo lived, almost a separate apartment, is where I live when it’s colder, as it gets the sun. In the summer, I live on the other side of the walkway in a more barnlike space. When the family visits, it serves us as a gathering place. I sometimes let them use the entire house and retreat to a pottery shed I converted, half a level down, off a side terrace that's a shaded place to write in the heat.
The family is my primary link to my former life. They appear when they appear, preceded by letters debating the timing and the length of the visit, or negotiating it between us. I’m glad to see them, but we tire of each other, probably I’m never really sure, though, because the signs are mixed on both sides. They come partly because, as I noted, two brief seasons are perfect here, but also to affirm that I live on in my isolated state and am neither mad nor infirm. Not yet.
Solitude is strangely companionable after a succession of faltering companions. I blame myself for this, my inability to fulfill the different roles thrust on me. It was the same at work, although it went on much longer owing to my talent for it, but that part of life constantly changes and I tired of it. I could say too that I tired of my companions, but this is inexact although functionally correct. It’s a bit like the family visiting and being unsure, in the end, what it meant on either side. Family, though, is family, whereas a companion is there or not there by choice. My need to be alone was an impediment to
the company companions crave. My tolerance for it was insufficient.
Still, I attracted them. This was incidental, I think, or accidental, despite often being accused of leading them on. No, it was always something that arose, and in general, I was game. Terrain, I thought of it, let’s have a look. But there is no look, in reality, just the totality of another. And I too was a totality that clearly didn’t add up, in the end. A life of incident, I think it’s called.
All this as counterpoint to family life, which nominally continues. We meet at the great feasts, when I journey by car and train back to the planetary heart of this region, its motor, as they say. It’s then that I stock up on the affairs of the day, stop in at my oncologist and my dentist, have my eyes examined, and assume again my past roles with my wife, her friends and one or two of mine, old colleagues. Also, with my publisher and assorted editors, gathered conveniently in the same city, which still claims me.
There is, in short, no real getaway, only what I’ve managed to carve out, to pay for with all those decades of work along with the new things, products of my solitary life, a spur to imagination and of course an opportunity to revisit, almost constantly, my misspent past.
No one seems to hold it against me, at least among those I regularly see on these excursions. It helps that my own sense of time has an innate continuity, kept alive by letters, as I mentioned, a medium somehow fitting to Castello di Otranto, a
place rarely visited by any of these people, despite its slight reputation for the brief snippets I mentioned, a season too short for tourism. Hence the attraction of my house for a few cognoscenti and for certain members of my family. It seems clear that Rodolfo pictured their comings and goings. The house he planned was more extensive, stupidly so, but even at a smaller scale, it consists of almost separate domains.
3.
The first night I stayed here, I wondered if his ghost would appear. His ashes are rumored to be scattered in the nearby woods, and of course the night is a chorus of wind, branches, wildlife, and the organic life of any country household. I should get a cat, I tell myself, but never have. I had a dog and a cat growing up, experiencing them as introductions to living things’ mortality. The mirror now does the trick, along with my slowly faltering gait and memory, nothing major.
I am reasonably fastidious, and it’s only my absence that sees an uptick in domestic pests, as we call them. My renewed presence holds them at bay. The man who looks after the house when I’m away is charged with setting traps, but also charged with removing them before I’m back.
No ghost has appeared. Only my former companions haunt my nights, a strange process in which their gorgeous forms float through and their
denunciations follow several hours later. There’s nothing to be done, I remind myself, managing yet again not to write a letter to one or another, having done this in the past and receiving not one word. I was discouraged for a while, and even more so before I came to Castello di Otranto, snubbed once at a friend’s memorial, for example.
Solitude puts all of this on the side, even if their shades or phantoms drift through at night. I invoke them when I write and wonder if they find themselves, ever, on my pages, should they bring themselves to read this novel or that story, which is doubtful. My wife, as far as I know, has never read anything I’ve written. That I write and appear to have a following is noticed. She has always had her own life. I figure in it like an old table, cherry perhaps, she can’t part with.
Rodolfo left such a table and I decided to keep it. When the family gathers, everyone can sit around it. In the worst of the summer, I sit at it and write, since the barn-like part of the house is cooler. He left a mess. Much effort went into clearing it out, the grounds included, before any work could be done. The cost of the house was low in consequence, along with the fact that he died in it and it sat vacant and exposed to the weather in its incomplete state. Just closing it in was my first priority, once it was emptied. Then I slowly furnished it. It’s still pretty spare.
At my age, life divides between napping and sleeping, each with its favored place. I keep a rough
schedule that depends considerably on the time of year. I tend to work late. I haven’t lost the habits established at school and then hardened in various offices, but you age back into the patterns of childhood, especially the napping. Meals are lighter and less formal.
4.
My daughter is visiting, although from my perspective, this is the worst time for it. I speak of the weather and the subsequent condition of the immediate terrain, which is parched. I don’t water it. In late autumn, it revives and in the spring it’s verdant. In high summer, as I think of it, days are stupefyingly hot. There’s always a breeze, which is more than can be said for Castello di Otranto. Giulia is the youngest of my four children, a writer like me. She lives with her partner Giorgio in that part of the city that’s still the heart of publishing of different sorts.
I first met Giorgio at the end-of-year feasts several years ago, the occasion for surfacing these ties. He is more or less her opposite, according to her letters, and she occasionally finds this hard going but also bracing, like opting for a cold shower when one would run a hot bath if one only had the time. She and he are of an age when time presses more. Deadlines are real and cashflow depends on meeting them. Editors prize reliability in content and punctuality. Her writing process is at odds with this,
very much like her father’s. I overcame it and now so is she. Her partner is free of this problem, having run his own show for a decade. He taught her how to ask for more money. She taught him the fine art of living with someone like her. These are works in mutual progress.
Her visit will be correspondingly brief, despite the difficulties of getting here from the big city. On paper, it’s not so very far, but once you leave the autostrada, it gets complicated. The road to Castello di Otranto is its own adventure, and the road to here can be actively dangerous. I prefer to drive it at night, when you can at least see the headlights of approaching cars and the road draws your attention from whatever is just beyond its edge. She arrived after dark, taking my advice.
She rises earlier than me, works wherever she can find shade, and disappears for hours at a stretch to make her way to the sea, as she likes to swim. I don’t like to swim, but I like the view. The sea is visible from higher up. I haven’t descended to the tiny beach in several years. The last time I went, with my oldest son, he had to help me on the way down. Going back up is easier. I don’t lack stamina, but trust myself less on rocky or otherwise uncertain paths.
We eat late, our one meal together. We share the cooking, enjoy the food we make, have a glass of wine with it, and talk for as long as suits us both. We seem in tune. If I have more appetite for solitude, her own desire for it is there, thwarted by the rest of life.
I remember exactly this. It’s the situation of one kind of writer, fated to be in the world, even desirous of being there, but done in by it every single day, sapped by others despite a hunger for their company in different forms. Of the two of us, my wife and me, I’m the one innately sympathetic to this situation, whereas my wife yearns for what I think of as the orthodox progression. She tries not to say this directly, so of course it appears almost like a billboard in every conversation. No bad feelings attach to this on my daughter’s side. We are who we are, apparent to her from the beginning.
She tells me she has a great many things in manuscript, handwritten, most of them. Once in a while, she surfaces something and I marvel at it. Gather it somehow, I say, even now as we eat, but then I add that the gathering can often only occur when we have the time to do so. I wrote a great deal that was hard for me to categorize until much later, when I came back to it. A lot of what we write is a trial run for something else that gestates at its own glacial pace, especially if it’s ours, detached from editors or agents or readers who might press us to speed up. I note this.
When she goes off to swim, one part of me prays to the gods to preserve her. This has always been true. We make these pacts with them to see us through another day. Yet she expresses her own terror of the sea, the sort of terror it possesses by definition. I feel it too sometimes when a
thunderstorm crashes in and the sky lights up. Luckily, it doesn’t happen in the summer.
5.
In the winter, I think of abandoning the house and returning to civilization. Indeed, I do so, but in the summer, despite its provocations, I may question my sanity, but I never have that same urge to flee. The main worry in the winter is the road, since I have to drive it when the village is functioning. One of my sons mentioned that the latest cars can detect oncoming traffic to some extent. I wonder. It would have to see around rocky corners. Can it really do that? My ancient car has two horns, one meant to signal “I’m coming” without spooking the wildlife, a polite sort of a warning.
We sit at one corner of Rodolfo’s large table. She’s striking, Giulia, and animated when she talks. We’re good company, limiting our encounters as we do. This may be a trait of our type, this ability to amuse, explaining my inexplicable success with women, a wit intimating something more at those moments when, by coincidence, exactly that is desired. On the downward slope it’s reversed, of course, their expectations and my shortcomings plain to see. We never discuss this, but I draw on it if it relates, as I saw many different human types in my line of work.
And it’s all there in the fiction and poems, the memoir pieces and bits of theory or musings on life
that make up my own work, as opposed to the criticism and analysis I wrote for money and to gain a reputation that fell perpetually short of an offer to teach. A measure of condescension from that quarter, in consequence. At conferences, on panels with the grandees of the overlapping worlds I covered, I served as a Greek chorus. It’s almost the only sympathetic role, I concluded much later. Those days are behind me, but not behind my daughter, whose circle in the metropolis wins her an audience of her own. Only my fiction could be said to have an audience, based on the sales. As I noted before, I no longer keep up with everyday events except as they’re reflected in letters and, less often, in conversations. My barber, devoted to the Northern League, dreams of Italy’s splintering back into its myriad small states. Castello di Otranto in his mind would be one. Was it ever? I imagine it was appended to something larger, the “castle” a fortification of some kind. I’m not sure. It’s too late to revert to the status quo ante, although my daughter mentions that Meloni wants to exempt the north from its constant payments to the south, like the Germans, who view us similarly as a drain on their largesse.
I joke with Giulia about my barber’s ambitions for this tiny realm, of which this house is possibly its furthest outpost. “I should fly the flag of our republic, if that’s what is.” Is there a flag? A question that I can’t answer, but likely there is, or a coat of arms of some kind that could be repurposed against
tricolored bars. What colors? These are the right questions. “I’ll have an answer at Christmas,” I promise, “But think about it too. I’m open to suggestions.” She proposes a family competition, the winner to be chosen on New Year’s Eve. “I’ll ask the barber about its history,” I tell her, “or the postal clerk. She of all people may know something useful.”
Was it really a republic? Perhaps you’re its last, long-exiled prince returned, she says. “The decline and fall of some condottiere’s spawn, more likely, but prepared to wear my uniform again if I can find it, and repel invaders of our westmost beach.” I will raise the alarm, she promises.
AUTUMN
1.
The heat breaks by the equinox and it finally rains, but not yet the squalls that blow in the sea. Then the rain is slanted and relentless, but the ridge that separates the house from the sea gives it a bit of shelter. We're not yet at that point, though, and there are a few stretches of good days when I'm tempted
to descend once more to the beach. My third son arrives tomorrow with his daughters, taking a break with them from his office and their schools owing to a brief holiday. The girls are old enough that they can be here without constant adult supervision. Likely, the beach will be a destination, and I may join them. His wife will be away with her friends. Nico is in the heart of the creative industry events for which the city is famous. He knows everyone involved in their realization, a kind of impresario of making and unmaking, as they may be ephemeral, but each involves heroic logistics. "I should be running Boeing," he jokes. His most important attribute is his ability to stay calm and keep it "operational." This is at odds with a demonstrable, often high-strung culture accentuated by industry pressures, not least of which is the constant demand, in fashion especially, to top rivals and blow away the press.
I received a postcard from him with the date and time, "plus or minus." He and the girls will come by the train and then a local hire will drive them here. This is typical of his arrangements, freeing him to give the girls his full attention, compensating them for all those weeks when others monopolized it. They'll stay until the driver reappears on Sunday morning. The grocer told me that Nico telephoned him and "Could I bring a few extra things with me to the house?" On Wednesday, a couple drive up from the village to clean the house, make up the beds, etc.
Late Wednesday afternoon, the car and driver climb the long driveway, and they emerge. He brings their luggage in, confirms the pickup, and departs. They snacked on the train, I'm told, so we eat lightly. The girls take a bath and are soon asleep. We talk, the first time we've done so since early January. He's not much of a correspondent, so night one is the debrief.
Of my children, Nico is the most politically hard to pin down. My sense is that he reads most politicians as entertainers or, more charitably, as media figures, a kind of celebrity with attached responsibilities. Industry titans are similar, like the ones who own the fashion houses. Not that they lack acumen, but a big part of their remit is looking good, inspiring confidence, or playing against that if or when their fan base requires it. He looks at them like a hotelier might.
Giulia told me on her visit that Nico keeps a diary. Professionally, he "has no opinion" about his clients and the worlds they inhabit. His own demeanor is relatively formal, bespoke suits welltailored in cloth that holds up to close inspection. "It's a uniform," he says. In and on his way to Castello di Otranto, he's a civilian and at his daughters' disposal. I don't ask about the diary, but am glad he keeps one. In my experience, he keeps his guard up in conversation. I'm a writer, he's aware, and something untoward might trace back to him. We negotiate this across four evenings. He
knows it would be accidental, so it's for our mutual protection, as we're close.
Luckily for us both, he can repeat stories in general circulation that I won't have heard. If there's a bit of embellishment, it won't be noticeable, and of course it won't be topical, either. My output ensures a considerable lag between his remarks and their veiled appearance, if any. He's also cautious around his daughters. Advertised as a metropolis, it's just a few streets of gossips, but it has a school and the school has a playground. Nothing really has changed. My role as a critic required me to ignore decorum. Foreigners often say of Italians that we can argue and then go out and have a drink, but it's not really true. It may be one reason I prefer solitude. Nico is the reverse, never critical, focused only on the thing to be done, however complicated, which he boils down to its essentials and sets them in motion. He's also able to explain it to others and put a price to it. How he does it I have no idea. He's not afraid of big numbers, nor is he afraid to say that these are the numbers and if you prefer not to spend it, then don't. It will cost this.
Antonio was still a little bitter about Rodolfo, who could have used someone like Nico. Antonio's thoughtfulness was manifest at the grocer's earlier in the week. "I asked Michele to go out to your place tomorrow and clear the path that goes down to your beach. Your son paid for it."
2.
The days Nico's daughters spend at my house are loosely organized by their father. For him, the greatest luxury is to be entirely free of everyone else, the same freedom I granted myself. But he brings his nature with him, his native tendency to make life hospitable for others. Hospitable in his world means creating ample pockets of time and space, but mixing activities in, whether a meal or an excursion. He's also aware of the pleasure children take in repetition and routine.
So, they breakfast together, then they roam the terraces, playing alone and with each other, then they snack, pack a picnic lunch fitted into a rucksack he carries, and disappear for a stretch, comparable to my daughter's, to visit the beach and swim. The weather is perfect for it, even if the water's a bit colder. He's a good swimmer and so are the girls. They return around four. We have an early supper, he reads to them, they chatter a bit to themselves, then fall asleep.
Over what amounts to a second course, we pick up where he left off. I find it useful to quiz him about objects rather than people, as this poses less of a minefield, conversationally. That I'm not up on who designed what, nor of brand names beyond a certain point, he speaks candidly about the absurdity of so much of it, brought out to generate custom, satisfy the backers, goose the press that follows trade around. Titillate, I should have said, for this is a
jaded crew, hungry for difference and nostalgic in their homage to imagined past glories that constitute their lore.
What stand out are the rare moments of actual brilliance. It can be entirely new or a take on the past that changes how we look at it. This applies across the board, from an item of clothing or an accessory or a piece of furniture to a spectacle. How the actors, as Nico calls them, are orchestrated is part of the interest, because every single object needs its human counterpart to bring it alive, lend their subjectivity to it in some manner. There's an art to this, rarely mastered.
He would make an excellent critic, and this is helpful in his dealings with the real ones. He never voices his opinion directly, but has a prodigious memory for commentary on their part he felt was true and well put, which he quotes back to them approvingly. Few critics can resist, as theirs is a notoriously double-edged line of work, either forgotten immediately or the cause of quarrels, often between them and some spiteful artiste, tetchier than usual due to career issues. He is something of a connoisseur of their work, and aids them in other ways behind the scenes. The actors like him, because he enforces the rules meant to protect them. "That's the deal." I admire him for this, but he says it's simply a necessity in a world so rife with exploitation.
3.
In the hours they're away, I write a bit, letters mostly, and nap. The silence of the house, the comparative silence, is striking. Nico comments how quiet it is, simply because the only sounds are from nature or generated by a clock, for example, or a refrigerator. He wears a wind-up watch. I have a wall calendar in the kitchen. There's a wind-up radio in a cupboard, a gift from Antonio when his work was finished. His father was a partisan and hidden radios were sacred.
By silence, I mean the lack of human company and the foregrounding of other sounds, as is normally the case. I thought early on to play recorded music, but I found I didn't miss it. I don't miss much of anything that was customary in the metropolis. The barber plays his radio and I hear snippets of music elsewhere in the village. But no one in the family brings anything audio, although I've never made a point of it. I guess it's the spirit of the place, the ambient noise of it.
The girls aren't silent and of course their father isn't, either, when they engage with him, one of the pleasures of these visits for them, as he gives them his full attention in the same way that I imagine he gives it to his clients. This is one of his traits, this focus, along with his ability to widen the view. But when we talk, he is in some sense a child again with his father, craving the latitude to be talk at length and be heard. His daughters are similar, although
the younger one wants him to read to her, while her sister prowls my library for books she remembers and others she's grown into or is anxious to test that premise. At meals, I quiz them on their day and am interested, always, how differently they experience the same terrain, even the same events. A day can be viewed from anticipation, in media res, and in retrospective, each corresponding to a meal and its time of day, although even breakfast has its backward glance. For me, also.
4.
I am glad for their visit as autumn is melancholic otherwise, even when the weather's fine. Long before it arrives officially, you feel everything moving inexorably toward winter, the season of my withdrawal, for most of it, back into metropolitan life, still cold but better equipped for it. In general, I dislike it. I could spend it below the equator, as a professor friend does, married to a Latina, but I'm married to a local and winter figures in her social season, her life as a patroness. I could have a girl in every port, like another professor I know was rumored to have, but it was hard to picture when I heard it the lifestyle of an older generation, jetsetters. My love life was almost entirely local, which I think was sensible as the end of an affair can ruin whatever's connected with it if the ending is unhinging, but your local everyday forces you back to it, even if you wander through it like a ghost for a
while, half-faint and bereft. Once I met a lover in the capital and then returned alone, stupidly chose the same hotel, and was given the same room. I should have changed it, I suppose, but it felt fated and therefore necessary to experience.
Solitude moves fatalism on to different topics. I worry more about my children and theirs, especially when they're present or I'm present, depending on the season and locale. Something genuinely terrible would no doubt be conveyed to me by someone from Castello di Otranto, the recipient of the bad news by telephone, likely, as each visiting child has her or his own list. If I absolutely need to be in immediate contact, I could call our lawyer's answering service he still has one, apparently an anomaly and leave the message to be conveyed. I've never done this myself, but there's a note in the kitchen to this effect, and one folded up in my wallet. When did he become our lawyer? He's younger than both of us. I renew our long relationship at year's end, verifying the answering service, then taking him to lunch and looking in briefly at his office to greet his associates, all younger than him, so they regard me as "an old client" and will, if need be, relay my message to whoever needs to hear it, more politely than the police would.
"The police" is not really applicable to Castello di Otranto, so far off the map that only those who patrol the autostrada occasionally appear, presumably as called for in the fiscal year of the agency or whatever it is. Nor is there much in the
way of bureaucracy. The postal clerk, keeper of village lore, is deputized by the region to perform certain official functions, with guidelines from afar about her limits, very, very loosely interpreted, but she's a sensible woman. Births, marriages, and deaths are registered, for example, in parallel with the Church, which also delegates practically everything to our one priest and his venerable assistant, his sister.
It is "our" at this point. In three seasons, this is "here." They know I have family elsewhere, as they count as regulars in what passes for tourism. The locals have a time-lapse view of them, while I appear weekly except in the winter, like clockwork, another human in slow decline. My granddaughters don't seem to notice, and in truth their presence prods me to more activity than usual. So it is that I agree to accompany them to the beach on their final outing.
I find that Michele has not only cleared the treacherous path but placed stakes at the worst points, firm enough to hold onto as one descends. The younger girl makes use of them, as do I. It's curious how something as slight as this gives you the confidence you lack without it. She and I are in the same straits on this score, but she has the advantage of a small stature and a well-buffered frame. In any case, we made it down together. The beach is rocky, then gravely, and finally sand, arguably, or something that passes for it, darker than sand and so warmer.
The path mercifully continues narrowly through the rocks and gravel until the beach flattens out. Michele tidied this up, too, or it might have been Giulia. Nico has brought a blanket from the house, an old one used exclusively for this purpose. The girls make sandcastles while we figure out some lunch. Even in the space of three days, it's noticeably colder, as is the water. The girls put their feet in, but that's it. We wear hats and we also wear sweaters, briefly shed and then put back on because the wind has picked up. We agree that their timing was good.
'Look, papa!" the younger one says. A sailboat passes, close enough that a couple waves back when my granddaughters greet them excitedly, jumping up and down. It's the only real incident of their visit, I realize. The rest is how it is here on their autumn holiday. Later on, will they resist coming, finding it too much the same? Giulia hasn't lost her taste for it, but she was older when she first started coming. These are the sorts of questions that have "God willing" attached, like imagining their weddings, their beauty as women, in the tradition of the family.
5.
Our last, post-dinner conversation finds Nico sated in terms of holding the floor, so he finally asks me what I'm writing. This leads eventually to questions from me about his own writing, which I know continues, writing being an inner necessity with us, as it is with Giulia. He envies her freedom to write.
"I'm free to write in my diary, which I have to guard with my life!" I came to fiction late, I tell him. Before that, poetry was my only real personal outlet. At a certain point, I stopped caring what people might think. I just started writing and sending it around. Diderot was my model initially, but the editors picked up on it, the one advantage of that small world.
"Does it still exist?" I think so, I said, but ask me again at Christmas.
1.
It’s 6 March, according to the new calendar the grocer gave me, belatedly. I spent the first night of March in the village, then retrieved my car from its aristocratic mechanic, and ran errands before finally coming here. The house was clean and Michele laid in firewood and made sure my lible butane stove
still works. So, five days back. It’s still winter, but not without some signs of spring. The house is cold at night and I dress accordingly, but my “apartment” is warm enough in the day just from the sun.
This is the far end of winter’s program, three months in the metropolis abending to the rest of life as husband, father, author, and aging body. My main preparation for it is to harvest my writing over the previous three seasons, and decide what to take with me. I write in notebooks of two sizes, one pocketable and the other thinner and larger. Each reflects its contents, as I have to transcribe and edit it on arrival, a process extending through the feast days. When normal life resumes, I email them to a few possibly interested editors, then subject myself to the oncologist and dentist. I shop a bit and see friends. We go out.
I get replies from the editors. We sometimes lunch, but mainly we confer. Along with transcribing, there may be galleys from them to review, the result of last winter’s discussions. Shorter things are mailed to me in Castello di Otranto, but these are longer. I go through them, marking them up. I edit as I transcribe, but a galley is a galley. It’s not like there are that many, but I write constantly, especially if I’m caught up in something. The poems get wriben when they do. I make a compendium of them and then a selection that I send around. If they appear, I see proof of it later, usually. It's not like there's all that much, but I write preby constantly, especially if I'm caught up in something. The poems
get wriben when they do. I make a compendium and then a selection from it that I send around. If they appear, I learn about it later.
2.
My second son visits us from Palermo. His wife has two girls from an earlier marriage, the older in Rome and the younger in Naples. One is at Sapienza, the other at the Art Academy, a sculptor and painter. They all used to visit me in the spring, but now the parents come as a couple and the girls come on their own. They haunt the beach and are good company.
He describes Palermo as a tamer Naples. He heads an international school, a role like his younger brother’s in demanding diplomacy, firmness, and delight. It abracts locals hoping their children will find a wider world, and expats hoping not to set their children back too drastically. His wife is English. They retreat to England in the summer. I may join them.
Eugenio is the tallest of my sons. He reminds me of the commodore from the Schweppes ads of the 1970s. He has a commanding voice and an eccentric nature he keeps under wraps at school that emerges with the family. His politics are on the left, reflecting his big heart and also Palermo, which suffers economically along with Sicily. Health services there are especially bad, so they use the NHS in the summer, as he has dual citizenship through her, as do her girls. They plan to retire there.
Where did this height come from? My sons are all taller than us. Only my daughter is shorter. She and Nico were the most athletic as adolescents. Eugenio is fit enough. They love to walk, an aspect of England they enjoy.
His wife is a photographer, quite good at it. Our house here has all the attributes of metropolitan life, and I make use of this by screening her work. Spring in Castello di Otranto is one of her subjects. It’s interesting to see it through her eyes. She loves being there, she’s told me.
They’ll live on in Palermo, I think, perfectly content with their situation. He’s good with the staff and students, has a gravitas that puts parents at ease. He’s nonsectarian, in keeping with a school whose main competitor is run by a priest, but he’s just Catholic enough not to look out of place.
3.
Roman was the first editor I saw. I sent him four linked short stories and he was unsure what to do with them. Serialize them? Make a slim book? He liked the largely heterosexual plotline and the jumping chronology. They reminded him of Rohmer‘s bourgeois fables. We sat in his cramped office. He’s a big man, florid in a way that suggests the end is near, his desk littered with the detritus of his trade. He seemed noncommittal. “Should I take them to someone else?” “No, no, I’ll take them!”
I like Roman because his edits are minor. He has a copy editor, but often overrules her red marks in defense of my style. It isn’t to everyone’s taste. My stories “lack incident,” I’m told, but he assures me that it’s there and even uncanny, Freud’s uncanny, he means, a bourgeois phenomenon.
The upshot is that he will send me a contract and the stories are out of my hands. This leaves the three novellas, started several years ago, a trilogy now, if not a novel. The manuscript has floated around, but I keep withdrawing it. Is it done? It’s Mario who poses this question. Tightly wound, addicted to nicotine in its Swedish form, his office is as small as Roman’s, but his desk is miraculously clear, only my manuscript between us. This is our third meeting about it. I nod yes, adding that I really mean it, but I’m not sure if the novellas should be published separately or together as a family saga. The latter, he says, and it could be optioned, meaning Netflix, e.g. His assistant brings us espressos. It’s not clear that Mario eats lunch.
4.
August and February are the months when the dead are with us. In August, we feel the mortality of all living things, their decline and fall. In February, just as we’ve lost hope in winter’s abeyance, the dead appear to remind us of themselves. In Japan, they appear ritually in August; in my metropolitan here and now, they are the raw material of dreams and
waking thoughts. At my house in Castello di Otranto in August, what Rilke describes, angels confused by the sheer quantities of the living and the dead, is evident.
There are two big cemeteries here, and my February dead have to be visited in both. Ricky and Eddie, my schoolmates, are in one; my grand-niece Bianca isn’t actually in the other, but in its “Poet’s Corner,” her friends placed a marker. I grew up with Ricky and Eddie. Bianca, the oldest of my grandchildren’s cousins, knew us as occasional visitors to the university town where my sister and her family settled.
Ricky was thought to be “slow.” Gangly and slightly hunched, he was a kind of cipher, subject to the slights boys visit on each other in school. The onset of puberty, a disaster in general, seemed to unhinge him. We went to chaperoned dances at our sister school, and he made liberal use of “cutting in” to have brief moments with girls who caught his fancy, to their horror. Boyfriends took him aside, but puberty made him brazen. Then suddenly he stopped attending the dances. We saw that he took care of his person more and slowly came into focus.
Eddie saw him with Martina, a known Bohemian, but beautiful in an understated way. It was a surprise, and a perfect example of how being in love works miracles between the lovers.
We graduated and I lost track of them both until their poetry began to appear in the literary journals. She gave a reading, occasioned by a chapbook they
wrote together, and I went. His health issues dogged him, but he looked radiant. By then, he spoke only with difficulty, and she read for both of them. His poems were short and observational. There were prose pieces that reminded me of Walser. A year or two later, I heard that he’d died and then read in her tribute to him how from the very start she saw his deeply imaginative spirit, trodden down by an illfitting universe yet sustained by his parents, who felt they had to expose him to it despite its thoughtless cruelties, support him without allowing him to become dependent. This is a very thin line to walk, but he emerged from it with sparks of genius visible to her despite the sometimes dense fog of a mind set in that body.
I always felt, in relation to women attracted to me, that what drew them was the last thing I would have thought as an adolescent, when we put so much stock in appearance and bravado. When Martina found Ricky, she freed him to be himself, the self she saw and desired. If we’re lucky, we too shed what we brought along from our childhoods that hobbles our maturity.
Eddie was my closest friend at school, the older son of an engineer and a painter. Remarkably talented, he was homosexual at time when it was inconvenient to be one. Adolescents are often bisexual, so I didn’t imagine it would continue or be an issue. His parents envisioned a scientific or technical career for him (his mother’s father had been the chief chemist at a petrochemical giant), not
the musician he wanted to be. He attended our wedding and visited us in our first household with a child. My wife thought he was unstable but, knowing him most of my life, I didn’t see it. When work took me Torino, where he’d moved. I called him and a man I didn’t know answered. When I explained who I was, the man blurted out that Eddie had shot himself. He’d just found him; the police were coming. Could I call his parents? Ringing off, I found their number. “Thank God it was you and not the police,” his mother said. It felt like Providence granted this.
Bianca, dead at 20 three years ago, is too raw. Suicide is terrible for the survivors unless it’s done in light of a terminal illness, say, and even then, it does others a disservice. I’m with the Church on this, feeling it could too easily lead to euthanasia, if it hasn’t already. That Bianca has her marker now reflects her published work. We tax the prematurely dead with what we feel they owe us, but how can we collect this debt? There’s more, her friends say, but it’s hidden. “Nothing is hidden,” a Zen patriarch noted.
5.
Self-restraint is imposed on me by the one suitcase and Marimekko bag I brought, which I had to carry back. I sidestepped this by having a few things shipped, but most of what I read, for example, is ordered by post from one or two bookstores if I see a
review in the fortnightlies that prompts my interest. The effort involved is a brake on my older practice of overstocking my shelves, and across my time in the metropolis, I winnowed my library a bit, trading one book or another for a credit to draw on later.
I read slowly, in reaction to my past life as a critic. I no longer follow whole categories of things that I once covered religiously. My wife reads the dailies, even the business one. In our sporting days, we had our own bank accounts. Hers is still opaque, but we’re solvent and I never inquire about how my expenses are allocated. The accountant gives me the documents and I sign them. It’s her money, I’ve always felt, brought to the marriage.
The house in Castello di Otranto is partly written off, my oldest son told me. They’re in business together now, so he understands our accounts and is slowly taking over. When he visits in the spring, we discuss the house and grounds, which he loves. He’s learned how my wife operates, no easy matter, finally seeing there’s a rationale that reflects long experience, as I told him episodically, providing many concrete irrefutable examples.
I was as surprised as anyone that she accepted my proposal. I fall on the cultural side of her interests, the focus now of her patronage, but I’m less interested in opera and the theater. She has her own circle. I’ll join if she asks. I don’t mind these occasions, a splendor that somehow persists, a holdover from one old regime or another. The crowd
is old, I notice, if sprinkled with curious or socially ambitious youth. (Is this possible?)
Spurred by an affair, I went systematically to concerts at one point, learning that the new is served up as an unfamiliar dish in an otherwise traditional meal. I lean culturally toward the classics, but we have many examples of them emerging from a new greeted typically with horror.
If I avoid the new, I never criticize it. How would I know?
1. By the equinox, I’m more or less recovered from three months of urban life. That it’s habit-forming is the idea, so every return has a period of adjusting to this place, settling back into it and reviving its rhythms or finding new ones that suit its tempo. This begins on the train, which is also true in the other direction. A remnant of the past, with sights and sounds particular to itself, a train is a time machine.
In spring, the grounds buoy up my spirits. I bring back the memories a city generates, shaped in no small part by the play of commerce. Even in the winter, brief thaws inspire the license fashion wants to take, the shedding or unwrapping that anticipates what lies ahead, fecundity’s siren song.
Now here it is again, but my reverie is mine alone. My oldest son was to have joined me, but he wrote that he’s delayed. We saw a lot of each other in the winter, so perhaps he’s had enough of me?
Not sure, but it’s okay, I need to expand on notes I made, ideas that came to me, seeing editors, roaming bookstores and galleries, exposing myself to culture as my wife understands it. I bring back a few small notebooks, bought fresh and filled of jotted notes to self. Everything is a note to self, of course, as I’m my most attentive audience, keeper of my flame, selfeffacing tooter of my horn.
My ability to name plants is laughable, but I’m aware of how this season operates. Fecundity is both the draw and hazard in spring’s sporting life. It may be that the hazards are less, but we’re a careless species. Are the young immune? The birthrate says so. We fucked like rabbits and the children appeared. Demeter presides and Persephone’s back again from the dead, nubile and fertile. All honor to them both, I think, walking the grounds.
Spring evens out night and day, then more and more sun until the solstice. It extends into the summer or perhaps summer reaches into spring like winter does to autumn, giving us glances of each
one’s worst days or weeks. The time changes and I reset the clock, which stood unmoving over most of the winter, despite life running on. I also reset my wristwatch, which I had serviced and runs more accurately. (I set it to the post’s official clock.)
Here, circadian rhythm is all. An odd noise, like the bark of a fox, can wake me up, but usually it’s the sun. I nap and work late, but in the spring, I get up early, as everything is alive again. I work on one terrace or another, depending on the time of day. This is a microclimate different from the village. The sea tempers things noticeably. There’s fog the trees drip with it, a ring of green below them even in high summer.
One editor made a joke about my primitive hut, as if, like Heidegger, I’ve retreated to an idealized world. Another compared it to Prospero’s island, me a mage with a staff. It’s too civilized, I tell them, and such magic as I had lacked staying power. Spare but livable describes it. Our apartment is grander, befitting its era. It’s smaller than what it replaced but better furnished. It’s a gallery, and very slowly I’ve made one here, having run out of walls at home. If ordering books here is a process, art is even more so.
In the winter, I visit the studios of a few artist friends. Painters generate far more work than their galleries sell. Those whose work sells give things away or sell it at gallery prices, giving the dealer a cut, but others are more casual or simply loyal to friendship or to a collector, possibly. I wish I could paint, but art and craft take up space. Rodolfo’s
production was much in evidence as were the toxic solvents he used. My creativity is contained. The garden is like Bonnard. It’s loosely arrayed, and spring does the rest.
2.
A solitary life means that I’m Bonnard’s woman in the bath, just as I’m a man in the shower. Who’s thinking or speaking is a constant question for a writer. Solitude makes this more apparent, but it arises in the metropolis, too, aware how we play the parts assigned to us or handed to us or even taken hold of despite our complex, unreliable natures as we think we understand them, always experienced and contended with in real time.
Solitude makes it easier to look at it dispassionately, while age gives us retrospect, leaching the terrors out of those moments when our psychology undid us. We live with minds and bodies that refuse increasingly to do our bidding. Not that they ever did so unfailingly, but we got used to a certain élan. We compensate for this with heuristics and self-forgiveness.
3.
The moon’s a companion, emblem of fecundity. A sliver, reappearing after going dark, reminds me of a woman who’s gone dark herself, unlikely to resurface. The abundance of this season sets
mortality aside, or desire does this for us. We rut at the first whiff of propagation’s heady scent. Some rut, that is; others don’t. Solitude spurs contemplation, especially of pleasure.
Desire fits uneasily with the city’s clockwork, a randomness we drink from furtively. We try to find places we can’t hear its song. This is one such, but I found it long after. I left a trail, but before the age of maximal surveillance. Even here I’m spied on from above, the examiner no longer human, but it’s a hike no civil servant wants to make. The post, the Church they’re left to themselves. Plots and heresies could be dreamt up, but the imaginary of Castello di Otranto doesn’t tend in that direction. This has promise as a story. I made a note to self to that effect on the train.
A letter in follow-up from my oldest son apologizes for his absence, which can’t be helped, and sets out various things he’s discussed with his mother. He’s the capo, never my role or title. My model was a gardener confronting his fields in different seasons, each with its necessities. It kept me in my children’s affection. He asks for my comments and sends his love.
Another letter is from a woman I saw several times this winter, renewing our long-running relationship, the only one besides my marriage I’ve managed to sustain, as, despite the desire she inspires, I’ve never acted on it. I type my reply because my handwriting is so awful that another woman once returned a letter I’d handwritten,
protesting that she couldn’t make out a word. As I type, our conversations come back to me. In the time we’ve been friends, she’s lived abroad, loved unsatisfactory men, and been thwarted in her efforts to find work in her field. This past winter saw her deciding not to compromise again, but to let a hundred flowers bloom, as Mao put it, acknowledging her inability to fit into the readymade categories. Her letter discusses this. She writes in parts like me, occasionally forgetting to mail it.
Sitting amid spring’s pervasive estrus, a tangent appears on the nature of women as lovers. Marriage’s domesticity and familiarity anchor love in affection, but other women arrive with erotic nuance and leave trails of it behind them. This is my imaginary not hers. “Only poems get with child.”
Not being immune, I was harried by fecundity’s possibility. Stratagems, devices, and chemistry are unreliable, we find, but abstinence is rarely an option in the metropolis once we’ve plunged in. Our lives can seem arid or fallow, but then Nature steps in or the gods sport with us yet again.
4.
The good weather brings me to the beach, making ample, grateful use of Michele’s stakes, which came through the winter fit for purpose. I don’t swim, but I test the water, which is still cold. Instead, I sit and look at it, the sea, an aural and olfactory presence
until seen at its own level, the view the beach affords. I take some pride in descending alone. Of course, it’s not clear what would happen if I died here or was swept away, a body unrecognizable from weather or beasts that dine on carrion, so not much to go on, if found at all. At the oncologist’s, I saw a poster asking people to donate their dead selves to the medical school for the students to carve up. Then our cohort’s bits and pieces, cremated, would be scattered. (Rodolfo was scattered solo.) I wonder if there’s any consciousness left at cremation? One advantage of the medical school’s intervention is that I would be really and truly dead. My wife’s mother, alive for almost a century, died in an entirely used-up body that she left to the school. Men came early the next day to collect it, complaining that we were slow to call them. To spend months in a freezer also makes me wary, but would I notice?
The beach generates such thoughts, sea standing in for the unknown and the aridity, even in the spring when the edge of undergrowth is not yet devastated by the heat, contrasts with the life forces pulsing everywhere else. If life is partly a preparation for its ending, a beach is as good a place as any for the autodidactic nature of preparing, like my annual visits to the cemeteries, which coincide, I realize, with the visits to my bodily advisors. Do I also have spiritual advisors? I would count my literary ancestors, who were more aware than most of the intermingling of the living and the dead.
The characters I conjure up give me psychoanalytic advice. They embody aspects of myself that I need to consider. Bringing them to consciousness was the ambition of Freud and Lacan, his most interesting follower. I learned from him to write on without flinching, giving one to the opposite sex or putting it in dialogue with itself, fiction’s gift to self-analysis.
I can’t say I clambered up, but ascending from the beach is less taxing, despite a greater need to haul one’s weight upward against gravity. There are places to pause and look back at a wider sea, a panorama that includes the terrain itself, halfway between a hillside and a cliff, and more the latter descending it. Walking back up, I lean into the hillside and feel safer. It is walking, not clambering, the upward motion of children, whose energy compensates for their stature. Endurance is me: good for the long haul.
At the summit, I pause again to look. The sound of my breathing tapers off. I think of my father, who once lit a cigar after a similar climb, red-faced and triumphant. I’m more careful with my health than he was, but I admire his celebratory impulse. When I say my prayers, I account for the day God gave me. If a walk figures, I mention it. The beach will be a highlight. I’ll thank Him for the sea. He already has my thanks and then some for spring.
On a whim, I made a bouquet, which I brought with me to the post, my first stop this Monday, and presented to the woman who presides over what passes for officialdom in Castello di Otranto. “From my garden,” I said. “Oh, Dottore, so kind!” I sense she rarely gets much thanks for her labors. She disappears, then brings out quantities of mail.
We don’t talk about our work, but if I have a new grandchild or grand-niece or nephew’s photograph to show her, she looks at it approvingly and shows me one of hers. While I’m older, her generations are closer together than mine, so these babies are roughly in the same cohort. We’re both attached to our families. I made a point of telling her that my wife doesn’t join me because her activities keep her elsewhere. She accepts my solitude. She knows I’m visited by our children, and that we regularly correspond. She likes it that I have no use for anything that threatens the post.
Suddenly she asks me if I’d mind if she gave the flowers to the Church, as they’re so pretty and the priest and his sister will be very happy to have this bouquet from the coast. I agree. They too are threatened by contemporary life, which declines to replace such loyal retainers once they retire or die.
Castello di Otranto’s fate is bound up in this, maybe, but the inertia of a bureaucracy like the post or the Church is legendary, so we’ll see.
She beams at me, having found a use for something she couldn’t categorize. Putting the flowers in water, she tells me she’ll take them over on her lunch break. Amazingly, there are still two services daily, so the flowers will be admired, even if they don’t last until Sunday. “They were picked fresh,” I almost say, but that’s a metropolitan talking. “I hope they do,” I reply.
I run my other errands and drive back. After lunch, I go through the mail, most of it editorial. It’s too soon for another letter from my friend, but my daughter writes, enclosing a clipping of her article for a woman’s quarterly. It pays well, she notes. She conveys family news no one else is sending. Editorial demands a response, so I lay things out and make a list, my habit from schooldays. I weigh it against my own work. This too is my own work, of course, the way making a warp is part of weaving, but it is and isn’t. At least the weather is fine. Work like this in the summer can be brutal or at minimum encumbered by the need to find places with shade and breeze. I’ve lived here a long time, but those places can vary hourly.
These are articles and chapters, things of that nature. The editors tolerate my process, but just barely, some of them, so I need to get everything in the post next Monday. With the books, it’s completely different. The editors know when I’ll reappear. The only risk is that I’ll die beforehand, but they have my edits. Editing is endless. Deadlines allow editors to call a halt, but death occasionally
does this for them, endangering any remaining harvest.
I make tea, reread my daughter’s letter, and begin writing a reply. I have until Sunday evening to finish it, but it prompts thoughts. Her article was written with a photographer in tow, and she’s in some of the photos, turned away, but it’s her. I know the place, famous but I’ve never been. As a child, I used to imagine I could step into a photo and be there with the cows or the sailboats, then step out again. I wish sometimes that this were possible, not simply to another place but in the era when the photo was taken.
Fiction is as close as I get to this, not a bad facsimile. Spring here and now makes up for the inconvenience of living at such a remove from others I often miss. At home in the metropolis, I’m struck always by the nature of married life, in which a longfamiliar-with-each-other couple negotiates their immutable differences, which they minimize as best they can, yet collide at predictable moments, like a situation comedy from childhood.
I miss my friend. If the portal science fiction promises finally existed, she could drop in.
John J. Parman is a Berkeley-based writer and editor. This is fiction, with invented characters and se<ings.
Published by Snowden & Parman Editorial (spedit.net) and distributed by The Pallas Gallery (thepallasgallery.com or @_p_a_l_l_a_s_) in San Francisco (1111 Geary Boulevard, 94105), whose Pallas Annex is shown to the left.
Text and images © 2024 by John J. Parman
In Castello di Otranto follows its narrator through four seasons, three at "the edge of the edge," as he describes his house and the village it orbits, and one in the metropolis he tries to hold at a distance. These are "bourgeois fables," one of his editors says, like those of Eric Rohmer. Moral tales? Read and decide.
