Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Vienna sang in a whirling haze about the two lovers. They visited Stephansdom, and were each charmed, above all else, by the sound of the other’s footsteps on the stone floor. They bought the most expensive tickets at the Staatsoper — the only ones still available — where they had scarcely heard the overture to … well, it does not matter, for they slipped away at the interval and hastened to their room. Alessandro felt an urgent charge running through him, a positive need to be inside her, to make love over and over.

In the evenings, they stepped out for dinner and to walk under the soft lights of the city, while a cool breeze circled them. They entered a lingerie store, at her girlish urging, her arms extended and her two hands pulling on his. As she lifted various paltry items into the air about her, he felt not only lust drive through him but also what seemed like an equal yet opposite force of tenderness.

One evening they passed a concert hall. The poster declared that P___ would be performing Mozart. As the strings in the orchestra finished tuning against the piano, Alessi felt her hand grip his. He looked at her, but her eyes were fixed straight ahead. Presently a hush fell over the hall and then, emerging from the canopy of silence, a single oboe broke through, “Gran Partita.” As the oboe made its lofty way through the air, Alessandro’s soul was so moved it went seeking something to cry for. Later, he would not remember having cried. She squeezed his hand again, and this time she was looking at him. She rose from the seat and, despite the reproachful Viennese faces, the two hunched figures squeezed past the knees of their neighbors. At the hotel she made love to him and afterward, holding him in her arms, she kissed his lips as Helen might have kissed Achilles’ heel.

To eavesdrop on lovers or to recount their words of tenderness is unquestionably ill-mannered, but it is also foolish to expect words exchanged in a mood of tenderness to bear up to the unforgiving regard of an age as cynical as love’s language is naïve. To describe their exchange, our beautiful Italian does not in only two syllables afford the same nuances as the English word mawkish. But to describe it thus is to accept defeat against the cynicism.

“You think that I am drawn to your weakness,” she said. “This is not true at all. Let me tell you something you may not know. The world is inhabited by three kinds of men. There are the weak, who are only that. There are the strong, who are nothing more. And there are men like you. Moisi, my love, you carry a deep well of strength that is yours, that will always be there. Your tears are the surface of that well.”

Alessandro had never known such happiness as was his in Vienna. He would never know it again. After a week, the two parted, having laid plans to meet again a week thence in another city of Europe. They exchanged telephone numbers and agreed to speak the next day. The next day, Alessi waited by the phone but no call came, and when he dialed the number, her telephone was always engaged. After a week of trying the same number over and over, Alessi put down the phone. Alessi remembered how she had remained silent about herself and how he had done the same and, for this small mercy, he believed he ought to be grateful, as if seeking to persuade himself that she had carried away no part of him.

The months passed and then the years, and although Alessi never forgot that week in Vienna, although he never forgot the intensity of feeling in those seven days, although he never forgot the woman, he did continue with life. In his outward form, one might say even that he flourished, for professionally he grew and grew and his scientific inquiries yielded greater and greater insights.

But here is the unaccountable fact. At a point in time that cannot be located exactly, Alessandro became possessed of a fear, an irrational and unscientific fear, which took hold of his sleeping hours. In a perversion of the original story, Alessandro Moisi Iacoboni came to believe that in the hour of his death he would cry out the name of his lost love.

He railed against his dreams, for what should it matter what trifling thoughts seize a man in his final hour? What should it matter to the present, to the life in hand, that it might end with a vision of loss? Isn’t a life worth more than that? And here Alessi reminded himself of the people he had helped, the patients who had survived because of his skill, and the physicians and pharmacologists whose understanding he had increased. Was that, he asked, not enough to dismiss all thought — all the dark dreams! — all the absurd fear of the closing mutterings of a dying man in his worn-out brain? Why, he asked above all else, should such an ending be the worst fate he could imagine awaiting him? For that was what it was: the terror of a meaningless end that unravels everything. Such fear and such dreams remained with him to fill out the hollows of his heart.

Alessandro therefore came to believe that he had to trick this end, must wrong-foot his apparent destiny, that he would have to take matters into his own hands. That was the thought, the contemplation of design, that was to carry him through many years.

In 1990, Alessandro accepted a chair at the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Maryland. Alessi was delighted by America, fascinated by this world within the world, and threw himself into all things American. He watched baseball and football, he bought season tickets, he was crazy for burgers and hot wings with blue cheese dip. He took to wearing a Baltimore Orioles cap on his rounds at the hospital and at the lectures he gave in the medical school. He loved the absurd game shows on television, where ignorance seemed to be celebrated. Five years after arriving, he became an American citizen. For a decade, Alessandro lived in what was apparently a blizzard of good humor, and the truth of it was that America had indeed infused his days with a simple joy. But it was a joy whose greatest achievement was to make bearable certain dark nights in which the old fear revisited him.

In September of 2001, Alessandro Moisi Iacoboni settled into window seat 12A, next to an elderly gentleman, on a fully booked Boeing 727 at Boston’s Logan Airport. Still percolating in his thoughts were the discussions he’d had at Harvard Medical School in a meeting with collaborators on a research project. In New York he was scheduled to give a lecture at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, before traveling back to Maryland. Shortly after the plane had reached its cruising altitude of thirty-one thousand feet, Alessandro felt a mighty ache in his upper abdomen. He curled over in his seat grabbing his chest. Alessandro knew what it was.

As he lay dying, Alessandro forgot his chosen fear. He did not think of the woman he had loved in Vienna, he did not utter her name, he did not pine for that loss. Nor, contrary to what some might imagine of men at their end, did he recall childhood, its accumulated tiny humiliations, the wounds that could not heal; he did not remember the taunting of the children, he did not remember the hatred in their eyes, or the occasion he threw his arms around a teacher, who only pushed him away with a look of disgust. He did not remember the nuns, who had shown nothing of the tenderness of Christian love. Such memories, when they come, do not come back vaguely but with the detail of a knife unsheathed. Yet to him then they did not come at all. Instead, Alessandro thought of the postage stamps in his wallet, stamps he had purchased in the various places he had lived, stamps unused, left over, stamps that signified letters and postcards unsent, the words he had never spoken and the people to whom those words had not been said. He thought of those wasted stamps. If you had been watching Alessandro at that moment, as he lay in the aisle of the airplane surrounded by flight attendants, you might have seen a curious smile spread across his face, you might have heard the muffled sound of a muttered word, and if you had been familiar with the accents and dialects of a corner of Italy, you might have recognized the voice of a child born only four hours by mule from the town of M___, for in the hour of his death Alessandro Moisi Iacoboni, like all men, cried out for his mother.