Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

I was facing Vittorio but, eager to get away and be alone, I wasn’t listening. I studied the besieged look of the table, the sauce-splashed napkins, the oil stains on the linen, the spills of grated Parmesan cheese, the dish of ragged spat-out olive pits, the flakes of bread crusts lying where the loaf had been twisted apart, the lip-smeared wine glasses, the tang of vinegar-sodden salad greens flattening in a blue bowl. The cheese board came, and Vittorio picked up the peculiar notched knife and wagged it over a crumbly hunk of Asiago but didn’t lower it.

The other guest, Tito Frasso, nodded at Vittorio and dabbed at the smallest breadcrumbs on the tablecloth, collecting them on the tip of his finger and poking them onto his tongue. Vittorio was dressed in stylish hunter’s tweeds. Frasso, hardly more than twenty-five, had green hair and wore a stitched leather vest over a yellow T-shirt and bright orange sneakers. He had been introduced to me as a journalist. Earlier in the meal he said he had an idea for a book.

“I always found it hard to tell anyone I wanted to write a book,” I said.

“Strange,” he said, naïvely, I thought. Yet in contrast to his clownish clothes, Frasso was soft-spoken and serious and respectful of Vittorio, who had invited him along so that he could mention my newly translated book in his newspaper column. Frasso had added, “I would like to solicit your advice.” He licked crumbs from his finger. “About writing.”

“My advice,” I said, “is give in to temptation.”

He lost his smile, he squinted at me, and moving his lips he seemed to repeat the words I’d just said.

Being back in Italy always reminded me of my first visit long ago, my beginnings as a writer, my humiliations and little victories on the branching roads of the sunny, antique country that was then still its old self. It was a place of men in brown suits and old women in black, of rat-tatting Vespas and cigarette smoke as ropy as incense, the air thick with Italian life, the hum of freshly ground coffee as dense as potting soil, the rankness of damp paving stones in a piazza, the piercing fragrance of flower stalls, the chalky tang of old stucco house walls as yellow as aged cheese, the gleaming just-mopped marble floors of dark interiors, and the glimpse of fruit globes on terracotta platters, the confusion of odors making Italy seem an edible country.

“ Che successo? ” Vittorio said suddenly, lapsing into Italian as though from shock. He touched my shoulder to steady me, and Frasso leaned away to give him room.

“Nothing.” But my memory must have shown as melancholy on my face. I forced a smile, I told him to continue, and this time I listened.

“ Bene. As I was saying, if you have any friends in Florence,” and he made an operatic gesture, raising his arms in welcome, and pleading with them to embrace a body, “please, I beg you, invite them to the dinner on Thursday when we launch your book.”

I hesitated, because I knew that if I told him the name of the man I had in mind, I would have to lie about it, and the sorry business had such a strange history that I might regret it. But I was at that later unapologetic stage of life when one can be bluntly curious to know how things had turned out for people met long ago on the road, people who’d been kind or cruel to me. How had they fared, and what had they forgotten, and who were they now? Mine was the vindictive nosiness and intrusion of a ghost, with the ghost’s satisfactions.

“There’s only one man, and he’s a Fiorentino, but he might not be alive,” I said. In a way I hoped he wasn’t, because then I could explain the background to Vittorio. “His name is Pietro Ubaldini.”

“I know him,” Vittorio said, looking pleased. “Tito?”

Frasso shook his head and frowned. The name was apparently new to him.

“Tito is from Napoli. He remains a student of this place,” Vittorio said. “I can tell you that Ubaldini is alive.”

“That’s good news.”

Vittorio cocked his head at me, because I hadn’t spoken with much enthusiasm. “A great patron of the arts from an old family. He is”—and he shrugged and twirled one finger—“ anziano now. I will have an invitation sent to him.” Vittorio folded his napkin, pressing it with the heel of his hand, and — more opera — from across the room asked the waiter in gestures for the bill, signaling with upraised scribbling fingers. “You’re okay with this dinner?”

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t mind saying some few words afterward?”

“I’m looking forward to it,” I said. “I want to talk about how Italy made me a writer.”

“Excellent.” Then he smiled, as though remembering something. “But how do you know the grande nobile Ubaldini?”

“Never met him. He’s the friend of a friend from long ago. I was told I should look him up if I was ever in Florence.”

That was a lie. I had met Ubaldini fifty years before, but not in Florence. I did not really care to talk to him again, but I wanted to look at him. If Vittorio had pointed to another table in the restaurant and said, “That’s him,” I would have been satisfied. I merely wanted to see his face, and I suppose I hoped he’d see mine. It was not an exercise in recognition, but in verification. So much time had passed that I sometimes thought I had imagined Ubaldini, but when Vittorio pounced on the name, I felt a bit winded, as if it had been an exertion to say it. It disturbed me to think that I would be seeing him again.

I had thought of him often over the years. It was in the fortified hill town of Urbino that I got to know what serious writing entailed. I had a free room, a job as a teacher, a small salary, and the love of a pretty woman who was studying at the university. But I had arrived there in such a roundabout way, I believed I was being plotted against.

In Amherst I had written stories, but many of my friends called themselves writers too. It was a comfort for us to be untested among bookish people in a college town, to talk about our writing and read our stories and poems to appreciative audiences at the local coffeehouse. We published them in our literary magazine, we complimented each other, and it was all a cheat for being self-serving.

Italy was the world, it was flesh and food and temptation, it was all those odors, the true test of my writing ambition. I hitchhiked to the coastal town of Fano and lived for a few weeks at the house of an American couple, the Shainheits. Fano was saturated with the aroma of grilled fish, the thick blue edge of the Adriatic Sea flopping against the hot sand. Benny Shainheit, a teacher of mine, was in Italy on a Fulbright and had invited me to stay. In the first week they were visited by another American academic, named Hal McCarthy. Over lunch at a café, McCarthy said he was headed inland. “Delicious Gubbio,” he said, working his lips around the words, making the place name sound like soupy dessert you’d eat with a spoon. “And what brings you here?”

I said I was writing something.

“Sunshine and blue sky everywhere,” he said, panting and slightly suppressing a furious giggle, “and you choose to sit in a dark room staring at a blank sheet of paper!”

“Not blank,” I said defiantly, but still I felt undermined, my first taste of the hostile envy of an idle academic for a young writer. That neither of the Shainheits said anything in my defense only added to my annoyance.

During the day, I wrote in my upstairs room while the Shainheits were at the beach with their little boy, and in the evenings I sat in a café, bantering with the locals, practicing my Italian. Late one night, about ten days into living with the Shainheits, I came back and found them — Benny and Laurie — sitting together at the kitchen table, as forbidding as my parents.