Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

“This is better,” he said with confidence.

The road narrowed, slanting into the hills, and for the next half-hour or so he seemed to use all his concentration to maneuver the car, taking the sharp bends by yanking the steering wheel, and speeding whenever the road straightened. We passed farmhouses, some small squat churches, and hillsides of cows, and I marveled that so much had happened since the Shainheits had tossed me out of their house.

All this time he was talking, with the casual enthusiasm of a benevolent Italian, about good food and great books and the lovely weather. And sometimes he was talking about nothing, but with such lazy pleasure he was exulting in his good mood and, in the Italian way, filled me — his passenger — with the confidence that happiness conveys. I was slightly tipsy from all the talk.

Then the car was slowing down and drawing into a widened viewpoint at the edge of the road, overlooking a village and the sunlit fields of rural Italy, the blue sea in the distance. We were parked on a parapet of land surrounded by poplars, outside time, as though he’d flown me from the sky to tempt me with the glorious view. I had no idea where we were.

He shut off the engine and turned to me, perspiring. He looked tormented, and his sudden seriousness alarmed me. When he wiped his face with his handkerchief he had to remove his sunglasses. His damp eyes were both lewd and benevolent.

“ Bella sole d’Italia, ” he said, seeming anxious, wearily wiping his face again in the heat.

“Where are we?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. He said, “I am from Florence, as I told you. But I have a villa on an island. You know the Isole Tremiti?”

“No.”

“Is very beautiful,” he said. “You can swimming, you can boating”—in his apparent fluster his English broke down. “Is the sweet life. Good food. You can make writing there. Is perfect.”

I said, “I need a job.”

“What money you need, I give you.”

It was a dream, it was everything I wanted: a house by the sea, the freedom to work on my book, comfort and happiness. But it was so voluptuous I knew there was a catch, and I suspected what it might be. “What do I do in return?”

“You make writing. You write fabulous!”

“Anything else?”

The sweat was dripping from his face, but he didn’t wipe it. His tight shirt was plastered to his body. He seemed determined not to say anything more, and yet to elicit an answer from me. He turned to gaze across the russet tiled rooftops and through the slender pines to ocean below us, and for all I knew the island he promised me, where I would write, was floating like a lotus blossom somewhere in the glittering scales of that sea.

“Sorry.”

“You say no because you never try.”

“I can’t do that.” Then, as though to explain, I said, “I have a girlfriend.”

“I sometimes have a woman,” he said in a sour tone of rebuttal. “It is”—he curled his lip—“like stroking a cat.”

“Let’s go,” I said. “You can drop me at the next town, wherever that is.”

His face hardened, and he wiped it with his bare hand and flicked the sweat from that hand. He said, “You are a big stupid. You refuse me, eh? Okay, Signore Scrittore, write something on this little road!”

And in his anger he reached for me. I lifted my arm to block him — but I moved too quickly, and in the confinement of the small car I caught his chin with my elbow, banging his head against the doorpost and knocking his glasses sideways, so they swung across his face.

He howled, then said, “ Va via! ”

And as soon as I pulled my bag from the back seat he slammed the door and sped downhill, leaving me in the long shadows of the tall poplars in the late-afternoon sun on the empty road. He knew he was abandoning me, and he was furious because I had rebuffed him. My talk about being a writer annoyed him, as it had annoyed Hal McCarthy and the Shainheits. I thought, irrationally, that these people were actively trying to prevent me from becoming a writer, but instead of making me feel small, I was defiant and saw myself as wolfish and resourceful.

I stood on the road, the setting sun on my face, looking around, wishing to remember every detail of this abandonment. I didn’t know which way to go, but because Ubaldini had gone downhill, I decided to head uphill. I walked for a while and saw a sign, Gallo, with an arrow, and kept walking in that direction, but I did not see a town, and no cars passed this way.

Then it grew dark, a car came out of that darkness, I made the autostop sign with my hand, and the car slowed down. It was a Fiat driven by an Italian man whose English was excellent. He was going to Urbino, some miles into the hills. He said he was a professor at the university there, and what did I do? Superstitiously, I said I was a teacher. “I am looking for a teacher,” he said. I thought to myself, Another one. But when we got to the town, he dropped me at a pensione and said would I please visit his office in the morning? He had a job for me, teaching English.

I spent the next two months in Urbino. I fell in love with Francesca Porretta, one of my students—“Paolo and Francesca,” I said, “ I celebri amanti. ” I tried to work on my novella, Ticket to Hell. Francesca tickled me as I wrote, she kissed my neck, some afternoons she lay on the edge of the bed and kicked her legs and laughed. “ Gli amanti condannati, ” I said. Francesca showed me the great painters of Urbino, Uccello and Raphael. I was blessed with luck: it was my luck that these people recognized and resented. I got very little work done, but I was learning.

Late in August I was notified by the Peace Corps that I’d been assigned to teach in Nyasaland, in central Africa. For my application, I was fingerprinted at the main police station in Urbino by an amused policeman, who smoked a cigarette between inking the right and the left set of fingerprints.

Kissing Francesca goodbye, I hitchhiked — more autostop— to Rome, then took a train to Naples, then a ship home, traveling third class in a cabin with seven Lebanese immigrants to Canada, who got off in rainy Halifax. From New York City I bummed a ride to Boston, starting from under the George Washington Bridge. A few months later I went to Africa. By then, Francesca had stopped writing.

At last my hitchhiking stopped. In a remote village of mud huts, among illiterates who lived on porridge and stewed greens, a place without pictures or books, all of it smelling of woodsmoke and the sour grass of its roofs and in the rains stinking of its red clay roads, I wrote every day. I went on writing, working, always in distant places. I traveled, I published my books, married twice, and raised my children. It was the life I’d wished for. And whenever I returned to Italy, I remembered the sunlit Italian roads and that autostop summer on the Adriatic and in Urbino, all of it like a banquet. And that was why, when Vittorio asked me in Florence if I had a guest for the dinner, I said, “Pietro Ubaldini.”

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.