Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

I wanted to sit, I hated the delay, but I knew that an Italian dinner was a ritual, and the delay itself was part of the ritual, like the chitchat, the predinner drinks that we sipped standing, the laughter, the teasing. Everything that seemed inconsequential was part of the observance — nothing could be hurried. All this time I glanced around, wondering about Ubaldini.

At last, Vittorio sighed and said, “ Allora …” The word was like an order, as people maneuvered to take their places at the table. I was seated at one end, Vittorio at the other. A chair stood empty near Vittorio, the linen napkin folded like a nun’s cornette on the plate before it.

“I am so excited to read your book,” the woman on my right said. She was a journalist, she would be reviewing it. “Is your first book?”

“No.” I could not bring myself to tell her it was my thirty-fifth.

“ Parla Italiano? ” asked the woman on my left.

I said no, I didn’t dare, and she smiled and sipped her wine, and the woman on my right told me of her trip to Eritrea: “Magnificent! Africa! But so sad, so poor.”

I said, “I used to live there.” But still she went on describing it to me.

And while she spoke, and the waiters served the antipasto, an old man came through the door, nodded at Vittorio, handed his coat to a waiter, and, sizing up the table, stepped to the empty chair. I would not have guessed it to be Ubaldini. He was slack-jowled, horse-faced, and his ill-fitting suit was too loose. He was smaller than I remembered, and with distorted features, his ears and hands much bigger. His only affectation was a stylish pair of glasses, tortoiseshell, with pinkish lenses. He tugged them down, surveyed the table, said something to the woman next to him — a pleasantry, I guessed, and a word to Tito Frasso, who sat across from him. When he smiled he showed his discolored teeth to their roots. Then he ate, daintily, in the Italian way, poking his food with a fork, not betraying any appetite.

After the antipasto came the soup course, the fish course, the pasta course, the meat course. I heard about Eritrea and the Red Sea, and poverty in Africa, and the animals — fantastic; and the dancers in Kenya — fantastic; and Somalia — a tragedy. More wine, more water, more bread.

Ubaldini kept his head down and picked at his food. I watched him closely as he ate with concentration, from time to time lifting his napkin to dab at his lips, and as he dabbed, meeting the gaze of the young man in outlandish clothes, and smiling at him with yellowish teeth, as though sharing a secret.

Waiters came and went, plates were gathered, glasses filled. The dessert was served, tiramisu, and the cheese set out.

As the coffee was poured, Vittorio rose and thanked the guests for being there, speaking in sonorous Italian; and then for my benefit he spoke in English, and the temperature of the room went down with the sound of the foreign language, the air becoming slightly stale.

“Tonight, my friend, our distinguished author, has joined us for the occasion of his new book — yes,” and he paused for the light clapping. “And he has agreed to say some few words.” He motioned to me. “Please.”

I pushed my chair back and stood up.

From the moment Vittorio began speaking in English we seemed to slip into an amateur theatrical, a play in which we were unsure of our lines. I spoke haltingly, as Vittorio had done, but the slowness threw me and made me less certain of what I was going to say next.

“Fifty years ago I visited Italy for the first time,” I said. “I was just a boy, really, but it was here, in the beauty of Italy, that I began to write…”

I did not say that it had been an autostop summer of obstacles and temptations. I described my arrival, my first impressions of Italy, the sunlight, the smells of food and hot oil, the glow of old stone, the texture of ancient marble, the way the whole of Italy had been sculpted and formed, every hill, every field, every town — none of it wild, all of it showing the evidence of the human hand, where eating was on everyone’s mind; not books but food.

I glanced at the dinner guests as I spoke, and my gaze returned to Pietro Ubaldini, whose elbow was propped on the table, his hand idly cradling his head, his fingers stroking his cheek, listening attentively.

Then I risked it. “One day I was traveling from Venice by autostop. I was picked up by an Italian man in a car. We talked and talked, and finally we disagreed. He dropped me suddenly by the roadside at nightfall, abandoned me on one of the branching roads of Italy.”

I looked squarely at Pietro Ubaldini. Still he stroked his cheek and stared through his tinted lenses.

“He didn’t know me, and I’m sure he forgot me. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, he did me a great favor. When you’re young the world seems unknowable, and so it seems simplified by its obscurity. You have no idea how precarious the road is, or where it leads, and it’s not until much later that you understand its complexity and how you found your way. Sometimes it is with the help of kind strangers, but more often perhaps, perversely, by the hostility of strangers. It was rejection that got me to Urbino and a job and a sense of myself. I arrived there through a series of accidents, one road leading to another. I didn’t know where I was, only that I had to keep going. I knew one thing — that I couldn’t go back. I was open to any suggestion — taking chances. I had to. I had no money.”

As I spoke, Ubaldini stopped looking at me and began to look at the young man, as though I was offering encouragement and a promise in my own story to the young man, who was listening with rapt attention.

“I see it now as a series of expulsions. Each person I met believed he was frustrating me. It was not the great literary culture of Italy that made me a writer. It was the opposite, its philistinism. You say you want to be a writer, and Italy orders you another glass of wine and says, ‘What’s the point?’ Italy’s love of comfort, its taste for good food and leisure, its joy in talk, its idleness, its laughter, its complacent teasing cynicism”—and here I paused for the people at the table to savor this description and bask in it—“all these traits make it the enemy of art.”

“Oh, no!” Vittorio called out, and Ubaldini nodded at the young man Frasso.

“But you give in to temptation, and you’re tested, and that’s how you learn. Italy’s great complacency, the way it wraps its arms around you, produces the occasional rebel who does not want that embrace. That person writes a good book, or a poem, or makes a film. I said no to that embrace on a country road.”

The scattered laughter, the uneasy murmurs, some of the whispers translations, made me want to finish.

“So I want to thank you for helping a bewildered stranger find his way. You didn’t know what you were doing, and neither did I, but here we are — and all’s well.”

Knowing that I was done, feeling released from their bewilderment, they clapped hard in relief. Vittorio thanked me, some of the people left, and the rest milled around the table talking, another Italian ritual, the protracted goodbye, a way of showing gratitude or warmth, the period of hesitation in a culture where hurrying, or any urgency, even the urgency to be alone and write, is considered a vice.

I stepped over to Ubaldini and thanked him for coming.

“I was fascinated by your remarks,” he said. “I appreciated the ambiguity.”

“What do you do in Florence?” I asked.

“I do nothing! I am ancient!” And laughing, he again caught the eye of the young man. “Tell me, will you be here long?”

“I leave tomorrow.” I looked for the lewdness and benevolence on his face, but saw the exhaustion of old age, and yet still a glint of greed in his eyes.