Charles Baxter - There's Something I Want You to Do

By the time she reached the village, after negotiating three hairpin turns and avoiding death by collision from an errant truck out of whose way she had swerved in a last-minute effort to save her own life, she could feel the sweat in her palms oozing out onto the steering wheel. No water came from the fountain in the town square: the pump had been broken for weeks, and there was no money to fix it. The air smelled of burnt rope. A brownish liquid flowed in the gutter. She parked her car, turned off the ignition, and waited until the motor coughed and sputtered and dieseled its way into silence. An American couple sitting in the square’s sidewalk café gazed at her with tourist-interest, as if she were a quaint item of local color. Amelia hurried into the general store, where she was greeted by the owner, Signor Travatini, a timid man who had a tendency to avoid her gaze; he was probably in love with her, or maybe he was planning on hiring someone to rob her.

“My dear Carlo,” she said. “How are you? It’s been a terrible day.” Italian, with its languorous vowels, was sheer pleasure after a day’s struggle with the Botho-Ugaric dialect.

“Yes,” he said, looking out toward the village square and her car. “Yes, and the sun has passed its way through the sky once again. Things are not translating? Sometimes they do not. Sometimes they stubbornly stay what they are. I am sorry.”

“No. Things are not translating. I need some cigarettes,” she said.

“Ah, but you do not smoke.” Everyone here kept track of everyone else’s habits, and the villagers all knew her by now.

“After such a day as I have had, I think it would be a good time to learn.”

He shrugged. “You are correct. As we get old, we need to acquire new vices. God will not be interested in us otherwise. We must wave our arms at Him to get His attention. It is the end of the day, so I will speak to you in confidence. I myself have attracted God’s attention by acquiring a new…how do you say this in English? Ragazza .”

“Girlfriend.”

“Yes. I have acquired a new girlfriend . Perhaps I am being too bold in saying so.” He stared at the cash register, harmlessly confabulating. The man was in his midfifties, and his pudgy wife, Claudia, dressed in black, sometimes lumbered into the store to do the accounts, and was known everywhere in the village for her terrible tongue lashings. Like Imyar Sorovinct, Carlo Travatini had earned a right to his fantasies. “My girlfriend loves me. And of course I adore her. She tells me that she admires my patience and my skill at lovemaking, despite my advanced years. The years give us older men a certain…te chnical skill. Forgive me for being so crude.” Amelia shook her head, disclaiming any possible shock. “Why do I tell you this? I do so because our love, hers and mine, is an open secret. I will not, however, give you the young lady’s name, because I should not wish to appear to be indiscreet. We Italians are not noted for our subtlety or discretion. We are announcers and are combustible. We announce first this, then that. In this announcing manner I have written poems for her, my beloved . Would you like to see my poems? They are of course not at the level of Montale, but…” He began to fumble in his pocket. Amelia stopped him in the midst of his harmless comic charade.

“No, thank you.” More love poems! They came out of the woodwork everywhere and should be outlawed. There was far too much love, a worldwide glut of it. What the world needs now, she thought, is much less love . “How wonderful for you. But, please, no.”

“All right. But I beg of you, do not mention the beautiful young woman to my wife, in case you should see her.”

“I shall say nothing,” Amelia told him. “What cigarettes do you have? I would like an Italian brand.”

“Well, we have Marlboros. Sturdy cigarettes in a crushproof box. And L & M. That is a good brand also.”

“Both American. No, I want an Italian cigarette.”

“Well, let me see. I have MS.”

“MS?” She felt a moment of pity.

“Yes. MS. Of course. It is a brand of cigarette we have here. Monopoli di Stato. You should know that by now. Filtro? Or Blu?”

“Blu, please.” He brought down a pack on which appeared, in rather large letters, the Italian phrase for “Smoking kills.”

“You should not do this,” he said, putting the cigarette pack into her hand with a tender gesture, brushing her fingers as he did so. “It is no way to get God’s attention. You should get a boy friend, perhaps?”

“Also, I need some matches, please.”

He reached under the counter and brought some out. He shook his head as she paid him for the cigarettes. “After all these years,” he said, “I do not understand you Americans. Forgive me. I have been listening to the news on the radio just now. Iraq, Afghanistan. You are unexplainable, indefinable. So friendly and yet so warlike. This contradict ion…I cannot understand it.”

“Yes,” Amelia said. “You are right. We are puzzling and incomprehe nsible. Thank you, my friend. Ciao.”

“Ciao, signora,” he said, looking away from her again, down at his hands. “Grazie.” What a sorrowful man, she thought, with his sorrow painstakingly narrated every day. You would never see such a man in the States. She had almost returned to the stolen Fiat when her Italian cell phone rang. When she answered, there was silence. She hung up.

The American couple waved her over. They were drinking wine.

“Hey there. Good afternoon,” the man said in English with a slight southwestern accent. “Care to join us?” He wore a Tyrolean hat, a blue shirt, a tan-colored sport coat, a string tie, and cowboy boots. His wife, deeply tanned, wearing a plain gray dress and a collection of thin gold bracelets that rattled like jail keys, smiled nervously upward at the sky, avoiding eye contact. She had very expensive hair, Amelia noted, highlighted with blond streaks.

“How did you know I was an American?” Amelia asked.

“Aw, you look like one of us,” the man told her. “It’s a duck recognizing another duck.” The wife nodded at the sky. Amelia felt all her strength leaving her body: she was heavily invested in appearing to be Italian or French, with a trace of beautiful haughtiness, or at least generically European snobbishness, and if she could be exposed this easily by lunkheads, then her nationality might indeed be an essence that no role-playing could disguise. Being an American was a curse — you were so recognizable everywhere that your nationality was like a clown suit. Maybe Jack would escape it. She had come to think of her own countrymen as them . She shivered. After all her efforts, she was instantly identifiable and still looked like one of them . Fucking hell.

“Sorry,” she said. “I have to get back. They’ve prepared lasagna,” she said. “The kids.”

“We’re going to be here in town for a few days,” the man said, before gulping down half his glass of wine. “You just drop in on us any old time. We got ourselves that villa up the hill. There for the whole week.”

“Okay,” she said, before waving goodbye to them.

—

On one of the hairpin turns on the way back, her phone rang again, and this time, when she answered it, the voice that came out — the connection was poor — sounded like her brother.

“Amelia?”

“Yes?” She held the cell phone in her left hand as she downshifted with her right. The steering wheel wobbled. “Jerry? Is that you, Jerry?”