“No.”
“'No?' What do you mean 'no'?” Sally was flabbergasted. Then she thought something terrible was happening to Tonino and she got scared. “Why can't I go?”
Paolo said, “His mother may go to see him.”
“So?” Sally asked.
“So, I never know what she is going to do next. If you're there, she may make another scene and I definitely don't want Tonino to have to deal with that now.”
“But she's under contract not to,” Sally reminded him. “Besides, she wouldn't make a scene in the hospital, would she? Not in front of Tonino now, would she?”
“I don't know. But I'm not going to take the chance.”
“But, Paolo, I want to go. I want to see Tonino. I want to be with you. “
“Sorry, I have to go now, Sally,” Paolo stated coldly. He paid the cashier at the doorway and said “I'll call you later.”
Sally sat at the table trying to let it all sink in. She could hardly believe Tonino was sick again. They had been so sure he would be one of the lucky ones. That is, Sally had been sure.
Not only that , but now she had just been shoved out of Paolo's life, the door slammed in her face. True, it was only for a little while, but she had believed he would never do that to her.
Not even for a minute.
CHAPTER FORTY SIX
When Paolo entered Sally's apartment, she saw his face and wanted to scream. The stricken man sat down and looked around the room in a fog.
“He's going to die,” Paolo told Sally.
“No, he isn't,” Sally said, impatiently.
Paolo shot her a dark look, as if he thought her resistance was mocking him. “Well, not today, of course.....” Paolo said vaguely, “....actually, we don't know when....but now it's just a matter of time.....”
“Why is he going to die!” Sally said.
Paolo was startled by her question. She knew why.
“Sally....you know why.”
“No. No. It's never sure! Don't believe it, just because they say so! It can be changed!”
Paolo put his hand up wearily to stop her.
“Let's take him to New York!” Sally cried.
Paolo was getting annoyed. “New York! What for?!”
“They can cure him in New York. They know everything about leukemia in New York...they have the latest research....the latest medicine...the best treatments....I don't think the doctors here are so advanced. Besides, did you see any other doctors?! Maybe they would say something different.....! Please. Let's take him to New York and try to make him better!”
Sally saw that her conversation was more like blows to Paolo's head than an offer of hope. She realized that this was not the time. She stopped, but she would bring it up again...later. They sat in silence as the day outside the terrace doors started to fade, leaving the unlit room gray all over.
“All we can do,” Paolo finally said, “is to live more or less normally, so that he is not aware of any of this-----and to keep him as happy and comfortable as possible.”
“All we can do????!!!!!” Sally couldn't believe her ears. “Why are you so ready to give up!” she cried.
For the only time in her life she thought Paolo would hit her. But he got a hold of himself and instead abruptly left the apartment, slamming the door.
Well, she thought, maybe I shouldn't have said it. But it was true. It seemed to Sally that he was always giving up. Or at least not solving things. But what did she expect from him? Did she expect Paolo to keep Tonino alive? Did she expect him to keep the Italian government intact?
Did she expect him to bring divorce to Italy?
Yes, I'm unreasonable, she thought. But maybe not. Maybe if we could get past this culture of apathy, something else could happen. She hated the common Italian greeting that characterized it so perfectly. They would ask: “How are you?” And shrug an answer: “One camps.”
One camps!! she always thought, is that all that can be hoped for?! Perhaps given Italy's history, that was already a lot. But American Sally couldn't accept this. She knew there was another way. America was built on it. It was in Sally's bones.
And she recoiled at what Italians called the “expected tragedy,” the kind of devastation that is also shrugged off when floods and earthquakes hit. She remembered one such conversation: “Was there much damage from the flood?” Shrug. “There wasn't much damage left to fix. They never fixed it from the last one.”
Suddenly she was furious at Paolo, as though it were some grotesque plot of his that Tonino was going to die. Because Italians didn't fix their floodgates, she was blaming Paolo for letting Tonino die! I must be losing my mind, Sally finally said to herself, this is insane. She telephoned Paolo.
“I'm sorry,” she said, “I'm so sorry. Instead of fighting you, I should be holding you.”
Sally could hear Paolo crying.
CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN
Sally knew Tonino would not die. “Isn't it wonderful how much the transfusions help!”
Paolo simply answered, “They'll help until they don't help anymore.”
How Italians exaggerate!! Sally thought. In fact, Italians always admonished each other in every conversation: “Don't exaggerate!”
The proof was that right now Tonino was back at home recovering, once again, after the restorative effects of his treatments. We've been through this before, Sally thought. In a little while the kid will be running around. He'll be fine.
As for Paolo's work, Sally considered that another story. She decided a career in Italian politics was like being an actor in New York: most of the time the show was closed.
But life in sunny, semi-tropical Rome was so simple and amiable that strangely even these two seeming catastrophes did not much change the smoothness of daily events. Now that the immediate crisis with Tonino had passed, Sally and Paolo continued almost as before, deep in their intimacy and appreciation of each other, of their casual ease with friends, and of Tonino. As expected, Tonino eventually resumed 'normal' life again, although there was a basic change in him this time, as he remained paler and more subdued than ever. However, he still painted and poured over his growing collection of stamps in his squeaky, boyish way.
But there was a change in Paolo too. Although life went on more or less in the usual manner, Paolo was sadder than ever. He was becoming like a balloon that was slowly leaking air.
He was losing whatever buoyancy he had.
Sally was sympathetic, but Paolo's just below the surface awareness of doom was hard for her. She felt he should not be so quick to accept death when there is a glimmer of life. Like most Americans, Sally firmly believed in sculpting a life of well-being, happiness, and hope. She wanted to say to Paolo, “When you are so resigned, I feel like life has no options, that it's already as it will always be, and there is no hope. Worse. There is no attempt at hope.”
She wanted to say, “If you won't take things into your own hands and I have to depend on you, where am I?” But she never said any of it.
So a change started to come over Sally as well. Paolo's fatalism about life--what one allows oneself to be able to do; in this case, regarding work and death--was becoming to Sally an echo of what she could now see as the dark side of the Roman experience.
After the first awe that such a place as Rome could even exist began to wear off, Sally started to feel a definite undertone of emptiness, of frustration, of uselessness, of withering.
She thought there is something dangerous to a person's sense of self worth here in Rome, among the mural of the past. Living in Rome was like living in a mob scene of the centuries. Sally often felt overwhelmed. She especially felt this way when walking on the old stone streets around the many ancient ruins throughout the city. These same streets that through millennia had supported, each for a moment, too many other lives for her own life to impress her. It made Sally feel insignificant, gave her the impression of being trampled by all the feet that had ever walked on these same stones. She was shamed for her mi
sguided sense of uniqueness under the gaze of all the other eyes that had ever seen the same carved columns, or thought the same thoughts.
A kind of claustrophobia began to set in for her.
The “wisdom” she thought she loved--in Paolo, in Italy--she started to see as form of passivity. Her American “can do” soul was getting restless. In addition, the very thing that once charmed her, that Italians live in their history, began to grate. She now saw them as people rooted in past ideas about what one should do or not do; could do or not do; or whether it mattered much whether you do anything at all.
More and more frequently, Sally began staring longingly at travel posters of New York the way she used to look at posters of Italy. She would stare into those skyborne views of Central Park, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty...as familiar to her as the furniture in her own living room.. and know that too much was happening at home while she was gone.
On a personal level her grandmother died, her cousin got married, her sister went away to school; Ruth was now in love. As an American abroad, she had missed the Cuban Missile crisis, the deaths of Marilyn Monroe and JFK, the March on Washington; and now she was away from all that was going on in the Civil Rights movement, Feminism, and the war in Viet Nam. Everything was changing and she felt that if she didn't get back before it was all entirely different, she would have lost her place in it.
Being away from America at this time meant she was missing the country's “growing up” and changing into something else. Like missing the key events in a loved one's life that you could never recapture. Sally was losing not only the formation of her country's history, but its pop culture from Beatlemania to Barbra Streisand as well. She was developing a kind of Cultural Amnesia.
Meanwhile in Italy she felt the stagnation: the unemployment, the constant shutdowns of critical facilities, the fatalism, and the kind of hostility against women's freedom that made Italy’s village men throw rocks at them when they drove a car. And a cultural inability or unwillingness to solve problems of any kind.
She would ask herself if she were happy with her life in Rome. And she would answer, not anymore. She would ask herself if she still loved Paolo, and she would answer that she did. It astounded her that she could love someone, and be loved by him, and still not be happy with her life. She had always thought these would be one and the same thing. And the truth was, this situation made Sally afraid.
She fought against these feelings but they kept getting stronger. She remembered Paolo had once asked if she would ever “skylark” him. She certainly never wanted to do that, but she now felt an overwhelming need to have Paolo open his hand, the one that always gently encompassed hers, so, like that trickster bird, she could suddenly soar toward the sky again.
CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT
After driving down the winding hill of the Via Veneto, they entered Piazza Barbarini and were forced to circle the loop around the Fountain of Triton, where Neptune gulped greedily from the shell of life, and then turn toward the street that would exit the Piazza.
Sally said,” I want to leave.”
Paolo didn't understand, but assumed that she meant where they were. “We are leaving,” he said, knowing he was stating the obvious. “Where do you want to go?”
“Home.” Sally said.
“Home?” He paused. “We can go home if you like. But I thought you needed to go to the bank.”
“No, I mean 'home.' To America.”
“To America!” The air shot out of Paolo as though Sally had punched him in the stomach.
“To America?! Why? For a visit?”
“No.” she answered. “I'm just ready to go home.”
Paolo was silent as he kept driving. Finally he said, “Ready? What does 'ready' mean? Why would you leave? You have a secure job, a comfortable apartment, lots of friends....” He wouldn't say “And me.” Nor did he say “Me and Tonino.” He wanted Sally to choose them, not to be cajoled into keeping them.
“I can't really explain,” Sally said. “It just seems to be time. Besides, I'm tired of Rome. Everybody says the same thing.”
Paolo was stunned. “You want to leave because everybody says the same thing??!!”
“No, no,” Sally said. “It's more. I don't know.” As she became able to narrow down her feelings, they all came streaming out at once. “I feel like a prisoner. It's so hard to get a job here, that even if I start to dislike this one, or if they fire me, I'll never get another. And I'm a second class citizen. I don't have any rights. I don't have any protection about staying in my apartment. Italian is not my language....I, and, oh, everything.”
“I think you are exaggerating,” Paolo said. He had stopped the car and turned to reason with her. “First, you have a good job. Second, they won't fire you; they just offered you a contract. You don't need protection for your apartment. Every landlord in Rome wants to rent to an American. And you speak Italian just fine!” He still didn't say, “What about me? What about Tonino?”
And because he didn’t, at that moment what had been just a vague, but increasingly stronger feeling about Paolo's perceived weaknesses, his fatalism about Tonino, his being married with no end in sight, his paralyzing wisdom, became fact in her head.
“I'm going home,” she said.
Paolo's face started to fall. And then it turned to stone. He started the car and drove toward her apartment. They were almost there when he said, “When?”
“In a couple of months.”
“Well,” Paolo said, “that will give you enough time to change your mind.”
“No,” Sally said. “That will give me enough time to pack.”
CHAPTER FORTY NINE
Sally thought she had made up her mind, although it really wasn't her mind that was making her want to go back home. Some unseen force had taken over and was pulling her in that direction.
But there were days when she felt it was absurd to think she would not be in Rome always.
Sally started slowly--very slowly--to undo her Roman life, half hoping that if she moved slowly enough she could fight the homeward pull and find the strength to stay. But once the process was begun...the calls about renting her apartment; not filling her calendar at the office with appointments too far in advance; putting paper and clothes in organized little piles for packing; inquiring about ship's tickets; and seeing every Roman stone and ray of light with the intensity and memory of a camera that would save them for later....it all began to take on a life of its own. Leaving was like a package where once the string starts to come untied, there was no stopping the unraveling.
For Sally and Paolo the remaining time together was painfully bittersweet. Paolo was counting on Sally's love for him to be strong enough to change her mind about going away.
“But I'll come back soon,” Sally told him, “and in the meantime it will be a great chance for you and Tonino to come to New York. Won't you come? You'll both love it and maybe you'll see that you'll want to stay....”
“I can't stay, Sally,” Paolo said, “how would I work? What would I do? I don't even speak English.”
“I can help you. You'll learn. You can stay with me. I’m sure we can find you a job. We can take Tonino for the finest medical treatment....” Sally was all caught up in some turn of the century immigrant's version of the American Dream.
“Maybe,” Paolo said vaguely.
Sally wanted to keep hope alive. “Well, anyway, you can visit and see.”
“Isn't it possible,” Paolo asked, “that it's you who could visit New York and when you catch up on what you think you're missing and get it out of your system, you'll return here?”
“Maybe,” Sally said vaguely.
Either way, each of them believed the other would arrange somehow to never stay permanently apart. But after this conversation, Paolo did not again discuss Sally's staying in Rome. He seemed once more to be ready to let life take its course. Sally felt this was further evidence that Paolo had a tendency to give up. And it propelled her
further into longing for the action, the stamina, the willingness to wrestle life to the ground that she thought she would find back in America.
But what Sally didn't recognize was that she too was letting events run their course.
CHAPTER FIFTY
The day came.
The ship was sailing that evening and they were to leave Rome in the afternoon. Tonino would not say good-bye. He looked at the floor and only spoke to his father again. He asked Paolo to bring him a present from Naples. Sally hugged him tight anyway.
As they drove out of the city and passed all her beloved places, Sally tried to take in all of Rome in one gulp. I'll be back, she told herself.
For Paolo and Sally the trip to Naples was a sad reversal of the earlier one that had begun their romance in earnest. Again, they hardly spoke; but this time it was because the end was already in sight, and not the beginning.
They crossed the pier in a silent daze as if there were no sound from the hustle and bustle, the horns, the music, and the shouting that accompanies every ocean liner's departure. Sally didn't remember getting on the ship, up to the deck, and leaning over the railing to look out over the crowd below.
But she would never forget the sight of Paolo. She found his tall, stately body in that crowd, and recognized his tired face.
“Paolo! Paolo!” Sally shouted and waved.
He probably didn't hear her above the din, but caught her wave as his eyes automatically searched for her among the line of happy passengers. He waved back without pleasure.
It was good-bye.
He lowered his head and started to move out of the crowd. She followed his back and wanted to yell out “Wait!!”, but she knew he wouldn't hear her.
Past the edge of the crowd, alone in the dim light of the pier on his way to the exit, he turned and looked up. All the lines in his face were twisted and his eyes were hollow with loss. He looked surprised at his own pain.
And then he was gone.
CHAPTER FIFTY ONE
Eventually, Sally left the cool evening air on deck and entered the smoky, festive ship's lounge crowded with strangers, other Americans who seemed like foreigners to her.
There she got a wave of grief so strong that she staggered alone, nearly fainting, to an empty chair while the band continued to play under a shower of confetti.
CHAPTER FIFTY TWO