Enigma Variations

  “Did I offend you, Nanni?” I finally had the courage to ask, perhaps as a way of allaying his reaction. Unable to stand the sudden chill between us, I asked, “Are you angry with me?” I could tell my voice was failing. He too could tell.

  He nodded ever so slightly five or six times, pensive as I’d never seen him before. Then he gave me a patronizing smile.

  “Sta’ buono, Paolo, e va’ a casa, behave, Paolo, and go home. I’ll see you in a few days,” he said.

  But there was still that dark, unwavering glare in his eyes, as though he was holding something back. “But I don’t want to leave yet,” I mumbled, before even thinking, already resigned to leave, which is why I drew closer for the usual goodbye hug.

  “Devi, you must.”

  He said it without the slightest rebuke in his voice, like a dismissal that could easily be mistaken for a plea. He was stepping back from me.

  I didn’t understand what devi meant that day. But thinking back now to that one word and to the way he’d spoken it, I must have sensed somewhere that this was the first time in my life that someone had treated me not as the child I still was or as a child who’d stayed out playing with friends one evening without letting his parents know he’d be late for supper, but as someone who on that very hour had strayed from being just a boy to becoming a desirable young man, who had tempted, maybe even threatened, someone quite older. On that day, without knowing the first thing, I’d been let into someone’s life as surely as I’d drawn him into mine. It took years to suspect he had struggled.

  I had seen my father bid my brother farewell a year earlier at the train station, and the two had hugged before my father released himself from his son’s embrace and asked him to just go now, for both our sakes.

  I didn’t hug Nanni again. I walked out of his shop, already planning my return in a day or so. After that, perhaps I might come back in the winter sometime. But I was also aware—and it came to me for the first time as I was heading back home that evening—that this, however unreal and unthinkable, might be my last time in his shop.

  For the next few years, what that devi meant kept changing like the colors on a mood stone. Sometimes it was like a slap and a warning; sometimes like the shrug of a friend who chooses to overlook a slip and pretends to forget; and sometimes, it burned through me like muted, imperiled consent. Go away is what one said to the devil, when the devil is already in us, and what he meant with that look in his eyes as he watched me walk away was, If you don’t leave now, I won’t fight you.

  On leaving his shop that day, I couldn’t have been more furious. I stomped along my shortcut, stopped at the Norman chapel, sat on the plinth to look out to the sea toward the mainland, but couldn’t gather my thoughts. All I was aware of was that I’d been chastised and then dismissed. I was livid. Because I knew he was right. He knew me more than I knew myself, and there was nowhere to hide from his words. Behave, Paolo, and go home. And as I was sitting there, I don’t know what seized me, but I tore off all my clothes, removed my sandals, even, and sat naked inside the chapel, trying to imagine that Nanni had told me to undress and stay naked until he’d come. And I sat there on the chipped limestone and saw us talking together, both naked, and I could tell he was going to touch me, but instead he looked down on my body and, smiling, started to spit on my thighs, my groin, my erection, and on my chest, as if to put out a fire, and I loved how I had come up with the idea of his saliva dripping on my body, because it told me that after doing this to me there was no way he wouldn’t come by now. I waited forever, aroused and naked, hoping he’d come, because he had to. I didn’t know what else to do.

  It was nighttime when I got home. In the mirror before bathing, I looked awful, but no one asked why I was home so late, or what had happened to make me look so gaunt and disheveled. But I knew that day that if I was ever going to come back as an adult to the island it would be to build my home in that chapel. It had seen me suffer and cry as I’d never wept before. I knew every one of its exposed stones, every inch, every weed, every crawling lizard, down to the feel of the chipped stones and pebbles under my bare feet. I belonged here the way I belonged to this planet and its people, but on one condition: alone, always alone.

  And as I stood inside the abandoned chapel that I had sworn someday to rebuild and make my home, I also knew then that if I had to wait ten years to see Nanni again, I would rather die now. Take me now, I asked, just take me now. I didn’t have such a decade in me. But what I also began to sense after sundown that evening, as I’d already sensed on the evening I stood burning in my nakedness in this old sanctuary, was the certainty that I was lying, that I would indeed be willing to wait and still wait, as those who stop their lives to expiate forgotten crimes are told to wait, because their true punishment is no longer to know whether they’re actually waiting for pardon and grace, or whether what they’ve waited for has long been granted unbeknownst to them, and that they’d lived out the term of their life without ever holding what was theirs to have and theirs alone. This was my first encounter with time. I became a person that evening, and I had him to thank. And blame.

  * * *

  NOW, ON THAT same shortcut years later, past the Norman chapel and the lime grove, I had the feeling that I should never have come. I had come for nothing. All that remained of our house was the blackened stump of what seemed a far, far smaller house than I remembered. For a moment I thought that someone had tampered with the layout, but the walls told me that this indeed had been the size of our house. The windows, the doors, the roof, all gone, and as I stepped into what had once been our living room, I thought of those Gothic abbeys that are completely hollow and all that stands between heaven and earth is a gutted hull and grass in the middle. But there was no grass here. Just metal scraps everywhere, peeling shreds of what I forgot had been the dark lime-green wallpaper in our living room, and in the middle a dead cat teeming with maggots. This was the carcass of our house. All I could think of was the silverware. Silverware doesn’t burn, doesn’t melt. Some of it bore my grandfather’s initials, and therefore mine as well. Where was the silverware? They’d most likely say it disappeared with the house. Everything disappeared. Sparito. That one word was supposed to explain everything, because what else could one say about honor and friendship and loyalty, except that time undoes them all, erases debts, forgives plunder, overlooks larceny and betrayal? Civilization would never be jump-started here unless all was whitewashed and forgotten. My room was upstairs—but of upstairs not even a trace. Something in me had died here. The night the lights went out and I wished to be held in the dark, not a trace of that either. The day he walked out with the desk and I thought of Aeneas and how I wanted to be his son. The evening I stood on the threshold to our living room and thought why can’t I be him instead of me. The evening I sat naked before God and couldn’t even begin to know what I wanted. So much had happened since that last summer—schools, lovers, my mother’s death, more travels, and above all the loss of people I didn’t even know I had yet to meet and love but then lost track of and never saw again.

  Looking around me, I began to suspect that many of the locals were observing me survey the grounds but that none would come out to say hello. The more I thought of them, the more I lingered over what had once been our home. I was touching and groping its debris, less to see if I recognized anything than to show those spying from behind their lace curtains that I had every claim to what I was doing. And yet as I continued wishing to prove that I belonged here and that what I was touching was mine, I was growing uncomfortable, sensing that I should perhaps avoid picking things up for fear anyone might mistake me for a thief. All I needed now was to be arrested for trespassing in my own home.

  Suddenly it hit me that what I’d lost was not only our house but also the right to think it would be mine someday. I owned nothing here. I remembered my grandfather’s pen. Should I even bother to look for it, or had it melted too?

  A stray dog who had been watching me from a distan
ce finally nuzzled up to me. I did not know him, nor did he know me. But we shared one thing—we belonged to no one here. From where I now stood, rebuilding seemed so pointless. I never wanted to come back here. The mere thought of rebuilding and of hiring architects, builders, masons, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, painters, and of walking up and down the glistening empty lanes past sundown in the rainy winter months here horrified me.

  And yet my life started here and stopped here one summer long ago, in this house, which no longer exists, in this decade, which slipped away so fast, with this never love that altered everything but went nowhere. You made me who I am today, Nanni. Wherever I go, everyone I see and crave is ultimately measured by the glow of your light. If my life were a boat, you were the one who stepped on board, turned on its running lights, and was never heard from again. All this might as well be in my head, and in my head it stays. But I’ve lived and loved by your light alone. In a bus, on a busy street, in class, in a crowded concert hall, once or twice a year, whether for a man or a woman, my heart still jolts when I spot your look-alike. We love only once in our lives, my father had said, sometimes too early, sometimes too late; the other times are always a touch deliberate.

  * * *

  A FEW YEARS earlier a classmate in college had shown me an article about San Giustiniano and asked if this was the same San Giustiniano I’d mentioned once. I wasn’t sure, I said. Even when I looked at the picture of the bay I continued to say I wasn’t sure—as if something in me no longer wanted to believe that the place could still exist without me there. It was the first and only time I’d ever seen a picture of the island in print. The article didn’t refer to anyone in particular, just to a significant police presence in this little-known fishing community in Italy. There had been no murders, the article said, but there were a few incidents involving the Mob where groups of young men were rounded up, stripped, questioned, beaten, and later released. The article spoke of local mobsters. I had an image of naked young men covering their genitals with both hands; it was the only other time in my life when I’d allowed myself to imagine Nanni standing stark naked. It felt like a taboo. All I imagined was Nanni trying to comfort his panicked younger brother. This was all hearsay, I figured, but until that very day in school, with the magazine in my hand showing an ancient stock photograph of the marina of San Giustiniano, I’d seldom allowed myself to linger on the thought of him without clothes. Something like deference and simple decency toward the young man whom I venerated and who had stepped into our living room and confided in my parents with such unguarded candor had always stood in the way. But the magazine stirred images I could no longer suppress. What was even more disturbing was that the article made a veiled suggestion of vile acts committed by the carabinieri. I read in these vile acts what had long been on my mind. I knew I was feeling a lingering, insidious joy in thinking of what the police could have done to him, as though their crime had freed my imagination and allowed it to roam into secret chambers I had so cautiously locked and lost the keys to. Had I stayed in San Giustiniano, I might have been one of these young men standing naked next to him.

  I lingered awhile longer, then decided to move toward a house adjoining ours. My father had heard that the other houses had suffered no damage and stayed intact despite their proximity to the fire. I knocked at the door, but no one was home. I walked behind the house and knocked at the back door in case they hadn’t heard my knock at the front door. But no one answered there either. I waited, then knocked once more. Someone must be home, I thought, because the garden hose was running. “C’è nessuno? Is anyone there?” I cried out. I heard one door bang shut inside. Someone was coming to open. But then I heard another door shut. I could even hear the patter of hasty footsteps. They weren’t coming to the door, they were scrambling to the other side of the house. Possibly children who were warned never to open the door to strangers. Or children playing a prank. Or just people avoiding strangers.

  I had no better luck with the house next to that one.

  On my way to try the fourth and last house along our stretch, I eventually ran into someone I thought I recognized because of his limp: it was our old gardener. He, it turned out, now owned a house much farther down on the same road. Had he seen me first, he would probably have skittered away like everyone else. He remembered my father, he said. He remembered my older brother and my mother—and with great affection, he added. He remembered the two Dobermans that accompanied my father wherever he went. I don’t think the gardener remembered me at all. I told him that my brother had settled elsewhere but that we all missed San Giustiniano still. I lied, perhaps to make conversation, or to draw him out, or just to show we bore no hard feelings for the locals. My father was aging and was sad he couldn’t come in the summer. I understand him, said the gardener. And your mother? È mancata, I said, she’s no longer with us.

  “There was a huge fire,” he said after a while. “Everyone came to see, but the flames ate everything. The firemen arrived from the adjoining town and were a band of incompetent sciagurati, wretches. They expected the fire to wait for them, but by the time they came everything was already up in smoke. The conflagration was brutal and so fast.”

  He kept quiet for a moment.

  “So you came to see.”

  “So I came to see,” I echoed. “It’s always so quiet and so peaceful,” I said, trying to show I had come with no agenda whatsoever. But then, after chatting mostly about nothing, I was not able to hold back. “Was anything salvaged—anything?”

  “Purtroppo, no, unfortunately, no. It hurts me to say it. Yours was the most beautiful house—and all that lovely furniture. I remember it well. At least you weren’t here to witness what we all saw. Indimenticabile, unforgettable.”

  There was a touch of high drama in his narrative. He must have sensed it too. “And now look at this cat,” he said in an attempt to change the subject and bring things down to a lower key. “I’ll have to go and find something to wrap it in and bury it now.”

  “Tell me about Nanni.”

  “Nanni the carpenter?”

  As if there were another.

  “Yes.”

  “Quello è stato veramente sfortunato, now, he was truly unlucky. The police suspected him, since he knew the house. They suspected his brother as well.”

  “Why?” I asked, looking up at the scenery and the surrounding trees and affecting fatigue and nonchalant admiration verging on apathy so as not to show I was actually grilling him.

  “Why, why. Is there ever a why? Everyone knew he came to restore the furniture. He was always restoring this, repairing that. Your father trusted him.”

  “And what do you think?’

  “The only one who had a key to the house was Nanni. Even I didn’t have a key. So it was natural to suspect him, but they arrested a whole group of them, not because of the fire but because some robbers used the house for smuggling and hoarding stolen goods. The carabinieri beat everyone. Then they had them strip and continued to search and beat them. So one sick officer came up with a twisted idea, singled out two young men and I don’t have to tell you what this officer wanted the two of them to do. I was there and witnessed everything. Nanni refused. He said he couldn’t. ‘Why?’ yelled the officer, slapping him twice in the face and then with his belt. ‘Because he is my brother.’ I heard those very words from his mouth and it broke my heart, because everyone knew that the two were inseparable, especially after their parents died. But then another officer stepped in and let the younger brother go. The poor boy opened the gate as fast as he could and dashed off naked, crying Nanni’s name as he ran out into the night. They beat Nanni more, of course. There was going to be an inquest, but Ruggiero was a smart lad. He packed all he could, stole into the office where Nanni was being kept that night, and the two ran away.”

  “And?”

  “He and his brother hid in the hills for a few days, then at night they took a boat and rowed to the mainland. And from there, Canada, Australia, South Am
erica, chissà dove, who knows where.”

  Again I looked around the scene where our old house stood.

  “So who really burned the house?”

  “Who’ll ever know. Many had their eyes on the house. But why would anyone burn it? Maybe an accident. Or it could be the Mob.”

  “And Nanni? Do you think he had anything to do with it?”

  “Not Nanni. Your father was like a father to him. We all knew that the house was stocked with contraband that year, but no one dared to say anything. Nanni, however, was the easiest one to blame. The police knew it was the Mob, but they blamed him.”

  The gardener squatted down to pick up the cat, and with the dead animal in one arm, he hugged me with the other.

  We were on the point of saying goodbye when I asked him one last question. “Why are people avoiding me?”