Return to Valetto

by Dominic Smith

I had the glassy, hangdog expression of a fish that has just been plucked from a lake.

From the top of the stone passageway, I could also see the rooftop terrace where Rose, the diplomat and go-between of the Serafino sisters, spent many of her summer afternoons in the 1970s, listening to opera from a small transistor radio and reading fashion magazines under a beach umbrella. There was always a tall glass of Aperol spritz beside her, an orange wedge floating on top, the glass full of ice and beading with condensation. She would routinely call me up there and have me read passages aloud from Italian Vogue. I could remember her enjoying my narration of Milanese or Florentine scandal, the ice cubes gently hitting her teeth when she laughed into her glass.

Susan has her mother’s thin nose and high cheekbones, but nothing of Clare’s knowing in the eyes. Susan’s are two flecks of pale blue mica in a slab of granite, and they have been unwavering for as long as I can remember.

There was an edge to my voice that surprised both of us.

Milo’s sons and my Italian cousins all played together, but my Italian was slow and Latinate, and theirs was full of jousting, rapid-fire dialect.

I thought of Luigi Barzini writing about the Italian family, where, he said, you could always turn for consolation, help, advice, provisions, loans, weapons, allies, and accomplices. There was something primal and unconditional about Italian familial love, but also something brutal and ponderous, a beautifully made millstone around your neck.

The dead husbands had all been barrel-chested, big-knuckled, quick to anger. Rinaldo’s slender hands were the color of almonds, and he gave off a watchmaker’s precision and patience.

I took a few slow, tentative steps into the living room and installed myself on the couch, crossed my legs, cocked my head to one side, tried to look as if the letter in Elisa’s hand was a piece of sheet music and we were about to hear a recital.

History is irony on the move, as Emil Cioran reminds us. It is also a flood of coincidences, overlaps, omens. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams dying just hours apart on the fiftieth anniversary of American independence; the brother of Lincoln’s assassin saving the life of Lincoln’s eldest son a year before the attack in the theater; the license plate on the car of Archduke Franz Ferdinand having the numerals for Armistice Day, the end of World War I; Hitler shadowing Napoleon in birth, ascent to power, invasion of Russia, and defeat by 129 years all the way through.

And it was the carefree sound of his voice that shifted something in me. I blossomed briefly with an anger that felt ancient, formidable, and uniquely Italian. As I boarded my train, I carried it like a swollen fist at the center of my chest.

“Better if we handle this informally. As a family.” “You sound like a mafioso.” “They don’t have a monopoly on ironing out the wrinkles in family laundry.”

We ate at the kitchen table the way strangers eat together on a cruise ship.

The guest list was still a moving target, but Milo insisted that he’d kept a tally of likely attendees and that one hundred would be the high end. It was the official number given to the caterers and it took on the gravity of newly passed legislation.

I counted to five, the way the strip-mall life coach had taught me, and blew some air out between my lips.

There were introductions and questions about the drive down south. There were offers of cookies and tea and hot chocolate, the prospect of a fire in the living room. We moved between Italian and English and some universal, halting language of gestures between weary travelers and their hosts.

For half a day, on the train to Rome, walking down the corridors of the nursing home, I’d felt something akin to rage. I’d carried it for a handful of hours, righteously, on my mother’s behalf. Now the unfolding events came at me through the scrim of other people’s emotions and decisions, blunting the anger to a weary kind of exasperation. Silvio Ruffo’s pocketknife was still in my pocket. Every morning I placed it there along with some loose change that I always carried and never spent.