Return to Valetto

by Dominic Smith

That hope, however naïve, is perhaps what drew me to these desolate places to begin with: the heroic idea of going up against history.

in bocca al lupo!, into the mouth of the wolf!

Italy is seismic, I’d written in my book, an ancient rider forever shifting in her saddle.

A beleaguered, slightly charming fortress against the world.

‘well, it just feels like you’re drifting into the past instead of the future.’ ‘I’m a historian,’ I told her. ‘The past is my profession.’

Stepping off that final stone ledge, I couldn’t help feeling some tenderness toward this previous person I’d inhabited.

We want history to be a unified narrative, a causal, linear plot that cantilevers across the centuries, but I’ve always pictured it like the filigree of a wrought-iron gate, our unaccountable lives twisting and swooping against a few vertical lines.

‘The exiled Italians took their villages with them in their pots and pans.’

I don’t recommend living a day over eighty-five. Everything after that is like reading a novel you never liked for the second time.’

‘Come see me again. It’s almost my birthday. I’m turning one thousand.’

Clare used to call our gatherings out here existential happy hours because of that view, and I could remember, as a boy, that I used to imagine sleepwalking right off the side of those cliffs and falling through time itself.

There was something primal and unconditional about Italian familial love, but also something brutal and ponderous, a beautifully made millstone around your neck.

‘They are in the puberty of old age.’

Italians walk through their own histories every day, passing the ravages and triumphs of bygone days.

Walk away and don’t look back was the least Italian idea I could imagine. In fact, looking back seemed to be the main point of leaving something behind.

Grief is a locked room, I told one of them, and I’ll be trapped in here forever.

How do twenty-somethings know so much?’ ‘Because they have no experience to get in the way of their theories.’

She gave out the sort of sigh Umbrian widows have been perfecting for millennia—a bellows at the base of a fire.

We used to treat food as the most important kind of medicine.’

our abandoned mothers who, in turn, performed their own kinds of vanishing.

Living in the heart of those who remain means never dying.

When you have gone years without intimacy, there is no human proximity or kindness that goes without notice.

‘I am begging you.’ ‘I taught you to never beg.’

I thought about the miracle of the archive, marvelled that all of our words aren’t unanimously read, charred and extinguished by those who outlive us.

We are all accidents of history and the cosmos, in the end,

once the past throbs in the veins of the present there is no more pretending to be a passenger reading idly on a train.

Car hugs are universally awkward,

It’s not too late until it’s too late.

‘I’ve stayed true to my principles. Festina lente,’ he said, quoting Horace in Latin. Make haste slowly.

a distant episode on the early tide of the longest day in history.

It was evening all afternoon,

If I was driven to the company of books, maps and stamps, it was in the span of a thousand dusks, when you sat marooned in the living room, the light fading from the windows, until I finally came back to turn on the lamps.

The wolf loses his hair but not his vice.

‘You have been the lamp burning at the end of the hallway for as long as I can remember, Signora,’ he said.

We have all lost the eternal flowering of our youth.’

There is no bottom, Evelyn Woodrow had told me in her chiropractic-museum-turned-therapy-room, just moments and hours of forgetting.