The Things I Could Have Said

 

by Camille Taccarello Christie

 

In the photograph, my face is tilted toward Marcello and the sun. He is smiling at the blonde who took our picture. I can’t remember her name. She was a writer who had come to the farm for lunch and found Marcello a perfect subject for one of her characters: thirty-one, dark, wiry, black beard, a certain elusiveness in his remarkable green eyes. She was earnest, she was attentive, and she was completely taken by his ways. And who wouldn’t be? The first time I met him, he talked like a prophet. But that was after I arrived at Trefonti, the place where the photograph was taken.

Perhaps some history. On my twenty-first birthday I received a letter from a friend living on a commune in northern Italy:

 

What a spot! No possessions, no ties, no plans, and very little money. Have become a vegetarian. We gather tomatoes in the laps of our aprons, and offer grass stems to the rabbits. . . .

 

I could see the disappointment in my mother’s eyes.

“She is running away.”

I laughed. “From what?”

“The real world.”

 

The story would end here if I had returned to Stanford for a gradu­ate degree in languages. Of course, that’s not what happened. It wasn’t the exotic I was after, but the ordinary. Simply this, a way out. No windy lectures, no three-hour exams, no endless hours at the Green Library. Nor was I eager to join the bastion of poor souls that trek the freeways daily to work. Mostly because I thought it robotic and against nature.

So I packed a duffel bag, threw in my copy of Medicine Woman and headed for the foothills of Bologna.

By the time I arrived at Trefonti, my friend was gone—suddenly—and no one looked too pleased about it.

“Where?” I asked a staff member.

“Sardinia. She left with her hiking gear and got as far as Porto Cervo.”

“Costa Smeralda?”

“Yes. We received a postcard saying that she met a lawyer from Rome with a sailboat. Apparently her soul no longer clamored for de­liverance.” The staff member gave me a searching look as though reading my mind.

But all I said was, “Where do I sleep?”

Given enough time, you can describe anything calmly. There is nothing like waking up to the sound of a rooster. It is pure and invio­late. From my window I could see miles of pale green farmland under a curving sky. Even now, the thought brings goose pimples to my flesh. The fig trees were silvery, birds singing, rows of sunflowers leaning into the morning sun. I spotted two gray squirrels playing recklessly near the barn when I heard a polite cough like someone was address­ing me.

“Salve.”

A man with his palms pressed together and a look of amusement spread across his face stood inside my room.

“I didn’t hear the door,” I said startled.

“We don’t believe in locks. My name is Marcello. Marcello de Sica.”

“A relative of the actor?”

“No,” he laughed, “I’m from Calabria, the south. Poor man’s coun­try.”

“Vittorio de Sica was a southerner.”

“Yes, but a pavone.”

“A peacock?”

“That’s it.”

He wore sandals with a green shirt, jeans, a black and white Arafat scarf draped around his neck. His dark beard looked carefully trimmed. You could tell right away he didn’t plough fields. His hands were slim and graceful. Someone later said his mother had been married to a jam magnate, and that she and her son were pas­sionate about horses. But if there was a family, he never mentioned them. Instead, he talked about local mythology, “Have you seen the three fountains—Trefonti—in the hills?”

I hadn’t.

“They honor Pan, an indulgent Greek god who pursued the nymph Syrinx before she was saved.”

“Who saved her?”

“Her sisters. Turned her into a reed.”

“Rather than be overtaken?”

“One hopes to think she could be changed back again,” he laughed.

I do not remember why Marcello chose Trefonti as opposed to a fancy riding farm except to say that he was tired of humankind’s in­sensitivity to the natural world. He would often remind me that there were no conveniences in our present day that did not cause dis­comfort. “I support the animals’ urge to survive,” he’d say, “man is methodically exploiting the earth.” Most of the staff felt that way, but when Marcello spoke, his words let loose an electric charge that penetrated the room. “Trust,” was one of his favorite words. Everyone listened. We were all joined in a spiritual intimacy. Or so it seemed.

 

When the war took place with Saddam, we began rallying with the PCI—Partito Comunista Italiano. Sometimes we’d make the peace march with lighted candles from Trefonti to Bologna. The war set off a lot of sparks, I remember. Rosa, a sort of spiritual mother in the group, felt that Bush should not have bombed Iraq.

“Americans are always out to prove something. They have nice cars, nice houses, nice educations, and don’t know the meaning of the real world,” she said.

“Americans shouldn’t be generalized.” I was surprised at the trem­bling in my voice.

“How can you say that? Every country is responsible for the action of its leaders.”

“Rosa, Rosa,” Marcello said firmly casting a stern look at her.

 

That night I went to bed with my face burning. I could still feel the sting of Rosa’s adjectives. It was something of a cross being the only Yank in the group.

My room was dark. I lay pensive listening to the rain. There were no bedside lamps, a dim bulb overhead had burned out. I heard the door close softly and thought I saw the silhouette of a beard.

“Awake?” It was a whisper.

“Yes. I want to thank you for taking my side.”

“I simply said what I felt. Rosa was rude. Petty too.”

“Was she poor growing up?”

“Her father’s a doctor from Bologna. He sends her money each month, but has never forgiven her for giving up a faculty career in physics for the commune.”

“Why did she?”

“Ah, she doesn’t know herself anymore.”

“I hear in Sicily they put spiders in the soup to cure hostility.”

“You are a student of medical lore? Molto bello.”

It took me a moment to realize he was stepping out of his jeans, and that the scent of his bathed body was not the brown soap supplied by the collective. He slid under the sheets beside me.

“I’m rewarding you,” he said.

“For what?”

“For being the only purist here.”

 

Strange how I didn’t mind the work assignments. Some days I shoveled horse manure and fetched eggs, despite the sharp beaks pecking my fingers. At other times I helped repair the barn roof, cooked and washed dishes for the restaurant or picked vegetables in the field. The revenue from the sale of the produce and the restaurant went into a general till. We each drew three-hundred-thousand lira a month. Roughly, two-hundred and ninety dollars—a plate of pasta in Bologna at the time could cost thirty dollars. Occasionally there was enough change left for a member to play the lottery, but that came to an abrupt endwhen someone purchased a winning number.

It was Christmas. You could see the hesitation in his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said grinning unsteadily, “the ticket was fairly won.” Two weeks later, he put on his new brown Timberlands and left for Singapore. For a moment, I actually thought he looked embar­rassed.

Rosa was shocked. Shocked and disgusted. “Everybody is hell-bent on theory but practice is another matter.”

 

One day when the restaurant was half full, and when the horses had been scrubbed and the tomatoes watered and the vegetable bar­rels filled to capacity, a blonde in her thirties appeared at the farm. She rolled into the graveled driveway in a red Ferrari hungry for lunch. Marcello said she was from Rome and wrote romances about rich women who have their designer night-gowns torn off by hand­some men. Women who have absolute control over their lives.

“Oh, you’re American,” she said looking at me with ice-blue eyes, “do you know Daniela Steel?”

Marcello laughed. “No, Lynn Andrews is more her style.”

He offered her the house specialty, Baby Lenin Soup.

“Lethal,” she said raising the spoon to her full epicurean lips.

After the dolce di taglierini, our visitor fished out a Nikon with a blue strap. What a striking couple we were. An American girl and her dark knight. Would we mind if she took a snapshot? Marcello was an uncanny study for one of her wily characters. I remember thinking, no, don’t take our picture, while all the time Marcello kept up small talk hinting that he was interested in romantic novels. That surprised me. I knew he never read any. When two people are involved they can be meticulously observant about each other’s reading habits. The only book I ever saw in his room was called, Mondo Cavallo.

 

I’ve often wondered why Marcello didn’t introduce me as his girl­friend. “It’s all in here,” he would say tapping his chest. “It all be­gins and ends here.” I admit it had been a strange year. One summer evening at midnight when the moon was falling across the fields, Marcello vowed that we would have a place of our own. “Our pas­sion,” he said “was filled with endless distances.” The next day he would be off to Rome, and then back again. Supplies for the farm, we thought.

Rosa began grumbling about some of the staff who were not doing their share, how a few of them were sleeping during the day while others were getting up at the crack of dawn.

Summer was almost gone. Rain comes early in the North, a sudden breeze like a slammed door, and then a knife-piercing downpour. I’d lean on my shovel in the stable and conjure the library at Stanford, its sprawling lawn and plum trees heavy with foliage, the faint smell of jasmine drifting toward the Quad. Lazy afternoons when the seasons felt steady and even.

 

It wasn’t until the blonde came that I realized things had changed. She patted Marcello’s shoulder that day and gave him a great, wide smile.

“I delight in places like this,” she breathed.

“I know how you feel.”

“What a life. What an ideal life.”

“We have a new stallion,” he said nodding toward the barn. She gave him a long,deep look as though she was deciding something.

“Give me a minute,” she said mysteriously and then disappeared.

At first I thought it was child’s play, a flirtation, but slowly the laughter died out from the barn and the silence that followed filled me with emptiness. I walked out to a path of apple trees until I came to a clearing. Everything swayed. The day was hot with a burning breeze. Scenes from the past began disintegrating before my eyes: the gold of the field, the long horse rides, the merging, the passion. I felt detached as if I had become an idea from a novel, a walking illustra­tion of a heroine pitiful and used.

I bit my lip. Some larger lesson seemed laid out before me.

 

Later I found out that Marcello knew the woman who took our photo­graph. Someone wrote to me and said they had been lovers in Rome before she left him for an actor. A Mickey Rourke type. When Marcello realized what had happened, he went to her apartment in the Aventino and ripped every candid shot he could find of the man. Then a year or so later, on one of his so-called supply-runs, he ran into her at the Cafè Raineri. “It’s a fluke,” she said, “you know, you’re the only guy that’s ever turned me on.”

 

But that day—that burning day, Marcello finally showed up in the kitchen with his backpack. The corners of his lips were bent in a smile filled with slightly saddened benevolence.

“I’m leaving.”

“Is it money?” I asked coldly.

“No.”

“What about us?”

“I think the point you missed,” he sighed, “is that I always spoke of drinking from the celestial well, but separately. Non è vero?”

“Wrong.”

“Listen, love loses its charm when it’s not free.”

“Let’s see. Who said that? Was it Kahil Gibran?”

“Try to understand,” he cried out, “I feel like an inmate in a prison camp. This place is eating me up!”

 

On the plane to San Francisco, I thought of the things I could have said and done after the fact. How I would not have hesitated with words in telling Marcello outright what a drag it was doing his share of the workload while he was screwing around in Rome, and how his talk of saving the planet was just a heap of select sayings, convenient palaver for someone cooling off, doing the hide and seek game from his Ex when all the time he was playing me like a yo-yo, spinning me out and reeling me in, making promises he didn’t intend to keep. Also, I thought of how I should have thrown the soup in his face. But then, I knew too, if it weren’t for his treachery, I might still be at the farm like Rosa.

That much I understood.