Less(21)

Less awakens to a feeling of peace and triumph: “Stiamo iniziando la discesa verso Torino. We are beginning our descent into Turin.” His seatmate seems to have moved across the aisle. He removes his eye mask and smiles at the Alps below, an optical illusion making them into craters and not mountains, and then he sees the city itself. They land serenely, and a woman in the back applauds—he is reminded of landing in Mexico. He recalls smoking on an airplane once when he was young, checks his armrest, and finds an ashtray in it still. Charming or alarming? A chime rings, passengers stand up. Passport, wallet, phone. Less has manned his way through the crisis; he no longer feels mickeyed or dull. His bag is the first to arrive on the luggage roller coaster: a dog eager to greet its master. No passport control. Just an exit, and here, wonderfully, a young man in an old man’s mustache, holding a sign lettered SR. ESS. Less raises his hand, and the man takes his luggage. Inside the sleek black car, Less finds his driver speaks no English. Fantastico, he thinks as he closes his eyes again.



Has he been to Italy before? He has, twice. Once when he was twelve, on a family trip that took the path of a Pachinko game by beginning in Rome, shooting up to London, and falling back and forth among various countries until they landed, at last, in Italy’s slot. Of Rome, all he remembers (in his childish exhaustion) are the stone buildings stained as if hauled from the ocean, the heart-stopping traffic, his father lugging old-fashioned suitcases (including his mother’s mysterious makeup kit) across the cobblestones, and the nighttime click-click-click of the yellow window shade as it flirted with the Roman wind. His mother, in her final years, often tried to coax other memories from Less (sitting bedside): “Don’t you remember the landlady with the wig that kept falling off? The handsome waiter who offered to drive us to his mother’s house for lasagna? The man at the Vatican who wanted to charge you for an adult ticket because you were so tall?” There with her head wrapped in a scarf with white seashells. “Yes,” he said every time, just as he always did with his agent, pretending to read books he had never even heard of. The wig! Lasagna! The Vatican!

The second time he went with Robert. It was in the middle of their time together, when Less was finally worldly enough to be of help with travel and Robert had not become so filled with bitterness that he was a hindrance, the time when any couple has found its balance, and passion has quieted from its early scream, but gratitude is still abundant; what no one realizes are the golden years. Robert was in a rare mood for travel and had accepted an invitation to read at a literary festival in Rome. Rome was itself enough, but showing Rome to Less was like having the chance to introduce someone to a beloved aunt. Whatever happened would be memorable. What they did not realize until they arrived was that the event was to take place in the ancient Forum, where thousands would gather in the summer wind to listen to a poet read before a crumbling arch; he would be standing on a dais lit by pink spotlights, with an orchestra playing Philip Glass between each poem. “I will never read anywhere like this again,” Robert whispered to Less, standing backstage as a brief biographical clip played for the audience on an enormous screen—Robert as a boy in a cowboy costume; as a serious Harvard student with his pal Ross; then he and Ross in a San Francisco café, a woodland setting—picking up more and more artistic companions until Robert reached the face recognizable from his Newsweek photograph: hair gone gray and wild, retaining that monkey-business expression of a capering mind (he would not frown for a photo). The music swelled, his name was called. Four thousand people applauded, and Robert, in his gray silk suit, readied himself to stride onto a pink-lit stage below the ruins of the centuries, and let go of his lover’s hand like someone falling from a cliff…



Less opens his eyes to a countryside of autumn vineyards, endless rows of the crucified plants, a pink rosebush always planted at the end. He wonders why. The hills roll to the horizon, and atop each hill, a little town, silhouetted with its single church spire, and no visible way of approach except with rope and a pick. Less senses by the sun’s shift that at least an hour has passed. He is not headed to Turin, then; he is being taken somewhere else. Switzerland?

Less understands at last what is happening: he is in the wrong car.

SR. ESS—he anagrams in his mind what he took, in his lingering hypnosis and pride, for signor and a childlike misspelling of Less. Sriramathan Ess? Srovinka Esskatarinavitch? SRESS—Società di la Repubblica Europea per la Sexualité Studentesca? Almost anything makes sense to Less at this altitude. But it is obvious: having cleared the problems of travel, he let his guard slip, waved at the first sign resembling his name, and was whisked away to an unknown location. He knows life’s commedia dell’arte and how he has been cast. He sighs in his seat. Staring out at a shrine to an auto accident, placed at a particularly rough curve in the road. He feels the Madonna’s plastic eyes meet his for an instant.

And now the signs for a particular town become more frequent, and a particular hotel: something called Mondolce Golf Resort. Less stiffens in fear. His narrating mind whittles the possibilities down: he had taken the car of a Dr. Ludwig Ess, some vacationing Austrian doctor who is off to a golf resort in Piemonte with his wife. He: brown skulled, with white hair in puffs over his ears, little steel glasses, red shorts and suspenders. Frau Ess: short, blond hair with a streak of pink, rough linen tunics and chili pepper leggings. Walking sticks packed in their luggage for jaunts to the village. She has signed up for courses in Italian cooking, while he dreams of nine holes and nine Morettis. And now they stand in some hotel lobby in Turin, shouting with the proprietor while a bellboy waits, holding the elevator. Why did Less come a day early? There will be no one from the prize foundation to straighten out the misunderstanding; the poor Ess voices will echo emptily up to the lobby chandelier. BENVENUTO, a sign reads as they pull into a drive, A MONDOLCE GOLF RESORT. A glass box on a hill, a pool, golf holes all around. “Ecco,” the driver announces as they pull to the front; the last sunlight flashes on the pool. Two beautiful young women emerge from the entryway’s hall of mirrors, hands clasped. Less readies himself for full mortification.