Beautiful Ruins (39)

“Bruno?” Pasquale said when Amedea was still several strides away. “You let them name him Bruno?”

She walked right up to him. “What are you doing here, Pasquale?”

“I wanted to see you. And him. Can you bring him to me?”

“Don’t be stupid.” She reached up and took the cigarette from his hand, dragged on it, and blew the smoke from the side of her mouth. He’d almost forgotten how small Amedea was—so wiry and lithe. She was eight years older than him and she carried herself with a mysterious, animal-like sensual ease. He still felt dizzy around her, the matter-of-fact way she used to drag him by the hand to his apartment (his roommate was gone during the day), push him down on the bed, undo his pants, lift her skirt, and settle herself on him. His hands would go to her waist, his eyes would lock hers, and Pasquale would think, This is the whole of the world, here.

“Can’t I at least see my boy?” Pasquale said again.

“Maybe in the morning when my father is at his office.”

“I’m not going to be here in the morning. I’m taking the train to Rome tonight.”

She nodded but didn’t say anything.

“So you just . . . pretend he is your brother? And no one thinks it’s strange that your mother has another baby . . . twelve years after her last child?”

Amedea answered wearily, “I have no idea what they think. Papa sent me to live with my mother’s sister in Ancona and they told people that I was caring for her because she was sick. My mother dressed in pregnancy clothes and then told people she was going to Ancona to deliver. After a month, we came back with my baby brother.” She shrugged as if it were all nothing. “Miracle.”

Pasquale didn’t know what to say. “How was it?”

“Having a baby?” She looked away. “It was like shitting a hen.” She looked back and smiled. “Now it’s not so bad. He’s a sweet baby. When everyone is asleep, I sometimes hold him and tell him quietly: ‘I am your mamma, little baby.’ ” She gave a little shrug of her shoulders. “Other times I almost forget and believe that he’s my brother.”

Pasquale felt sick again. It was as if they were talking about an idea, an abstraction, and not a child, their child. “This is insane. To be acting this way in 1962? It’s wrong.”

Even as he said this, he knew it must sound ridiculous, since he was taking no part in raising the baby. Amedea said nothing, just stared at him and then removed a bit of tobacco from her tongue. I tried marrying you, Pasquale almost said, but thought better of it. She would only have laughed, of course, having been there for his . . . “proposal.”

Amedea had been engaged once before, when she was seventeen, to the prosperous but frog-eyed son of her father’s partner in his real estate holding firm. When she balked at marrying a man twice her age, her father was furious; she had dishonored the family, and if she would not marry this perfectly good suitor, then she would never marry. She had two choices: go off to a convent or stay in the house and care for her aging parents and whatever children her married sisters bore. Fine, Amedea said, she’d be the family nursemaid. She didn’t need a husband. Later, irritated by her defiant, surly presence around the house, her father allowed her to get a secretarial job at the university. She’d worked there for six years, cutting the loneliness by taking an occasional faculty lover, when, at twenty-seven, she went for a walk and came across nineteen-year-old Pasquale studying on the banks of the Arno. She stood above, and when he looked up, she smiled down at him and said, “Hello, eyes.”

From the first, he was wildly attracted to her thin, restless energy, her subversive quick wit. That first day, she asked him for a cigarette but he said he didn’t smoke. “I walk by here every Wednesday,” she said, “in case you want to start.”

A week later, she walked by and Pasquale leaped to his feet and offered her a cigarette, his hands shaking as he pulled the pack from his pocket. He lit her cigarette and she gestured at the open books on the ground—a book of poems and an English dictionary. He explained that he’d been assigned to translate the poem “Amore e morte.” “The great Leopardi,” she said, and bent to pick up his notebook. She read what he’d translated so far: “‘Fratelli, a un tempo stesso, Amore e Morte/ingenerò la sorte—’ Brothers—the time is same, Love and Death/engendered sorts.”

“Good job,” she said, “you’ve cured that song of its music.” She handed him back the notebook, said, “Thank you for the cigarette,” and walked on.

The next week when Amedea walked by the river, Pasquale was waiting with a cigarette and his notebook, which she took without a word, and read aloud in English: “Brothers of a single breath/born together, Love and Death.” She handed him back the notebook, smiled, and asked if he had an apartment nearby. Within ten minutes she was tugging at his pants—the first girl he’d ever kissed, let alone slept with. They met in his apartment two afternoons a week during the next eighteen months. They never spent a night together, and she explained that she would never go out in public with him. She was not his girlfriend, she insisted; she was his tutor. She would help with his studies and train him to be a good lover, give him advice about how to talk to girls, how to approach them, what to avoid saying. (When he insisted he didn’t want other girls, he wanted only her, she laughed.) She also laughed at his early, awkward attempts to make conversation. “How can those beautiful eyes have so little to say?” She coached him to make eye contact, to breathe deeply, and to consider his words, not answer so quickly. Of course, his favorite lessons were those she gave on his mattress on the floor—how to use his hands, how to avoid finishing too quickly. After a few successful lessons, she fell off him one day and said, “I’m quite the teacher. How lucky for the woman you’re going to marry.”