In Castello di Otranto: Autumn

1.

The heat breaks by the equinox and it rains a bit, but not yet with squalls that blow in, slanted and relentless. (The ridge that separates the house from the sea gives it a bit of shelter.) We’re not at that point, so there’s a stretch of good weather that tempts me to revisit the beach. My third son arrives tomorrow with his daughters, taking a break from his work owing to a school holiday. The girls are old enough that they can be here without constant adult supervision. The beach will be their destination and I may join them. His wife will be away with her friends.

Nico is in the heart of the creative industry events for which the city is famous. He knows everyone involved in their realization as an impresario of making and unmaking. They may be ephemeral, but each one requires heroic logistics. “I should be running Airbus,” he jokes. His most important attribute is his ability to stay calm and keep it “operational,” unlike the high-strung culture he serves, amped up by industry pressures, including the need, in fashion especially, to top rivals and amaze a jaded press.

I had a postcard from him with the date and time, “plus or minus.” They will take a train and then a local hire will drive them here, freeing him to give the girls his full attention, compensating them for all those weeks when his work monopolized it. They’ll stay until the driver reappears on Sunday.

I received a postcard from him with the date and time, “plus or minus.” They will take the train and then a local hire will drive them here. This is typical of his arrangements, freeing him to give the girls his full attention, compensating them for all those weeks when others monopolized it. They’ll stay until the driver reappears on Sunday morning. The grocer told me that Nico telephoned him, so “Could you bring a few extra things with you to the house?” On Wednesday, a couple drove up from the village to clean, make up the beds, etc. Late that afternoon, the car and driver climbed the long driveway, and they emerged. He brought their luggage in, confirmed the pickup, and departed. They snacked on the train, I was told, so we ate lightly. The girls took a bath and were soon asleep. We talked, the first time we’ve done so since last February. He’s not much of a correspondent, so night one was the debrief.

Of my children, Nico is the most politically hard to pin down. My sense is that he reads most politicians as entertainers or media figures, a type of celebrity with responsibilities. Industry titans are similar, like the ones who own the fashion houses. Not that they lack acumen, but a big part of their remit is looking good, inspiring confidence or playing against that if their fan base requires it. He sees them as a high-end hotelier might.

Giulia told me on her visit that Nico keeps a diary. Officially he “has no opinion” about his clients and the worlds they inhabit. His own demeanor is relatively formal, bespoke suits well-tailored in cloth that holds up to close inspection. “It’s a uniform,” he says. In and on his way to Castello di Otranto, he’s a civilian at his daughters’ disposal. I don’t ask about the diary, but am glad he keeps one. In my experience, he keeps his guard up at first in conversation. I’m a writer, he’s aware, and something untoward might trace back to him. We negotiate this over four evenings. He knows it would be accidental, so it’s for our mutual protection, to preserve our affection.

Luckily, he can repeat stories in general circulation that I won’t have heard. Any embellishment won’t be noticeable, and the stories won’t be so topical, either. My slow output ensures a considerable lag between his remarks and their veiled appearance, if any. He’s also cautious around his daughters. Our putative metropolis is just a few streets of gossips, but it has a school and the school has a playground. Nothing really has changed. My role as a critic meant I had to ignore decorum. Foreigners often say of Italians that we can argue, and then go out and have a drink, but it’s not really true. It’s one reason I sought solitude. Nico is never openly critical, just focused on the thing to be done, however complicated, which he boils down to its essentials and sets in motion. He’s able to explain it to others and put a price to it. How he does this I have no idea. He’s not afraid of big numbers, nor is he afraid to say, “If you’d rather not spend it, don’t. It will cost this.”

Antonio is still bitter about Rodolfo. He could have used one like Nico, whose thoughtfulness he conveyed when I ran into him earlier this week. “I asked Michele to go out to your place tomorrow and clear the path that goes down to your beach,” he told me. “Nico called me and then paid for it.”

2.

The days my granddaughters spend here are loosely organized by their father. For him, the attraction is to be entirely free of everyone else, the same freedom I grant myself. But he brings his nature with him, his native tendency to make life hospitable for others. In his world, that means ample pockets of time and space, with activities mixed in, a meal or an excursion. He’s also aware of the pleasure children take in repetition and routine.

So, they breakfast together, then the girls roam the terraces, playing alone and with each other, then they snack. Nico packs a picnic lunch into a rucksack he carries and they disappear for a stretch, similar to my daughter’s, to visit the beach and swim. The weather is perfect for it, even if the water’s a bit colder. He’s a good swimmer and so are the girls. They return around five. We have an early supper, he reads to them, they chatter a bit to themselves, then fall asleep.

Over what amounts to a second course, we pick up where he left off. I find it useful to quiz him about objects and events rather than people, as this poses less of a minefield, conversationally. That I’m not up on who designed what, nor of brand names beyond a certain point, isn’t important. It’s just to get him started. He notes the absurdity of much of it, only meant to satisfy the backers and goose the press that follows trade around, hungry for difference and nostalgic, they always say, for imagined past glories.

What stand out are the rare moments of actual brilliance. It can be entirely new or a take on the past that changes how it’s seen. This can apply to an item of clothing, an accessory, a piece of furniture, or a spectacle. How the actors, as Nico calls them, are choreographed is part of it, because every single object needs human counterparts to bring it alive, lend it their subjectivity in some manner. There’s an art to this, rarely mastered.

He’d make an excellent critic, which is helpful to his dealings with the real ones. He never voices his opinions directly, but has a prodigious memory for commentary on their part he felt was true and well put, quoted back to them approvingly. Few critics can resist, as theirs is a double-edged line of work, either forgotten immediately or a cause of quarrels, often with some spiteful artiste who’s tetchier than usual owing to career pressures. He’s something of a connoisseur of the critics’ work, and aids them in other ways behind the scenes. The actors like him because he enforces the rules meant to protect them. “That’s the deal,” he says flatly. I admire him for this, but he says it’s simply a necessity in a world so rife with exploitation.

3.

While they’re out, I write some letters and nap. The comparative silence of the house is striking. The only sounds are from nature or generated by the pendulum clock and the refrigerator. There’s a radio in a cupboard, the kind you crank to recharge, Antonio’s gift when the house was finished. His grandfather was a partisan, and having a radio is seen as a sacred duty.

By silence, I mean no human company and the foregrounding of other sounds. I thought early on to play recorded music, but I found I didn’t miss it. I don’t miss much of anything that was customary in the metropolis. The barber plays his radio and I hear snippets of music elsewhere in the village, but no one in the family brings anything audio. It must be the spirit of this place, how its ambient sounds are music enough.

The girls aren’t silent and of course their father isn’t, either, when they engage with him, one of the pleasures of these visits for them, as he gives them his full attention in the same way that I imagine he gives it to his clients. This is one of his traits, this focus, along with his ability to widen the view. But when we talk, he is in some sense a child again with his father, craving the latitude to talk at length and be heard. His daughters are similar, although the younger one wants him to read to her, while her sister prowls my library for books she remembers and others she’s grown into or is anxious to test that premise. At meals, I quiz them on their day and am interested, always, how differently they experience the same terrain, even the same events. A day can be viewed from anticipation, in media res, and in retrospect, each with its meal and its times of day. Even breakfast has its backward glance.

4.

I’m glad for their visit, as autumn is melancholic, despite the fine weather. It might be the medical doctor’s visit and my semi-annual examination. Long before the solstice, I feel everything moving inexorably toward winter, the season of my withdrawal, for most of it, to metropolitan life. I could spend it below the equator, as a professor friend does, married to a Latina, but it’s my wife’s social season, central to her life as a patroness. I could have a girl in every port, like another professor I knew was rumored to have, the lifestyle of an older generation, jet-setters. My affairs were local, which was sensible, as the end of an affair can ruin whatever’s connected with it if it’s unhinging. The local forces you back into the everyday, even if you wander in it like a ghost, half-faint and bereft. I met a lover once in the capital as an affair was winding down, and then returned alone, foolishly choosing the same hotel, and was given the same room. I should have changed it, I suppose, but it felt fated and therefore necessary to experience.

Solitude moves fatalism on to different topics. I worry more about my children and theirs, especially when they’re present or I’m present, depending on the season and locale. Something genuinely terrible would no doubt be conveyed to me by someone from Castello di Otranto, the recipient of the bad news by telephone, likely, as each visiting child has her or his own list. If something dire needs to be conveyed from here, then Antonio and the postal clerk have my instructions to call our lawyer’s answering service — he still has one, apparently an anomaly — and leave the message to be conveyed. It’s never happened, but there’s a note in the kitchen to this effect, and another folded up in my wallet.

When did he become our lawyer? He’s younger than both of us. I renew our long relationship at or after the year’s end, verifying the answering service, taking him to lunch, and looking in briefly at his office to greet his associates, all younger than him, so, as “an old client,” they will, if need be, relay any dire message more politely than the police would.

“The police” is not really applicable to Castello di Otranto, so far off the map that only those who patrol the autostrada occasionally appear. Nor is there much in the way of bureaucracy. The postal clerk, keeper of village lore, is deputized by the region to perform most official functions, with guidelines from afar about her limits, very, very loosely interpreted, but she’s a sensible woman. Births, marriages, and deaths are registered, for example, in parallel with the Church, which also delegates practically everything to our one priest and his venerable assistant, his sister.

It is “our” at this point. In three seasons, “here” is here. My family counts as regulars in what passes locally for tourism. The villagers have a time-lapse view of them, while I appear weekly except in the winter, like clockwork, one more human in slow decline. My granddaughters don’t seem to notice, and their presence prods me to accompany them to the beach on Saturday.

I find that Michele has not only cleared the treacherous path but placed stakes at its worst points, firm enough to grab onto as one descends. The younger girl also makes use of them. It’s curious how something so slight gives us the confidence we lack without it. She and I are in the same straits on this score, but she has a smaller stature and a well-buffered frame. We make it down together. The beach is rocks, then gravel, and finally sand or its facsimile, darker than sand and so a good deal warmer.

The path continues narrowly through the rocks and gravel until the beach flattens out. Michele tidied this up, too, or it may have been Giulia. Nico brought a blanket from the house, an old one used only for this purpose. The girls build sandcastles while we make some lunch. In just three days, it’s noticeably colder, as is the water. They put their feet in, but that’s it. We wore sweaters, briefly shed and then put back on because the wind has picked up. We agree that their timing was good.

‘Look, papa!” the younger one says. A sailboat passes, a ketch, close enough that a couple waves back when my granddaughters greet them excitedly, jumping up and down. It’s the only real incident of their visit. The rest is how it is here on their autumn holiday. Later on, will they resist coming? Giulia never lost her taste for it, but she was older when she first started. These are questions that have “God willing” attached, like imagining their weddings or their beauty as young women, in the tradition of the family.

5.

Our last, post-dinner conversation finds Nico sated in terms of holding the floor. He asks me what I’m writing. This leads eventually to questions from me about his own writing, which I know continues, writing being an inner necessity with him, as it is with Giulia. He envies her freedom. “I’m free to write in my diary, which I have to guard with my life!” I came to fiction late, I tell him. Before that, poetry was my only real personal outlet. At a certain point, I stopped caring what people might think. I just started writing and sending it around. Diderot was my model, but the editors picked up on it, the one advantage of that small world, and saw some of it into print.

“Does that world still exist?” I think so, I say, but ask me again at Christmas.