In Castello di Otranto: Spring

1.

By the equinox, I’m more or less recovered from those months of urban life. That it’s habit-forming is the idea, so every return has a period of adjusting to this place, settling back into it and reviving its rhythms or finding new ones that suit its tempo. This begins on the train, which is also true in the other direction. A remnant of the past, with sights and sounds particular to itself, a train is a time machine.

In spring, the grounds buoy up my spirits. I bring back the memories a city generates, shaped in no small part by the play of commerce. Even in the winter, brief thaws inspire the license fashion wants to take, the shedding or unwrapping that anticipates what lies ahead, fecundity’s siren song.

Now here it is again, but my reverie is mine alone. My oldest son was to have joined me, but he wrote that he’s delayed. We saw a lot of each other in the winter, so perhaps he’s had enough of me? Not sure, but it’s okay, I need to expand on notes I made, ideas that came to me, seeing editors, roaming bookstores and galleries, exposing myself to culture as my wife understands it. I bring back a few small notebooks, bought fresh and full of jotted notes to self. Everything is a note to self, of course, as I’m my most attentive audience, keeper of my flame, self-effacing tooter of my horn.

My ability to name plants is laughable, but I’m aware of how this season operates. Fecundity is both the draw and hazard in spring’s sporting life. It may be that the hazards are less, but we’re a careless species. Are the young immune? The birthrate says so. We fucked like rabbits and the children appeared. Demeter presides and Persephone’s back again from the dead, nubile and fertile. All honor to them both, I think, walking the grounds.

Spring evens out night and day, then more and more sun until the solstice. It extends into the summer or perhaps summer reaches into spring like winter does to autumn, giving us glances of each one’s worst days or weeks. The time changes and I reset the clock, which stood unmoving over most of the winter, despite life running on.

Here, circadian rhythm is all. An odd noise, like the bark of a fox, can wake me up, but usually it’s the sun. I nap and work late, but in the spring, I get up early, as everything is alive again. I work on one terrace or another, depending on the time of day. This is a microclimate different from the village. The sea tempers things noticeably. There’s fog — the trees drip with it, a ring of green below them even in high summer.

One editor made a joke about my primitive hut, as if, like Heidegger, I’ve retreated to an idealized world. Another compared it to Prospero’s island, me a mage with a staff. It’s too civilized, I tell them, and such magic as I had lacked staying power. Spare but livable describes it. Our apartment is grander, befitting its era. It’s smaller than what it replaced but better furnished. It’s a gallery, and very slowly I’ve made one here, having run out of walls at home. If ordering books here is a process, art is even more so.

In the winter, I visit the studios of a few artist friends. Painters generate far more work than their galleries sell. Those whose work sells give things away or sell it at gallery prices, giving the dealer a cut, but others are more casual or simply loyal to friendship or to a collector, possibly. I wish I could paint, but art and craft take up space. Rodolfo’s production was much in evidence — as were the toxic solvents he used. My creativity is contained, but the garden is like a Bonnard: loosely arrayed, and spring does the rest.

2.

A solitary life means that I’m Bonnard’s woman in the bath, just as I’m a man in the shower. Who’s thinking or speaking is a constant question for a writer. Solitude makes this more apparent, but it arises in the metropolis too, aware how we play the parts assigned to us or handed to us or even taken hold of despite our complex, unreliable natures as we think we understand them, always experienced and contended with in real time.

Solitude makes it easier to look at it dispassionately, while age gives us retrospect, leaching the terrors out of those moments when our psychology undid us. We live with minds and bodies that refuse increasingly to do our bidding. Not that they ever did so unfailingly, but we got used to a certain élan. We compensate for this with heuristics and self-forgiveness.

3.

The moon’s a companion, emblem of fecundity. A sliver, reappearing after going dark, reminds me of a woman who’s gone dark herself, unlikely to resurface. The abundance of this season sets mortality aside, or desire does this for us. We rut at the first whiff of propagation’s heady scent. Some rut; others don’t. Solitude spurs contemplation, especially of pleasure.

Desire fits uneasily with the city’s clockwork, a randomness we drink from furtively. We try to find places we can’t hear its song. This is one such, but I found it long after. I left a trail, but before the age of maximal surveillance. Even here I’m spied on from above, the examiner no longer human, but it’s a hike no civil servant wants to make. The post, the Church — they’re left to themselves. Plots and heresies could be dreamt up, but the imaginary of Castello di Otranto doesn’t tend in that direction. This has promise as a story. I made a note to self to that effect on the train.

A follow-up letter arrived from my oldest son, apologizing for an absence that can’t be helped. He sets out various things he’s discussed with his mother. He’s the capo, never my role or title. My model was a gardener confronting his fields in different seasons, each with its necessities. It kept me in my children’s affection. He asks for my comments and sends his love.

Another letter is from a woman I saw several times this winter, renewing our long-running friendship, the only close one with a woman that I’ve managed to sustain, as, despite the desire she inspires, I’ve never acted on it. I type my reply because my handwriting is so awful that another woman once returned a letter I’d handwritten, protesting that she couldn’t make out a word. As I type, our conversations come back to me. In the time we’ve been friends, she’s lived abroad, loved unsatisfactory men, and been thwarted in her efforts to find work in her field. This past winter saw her deciding not to compromise again, but to let a hundred flowers bloom, as Mao put it, acknowledging her inability to fit into the readymade categories. Her letter discusses this. She writes in parts like me, occasionally forgetting to mail it.

Sitting amid spring’s pervasive estrus, a tangent appears on the nature of women as lovers. Marriage’s domesticity and familiarity anchor love in affection, but other women arrive with erotic nuance and leave trails of it behind them. This is my imaginary not hers. “Only poems get with child.”

Not being immune, I was harried by fecundity’s possibility. Stratagems, devices, and chemistry are unreliable, we find, but abstinence is rarely an option in the metropolis once we’ve plunged in. Our lives can seem arid or fallow, but then Nature steps in or the gods sport with us yet again.

4.

The good weather brings me to the beach, making ample, grateful use of Michele’s stakes, which came through the winter fit for purpose. I don’t swim, but I test the water, which is still cold. Instead, I sit and look at it, the sea, an aural and olfactory presence until seen at its own level, the view the beach affords. I take some pride in descending alone. Of course, it’s not clear what would happen if I died here or was swept away, a body unrecognizable from weather or beasts that dine on carrion, so not much to go on, if found at all. At the oncologist’s, I saw a poster asking people to donate their dead selves to the medical school for the students to carve up. Then our cohort’s bits and pieces, cremated, would be scattered. (Rodolfo was scattered solo.) I wonder if there’s any consciousness left at cremation? One advantage of the medical school’s intervention is that I would be really and truly dead. My wife’s mother, alive for almost a century, died in an entirely used-up body that she left to the school. Men came early the next day to collect it, complaining that we were slow to call them. To spend months in a freezer also makes me wary, but would I notice?

The beach generates such thoughts, sea standing in for the unknown and the aridity, even in the spring when the edge of undergrowth is not yet devastated by the heat, contrasts with the life forces pulsing everywhere else. If life is partly a preparation for its ending, a beach is as good a place as any for the autodidactic nature of preparing, like my annual visits to the cemeteries, which coincide, I realize, with the visits to my bodily advisors. Do I also have spiritual advisors? I would count my literary ancestors, who were more aware than most of the intermingling of the living and the dead.

The characters I conjure up give me psychoanalytic advice. They embody aspects of myself that I need to consider. Bringing them to consciousness was the ambition of Freud and Lacan, his most interesting follower. I learned from him to write on without flinching, giving an aspect to the opposite sex or putting it in dialogue with itself, fiction’s gift to self-analysis.

I can’t say I clambered up, but ascending from the beach is less taxing, despite a greater need to haul one’s weight upward against gravity. There are places to pause and look back at a wider sea, a panorama that includes the terrain itself, halfway between a hillside and a cliff, and more the latter descending it. Walking back up, I lean into the hillside and feel safer. It’s walking, not clambering, the upward motion of children, whose energy compensates for their stature. Endurance is me: good for the long haul.

At the summit, I pause again to look. The sound of my breathing tapers off. I think of my father, who once lit a cigar after a similar climb, red-faced and triumphant. I’m more careful with my health than he was, but I admire his celebratory impulse. When I say my prayers, I account for the day God gave me. If a walk figures, I mention it. The beach will be a highlight. I’ll thank Him for the sea. He already has my thanks and then some for spring.

5.

On a whim, I made a bouquet, which I brought with me to the post, my first stop this Monday, and presented to the woman who presides over what passes for officialdom in Castello di Otranto. “From my garden,” I said. “Oh, Dottore, so kind!” I sense she rarely gets much thanks for her labors. She disappears, then brings out quantities of mail.

We don’t talk about our work, but if I have a new grandchild or grand-niece or nephew’s photograph to show her, she looks at it approvingly and shows me one of hers. While I’m older, her generations are closer together than mine, so these babies are roughly in the same cohort. We’re both attached to our families. I made a point of telling her that my wife doesn’t join me because her activities keep her elsewhere. She accepts my solitude. She knows I’m visited by our children, and that we regularly correspond. She likes it that I have no use for anything that threatens the post.

Suddenly she asks me if I’d mind if she gave the flowers to the Church, as they’re so pretty, and the priest and his sister will be very happy to have this bouquet from the coast. I agree. They too are threatened by contemporary life, which declines to replace such loyal retainers once they retire or die. Castello di Otranto’s fate is bound up in this, maybe, but the inertia of a bureaucracy like the post or the Church is legendary, so we’ll see.

She beams at me, having found a use for something she couldn’t categorize. Putting the flowers in water, she tells me she’ll take them over on her lunch break. Amazingly, there are still two services daily, so the flowers will be admired, even if they don’t last until Sunday. “They were picked fresh,” I almost say, but that’s a metropolitan talking.

I run my other errands and drive back. After lunch, I go through the mail, most of it editorial. It’s too soon for another letter from my friend, but my daughter writes, enclosing a clipping of her article for a woman’s quarterly. It pays well, she notes. She conveys family news no one else is sending.

Editorial demands a response, so I lay things out and make a list, my habit from schooldays. I weigh it against my own work. This too is my own work, of course, the way making a warp is part of weaving, but it is and isn’t. At least the weather is fine. Work like this in the summer can be brutal or at minimum encumbered by the need to find places with shade and breeze. I’ve lived here a long time, but these places can vary hourly.

These are articles and chapters, things of that nature. The editors tolerate my process, but just barely, some of them, so I need to get everything in the post next Monday. With the books, it’s completely different. The editors know when I’ll reappear. The only risk is that I’ll die beforehand, but they have my edits. Editing is endless. Deadlines allow editors to call a halt, but death occasionally does this for them, endangering any remaining harvest.

I make tea, reread my daughter’s letter, and begin writing a reply. I have until Sunday evening to finish it, but it prompts thoughts. Her article was written with a photographer in tow, and she’s in some of the photos, turned away, but it’s her. I know the place, famous but I’ve never been. As a child, I used to imagine I could step into a photo and be there with the cows or the sailboats, then step out again. I wish sometimes that this were possible, not simply to another place but in the era when the photo was taken.

Fiction is as close as I get to this, not a bad facsimile. Spring here and now makes up for the inconvenience of living at such a remove from others I often miss. At home in the metropolis, I’m struck always by the nature of married life, in which a long-familiar-with-each-other couple negotiate their immutable differences, which they minimize as best they can, yet collide at predictable moments, like a situation comedy from childhood.

I miss my friend. If the portal science fiction promises finally existed, she could drop in.