In Castello di Otranto: Winter

1.

It’s 6 March, according to the new calendar the grocer gave me, belatedly. I spent the first night of March in the village, then retrieved my car from its aristocratic mechanic and ran errands before coming here. The house was clean, by prearrangement, and Michele laid in firewood and made sure my little butane stove still worked.

So, five days back. It’s still winter, but not without some signs of spring. The house is cold at night and I dress accordingly, but my “apartment” is warm enough in the day just from the sun. This is the far end of winter’s program, several months in the metropolis attending to the rest of life as husband, father, author, and aging body. My main preparation for it is to harvest my writing over the previous three seasons, and decide what to take with me. I write in notebooks of two sizes, one pocketable and the other thinner and larger. Each reflects its contents, as I have to transcribe and edit it on arrival, a process extending through the feast days. When normal life resumes, I email them to a few possibly interested editors, then subject myself to the oncologist and dentist. I shop a bit and see friends. We go out.

I get replies from the editors. We sometimes lunch, but mainly we confer. Along with transcribing, there may be galleys from them to review, the result of last winter’s discussions. Shorter things are mailed to me in Castello di Otranto, but these are longer. I go through them, marking them up. I edit as I transcribe, but a galley is a galley. It’s not like there are that many, but I write constantly, especially if I’m caught up in something. The poems get written when they do. I make a compendium of them and then a selection that I send around. If they appear, I’ll see proof of it later, usually.

2.

My second son visits us from Palermo. His wife has two girls from an earlier marriage, the older in Rome and the younger in Naples. One is at Sapienza, the other at the Art Academy, a sculptor and painter. They all used to visit me in the spring, but now the parents come as a couple and the girls come on their own. They haunt the beach and are good company.

He describes Palermo as a tamer Naples. He heads an international school, a role like his younger brother’s in demanding diplomacy, firmness, and delight. It attracts locals hoping their children will find a wider world and expats hoping not to set their children back too drastically. His wife is English. They retreat to England in the summer. I may join them.

Eugenio is the tallest of my sons. He reminds me of the commodore from the Schweppes ads of the 1970s. He has a commanding voice and an eccentric nature he keeps under wraps at school that emerges with the family. His politics are on the left, reflecting his big heart and also Palermo, which suffers economically along with Sicily. Healthcare there is especially bad, so they come here and also use the NHS whenever they visit England.

Where did his height come from? All of our sons are taller than us; only Giulia is shorter. She and Nico were the most athletic as adolescents. Eugenio is fit enough. They love to walk, an aspect of England they enjoy.

His wife is a photographer, quite good at it. Our house here has all the attributes of metropolitan life, and I make use of this by screening her work. Spring in Castello di Otranto is one of her subjects. It’s interesting to see it through her eyes. She loves being there, she told me.

They’ll live on in Palermo, I think, perfectly content with their situation. He’s good with the staff and students, has a gravitas that puts parents at ease. He’s nonsectarian, in keeping with a school whose main competitor is run by a priest, but he’s just Catholic enough not to look out of place.

3.

Roman was the first editor I saw. I sent him four linked short stories and he was unsure what to do with them. Serialize them? Make a slim book? He liked the largely heterosexual plotline and the jumping chronology. They reminded him of Rohmer‘s bourgeois fables. We sat in his cramped office. He’s a big man, florid in a way that suggests the end is near, his desk littered with the detritus of his trade. He seemed noncommittal. “Should I take them to someone else?” “No, no, I’ll take them!”

I like Roman because his edits are minor. He has a copy editor, but often overrules her red marks in defense of my style. It isn’t to everyone’s taste. My stories “lack incident,” I’m told, but he assures me that it’s there and even uncanny, Freud’s uncanny, he means, a bourgeois phenomenon.

The upshot is that he will send me a contract and the stories are out of my hands. This leaves the three novellas, started several years ago, a trilogy now, if not a novel. The manuscript has floated around, but I kept withdrawing it. Is it done? It’s Mario who poses this question. Tightly wound, addicted to nicotine in its Swedish form, his office is as small as Roman’s, but his desk is miraculously clear, only my manuscript between us. This is our third meeting about it. I nod yes, adding that I really mean it, but I’m not sure if the novellas should be published separately or together as a family saga. The latter, he says, and it could be optioned, meaning Netflix, e.g.

His assistant brings us espressos. It’s not clear that Mario eats lunch.

4.

August and February are the months when the dead are with us. In August, we feel the mortality of all living things, their decline and fall. In February, just as we’ve lost hope in winter’s abeyance, the dead appear to remind us of themselves. In Japan, they appear ritually in August; in my metropolitan here and now, they are the raw material of dreams and waking thoughts. At my house in Castello di Otranto in August, what Rilke describes, angels confused by the sheer quantities of the living and the dead, is evident.

There are two main cemeteries here and my February dead have to be visited in both. Ricky and Eddie, my schoolmates, are in one; my grand-niece Bianca isn’t actually in the other, but in its “Poet’s Corner,” her friends placed a marker. I grew up with Ricky and Eddie. Bianca, the oldest of my grandchildren’s cousins, knew us as occasional visitors to the university town where my sister and her family settled.

Ricky was thought to be “slow.” Gangly and slightly hunched, he was a kind of cipher, subject to the slights boys visit on each other in school. The onset of puberty, a disaster in general, seemed to unhinge him. We went to chaperoned dances at our sister school, and he made liberal use of “cutting in” to have brief moments with girls who caught his fancy, to their horror. Boyfriends took him aside, but puberty made him brazen. Then suddenly he stopped attending the dances. We saw that he took care of his person more and slowly came into focus. Eddie saw him with Martina, a known Bohemian, but beautiful in an understated way. It was a surprise, and a perfect example of how being in love works miracles between the lovers.

We graduated and I lost track of them both until their poetry began to appear in the literary journals. She gave a reading, occasioned by a chapbook they wrote together, and I went. His health issues dogged him, but he looked radiant. By then, he spoke only with difficulty, and she read for both of them. His poems were short and observational. There were prose pieces that reminded me of Walser. A year or two later, I heard that he’d died and then read in her tribute to him how from the very start she saw his deeply imaginative spirit, trodden down by an ill-fitting universe yet sustained by his parents, who felt they had to expose him to it despite its thoughtless cruelties, support him without allowing him to become dependent. This is a very thin line to walk, but he emerged from it with sparks of genius visible to her despite the sometimes dense fog of a mind set in that body.

I always felt, in relation to women attracted to me, that what drew them was the last thing I would have thought as an adolescent, when we put so much stock in appearance and bravado. When Martina found Ricky, she freed him to be himself, the self she saw and desired. If we’re lucky, we too shed what we brought along from our youth that hobbled our maturity.

Eddie was my closest friend at school, the older son of an engineer and a painter. Remarkably talented, he was homosexual at a time when it was inconvenient to be one. Adolescents are often bisexual, so I didn’t imagine it would continue or be an issue. His parents envisioned a scientific or technical career for him (his mother’s father had been the chief chemist at a petrochemical giant), not the musician he wanted to be. He attended our wedding and visited us in our first household with a child. My wife thought he was unstable, but, knowing him most of my life, I didn’t see it. When work took me to Torino, where he’d moved. I called him and a man I didn’t know answered. When I explained who I was, the man blurted out that Eddie had shot himself. He’d just found him; the police were coming. Could I call his parents? Ringing off, I found their number. “Thank God it was you and not the police,” his mother said. It felt like Providence granted this.

Bianca’s death three years ago, is too raw. Suicide is terrible for the survivors unless it’s done in light of a terminal illness, say, and even then, it does others a disservice. I’m with the Church on this, feeling it could too easily lead to euthanasia, if it hasn’t already. That Bianca has her marker reflects her published work. We tax the prematurely dead with what we feel they owe us, but how can we collect this debt? There’s more, her friends say, but it’s hidden. “Nothing is hidden,” a Zen patriarch noted.

5.

Self-restraint is imposed on me by the one suitcase and Marimekko bag I brought, which I had to carry back. I sidestepped this by having a few things shipped, but most of what I read, for example, is ordered by post from one or two bookstores if I see a review in the fortnightlies that prompts my interest. The effort involved is a brake on my older practice of overstocking my shelves, and across my time in the metropolis, I winnowed my library a bit, trading one book or another for a credit to draw on later.

I read slowly, in reaction to my past life as a critic. I no longer follow whole categories of things that I once covered religiously. My wife reads the dailies, even the business one. In our sporting days, we had our own bank accounts. Hers is still opaque, but we’re solvent and I never inquire about how my expenses are allocated. The accountant gives me the documents and I sign them. It’s her money, I’ve always felt, brought to the marriage.

The house in Castello di Otranto is partly written off, my oldest son told me. They’re in business together now, so he understands our accounts and is slowly taking over. When he visits in the spring, we discuss the house and grounds, which he loves. He’s learned how my wife operates, no easy matter, finally seeing there’s a rationale that reflects long experience, as I told him episodically, providing many concrete irrefutable examples.

I was as surprised as anyone that she accepted my proposal. I fall on the cultural side of her interests, the focus now of her patronage, but I’m less interested in opera and the theater. She has her own circle. I’ll join if she asks. I don’t mind these occasions, a splendor that somehow persists, a holdover from one old regime or another. The crowd is old, I notice, if sprinkled with curious or socially ambitious youth. (Is this possible?)

Spurred by an affair, I went systematically to concerts at one point, learning that the new is served up as an unfamiliar dish in an otherwise traditional meal. I lean toward the classics, but many of them emerged from a new that was greeted with horror. How could they know?