In Castello di Otranto: Summer

1.

It wasn’t my intention originally to settle here. In the dead of July, summer’s dog days when the ground’s terraces are so many blasted weeds, fodder for a brushfire, I sometimes wonder what I’m doing here. It was the house that drew me, almost a ruin when I found it, its owner-architect Rodolfo still alive, although a ruin himself and a cautionary tale.

In those days, I was a metropolitan. Somehow the rumor reached me of this village and the house, at the edge of civilization as I knew it, or more accurately at the very edge of that edge or even a step or two beyond it, the terraces descending into the wilderness that separates an agrarian interior from the thicketed tumble of the coast. There are paths to the sea from here. Small beaches can be found amid inhospitable outcroppings, if one is prepared to descend to them.

The house is oddly divided from the grounds, its main terrace a full story below, and two more terraces below it, one long and narrow, the other shorter, but with a path extending to a road of sorts below, where an old tractor and assorted gardening tools are stored. From all of them, the sea can be heard but not seen. The house sits on a plinth, backed by a hillside. The sea is in the air. It’s immensely far from everything else, I felt, and this feeling continues.

Rodolfo owned an old Benz diesel. My BMW is only slightly newer, but better maintained by Castello di Otranto’s sole mechanic, a cousin many times removed of the last czar. Despite the sea lying less than a kilometer away, the car’s body hasn’t rusted. Like my predecessor, I drive it into the village once a week to shop. On the first Monday, generally, I have my hair cut. In the spring and autumn, when the weather is at its best, a medical doctor visits and sees all comers. I present myself. My ailments are minor. I had cancer before I came here, but it was treated and hasn’t recurred.

I bought this house from Rodolfo’s estate partly as a project, as it needed to be restored and finished, and partly as a place to write. I suppose too that it was to separate myself from my past life, which can make even a metropolis, as my city proclaims itself a little dubiously to be, too small. My whereabouts are known, though, and of course I correspond.

So, the post office also figures in my weekly journeys. Everything is done by post as there’s no wireless connection to the house, not even a telephone. I was glad to forego those urban devices. News is impossible to evade altogether, but here it lags events. At the barber’s, I at least hear updates to his prejudices, which are numerous.

2.

While I restored and completed the house, I stayed in the village proper. This was long before I decided to move here and exile myself. I came for a few days every few weeks, riding with the builders to the house to review their work. Owing to its remoteness, it went slowly, and Rodolfo’s idiosyncratic plans, mostly hand-sketched, were also a problem, but the builder’s capo, Antonio, had known him and worked on his house before he ran out of money.

The house is divided in two by an inner walkway illuminated from the roof. Beyond it is a third space, clearly intended by Rodolfo as a love nest. The front room, where Rodolfo lived, almost a separate apartment, is where I live when it’s colder, as it gets the sun. In the summer, I live on the other side of the walkway in a more barnlike space. When the family visits, it serves us as a gathering place. I sometimes let them use the entire house and retreat to a pottery shed I converted, half a level down, off a side terrace that’s a shaded place to write in the heat.

The family is my primary link to my former life. They appear when they appear, preceded by letters debating the timing and the length of the visit, or negotiating it between us. I’m glad to see them, but we tire of each other, probably — I’m never really sure, though, because the signs are mixed. They come partly because, as I noted, two brief seasons are perfect here, but also to affirm that I live on in my isolated state and am neither mad nor infirm. Not yet.

Solitude is strangely companionable after a succession of faltering companions. I blame myself for this, my inability to fulfill the different roles thrust on me. It was the same at work, although it went on much longer owing to my talent for it, but that part of life constantly changes and I tired of it. I could say too that I tired of my companions, but this is inexact although functionally correct. It’s a bit like the family visiting and being unsure, in the end, what it meant on either side. Family, though, is family, whereas a companion is there or not there by choice. My need to be alone was an impediment to the company companions crave. My tolerance for it was insufficient.

Still, I attracted them. This was incidental, I think, or accidental, despite often being accused of leading them on. No, it was always something that arose, and in general, I was game. Terrain, I thought of it, let’s have a look. But there is no look, in reality, just the totality of another. And I too was a totality that clearly didn’t add up, in the end. A life of incident, I think it’s called.

All this as counterpoint to family life, which nominally continues. We meet at the great feasts, when I journey by bus and train back to the planetary heart of this region, its motor, as they say. It’s then that I stock up on the affairs of the day, stop in at my oncologist and my dentist, have my eyes examined, and assume again my past roles with my wife, her friends and one or two of mine, old colleagues. Also, with assorted editors, gathered conveniently in the same city, which still claims me.

There is, in short, no real getaway, only what I’ve managed to carve out, to pay for with all those decades of work along with the new things, products of my solitary life, a spur to imagination and of course an opportunity to revisit, almost constantly, my misspent past.

No one seems to hold it against me, at least among those I see regularly on these excursions. It helps that my own sense of time has an innate continuity, kept alive by letters, a medium somehow fitting to Castello di Otranto, a place rarely visited by any of these people, despite a slight reputation for the brief snippets I mentioned, seasons too short for tourism. Hence the attraction of my house for a few cognoscenti and for members of my family. It seems clear that Rodolfo pictured their comings and goings. The house he planned was more extensive, stupidly so, but even at a smaller scale, it consists of almost separate domains.

3.

The first night I stayed here, I wondered if his ghost would appear. His ashes are rumored to be scattered in the nearby woods, and of course the night is a chorus of wind, branches, wildlife, and the organic life of any country household. I should get a cat, I tell myself, but never have. I had a dog and a cat growing up, experiencing them as introductions to living things’ mortality. The mirror now does the trick, along with my slowly faltering gait and memory, nothing major.

I am reasonably fastidious, and it’s only my absence that sees an uptick in domestic pests, as we call them. My renewed presence holds them at bay. The man who looks after the house when I’m away is charged with setting traps, but also charged with removing them before I’m back.

No ghost has appeared. Only my former companions haunt my nights, a strange process in which their gorgeous forms float through and their denunciations follow several hours later. There’s nothing to be done, I remind myself, managing yet again not to write a letter to one or another, having done this in the past and receiving not one word. I was discouraged for a while, and even more so before I came to Castello di Otranto, snubbed once at a friend’s memorial, for example.

Solitude puts all of this on the side, even if their shades or phantoms drift through at night. I invoke them when I write and wonder if they find themselves, ever, on my pages, should they bring themselves to read this novel or that story, which is doubtful. My wife, as far as I know, has never read anything I’ve written. That I write and appear to have a following is noticed. She has always had her own life. I figure in it like an old table, cherry perhaps, which she can’t bear to part with.

Rodolfo left such a table and I decided to keep it. When the family gathers, everyone can sit around it. In the worst of the summer, I sit at it and write, since the barn-like part of the house is cooler. He left a mess. Much effort went into clearing it out, the grounds included, before any work could be done. The cost of the house was low in consequence, along with the fact that he died in it and it sat vacant and exposed to the weather in its incomplete state. Just closing it in was my first priority, once it was emptied. Then I slowly furnished it. It’s still pretty spare.

At my age, life divides between napping and sleeping, each with its favored place. I keep a rough schedule that depends considerably on the time of year. I tend to work late. I haven’t lost the habits established at school and then hardened in various offices, but you age back into the patterns of childhood, especially the napping. Meals are lighter and less formal.

4.

My daughter is visiting, although from my perspective, this is the worst time for it. I speak of the weather and the subsequent condition of the immediate terrain, which is parched. I don’t water it. In late autumn, it revives and in the spring it’s verdant. In high summer, as I think of it, days are stupefyingly hot. There’s always a breeze, which is more than can be said for the village. Giulia is the youngest of my four children, a writer like me. She lives with her partner Giorgio in that part of the city that’s still the heart of publishing of different sorts.

I first met Giorgio at the end-of-year feasts several years ago, the occasion for surfacing these ties. He is more or less her opposite, according to her, and she occasionally finds this hard going but also bracing, like opting for a cold shower when one would run a hot bath if one only had the time. She and he are of an age when time presses more. Deadlines are real and cashflow depends on meeting them. Editors prize reliability in content and punctuality. Her writing process is at odds with this, very much like her father’s. I overcame it and now so has she. Her partner is free of this problem, having run his own show for a decade. He taught her how to ask for more money. She taught him the fine art of living with someone like her. These are works in mutual progress.

Her visit will be correspondingly brief, despite the difficulties of getting here from the big city. On paper, it’s not so very far, but once you leave the autostrada, it gets complicated. The road to Castello di Otranto is its own adventure, and the road to here can be actively dangerous. I prefer to drive it at night, when you can at least see the headlights of approaching cars and the road draws your attention from whatever is just beyond its edge. She arrived after dark, taking my advice.

She rises earlier than me, works wherever she can find shade, and disappears for hours at a stretch to make her way to the sea, as she likes to swim. I don’t like to swim, but I like the view. The sea is visible from higher up. I haven’t descended to the tiny beach in several years. The last time I went, with my oldest son, he had to help me on the way down. Going back up is easier. I don’t lack stamina, but trust myself less on rocky or otherwise uncertain paths.

We eat late, our one meal together. We share the cooking, enjoy the food we make, have a glass of wine with it, and talk for as long as suits us both. We seem in tune. If I have more appetite for solitude, her own desire for it is there, thwarted by the rest of life. I remember exactly this. It’s the situation of one kind of writer, fated to be in the world, even desirous of being there, but done in by it every single day, sapped by others despite a hunger for their company in different forms. Of the two of us, my wife and me, I’m the one innately sympathetic to this situation, whereas my wife yearns for what I think of as the orthodox progression. She tries not to say this directly, so of course it appears almost like a billboard in every conversation. No bad feelings attach to this on my daughter’s side. We are who we are, apparent to her from the beginning.

She tells me she has a great many things in manuscript, handwritten, most of them. Once in a while, she surfaces something and I marvel at it. Gather it somehow, I say, even now as we eat, but then I add that the gathering can often only occur when we have the time to do so. I wrote a great deal that was hard for me to categorize until much later, when I came back to it. A lot of what we write is a trial run for something else that gestates at its own glacial pace, especially if it’s ours, detached from editors or agents or readers who might press us to speed up. I note this.

When she goes off to swim, one part of me prays to the gods to preserve her. This has always been true. We make these pacts with them to see us through another day. Yet she expresses her own terror of the sea, the sort of terror it possesses by definition. I feel it too sometimes when a thunderstorm crashes in and the sky lights up. Fortunately, it rarely happens in the summer.

5.

In the winter, I think of abandoning the house and returning to civilization. Indeed, I do so, but in the summer, despite its provocations, I may question my sanity, but I never have that same urge to flee. The main worry in the winter is the road, since I have to drive it when the village is functioning. One of my sons mentioned that the latest cars can detect oncoming traffic to some extent. I wonder. It would have to see around rocky corners. Can it really do that? My ancient car has two horns, one meant to signal “I’m coming” without spooking the wildlife, a polite sort of a warning.

We sit at one corner of Rodolfo’s large table. She’s striking, Giulia, and animated when she talks. We’re good company, limiting our encounters as we do. This may be a trait of our type, this ability to amuse, explaining my inexplicable success with women, a wit intimating something more at those moments when, by coincidence, exactly that is desired. On the downward slope it’s reversed, of course, their expectations and my shortcomings plain to see. We never discuss this, but I draw on it if it relates, as I saw many different human types in my line of work.

And it’s all there in the fiction and poems, the memoir pieces and bits of theory or musings on life that make up my own work, as opposed to the criticism and analysis I wrote for money and to gain a reputation that fell perpetually short of an offer to teach. A measure of condescension from that quarter, in consequence. At conferences, on panels with the grandees of the overlapping worlds I covered, I served as a Greek chorus. It’s almost the only sympathetic role, I concluded much later.

Those days are behind me, but not behind my daughter, whose circle in the metropolis wins her an audience of her own. Only my fiction could be said to have an audience, based on the sales. As I noted before, I no longer keep up with everyday events except as they’re reflected in letters and, less often, in conversations. My barber, devoted to the Northern League, dreams of Italy’s splintering back into its myriad small states. Castello di Otranto in his mind would be one. Was it ever? I imagine it was appended to something larger, the “castle” a fortification of some kind. I’m not sure. It’s too late to revert to the status quo ante, although my daughter mentions that Meloni wants to exempt the north from its constant payments to the south, like the Germans, who view us similarly as a drain on their largesse.

I joke with Giulia about my barber’s ambitions for this tiny realm, of which this house is possibly its furthest outpost. “I should fly the flag of our republic, if that’s what it is.” Is there a flag? A question that I can’t answer, but likely there is, or a coat of arms of some kind that could be repurposed against tricolored bars. What colors? These are the right questions. “I’ll have an answer at Christmas,” I promise, “But think about it too. I’m open to suggestions.” She proposes a family competition, the winner to be chosen on New Year’s Eve. “I’ll ask the barber about its history,” I tell her, “or the postal clerk. She of all people may know something useful.”

Was it really a republic? Perhaps you’re its last, long-exiled prince returned, she says. “The decline and fall of some condottiere’s spawn, more likely, but prepared to wear my uniform again if I can find it, and repel invaders of our westmost beach.” I will raise the alarm, she promises.