The (Other) You Read online

  A kind of lovemaking, the Professor supposed. For this, he felt grateful, obscurely flattered.

  2.

  The Professor had booked them into the Mairead Grand Palace, the most luxurious of the old hotels of Mairead, meriting three stars in the Blue Guide. But when they arrived in their hired car, the Professor was dismayed to discover that the elegant eighteenth-century granite facade of the hotel was obscured by ugly scaffolding and that the square in front of the hotel, once so beautifully kept, had a look now of neglect; grasses poked through cracks in the cobblestones, and bits of litter blew in the wind like antic thoughts. Attached to the hotel, it seemed, was a café with few customers, rain-lashed umbrellas above tables with rusted tops.

  A family of squat, stout persons in summery tourist attire was descending the steps from the hotel entrance, spreading slowly out to take up most of the steps, like a kind of lava; the Professor and his wife were obliged to step aside, to let them pass. It wasn’t clear which persons in the family were adults and which were children for the children were nearly the same size as the adults. Rudely and gleefully they laughed, and would have collided with the Professor if he hadn’t quickly stepped aside, protecting his wife with an uplifted arm—“Excuse me!” But the children snorted with laughter, surging past the Professor and his wife without seeming to see them. Nor did the heavyset adults, descending the steps with annoying slowness, seem to see them, chattering in a language not Italian, indeed no language the Professor could recognize.

  The Professor’s wife was shaken. She’d had a close look at the children—those brute, blank faces! She dreaded her grandchildren growing up and forgetting her. Between infancy and approximately age ten, children are adorable, and grateful to be fussed over by grandparents; beyond that, they become unpredictable, unknowable. The Professor’s wife had a vision of their beloved grandchildren grown into brutes who pushed past their grandparents impatiently without a glance of recognition.

  “Are you all right, dear? Take my arm.”

  “Of course I’m all right! Don’t be ridiculous.” But the wife took the Professor’s arm, grateful to be comforted.

  She was shivering, disoriented. Two plane flights had drained her of her customary energy and optimism. In the hired car the Professor had nodded off in sleep but she’d been awake every moment.

  I will get through this, and I will bring him back home safely. I will bring gifts for everyone . . .

  Checking into the Mairead Grand Palace the Professor was relieved to see that the interior had not greatly changed since his last visit. At least, at first glance it did not seem to have greatly changed. The Professor recalled an opulent foyer with a gold-gilt rotunda ceiling, wine-colored velvet chairs and settees, mahogany furnishings; a pristine marble floor, and a sparkling fountain with nymphs at its center; an elegant tearoom behind tall lush ferns and lacquered Japanese screens, where a string quartet played in the late afternoon and evening. Now, when he looked more closely, the Professor could see that the wine-colored chairs and settees were replicas of the originals, in coarser materials; the marble floor had been replaced with simulated marble, with a plastic sheen; the ferns were still lush, but artificial. The tearoom and the fountain had vanished. The ornate rotunda ceiling had vanished and in its place was a lowered ceiling out of which was piped, not the soothing classical music of Vivaldi, Brahms, Beethoven, but harsh pop-rock music.

  “At least, they have our reservation,” the Professor remarked cheerfully to his wife, who was pressing the palms of her hands against her ears with a distressed expression. “Our room will be quiet, I’m sure.”

  Indeed their room, on the eighth, top floor of the hotel, was quiet, with a stillness that seemed unnatural, as in a museum, or a mausoleum; a place where time has mercifully ceased. Both the Professor and his wife were very tired from their long journey but the Professor did not follow the wife to bed immediately; instead, he stood at a window gazing out, searching for landmarks in the darkening city. At first he wasn’t sure where he was, and what had become of the University, the Museum of Antiquities, the Royal Observatory—then he located the Basilica with its tall lighted cross, and the Royal Palace, which was also lighted; there, the shadowy river—the Po; and there, flickering lights along the Promenade. His eyes filled with tears. He would not have wanted his wife to see him in so emotional a state; of the two, it was the wife who was “emotional” and the husband who was “rational”; it would only confuse the wife if she saw him wiping at his eyes for no evident reason.

  She is here, somewhere. Agustina!

  Sweeping upon the Professor like a flood, the anguish and yearning of his old, lost life in Mairead. How as a young Fulbright scholar he’d journeyed to Italy, to fabled Mairead, knowing that his life would be irrevocably changed. How in the early mornings he’d bicycled to the Museum of Antiquities, where he’d been given a carrel in the Department of Special Collections in which to work; how grateful he’d been, entrusted with precious documents out of the Collection, to translate a twelfth-century Italian exegesis on Aristotle, later revised and refined into his first publication. The kindness of Ricardo Albano, Director of Special Collections, who’d invited him several times to lunch at an elegant restaurant near the University and one memorable evening to dinner in his beautiful old brownstone residence on the Viale di Pignoli, when he’d introduced the young American to his wife and daughter.

  Agustina. A girl of sixteen, with whom he’d exchanged only murmured greetings at the time of their first—and only—meeting. How embarrassed the girl had been, to be introduced by her courtly father to the visiting American; a schoolgirl, in a school uniform, looking younger even than sixteen, with an olive-pale skin, dark evasive eyes, unusually thick brows.

  How absurd. He did not believe in such a thing, really—Love at first sight.

  Those many times after the Museum closed he’d drifted past the house on the viale. Telling himself that he was—only—going for a walk, to stretch his legs. Clear his head. Glancing up to see a face in an upstairs window of the distinguished old house—just the glimpse of a face, that sent shock waves through his body.

  Sick with love: lovesick. Chiding himself—But no. Absurd.

  Of course, it had been absurd. At twenty-four he was much too old for a schoolgirl of sixteen who’d looked (as he recalled) even younger. Proof of that absurdity was, in the years that followed, the Professor made no attempt to contact the daughter of Dr. Albano, nor even to determine what had become of her. Though he’d exchanged letters with Dr. Albano for many years he’d never dared ask personal questions. Then, fifteen years before this return to Mairead, their correspondence ceased. The Professor had not known why, and had not made inquiries. He’d reasoned that Dr. Albano had surely retired by that time. Very likely, the older man’s health was impaired. Possibly, he was no longer living.

  Though the Professor’s wife had heard many accounts of the Professor’s privileged time in Mairead as a Fulbright fellow, and knew the name Albano well, she’d never been told of her husband’s infatuation with Dr. Albano’s schoolgirl daughter. She’d never heard the name Agustina, nor was it likely that she ever would.

  * * *

  Abruptly wakened by a sound of jackhammers in the square outside!—morning came with a jolt.

  The Professor and his wife were obliged to rise earlier than they would have wished, for back home in the States it was not yet 2 A.M.

  The Professor had adjusted his watch to the new time the previous day. The wife had not, yet.

  The wife shuddered, for she’d had a dream of being cast adrift on a leaky barge, on a river; the worst of it was, she’d been alone, and it was one of the wife’s unacknowledged terrors, being alone, and lost, in a foreign place without her husband. The Professor had had a similar dream, of being forced to lie down on his back in water, in a sort of lumpy bed over which cold water rippled in a ceaseless stream like an ingenious form of torture.

  The Professor pointed out to his wife tha
t some dreams are explicable as (mere) neurological twitches and twinges, of no more significance than optical illusions. A dream isn’t real but its neurological processes might be said to be actual.

  “‘Real’—‘actual’—what difference does it make, if you are helpless and frightened?”—the wife objected.

  Her dreams had been brief, transient, startling visions—(indeed like water rippling over her brain)—from which she’d wakened in a state of panic. She was sure she’d been hearing the faint cries of a boatman. A tall lanky man with a pole, like a Venetian gondolier. The Professor laughed at this odd detail. He could depend upon his dear wife to come up with the most fanciful notions, to dispel tension. “But how romantic, my love! A Venetian gondolier in our hotel room!”

  The wife winced at this remark, for the Professor was often condescending, as if she were a bright child not to be taken altogether seriously. She considered, but rejected, telling him that the most frightening part of her dreams was that she’d been alone, without him, in this foreign place.

  “As long as you’re with me, I can’t be lost. So—don’t leave my sight, please!”

  Very winningly the wife smiled, as she’d learned to do, long ago.

  The Professor squeezed the wife’s fingers, to assure her.

  Imagining the Albano residence on the Viale di Pignoli. A face of wraith-like beauty in a window, awaiting him.

  * * *

  When they emerged from the Mairead Grand Palace bright sunshine washed away memories of the night. The café with the stained umbrellas was not yet open, and did not look so derelict as it had the previous night; vendors had not yet opened their stalls, and tourists were not milling about; the cobblestone square glistened as if there’d been a storm in the night.

  A short block from the hotel the Promenade was virtually deserted but the river sparkled with light.

  By early evening, the Professor said, half the city of Mairead would be strolling along the river. Couples, families, friends walking arm in arm like lovers . . . Forty years ago he’d ached with loneliness. His desire for the schoolgirl daughter of his revered mentor, of which he’d been ashamed. (Though not a soul had known of it, at the time or in subsequent years.) Walking along the Promenade the Professor began to speak avidly, excitedly. His wife saw how he was stroking his whiskered jaws and how his eyes glanced restlessly about, as if seeking a familiar face.

  Unlike the Professor the wife knew no foreign languages. It was all she could do to recognize a few Italian phrases and to make herself understood—barely—in carefully enunciated English. She was feeling subdued, slightly dazed. It wasn’t like her to cling to the Professor’s arm as if she feared him drifting away from her. His excitement was jarring to her for it excluded her. Did he have some particular, secret reason for his excitement? What was he expecting, in Mairead? The city did not seem so beautiful to the Professor’s wife as the Professor had described it.

  He is looking for—who? Someone.

  Everywhere she looked were very old walls that were cracked and crumbling and defaced with graffiti in lurid colors. Simply to see such signs of vandalism registered as a shock, like a shout in the face. Here and there along the Promenade were patches of thistles that had broken through the cracked pavement; jungle-like vines growing like sinewy snakes over walls and railings, some of the vines desiccated and broken. You could see, on the walls, the areas where vines had once been growing and had fallen away, skeletal imprints like outstretched imploring fingers.

  Blue Guide in hand, the Professor often came to a dead stop to consult it. The wife tried not to become impatient with these frequent starts and stops. She could see that pages of the Blue Guide were annotated in the Professor’s handwriting but many of the notations were faded. Also, the Professor was often baffled by discrepancies between the guidebook and the city itself. How embarrassing, his habit of stopping strangers to make inquiries, tapping a forefinger on the map in the book—“The War Memorial is supposed to be here, exactly where we are. But it isn’t here. D’you know where it is?”

  Strangers whom the Professor accosted in this way usually tried to assist him, though it wasn’t clear (to the wife) that they understood him. She wondered if her husband’s command of idiomatic Italian, of which he’d long been proud, had deteriorated in the years since he’d used it.

  “Maybe you should speak English to them. That might be easier.”

  “Obviously not! These are Italians, they speak Italian.”

  “Some of them speak English. . . .”

  “No. Not most of them. Not in Mairead.”

  At breakfast in the hotel the Professor had planned a walk along the Promenade that would lead them to one of the historic parts of the city, to the University, the Museum of Antiquities, and eventually to the elegant Viale di Pignoli. But after just a few minutes it was clear that Mairead was no longer a prosperous city: abandoned buildings lined much of the Promenade, as well as boathouses covered in graffiti and boat ramps no longer in use; of the numerous restaurants and cafés listed in the Blue Guide only a few remained, and these were not open. The Professor was eager to have lunch at a two-star Michelin restaurant near the Museum of Antiquities, to which Dr. Albano had once taken him; but Ripetta, it seemed, no longer existed unless (as the Professor suspected) it had passed into new ownership, and a new name . . .

  They were crossing wide, windswept piazzas with ornate, but no longer functioning, fountains at their centers, leaf-choked and abandoned. Tall weeds and thistles grew brazenly at the edges of cracked and uneven paving stones. Even tall trees were denuded of leaves, as if autumn had come early. Yet, the Professor was determined to seek out landmarks in the guidebook which he’d marked back in his study at home: the Royal Armory, squares dominated by military/heroic statuary—lions, eagles, elephants, generals on fiercely grimacing horses, brandishing swords. Another stroll along the Po River where (the Professor recalled) there’d been canoes for rent as well as privately owned sailboats, yachts, motorboats—now much diminished. And there—was that the Avenue of the Apostles?—or had they taken a wrong turn . . .

  As the Professor spoke to the wife, or read to her from the guidebook, the wife listened only intermittently, as she had long accustomed herself to listening to only a portion of the Professor’s pronouncements. For frequently her husband gave the impression of talking to himself, rehearsing piquant phrases, or thinking out loud; he wanted his wife beside him, for he required an audience, yet he did not really want her to respond to his remarks, and certainly he did not want her to interrupt with questions or comments. Frowning and squinting, stroking his bristling whiskers, the Professor seemed to the wife both pompous and endearing; often she was suffused with love for him, a sensation that could sweep upon her without warning; then, a few minutes later, when the Professor accosted a passerby to ask for directions, not seeming to notice how the passerby was confused by his Italian, she felt exasperation for him. Fiercely protective of her husband yet highly critical of him, intrigued by him yet (sometimes) frankly annoyed by him—the wife knew no one else for whom she felt such conflicting emotions.

  Of course—I love him. That will never change.

  Back home, in their university community, the Professor had acquired a reputation for eccentricity that wasn’t entirely deserved, the wife thought.

  His colleagues and graduate students admired him as the most distinguished member of his department even as they regarded him with a measure of (affectionate) bemusement, indulgence. Particularly the younger faculty members noted that the Professor was at times rather absentminded; he muddled their names, and seemed not to hear what they were saying to him so earnestly, to make an impression upon him. He was courteous to the young women in the department without (it seemed) taking them quite so seriously as he took the men. Yet, the Professor was a fount of scholarly knowledge and wisdom; he seemed to know everything in his field, at least up to ten or fifteen years ago, and he could recite long passages from seminal texts in the
original languages. He was tireless in his efforts to help their careers—his letters of recommendation were known to be masterpieces of generosity, erudition. It was amusing to observers that the Professor wore, in winter, a wooly black Astrakhan hat; coarse gray woolen socks with sandals; tweed sport coats with leather elbow patches. He was not handsome but rather what one would call “striking”—“Magisterial.” His hair was still abundant, faded to silver-white; his eyebrows were wiry and grizzled and would have obscured his vision if the vigilant wife did not keep them trimmed as she kept trimmed her husband’s mustache and whiskers and the more delicate hairs of the Professor’s ears and nostrils, with a miniature scissors.

  Ridiculous to fuss over his appearance, the Professor complained, embarrassed; but the wife insisted for she could not bear anyone laughing at her dear husband, unless it was herself.

  3.

  Following lunch (not at Ripetta, which seemed indeed to have vanished), the Professor suffered a rude jolt: the historic district of Mairead, parts of which dated to the eleventh century, had been much altered. Entire blocks of distinguished old buildings (including the southern edge of the university campus) had been razed, replaced by ugly, utilitarian buildings in the raw-cement Brutalist style as well as the most egregious of urban eyesores—multi-level parking garages. At the site of the Royal Observatory, to which the Blue Guide had given two stars, and which the Professor remembered distinctly, was a ragged soccer field upon which schoolboys in uniforms ran shrieking as hyenas. The Basilica di Santo Clemente, Mairead’s most notable landmark, was not where the map in the guidebook indicated, adjacent to the Casa di Russie and its elegant grounds, but several blocks away in a bustling commercial area. And then, to their disappointment, despite the steep admission price, eight euros, only a part of the Basilica was open to visitors, and this part did not contain the great works of art by Bernini and Michelangelo which the Professor had looked forward to seeing for the first time in forty years, and which had lingered in his memory like a potent dream.