* * *
Ardito! Your name means courage, as their first commandment went. Run into battle! Victory at any cost!
Switzerland for schooling.
Holidays at Como. Waiting in short pants. Waiting for a shiny car to come and take him. His father’s driver.
The occasional weekend in Brera. Trips to Rome with his father, twice visiting Cinecittà to see producers his father knew. Movie stars. Sports cars like wraparound sunglasses. Umbrella pines above the studio café, Sandro unsure how to speak to his own father. Sipping his aranciata as a camera slid past on a dolly — it was a big black heart, with its two film reels, a heart or an upside-down ass, and the cameraman peered through its viewfinder, trailing the slinky steps of a woman in a white dress.
He never liked his father much, an old, strange man who relished in dampening Sandro’s fun in the same way Roberto did. They were alike, his father and Roberto, in that one way, and unalike in other ways. Roberto did not care how things were made, as their father did. Roberto liked to dominate, and he liked it when other people showed their weakness. Sandro cared how things were made, and what you did with made things. He liked machines. He liked guns. He never loved motorcycles the way his father had, but Sandro’s father was busy running Valera operations and barely rode motorcycles by the time Sandro was born. What Sandro remembered was his father posing for photographs on the new Moto Valera sport models, an old dapper man in his Brioni suit, clutching the handlebar grips.
His father was cruel to his mother, and this might have been cause for an intimate alliance between mother and son, but he never liked his mother much, either, so he allowed no alliance. Because she was mean. A naturally mean person. Only once did he feel something like sympathy for her. The war had ended and they were back in Milan, at the house in Brera. Sandro was ten. His father, just returned from Brazil, was in the hall removing a woolen scarf that sparkled with raindrops. He looked up at his wife’s open, eager face as she stood on the landing, the geometry of its balustrade, perfect right angles and folds repeating themselves up and up, bending out of view, and her anticipation, her own oppressive need for order and right angles and patterns all there, exposed, as if the landing were a stage. His father had looked at his mother, at the dress she had on, layers of transparent material that altogether were shiny and opaque, the heels and pearls and her hair curled under on each side of her face like two treble clefs, and Sandro’s father had frowned.
“You should take a lover,” he’d said. Then he went into his study, to the right of the stairs. Shut the door and latched it.
Sandro’s mother gripped the banister. She was crying and didn’t bother to wipe the tears. That was the only time he ever really felt anything for his mother, who had prepared so intently, with such foolish hope, for her husband’s return and was punished for being eager, in front of her children and the servants. She had gone off to the kitchen after that and yelled at the cooks, really let them have it. As she called them idiot and cretin Sandro felt each insult, not as the recipient but the one who delivered, his mother’s anger like bullets shooting from his own fingertips.
She never did take a lover as far as he knew. Now she had the American writer, the old blowhard, but Sandro could not imagine they were intimate, it seemed somehow impossible, but he knew the impossibility was in him and not between his mother and the writer. It saddened him to think his mother had gone from an imperial force like his father to a silly man who thought his incessant blather was proof of anything, virility or knowledge. The moment the mouth opened the mind shut down, was Sandro’s feeling. But his mother had power now, which she never did when Sandro’s father was alive, and that was something. To make your own decisions.
* * *
He thought a lot about the man who had drowned, or tried to, in the East River. Sandro had saved one man and shot another in the hand and the one he’d saved had not wanted to live. The look on the man’s face, trapped with the living. Lost and alive. The layers and layers of the man’s drenched winter coats, too heavy for Sandro to lift him out. He had weighted himself to guarantee his passage to death. All those coats pulling him down had reminded Sandro of a tribe his father had told him about, deep in the Amazon of Brazil, who weighted themselves with stones so that their souls would not wander away. Sandro had asked more, but his father brushed him off. It became an obsession for him as a boy, this idea of people trying to keep their souls from escaping. He read about other tribes in other parts of the world, Borneo and New Guinea, people for whom the soul was a contingent and skittish thing that could be chased out or lost or worse. It might run away. It had to be kept from leaving you, whether with seduction or stays or hooks or with heavy stones.
That the soul was not a fact, a simple thing you were, and possessed, had seemed to Sandro so reasonable. Still he believed it. That reality, in a sense, was not an objective place where you were thrust. You had to maintain your hold on it by vigilantly keeping watch over whatever slight and intangible thing gave your life its meaning. Call it a soul, or presence. Whatever it was, a prisoner or guest and you had to trick it or petition it into lingering.
People weighted themselves, Sandro knew, if not with stones.
A movie, a lover. Friends. Complicities. A certain amount of success. These were decent crutches, provided they could be changed up often enough. And art, of course. Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.
As a child, his soul felt airy and evanescent, something that was filled only with longings and boredom he knew to be Italian and Catholic. Church with his mother and brother. Women sweeping the sacristy steps with sorghum brooms. Lifeless Madonnas in their blue shawls, always that same shade of blue: piety, sky, forgetting. The hope that comes of mystery and emptiness (hollow plaster). The organ’s resounding pipes as the congregation sang the “Stabat Mater,” which overflowed its subject, the sorrows of Mary, her suffering an image all men could look to, the tear-streaked face. The music surged in and widened the space of his little soul. It made him light. It filled him with something, sadness and jubilation for experiences that were not his own. Or they were his own, but they had transmutated to sweet and overwhelming song.
Fac ut ardeat cor meum in amando Christum Deum.
Make my heart burn with love for Christ.
But the translation sheet said “soul.” “Make my soul glow and melt.” For young Sandro mouthing these words in his high voice it was enough to want to burn ardently, not a secular plea, but neither a plea to merge with a mother’s suffering, even the wife of God. To make the heart burn. With something.
FAC UT ARDEAT. A phrase his father put above the hearth. A clever command, To make burn. And wood was deposited there. But probably it was not merely a joke, and related to his father’s own past as an Ardito. An ardent one. Who had burned with the ardor that made him dash into war, toward death, and then toward money and power. The phrase could not be reduced to its imprisonment in the literal, above the hearth. The burning of. The soul, glowing and melting — there or gone, lost or escaped — was what mattered.
But if you let your soul go? Let it wander? Would it eventually come home to you? Was it like love in that sense? A thing you had to set free to experience? Even to encounter? Whoever encountered love was so lucky. He meant encountered it not as a might have been but as it was. There was maybe no such thing. His father said history was always late for its date with itself. It was late, it was early, it was before and after its own time. Italy was always missing its rendezvous with itself. The timing of its becoming a nation had not worked, and no one believed in the Risorgimento. The North and the South were never in sync. People had their revelations too early or too late. They were always missing their appointments with themselves. Well. With each other, too. Ronnie was the only appointment Sandro had managed to keep, a friendship he’d recognized the moment they met. He had maintained it all along, it was a connection that happened in time. Not in fantasy, not in hindsight. But he hadn’t exactly managed anything, it was just luck, like love was luck. It was chance. They knew when they saw each other what they were each looking at. He and Ronnie were almost mirror images, meaning opposites. It was love at some wry distance. Rivalry. It would outlast actual love, he knew that, there was no question of it.