Under the Rose. Flavia Alaya

incestuous terror in those eyes the moment he brought me to meet her. She thought I might actually have won him, so proud she stupidly imagined me, and yet in truth so secretly trembling in his power. Why did this twisted labyrinth of operatic Italian emotion make me feel so alive? I felt alive. I did my best work ever. Surges of genius flashed through me like galactic implosions. I felt tremendous, invincible. And yet tragic, tragic as the Lady of Shalott with the curse upon her. I wept inwardly, in a fury of baffled freedom.

      Spring came. On the great bluffs overlooking the Hudson, Damian kissed me, amid the unspeakable spring beauty of the Cloisters. He told me he loved me. I so longed to believe it, so believed it, that I could not see for the cloud of unknowing that wrapped my sight, that made the beauty of the lady in the great medieval tapestries there, the chaste and beautiful lady and the whitest white unicorn in the universe, swim before my eyes amid the green, the jasmine green of the world.

      And when he took me to a romantic senior dance and, afterward, pressing me down on the bed in his room and, lifting my soft yellow gown, said, “Let us do this now, let us finally do this”—and I had wanted to, yes, but not now, not yet, vorrei e non vorrei—and he had stood over me as I lay there on the edge of the bed and lifted me roughly by the thighs and pushed himself as far as his first hard thrust would go till I cried in pain—I had welcomed him in the surrendering agony of my mind.

      Damian left for Paris the August after I graduated. A year passed, some of it in misery, before I followed him to Europe.

      It is a long time, a year—long enough to bury your heart like a bone in the garden, long enough to imagine it bloom again.

      Long enough to transform the book of loving-to-know into the book of love.

       Part Two

       LA GIOCONDA

       1

      Perugia, October 1957. I had been nearly a month in Italy, and until this singularly fateful afternoon had felt nothing like such joy—not since the S.S. Giulio Cesare had docked in the Bay of Naples and dropped me for the first time in the hard lap of my father’s homeland. Oddly, I can remember all the prescient little details, racing to the headquarters of the University for Foreigners, darting up and down the city’s toothy hills in my new Italian heels, muttering a girlish prayer: Please God, don’t let me be late again, not for Luigi Barzini.

      And those miraculous new shoes!—carved by some ingenious Italian sculptor out of a deliciously edible-looking buttercream-color leather, unbelievably sexy, unbelievably soft. Leaving aside the fact that I could have run an Olympic 100-meter dash in them, they did things for my legs, a fact duly confirmed by the owner of a white Fiat who slowed down just long enough to pronounce judgment. It didn’t even occur to me at the time that I wasn’t supposed to love it. No macho had ever filled me with such a sudden bliss of entitlement, a conviction that all this—all this Italy—belonged to me.

      Damian had met me when I’d arrived in September. He had actually come to the pier like a facsimile of an eager lover. For months I had longed to see him. For more months I had dreaded it, for weeks, for days, up to the very dawn the ship pulled into the harbor and slumped shuddering into the pier. But there had been nothing to dread. I had instantly and unequivocally detested the sight of him.

      Fever blurs the scene, mitigating my indifference. I had caught the Asian flu—the asiatica—on board. Tiny Santina Dimichino, my father’s cousin, eyes shaded by an elegant gray Borsalino, is waving a huge white handkerchief and crying, “Flavia! Flavia!” my name suddenly new and beautiful in her mouth. Damian fades away, there is barely time for me to smell the salt of the Santa Lucia harborside or take in the bay awash in morning light, before Santina and I and cousins Gino and Maria, and a poor driver friend who has lent the car and is glumly crushed against the steering wheel, are all of us squeezed like bread stuffing into a tiny Cinquecento for the trip to their apartment, and I understandably go blank.

      By the time I come awake, the city is gone, and I am in my Zi’ Irena’s garden in Striano, thirty miles away. Two beautiful cousins, Alfonso and Carlo, are taking turns plucking ripe purple figs from the orchard and feeding them to me from their hands. Striano is a teeming world of cousins, many of them young, some of them the handsomest beings I have ever seen. But also the poorest. My cousin Anna, Zi’ Maria’s daughter, is ashamed to expose her poverty to me, thinking I will judge it. She cries, “Ah, Flavia, come siamo combinati!—how we live!”—blushing as she leads me up the metal stairway to a makeshift apartment where five of them struggle to live in a drying room of the family’s old spaghetti factory. They are kind. Unbearably so, my every wish their command. But I know that, with my soft American face unmarked by suffering, what they feel cannot all of it be love.

      So it was that after about three weeks with my cousins I had been rather glad to come away to Perugia, where new Fulbright grantees had been invited to be prepped for what was, sub rosa, really a year’s duty as paradiplomats for the Eisenhower State Department. And so it was that on this strangely sublime October day I had already been in the hilly Umbrian city a week—time enough to know I would always be late for afternoon lectures, time enough to have learned to sprint up those last few marble steps and, with my aerobic heart still pounding, let the blinding shade of the portico chill the sweat off me before I made my red-faced entrance through the front door of the lecture hall.

      But even as the familiar cool grabbed my hair, I could hear from deep inside an echoing riff of American laughter, unmistakable as bebop. In the frame of the great door, space and time collapse. My face abruptly meets his face shining above the thick black pillar of his cassock. Somebody shouts, “Canceled!” and he fractures the news back at us like some bad archangel: “Barzini has died! Barzini is risen! Barzini will come again!” Laughing, laughing with relief—for I have not missed the lecture after all—I let the momentum pivot me into reverse again. Somebody says, “Meet Father Browne.” Our eyes join in a sudden clearing of haze.

      I did not know I would love him. I thought I still loved someone I had left behind me. That day meant nothing more to me then than a reclaimed afternoon, a few sunny hours to sip vermouth under a yellow umbrella, to sail like an American fleet out to the Corso and into the bay of the piazza, Father Browne and the three of us: a young California composer named Paul Glass going to Milan, Anna McGill, a weaver from Milwaukee going to Florence—and me, a master’s year in English and comp lit at Columbia behind me, taking my Fulbright to Padua to read literature and politics at the university.

      This Cagney Irish priest named Browne was Father Henry J., a Catholic University professor on a research grant in immigration history, just arrived from New York. Paul had staked a personal and instant claim to him. I could see why: the movie star presence, the face a miracle of cunningless animal brightness like a feral child’s, the electric violence in his wonderful hair. He had a bristly military brush cut, black sketched with gray—more fur than hair, really—jump-starting from a sharp widow’s peak and surging back over that splendid head, which was set as squarely on his thick shoulders as a prizefighter’s. And he was funny. Before we’d even ordered our drinks he was off the runway like a Cessna in an updraft, everything Ful- or half-bright, the underbelly of every American careerist in Italy in his gunsights, soaring away as the laughter crashed. The timing infallible, one resistless jolt after another. My brain spun. I laughed as if he’d invented it, as if a depth charge were rupturing some deep archeology of Italian-woman seriousness crusted down in me like a buried sea of Sicilian salt.

      He asked me if I was from New York, and still daubing my eyes with a fingertip, I nodded yes. “Well, actually from New Rochelle,” I corrected. His burst of laughter was ruthless—the stab-laugh of a comic with a ready punchline. His face came at me in a