By Victor Greto
At first, I couldn’t make him understand me. He thought I was looking for my grandfather.
Dorothy was in the next room waiting. From the corner of my eye I could see her peering in every once in a while, unsure.
Finally, I told him my grandfather had died in America a long time ago, that I was looking for his sister, Lucrezia, and the address I had just given him was what my mother back home in America had given me. The address was decades old, and none of us had any idea if the woman was still alive, still lived in the mountains of the Abruzzi, or even if she herself had gone to America.
When he finally realized my grandfather was dead, his tone changed completely, and he told the rest of the tourist people in the office with him that he was dead. They looked at me sadly.
They brought out a map of the area and the man who spoke halting English pointed to where the address was. It was in the mountains, off a dirt road. He looked up the address in the phone book and spoke with the person who lived there. It ended up that he was a cousin of my grandfather’s sister who spoke no English.
The man looked at me while on the phone and asked if I wanted directions to the place. I nodded yes, and he drew a thick turquoise line from road to road. His index finger pointed to the place.
He nodded with satisfaction. There it is, he said.
I thanked him for his trouble, shook his hand, nodded to the rest of the people there, and walked out with the map. They followed me to the door. They said Good luck to me in Italian and Dorothy and I walked to our rented car.
Chieti is a town almost directly east of Rome by the Adriatic. We had just come down from Rimini where we had spent two days on the beach. Chieti sits atop a mountain. We got to it by driving up a circular road.
When we got into the car, I pointed the place out to Dorothy.
“That’s it,” she said simply. She looked at me, puzzled.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He can’t speak a word of English.”
“So you don’t want to go?”
“I don’t know,” I said again.
Through the windshield of the car I saw my mother’s surname on a store. I smiled and shook my head. “No, I don’t want to go. I couldn’t say a word to them. I have no idea.”
I started the car and drove back the way we had come, down the road, down the mountain.
Dorothy was not Italian. She was my wife, we had been married eight years, and we were thinking of getting a divorce. I had convinced her to come to Italy with me, that just perhaps it might change things between us. It hadn’t.
We were together as we had been together for the past six years, and that was all. I was not who I wanted to be, and I had no idea what she was or wanted to be. I simply wasn’t interested. And I knew that finally, after all these years, she wasn’t interested either.
We drove across the mountains into the center of Italy toward Rome. It wasn’t too long of a drive, but Rome turned out to be a nightmare. The traffic was horrendous, I just missed hitting two cars, and while trying to find a hotel we ended up in the middle of a piazza surrounded by people who swarmed about us. We were stopped by the carabinieri, cops who checked out our passports and my American license. They let us go after I pretended I had no idea what was going on.
Dorothy, in tears, demanded to leave Rome, and I drove right through to the highway that led north to Florence.
When we had gotten only halfway there it was dark and we were both tired. So we stopped at a remote hotel miles before Florence called the Palomino.
The guy at the desk wrote down the amount it cost to stay there one night and we looked at each other the way we had looked at each other for the past eight years. The man lowered the price. I nodded and took out my credit card.
The room was what we had expected, plain and lifeless. She turned on the television before she went into the bathroom, and I listened to an Italian movie; a priest was being tempted by a beautiful girl.
She took a while in the bathroom and I lay on the bed, which was hard, and stared at the movie.
The sheets seemed dusty and everything so very quiet when we got into bed without a word. We fell asleep almost immediately.
I was the first to wake.
It was bright and sunny. I walked to the window and looked out. It was very peaceful and green, insects buzzing, distant voices, and then rolling hills.
I wished like I had always wished, not to have been me for a moment, to just disappear into that countryside. Perhaps then I would know. I remained where I was.
I turned my head around, my body still facing the window and sun, and watched Dorothy’s face, eyes and mouth sleep. Each morning she looked that way, small creases around her mouth, her short, upturned nose moving slightly, her closed eyes, somehow, smiling.
I turned and went to her, one knee on the bed, my hand on my hip. I wondered if she had ever watched me sleep in the morning and what she thought and what I looked like when I slept.
When she suddenly opened her eyes, I saw them look at me like a fish’s would, her face still, caught. I turned as suddenly away, walking to the window, and remarked how beautiful a day it was becoming.
She said nothing, and when I turned around her eyes were closed once more, her muted face pressed against the pillow.
© 2023 Victor Greto