Obviously, within just two generations, the depletion of the aristocratic line was nearly complete, and the sole heir to the villa would be Beatrice’s half Irish-American son, David, who with his German wife would put the property back together again and presumably pass it on to their half German, one quarter American, and one quarter Italian children. Somewhere during the evening Beatrice had told me that her son’s middle name was Sandro after her uncle, the original heir, who had died in the driveway after a lifetime of incarceration because his father was determined not to have a peasant in the family line.
* * *
The night Beatrice told me the story of her uncle Sandro, we stayed up talking until very late, and she appeared to find me agreeable company. She told me she was going to Firenze for the weekend, and when I got up the next morning, my head bleary from the two bottles of wine we had finished off, her little car was already gone. It was another in a series of perfect days, sunny and hot, and I made my tea and sat out on the terrace with my notebook, reconstructing the details of our conversation. I heard the door of the cousins’ apartment open, and then from under the arbor a small, foppish man appeared, patting at the pockets of his jacket to find, I presumed, his car keys. He had thin blond hair, which must have been a lifelong trial for an Italian, skillfully trimmed at the front to disguise his prominent domed forehead. His eyes were close-set, of a leaden hue. Like his cousin, he had a strong aquiline nose that started between his brows. A colorless mouth over a receding chin made the bottom half of his face seem to fade away. This must be Luca, the psychiatrist who had never married and lived with his sister. I rattled my cup in the saucer to catch his attention. He looked up and found me in the shadows. “Buongiorno,” I said boldly.
He smiled, a tight, patient smile designed to disarm. “Good morning,” he said very correctly and clearly. He knew all about me, no doubt: that I was an American, a professor who didn’t speak Italian. “How are you enjoying your visit?” He approached me hesitantly. If I was dismissive, he could still turn off toward his car.
I put down my pen. “I’m enjoying it very much,” I said. “Thank you.”
He took a few steps closer. “My name is Luca,” he said. “I am Beatrice’s cousin.”
“My name is Jan,” I offered.
“You are Beatrice’s colleague, I believe.” Now he was very close, and we both lowered our voices appropriately.
“Actually, I’m a colleague of a colleague,” I said.
“And you teach English literature?”
“I teach creative writing,” I said. Instantly and as always I wanted to bite back this incriminating factoid.
“Ah,” he said. “I’m not sure I understand how that can be done.”
“You’re not alone,” I said.
He smiled again, an odd, indulgent smile, recognizing this as a subject that pained me and undecided, as he must professionally be, whether to pursue it or allow me to drift off on my own. “I see,” he said.
“Your English is very good,” I said. “How did that happen?”
“I fear it is rusty from disuse,” he demurred. “I studied in America many years ago. I was in Boston for two years. I have never been colder in my life.”
“Boston is brutal,” I agreed.
He nodded, allowing his gaze to wander over the table, the teapot, my notebook. “But you are working and I am disturbing you.”
“Not at all,” I said.
Again he said nothing. His facial muscles resolved into an expression of unruffled, undistracted listening. Listening for what I said next. His eyes suffused with interest. If we were in his office, he would doubtless say something like, And what brings you here to talk to me today? I looked down at my page—notes about Sandro Salviati—and it occurred to me that this Luca was Marco’s son. And Marco, according to Beatrice, was a fascist.
I raised my eyes, determined to say nothing.
“Is this your first visit to Italy?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I came just after college, a long time ago. I was with a couple of friends and we went to cities mostly. Rome, Florence, Milan, Venice. Over the years I’ve made trips to Rome to visit a colleague I have there. This is my first time in Tuscany. I’ve always wanted to see the hill towns.”
“Yes,” he said. “The hill towns are fascinating to tourists.”
As he spoke, I heard a rustle beneath the wisteria and I glanced past his shoulder to see the crouching crone, his sister, Mimma, peering out from the edge of the arbor. “Luca,” she commanded in a high-pitched screech. “Vieni subito!”
Come at once. I understood and so did he, but he didn’t appear to be moved by her urgency. “My sister is a very anxious person,” he observed. “And sometimes she becomes confused. I believe she gave you some difficulty about the key.”
“It was my fault,” I said. “Because my Italian is so poor.”
“It is always somebody’s fault,” he observed cryptically.
I have a strong aversion to practitioners of the psychiatric profession, and not without reason. I know they can help desperate patients, particularly those who suffer from severe depression, and that there may be among them many individuals who sincerely want to ease the burden of helpless sufferers or who are themselves skeptical about their own practice. My brief against them is personal. Their reductive representation of human psychological complexity offends me as a writer. I abhor the trend among young writers who endow their characters with various syndromes or complexes they’ve discovered in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a diabolical tool for assessing psychopathy which is updated every few years with reappraisals and refinements of symptoms ad absurdum, created to provide drug companies with new mental disorders they can then manufacture a drug to treat.
As a teacher, I blame both parents and psychiatrists for the many students who arrive in my writing classes paralyzed by dependence on psychotropic drugs. Not long ago I passed an otherwise satisfying fall semester watching a lively, talkative, nervous young writer whose prose style zinged with energy transform into a trembling zombie, hardly able to carry on a conversation, much less write a coherent sentence. By the end of the spring semester, when she dropped out of college, she had lost twenty pounds. Hers was not an unusual case. Late-night emails lamenting that a paper wouldn’t be submitted by the deadline, or that attendance at class was unlikely, often cited “difficulty adjusting to a new medication” as the cause.
And finally, I hold the psychiatric profession responsible for the American reader’s fierce determination to understand character, in fiction and in real life, as necessarily the result of victimization. For such readers, character development is a free-will-free zone, and people turn out the way they do because of what has been done to them. Confronted with complex characters, my students invariably search for the abuse that excuses willful malice or just mindless self-destruction. Emma Bovary fails to arouse their sympathy—everyone was always nice to her, and her husband adored her. Why can’t she be happy with the choices she makes? She should be on medication.