The romance with Chiara started on the beach. Then he neglected tennis and took up bike rides with her and her friends in the late afternoons in the hill towns farther west along the coast. One day, when there was one too many of them to go biking, Oliver turned to me and asked if I minded letting Mario borrow my bike since I wasn’t using it.
It threw me back to age six.
I shrugged my shoulders, meaning, Go ahead, I couldn’t care less. But no sooner had they left than I scrambled upstairs and began sobbing into my pillow.
At night sometimes we’d meet at Le Danzing. There was never any telling when Oliver would show up. He just bounded onto the scene, and just as suddenly disappeared, sometimes alone, sometimes with others. When Chiara came to our home as she’d been in the habit of doing ever since childhood, she would sit in the garden and stare out, basically waiting for him to show up. Then, when the minutes wore on and there was nothing much to say between us, she’d finally ask, “C’è Oliver?” He went to see the translator. Or: He’s in the library with my dad. Or: He’s down somewhere at the beach. “Well, I’m leaving, then. Tell him I came by.”
It’s over, I thought.
Mafalda shook her head with a look of compassionate rebuke. “She’s a baby, he’s a university professor. Couldn’t she have found someone her own age?”
“Nobody asked you anything,” snapped Chiara, who had overheard and was not about to be criticized by a cook.
“Don’t you talk to me that way or I’ll split your face in two,” said our Neapolitan cook, raising the palm of her hand in the air. “She’s not seventeen yet and she goes about having bare-breasted crushes. Thinks I haven’t seen anything?”
I could just see Mafalda inspecting Oliver’s sheets every morning. Or comparing notes with Chiara’s housemaid. No secret could escape this network of informed perpetue, housekeepers.
I looked at Chiara. I knew she was in pain.
Everyone suspected something was going on between them. In the afternoon he’d sometimes say he was going to the shed by the garage to pick up one of the bikes and head to town. An hour and a half later he would be back. The translator, he’d explain.
“The translator,” my father’s voice would resound as he nursed an after-dinner cognac.
“Traduttrice, my eye,” Mafalda would intone.
Sometimes we’d run into each other in town.
Sitting at the caffè where several of us would gather at night after the movies or before heading to the disco, I saw Chiara and Oliver walking out of a side alley together, talking. He was eating an ice cream, while she was hanging on his free arm with both of hers. When had they found the time to become so intimate? Their conversation seemed serious.
“What are you doing here?” he said when he spotted me. Banter was both how he took cover and tried to conceal we’d altogether stopped talking. A cheap ploy, I thought.
“Hanging out.”
“Isn’t it past your bedtime?”
“My father doesn’t believe in bedtimes,” I parried.
Chiara was still deep in thought. She was avoiding my eyes.
Had he told her the nice things I’d been saying about her? She seemed upset. Did she mind my sudden intrusion into their little world? I remembered her tone of voice on the morning when she’d lost it with Mafalda. A smirk hovered on her face; she was about to say something cruel.
“Never a bedtime in their house, no rules, no supervision, nothing. That’s why he’s such a well-behaved boy. Don’t you see? Nothing to rebel against.”
“Is that true?”
“I suppose,” I answered, trying to make light of it before they went any further. “We all have our ways of rebelling.”
“We do?” he asked.
“Name one,” chimed in Chiara.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“He reads Paul Celan,” Oliver broke in, trying to change the subject but also perhaps to come to my rescue and show, without quite seeming to, that he had not forgotten our previous conversation. Was he trying to rehabilitate me after that little jab about my late hours, or was this the beginnings of yet another joke at my expense? A steely, neutral glance sat on his face.
“E chi è?” She’d never heard of Paul Celan.
I shot him a complicit glance. He intercepted it, but there was no hint of mischief in his eyes when he finally returned my glance. Whose side was he on?
“A poet,” he whispered as they started ambling out into the heart of the piazzetta, and he threw me a casual Later!
I watched them look for an empty table at one of the adjoining caffès.
My friends asked me if he was hitting on her.
I don’t know, I replied.
Are they doing it, then?
Didn’t know that either.
I’d love to be in his shoes.
Who wouldn’t?
But I was in heaven. That he hadn’t forgotten our conversation about Celan gave me a shot of tonic I hadn’t experienced in many, many days. It spilled over everything I touched. Just a word, a gaze, and I was in heaven. To be happy like this maybe wasn’t so difficult after all. All I had to do was find the source of happiness in me and not rely on others to supply it the next time.
I remembered the scene in the Bible when Jacob asks Rachel for water and on hearing her speak the words that were prophesied for him, throws up his hands to heaven and kisses the ground by the well. Me Jewish, Celan Jewish, Oliver Jewish—we were in a half ghetto, half oasis, in an otherwise cruel and unflinching world where fuddling around strangers suddenly stops, where we misread no one and no one misjudges us, where one person simply knows the other and knows him so thoroughly that to be taken away from such intimacy is galut, the Hebrew word for exile and dispersal. Was he my home, then, my homecoming? You are my homecoming. When I’m with you and we’re well together, there is nothing more I want. You make me like who I am, who I become when you’re with me, Oliver. If there is any truth in the world, it lies when I’m with you, and if I find the courage to speak my truth to you one day, remind me to light a candle in thanksgiving at every altar in Rome.
It never occurred to me that if one word from him could make me so happy, another could just as easily crush me, that if I didn’t want to be unhappy, I should learn to beware of such small joys as well.
But on that same night I used the heady elation of the moment to speak to Marzia. We danced past midnight, then I walked her back by way of the shore. Then we stopped. I said I was tempted to take a quick swim, expecting she would hold me back. But she said she too loved swimming at night. Our clothes were off in a second. “You’re not with me because you’re angry with Chiara?”
“Why am I angry with Chiara?”
“Because of him.”
I shook my head, feigning a puzzled look meant to show that I couldn’t begin to guess where she’d fished such a notion from.
She asked me to turn around and not stare while she used her sweater to towel her body dry. I pretended to sneak a clandestine glance, but was too obedient not to do as I was told. I didn’t dare ask her not to look when I put my clothes on but was glad she looked the other way. When we were no longer naked, I took her hand and kissed her on the palm, then kissed the space between her fingers, then her mouth. She was slow to kiss me back, but then she didn’t want to stop.