IHAD PLANNED TO STAY IN ITALY only three weeks, studying art history at the University of Padua. On the last day of class, my professor, a striking Milanese woman named Sofia Gallione, invited me over for coffee. I assumed she’d extended similar invitations to all her students, yet I couldn’t suppress the crackle of hope in my chest as I ascended the stairway to her flat. Perhaps she had glimpsed in my final paper on Titian some nascent brilliance worth fostering. In my visions of this evening, she would beg me to carry out the rest of the summer as her research assistant.
I was only twenty, driven by a dreamy conviction that life would unfold exactly the way I wanted. Others told me I floated through the world. This they said with a mixture of pity and scorn. I didn’t know what they meant; I’m still not sure I do.
Sofia’s flat was in a yellow building around the corner from the main piazza. The entryway afforded me a view of the living room and adjacent kitchen, which was narrow, with chipping white cabinetry and an electric stove. A vase of dahlias rested on the mantel, the blooms so round they looked fake.
We sat at a table with a mahogany chessboard. Sofia asked me where I was from and what my goals were. I said that I planned to get my PhD and specialize in the work of Suzanne Valadon, a French artist known for her unconventional nudes.
Sofia leaned in as I spoke. She had green eyes that went transparent when touched by the sun. If you rolled a dirty coin down the meridian of her face, you would meet resistance only at her nose, a dramatic Roman nose that augmented her beauty into the sublime. Her earrings featured a Benedictine cross. Once, she had been religious. I imagined she’d taken to academia to offset the loss of her previous doctrines.
She picked up a rook from the chessboard. The reason she’d invited me over, she said, was to ask if I’d care for her son, Marco. His nanny had run off to Malta with a Dutch merchant on holiday. It was too late to go through the task of finding another English-speaking girl to take her place; such affairs were settled months in advance. I was already here, she continued, rolling the rook between her palms as if to thin it. Besides, I possessed the ideal disposition for the role.
“Oh?”
“Very maternal. You’ve heard this before?”
“No, never.”
“Interesting.”
Even in the moment, the irony of her proposal did not pass me by. I had badly wanted her to recognize something in me, and she had, only it wasn’t what I’d expected. At that age I took my future as a burgeoning scholar seriously and wished others would as well. I didn’t want to be perceived as maternal, a quality that struck me as the antithesis of everything intellectual. The imposing presence of children, with their cries and coughs and bodily needs, seemed incompatible with a life devoted to books.
A honk from outside drew my attention to the balcony. I could make out the misaligned slopes of the city’s red roofs across the way. From the arcaded street below rose the sounds of women gossiping on their way home from the market. A dreamcatcher strung around the door handle caught the light and fell back into shadow. I felt certain one of Sofia’s American students had given it to her.
“You can stay here,” Sofia said. “Next week we’ll go to the seaside.”
It was a kind offer, I said, but truly, I had no babysitting experience.
She waved this off. “Women have an instinct for caretaking. It’s in our DNA.”
That night, I phoned my parents to tell them of my decision to stay. In the hours since leaving Sofia’s, I had warmed to the idea, burnishing a defense in case either should suggest domestic work was beneath me. To my surprise, both reacted encouragingly—one of the rare times they were in accord. How fantastic, my mother said. Now I’d have an opportunity to experience the real Italy.
I ventured out for supper. The dizzying heat of the day had diffused into a mist over the river. Hosts waited in the entryways of restaurants, trying to lure tourists inside. Through the window of an enoteca, I watched a group of friends sing “Happy Birthday” around a cake. The lyrics were different, but the tune was the same. Probably it was the same anywhere you went.
“Table for one?” asked the host, a slender man dressed head to toe in red, seizing on my interest.
“No, thanks.”
He pursed his lips; I was blocking the entrance. I muttered an apology and meandered down the block. The blunt edge of loneliness dug into me. The main square was deserted. In front of the duomo, a beggar asked me for change. I held out my palms to show her that I had none. Only a few vendors remained, trying to hawk the last of their goods. I listened to their eager hollers: Signorina! Signorina!
The following morning, I moved into the attic of Sofia’s flat. The apartment’s poor wiring meant I couldn’t simultaneously operate the window air-conditioner and a hairdryer without blowing a fuse. I had my own claw-foot tub.
In the kitchen, Marco sat at the table, licking powdered sugar from his lips. Even at six he had the elongated neck of an Irish setter. He was drawing something, though wouldn’t show me what. “Guarda!” he cried, lifting his pencil between his finger and thumb and wobbling it so the yellow wood appeared to bend.
He was training himself to be a magician. For Christmas, his grandparents had purchased him a deck of cards that would eject the four of clubs from its center when tapped. Marco liked this trick, though it wasn’t his favorite. His favorite involved materializing objects in midair—a coin, a pair of scarlet cloths, a crochet ball.
A photograph of Sofia and her husband stood propped on the counter beside the butter dish. I studied it. Giovanni Gallione had sharp cheekbones and unruly dark hair. He looked amiable enough. The photo had been taken on a beach, probably by a stranger. I liked to imagine that, somehow, I had taken it; that that stranger had been me.
Over the next few days, Sofia and I fell into a pattern. Every morning before she turned to working on her book, she would flip to a new page in her collection of chess problems and arrange the board in the kitchen. For the next fifteen minutes or so, she would study the squares with intense concentration. Sometimes she’d stand to pace, picking up the knight and setting it back down. Eventually, she grew frustrated—first with herself and then with the game, as if it were taunting her. Only then did she return to her study to work.
Marco demanded my interest in each of his curiosities, no matter how banal. He spoke in pidgin English only when his mother was nearby to scold him out of Italian. Alone, he was more stubborn, feigning ignorance when I told him to turn off the TV or brush his teeth. His grasp of the Italian language must have made him feel superior to me, and he took pleasure in ordering for us both when we went out for gelato. A man buying ice cream for his lady. He laughed when he heard me ask for directions and said I sounded stupid. Stupido—that was his favorite word.
During that first week, I worked hard to appear unintimidated by Sofia’s sophistication. When she mentioned an artist I didn’t know, I affected recognition, making a mental note to research the name later. I suspect at least some of the people she mentioned were fictional, that she was amused by my brownnosing. When her friends came around, she introduced me as “the American.” I imagined they were all impressed by me, and that they’d telephone later to ask Sofia where she’d found such a clever girl.
To these friends, Sofia indulgently showed off the gifts Giovanni sent from abroad: an embossed cigar case, a jade bracelet, silk bedsheets so delicate that simply touching them felt indecent. The latter arrived with a handwritten note, which Sofia read to herself, her lips twisting around the words. When she glanced up and noticed me watching, she furtively clutched the paper to her chest.
At the end of my first week, Sofia knocked on the attic door and asked, “Where is the spatula?”
I had not seen it. Nor had I seen the clogs she kept by the doormat for taking out the trash.
With each passing day, another object disappeared: a pair of Armani sunglasses, a prized mollusk shell from Slovenia, the coffee-table book of Hopper paintings. By the third time Sofia inquired about an object’s whereabouts, it was with more than a hint of suspicion. Yet she didn’t throw me out. She probably reasoned that if I had taken these things, I must need them more than she.
And then, at last, it was time for us to go to the shore. Giovanni would be flying in from Shanghai and driving with us to the coast. “Please pack Marco’s things,” she said.
I shuffled into Marco’s room to find his suitcase. In the corner of the closet, a glint of metal caught my eye: the spatula. It was stacked beside the other missing items, tucked behind a regiment of stuffed animals. I decided not to mention the stolen items to Sofia, opting instead to replace them when she dashed out. I didn’t believe Marco intended to get me in trouble, though I do think he wanted someone to notice the objects’ absence.
Sofia cleaned the entire flat in preparation for Giovanni’s arrival, wiping down the countertops and clearing the stack of invitations piled on the sofa. She sponged the red sauce that had crusted on the stove, removed the hair from the drain, refilled the water pitcher. She laid out two dresses on the bed and had me select one. She smiled at my choice; Giovanni had had it made custom for her in Hong Kong.
Her lurch toward the domestic surprised me. With news of her husband’s arrival, she transformed into the consummate housewife. A sense of wonder subsumed my repulsion. I had believed she of all people would be above such efforts and labored to wed this new version of her to the woman who had confidently led my seminar through the halls of the Gallerie dell’Accademia weeks before. Had I made any long-lasting friends in that class, I might have taken joy in deconstructing her every move with them.
At noon on the day of Giovanni’s arrival, the phone rang. There had been a holdup in Shanghai; he had missed his flight. He planned to meet us at the seaside instead. “Sure, that’s fine,” Sofia said. Only her face, which I could see but Giovanni could not, revealed the violence of her hurt. She hung up and fiddled with the strings of her orange halter dress—the one from Hong Kong. “The bastard,” she said as the tie came undone. With one hand pinning the top of the dress in place, she swept her arm over the chessboard, sending pieces flying. A pawn rolled to my feet. “Tell Marco we’re leaving in twenty minutes,” she whispered.
We loaded up the Fiat. The journey took longer than expected. Outside, the view of rolling plains was spoiled by the nearer sight of utility poles, derelict factories, squat warehouses. Sofia turned on the radio and flipped from station to station. Marco was sensitive to his mother’s irritation. He stamped his feet against the back of her seat. “I’m hot!” he whined, fanning himself with his hand.
Sofia said he was probably just tired—why not shut his eyes and nap?
This only made him angrier. His face reddened. “Why are you so stupid? That’s why Daddy didn’t come, because you’re stupid! I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”
Sofia reached back and swatted his leg. He jerked it away and laughed, pleased with his reflexes, before his glee canted once more toward upset. I felt obliged to defuse the situation but wasn’t sure how. I sat very still, imagining each part of my body slowly turning invisible.
On the side of the highway, two women in push-up bras and nylons stood stationed with identical expressions of apathy. One had on a synthetic jet-black wig, a safety pin speared through her bottom lip, the other a blond wig and a tight white shirt. Though neither glanced at me, I felt sure they could see me. They looked my age, if not younger.
“Prostitutes,” Sofia said, a note of disgust in her voice.
I would think of those women—girls—long after I’d left Italy. I would remember, too, the smell of citrus that hit me as we finally exited the highway. Closer to the village, the dry grasses yielded to lush gardens whose very color disclosed the demands of their upkeep. In town, restaurants lined the harbor. The whole place looked like a Hollywood set.
A part of me was relieved that Giovanni’s flight had been delayed. I wasn’t looking forward to negotiating life with an unfamiliar entity in the house. If Sofia’s behavior was any indication, he would coax out in her traits I neither liked nor respected. She moved around the villa like an alpinist struggling to adjust to the air. I tried to engage her by inquiring about her research, with little success. When I asked if there was anything I could do, she withheld her usual “Grazie mille,” replying instead with a frosty “No, thank you.”
To compensate, I spent more time with Marco—the job I had been hired to do and yet resisted. When an Austrian girl my age approached us in town, explaining that she too was an au pair, I objected. I was no au pair, I said; I was merely doing a favor for a family friend.
At the shore I buried Marco beneath mounds of sand flecked with cigarette butts. When he practiced his magic tricks, I dutifully held his supplies. I made a terrific assistant, he said.
He made friends quickly with other children. Most came from old-money families who could afford nannies, personal chefs, and cleaners. His best friend was an adorable brunette named Valentina. One afternoon, he invited Valentina to the villa. Her parents waved the three of us off gleefully.
Sofia and I prepared lunch while the children played. Sofia balanced a strawberry on its tip on the cutting board and sliced it cleanly in half. Her face was shaded beneath the brim of a sunhat, her cleavage exposed by the V of her kaftan.
“How long have you and Giovanni been together?” I asked.
She peered at me and smiled. I returned this smile before realizing hers had been only a quirk of the lips.
“He’s a good husband,” she said. “Picky sometimes—boh, not picky. What’s the word you Americans like?”
I shrugged. She was posturing. Her English was better than mine.
“It’ll come to me.” She emptied a cup of limoncello into the pitcher. I was surprised and pleased that she wanted to have a drink with me. “Oh, cara,” she sighed. “There is much you don’t understand.”
“I understand love, though.”
“Young people always think they understand love.”
“But I do,” I insisted.
“Well, that makes one of us.”
Sofia lifted the pitcher. Together, we walked out to the children. They were not playing together so much as side by side.
I followed Sofia to the terrace’s edge, bordered by tall cypresses. We adjusted the deck chairs. Before us stretched the sea—one long sheet of blue.
Sofia shielded her eyes with her hand and said, “In my head, I’m like those girls on the boat out there. You see them?”
I nodded.
She went on. “I’m twenty-three, dancing on a sparkling boat. But then I look at you and the other students who fill my desks, and I see myself as you all must see me.”
“How’s that?”
She rested her head on the back of the chair, her dark curls flattening against the canvas. She murmured, “I was fourteen the first time I fell in love.”
The man had been a Belgian artist she’d met in Verona. They struck up a pen pal relationship. In his letters, he told Sofia she was an old soul, wise beyond her years. She grew convinced he was the only person capable of recognizing her unique combination of intellect and beauty. “He told me I saw things others didn’t while remaining hidden myself,” Sofia said. “I thought this was the highest compliment anyone had ever paid anyone.”
One day, the artist wrote saying he’d be in Venice and that Sofia should take the train to meet him. He included money for a ticket in the envelope. “Come be my muse,” he wrote.
Sofia had wanted to go but couldn’t fabricate an excuse convincing enough to offer her parents. At least, this was how she justified her hesitancy. In reality, she was afraid. She knew what girls did with men like that. A classmate of hers had an older boyfriend, a French man. “She bragged vulgarly about the things she did to him,” Sofia said, “but I wonder if she wasn’t a little ashamed too.”
The date in the artist’s letter arrived. Sofia pictured him alone in his hotel room, gazing at the canals. When he realized she wasn’t coming, he must have grown disappointed and thought she was not so mature after all. “That was the worst thought of all,” she said. “That he would no longer think I was special.”
In his final letter, the artist claimed to have known Sofia wouldn’t keep her word. In the future, he wrote, when she thought back on him she would call him a creep, if only to avoid confronting the fact of her own desire.
“Do you think he’s a creep?” I asked.
“No. But I understand now why he wrote it, which I couldn’t back then.”
Sofia contacted the artist once more a few years later, once she’d left home. He didn’t respond. It crushed her. She had believed he’d liked her despite her youth, rather than because of it. But wasn’t this always how it was? she said. We never know what impact we make on others unless they tell us, and often not even then.
Before I could respond, I heard the terrace door open behind us. “Papà!” Marco shouted, leaping up.
I turned, the moment stuttering as if I were watching a damaged film. Giovanni Gallione was taller than I’d expected. Handsome. The planes of his face were chiseled and enticing. I felt a biting resentment toward him, not least because he had severed the intimacy of the moment. It seemed to me I’d been waiting for a moment like that all my life.
Giovanni took my hand only after embracing the others. His grip was strong, formidable. “Sofia has told me much about you,” he said. He removed a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his linen pants. He moved agilely, his limbs like oars in water.
Sofia insisted on braised lamb shanks for dinner and tasked me with peeling the garlic. Giovanni directed Marco to his suitcase. “There’s a surprise for you in there,” he said, winking. In the front pocket was a magician’s cape, which Giovanni had purchased from a vendor on the promenade along the Huangpu River. Marco gasped, charging gratefully into his father’s arms. Both mother and son had recentered their energies on Giovanni—the magnetic north I hadn’t even realized they were missing. I knew then, if I had not before, that Giovanni’s arrival signaled my ending; I knew the way certain animals can tell it’s going to rain before a single cloud transits the sky.
My bedroom in the villa was beside Sofia and Giovanni’s. Only a thin wall separated us. That night after I turned off the light, I stayed up listening to their murmurs through the plaster. I used to do this as a child, standing outside my parents’ room during their intense arguments.
After a prolonged moment, the voices cut out. A zipper came undone. A belt hit the floor. I held my breath, picturing the scene, the slant of moonlight over the dresser. In a zooming instant, I envisioned myself in Sofia’s body, with Giovanni stroking my neck and shoulders. The next, I shut my eyes and plunged from her body into his. His hands were my hands as I slid her dress up her thighs. His face was mine as I moved my tongue to the flower between her legs. Even in fantasy, the look in her eyes thrilled me. Without thinking, I threw back my head and released a small cry. Suddenly, Giovanni and Sofia fell silent. I drew back from the plaster as if it had caught fire. I counted slowly to five and tried to make my jumping mind go blank.
When the sounds from within started again, I sank down into the sheets, paranoia blurring the edges of my vision. Beneath the gauzy cotton, I stroked myself to the point of forgetting. Afterward I lay with my head swaddled in the pillow, listening to my raging heart.
I awoke the following day with a sick feeling of dread. I removed my tote bag from the hook, planning to take Marco to the shore. When I stepped outside for my sandals, Giovanni was already there, smoking. His gaze traveled like a serrated blade across my face. He offered me a cigarette; I declined. Our interaction followed a clipped tempo, as though we were dancing.
“You Americans are so much healthier than we are,” he said. “But you lack passion.”
He reached out and caressed my cheek with the back of his hand. The cigarette nearly grazed my skin.
“I’m taking Marco to the beach,” I said.
“No, no, I’ll do that. You take the day off.”
I returned to the villa. Sofia was at her chess table. Her hands drifted over the board, her fingers hopping from the bald head of one pawn to another. I had previously put great faith in my ability to read her, but now she appeared to me as a stone wall. Dizzy, I went to the bathroom and knelt over the toilet bowl. The smell of wet porcelain wafted upward. I gagged. Nothing came. I returned to bed, pulling the sheet to my chin. How desperately I wished for my own mother then.
That Sunday, the four of us traveled back to Padua. When we arrived, I proceeded straight to the attic. The cot, the walls, the claw-foot tub—I regarded them all at a remove.
Maybe it was Sofia’s coldness toward me, or the fact that despite it I still loved her, that prompted me to steal a souvenir to take home with me. After everyone else went to bed, I snuck to the kitchen. The room looked larger in the darkness. I imagined a disembodied eye tracking me as I ran my hands over the embroidered tablecloth and the gleaming knights with their equine faces.
The balcony door was shut. A patch of moonlight lay on the floor like a tired dog. The dreamcatcher was where I’d first seen it on the handle. With trembling hands, I slid it free. The web was more magnificent than I remembered. Two crystal beads glinted in its center, the same azure as the sea by the villa.
I heard a faint shuffling behind me and shoved the dreamcatcher under my shirt. With a caffeinated feeling I turned, expecting Giovanni or Sofia. Instead, there stood Marco in his cotton pajamas. He looked small and distant, his features hazy with sleep.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “Go to bed.”
“You are leaving?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Please don’t. You can order the gelato. I won’t laugh.”
I frowned. Though I knew he’d had other nannies, my predecessors were abstract, the way certain foreign countries were abstract. This was what kids were built for, wasn’t it, with their hearts like Scotch tape, indiscriminately sticking to whatever touched them?
He raked his lower lip with his teeth. “Will you tuck me in?”
Together, we passed back through the hallway. The dreamcatcher strained against me with every breath. Marco asked if I’d tell him a story. I stayed with him until he fell asleep, then went upstairs and packed the dreamcatcher between two shirts, just to be safe.
At the station the following day, Sofia, Marco, and I huddled beneath the ticker board on the platform. Around us strolled businessmen, couples, women in flowing skirts. I wondered where everyone was headed, if anyone was going my way.
Marco waved his plastic wand through the air. “Guarda! Your shoe.”
I lifted my sneaker. A piece of paper was stuck to the sole. The drawing was of the two of us on the beach. Marco wore a magician’s cape, I a top hat. Around us hovered gigantic white doves, frozen mid-flight. I promised to hang the picture on my bedroom wall when I returned home.
Sofia kissed me on both cheeks. As the train pulled away, I allowed myself a fantasy that she would remain in my life despite our bitter parting. We would visit each other, go on holiday together, and send Christmas cards with twinkly snowmen.
I tacked the dreamcatcher on my wall when I returned to school. Sometimes, while memorizing facts for an exam, I’d glance up, see it, and think of Marco.
At the end of the year, I applied to a series of doctoral programs. When I didn’t get in, I let these rejections infuse me. Giovanni’s voice ran like a needle through my thoughts, telling me I lacked passion. It felt like a damning charge. How does one remedy a lack like that?
Over the next decade, I held several odd jobs: pet sitter, desk manager for a Pilates studio, medical copywriter. Eventually, I relinquished my notions of a higher purpose, settling into a career as a brand manager for a confectionary company. When others asked, I no longer pretended to have grander aspirations.
I moved from one generic apartment to another, sprucing up each with low-maintenance succulents. My favorite was on the ground floor of a brownstone in a large city. Before letting myself in, I’d always peer through the window and imagine what an onlooker might glean from my spartan furniture, my well-kept kitchen.
With each move, my collection of art history books dwindled. The texts I’d once thought would be essential to my profession now seemed a waste of space. One day I put the last of them in a cardboard box and left them on the curb with a sign reading Free.
For my thirty-fifth birthday, a boyfriend I’d later marry suggested we fly to the Amalfi coast. He was an ungrudging man, laconic and bookish. I couldn’t explain my reluctance to go without disclosing the peculiar clutch that distant summer maintained over me. When I reflected on my time with the Galliones, my body braced as if I were still standing outside Sofia and Giovanni’s bedroom door, waiting to be discovered.
I now have two girls of my own. One is twelve, the other sixteen. They have hobbies and friends, ideas about themselves and the world. I have hopes for them. These hopes are not the same ones they have for themselves.
Just last week, I thought I saw Sofia on the metro. It didn’t seem unlikely; I was convinced she was always nearby, the age she’d been when I left her. I imagined striding across the platform, asking her out for tea. We would dine in a café downtown, where I would tell her about my life. When I’d say that I was happier than ever, she would be kind enough not to pry. On the sidewalk, we’d stand too close together, our bodies touching, fire between them.
On the train, I reached out through the thick air. The woman turned. Even before she did, I knew her face wouldn’t be the one I wanted. As the train screeched to a halt, I shut my eyes and allowed my vision to fill with the sight of a hundred glorious doves.
Lauren Aliza Green’s work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Joyland, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook A Great Dark House (Poetry Society of America) and the novel The World After Alice (Viking/Penguin).
Photo by Cristian Cojocarita on Unsplash
