Lost Hearts in Italy: A Novel

Chapter 1 1 MIRA P 2004 telephone The call comes three or four times a year. Always in the morning, when Mira's husband and children have left the house, and she is at work in her study, in the dangerous company of wordswords that are sometimes docile companions and at other times bolt off like schizophrenic lovers and leave you stranded on a street corner somewhere. There are moments when Mira, abandoned in the middle of a paragraph, sits glaring furiously out past the computer at the chestnut trees in her hillside garden and the industrial smudge of Turin below in the distance and the Alps beyond. Then the phone rings, and she breaks her own rule to grab it like a lifeline. And eerily enough, as if from hundreds of miles away he has sensed her bafflement, her moment of weakness, it is often Zenin, a man who once wrecked part of her life. Oh, not Zenin himself, not at first. His billionaire's paranoia is too strong for that. He never calls her on a cell phone, always from his office, never from one of his houses, from his yacht, from his jet. The call is placed by any one of a bevy of young Italian secretaries, the kind who announce their names in bright telemarketers' voices. Pronto, it's Sabrina. Marilena. Or Veronica. It's different each time, but always the kind of aspirational Hollywood-style moniker that in Italian sounds slightly whorish. E la dottoressa Ward? E proprio lei? The secretaries insist on asking twice if it is Mira. And they love her title, which is Italian grandiosity for a simple college degree. Zenin, the parvenu, loves it too, loves having a cultured woman to disturb. If anyone else answers, husband or children or maid, the girls have instructions to hang up. And after that, Sabrina or Marilena or Veronica always inquires, with arch emphasis, whether it is convenient for her to talk. Convenient as interpreted by a drug dealer or a stool pigeon, or of course a philandering wife. Sometime during that familiar question, Mira's body undergoes a swift unwelcome transformation: melting between the legs, throat suddenly garotted by an ancient knot of tears. Outdated reactions of the body, whose memory is longer than that of the heart. Feelings left over from a time years earlier, when she was very young and lived in Rome. When she was still married to her first husband, an American as young and new to Europe as she was. Married and deep in adultery with Zenin, the Venetian tycoon whose cold sensuality and provincial vulgarity represented, to the girl she was back then, everything mysterious and desirable about Italy. A robber's cave of wonders she was desperate to explore. It was a time when the dye of secrecy darkened every part of her life, and with a mixture of shame and longing she used to pray for calls like these. Because every call meant an assignation, and Zenin, at that point, was her religion. Nowadays she hasn't seen Zenin for nearly ten years. And when she realizes who is calling, the older Mira simply says to herself: bastard. Sometimes in English, sometimes in Italian. Bastardo. A toothless insult, but one that translates exactly. But she doesn't hang up. She always talks to Zenin. This time, as usual, he asks what she is doing. Working. Working? Writing? Writing whatlove poems? His familiar voice, with its Veneto accent, is teasing, that of an uncle talking to a beloved but difficult niece. And as always, it is surprisingly small, as the voice of the conscience is said to be. Not high, but faint and dry, as if lacking an essential fluid. No, I'm writing an article about a cheese festival. A cheese festival! Oh yes, laughsAndrea Lee is the author of 'Lost Hearts in Italy: A Novel', published 2006 under ISBN 9781400061693 and ISBN 1400061695.