(A big, lush novel from critically beloved Jenny McPhee, set against the exotic backdrop of postwar Italy.

Dante Sabato has always wanted to kill himself. He has also always wanted to sleep with women. A poet, translator, and writer of novels, Dante has long been in the best position to do both things. But even war could not end his dark obsessions, no matter the dire circumstances--prison, resistance, the role of assassin. A few scant years after losing all the people he has loved, he is a man of no moon--no pole pulls him, no object can hold his fancy. Then, one night, into his life step two American beauties: sisters Gladys and Prudence, ex-pat actresses on the prowl. One he desires, the other he demands, and a ménage blooms that threatens Dante's ability to end his own existence.

This is Jenny McPhee at her finest. Whether she is sketching the war-bruised Italian psyche as it brushes up against the puffed-up American dream of heroism, fantastically detailing the styles and locales of the late 1940s, or creating a sexual situation with spark, smoke, and fire, she is masterful in her prose, and her storytelling mesmerizes on every page.

The artistic life is a long, lovely suicide.

–Oscar Wilde

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

–W.B. Yeats

There is no hope, desire being spent.

Rest forever. So many

Palpitations. Your flutterings

Serve no one, nor do you dignify the earth

With your sighs. Life is bitter and empty,

Nothing more. The world is a slough.

Calm yourself now. Despair

For the last time. Fate gave your kind

No gift but death.

–Giacomo Leopardi

Prologue

At the risk of waking her, I ran my finger along the perfect little bumps of her spine, down into the small of her back, then up the gentle rise, until finally I sank it deep into the fissure between her supple, tender cheeks. I had traveled there earlier with my tongue and knew her heat, her smell, her geography. In my mind, I already had an intimate map of her drawn, all the dark, hidden places where I had strayed. She was lovely asleep, naked, quiet, her yellow hair tangled behind her ear, her thin lips slightly parted. She stirred and I removed my finger, replacing it with lire notes tightly rolled into the shape of a cigarette.

I left the bedroom and went into my office. I neatened up my desk to the tip-tap of raindrops on the windowpanes. I glanced at my agenda for that day--Wednesday, March 15, 1948–and whispered to the room “Beware.” I considered destroying the stack of unfinished poems and stories but decided that would be treating them better than they deserved. The matter of leaving a note I rejected as inelegant, and what would I write--I’ve finally done it, Hurrah. I walked around the apartment for the last time, pausing before my favorite of Aunt Pia’s paintings, a scene with nuns strolling along a row of cypresses on a lawn flaxened by heat, the sea shimmering in the distance like an unraveled bolt of silk.

Feeling considerate, I left the door unlocked. On my way down the stairs, I kept an eye out for who might see me, if a neighbor opened a door, or the concierge came out from his office to wish me a good evening. But I saw no one and by now he was eating his dinner or at the bar with his cronies discussing our ever-tumbling government, the chronic instability a welcome relief after fascism’s dreadful permanency.

I walked along the via Giulia towards the Ponte Sisto, the rain tickling my neck and ears. I considered going back to the apartment to get an umbrella, then appreciated the perversity of the thought. As I arrived at the Lungotevere, I was momentarily blinded by the headlights of cars whizzing past. I could walk in front of one, like Germana, but I didn’t like the idea of splatter. I made my way onto the bridge and half way across. A man under an umbrella passed by without looking at me. The water of the Tiber, usually golden brown, was dark gray and colorless. I hoisted myself up onto the stone wall, proud I had gotten this far. Death brings freedom, I reminded myself, as I felt hesitation’s familiar stranglehold close around my will. The scourge of ugly doubt could never torment me again. The Tiber’s nectar would fill my lungs and my inadequacy in all things would disappear with my last breath. A car honked. I moved closer to the edge, my feet dangling heavily. Why should killing myself be more difficult than killing someone else?

The first time I ended a man’s life the sensation brought terrified confusion. By the third death the adrenalin of cruelty, the success of staying alive, and the endless rhythms of self-justification vibrated together into a crescendo of physical satisfaction. As hard as I tried, though, I never could make the severed body parts erotic. Guts spilling from stomachs, brains oozing from skulls weren’t pretty but they didn’t get to me like the body parts. A lopped off hand, the fingers still twitching; a head with lips still trembling; an arm and shoulder ripped from its torso; no matter how many times I saw these things, I felt I was being turned inside out like a glove peeled off a hand.

The lights of Rome filtered through the rain, sparkling intermittently. How seriously I took myself. Would the water be cold? Thick with filth? Would I struggle to survive? My questions were stepping stones to the oblivion of nevermore. So many others had gone easily before me, yet I hesitated. Time assured me of the meaninglessness of my gesture. I wanted to be rid of the present, an overrated tense. I pushed my palms into the rough damp stone and lifted my weight up onto my arms. I placed the soles of my feet hard against the wall. Dive or belly-flop? A raindrop landed on my eyelash and for a moment the city erupted into a kaleidoscope of possibility. Now, I thought, now.

Someone grabbed me around the waist and pulled me roughly to the ground. “Not on my watch,” a negro American soldier said in English. “Unless I could trade your dumb ass for one of the dead in my platoon.” He shook his head. “Anyway, I hear the promised land’s a ghetto these days, buddy.”

He helped me back to my feet. “I am a poet,” I said.

He laughed. “Aren’t we all. I’m going to give you a military escort to wherever you’re headed in this particular world.”

I gave him Tullio’s address. When he dropped me off, I asked him, “Your name wouldn’t happen to be Clarence would it?”

“More like Charon,” he said.

Part 1

1948

I

Rome

We spoke in Italian at first and I relished hearing my language reinvented by that plump tongue, those tinted lips. Her name was Gladys Godfrey and she was an American actress. She had recently arrived in Rome, and was eager, it seemed, to find the right bed. She was not a great beauty, and given her trade, she’d heard that said about her as often as she looked in the mirror. I wouldn’t be able to do much for her directly, since I was in a different profession, but she must have decided I had something to offer. I finally interrupted our conversation about the recent Academy Awards–Rosalind Russell’s surprise loss to Loretta Young and De Sica’s special award for Shoeshine--and, in English, said, “I speak English. I’m a translator.”

She looked as if she might slap me, then her face relaxed.

“You’re a cad,” she flirted, “but I forgive you. I should have guessed you were a translator. You boys are a dime a dozen, like actresses in Hollywood. Do you get paid well, or do you live on the glory of your experience too?”

Her hair was standard starlet, light brown, shoulder-length, with a permanent wave. It suited her. She had brown eyes flecked with gold, creamy, powderless skin, and a too perfectly upturned nose, though I doubted it had been fixed. It was an entirely forgettable face. She, however, was anything but.

“I get by,” I said.

“Whom do you translate?” She asked.

“Hawthorne, Melville, Steinbeck, Whitman, Hammett, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner...you name him, I’ve translated something or other of his.”

“Americans,” she said, her tone disparaging, “and all men to boot.”

She wore a sleeveless blue dress and a matching cardigan that kept slipping off her shoulders. She smelled of hibiscus. I loved the assortment of scents women offered. When an appealing woman moves in my direction on the street, or in a restaurant, anywhere, it is my custom to exhale through my mouth, then, just as she passes, to breathe her in. I have always been captivated by the scent, no matter how unexpected. But smell is a sensitive subject with women, one I often couldn’t resist mentioning. I once told a lover her scent reminded me of asparagus and she never spoke to me again.

I said, “I don’t exaggerate when I claim the Americans were our saviors.”

“Oh that dreadful war,” she sighed. “You Europeans won’t ever get over it, I’m sure.”

The party going on around us was taking place in Tullio Merlini’s sprawling apartment just off the via del Corso. Tullio was a kind of film industry ambassador maintaining diplomatic relations between the various players, mostly producers and talent. He also dabbled in international relations as he had friends at Ealing, Epinay, and, having spent the war years in Los Angeles, in nearly all of the Hollywood studios. I believed he took money from everyone--or no one. I never did know where Tullio got his money.

Like most of us in Italy, he was devoted to America, but it was difficult to be eternally grateful for something we should have done ourselves. So the exalted was also hated, the way a man obsessed with a woman can despise her too. Still, superficially at least, Americans, things American, were adored, and Tullio’s apartment was a den of idol worship. Bottles of Jack Daniels and Coca Cola, packs of Lucky Strikes and Chesterfields, the music of Glen Miller, Art Mooney, and Dinah Shore, all in abundance, mocked their wartime prohibition, while annihilating memories of shortages and black markets. The scene might have been perceived as a flaunting of the spoils, only Italians, perpetually in a state of decadent denial, refused to acknowledge that we were the conquered, not the conquerors. Evidence of our downfall lay everywhere just beyond Tullio’s walls.

“I actually meant the American writers were our saviors more than the soldiers,” I said. “Their work gave us hope for the future of civilization, not to mention literature. And translating them did earn me enough money to get by.”

“Oh them again. Well, I’d rather read a long-dead Brit like Dickens or Austen over any of those guys.” She examined her crimson nails. “I mean they’re all so fixated on manhood. It’s boring. Poor Hemingway beat the poor thing so badly he finally just had to cut it off in one of his books.”

She pulled a silver cigarette case from her handbag, extracted one, then glanced across the room toward a woman alone in a corner watching us. A wry little smile lit up Gladys’s face.

“No, I’m not a fan of those guys,” she said, turning her attention and body back to me. “What are you working on now?”

“Cornell Woolrich stories.” I lit her cigarette.

“Well, that’s better. At least the pulp writers know they’re obsessed with themselves.” Her mouth folded into a pout. She shrugged her shoulders.

“I’ve never met a writer of any kind who wasn’t obsessed with himself,” I said. “And I speak from experience.”

“So you’re a writer as well as a translator? That’s like being an actress and a model, like adding insult to injury, n’est-ce pas?” A spiral of smoke snaked from between her lips.

The door to Tullio’s apartment opened and there was some fanfare and loud exclamations. Gladys craned her neck to see who had arrived. Tullio had previously indicated that Katherine Hepburn, having recently made the crossing on the Nieuw Amsterdam for a European holiday, would be attending his soirée.

“Still no Kate,” Gladys said turning back to me.

The woman from across the room was now standing next to me and in front of Gladys.

“So you found him,” she said. She wore an olive green suit that matched her eyes. They were chameleon eyes, as if they might change color at whim. “I’m impressed,” she said.

These remarks were directed at Gladys. She spoke as if I were either invisible or deaf. The lingering smoke from Gladys’s cigarette made it impossible for me to detect a scent.

“I’m smarter than you think,” Gladys said to her.

“And I’m the better actress,” the woman said.

Something very familiar about her gave me the sensation that I had known her all my life. I then noticed her uncannily close physical resemblance to Gladys.

Gladys turned to me. “This is my older sister, Prudence Godfrey. She told me there was one man in this room worth talking to and challenged me to find him in under ten minutes. It took me three. Evidently you are he, but I never did get around to asking your name.”

Prudence’s eyes met mine directly for the first time, and for an instant I was afraid.

She said, “Dante Omero Sabato.”

I liked the way she said it.

“He’s Italy’s most famous living poet,” she added.

I even liked the way she said that. Her amused disdain held a perfect kernel of awe. She was the better actress.

“I’ve heard of you,” Gladys said. “You write film criticism for Cinema. No one agrees with you but they’re all scared of you.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “Let’s skedaddle. I heard Kate Hepburn and Anna Magnani were coming but I’m hungry and sick of waiting around.”

“I’m only leaving if he comes with us,” Prudence said, apparently meaning me.

“Oh, he’s coming alright,” Gladys said, her arm slipping through mine.

“I would rather end my life right now,” I said, “then let the two of you walk out of Tullio’s door without me.”

“Strange,” Prudence said, still speaking to Gladys as if I weren’t there, “he says it almost as if he means it.”

It was the “almost” that made me fall for her. She was on to me, and my lack of conviction, from the start. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Recommended to book clubs by 0 of 0 members.