Introduction

I believe that most memoirs are novels masquerading as memoirs.  My novel -- about a young American translator who flirts with the idea of becoming an expatriate in France and italy -- is based on real events.  It is based on real people, real places, real stories, but cemented together with a strong layer of invention.  So, when I take you to a Tuscan villa in Italy, when I describe the grounds, the people, the walls, the history, a great deal of this is based on actuality. 

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Excerpt

When Ed and i went to stay at the Auberge Birague,
we certainly never expected to meet up with
anyone either of us knew. Our habit was to take
breakfast in the café and sit near a window that opened onto a
flower box overflowing with nasturtiums already wilting in the
sultry air. One morning several days after we arrived, a woman
in a short-sleeved black shirt and beige linen pants entered the
café and sat down several tables away from us. I noticed Ed
watching her with laserlike curiosity. “My God!” he gushed to
me in a whisper. “I know this lady.” She turned out to be Marina
Vezzoli, an Italian writer he’d met at a literary festival in Chile.
He got up and approached her, shoulders canted forward like a
primary-school student cowering before his teacher. Extending
his hand he said, “Hello, Marina, Edward Cannon. We met in
Santiago. At the festival.”
She was around sixty, quite trim with tawny shoulder-length
hair veined with gray. Her eyes were pale and thoughtful as she
looked at him with puzzled reserve. But soon her face kindled
with recognition. “Ah, of course,” she said. “Forgive me. What
are you doing in France?”
Ed explained that he had lived in Paris for ten years, that he’d
just sold his apartment right across the street from the Auberge
Birague, and that he and I were staying at the hotel for a couple
of weeks before he left for America to begin a tenured teaching
job at New York University. At this point Marina Vezzoli shot
me a look of bemused curiosity. And then, for some odd reason,
Ed launched into Italian.
After listening to a few awkwardly constructed sentences,
Marina leaned forward, patted him gently on the hand, and said,
“Why don’t you speak in English, my friend? It would be easier
on both of us.” I winced for Ed. His midwestern charm was usually
able to warm even the chilliest reception. As famous as he
was, he was unaccustomed to having his own pretentiousness
pointed out to him. Clearly stung, he straightened his six-foottwo
frame, nervously raked his fingers through his longish,
thick dirty-blond hair. He was fifty-nine years old, and if you’d
seen him at a distance you might have mistaken him for an aging,
slightly paunchy surfer. He returned to our table, flustered
and embarrassed.
Genuinely bewildered, I said to him sotto voce, “Why did
you . . . switch to Italian like that?”
“I don’t know why. Now I feel like an idiot.”
“Well, don’t worry. It’s not that critical.”
“Something is wrong here, Russell,” Ed warned me. “She acts
as though she barely remembers me, but believe me, she does.
We sat next to each other at dinner, as a matter of fact.” They’d
spoken at length; he remembered one fascinating conversation
in which Marina Vezzoli assured him that Henry James didn’t
really understand Italians. And then a few years after Santiago,
Ed had served on a panel in Saint Paul de Vence discussing two
Italian writers, one of whom came up and introduced himself as
a friend of hers. “Now she treats me like a stranger,” he grumbled.
“Whose ego is as big as Mount Vesuvius.” I glanced over at
the woman now perusing the Corriere della Sera while sipping a
glass of freshly pressed grapefruit juice.
Ed went on with a bit more restraint. “Besides, I’ve told you
all about her. She’s the one who wrote that wonderful novel that
was made into the film we saw. The one called Conversion.” He
leaned back in his chair.
“Oh,” I said. “So that’s who she is.”
As though perceiving that Ed and I wanted to gossip about
her, the woman took a last bite of her toast, carefully folded her
newspaper, and pushed back from the table. Nodding cordially
at us, she left the breakfast room. I remember Ed watching her
exit with an expression of pure reverence.
Our room at the Auberge Birague was decorated in blond
Swedish furniture; it had tall glass doors that opened onto a balcony.
Late in the night on the day we encountered Marina Vezzoli,
I woke up to a terrible pounding, to the smell of sweaty
bodies, to the alarming realization that there were other people
in the room besides us. Two men wearing black ski masks pulled
down to their lips had burst in from the terrace. One of them
held what looked like some sort of semiautomatic weapon. The
other pulled out a long, bowed knife, the sort that might fillet a
large fish. When I saw the first glint of the rifle’s muzzle, when I
heard the menacing click of the magazine, I was paralyzed by one
desperate hope: that the gun and the man who held it would
somehow just melt into fantasy and that I wouldn’t have to die
right there. “Stay where you are!” the gunman garbled in
foreign-sounding French. As if we’d dare to counter them.
“Your money! Your passports! Where!” snarled the other one
with the knife.
I managed to tell him and he opened drawers, quickly scrabbling
through the contents. He turned back to me and took several
steps closer, waving his dagger. “They’re not!”
“I have them,” said Ed, who was leaning up in bed on his elbows,
looking typically angry at something not to his liking. It
was as though he hadn’t even registered the threat of the
weapons.
From here on it all blurs, the order of things. I don’t know if
it was right then when one of them actually protested, “Wait,
shit! Two men. It’s two men,” before Ed recklessly jumped out of
bed. Standing there in a T-shirt and skimpy underwear, he
started screaming in English, “Get out of here, you monkeys!
Go fuck up somebody else!” There was a quick tirade in a language
other than French, but then they actually listened to him.
They turned and rushed back to the balcony and clambered out
whatever way they had come in.
Ed and I sat on our twin beds in quiet disbelief, staring at the
doors opening onto the slate mansard roofs of the place des Vosges.
The curtains billowed as if in the lingering spirit of such an
outrageous intrusion. “Are you insane?” I finally shouted at
him. “They could’ve killed us!”
Collapsing onto the bed, Ed, looking befuddled, admitted, “I
can’t believe what I said.”
“You called them monkeys. And they weren’t even black!”
“By the way, that language they broke into, that was Albanian.”
“So what! They still could’ve understood English.”
He stared at me, blinking. “Of course, you’re right, Russell.
But you should know me by now. What happens when I get
angry.”
“Ed, you told them to fuck off,” I reminded him.
This most eloquent of poets, who could also be profoundly
vulgar, actually laughed. And then I did, too—comic relief it
must have been. It suddenly seemed as though the bizarre incident
had never even occurred. The apoplectic yelling had attracted
no attention, no knock on the door, nobody calling up
from the lobby. The hotel had remained absolutely still. Could
no one have heard the commotion?
“We’ve got to call down and tell them what happened,” I insisted.
“Okay, but wait a minute.” Ed swept the hair out of his eyes
and peered at me. He was breathless. “You heard them say ‘two
men’ right?
I told him I had.
“They weren’t expecting to find us.”
I didn’t answer, trying to figure out why this might be significant.
“Don’t you get it, Russell? They were expecting a man in bed
with his wife.”
“If that’s true then we’re doubly lucky they didn’t shoot us,
the wrong people.”
“No, Russell. If they were hired or politically motivated, if
they’d have done something to us, then they would’ve failed
their purpose.”
“All the more reason to let them know downstairs.”
Ed looked distressed. “I don’t want to,” he insisted. “I just
can’t deal with anything more tonight. They’ll insist on calling
the police who will want to take reports. We’ll be up all night.”
He hesitated. “They’re gone; they’re probably halfway across
Paris by now. We can let the hotel know in the morning.” He
paused again, seeming bewildered.
“What is it, do you think you recognize something about
them?” I asked.
“No, no, it’s not that,” he replied. He got up and went into
the bathroom and left the door ajar. “Not at all.” He remained
there in complete stillness and finally I asked him if anything
was wrong. When he didn’t answer, I walked over and found
him staring at himself in the mirror. His eyes finally met mine.
“Nothing’s wrong, I’m just getting some Xanax.” He reached
for his shaving kit, opened a plastic cylinder and took out a one
milligram pill that he divided equally and gave half to me.
I awoke the next morning from a very deep sleep. The room
was profoundly quiet. Ed’s face looked unnaturally pale. I
climbed out of my bed and went over to check. I ventured to
feel his forehead. It was chill to my touch, winter cold; he no
longer seemed to be breathing. This was as shocking to me as
the appearance of that semiautomatic rifle just hours before. “It
can’t be!” I said aloud. “He can’t possibly . . .” I told myself,
cradling him in my arms like a child. I swept my fingers
through his hair and softly whispered, “No, no, no,” as though
my gentle reproach could make him breathe again.
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Discussion Questions

1) What are you saying about global terrorism and the threat of terrorism in this novel.
 
2) What are you saying about the memoirs that lie instead of telling the truth?
 
3) What are the various "conversions" in the novel. 

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