Better Than Fiction 2 (6 page)

Eventually it would be time to go home, the home that for me was not just New York but another step removed within it: college, where my time was dwindling, just a few weeks to go. Jimmy and Robin and pretty much everyone asked me what I’d do next and if I’d be back. I said I obviously would, but I didn’t know if that was true. At that point travel seemed a confusing concept – all I knew was that I was moving to Brooklyn after graduation and there was no telling what would come of that, if I could even be the real journalist I felt I had experienced on that trip, the self I had gotten a sense of for a brief period.

Jimmy insisted on driving me to the airport in Memphis – he didn’t mind the long trek, he assured me, as once I was gone his days would feel very empty. He insisted on carrying my bags, though I walked him back to his car. There he gave me the longest
hug and leaned into a kiss, which missed my cheek and got to my lips. I laughed shyly then realized it wasn’t a complete accident: ‘I’m telling you, Pia, if you were older, and I was younger…’ He left it at that, we left it at that. But it was a sentiment he returned to again in one of the many letters he wrote me after I was in New York, long letters in his beautiful handwriting, detailing his days, and only once in a while hoping that perhaps one day I could help to get John Faulkner’s work published.

For a while I wrote him back, but eventually either he or I stopped responding, and the experience left my mind, as I was busy dealing with finding some sort of footing as an adult, now actually a real journalist in the city.

Years went by and then one day I found his letters again and thought I’d look him up online. What I found was sad, though not surprising: He had died at 79, just two years after my visit. It seemed hard to imagine, given his vitality. I felt crushed, remembering his letters. And yet I also felt lucky.

In 2008, my ex-boyfriend and I drove cross-country and stopped in Oxford for a couple nights. I remembered more than I thought even after eight years – ‘Welcome to Lafayette County!’ I announced, as if I had been a native. A couple of months before, the first Presidential election debate of 2008 had taken place there, and that was the only context my ex-boyfriend had. He was not a literary person, so I broke down for him my early love of Faulkner, and the Brother Will I discovered through Jimmy Faulkner, as we pulled up to the twin cedars of Rowan Oak.

‘It’s seems like you’ve lived here for ages,’ he said. ‘Like you’ve come home.’

There was a lot he did not understand. I had been Italian? I had broken my vegetarianism? (He was vegan.) I had just stayed with students? This had all meant the world to me?

But I didn’t feel like explaining.

We walked into Rowan Oak, hand in hand, me shaking with so many emotions. Bill happened not to be there when we dropped by, but he was still the curator, an assistant assured us. This time I had a camera and took photos; the wallpaper on my computer is Faulkner’s office wallpaper, taken on my camera from that trip. My ex patiently walked with me through it all, absorbing my enthusiasm though not emitting it.

And that was fine. We took a walk in the woods and I told him if he closed his eyes and breathed deeply, he could smell the mix of magnolia blooms and bourbon, but he couldn’t. And there was something I loved about that – something that only I was able to channel, a portal that was mine, this universe that had in just some days shaped me, taught me who I was more than any other experience of my adult life.

‘Not bad,’ Professor Sizer had grinned, a rare expression of approval from her, as I handed her the 30 pages of my final assignment.

I didn’t get it back until years later, when I returned to Sarah Lawrence to give a reading as a published author. Professor Sizer had apparently wanted to give my introduction, and she concluded her remarks with ‘I have something for you,’ then handed me my paper in front of a large audience. (It was an A-, with light pencil marks all the way through.) I thanked her and thanked her and thanked her in my head all through the reading, but also thanked everyone who I had encountered on that trip and especially Jimmy and of course, as sentimental as it might sound, Brother Will himself.

I also thanked that gray-skinned, frazzled, listless 22-year-old who lived with being so lost that there was no choice but to allow herself, on a most unlikely adventure, to be found again.

I
strode over the tarmac at Dublin airport on a wind-lashed November day, trailing a glow of new authorhood. After two years of writing, five months of rejection, and a ten-day bender when I finally snagged an agent, one lunchtime brought a flurry of bidding, then sales to publishers. One of them was in Italy.

Now I was off to that book launch, my first.

The Italian publisher, from a prestigious old house, had decided to beat the English market to the post by hosting the novel’s world premiere. Looking back, it was a risky first novel, a gamble for a publisher, and the premiere may have been meant as a hedge for its added publicity value. But I hadn’t read so far into the situation. In fact, I hadn’t thought about it at all. I was going to Rome full of the heady altruism known to first-time authors and astronauts, the feeling best described by Mario Puzo after selling
The Godfather
– ‘almost like not
having to worry about dying.’

I’d travelled before, to Rome as well, so it was nothing more than an exotic twist to what I foresaw as a celebration and fait accompli. Arriving in Rome, I was happy to be ripped off by the airport taxi, pleased to marvel again at just how wrong leather can be as a material for trousers, nostalgic to ask myself where the ancient Romans had really found the models for their statues. I checked into the Hotel Raphael beside the Piazza Navona, and after coffee went to meet my publisher.

‘So here’s the problem,’ he said after pleasantries. ‘This book will not be accepted in Italy unless we can get one lady in particular to write about it. We actually thought we had an appointment with her – but now we’ve lost contact and her trail’s gone cold.’ After a moment he shrugged in that Italianate,
che sarà
kind of way. ‘She’s very unpredictable. We’ll just keep trying.’

So there was to be no fait accompli. No automatic celebration. Reality intervened at the first hurdle, making me calculate the power of this mystery person against Italy’s diversity and size. It was some power.

Her name was Fernanda Pivano; everyone called her Nanda. She was the mother of American literature in Italy, and had famously been the muse – maybe more! – of Ernest Hemingway. She was an intimate of Kerouac, Corso, and Vidal, of Ferlinghetti, Burroughs, Bukowski, and Ginsberg. She had been imprisoned three times by Italy’s fascist government for importing their liberal literature. And after such a formidable history she was now old – and grumpy.

‘Well,’ I ventured as she took shape in my mind, first as Helen of Troy, then Gertrude Stein, then Eleanor Roosevelt, ‘in fact it’s not an American book. I’m not American; I wrote the
thing in London.’

‘Forget it,’ the publisher waved. ‘In Italy it’s American literature. We need Nanda or nobody else will take notice. For half a century she’s been the patron and gateway for this kind of book. She has to meet you.’

And so the mythical doyenne ate the rest of the trip, became its tapestry. She roamed the shadow of every introduction, was behind the gaze on every face. She became the book’s only chance. Pitched in my mind against visions of who she might be was a sober reassessment of this whole book game. It was more precarious than I’d thought. And failure here could only knock-on to the rest of the world. More weightily still, as the hours of my visit passed, a date with Nanda grew to imply much more than media approval; it became the approval by proxy of Hemingway and Kerouac themselves.

We had three days to find Nanda. In the meantime the publicity department spread her dust over every interview: ‘Nanda is very interested, you know, she definitely wants to meet him. She’s probably going to write something.’

But Fernanda Pivano, legend, keyholder of Fate, was nowhere to be found. On a rooftop overlooking Rome, I attended the first literary party of my new life, and her seed was already planted, her name travelled like a rumour of sex. She might even show up there! Why not? She’d been seen in Rome just that week, surely she could make an appearance. Looking around, it became clear that we were persons in waiting. Waiting for Nanda. All the assembled authors and publishers were not enough to carry the night.

They were only enough to ramp up the legend.

‘She doesn’t suffer fools, believe me. If she doesn’t like you, forget it. If she doesn’t like you, you may as well pulp the book and leave town.’

Day three approached and we not only had to find her but now she had to like me. All the intelligence I’d garnered was no help at all: it stretched to knowing who she really liked, and that was Hemingway, Kerouac, and Ginsberg. Hard acts to follow. What’s more, unlike many salon legends, this wasn’t bullshit. Nanda Pivano had translated most of her American friends into now classic editions in their own right, and had written, edited, criticised, and reported her own significant post-war and Beat works in step with them. She had not only been Hemingway’s acknowledged confidante, she said she was the last person ever to hear from him.

Hemingway sought out Nanda before death.

‘She was scheduled to appear at a venue on Thursday,’ the publicity crew hissed. ‘But she cancelled. Now she’s not answering calls.’

‘She was seen at an event! But she vanished.’

‘We just heard she’s moving house! But nobody knows where.’

‘Someone answered her phone! Apparently she’s not well.’

So came the cries from the jungle of my trip. Then on the day before the last, having enjoyed some old balsamic while adjusting to life as a reject of Hemingway: ‘We found her – she’s in Milan!’

I snatch an afternoon flight to Milan where I’m met by Chiara, my guide for the hunt’s climax. She’s a lively philosophy graduate from the publisher’s local office, and presents with the right mix of realism, anarchy and hope.

‘When’s our appointment?’ I ask.

‘What appointment?’ she smiles.

It remains a commando mission. Chiara has met Nanda before, and as we hunker down to strategize over coffee, she
pulls a few more tales from the archive of Nanda’s stubbornness, caprice, intelligence, and charm. And she repeatedly calls a local number, one we’re assured is Nanda’s, but there’s no answer. Meanwhile information filters in that says the number connects to an apartment just around the corner – which must be the one Nanda is in the process of leaving.

Coffee turns into prosecco until the number finally answers. Its not Nanda but another lady, an assistant or friend, who says Nanda may or may not see us – but we can approach the apartment and take our chances. We walk to the address and try the bell, but no one comes. The building is an elegant low-rise over a gated garage with a restaurant built in alongside it. After loitering around the gate for a while, we retreat for more drinks and try the phone again.

Prosecco turns into grappa. Night begins to fall.

As a final shot within the hours of decency, we return to the darkened building and ring the bell. This time a lady comes to the gate and lets us in. Just like that, as if she’s always there, and always lets callers in. She says Nanda is upstairs, and leads us to an apartment stacked high with boxes and furnishings. In one central room, once the living room, a sofa and an armchair still sit in place. And from deep in the armchair a pair of eyes sparkle up. They follow Chiara and me to the sofa. Behind the eyes a small round woman begins to smile. Her hair is short, still brunette, framing a Genoese face with the beaming cheeks and handsome radiance of a boy on the cover of a raisin box. She watches me for a few moments, then says in English, ‘Take off your clothes.’

I grin. She beams. At eighty-five she has not only the face but the mischief of a schoolboy. Chiara, realising she’s sat between urchins, flaps at me not to do it. She later tells me Nanda has
used the gambit before, that it was a trick, because someone once actually undressed and she wasn’t impressed. More playful gambits follow, and I roll with them until Nanda leans from her chair to say that she’s read my book. That she loves it. This is the Mario Puzo moment I would’ve undressed for. In the buzz that follows, she invites us to invite her to dinner at the trattoria downstairs. Chiara and I take an arm each and manoeuvre her down to the place, settling at a large wooden table and ordering red wine. Nanda sits facing me, scrutinising. She wants to know about me, but my brief history – recent move to a forest in Ireland, upbringing in Mexico City, father running projects out of New York – makes her stop me.

‘Do you keep animals, in this forest?’

‘Not as in livestock. But there are creatures around the house, foxes and such. There’s even a fox who comes to be fed every night.’

‘And your father died in New York?’

‘He didn’t die there. Though he was treated for a time there, when he fell ill.’

‘Foxes, New York,’ her eyes glisten over my face. ‘Listen to me: if you’re going to write like this, you mustn’t face the world as yourself. You need a
figura
. If you show them yourself, they’ll destroy you!’

‘But part of the soul of this work is that it’s the first really honest thing I’ve done,’ I say. ‘It’s not in that spirit to hide.’

‘No, no,’ she says. ‘Don’t show them yourself. Look at Hemingway, look at all his friends. Those were deeply strange men. If anyone knew how they really were, they would’ve destroyed them. Deeply strange, all those boys. Do you think they would’ve survived without their
figura
? I was imprisoned for some of their ideas. Imprisoned three times, under fascism. And let me tell you something – I can smell it coming again.’

The words settle heavily between us. ‘Except, Nanda,’ I start, ‘it presumes that I’m also deeply strange...’

‘Spanish liar!’ she squeals. ‘You’re a Spanish liar! You need a
figura
! I’ll make one for you, and I’ll introduce you to all my friends in America...’ and through my cigarette smoke, over wine by the light of her gaze, the night becomes a kind of arrival. A docking at the wharf of great spirits, hearts, and minds. Of human turmoil and its answers in art. That Trojan intellect empties me out and pumps me full of the substance of art and life, makes me feel for the first time like a writer. She gives Hemingway’s blessing, speaks to me of him and his cohorts as of mutual friends we’d just been with. Then we kiss goodnight through the bars of her gate, and she is gone.

Sometime later a sketch of the article she was writing arrived at my place in Ireland. It was a poetic piece on me and my book, to be published in an Italian daily.

And there was my new
figura
– I’d virtually been raised by foxes in the wilderness, after my father’s suicide in New York.

I wrote to Nanda about it. Raised by foxes is one thing; suicide was a little strong.

‘Spanish liar!’ she wrote back.

We corresponded in handwriting for a time before her death, her last letter to me from a summer house in Portofino. And thinking about it now, I should have taken her advice. She not only passed on secrets and tips, she handed me a baton and a challenge. Still today my mind hunts Nanda and her advice.

But maybe it’s not too late to follow what she gave me.

After all, a suicide in the family can leave you confused.

And foxes are no example for a growing boy.