Memory I

Back to the Beginning

There are no barriers to where your thoughts will take you.

After finding the villa a friend had lent us for our honeymoon, Mario and I stretched out in the sun. I had already walked along the shore and photographed the fishermen hauling in their nets. Now, with nothing special to do, it was time for memories.

I was back once more in 1957.

Mario. It was October. A year had passed since I had seen him. And now we were married. Curiously he was the only Italian I had met who seemed to have been aware of me as a person rather than solely as a member of the opposite sex. My other Italian friends had been quite incapable of understanding our friendship. “But has he never paid court to you?” they would ask, using the lovely Italian terminology, and then shake their heads in disbelief when I tried to explain that the Etruscan archaeologist I had met in Florence and I were friends and would they please tell me what was so strange about that.

Memories crowded in as Mario rested up from his bout with the flu and the stress of our wedding. I had crossed the Atlantic still one more time and after a few days in Germany with my parents, it was time to continue on and face whatever fate was in store for me. We were in Trento, my parents had their own schedule to follow and we were waiting for the train that was to take me to Florence and Mario. “The train should be here soon. It’s already 10 minutes late,” and I smiled now, thinking that in Italy a ten-minute delay in a train schedule was nothing. Mussolini had been credited with making the trains run on time. “I sort of doubt whether I’ll get a seat.” I added, looking around at the platform. To my left a horde of small boys in blue shorts and t-shirts had momentarily come to rest on their miniature suitcases and buzzed restlessly, impatient at this restraint on their liberty. Three stocky women, dark hair flying in wisps around their faces, kept them tied to their posts with a constant stream of orders in the deep voices of Italian women. On my other side a couple of priests in their black cassocks sweated in the heat of the September sun. An old peasant woman hunched her shoulders and plodded up and down the platform carrying a bunch of purple heather, the spikes pointed out in front of her like a bristling bunch of arrows. Men and women stood together in family groups and glanced up the track, moving suitcases this way and that. I hadn’t realized that Italian vacations were over and children were on their way back to school.

I had just decided that I too had better move away from the children when the train slid almost noiselessly into the station. A few people fought their way out and then it was our turn. “Take my suitcases, I had told my father, and I’ll see if they can be handed in through a window.” Glances into the first two compartments convinced me I was best off at the entrance. “I’ll stay here by the door,” I shouted, frantically signaling him to bring my suitcases back. “There’ll be room here somehow.” Several young men already settled on the platform helped stack my suitcases with theirs and tried to close the outside door. “Momento!” someone cried, and another suitcase and a girl climbed up the steps. Two nuns, looking frighteningly voluminous in their black habits, started to follow, but quickly exited when they realized either their suitcase or they would have to stay behind. “Watch your hands!” the conductor sang out slamming the door shut. I leaned out the window and reassured my parents. “We’re all quite happy in here. Don’t worry. Goodbye, goodbye!” and we moved off.

“Where are you going?” the girl next to me said once we had more or less comfortably leaned ourselves against the wall. “To Florence.” I answered her in Italian. “A fiancé of mine is there.” “The fiancé,” she corrected me. “Or do you have more than one?” she smiled. “Of course. Just one. He’s an archaeologist.” I paused a minute to find the right words and then went on. “But maybe you can explain something else. I read about an auto racer in a magazine. It said he had shortly become engaged to a certain young lady and expected to marry her. It seems that if he’s engaged to her, one would naturally assume that they would be getting married.” “Engagements aren’t very permanent things in Italy. Until they’ve actually set the date, being engaged doesn’t mean the two will get married.” At this point I realized that fidanzato simply meant boyfriend or girlfriend.

Maybe that was what Mario had meant when he said I would still be free to decide, to change my mind. But more than anything else his lack of doubt committed me as much as it did him. Although I was the one who had left my job and come across the ocean, he too had prepared the way and his family and friends were expecting a wedding. I had been so terribly excited in New York, but now I felt just plain frightened. I closed my eyes and wished with all my heart that Ellen, who had listened to all my plans and helped me pack my last suitcase, was with me now. She had felt as sure as I, had been delighted to find that romance still existed. And her colleagues at the Ford Foundation were as enthusiastic as she. It seemed that only Wall Street was against us, judging from the reactions of a group of businessmen she related our story to. “They haven’t seen each other for a year?” they said. “Can’t possibly work.”