was something about being in Italy that made it so possible, and I feasted on it in those early years. The scenery was first-rate—a villa by the sea, a constant blue sky, a countryside dotted with white trulli. Michele’s whole family effortlessly received us exactly as we presented ourselves, and we were never inconvenienced by any reference to or inquiry about how we had managed to pass each year’s preceding eleven, often difficult months of our strange and ill-founded marriage, and so it was almost possible to forget them.
When we decided to have Leone, I realized that I no longer wanted to be some girl passing through on the back of Michele’s motorcycle, married as a performance art prank. Now I wanted to stay, to be the mother of many children, to be a member of a family, the Fuortes family. And I wanted it year-round, not just for this wonderful but heartbreakingly ephemeral month after which I would not see or speak with or hear from any of the Italians—including Michele, in a way—for the next eleven months. My ambivalent relationship to Michele had not changed with the arrival of Leone, but my attachment to family had. I thought a great deal of that empty house that my parents had left Simon and me alone in, and understood that no matter what disappointment I felt in Michele, I would never, ever, leave.
But for now, at this time, I am still only a guest. A familiar July visitor, who happens to bring with her every time she comes a new baby with the Fuortes surname, but a guest, nonetheless, for just the month in Puglia. And I was wide awake, prepared even, for the fact. I got my shit together. I knew that we would need cash, sandwiches for the trip, cold rosé at the house when we arrived. I arranged for those things myself even. I bought the plane tickets. I rented the station wagon and remembered to ask for a rear-facing infant seat and a forward facing child’s booster seat. I knew that the Lire was out and the Euro was in. I got Leone a passport two weeks after he was born and signed it for him, writing Mother in parentheses. I took Italian lessons. And as we were packing the leased station wagon for that trip from Rome to Leuca, with our double stroller and our diaper bag filled with diapers in two sizes, and the bottles, and the wipes, I laughed to Michele, “Look at us now, Mr. Motorcycle!”
We arrived in Leuca after dark and, uncharacteristically, a day ahead of Alda. Her train from Rome was scheduled to arrive the following evening. Before we’d left Rome, she pressed the small heavy sack of keys in my hand, the keys to the house in Puglia, and laughed, kindly.
“Now I’m the guest!” she said, smiling.
I carefully packed the keys in my bag and felt an uneasy buzz of responsibility the whole eight-hour drive to the south. We passed the same remnants of aqueduct, and the tall skinny cypress trees, and the huge windmills at Tavoliere and the trucks heading north filled with just-harvested tomatoes, but now I was inside an air-conditioned diesel station wagon reading Green Eggs and Ham to Marco and nursing Leone the whole time, taking advantage of their naps to eke out any daydreamy thoughts about paths not taken and lives not lived. Still, Michele and I have nothing much to say to each other and the long drive passes almost wordlessly between us.
We drove Michele’s customary quick circle of the lighthouse that looks down upon the whole port before continuing to the house on Via Tommaso Fuortes. I fished out the sack of keys and opened the tall, heavy door, and Michele put all of our things inside, piling up our luggage in the center of the impluvium. Marco said, in two-year-old talk, “Hey! Where’s the ceiling?” And we laughed. I turned on the lights in the kitchen and in the storeroom off the kitchen and checked to see what there was: tomatoes, oil, garlic, melon, eggplant. Exactly as it was every year. Rosaria had been there earlier and kindly left us a meal under dish towels in the cabinet, per Alda’s phoned-ahead instructions, surely. Michele opened his suitcases and within five minutes exploded like a dandelion gone to seed, his shit floating all over the house and landing wherever it may, wherever he drops it. His eyeglasses, shoes, wallet, keys, camera, a