along the lake. Paola, who worked at her father’s café, serving espresso and pizza and fried artichokes to the locals, is entirely alone, away from her two brothers, and she stands at the lip of the lake, one toe pointed, dipping in.
Ramon Sr. was filthy from working and he had come to the lake to cool off. The sun was so hot, he wasn’t sure if she was a real woman or a mermaid, and, according to Ramon, his father had fallen in love with Paola by the time she’d turned to face him.
Ramon’s father later went to work for BP, as a geologist, and he took Paola away from Italy and her brothers and her parents’ graves and her life at the café that had exhausted her. The café had closed when she left—I have seen it on the outskirts of the village—and so Paola got on a plane for the first time, and went first to Spain, where Ramon was born, and then to West Africa and England and then South America and then Holland, and later, when Ramon left her for college in the States, they went off to Java, where Ramon brought an American photographer to the jungle and opened an umbrella in a hot cave to protect his face from a throng of bats.
_______
I thought of Paola as we continued back to Brooklyn, imagining how different this conversation would have been at my mother-in-law’s house. Black child? Spanish or Italian would be better, but why not?, Paola would have said. Me, I had no troubles with having the babies (interesting, knowing how much she had tried for a second child), but if Jessica has the trouble with the babies, then sure, take one from somewhere else, why not. There are so many here, so many young people with the children, but we take care of our children in Italy. Spain too. We don’t give them away, acch, anyway. It’s awful, America. Just awful. So high up everyone is. And after those buildings fell? Yes, I know, where you are, it’s not so high, but, Ramon, why do you live there? Come back to Italia. I have a space for you here, in the house, where you can make your plans for all your buildings. Here, in Lazio! Jessica, too, we have very nice schools here. She can teach in them. Or Rome. Very good schools! Like England! Jesse could go to Rome, and, Ramon, you can stay here. And anyway, Ramon, she’d have said, you are so young to have a baby. Not yet, she’d say to her forty-two-year-old son. Come here and stay here and then you will see, the babies will come.
From where? I wondered, thinking of Ramon’s mother. I understood her better after all these years—or I should say I could anticipate her more accurately—but on that first trip, I’d been shocked as I watched her remove Ramon’s things from his overnight bag, as if they’d been plated in gold. She placed these items—regular things!: jeans, polo shirts, balled-up socks—on shelves cleared for him alone. The house was cluttered with a lifetime of trinkets from abroad, an accumulation of crud and beauty and memory and the evident compulsion to keep all of it. As I had not been offered my own shelf, I placed my backpack on the floor. When I returned from the bathroom, which was jammed with unopened boxes and porcelain figurines, jars of expired face cream, decade-old bottles of suntan lotion and shampoos, the backpack had been removed.
“Where’s my stuff?” I asked Ramon.
He took a deep breath. “That backpack, you know, it’s been a lot of places. Dragged all around, you know? It’s probably a little dirty for the house.”
“So, where’s my stuff then?”
“My mother is cleaning it on the terrace.” Ramon breathed out.
“Is this you saying this or your mother?” I asked. “That my stuff is in need of cleaning?”
“My mother,” he told me. “But, I mean, she has a point. The trains. The hostels. The dust. Anyway, she’s wiping it down now. Then she’ll put some sort of plastic down here.” He spread his hands out on the floor by the twin bed I assumed I’d be sleeping in. “And then you can set it down and use it. On the plastic.”
I did believe it was crazy and slightly defamatory. But then! But then. The social responsibility, the need to understand a different way of life . . . I had thought, as I sat for a