Last Summer in the City Read online

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  A Note About the Author and Translator

  Copyright Page

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  To Sara Calligarich

  The first great disaster to befall mankind

  was not the flood but the drying out.

  —SÁNDOR FERENCZI

  As he rose and fell

  He passed the stages of his age and youth

  Entering the whirlpool.

  —T. S. ELIOT

  FOREWORD

  By André Aciman

  Last Summer in the City, by the Italian novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Gianfranco Calligarich, was first published in 1973. He had arrived in Rome in his early twenties as a correspondent for a small newspaper based in Milan, and not much later, when recalled to Milan by the paper, decided instead to stay in Rome to devote himself to a novel, probably his plan all along. When finished, however, the book was turned down by every Italian publisher until dropping into the hands of one of Italy’s most renowned writers and essayists, Natalia Ginzburg. She read it overnight, and her response was so enthusiastic that she got the publishing house Garzanti, which was initially underwhelmed by the novel, to publish it. Seventeen thousand copies were sold that summer, earning the young author a succès d’estime as well as a book prize. But not much later, the novel disappeared from the shelves and could be found only in scattered bookstalls and secondhand bookstores around Italy. Copies, however, were vigorously coveted by booklovers and reading groups, including some doctoral students, and the novel became the object of a cult among the literary cognoscenti. Then, nearly four decades later, in 2010, the prestigious small publishing house Nino Aragno Editore decided to reissue Last Summer. Deemed once again a highly crafted and serious novel, it was reviewed to great acclaim, with many critics openly kicking themselves for neglecting Calligarich’s work when it was first published. But once again, and despite being reviewed by almost all of Italy’s main dailies, the novel dropped from sight, only to be finally rereleased in 2016 by Bompiani as well as by a number of international publishing houses.

  * * *

  Calligarich is not a familiar Italian surname. It has Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian roots, and, like many surnames ending in ich, is frequently claimed by Italo-Slovenians whose lineage most likely goes back to the port city of Trieste. Many Italians continue to keep the Slavic surnames without necessarily feeling any connection to a Slavic ancestry.

  But Gianfranco Calligarich’s origins are more complex. He was born in Asmara, Eritrea, once a thriving Italian colony. His father, who was born in Corfu to a Greek mother and a Triestine father, was Jewish, while his wife was Piedmontese. Gianfranco himself grew up in Milan, then moved to Rome, and yet, as he claimed in an interview, his roots are planted in Trieste, where he would most likely want to be buried. His extended family feels drawn to Trieste, dreams Trieste, feels Trieste, and ultimately claims to belong to no place but Trieste, even if many of its members may never have set foot there and wouldn’t begin to understand the Italian spoken by native Triestini. His grandfather’s life is worthy of a tiny epic, since the man, born with Slavic roots, moved from Trieste to Corfu, married a Greek woman, and later, on being branded a deserter by the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I, fled on the first ship he found, landed in Italy, and settled in Milan. On his deathbed—or so the story goes in Last Summer in the City—Calligarich’s grandfather, who had traveled the seas in his younger days and whose mind was already drifting to a seagirt Trieste of memory, asks his son to let him taste some seawater. Though the request may seem strange, coming as it did in landlocked Milan, his son, in Calligarich’s novel, has no choice but to get in his car and drive all the way to Genoa with his fourteen-year-old son, whose brooding silence seems to have become the norm. The boy’s father finally reaches the sea, fills up a bottle with water, and drives all the way back to Milan only to find his dying father already unconscious. Still, the dutiful son, who could very well be Gianfranco’s father, daubs his father’s face with the salty water even if the dying man is past caring or being grateful for the gesture.

  Seawater is not in the slightest insignificant, since Leo Gazzara, the narrator of the novel, who at times could probably be a stand-in for the author himself, will choose to leave Milan and move to Rome, in good part because of its proximity to the beach. There are, in the novel, numberless times when, on a lark, the narrator will hop in his car and drive for a good half hour to the sea. Trieste, after all, faces the sea, and finding the sea anywhere on the planet remains, in more ways than one, a form of homecoming for the narrator. His Triestine grandfather found closure by asking for seawater, and, fifteen years later, at the age of thirty, Leo will too.

  Diving into the sea or just walking along the shoreline remains a source of undiminished bliss and purifying solace for Leo, a moment when his persistent penury, failures, defeats, and the unyielding solitude that he struggles to flee as obstinately as he keeps seeking it out all are summarily wiped off by a sudden plunge underwater, an instance of physical and spiritual redemption that this young man is unable to find elsewhere. “I dived in and swam until I was out of breath. Then I turned and played dead, listening to the swish of the water around my ears. I felt good, I couldn’t remember ever feeling that good.”

  This, in many ways, could be the very best that life has to offer Leo Gazzara. He fritters away his days and nights in Rome, on sleepless hours with Arianna or in tumultuous all-night benders with his pal Graziano, while all he’s desperately trying to do is reshuffle the worthless cards that life has dealt him. In this, as so many critics were all too quick to point out, he is the incarnation of Marcello Rubini of La Dolce Vita (1960) and now, with the wisdom of hindsight, of Jep Gambardella of La Grande Bellezza (2013). Both films are about the aimless lives of well-heeled journalists whose careers were taken over by worldly ambitions when in truth their deeper vocation was literature, a dream destined to be perpetually postponed if not altogether shelved. As colorful as Marcello’s life may seem, the shallow itinerary of his day-to-day is a perpetual skidding from one woman to another, one nightclub after another, one gathering, one soirée, one person, to the next. Gambardella’s itinerary is hardly different. Clearly inspired by Fellini’s classic from fifty-plus years earlier, Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty is a far less somber portrait of the decadent lifestyle of the privileged few and reflects an Italy that moved on following its startling postwar boom of the early sixties, then survived the Anni di piombo of the seventies and eighties—the “Years of Lead,” when Italy faced an endless assault of political carnage that eventually claimed the life of Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978—only to come out as elegantly disenchanted and unflappably put-together, but no less feckless and disaffected, than the sixties Rome of Fellini’s speckling Via Veneto. As Jep chastises Stefania in the famous balcony scene, “We’re all on the brink of despair.” This never changes. It sits on every page of Calligarich’s novel. His characters, unless gainfully employed or blinkered by upward mobility, sit on the brink of despair, condemned, as each is, to a staring contest with the abyss, sensing all along that the abyss is winning. What holds them together, what feeds and enables their internal atrophy, is Rome itself.

  * * *

  The Rome of the early seventies is not just a city with famous sites and monuments, most of which are to this very day still begrimed by age and
neglect. Rome is where almost everyone in Last Summer charts his or her circuitous transit through a city that, despite claiming a historic center, has no center and lets everyone feel squandered and scattered about. All Leo does is drift—as Arianna, his love interest, drifts; as Graziano, his drunken friend, drifts; as Fellini’s Marcello drifts. People don’t amble or stroll in Rome, they meander, and stray from the Spanish Steps to Piazza Navona, to Campo de’ Fiori, over and across Ponte Sisto to Trastevere, then back across the river to Piazza del Popolo, Via Frattina, and finally once again to Piazza di Spagna and Trinità dei Monti. Places spill into one another, by turns splendid and beautiful, then ordinary and drab, mirroring Calligarich’s masterful prose style, which frequently jolts the highly elegiac with the brutally colloquial.

  Calligarich’s Rome is lived and loved in all seasons, at all hours of the day and night, dawn especially. Not a city easy to peel off or to abandon and forget. And to bring the point home, Calligarich quotes Cavafy’s unforgettable poem:

  There is no ship for you, there is no road

  As you have destroyed your life here

  in this little corner, you have ruined it in the entire world.

  (TRANSLATION BY RAE DALVEN)

  And yet, as Calligarich has Arianna say, no one is from Rome. Everyone comes from elsewhere. Rome is home to the transient, to those who don’t belong anywhere, who are unfinished, who have a self but want another and can’t, for the life of them, disown the one they’ve got. They drift and they ramble. One way or another, they will ultimately alzare le vele—to use a common phrase in the novel—hoist their sails, or, as more accurately rendered here, get the hell out.

  One learns to hate Rome so as to stop loving it.

  Or it’s the other way around: one loves it because one could easily hate it.

  Rome is the lingering, glamorous patina that blinds the characters of Last Summer in the City to the very real fact that they are seriously damaged and marooned. Despite their few moments of mirth and pleasure, each is an emotional cripple. What afflicts them all, if observed from a purely literary perspective, is a classic case of existential anomie. Whether they are rich or poor, settled or not, with or without someone who means anything to them, all seem to spin their wheels. There is no one to blame, everyone to scorn, and only one person to love—if you could even call it love, because the feeling bristles with so many barbs that one should know enough to leave it alone. Better to flee and leave everything behind.

  Booze is an option, and Leo is prey to alcohol and will stop drinking only after being stricken with the DTs. Friendship is another option, as are women; then there are books, the sea, and finally, of course, as ever again, beloved Rome, home to the abyss. Rome cradles all forms of dejection, nourishes them, and then, when you least suspect it, turns out to have been starving you all along. Calligarich’s characters, and Leo in particular, are unwilling or unable to connect with others, to consummate whatever life tosses their way. While they may be dissolute, ultimately they are numb to experience itself. This is neo-Sartre and post-Camus. As his friend Graziano will tell Leo, “You can’t just go on like this.”

  But, yes, he can. And his curse is that he knows he can.

  What gives him the greatest pleasure is not so much sleeping with a woman but waking up in her bed after she has gone to work and smelling the coffee, ready to be reheated, or, better yet, getting up, roaming around the empty apartment, switching on music, reheating the coffee, then finally lounging in a bathtub filled with hot water. After which he’ll dry himself with clean towels, dress, and shut the door behind him, never to return. Women, as he himself says, come easily to him.

  * * *

  Then one evening Leo meets the beautiful Arianna. They’re at a stylish cocktail party in a large apartment owned by a friend who is a successful television producer who will eventually offer Leo a job, though within a few hours of being hired Leo will walk out. With hardly a penny to his name, and soaked from a rainstorm, Leo arrives at the party, where people are very consciously bedecked in fashionable rainy-day clothes. A rolling cart containing various alcoholic beverages makes the rounds. And a bowl full of peanuts materializes. Totally famished, Leo tackles the peanuts. When the hostess, his friend, asks him to fetch some ice from the kitchen—it’s their butler’s evening off—Leo opens the refrigerator and gorges himself on all manner of cheeses. On his way to and from the kitchen he runs into Arianna, who is curled up on the floor, on the phone. They talk for a moment, then reconnect later, and eventually, by three in the morning, leave together. They casually talk books; she loves Proust. She asks him when he would have liked to be born. His answer: “In Vienna before the end of the empire.” Perhaps his is an unconscious wish to walk back his family tree to a time preceding his grandfather’s flight from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when everything was as it should be, or so it seems in retrospect. As for Arianna, her answer to the same question couldn’t be simpler: “Combray,” she says.

  Then she asks him to drive her to the Capitol. “‘I’d like to see the city from the terraces of the Capitoline Hill.’ We got there in five minutes and went and leaned on the parapet just above the Forum. Beneath us, the squares were deserted, and the basilicas, frozen in marble, were dreaming of the day they would thaw.” At which point she utters something that underwrites the source of Leo’s—and one is tempted to assume Calligarich’s own—malaise. “‘Feeling nostalgic for something we never had.’”

  Leo and Arianna feel like throwbacks from an almost remembered era that may never have been but that beckons to a better life that is indeed their rightful life, not the one they’re given in this makeshift town called Rome. His reply to her sudden exclamation will come a few pages later when they end up having brioches at dawn, and he remembers it’s his birthday. He is thirty years old, and, raising his boiling cup of caffellatte as though it were a champagne glass, he toasts, “‘To all the things we haven’t done, the things we should have done, and the things we won’t do.’”

  Neither belongs either here or elsewhere, either in this calendar year or any other year.

  No two stranded souls could have been better paired—which is why they are terminally destructive.

  We may, barring another name for it, call this love.

  It springs on them at the bus station, among the rising “good smell of coffee, that good smell cafés have early in the morning.”

  But they won’t speak a word of love. Instead, she asks him to drive her to the sea. They’ll walk on the shore, close to the waves, feel the weather turn chilly, he’ll hold her, she’ll hold him, and Arianna will keep testing him throughout the night. But no sex, she warns. She will eventually fall in love with him, but in the past tense, “‘God, how I loved you … How I loved you,’” she’ll confide one day, and he too will say much the same, “‘I think I’m in love with you,’” to which she will snap back, “‘Never say that again.’” Then they start kissing, and when he asks her to come home with him she says, “Are you crazy?… I don’t feel like making love, haven’t you got that yet?” and he narrates, “She gave me a last, light kiss on the lips.”

  Leo will struggle not to speak his love, and almost drives himself into believing he feels no love for her, while she has been running hot and cold with him, until, maybe all too suddenly, in bed together, he realizes he is unable to feel aroused and longs for the warmth that would have stirred him: “I was frozen and unhappy and there was nothing in me, not even a little of that warmth I would have liked more than anything else in my life, that all-consuming warmth that would have spread from my belly through my body so that in the end I’d be able to reach her.” Much later in the novel, when she is emotionally available to him, he longs not for that tepore (warmth) in his belly but for exactly the opposite, torpore (numbness): “… the languor I had so long looked for with her.” The paradox couldn’t be crueler. And yet, as unsettling as this paradox can be, it is compounded by another paradox far more bitter and harder to swallo
w when Leo realizes that Arianna is now living with another man: “I felt she was mine,” Leo thinks, four pages before the end of the novel. “I had never before felt that so much as I did now, when she was someone else’s. What lousy luck. I knew what it meant, that she could only belong to me when she was someone else’s.”

  * * *

  Avanzo in Italian means a leftover, a remnant, the unwanted, discarded remains of someone else’s life or property. In many ways, that one word also sums up the essence of Leo’s life. From a cheap hotel near Campo de’ Fiori, he moves into his married friends’ apartment when they invite him to house-sit during their two-year absence in Mexico. Their marriage is on the rocks, and they welcome the change of scenery; Leo makes a pass at the wife, when the husband is not in the room, but things don’t go any further. Since the couple can’t take their old Alfa Romeo abroad with them, they sell it to him for a pittance. The car, the apartment on Monte Mario, down to the bowl of peanuts at the party, even the attempted pass at the wife—all these details, as Leo will grow increasingly aware, are leftovers from other people’s lives.

  Similarly, though married to an American millionairess, the perpetually drunken Graziano Castelvecchio loves to dine on avanzi in restaurants. Some restaurants, he claims, have the best avanzi.

  It is, however, Graziano who dots the i’s to what remains a dominant key in Leo’s life. He, like Graziano, is a leftover, a survivor of an extinct species. “‘Look around you,’ he said as we walked down Via del Corso, surrounded by people coming out of office buildings. ‘Is there anything you feel part of? No, there isn’t. And you know why there isn’t? Because we belong to an extinct species. We happen to still be alive, that’s all,’ he said, stopping to light a cigar. Because, if I didn’t know, we were born just when beautiful old Europe was fine-tuning its most lucid, thorough, and definitive suicide attempt.”