From the Fire Hills

Hole in the Heart

41 HOLE IN THE HEART I have walked miles of decommissioned rails in the hills above Spoleto, through galleries perfected in the forges of archetype, where bats fired like synapses. In any tunnel or horror flick, this fulcrum, this choice: to cover my eyes and march, or open wide and return—to California, say, my sister with her new twins two months premature. In a photo, my father holds an infant in his hands, and his hands are what I remember: inaccurate, clumsy, too big to deliver anyone into this new history of images. I have entered Italy through history, from the otherworldly fluorescence of a bus terminal, up escalators, through walls of a medieval fortress like the one the mind makes of itself under siege. When I emerged in the arterial confusion of the city, I understood the Renaissance in all its pomp and ephemera, each chubby cherub suddenly airy, dumb from light. My wife and I, childless, childishly watch TV each night, talk to death our dedication to the image— animal fetuses in vitro: the silky skin of a wolf pup, hairless, eyes sealed over, or rigorous organs beyond that briefest of feline membranes. Surely we were meant to be gods gazing through these windows at a heart thrashing about like a bat in a tunnel in the hills just north of Spoleto, where, in boar season, 42 hunters fire into the heart of autumn. Even in Italy, I watched too much TV, conversing not with people but with language itself. For hours the bright birds of women pranced about some host—articulate, bespectacled—who barked detergent. They are fine, my sister’s twins: Sam with tubes laid lovingly in his ears. Lexi, a procedure to close a hole in her heart. Imagine the lack of allegory there, or in the way those dancers on Italian TV go under for love of their bodies. Imagine sunlight carving itself into Spoleto late, as I entered over viaducts, not unlike a surgeon somewhere in California, tunneling a blocked artery, up a uterine canal, camera threaded in, back to the beginning. Outside the tight gauze of the OR, a few women in white gather. Cigarettes extinguished, they also enter through a small hole in the heart. ...