From the Fire Hills

The Gothic Line

I 5 THE GOTHIC LINE That evening I must have crossed it, racketing out the cobbles in an orange city bus to Casalecchio— suburb of Bologna on the Reno’s banks— to dine with those I hardly knew, owners of the only café near the school where every day I filled blanks with proper nouns, conjugations in the remote past, for which, I later learned, Italian now has little use. What was I doing as I stamped my feet, then ticket, ascended the stairs at the stop, huddled in my half literacy and cheap coat I had to buy when a winter I had not counted on descended? I must have transgressed some checkpoint between acquaintance and friend, grim shoreline pocked with the unintelligible artifacts of embarrassment and xenophilia, as Mina buzzed me up to a linen table and the foreboding of their furniture: mobili in Italian, the movables, like me on the ride out of the urban, repeating scant vocabulary to the cobble’s stutter. And it’s not the tortellini served that night, handmade, curled in silken broth, or the fizzy wine, which Dino— from Costante, constant, forever—bottled himself. Not even some idea of the exotic, which surely I still felt then, one season into my becoming, my beginning Italian like a wounded machine sputtering its declensions to their transnational sympathy, which, after all, could be anyone’s. 6 But the grandfather, who arrived after dinner, spoke a broken dialect gauzed in bookish Italian— another kind of wound—whose eyes, when Mina introduced me as the American, glazed over then burned through me, or the version of me forever fixed in his past, in an Allied tank entering Bologna, while he holed up in the hills near the Gothic Line, his wife in labor, in a shelter outside the punished city and the periodic sentences of bombing. And though I confess now my ignorance of war, that I first entered the vast cathedral of its history in Bologna that winter, still I knew enough to understand what he didn’t say, which, in my own tongue, sounds like this: You, who liberated the streets in your machines, who delivered my daughter from the fire hills and noise of our wrongness, still I claim you, blue-eyed bringer of the marketplace. Hold my hand, as you are doing now, as you will continue to do, your calling, your curse—for you will occupy forever one person to me, constant, immovable. ...