Books & Rough Business

III

104 Books and Rough Business III Then one day arrived Arturo Da Villa, sent by Einaudi. Someone up at the head office had heard stories of strange discounts in downtown Naples. Though built thick, more like a farm boy than a man of letters, Arturo always exhibited a certain vanity about his hair.That first day, it shone with cream, its comb perfect. Likewise sophisticated was how he let a cigarette dangle from one corner of his lips. The man caught me at a time when I was alone at the desk, and once I ascertained what he’d come for, I gave him a straight and unapologetic explanation. I hadn’t grown comfortable with the likes of Alda Croce only to get tongue-tied around a freelance investigator, especially not one with an accent a bit like Nino Benvenuti’s. I even explained something about figuring profits, clarifying my percentage gain on each Laterza title. “You’re right,” Da Villa conceded, tasting his cigarette. “It’s a 40% return on investment.” And he invited me for coffee. At the café across Toledo, this man who’d come into my store prepared to have me hauled off by the police instead offered me direct distribution on all Einaudi titles. “That’s not just the Laterza imprint, signore.” Mine would be the first shop in the readers’ ghetto to receive the books, and I’d be able to replenish the stock with a single phone call. Actually, I already found Da Villa appealing. He’d been so intrigued by my case, it turned out, that he’d come all the way down from Udine. That town is one Americans might know, in the northernmost pocket of my country, the bulge above Trieste. There’s a NATO Air Force base. For Da Villa, this visit to Naples was his first, and between his interest in my 105 Tullio Pironti home and mine in his, by the time we finished our coffees we’d launched a friendship that would last for decades. If he were still alive, Arturo, I’d still be meeting him for coffee whenever he came to town. In fact, what to do with someone like him presents a challenge for this book. Da Villa’s friendship and its impact on the work I came to do, during the same period, don’t fit a conventional chapter framework. It’s not a neat bundle, beginning to end. My adult life tends to be defined, rather, by books and the people who make them. Those people are sometimes a book’s writer, sometimes its subject—and either way, I must add, they’ve also involved me in projects that never made it to print. Such projects, still seen only in the mind’s eye, include a memoir by a woman on the margins of terrorism and the dreambook of Federico Fellini. They’re among my most fascinating experiences, and they reveal a lot about my changing culture. But whether the experience resulted in an actual book or not, they didn’t proceed in a logical order. As a grown man, I’ve rarely gone step by step, as my mother did during her nights of prayer, or as I myself did during my match against Troianovich. So the chronological outline of my changing feelings, and those of my family, can no longer rule this memoir. Coming of age is rough business, you might say, but now it’s past. What matters instead: books. As for Da Villa, even on his first days in Naples he helped me to see things in a new way. He was fascinated with my city’s rough-and-tumble, so different from the orderly life in the shadow of the Alps. On that very first visit, he pumped me for whatever I could tell him about the Naples version of Three-Card Monte. I understand there’s also an American adaptation of this scam, popular in New York, but Arturo had never seen the trick until he got off the train at Napoli Centrale. He didn’t even mind the thousand lira or so he’d lost, trying to finger the runaway ace. He felt it was small price to pay for such a spectacle. That was Arturo Da Villa, delighted as a child at the drop of a card. Yet at the same time he was one of those who, like Professor Galasso, broadened my culture every time we got together. Da Villa didn’t...