We left for the bobsled race in the afternoon. At one p.m. it was beginning to get cloudy, although in places the sky was still blue. We wore our matching red Welcome Team uniforms, which were the wrong choice, because they were barely insulated. We boarded a bus to Cesana. There, we took a fully enclosed gondola lift, which Federica called an ovovia, up over the bobsled course, a mass of silvery tubing. In the ovovia, there were two benches facing each other. I sat with my back against the peak of the mountain and watched the course tumble out below her. Federica had wide shoulders and narrow hips. She wore her hair in a low ponytail; she never wore a hat. She had a long straight nose with no dip where it met her forehead, like Augustus Caesar’s profile on coins, and angry eyes that were archaically large, too large for her face.
We got out at the bobsled course, but it was deserted, so we got into another ovovia and made it up over the sci di fondo course to the top of the mountain. Back at Cesana Pariol we built a snowman and I couldn’t tell what language the children were speaking.
We entered the course and walked all around to try to warm ourselves before settling into a spot near the startingline, where the track went vertical and the five rings were printed in blue below the ice. We sat on a platform built for a TV camera, and I chatted with an Alpino in a feathered cap.
Federica ignored me for a long while, as usual, though there was nothing to do but talk to me. Then she made me reach under her red uniform jacket and take her phone out of her right pocket because her hands were frozen.
The best part of the race was the noise, a low rumble that shot from one ear to the other like a stereo. The bobs were very shiny. We stayed for one heat. It was just too cold. We got back in the ovovia and went up the mountain again. The air was so charged with misty snow we couldn’t even see the car ahead of us.
This was how I met Nicola. He got in our gondola at the top of the mountain.
The ground fell away. We slid among the evergreen steeples, and the snow shushed against the rounded windows. I scanned the rubber seal around the doors. The ride back was going to take so long, and there was no way to exit. I felt the first twinklings of panic. I didn’t know how to adjust to the intrusion of this boy into our space. The height would have been manageable if he weren’t there. I clenched and unclenched my numb toes.
He’s (she found the word I didn’t know) a nobleman. She whispered it to me, while he watched, smiling. È nobile. He was a bit older than us. Nineteen. His coat was all the way buttoned up.
The snow brought the sunset close; it was in the frost on the window and in the hazy trough of mist between our descending gondola and the ascending gondola across the way. No conductor visible anywhere. We were caught in a scheme of disembodied, geometric power. Like solar system or vortex street. Carried along by hidden power with hidden motives.
Federica and I sat on the bench on one side, and he sat on the other side. He had an intelligent face, baroque, used beauty. There was something examined about his face, adored. I had the sense lots of people looked at him. It was an agile, active face, or it was carrion, picked over, it seemed to me, even in those first moments. The face showed that everyone wanted to know what he thought all the time. He had smoking green eyes.
“Ciao, Fede,” he said. She later explained she’d met him at a few parties. He was famous around Turin and good with names.
“Ciao, Nicola,” she shot back, with a note of contention in her voice.
Down we floated in our white globe, glass circle in the white world. The gondola was even farther from the trees; we’d drifted over a crevasse. The poles holding the wires were as tall as skyscrapers. We rocked back and forth as we parted the snow. The sun was bristly between the flakes. I was worried I was having trouble breathing; my heart was beating arrhythmically. I watched her for clues about how to behave. I reached for her hand. He smiled at that; he kept his eyes on my hand when he said, in Italian, “And your friend, who’s she?”
I was terrified of him and what he might see about me and Federica. He could tell I depended on her. I tried to tell myself, Don’t worry, he can’t look into your mind. I didn’t know whether he was good—responsible, sincere. I later learned that many people found him arrogant, he was so knowing.
Federica took my hand off hers. I wanted to grab it back, but I was afraid I’d fall apart if she refused me. My shame ricocheted within me, getting stronger. My ears rang, and hot queasiness squeezed at me from the inside. Meantime, the gondola went falling at increasing speed through the air. I was worried I would throw up. I couldn’t breathe. I put my hand under my coat and pinched my waist trying to ground myself, but my body was disobedient. Stop it, stop it, I either thought or said; I was rocking and grimacing, and I had to do whatever was necessary to stay alive. Silence rolled over me, my pulse was overflowing and escaping. My heart hastily counted down. I was aware that I could keep breathing, but my heart was going to stop and there was nothing I could do about that. Could I do my own chest compressions? We were so far from a hospital. I never found out how Federica answered “Who’s she?”
“Are you afraid of heights?” he said. His voice was far off. He spoke to me in English with a formal, old-fashioned American accent. I couldn’t lift my head. “We’ll be down soon.” It was like hearing a painting speak.
He stood, crossed the flying space in one step, and knelt in front of me. He put his leather-gloved hand on my shoulder and neck. His touch was a shock. In the black midst of my panic, it thrilled me. No one had ever touched me there or in that manner.
I tilted my head back against the window and felt the cold glass. I was pinned there against the window by his tense hand while the pink atmosphere continued, in slow motion, to shatter all around us.
Fede didn’t like that. “She’s being silly,” she said, in Italian. Fede didn’t want me to have the attentiveness and gentleness from the nobleman.
I wondered if he could feel my whipping heart. I couldn’t look at his face, so I just looked at the dark curls on his temple. I’d dreamed of being saved, but I’d never felt it. He was part of it, the dawn on the Po and the long purple cypress shadows, the scent of the evergreen boughs broken by snow, the exaltation—and now I felt something so consuming I was worthy of it—that fine cold glove, that knowing compress on my neck. An ultraviolet feeling.
The gondola was a shuddering fantasyland, the sun emerged, and the snow was an endless cascade of gems. He looked out from the window of this little flying room into the winter room of next year, the year after that. He swapped my panic for wonder.
What is the purpose of art? To classify certain things as types of things, my high school art teacher said. To classify certain things as types of things.
In a certain sense that day stood still forever. No day ever passed since then. Some mornings I woke up in midair in the snow, kissing the air that fluttered out of Nicola’s mouth.
I had arrived in Turin five months earlier, in August, at the station called Porta Nuova. The other station, Porta Susa, was under renovation for the Winter Olympics. Carla, the mother, carried a sign that said “Benvenuta Nora.” She had fluffy blond-dyed hair and stringy, convex bangs. Later I realized it was the kind of hairstyle that was popular in the eighties. Gianni was long-limbed with a gray curly head and a stubbly face. He held the leash of Rosa, the purebred German shepherd, and pointed out the police dogs. “Good husbands for Rosa,” he said, with a crooked smile.
I didn’t like Federica at first, as we walked down the platform and out into the sunshine on the grand baroque city. She was terrible at English and skeptical of me. I wanted to begin a sisterhood right away. At home in the US, I wasn’t close to anyone. I couldn’t imagine confiding in a sister, didn’t even think about what secrets I could confide; I just wanted to experience life alongside a friend, life not so arid and shut away.
My parents had sent me to live with these distant relatives because I’d been self-harming at home. It was my tenth-grade year and I was glad to get out of Florida. We lived in the old people part, on the Gulf Coast.
I liked to put myself in situations and see how they felt; I was the scientist and the rat. That was why I cut myself, which was the behavior that sent me to Italy. I thought it was silly and dramatic to cut my arms, so I cut my thighs. I didn’t want my actions to be interpreted as a “cry for help.” I did it because I wanted to see how everything felt and I wanted to be an artist and I didn’t know what to do with my energy. My parents had given me a Swiss Army knife with a silver emblem so smoothly embedded in its red plastic case that I could barely feel the difference in the two materials. Secreted within its rounded body were its multitude of skills: the beige toothpick, the tweezers, the tiny scissors, the nail file, and then that knife with its nail grip like a long slitted eye. I wondered, Am I capable of this? It seemed to work for some people, like meditation or exercise, and I wanted to call myself brave. In my shower, standing on the knobby pink nonslip mat, I tried a dozen times. I wanted to feel myself gather into a bolt of energy, but the results were not promising, and I didn’t want to take a shortcut with a bigger, sharper knife or something less painful, like a bunch of pills. Where would I have gone if no one had stopped me? Maybe I could have pressed my distress back into my body, like the knife back into its slot of darkness, and tried another way of being.
But then, to my surprise, there were external consequences. The pediatrician told my father, and his crying immediately made my behavior serious. Serious enough to earn me a plane ticket across the ocean. Serious enough to find me stretching my legs at five a.m. in the soft plane corridor as the ocean turned cold red. The sun came over the horizon in a hot blade. First my hair and hands, then the ocean became lustrous copper. Cold air leaked in around the oval window.
They asked me why I did it, and I couldn’t say much but apologies, and they decided that I needed a change, and they were right about that, though their love made me squirm.
It was hard to comprehend the cause and effect, how pushing at my thigh with a Swiss Army knife in the shower had produced this. On the plane, I had the first coffee of my life.
In the end of summer and the fall, as Turin prepared for the Olympics, Federica and I walked together by the Po. We walked down the white stone quays, where sometimes she made me light her cigarette. Orange enamel streetcars slid over the arched bridge and vanished into the cypress-heavy hillside. Boys in long boats dipped their oars. We walked up the stairway and into Piazza Vittorio. Streetcar wires crisscrossed overhead like a zodiac ceiling. The piazza started broad and narrowed into Via Po. Turin was more north than you’d expect, as far north as Minneapolis. Once, Hannibal marched over the mountains and into town with his elephants. You could still see the red brick gate the Romans built. Like everything else in Turin, the Roman gate was unremarked upon, unfenced, and there for the taking. In Turin nothing was barred off. It was like an old tomb no one had discovered.
Federica and I walked along Via Po with the evening light cutting at us along the arcades. We walked along Via Roma, buffeted by the crowds. Early on, when I didn’t speak Italian, Turin felt void of conversation. People could be talking loudly and the effect was still one of silence, nothing for my thoughts to grip. People passed like shades of the underworld.
We walked from the fascist arcades of blocky, polished granite to the eighteenth-century arcades. She showed me Libreria Luxemburg, which had an upstairs room of English books, and there I bought Rilke and Primo Levi. Turin smelled like laundry, cigarettes, diesel fuel, and lemon balm.
For the Olympics, we were too young to be full volunteers, so we were going to work for the “Welcome Team.” We attended trainings and received cheap red jackets and padded pants.
Part of my function in Italy was to teach English to Federica, but she was a terrible student, restless and forgetful and angry. And I didn’t know how English worked. I was supposed to teach her the difference between “I’m going to” and “I will.” One of them signified a planned future and the other a spur-of-the-moment future and I never found out which was which. While we worked, she would take an entire liter water bottle—no one drank tap water—and slowly crush it down to the table with her teeth, gulping up the water as it escaped.
Her eyes would be pleading for rescue while she cursed me for drilling her on prepositions. But I couldn’t explain why “get” is so different in get together, get over, get up, get down, get in. I pretended that it wasn’t fun for me either.
In reality, it was fun, extremely fun. I loved how Federica would cheat off my tests at school. I loved being patient with her. I loved her helpless, enraged gratitude. At school, someone told me she only liked dogs. I took this as advice. I looked for ways to be her dog.
She did have a dog, Rosa, the German shepherd, and at fifteen she was already something I’ve never become, which was the kind of person who could train a dog. She was able to be strict. She was able to subject others to her will, even if they protested. She had something to prove.
On one of those early days, Federica and I took Rosa out to the Parco del Valentino so that Federica could teach her tricks. Competitive walkers swished past on the royal paths. The orange tram eased over grassy tracks. Boys in red capssculled on the steely Po. A blushy sky and Rosa’s black gums. Federica held biscuits in her hands for Rosa. She told me, “If a dog likes treats, it doesn’t mean the dog is stupid. The best dogs love treats. The best dogs will do anything for a treat.”
Desire didn’t make me stupid. Desire made me sharp, and good.
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