It was one of about a dozen notebooks Whitney brought with her when she moved in with Paolo, all of them of the very same make, thick, black-covered things, perhaps two hundred octavo-sized pages in length. Thumbing through the pages he saw it was a great catchall: images clipped from fashion magazines; short quotations from other writers; quick notations, like “Woman at Il Forno with the long coat of faux leopard”; small patches of richly colored fabric the size of playing cards; and what looked like diary entries, referring as they did to things she had talked about, personal things, like strains with friends or remembrances. 

Something told him to begin at the end, but the last dozen or so pages were blank. When he thumbed to the place where she last left off, it was the same melange of material—notes, clippings, the odd photo. He had an instant of thinking he should put the journal aside, then he opened to an entry that stood out for its length. Flipping back and forth he saw it filled a page and a half, beginning just below an old photo of the child Whitney in a jumper of ghastly plaid and glossy Mary Janes. 

She had very clear handwriting, made with a fine pointed pen and forward-slanting like Palmer script but of a font more like close-kerned print than cursive. The taller letters were always elongated. 

The Italian Novel

No one writes out of desperation. It’s too difficult. Writing is always an act of hope.

But our astrophysicist had long practiced a kind of dialectical thinking where it served him; he could show even the simplest, irreducable values to be the flimsiest of constructions, things whose propriety derived entirely from jerry-rigged meaning at almost every joint. All of which is really just to say he was a master of confusing an issue. And so from spotting Whitney’s notebook, then feeling an impulse that he had to hesistate over, he began the work of rationalizing what followed, looking more broadly at the nature of the thing—of the private and trespassing. 

Look for some hidden tension—this was always a good place to begin—and wasn’t there something a little strange about privacy for two people who’d been sharing the same bed for two years. They saw each other naked, fatigued, and ill. They daily shared private thinking and feelings with one another. Each of them knew every square centimeter of the other’s body. All of their most private possessions were collected together in one place. That there could be any privacy in a life like that began to seem a bit of a stretch.

The Italian Novel

It is a strange thing to look into someone else’s journal, as close as one comes to entering another person’s consciousness with all of its contents, spoken and unspoken, speakable and unspeakable. Paolo hesitated as most people would; our presumption is that such things are very narrowly private, the journaler’s own and only the journaler’s.

Think of the girl’s diary with its emphatic little clasp.

The Italian Novel

Paolo rode his bici to the Institute that evening, though better with his umbrella he had walked, as only minutes from the apartment in via Ghibellina it began to rain like it does in November in Firenze, dutifully and raw. Coming to the river at the ponte alle Grazie, he was already wet to the skin and shivering, wet to the skin and weeping, like one might while pedaling into a cold wind, though it wasn’t the wind now but what he uncovered a few hours before when he’d looked into one of Whitney’s notebooks and read that she was fucking someone called M in the stacks at the biblioteca nationale—at the biblioteca and elsewhere he was quite sure. His whole center ached, from shoulder to shoulder, neck to navel, and his reflex was as predictable as it was foolish, to break it all down like it was just another complex mathematical object, break it all down into its most basic components to see how it added up. He was a smart one, Paolo Donati, yes, but there is smart and then there is smart; it just wasn’t the right domain for such operations. So along the lungarno he flew like a wraith through the dark, past the ponte vecchio, then down behind the palazzi along borgo Jacobo.

The Italian Novel

Yes, it was still just a hypothesis. That they were lovers would have been rather hard to confirm. Some weeks later though, after forgetting her laptop at the office and doubling back, there was leaking from Malavisi’s office the unmistakable murmur of very earnest fornicating.

Would she have investigated further had his door not been a little ajar? Unlikely. But it was, and the still invisible couple sounded quite earnestly focused on their own business. So Whitney drifted to the door and turned one eye to the narrow slit there like Professore Galileo to his crude but historical eyepiece.

Quite within direct view of where she stood stretched the divan the director kept in his office for functions perhaps just like the one she was then observing—a tight squeeze, to be sure, Signora Lucia L. arse up at the north end of the thing, arse up and skirt tumbled up her back, while Capo Malavisi kneeled just south and behind her, bumping her bottom at a tempo roughly tango-like.

If only she could achieve a writing rhythm like that.

The Italian Novel

Whitney at this point had twenty years’ close acquaintance with non-profit organizations like the museo—with schools, philanthropic societies, cultural institutions and the like. They were in fact her meat and potatoes as far as paid employment went, what first came her way, then by the merciless action of time and the advantage of previous experience. At forty now she had difficulty even imagining doing anything but communications work in such places.

Perhaps because she had a writer’s eye she had developed something like an ethnology of the non-profit—of the personalities who gravitated toward them, of their behavioral norms, forms of power, structures of meaning, modes of production and reproduction. She could have written a book on it if it all weren’t so dispiriting.

At the heart of it, at least among the professional staff, was a structurally conditioned mediocrity, though she would have used this term in a merely descriptive way to indicate a pervasive middleness—a middleness of ability and imagination, of vision and ambition, of execution and achievement—structurally conditioned, she hypothesized, by there being no real necessity to accomplish anything, as distinct from most areas of business and commerce, where one competes and profits or withers away. That she had now spent a week working on something that could have been completed by a simple python script in less time than validating a single contact by hand seemed so perfectly emblematic of that world was something she must hold onto it, write it down somewhere, should by some very strange chance there come a day she found herself writing that ethnography of middleness.

Gloomy as she was now she went on to picture what seemed the certain future of such formations, airless offices overcrowded with desks staffed mainly by women, though never as managers, all of them grinding away at some outmoded process, while the rest of the world relied on a single very fast computing machine circling in a geosynchronous orbit over the civilized earth.

The Italian Novel

She might have called to him there—Massimo?—but the word wouldn’t come, so she just stepped to the end of the rank where he waited.

His shoulder was turned to the shelving and he had a book in his hands. This he closed to look at her—a strange look, serious or sulking, the same look with which he’d admonished her at the café on via dei Neri.

Restless is a force without direction.

He held the book up now, swivelled it as if proffering it to her, but she—she went on trying to read his look. Long and slow she breathed then moved toward him, ghosting along again until she was very close.

She touched her fingers to his chin. He’d the finest grit of beard. Then she kissed him, soft at first, slowly, searching, as if his lips would tell her what it was.

A heartbeat and the lights snapped off. 

All was as dark as black now and they both held perfectly still.

The Italian Novel

The shoulder of each shelf wore a label with its range—500 to 510, 510-520. It was another dozen such ranks before she crossed over into the 600s, whose scope looked rather like science still, as best as she could reckon from the spines of the books nearest the aisle. One more set of lights went on in front of her as she moved.

A moment later, she was among the 700s or languages, set hinge-like between the technical material behind her and letteratura, and there was something about this boundary that brought her to a stop. She came around to look back toward the entrance. Already the lights there had gone dark again. The door itself she could no longer make out. A small shiver went through her and for a moment it was as if she had just fallen into the place from the sky. Yes, it occurred to her now this was the point where she might let it go, this strange foray, and return to the reading room and the difficult work of The Italian Novel. 

800-810, 810-820, 820-830. More lights came on and just above the books on the next set of shelves, she saw Massimo’s fine white shirt as he shifted himself from one foot to the other. It took her breath away.

The Italian Novel

As soon as she reached the reading room she saw her things had been left alone. Massimo had vanished. She felt a prick of pique, but caught herself; it could only have been that he had misunderstood. She would make light of the lapse the next time they met. 

A moment later she came to her chair; on the table before it lay a kind of notetaker’s card. Still standing, she looked out over the broad hall. All of the regulars were there–il Professore, Mme. Prim, M. Balzac–all of them absorbed in the usual pursuits. Then to the notetaker’s card again, where there was inscribed what looked like a Dewey Decimal number.

The handwriting she recognized right away; she had been examining it inverted for three days now, but it meant nothing to her at first. If it were some kind of riddle, she wasn’t yet amused. Her impulse was to set it aside and get on with her work. Wasn’t it a little strange then she began to gather up all of her things to see where this number would lead?

Just outside the reading room hung a floorplan of the biblioteca with the stacks identified by subject and decimal. The card she was still holding pointed to letteratura—she ought to have known this—but where was letteratura? She came to the library three or four days a week but never to its stacks, for she had not enough Italian.

Down and up the vaulted hallway she looked, then off again with only a clue.

It was several minutes and something very like going around in circles before she felt she had found the way, up one staircase then down another—it is often thus in Italy—right, then left, then right again by way of crepuscular corridors, past a marquee at last that read pile or stacks and through a heavy door. The light winked on when she entered; it was the 500s, pure science, and a little musty to her nose. Directly before her ran a long aisle between a stretch of shelving whose reach dissolved into darkness. 

Forward or back now, she told herself. But away from science.

The Italian Novel