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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

Yes, it was clear to her though only now that fate had rather new plans for her, a change of course she might have discerned back in September when she first met the young man at the biblioteca.

It was the day after they first took coffee together at the place along via dei Neri, that lovely hour they lingered there, the easy conversation, the slow walk back almost touching, the propitious spiral of birds against the grey sky. She half-wished he never reappear and undo her fine sense of the thing. But when she reached the reading room that morning, there he was already, broad shouldered again, trim in his good, white shirt, and bent as always over his curious treatise.

She took her place without greeting him. He looked up at her, smiled and nodded once, then bowed again to his books. She pulled her things from her sack but slowly, softly, with a tenderness for their quiet there that surprised her. Then, as she fell to it, as happened so often, she felt that little twist of needing to pee, always best addressed before setting oneself to write. Slowly again, softly, she slid away from the table, rose and whispered, Guardo questo? referring to her things. Massimo looked up again, a moment, then, Certo, he answered.

The Italian Novel

That week in late September when Massimo first appeared, she was laboring with more than the usual pain on a few pages where her central character–an American woman who was also working on something called The Italian Novel–sees she is no longer interested in the man she lives with. They have very different ways of thinking about things, the contrast has lost whatever charm it once had, and she has come to feel they are a poor erotic match. The difficulty Whitney the actual writer was having with the material was that it all seemed so conventional. In trying to convey something about the main character’s desire, for example, she had actually written, She wanted a man who would take her. Still worse, having drawn on her own experience to give form to this character, there was a difficult moment when she had to wonder whether she herself was also in some way poorly imagined.

—The Italian Novel

In fact, for Whitney the two things were rather desperately tangled up with one another— the problem of her book, the problem of desire. Her working title spoke well enough about all of it. She had hundreds of manuscript pages, but it still seemed more like an idea for a story rather than a story in the making, and so the placeholder title, The Italian Novel. And how was she to write the kind of story she imagined in outline while living a life so empty and gray? She had watched herself struggle to catch hold again the pulse of desire. Over the last few months, for instance, she had begun to conjure up for herself one after another imaginary lover, like the young man in the dream, like a couple others in the waking world. There was cheerful Nicolo the butcher’s son, so handsome in his blood stained apron. There was the very good looking older gentleman sitting across from her on the train from Bologna. Not a word passed between them, but their eyes met once just after they left the Centrale, and Whitney at least felt herself at the edge of abandon. When she got back to the apartment, she lay down on the sofa, closed her eyes, and imagined the stranger fucking her.

—The Italian Novel