Page 47 - WTP Vol. XI #6

He appeared quite distinguished, though he showed no restraint in interacting with the boys, who were busy clowning with him, eliciting his smile and genial wrinkles around his eyes. The younger of the women (mother, it seemed clear, of the brood of three children) wore her hair slightly frosted. Her weight in mid-life having settled on her nicely, she carried herself with ease and grace.
The object, again, of their lively interaction consisted of the fish tanks. The younger of the boys, blond-haired, thin, and rangy, was gesticulating back and forth between the tanks, is if counseling the others on what their choice should be. His commentary, clearly, was intended as comic, and drew laughter from the others. Observing from the background, Parsons looked on with pleasure: an engaging young man.
And a young man who, in the course of his performance, enacted a gesture that drew Parsons’ attention. Turning away for a moment to respond to a comment, he reached a hand behind him and laid his palm, very softly, on the glass of one of the tanks. Then he eased it away with equal care and softness. The gesture struck Parsons as delicate and thoughtful. He couldn’t picture an American, a young man especially, ever doing such a thing.
The family was Italian! Not merely hearing them but observing them in motion made this evident to Parsons. It wasn’t for the first time that he felt a twinge of
envy, envy that Italians had not one but two tongues— their speech, yes, of course, but also their celebrated gestualità, their physical expressiveness.
An impulse prompted Parsons (how long he’d remember!) to step forward at this juncture and murmur a comment. It was an old one in their language, the expression he offered, rather out of date now, an idiom concerning fish and creatures of the sea that were found to be captive. It was a whimsical locution rich in irony in Italian; nothing at all so simple as “shooting fish
in a barrel.” An old expression, rather, that freighted several meanings, varied shades of possibility, meanings pertaining to position and authority, depending on the context: true sfumature.
As if transfixed, the whole group turned toward Parsons.
He was instantly aware of the risk he had taken, of appearing invasive, indecorously so. In letting the group know that he had been listening in, he was “exposing” them in perhaps an unwelcome way. Disrupting the happy circle to which they were entitled.
He therefore apologized, requesting mille scuse. “I’ve intruded,” he declared.
For the briefest of moments—gazing at Parsons with
a quizzical expression, but one, Parsons thought, that conveyed curiosity as well as consternation—the man looked at him as if he might say something. But he chose not to speak. Instead, he and the others, rendered mute by the intrusion, turned and moved off together, without ceremony. The younger woman, thought Parsons,
whom he took to be the wife, had been alarmed by his speaking. She turned and glanced back with a faintly frightened expression as they took their leave of him. The youngsters in the group seemed bemused, perhaps
P
alpine meadows, and of a singular experience being there had afforded.
intrigued. The older woman, alone, seemed unruffled
by it all. She’d looked on, Parsons noted, with the very faintest smile. As though she had seen everything; as if there was nothing new here, nothing new here whatever.
Then they were gone: enclosed in that membrane so peculiar to families, the invisible sheath that envelops every family’s inviolate narcissism, Parsons’ own being no exception. It served, that aura, that “surround,” whatever it was, in sealing off others, to protect and endorse the family, emphasize its importance, to assert its primacy as the world’s crucial family.
~
The trout was delicious. The balance of the trip to Montreux proved pleasant. Two years would pass before Parsons would encounter any of the family’s members again.
Excerpted from A Taste of Italy, a novel-in-progress.
Wertime is the author of a memoir, Citadel on the Mountain: A Memoir of Father and Son (Farrar, Straus & Giroux),which won the James
A. Michener Memorial Prize. His fiction, criticism, and essays have appeared in The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Vir- ginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, Southwest Review, and The American Scholar. He is the author of the WTP Craft Notes series.
arsons’ memory was
sharpest of the high
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