There's Something I Want You to Do

“Yes. I have acquired a new girlfriend. Perhaps I am being too bold in saying so.” He stared at the cash register, harmlessly confabulating. The man was in his midfifties, and his pudgy wife, Claudia, dressed in black, sometimes lumbered into the store to do the accounts, and was known everywhere in the village for her terrible tongue lashings. Like Imyar Sorovinct, Carlo Travatini had earned a right to his fantasies. “My girlfriend loves me. And of course I adore her. She tells me that she admires my patience and my skill at lovemaking, despite my advanced years. The years give us older men a certain…technical skill. Forgive me for being so crude.” Amelia shook her head, disclaiming any possible shock. “Why do I tell you this? I do so because our love, hers and mine, is an open secret. I will not, however, give you the young lady’s name, because I should not wish to appear to be indiscreet. We Italians are not noted for our subtlety or discretion. We are announcers and are combustible. We announce first this, then that. In this announcing manner I have written poems for her, my beloved. Would you like to see my poems? They are of course not at the level of Montale, but…” He began to fumble in his pocket. Amelia stopped him in the midst of his harmless comic charade.

“No, thank you.” More love poems! They came out of the woodwork everywhere and should be outlawed. There was far too much love, a worldwide glut of it. What the world needs now, she thought, is much less love. “How wonderful for you. But, please, no.”

“All right. But I beg of you, do not mention the beautiful young woman to my wife, in case you should see her.”

“I shall say nothing,” Amelia told him. “What cigarettes do you have? I would like an Italian brand.”

“Well, we have Marlboros. Sturdy cigarettes in a crushproof box. And L & M. That is a good brand also.”

“Both American. No, I want an Italian cigarette.”

“Well, let me see. I have MS.”

“MS?” She felt a moment of pity.

“Yes. MS. Of course. It is a brand of cigarette we have here. Monopoli di Stato. You should know that by now. Filtro? Or Blu?”

“Blu, please.” He brought down a pack on which appeared, in rather large letters, the Italian phrase for “Smoking kills.”

“You should not do this,” he said, putting the cigarette pack into her hand with a tender gesture, brushing her fingers as he did so. “It is no way to get God’s attention. You should get a boyfriend, perhaps?”

“Also, I need some matches, please.”

He reached under the counter and brought some out. He shook his head as she paid him for the cigarettes. “After all these years,” he said, “I do not understand you Americans. Forgive me. I have been listening to the news on the radio just now. Iraq, Afghanistan. You are unexplainable, indefinable. So friendly and yet so warlike. This contradiction…I cannot understand it.”

“Yes,” Amelia said. “You are right. We are puzzling and incomprehensible. Thank you, my friend. Ciao.”

“Ciao, signora,” he said, looking away from her again, down at his hands. “Grazie.” What a sorrowful man, she thought, with his sorrow painstakingly narrated every day. You would never see such a man in the States. She had almost returned to the stolen Fiat when her Italian cell phone rang. When she answered, there was silence. She hung up.

The American couple waved her over. They were drinking wine.

“Hey there. Good afternoon,” the man said in English with a slight southwestern accent. “Care to join us?” He wore a Tyrolean hat, a blue shirt, a tan-colored sport coat, a string tie, and cowboy boots. His wife, deeply tanned, wearing a plain gray dress and a collection of thin gold bracelets that rattled like jail keys, smiled nervously upward at the sky, avoiding eye contact. She had very expensive hair, Amelia noted, highlighted with blond streaks.

“How did you know I was an American?” Amelia asked.

“Aw, you look like one of us,” the man told her. “It’s a duck recognizing another duck.” The wife nodded at the sky. Amelia felt all her strength leaving her body: she was heavily invested in appearing to be Italian or French, with a trace of beautiful haughtiness, or at least generically European snobbishness, and if she could be exposed this easily by lunkheads, then her nationality might indeed be an essence that no role-playing could disguise. Being an American was a curse — you were so recognizable everywhere that your nationality was like a clown suit. Maybe Jack would escape it. She had come to think of her own countrymen as them. She shivered. After all her efforts, she was instantly identifiable and still looked like one of them. Fucking hell.

“Sorry,” she said. “I have to get back. They’ve prepared lasagna,” she said. “The kids.”

“We’re going to be here in town for a few days,” the man said, before gulping down half his glass of wine. “You just drop in on us any old time. We got ourselves that villa up the hill. There for the whole week.”