The Invitation by Richard Ploetz

A couple of weeks before we left for Italy, Charles told me he felt he was getting old. I wasn’t really surprised, as whatever Charles does or says has an inevitability about it. As though there was a plan already there waiting to unfold.

We took a train to Tarquinia to see the painted tombs. The Etruscans who had lived there were an ancient civilization long before Rome was Rome. The rich people buried each other in underground tombs they dug into rock. “Limestone,” Claudia, our guide, said, scratching the rough stone wall going down into a tomb with her red-painted fingernails. Charles, of course, knew more about these tombs with their painted scenes (frescos) than Claudia did. He’d read D.H. Lawrence’s ETRUSCAN PLACES and several other books on the subject. Though he did keep his mouth shut out of politeness. But I could tell he was unsatisfied that so little was known about these people who had basically disappeared after the Romans took over. No buildings were left (they built their temples and such out of wood, which rotted). The little writing they left, carved on sarcophaguses, has not yet been translated. It’s like the Rosetta Stone, Charles told Claudia, someday someone will figure it out. Meanwhile, it’s a mystery. Yes, Claudia said in her social studies teacher voice, so all we know of these Etruscans is what we deduce from the scenes painted on the walls of their tombs. They are joyful scenes—feasting, music, dance, drinking, hunting, fishing. The good life they believed would continue in the afterlife, in fact, which they deserved, being the rich, powerful—“invincible”—people they thought they were. But the last tomb that Claudia took us down into had a different picture on its walls. The figures were black and white—no bright colors, no happy times—but a funeral procession—a dead man being led by a demon to a door that opened into the underground, to Hell. He was followed by a female demon lighting the way with a torch. This tomb, Claudia explained, her favorite, was made in the period after the Romans had taken over and disillusioned the Etruscans about their invincibility.

***

One evening in Rome, in Trastevere, where we were staying, Charles met someone. We had come back from walking the old Appian Way. The big flat paving stones are still there 2000 years later. Charles surprised me by getting on his hands and knees and scratching his name on one. And the date. “Just think,” he said, “Spartacus and his men crucified along this very road, one every mile for 300 miles.”

It was so peaceful that afternoon. For the first time, I heard birds, and a breeze ruffled Charles’s hair. No, I couldn’t imagine crosses with men nailed to them.

We had returned and were enjoying our evening Proseccos at an outside table next to one of those heaters with a big orange flame, watching the sunset over Santa Maria in Trastevere. Its bell had just rung seven times. People were sitting around the big fountain in the middle of the piazza or strolling across with their dogs, alone or in couples. A man was squatting on the cobblestones, using a blowtorch to put the finishing touches on a painting he’d made. There was a little crowd gathered around him. He turned off the torch and held up the painting to them. They applauded.

“I met a man,” Charles said.

“What?”

“Just now. In there.”

He had gone inside to use the toilet.

“What do you mean?”

“Just now,” he said, “the waiter or bartender—or both—I don’t know. He asked me to have a drink.”

I realized Charles had been gone for a little while—or longer—I wasn’t paying attention, and time seemed to have slowed or stretched with the sunset fading gloriously and the people sitting or strolling on the piazza in absolutely no hurry.

“So, I did,” Charles said, “a glass of red wine. It seemed natural enough. We had all the time in the world. No place to be.”

He paused for a moment as if thinking about what he had done.

“There were no words. We spoke, of course. He reached over and put his hand on mine… There’s no explaining it. Something you feel you don’t…deserve? Not to give anything a name!”

“You weren’t gone long,” I said.

“I felt like I was sinking into a crevasse that had opened in the floor. Like one of those tombs, you remember, into a bright and joyful time, like the heaven after death they felt they deserved because they were…’invincible.’ I felt I was invincible.”

A boy launched one of those lighted whirl-a-gig things. It shot high into the air and came slowly back to his waiting hand.

“Nothing I was ready for.” Charles said, “or thought could happen. We have our life. Safe. Dependable. Neutral.”

He swept his hand at the sky, which had faded to grey.

“I almost want to go back in there and vanish into that crevasse or whatever lies below or above. No longer this.”

***

The next day, we were to go to a little town called Zagarolo to learn how to make pasta. But the spirit seemed to have gone out of Charles. He lay pale in our bed in our room in Trastevere—no morning walk, no Cornetto from the little pastry shop around the corner.

“I don’t know what’s asked for,” Charles said.

Charles almost automatically armored himself even as he yearned and tried to be free. He couldn’t help it or escape it. Who he was was always reclaiming him. That hole that had opened up in the floor closed and was the same again. The man, the waiter or bartender—or both—barely showed a sign he remembered us when we stopped for Proseccos the next night.

We were in Florence eating a pizza with truffles and drinking red wine. We were outside on the Piazza della Repubblica; a man was playing an accordion on the far side near the carousel. I recognized some Broadway tunes.

Charles had chosen a table far enough away that the music wasn’t too loud (it was an electrified accordion). We could chat and hear it in the distance.

After we’d finished and paid, we wandered over to where the man was still playing. Three little girls were dancing, the crowd clapping in time to the music. When he finished, people came up and dropped coins into his open box.

That was it, I thought (he’d been playing the whole while we were eating). He would pack up and leave. Instead, he set up a music stand with some sheet music and began playing, starting and stopping like he was warming up.

“Let’s go,” said Charles.

When suddenly, sounds—deep and loud—came out of the speakers beside him like organ music at the start of a horror movie!

“Bach’s ‘Toccata and Fugue in D Minor’! On a squeeze box?” Charles took my hand. “Come on—”

But we didn’t. Or should I say Charles didn’t? As the man leaned forward, throwing his head back, his fingers flew over the keys—like he was rushing up a long flight of stairs—pausing and—rushing down. I don’t know how else to put it. It was like being in a church with the organ roaring and shaking the rafters! Certainly not something to dance to. Not what the crowd expected, with the carousel tinkling behind them and Santas going round and round with the horses and, every now and then, a white elephant. Those who’d stayed to listen at first drifted away. Charles and I and five or six others were left. The man kept playing, leaning into the music, then rearing back, squeezing the box while his fingers raced. His eyes were tight shut except when he reached forward to turn over a sheet of music.

The afternoon sun was leaving the piazza, climbing buildings on the far side. My feet were getting cold.

Finally, he finished. Stood there with that thing hanging off him like a huge baby in a front pack.

Charles went up and dropped some paper money in his box (it looked like a hat box).

“He played it all,” Charles murmured when he’d come back. “Every single—The whole fucking Toccata… On an accordion.”

We took a long while walking back to where we were staying, just a few blocks.

“What’s left,” Charles said, the key half turned in the lock.

“What’s left?” he said after the bartender had poured two glasses of wine and moved away. Charles held his hand in front of him with the palm up as though waiting for words to fall into it. Or thoughts trying to find words. “I love you,” he said, “but I loved you twenty-five years ago. You were 28, and…” Charles stared at me on the bar stool beside him, almost like he’d never seen me. “What?—I should take up the accordion?”

We finished our wine; the bartender refilled the glasses.

“When I’m listening to that guy playing the Toccata,” Charles began reasonably, “I’m also, at the same time, the guy down in the tomb watching the funeral procession—and, at the same time, it’s me bringing up the rear.”

***

In Rome, whenever we noticed them fixed in the sidewalk, we would stop and read them. Small, square brass plaques, set into the pavement and kept polished by years of shoes walking over them. The names of Jews who’d been arrested from the building in front of which the plaque was set. It gave their name and birth date when they had been arrested by the Gestapo or fascist Italian police, to where they’d been deported—Auschwitz mostly—and when they had been killed there. In some cases, that date was “INOTA”—unknown.

“How could they do it?” Charles said after taking a picture with his iPhone. “The kid’s eighteen. He could be an old man today living on this street. Amedeo di Cori…”

***

It rained on our next to last day. Charles took us to the Pantheon. We stood in the center under the oculus, the hole in the middle of the dome, and felt the mist come down on us.