I skimmed through a copy of the latest issue of Corriere della Sera that lay on the floor by my bed. My parents had started buying Italian newspapers at the international newsstand again. I should have known something was up. Italy was in the hands of a new leader. He came from television and was stepping into politics, promising a brighter tomorrow filled with job opportunities and modernity. He’d won the elections in March. Everyone loved him. Nineteen ninety-four had been a promising year even though some said he was a crook. He owned four national television stations, three publishing houses, innumerable magazines, newspapers, film-production companies, video-rental chains, and sports teams. At least there would be job openings, everyone said—and if he was so good with business, who knew how much better he would be with politics. He had composed a hymn for his new political party: “Forza Italia!”—“Go Italy!” Maybe he would bring good news to my family when we moved back. His face was tanned and his teeth shone. It was enough to trust him. He was five foot five and his name was Silvio Berlusconi.
As I flipped through articles about the stout smiling man, dozens of highway patrol cars and Los Angeles police vehicles appeared on the KCAL news. They rolled in perfect formation down the 405 freeway—the same freeway that roared in our ears every day—trailing behind an unhurried white SUV. It was a slow-speed chase, I gathered from the news. The man inside the white car was O. J. Simpson—a football player and actor I hadn’t known much about until a few days earlier when he’d been charged with the double murder of his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman. She had been stabbed in the head and neck. If he was convicted Simpson faced the death penalty. That morning his lawyers had convinced the LAPD to allow him to turn himself in. One thousand reporters waited for him at the police station, but he never showed up.
He reappeared hours later on TV inside a white Bronco. A friend drove the car leisurely while O.J. held a gun to his own head. The freeway was packed with onlookers waving from overpasses and ramps, cheering their favorite NFL star as if he were a marathon runner making his way home. Some people pulled over and got out of their cars to salute him from the roadside and I too wanted to cheer for him for some reason. It was his wax-museum face and that gun at his head and something about him that said he was done. It made you want to protect him, make sure he’d get home all right, that he wouldn’t pull that trigger. I was spying on him like the rest of the nation. The only way to give him privacy was to turn the TV off.
I switched the channel and a sea of freckles hit me. I recognized the song. I knew the face: “And when I say I’m looking, don’t mean I wanna find what I’m looking for / When I say I’m searching, don’t mean I want to search at all.”
There was Deva. In the final cut of her father’s music video. She leaned against a wooden fence looking up at her dad with adoring eyes. His face looked starched without the beard. His plump nose in contrast with her immaculate youth. “Don’t mean I want to search at all.”
Father and daughter clasped hands and walked down the dirt path, their voices reverberating in my ear like a drawn-out off-key note. My heart began to race. I wanted to pause the video and look at each image frame by frame, but I couldn’t and I realized I should force myself to not even try. The way out of the pain, I saw, was to walk through it or drive through it perhaps, like O.J. was doing. If I could sit all the way through the video just once, putting my eardrums under siege, I could return to a time when those voices did not exist. Before being uttered, those notes had been nothing—and if I stayed there and let the music take its course, they might become irrelevant again. I remained still in bed, listening as the song stretched out infinitely, expanding backward in time. Then even the echoes dwindled. I stayed put until all sounds were dismantled and I could not hear Deva’s voice in my ears anymore. Until she was a muted beauty next to a muted old man.
27
“We’re leaving in one month, everybody! Last chance for authentic Italian food in LA County!” my mother screamed from the front yard. It was the end of July and everything we owned was out on the front lawn. My mother baked pizza pies and offered pasta alla Norma with salted ricotta to passersby. Her food stand was in the driveway and that was all she cared about, that our neighbors would remember the Italian family by the taste of the food she cooked.
My parents were proud of their choice to return now. Apart from the new job prospect, moving back had turned into a political act. America was inhumane, they said. Nobody in their right mind could live permanently in Los Angeles. It was a doomed city, destined for maniacs and workaholics. How much easier things would be once we all went back, they kept saying. The quality of life, food, even water would be better. There were people on the other side of this mess, people who actually wanted us back, who would help us. We would not return to an indifferent city.
Neighbors and visitors trickled in after my brother and I hung large signs on Sepulveda Boulevard: “Yard Sale! Moving back to Europe. Furniture, appliances, and free home-cooked Italian food by Serena.” Probably the one astute marketing strategy my parents had conjured since they’d moved. Ettore played Pink Floyd from the crackling speakers that were set up on his oak desk. It was going on sale for fifty dollars.
“If you can see it, you can buy it.”
Ettore had coined the phrase to lure people in. It was amazing how this car-salesman persona had emerged—at last. How confident he was, pitching Jerry Garcia records and talking about Woodstock with a hippie from Santa Cruz. Now that it was too late, now that we were leaving, he felt like he could try on everything he’d snubbed when he first arrived. He exuded confidence and a permanent smile. English words slipped out of his mouth like audacious rattlesnakes: “Thank you, ma’am.” “You take care now.” “How’s it goin’?” “You bet.” “Dude!”
Creedence arrived at the edge of the driveway with a twenty-dollar bill in his hands. My brother had prepared a box full of his favorite things for him. He’d planned on giving it to him since the day we found out we were headed back to Italy, but he priced them first, just so his friend would see how generous he was in giving them away—a quintessential Italian ploy. He teetered at the edge of the driveway pretending to bargain. Behind his charade I recognized a seal of love and appreciation for having been close to Creedence, for growing up on the same burning streets, bruising knees and falling on Rollerblades—the ominous rumble of the freeway in their ears all those months. The late afternoons coming home dirty from play, smeared with sticky syrup from fast-food sodas, still panting with the last rays of sun on their faces, had meant something to my brother. But Creedence—the odd Mormon Virgil who had introduced him to that neighborhood’s microcosm—didn’t get sentimental.
“I heard they are renting the house to a family with three brothers. I’ll buy the whole box from you in case we need extra hockey gear,” he said, handing over his twenty dollars.
My brother gave him the stuff and lifted his hand dismissively.
“You can just have it. I don’t need dollars in Italy. Buy me a burger the next time I come to LA.”
I imagined how many times he’d rehearsed that mature line, announcing that the next time they saw each other they’d have their own money to spend, but also implying that there would be a next time. Creedence gave my brother an awkward young-male hug, drawing a safe space between arms and chests. Two fourteen-year-old kids eluding the emotions of friendship.
“Hey, come to Rome sometime.”