Three Sofias

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In 1883, in the village of Casamicciola on the island of Ischia, situated within the volcanic Phlegraean Fields west of Naples, the noted Italian philosopher, Benedetto Croce, seventeen years old and libidinous, was walking behind a row of houses, along a hedge of Spanish broom. Even as a young man he liked to fix his attentions on one particular problem, moving rigorously toward a solution to that problem. This was his way of containing a world that so often evaded consideration. All manner of truths could be discerned so long as one avoided distraction, but as he walked along the hedge of Spanish broom, his thinking was erratic and restless and he focused on the flowers in an attempt to keep his mind off the rendezvous that awaited him.

           The petals of the flowers were like the wings of butterflies and nearly identical to the petals on the little magnolia flowers that once bloomed in his mother’s garden—the magnolia flowers that eventually lost their petals and produced the pods of the snap peas he ate by the handful as a young boy.

           Somewhere in Casamicciola, Sofia was oiling her hair. Her cheeks were wet with rose water and she had used a burnt matchstick to darken her eyes. “Meet me in the baths,” her note had read and he kept the note in his pocket and was fingering the note, wearing away its edges, as he walked along the Spanish broom.

           While he was considering the flowers, the buildings around Benedetto began to roll toward the earth. This is how it was for him: sudden and unexpected dread. It was as if there were a second body inside his body, and this second body was slipping. In a nearby kitchen, a housewife dropped the rolling pin she was carrying. A child in bed took hold of his sheets and held them tightly and tensed his body and held his breath. The ground beneath Benedetto began to tremble and all around him he heard the sound of wood being bent—the integrity of wood being stressed and tested. He took five quick steps forward, two steps backward—this is how I imagine it—and then it was darkness.

           He was buried for two nights before his body was discovered and pulled from the wreckage. It took him months to heal from the injuries he sustained. His father, mother, and sister—relaxing in the rented villa—died more or less instantaneously. He did not see Sofia again and did not learn what had happened to her. Having inherited his family's wealth, it was ensured that Benedetto would never need to work again. For the next three years he lived in Rome with his uncle who was a Hegelian and an influential statesman. “These were my saddest and darkest years,” Benedetto wrote. “I never once saw Rome by night.”

           But had he left his uncle’s lodgings one summer evening in June and walked along the Via del Corso, Benedetto might have seen Alberto Moro and his mistress exiting the Caffè Aragno. Had he seen them and followed them far enough, he would have observed the quiet way Moro played with the fabric of his mistress’s blue dress—the way he let his arm fall, the back of his hand hardly touching the dress before reaching with his little finger and wrapping it in the pleated flounce of her skirt. Their elbows touched as they walked and the tenderness they shared was so ephemeral it nearly passed unnoticed in the amorous Roman night.

           Moro was a painter of no renown whose work was forgotten long before his death in 1933. During the year that he frequented the salons at the Caffè Aragno, he was entertaining, in an ambivalent way, a future in politics. He knew nothing about politics and did not care to learn. What he knew was the sparrows that nested outside his bedroom window and the crack in the ceiling over the bed that was shaped like a palm frond. He knew and he loved the dust kicked up by horses that coated the sleeves of his jacket and the processions of black-clad clergymen who walked through the streets. He knew the way these clergymen whispered to one another and sometimes the sound of their stifled laughter. What he knew was the scent of jasmine hovering at the gates of the walled garden he passed daily on his way to his studio in Monti and the scent of rose water heavy on small, round cheeks in the evening. The shadows cast by gas lamps mattered a great deal to him, as did the bony knuckles of his mistress’s left hand. His mistress was a woman named Sofia Onorati and she was ten years his junior. She was tall and freckled, walked lightly, and her hair was sometimes red and sometimes blonde, depending on the light—but none of this matters here. What matters here is Sofia’s mother, who died before her daughter was eight years old and Sofia’s father, who was cruel and full of love that he could not express. Sofia left her father’s house when she was seventeen years old and moved to Rome where she lived with an aunt who was practically blind. She sent her father money every month, folded among stiffly formal letters, and he never once asked where the money had come from or how she managed to earn enough to spare.

           Later that evening, after leaving the cafe, Sofia and Moro lay in bed beside one another and Moro twisted the corner of the bed sheet around her ring finger. “I am still waiting for an answer,” he said. “And not another riddle, please, I beg you.”

           For all his love and admiration, Moro did not really know Sofia. She presumed nothing. She disclosed very little. She held no offenses. Moro did not know that Roberto Bracco, the rising literary darling, had made a pass at her that very evening at the Caffè Aragno. He did not know that she had excused herself from their table in order to look more closely at a shorthaired cat that was sleeping outside the cafe window. She wanted to touch the world in a way that was unmistakable. She wanted to touch the world and arrive at an understanding of herself that could not be taken away. Moro did not know how easy it would be to offer Sofia everything she wanted. It would take only a gesture—the right word at the right moment.                                             

           She loved Goethe—this was something else he would never discover. She had memorized significant passages from the Roman Elegies and held them in the hidden pockets of her underskirts like mantras. Rome cannot be Rome. Goethe remained the source of her most intense and private ruminations, until, in 1914, she read Camillo Sbarbaro's Pianissimo. “Joyful and fearful I see you,” she recited quietly to herself as she hung wet laundry over an iron terrace railing. She thought of Sbarbaro regularly and liked especially to imagine herself the sister he so often wrote into his poems.

           By the time she was forty-two, having moved from Rome to Turin, having long ago left behind the memory of the amateur painter Alberto Moro, Sofia had become impenetrable. She still encountered the world openly, porous, waiting on everything she saw to pierce her and yet she was never pierced by it. She held this incongruity in her eyes, and when you saw it in her eyes you were involved in it, too.

           Considering Sofia’s persistence and her resignation—considering the way these two things knotted in her eyes—I am reminded of a woman I met briefly at the Bellas Artes museum in Buenos Aires. I might go so far as to say that the portrait I have sketched of Sofia in Turin is in actuality my attempt at imagining more fully this Argentine woman I met for only a moment.

           It was my last day in Argentina and it was cold. I walked through the museum looking at the walls. The blues were blue. The reds were red. It was the Flemish hall, apparently. Faces as faces, only longer and pinched.

           She was standing in front of a Bles. The Last Appearance of Christ to His Disciples. Peter at the moment of his most intense shame, swimming to the shore to meet again the man he had not loved well enough.

           “The mountains are green,” I said, standing over her shoulder.

           “Are they mountains?” she said.

           She had forgotten her glasses and was practically blind without them. Colors swam together.

           “You’re too close to see the cliffs.”

           “Even if the mountains were the color of mountains,” she said, “I wouldn’t know it.”

           That was all and then she left.

           There was a commotion behind us. The sound of museum laughter. There was a young couple and beside them a man as fat as Balzac and as regal. The woman turned from the canvas and looked at me and smiled. Green eyes, hard eyes, squinting. She saw my face and maybe, in her blindness, it looked long and pinched, as indistinct as the face of a Flemish patriarch.

           The fat man put his hand on her shoulder and together they left the gallery.

           Later that evening, when I was lying in bed, I kept thinking about this short exchange. I thought about the Bles painting, too, and about Peter reaching for the Christ, and I thought about the green mountains.

           Laura was lying in bed beside me and I told her about the woman. She did not understand what I was trying to say and, worse still, she grew quiet and sullen and jealous. “It’s our last night,” she said, and I said nothing.

           “I’m glad you enjoyed the museum,” she said, and I said nothing.

           Soon she was asleep. The room was sterile and clean. A new selection of shampoos and lotions and soaps in foil wrappers was waiting beside the sink whenever we returned. The room smelled like lemons, it smelled like Laura’s body in the sheets. The lights were dim but the dark outside made them enough. There was a balcony attached to the room and most nights I sat on the balcony smoking Argentine cigarettes and drinking Malbec. Lying in bed, my mouth was dry and my teeth were still filmy with the wine. The door to the balcony was cracked and the voices of the couple in the adjoining room had entered our room, too. They were arguing in Spanish and I listened without comprehending and felt myself a part of something consequential. Occasionally they were quiet. The sounds of traffic and men in the streets filled their silences. And there was also a mechanical sound beneath the other noises, like an engine that never stopped or a train that never passed. One could not help but imagine, across these silences, a man with black hair and soft lips reaching to rest his hand on a woman’s exposed knee.

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