From Vincentia Adulati’s Portrait of Love in Prose
The renowned Italian romanticist shares her insights on affairs of the heart. A selection of her work is translated here by the noted Genoese divorce lawyer Gian Carlo Castelli.
Love lives in the smallest of things. Not in those tawdry, self-aggrandizing, displays that now pass for entertainment, nor the trail of uninformed imaginings dribbled from a writer’s nib — and certainly not the strains of an unrehearsed dirge scratched out across ill-tuned strings. No! When I speak of love, amore, I speak of that which transcends any performance, stanza or song our worldly minds can affix to it. We cannot know it by what we call it or how we portray it. We cannot say what love embraces — only what it sets aside. Love knows what is essential, and all else falls by the way.
Picture two aspiring lovers — Fede and Michi, perhaps. They are dizzy with anticipation, embarking on the romance of their lives. For the occasion of their first meeting each has bought new shoes — proving, if proof of such things is necessary, that they are sole mates. A week’s rain proceeds their rendezvous, upwelling both their anxiety and their storm gutters, but the day is born bright and clear in accordance with their expectations.
As twilight approaches, they meet under the eaves of the arbor in one of the city’s less dangerous parks. If, as is likely, Fede presents Michi with a flower, it is indisputably an Orchid. It sounds the very first of flowers — no lips may speak its name unless formed for a kiss. It evokes the lush, the exotic, and the mildly difficult to spell. Like most flowers for most people, it is hard to know on sight, and after the sound of it, the sight may be something of a disappointment. Yet this Orchid, in this moment, under this arbor, in its singularity, whispers, “I am not handing out more of these to other contestants.”
Michi has spared no expense and invites Fede to share a carriage ride. They step inside the beautiful conveyance, extravagantly carved, bright and ornate — a dazzling exterior with a plush, inner-life. Gold trimmed and festooned with living green, it is drawn along by a rheumatic horse locked in an eternal struggle against thrice its weight in wood and wrought iron. Transported in its velour cocoon, over a street cobbled together by the public works department, they experience together all the intimacy of minor kidney displacement in a leather-bound box.
They arrive in splendor at the restaurant, the reservation process having provided Fede a crash course in hostage negotiation. The inundated maître d’, who seems to have as many arms as needed for the seven o’clock seating, bids them welcome. As does any good octopus, he knows two suckers when he sees them. He leads them past the violinist, around the fountain and into the shadow of a sullen pillar, which occludes the wobbly table that befits their budget. The waiter assesses his likely gratuity at a glance, and with stifled sniff presents the menu; the right fold offers all the world, and the left closes it again with the clank of a bank vault. They order from among the smallest digits they can find, then peak around the pillar to marvel at the distant violinist, while passages of Elgar’s Salut d’Amour attempt to swim upstream against the sounds of the kitchen nearby. They dine finely indeed, while sampling the most unpretentious, thrifty and compact bottle of wine to be found in the building.
Arm in arm after dinner, they stroll slowly down to the pier amid the welcoming calls of gulls and carefully over sidewalk pavers that have suffered upheavals not unlike those at the public works department. The benches looking out over the darkening ocean all appear to be occupied — but look! There, far down toward the cannery, a lone lover’s throne awaits, situated near a storm drain that smells curiously more like the ocean than the ocean itself.
They sit closely, no pleasantry of the evening’s dress, flower, diversion or meal able to exceed the pure joy of this moment. The sea before them is mysterious, powerful, restless — Poseidon’s tread rumbles in his vast domains and the waves break upon the pier with the ardor that culminates a thousand-mile quest. Yet the spectacle of the ocean is lost upon our two hearts rapidly becoming one, their gaze fixed upon each other as the week’s rain, the tide and the recent budget cuts to the public works department rise up through the storm drain and all over their new shoes.
But their gaze is unbroken, until at last their eyes close for a first kiss. And that, dear friends, is amore!
