Trinita

Trinità

by Samina Najmi

Photo by Samina Najmi

        After years of envying parents who could afford it, I made it happen. I took my two teenagers, born in Boston and raised in Fresno, California, to the cities in Bella Italia I most wanted them to experience with me: Firenze and Venezia. It was a feat to have found a time in 2019 that worked for all three of us. Maya, it turned out, would not be coming home from college her first summer but staying in La Jolla to work, and Cyrus, a rising senior in high school, had his hands and head full with other ambitions. That’s when I realized that our summers of assumed togetherness had ended, as abruptly as all eras end; that I could, with patience, replenish the savings in my bank account, but I’d never find an ATM to retrieve the hours that have accrued to the past. It was two months before Venice’s worst flooding in fifty years, five months before the coronavirus pandemic struck Italy.
        That one precious week in early September, stolen from all our other obligations, I watched my children’s interactions with the landscape, and with each other in that landscape—Cyrus expecting at any moment to step outside this “Old Town Florence,” into some modern downtown, and marveling that that never happens. Because in Firenze the present inhabits the past and fills it with flesh, like young children growing into the clothes their parents have picked out for them. The light of recognition in Maya’s eyes as she stands before Botticelli’s Birth of Venus at the Uffizi which, until now, she knew only as an illustration in her Art History textbook. At once enchanted and disconcerted by the canals of Venice—a visual wonder at every turn, but utterly unreal. (And how sustainable? my Gen Z children wondered).
        There is recognition for me, too, from my visit to these two cities some seven years prior. I had come seeking asylum from grief after my father’s passing. He died suddenly in Karachi that March, his much-anticipated visit to us in California suspended in the never-to-be future, though his packing list sat in readiness on the night-stand. I had had no plans for such extravagance in grief, for choosing this moment to realize a banal, if dearly-held, dream of seeing Italy someday. But my own fiftieth birthday followed a few weeks after Abbu’s death, and that was also the date stamped on his passport: June 4, marking the expiration of his visit visa to the U.S. The knotting of death, birth, desire, travel, and expiration-date struck some barely registered chord, but with sufficient power to delineate the finiteness of things, including the shape of our own longings. And so, casting aside concerns about future college expenses, and leaving Maya and Cyrus with my sister, Sadia, and her family, I had come to Italy with my husband of sixteen years, unaware that it was a last-ditch attempt to resuscitate a dying marriage. As I looked out on the Grand Canal from the crowded vaporetto that warm July, the mists of mortality enveloped me more closely than I knew.
        In that sense, this long-coveted, September visit to Italy is a conscious reprise. Happier times of togetherness for my children and me—long, exploratory walks, which they navigate with Google Maps on their phones, technology for wanderlust that Marco Polo and Cristoforo Colombo could not have dreamed of. Firenze makes a particular impression on them. Our hotel stands a whisper away from the Renaissance sculptures in the Piazza della Signoria, the public square where Neptune poses for selfies with the tourists, where the story of the abduction of the Sabine women by Romulus and his men is carved out of a single marble slab for viewers to gaze on from every angle, and where Medusa’s head dangles in perpetuity from Perseus’s grasp. I imagine the Signore looking down on them all from their seat of government in the Palazzo Vecchio, the sculptures pulsing with particular meaning to the Florentines of the day and still speaking to us of power and passion, and our own appetite for violence. We have our afternoon cappuccinos across from this ever-accessible outdoor gallery, and one tender night my children and I sit on some steps nearby, licking our gelati.
        At nineteen and seventeen, Maya and Cyrus move through the Basilica di Santa Croce unencumbered by time. There they stand, reading plaques, as close as they will ever get to the bodily remains of Michelangelo, Galileo, Rossini, and—excitingly for kids who have been involved with Model UN in high school—Machiavelli. But the goosebumps are all mine. It’s the same when I see them sitting among other students at the Biblioteca delle Oblate, Cyrus peering into his laptop, Maya scrolling on her phone, and the cathedral’s rust-red dome observing their preoccupations from the open balcony. What the Duomo must know about aspirations of becoming, itself a hundred and forty years in the making, until Brunelleschi’s eye gave its beauty a long-awaited, half-hoped-for completion, with the strength to endure.
        My children appear racially ambiguous. Matrilineally Pakistani, they are Italian on their paternal grandfather’s side. Livio “Lee” Vagnini’s mother, Margarita Avondo (or Rita, as she was called) left Turino for New Jersey in the early years of the twentieth century, married an Italian American named Francis “Frank,” whose parents had migrated from Sorrento, and whose name echoes in my ex’s. But grandson Frank altered the spelling of his last name to make it phonetic in English, and so my children became Vanninis.
        Not that names are reliable routes back to our ancestors anyway. My own last name came not from a clan but from my paternal grandfather in pre-Partition India, the poet who chose Najam, the Arabic for “star,” as his penname. Najmi, literally “my star” but implying “of Najam,” was the name he gave to his children and, in the South Asian custom of the day, to his poet apprentices. After years of considering ourselves unique, I was startled to discover in my thirties how many Najmis exist online with whom I have no familial ties.
        No familial ties, but yet a connection. Because when you huddle in close proximity under a single umbrella, it hardly matters in the long run how you got there. So Maya googled “Vannini in Firenze” and found a pasticceria with the name. We made the pilgrimage by cab to have our lattes in that hallowed space beyond tourist attractions. The women who worked there spoke only Italian but gleaned enough from Maya’s driver’s license to be tickled by the thought that they were welcoming “back” one of their prodigal own. We walked home because we were out of euros and the taxi we called didn’t accept credit cards. And wouldn’t you know it? Barely a mile down the road, on the same Via del Ponte alle Mosse, Maya’s eagle eye spots yet another Vannini business—easy to miss as we tread the narrow sidewalk past all the other small businesses in the big, concrete building. The small, unpretentious store is closed for the day now, but its watches and clocks of disparate shapes and sizes are prominently displayed on glass shelves in the narrow, arched window. Vetta Vannini, the sign says, inviting passersby to linger in the window. The simple display defies us to go digital; it appeals to our yearning for something tangible to touch, something beautiful to behold. Something to distract us from the intended purpose of the window’s wares: to mark the minutes as they go by. Because to wrap time around our wrists is to forget that it eludes even Perseus’s grasp.
        But nothing absorbs time as the river Arno does, gathering our todays into its yesterdays, to flow swiftly and silently into someone else’s tomorrows. Long before I ever visited Florence, I imagined the Arno as Keats and Shelley evoked it in their poetry almost two hundred years ago. The name itself appealed, its open vowels calling me across some great distance. Arno . . . To say its name is to open wide and deep before you breathe it out again, tongue touching the palate like a furtive piano key—deft, soft—without the lips ever sealing your mouth against the air.
        No matter where we roamed, the Arno framed Firenze for me. Even while I stood inside the Uffizi, amidst the art collection of the Medicis, it beckoned from the upper-story windows of the South Corridor, and I turned my back on the treasures within to photograph it. The river sparkled like jade in the sun, arched by bridges and edged by an unbroken line of buildings in amber, gold, and dust. But my favorite site from which to view the Arno was the Ponte Santa Trinita, a Renaissance-era bridge that once had a life as a medieval wooden structure. Its name—without the accent on the “a” in Trinita—echoes an older time when Florentines referred to the Holy Trinity with an emphasis on the first vowel rather than the last. In 1259, when the Arno’s flooding frenzy washed the wooden bridge away, it came back reincarnated in stone. But stone had its vulnerabilities, too, it turned out, and the bridge was swept away again in 1333. Rebuilt by the Florentines and destroyed again by the river, the bridge had to wait until 1569 for the architect Bartolomeo Ammannati (who also sculpted the Neptune of our selfies) to design its three-arch structure. Like Brunelleschi, Ammannati imparted strength to beauty, his design directing water away from the structural support for the bridge. So this time the bridge survived almost four centuries, only to be blown up by the retreating Nazis one night in August, 1944—all of it, including the four marble statues representing the seasons, two on each side of the bridge, which had been added in 1608 as part of the wedding celebrations for Cosimo II de’ Medici. The people of Florence rebuilt it yet again in the 1950s. They retrieved the original stone piece by piece from the Arno. What the river wouldn’t return they replaced with stone from the same quarry as the original. Only Primavera’s marble head remained missing—until the Arno relinquished that 350-year-old treasure, too, in 1961.
        Like so many other people whose lives intersected with ours on the Ponte Santa Trinita, Maya, Cyrus, and I gazed at the peach and purple hues of the sun setting on the river, the skies reflected in it. At night the lights shimmered golden in the waters while we indulged in our daily gelato ritual. My marriage was four years in the past, all bitterness behind us, but that particular gelateria immediately south of the bridge that Frank and I had favored was still there, and I could still order a black sesame gelato inside and eat it on the Ponte Santa Trinita amid the teenage banter of my two children. Who can say we weren’t a flesh-and-blood trinity then, indistinct among the other tourists, but with a sanctity all our own?
        On our last night in Firenze we watched the sun set on the city from the height of the Piazzale Michelangelo. It was an aerial view of the red rooftops, the Duomo distinct among them, and the Arno flowing by. As night fell, we strangers danced together, celebrating . . . what? That life was ours in that moment—small, insignificant, and as vulnerable to time as the wooden bridge was to the river, but part of something larger, a historical human stream, to whose existence the panoramic landscape bore witness. We had formed a flash community on the Piazzale Michelangelo that night—our lives converging, precious, on a hill above the Arno; our laughter and dance a timeless toast to our own effervescence.
        One song that the street musicians didn’t play on the Piazzale that night, but which we heard many times in the course of our week in Bella Italia was Andrea Bocelli’s “Con Te Partirò.” I remember when the tenor, child of a small town close to Firenze, made himself known to us in Boston, before Maya and Cyrus were born. Bocelli has his fans and detractors—the latter find him too popular for opera, too operatic for pop—but Frank and I loved the song the moment we first heard it, over twenty years ago. Bocelli’s voice resonated with some hard-won knowledge. It was perhaps what he knew from having once been able to see, and then not. Wherever it comes from, the yearning reaches us in song and evokes in the sighted a wrenching recognition, the certain knowledge of loss.
        The song unsettles me. In 1998 Frank and I didn’t have children, but we did have our gentle tabby, MoeMoe. Two weeks before Frank discovered MoeMoe dead outside our doorstep, his radio kept playing Bocelli’s song over and over again. It’s hard for either of us to hear it now without the weight of memory pressing on us as foreboding. So, beautiful as Bocelli’s voice is, sadness overcame me when the gifted woman cellist on the street corner played the tune—not once, but twice—as we ate our last dinner, outdoors on a patio, in Florence. And later in Venice, the same sadness intruded again when the orchestras on opposite sides of the grand Piazza San Marcos switched from Beethoven to Bocelli’s song. Suddenly, like an orchestral tag team, they took turns playing “Con Te Partirò” to the throngs that had gathered to listen—some, like us, seated at their circular tables, others standing, and a few couples slow-dancing to the music as midnight approached.
        I couldn’t shake that sadness off for a couple of weeks after our return to Fresno. For the first time, my curiosity about the lyrics compelled me to do a little research. And I discovered that the song doesn’t translate. My limited knowledge of Italian told me that “con te partirò” means “with you I will leave,” and yet the English title, which generated instant fame for Andrea Bocelli, is “Time To Say Goodbye.” But now I learned that the disjunction goes beyond the title. Some critics have pointed to the incoherence of the lyrics themselves when translated to English. I’m riveted by one section of Bocelli’s duet with Sarah Brightman in particular, which has been translated as:
                Horizons are never far
                Would I have to find them alone
                Without true light of my own with you
                I will go on ships over seas
                That I now know
                No, they don’t exist anymore
                It’s time to say goodbye
People point to the absurdity of the last four lines, of going on ships over newly discovered seas that don’t exist anymore. (In fact, “they” could mean both the ships and the seas here.) How can they both be true: ”seas/that I now know,” which, in the next moment, “don’t exist anymore”?
        But the very incoherence of the lines makes my sadness intelligible to me. Every time I chanced upon the melody during our week in Italy, I need not have succumbed to a superstitious foreboding, or even to the heft of a twenty-year-old memory. The English translation articulates a paradox, two mutually exclusive, yet inclusive, truths: in the very moment that you’re discovering the preciousness of something, you are also losing it. We may well visit Bella Italia again someday, the three of us together. But as a friend of mine put it, we won’t be the same people.
        I hear Bocelli’s song in Fresno. It has become a chorus to that week in Italy, a time of increasingly rare togetherness with my young adult children. The melody plays somewhere in my consciousness, soft and subtle, between Maya’s phone calls from La Jolla—those calls that allow me to share in her excitement about her Clinical Psychology and Ethnic Studies courses, her work at the VA, the events she has planned for the Pakistani Students Association on campus. Mama, she says, her voice in my ear brimming with the cadences of the four-year-old she used to be.
        I hear Bocelli’s song as Cyrus works on his college applications. He’s seated at the same circular, cherry-wood dining table where he constructed his very first sentences on the page, shortly after our move from Boston.

Photo by Samina Najmi

Today his reach is eager for worlds beyond Fresno, beyond California and the western bounds of this vast country. This time next year, neither of them will be sitting across from me at the dinner table. This time next year, who knows how else the earth will have shifted?
        Con te partirò, I think. It has always been time to say goodbye.