The primary can always be contemporary
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raconti
Sharpened at Both Ends
For thirty years, the professor came to Berkeley for the Spring semester and stayed in apartment four, on the top floor of the house. Its three rooms faced west through windows that wound open over the town, to the bay and bridge between the city and the mountain.
I would see them walking to and from campus, he and his wife, a cellist back in Moscow. They both had long hair that fell over their small frames, and they walked together, slowly, as against some wind.
One year I was living across the hall. I heard their voices as they followed each other around the apartment. It was he, I imagine, following her, through the slatted doors that folded back between rooms, as she made strong black tea in the kitchen and went through the closet to the deck to smoke. Later I learned he was a respected philologist and historian of the Russian language. Of particular interest was...
From our separate doors, we talked on the deck. He stood at the edge, hands in his pockets, just breathing. He had given up smoking; this breathing, he said, was better. It was just Spring and in Berkeley spring is an event of the flowers climbing. He still accompanied his wife as she smoked, and sat beside her facing the windows as she played the cello.
On Easter, Viktor, wearing a long charcoal mac, long hair and long beard, stopped me on the street. He had a message. He had lung cancer, and asked me to tell my mother and my aunt. My grandmother passed away the winter before.
I did not see him again. He took to bed and died shortly after. That summer, I moved into apartment four. He had placed the desk by the bed in the long, narrow room to the south. It was part of a set my grandmother had — desk, dresser, vanity and swivel chair — made of wood, painted yellow with very light blue trim. The yellow was pale and finely cracking. ivory, old bone.
Behind the desk stood the dresser with brass bail pulls and a folding mirror along its top that swam light on the walls. The brown, pink, and yellow OED, a bone holding a dried flower and a Russian knife holder, self-possessed chrystal.
In the morning I worked at the desk. As the sun moved over the hills, light waved on the top, on the paper, over the words.
When I opened the top drawer, Viktor's pencils rolled up the raw wood to the front. Each was sharpened on both ends. An inch of Ticonderoga yellow between two carbon points. Rather like the knife holder, which is rather like a vajra used to cut through illusion.
BERKELEY JULY 2026
A Domani
Two shapes. A rectangle and a triangle. A blue door just off the bridge that you open at 19:30. A man in a blue shirt is there, risen from the others at the back tables preparing for the night. He leads you to your table at the stern, tells you what is good, leaves, and returns with a cold glass of white wine.
At Coco Coco, couples sit side by side. Square tables arranged like blocks of a musical score. On the left in red gingham and black and white stripes; on the right, the same. Torsos angled toward the centerline, as if we are going somewhere without moving. Between them double doors open to the patio creviced between the bridge and water.
Tonight I sit in the back corner. Behind me the kitchen door and its sounds. A wooden bureau with five thin cakes and silver ice buckets. Above it are shelves of white plates and slanted drawers for cutlery. I sit across from the man behind the desk, the one who pulls his glasses down and bends forward to account for each meal. Each bottle of wine, each caprese, each fritto misto and rabbit stew. Two high shelves of cookbooks behind him.
Last night I was first here, seated at the front table closest to all edges, between bridge and land, ringed by volcanic rock. Fishing boats laid in wait on the water that drew indigo as the sun went down, after the afternoon wind had sanded its surface. The bridge joins Ischia to the islet, a rock rising from the sea where a castle was carved two thousand five hundred years ago, later a monastery, gardens, settlements, a bombing. Descending stone paths, roofs of tall grasses rushing in the wind, throwing off gold light and behind, blue water tearing like static.
The man behind the desk, in a white shirt and jeans, stands beside me and looks down at this. I look up to him and he hesitates, and then, drawing a hand up to his chest and unfolding the palm asks Stai scrivendo un romanzo? I pause then draw my own hand up off the table. I write, I don’t know what I write. Mai un giorno, una romanza. He smiles, slowing away.
A woman in a blue dress periodically emerges, carrying an oval platter with two fish laid across. The couple in front of me is trying to figure out what she is doing. She shows the fish, then returns to the kitchen to cook them, the man says. They are already cooked, she is serving them, says the woman. The man behind the desk sees the question, calls the waiter who speaks English. Is what the woman is doing on the menu? He opens the blue book and points, catch of the day.
I keep turning to the wall behind me of framed family photographs. A boy in a yellow raincoat holding a fish by the tail. A close-up of the Pope greeting people just out of frame. The piazza and road and bridge flooded, the town becoming Venice. Save for one new picture of a waiter and celebrity I don't recognize, the photos are all vintage, sun-bleached now.
The owner comes over again and shows me his phone. It’s him in the yellow raincoat, standing in a mess of water outside Coco Coco. He presses play, looking toward the piazza as waves break over the bridge in fans of spray. Scraps of white red and blue paper floating at his feet. I think the air escaping from submerged parts of the castle in small bubbles that rise to the surface and pop.
The man in the blue shirt who greets me each night, smiling, who directs you to a table with his eyes and a nod, brings the tablecloth and lets it fall in the air, smooths it, sets the menu, tells you what is good—la zuppa è buona, con fave e patate—checks each table. A good job, like the taxista said in Napoli. We don’t go crazy over soldi, soldi, soldi.
He is putting wine away now. Now ordering cutlery in the wooden boxes. I will probably never see him again. As he calls after someone leaving: A domani!
Walking back through the blue door onto the bridge, the sliver moon trailed by Jupiter pours light down on the bay, the water rocking in its draw. The small fishing boats sleep white on the water. A single boat glides in from sea through the strait of green hillsides and zigzagging stone walls now darkened. Engine off and no lights. Only light in its wake, a silhouette of a boat and maybe a man—un’uomo in Mattera’s painting.
ISCHIA JUNE 2026
Anyways, he was thinking
Or remembering—always as if for one, that for this math of bringing things together, observing events. And what he had repeatedly observed, and drawn some conclusions or hypotheses from, and sometimes just a question, was a great yet inevitable effort. The question he may say out loud. A statement, risen, pointed into the air. He watched it fly out, and then took it back inside of him to continue to work on. He would sink somewhere and then suddenly say what he thought. This often upset his wife, who took these observations, these thoughts—condensed marbles—to be an insult and proof he was not listening to her. She'd get very upset for a few minutes, sulk another few minutes, and then somewhat begrudgingly go on with it, eat her baked potato.
