I had got the idea for my master’s thesis on To the Lighthouse almost a year before the end of my relationship with Ezio, when he and I had just got back together. Seeing him off after his holiday visit to New York, the thesis sprung, fully shaped in my mind, on the bus back from the airport to the city. I would have a Part I focused on Mrs. Ramsay and her two experiences of merging: her contemplation of the lighthouse in her moment of solitude and then her blending with the assembled family and guests at dinner; Part II would look at the experience of the artist Lily Briscoe and the impulses that allow her to complete her painting; and, finally, a Part III would focus on Woolf’s aesthetic as a novelist and the attempted wholeness of To the Lighthouse. I wrote of my academic epiphany in a letter to Ezio, and he was pleased to have his visit to me end so productively. You could say that I, too, had my vision and that somehow it linked with loving another person. Beyond this, though, a tie between Ezio Tarantelli and Virginia Woolf seems tenuous. While someone like him might make an appearance in a novel by E. M. Forster—Forster would extol his physical grace and, notwithstanding his ambition and discipline, his freedom from Protestant shame, Virginia Woolf doesn’t seem especially interested in her fiction in foreigners. There’s the Swiss maid in To the Lighthouse, lying in bed at night and homesick for her father and beautiful mountains, and Lucrezia, the Italian wife of Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, who, back home, sewed hats with her sisters. But these characters fail to introduce any ethos into the novels that competes with Englishness. Woolf doesn’t look outside English society or landscape for any of her values.
In the end I couldn’t as well. I didn’t want to leave my language and my culture for more than an extended excursion. When I married, it was to an Englishman who had emigrated to the United States in adolescence and resided as long as I had in New York. Ezio Tarantelli, in an ironic twist, married an American with a PhD from Tufts in English literature and a BA from Wellesley, who did indeed go to live with him in Italy. She and I would have been classmates if I’d chosen Wellesley, which I also applied to, and not Bryn Mawr. Ezio met her the winter he stayed on in Boston, something I learned only seventeen years later when I saw him again in Rome.
In the summer of 1984, during the period I lived in Virginia, the Barnard philosopher I was still involved with rented a villa close to Florence, and I was able to join her there for a few weeks. Immersed in early Renaissance art—churches, frescos, sculpture, and painting, Donatello, Massacio, Fra Angelico—she and I and a couple more visiting friends took side trips to Siena, Pisa, and other towns, and a plan formed for a short excursion to Rome. Whom do I know in Rome? I wondered in momentary amnesia. Remembering, I dialed Rome phone information and got numbers for three Ezio Tarantellis. The first I tried was the right one. “Ti ricordi Wendy?” I asked. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he answered in English.
I arranged to meet him for lunch, and he picked me up at my hotel in a much nicer car than his old Fiat. We were now in our forties. I had worried I might find him bald or fat or dull, but he wasn’t any of these things. He looked and seemed the same, and without effort or strain we fell into our old familiarity. Though I didn’t divulge my affair with a woman, I spoke of my marriage being in trouble, and he urged me to try to work it out. At the same time, however much he valued family stability, he confessed to being habitually unfaithful to his wife. He had tried to change for her, he said, but just couldn’t do it, and I was grateful not to be in her position. I’m sure if we’d had a bit more time, he would have proposed driving out to Ostia for a tryst, and I might very well have gone and then regretted it. Instead, we talked on about our children—he had one son, my son’s age—each other’s friends and family, and our careers. He had realized most all of the ambitions he’d harbored when I knew him and was proud now to be the youngest full professor at the University of Rome as well as an economics advisor to a major trade union. He’d done well, he said, since I’d abandoned him in the cold Boston winter. “Poor boy,” he said, miming grief. The pain was remembered playfully. “You’ll always have a friend in Rome,” he assured me, as we walked to his car with our arms around each other’s shoulders.
In November, when I was back at work at Hollins, he phoned me from Toronto, where he was attending a conference. I felt very happy to hear from him. We chatted on a bit about our lives, and he still expressed concern that I work to save my marriage. In March 1985 I received a call from my always up-to-date-with-the-news mother. “Isn’t it terrible about Ezio?” she said. “What?” I asked. I hadn’t heard. After delivering a lecture at the University of Rome, Ezio Tarantelli had been gunned down in a parking lot by two members of the Red Brigade. They killed him because of his opposition to the scala mobile, automatic wage increases to adjust for inflation.
