Your story in this week’s issue, “Dietrologia,” revolves around the term dietrologia—an Italian word meaning a hidden motivation or explanation behind something. (It is, literally, “behind-ology.”) How did you become familiar with the word, and was the story built around it, or did the use of the word present itself during the writing?
Lovely word! I studied Italian in high school, I still speak it, my mother is Italian, my first job was in Italy—I was a teacher in Urbino, before I went to Africa. I like the word for its slightly sinister quality, suggesting deep suspicion, bordering on paranoia as well as on the paranormal. The word was in the story from the beginning, though my working title was “Downsizing,” a much duller word.
In the story, an old man, Sal, tells tales from his life—tales that are psychologically complex—to three young children. He can’t expect his audience to understand his stories, so why does he tell them?
What seems like a conversation between an anxious old man and very young children becomes confessional—a relief to him to be able to tell these stories without interruption and sort of make sense of his life. To the children, the stories are less like narratives than like songs, which become more enjoyable with repetition, even if the children don’t wholly understand them. They seize on certain words, as we tend to do with songs and poems, and that becomes a form of understanding to them and a consolation to him.
What do the children see in him, aside from his generosity with cookies?
The cookies are central (“I accept cookies,” we are constantly tapping into Web sites), but it’s important, too, that the children have his sympathetic attention. He asks them about school and so on, and he listens closely; there’s a lot of back and forth, a kind of play, which the children enjoy. Some of the time he talks to them pompously, as though they were adults: “Home—the notion of home . . .” I find this funny and rather touching. Like Sal, I often have trouble making sense of an experience until I’ve laboriously written it down, or turned it into fiction.
Sal is resisting his wife’s plans to move them both to a “unit” in an assisted-living facility. Does he see a dietrologia behind her wish to move?
You can see he’s happy in his big house filled with possessions, and, obviously, he’s resisting a big change, the move to a “unit.” He doesn’t want to move, or downsize—he still has plans. He was a clerk, covertly writing poems; he had a parallel life, and wants it to continue. In his dietrologia, he sees that he would be miserable moving.
One of Sal’s memories involves an encounter, during a storm in Sicily, with a boy who runs away from him, terrified. Sal says that the boy unconsciously “knew he had to separate himself from me.” Was the boy right, as Sal implies, to be frightened?
The Italian boy is more frightened of Sal the stranger than of the thunderstorm, and is probably right to be. His running into the storm is something that impresses Sal in retrospect, and he remembers it later when he needs to choose how to act.
Sal is a lonely character, disappointed in his two marriages, unable to follow his desire to be a poet. Instead, he was a claims adjuster. You give us several of Sal’s poems, which he recites to the children. How did you go about creating his poetic voice?
Sal says, at one point, that he writes poems with his left hand. I do, too, though I have never published them. A fiction writer needs to be really brave to publish his or her poems—Borges was brilliant in his fiction and his poetry; Updike was an excellent poet; so was D. H. Lawrence; Virginia Woolf was good at both, too. Mine are like Sal’s, I think. But Sal’s a reader. There are some allusions to his reading. When he thinks about how children are “near and mysterious,” he’s remembering a Borges poem, “John 1:14”—“Who plays with a child plays with something / near and mysterious” (“cercano y misterioso”)—and Sal’s mention of religion as “soul butter” is from “Huckleberry Finn.”
His final act is intended to protect the children—and spare him from having to move to the assisted-living facility. Do you think it accomplishes those things?
I hope both are accomplished. The signs are there: he seems to see it all; he believes he’s gifted that way. His name is Salvatore, after all—“savior.” The great trouble for him is that he loses the children, but that would have happened anyway.
