‘Through a friend of a friend: how you get everything in Italy,’ he said. Looking at his possessions, I remembered how, when I was a child, things which belonged to other people often fascinated me – a hairslide or some furry slippers, foolish things like that. I would long to possess such things myself, but on the few occasions when I managed to obtain an identical object, it no longer had the magic which had drawn me to it in the first place. Its mystery and attraction were immediately lost, simply by my possessing it.
‘What sort of place do you have in S. Giorgio?’ I described my apartment to him. I told him I liked it, but that sometimes it was too noisy.
‘That’s a problem when you live in a noisy country,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I suppose it could be worse.’ Sometimes it didn’t bother me when Franca and Lucia would be shouting and roaring in the stairwell, and the television was on full blast from early morning until late at night. Sometimes it got on my nerves. What really annoyed me though was when Franca set herself up as a model of happiness, and said that I too could be as happy as she was. She was always telling me that I thought too much. It only complicated things, and made you miserable. I hated it when she talked to me like this. It was certainly true that I wasn’t happy a lot of the time, but I didn’t believe that putting your brain on ice could make much significant difference. If the price of consciousness is misery, then I’ll take that any day, rather than dumb bliss. I can’t stand it when people try to make you be the same as they are, as if their own lives are so wonderful.
Sometimes I used to think that Franca was like a great big tabby cat, living on pure instinct. I once had a cat when I was growing up in Ireland. It was going to have kittens, and I realized one day as I watched her sitting licking her paws that she wasn’t at all concerned about it, she wasn’t getting ready for it or worrying about the future. She wasn’t even aware that she was going to have kittens. And then when they were born, she was perfectly contented, and stayed in her box with them and looked after them. She sat over them purring, and growled a little when I put my hand in to try and touch them. Six months later, she was killed. The kittens didn’t miss her. Often when I looked at Franca, I would remember that cat.
There was a glass egg on the table, and I picked it up. I asked Ted if it was Murano glass, and he said that it was. Franca had a Murano glass decanter and six matching liqueur glasses that she got on her honeymoon in Venice. They were made of dark red glass, and were all hand painted with flowers – really florid. I know that she never used them, not even once, in all the years she was married. She kept them locked up in a glass-fronted cabinet. I know such a thing is outmoded and foolish, like the idea of a best parlour, but it appeals to me. We had a china cabinet at home in Ireland. I like the idea of having all those bits of glass and delft and keeping them locked up for years and years. They became a sort of witness to all the sturm und drang of family life; they give you a fixed visual point, even if it is only in the form of a carnival glass tea-set, or a silver-plated sweet dish. We were never allowed to use them, and as a child, it was as if they didn’t even belong to us, they had that mystery of other people’s possessions. As I grew older, I liked them even more, for their worthlessness, because the only value they could have was sentimental. Sometimes when I was in Fabiola’s house, and I looked at her cold and costly fixtures and fittings, I’d think of those things we had at home, like two delft pigs hugging each other, one for salt and one for pepper.
‘I don’t like things that just have monetary value,’ I said to Ted. He was standing over by the window watching me. I was still holding the glass egg. ‘My grandmother used to say about people, “Money’s their God,” and in Italy I feel like I know people for whom that really is true, and they make no attempt to hide it. I often think about that when I’m in the streets, when I visit a city like Rome or Florence. In a shop window you’ll see maybe a pair of shoes on a little platform, all cleverly lit like they were a holy relic, and you’ll see people looking in the window, and it’s like they’re almost awed. I want to say to them – it’s only a pair of shoes, for crying out loud, only a belt or a handbag or whatever it happens to be. In a few years’ time all these things will be worn out or they’ll just look foolish. Sometimes when I see people in the street I feel pity for them, as if I’m looking at them from a thousand years away. Do you know what I mean?’
He said that he understood. I wasn’t sure that he did, but I decided that, for now at least, I would believe him.
5
I won’t say anything about whether or not I slept with Ted that night. Even if I did say, it would be foolish to believe me, because everybody tells lies about sex, and I’m no exception. What I will say is that it took me a long time to fall asleep, which is usual when I’m away from home. I lay awake far into the night, looking at the window. There was a big moon. It made a pale square of light on the floor, and I remembered a dream I once had. In it, there was a huge flat golden moon, which was low in the sky behind a leafless tree. I was able to reach out and touch the moon; I put my arm through the branches and pulled it out of the sky. It came down as smoothly and as easily as a circle of silk. Shimmering, golden, it hung limp in my hand, but now there was no light. I remembered I had felt happy when I woke up, because the dream had been a good one. When I looked at the moon over Florence I hoped I might dream it again, but I didn’t dream at all that night. I didn’t mind, because I could so easily have had one of my usual nightmares, and I was grateful that I didn’t.
The following morning, even though it was October, it was dry and bright enough for us to have breakfast sitting outside. We went to Piazza Santo Spirito, which was all but deserted, and quiet but for the noise of a television from behind a high, shuttered window, its frenetic gabble of trailers and ads muffled by distance. We didn’t talk much. I’m always quiet and sleepy in the morning, it takes me a long time to shake off the night. I had coffee and a big custardy cake, which I pulled apart with my fingers and ate slowly. If I could, I would eat things like that every day, but I only treat myself occasionally. I let my eyes wander over the high pale buildings around us, the spotted trunks of the plane trees, and the flurrying crowds of pigeons which gathered around a fountain.
On the way to the café we had passed the place where Dostoyevsky had finished writing The Idiot. I looked at the building out of the corner of my eye, and thought of the day I first saw it, years before, on a visit to Florence. It’s an unassuming yellow house opposite the Pitti Palace. The only unusual thing about it is the stone plaque that tells whoever cares to know that Dostoyevsky finished writing the novel there in 1868. I had been tempted for a moment to point it out to Ted, but I didn’t. It’s so precious to me that I wouldn’t have known how to react if he had just said ‘So what?’ or ‘Big deal.’ Often I had watched crowds of people drift past the house and never look up, paying no more heed to it than to any other building around, but to me it was precious. If Ted didn’t share that appreciation (and I felt quite sure that he wouldn’t), I thought it would be a desecration to draw his attention to it. So I said nothing, we walked on.
On one side of the square where we were sitting, there was a church. On the façade was a memorial to the fallen of two world wars, with a list of the names of the men of the parish who had been killed. The whole thing was surmounted by a dusty wreath, decorated with golden baubles like Christmas-tree ornaments, and their brightness only made the leaves and the ribbon look even more faded and dull. There was a war memorial in S. Giorgio too, with a flagpole. The cord which runs down the side of the pole pings in the breeze, it makes the same sound that the masts of boats make when they’re all pulled in to harbour on a quiet night. When I passed the war memorial in S. Giorgio, I always used to think of the sea.
The church itself looked old and neglected. Weeds and tufts of tough grass grew in cracks on the steps in front of it. Mass must have ended, because a congregation was leaving the building, twenty people at most, the majority of them elderly wo
men. Then I saw two other people crossing the square, one of them also an elderly woman dressed in black, walking slowly with the aid of a cane. She was arm-in-arm with a middle-aged woman, whom she was hectoring relentlessly. Oddly, because of her beaten, defeated look, the younger woman looked the older – that is, as if her soul had aged. She was dressed in a suit, dressed with neatness and precision, but was not at all elegant. Her clothes were drab and unflattering, her short hair set in a rigid style, her face submissive, tired. As they walked past us, I could hear their voices, the old woman releasing a torrent of angry language, the other woman patiently interjecting every so often, ‘Si, Mamma. Si, Mamma.’ In my mind’s eye, I could see the apartment they had just left. I had been in Italy long enough to imagine it down to the last detail – the clean, cold rooms, the glass-topped table with a lace runner and an ugly piece of ceramic on it, which, twice a day, the daughter would laboriously clear away, and then set the table. I could see the white stone floors which, after meals, would be ruthlessly swept, then polished. On the sideboard there would be a framed black and white photograph of the elderly woman and her husband, taken years before, but she would still not look young in it, would look hard and stern. Beside the photo would be a green plant, and there would be other green plants around the house, some of them huge. Their beds would be neat, narrow, perfectly made, and there would be a big multi-channelled television, which they would watch impassively for hours every evening. And so their lives would pass.
The two women had reached the top step of the church. They pushed the worm-eaten inner door, and the huge blank façade swallowed them up.
‘Ted,’ I said, ‘did you know either of your grandmothers? Do you remember them?’
‘Grammy? Do I remember Grammy? Who could forget her? Grammy was like a Marine with lipstick. Or rather, she would have been if she’d worn lipstick.’ He laughed and was quiet for a moment. ‘Funny you should ask about her. I think about her all the time. Well, a lot of the time, anyway. I guess I think about her to know what I really do think about her.’
He told me that ‘Grammy’ was his mother’s mother. He never met his father’s mother, she died in 1942, before his parents had married, but from family legend she was every bit as tough as the grandmother he knew. The lies of the past! I never cease to be amazed by the discrepancy between the myth of womanhood and the reality of it. What family doesn’t have a sepia print of some doe-eyed creature, all roses and poses, in her high-necked white blouse and long dark skirt, pretending to read a book while her sister leans sweetly over her, or playing the piano while her sister turns the pages.
Looking at these submissive shrinking violets, who would ever guess the tales that are handed down in families, of how they drove through the lives of their children like tanks, making wounds which it would take generations to heal. Ted said that he thought a hundred years wasn’t a long time at all – in human terms, in terms of the individual, yes, it’s usually longer than life itself, but in terms of a family, it’s very short.
‘I look back at my grandparents,’ he said, ‘and I feel that me and my sister – especially my sister – are still picking up the tab for things that happened before the First World War. Doesn’t that sound crazy? But I can’t stop myself from thinking it. But then when I think of my life, the choice and the comfort I have, and then I think of her, I feel guilty. I mean, I’m sure my grandmother didn’t want to be like that, I’m sure she didn’t set out deliberately to terrorize three generations, it just happened that way. She had such a hard life – although of course, she never stopped telling us how hard it was for her, and how easy it was for us.’
He told me that his grandmother was a first-generation immigrant. She was born in Bergen, and in 1910, when she was sixteen, she migrated to the United States with her family. It was a classic migrant experience – travelling steerage, cardboard suitcases, possessions tied up in bundles. Through Ellis Island, like everybody else then, luggage labels tied to their coats. She said years later that she hated sentiment about that time, she said that it was awful, that if you hadn’t been through it you couldn’t imagine the coldness of it, the people checking you for vermin, treating you like you were nobody, nothing.
The family settled in the Mid-West, and although there was already a large Scandinavian community there, the new migrants experienced hostility and prejudice. They were accused of being dirty, and to refute this, they overcompensated. ‘My God,’ Ted said, ‘my grandmother was obsessed with dirt. You never saw a person like her – with the possible exception of my mom. My mother keeps the house so clean that you wouldn’t believe it, you know, even things like the grill on the broiler or the lines between the tiles in the shower stall – I figure they’re not supposed to be clean after a while. But not in our house. It was only when I went to college that I found out how fluff can gather in balls under the bed. It never got a chance to do that around Mom.’
To begin with, the new arrivals moved in with other members of the family who had moved to America some years earlier. For ten years, his grandmother worked in a boarding house there, doing laundry, cooking, washing down flights of stone steps, cleaning, cleaning, always cleaning things. Then she married ‘the sweetest, most gentle guy you could ever hope to meet’. He worked with his family in running a general store, and so she started to work there instead, selling sugar and tea and cloth and wool, all sorts of things. She had a baby a year for the next ten years, but things being as they were, only six of them lived to adulthood. Ted’s mother was her eldest daughter. By the end of the 1920s, things were better. The shop was doing well, and they felt that things were beginning to come together, when the Depression happened, ‘and they were right back to square one’.
Ted said: ‘One time I was in a supermarket with my mom, and I asked her, “Don’t you think it’s sort of obscene, there’s just so much here, I mean too much of stuff like Twinkies and soda and junk like that?” But Mom stood there with a two-pound jar of mayonnaise in her hands and she said, “Believe me, if you’d gone through the Depression, you’d not think this obscene, you’d be glad you’d lived to see it.” She put the mayonnaise in the cart, and I knew not to say anything else. And this you can’t deny – my grandmother came through migration and marriage and the Depression and ten kids and the Second World War. I didn’t. Maybe if she hadn’t been so tough she wouldn’t have made it through all those things.
‘But she did everything she set out to do, and in the end, she had more than she could ever have dreamed of when she was young. The sad thing is, it didn’t make her at all happy. Things picked up in later years and all her kids did well, they all got jobs and money. Dad was in Europe during the war, and when he came back, he and my mother got married. Then Dad went through college on the GI Bill, to become an engineer, while Mom helped support him, working as a secretary and running the house. In time Grammy saw Mom and all her kids with a good life style – nice big house in the suburbs, big car, smaller car that Mom took us to school in, me and my sister off to summer-camp every year. We were able to go to college, we didn’t have to start working as young as she did. But it still wasn’t enough.
‘By the time she was an old lady, she was still lethal. The toughness that was there; I don’t think that woman had a sentimental bone in her body. Do you believe this, Aisling? In all my life, I never once – not once – heard her say a nice thing to her daughter, my mother. Like, “You look pretty today,” or “That dress looks good on you” – nothing. She made Mom just as tough as herself, and I think Mom supporting Dad ultimately had a bad effect. My mother could never stop being in charge after that. She had had to be super-capable from the time she was ten until Dad left college, so she wasn’t going to stop then.
‘Grammy lived with us in her last years, and I really do have to say, I think it was a relief to all of us when she died. My mom in particular was just burnt out from her. She was relieved, but she felt guilty about being so glad.
‘There was an anger in Grammy
, a rage. She fielded everything life threw at her, and yet I feel there was still a gap in the middle of her life, her self. There was something missing; she suspected that all along, and the older she got, the more she knew it, and the more she knew she’d never understand it, the madder she got. There was a part of her own soul that she’d never been able to come to terms with, and she just couldn’t bear that – that all those years of being thrifty and hard-working and God-fearing and clean hadn’t been enough. That tormented her, that put her in a rage.
‘I always think she lived too long, because she lived to see the sixties. It was as if society was suddenly discrediting all the things she’d done. She was so mad at my sister Amy. She was really into the sixties, she’s older than me, and Grammy just couldn’t bear it that she was protesting Vietnam and wearing strange clothes and living the way she did. My grandmother felt that after everything that had been done for her, Amy was just selling out. But I think Amy had to be the way she was, she couldn’t just go on being like Grammy and Mom. The world changed too much. And I think my mother’s shaping up to be just like her mother, that’s what frightens me. After all those years of hard work and baking and taking us kids out to Trick or Treat at Hallowe’en, there’s the same toughness, the same lack of something, the same anger building up.
Remembering Light and Stone Page 6
