by Mary Gordon
She thinks at first that there are six frogs surrounding the fountain’s jets of water, but then she sees that they aren’t animals at all, only playful shapes, and that is what the fountain demands: an understanding of this place of playfulness. Which the glum tourists seem incapable of even beginning to understand. Beside them, young people smoke and flirt. With a hardly concealed urgency what seems like a small army of dark-skinned men are trying to sell electrified toys: mice, cats, dogs, frogs, or neon-colored circles of plastic tubing that make a whistling sound when they are swung, like a lariat, overhead. The church, with its gilded apse and mosaic saints who look down on the foolishness or beauty of the people who will soon be gone—as they are gone from life, but here now, in some way, taking part in something, stone that is, or some more permanent kind of life—these saints seem far beyond abashment. Nothing can shock them, she thinks, nothing can disappoint. Their inapproachability comes to her as potent reassurance. She does not know of what.
She sees that the square is the home for another kind of life, more habitual, more domestic. There are people who come here every day; it is their work to be here; they are homeless, and they sit or squat; they beg in a sluggish, aimless, almost offhand way, and their dogs, flea bitten, interested only in their masters, sniff the cobblestones, forage for the leftovers of the careless tourists, close their eyes ecstatically against the noonday sun. Established in a corner of the square, sitting on a camp stool, a woman with wild hair, ripped stockings, ruined shoes, is concentrating avidly on a piece of needlepoint. Miranda looks to see if there is a cup at her feet, if she is some specialized form of beggar. But she doesn’t seem to want anything from the others in the square. It is simply where she is, where she always is.
And walking in and out, chattering, seeing nothing but the place they need to be next, matrons with string bags make their way down the side streets. Some of them have settled down for a late morning coffee; two, perfectly but unfashionably coiffed, cut, with a fine precision, a cornetto into identical halves.
She turns up a little street, passes an ancient-looking stone building that is in fact a garage. The men inside it are wearing greasy overalls with their names stitched on the pockets. GUIDO, the names say, GIANNI, but they could as easily say BILL or RICK. The smell of oil and gasoline is a shock; she’s reminded that this is a real city, and that the saints on the church are forgotten most of the time by most of its citizens. A large, hot-looking German shepherd lies in the doorway, while his master, five feet away, lies underneath a shiny, red, clearly quite costly car, whose fate is in his hands.
Adam is waiting for her at the workman’s café he described. There are four tables outside; he asks if she’d like to sit at one of them.
“No,” she says, “I’m too nervous about running into Valerie. This is her neighborhood.”
“Oh, God,” he says. “I guess I’ve done such a good job of blocking Valerie out of my mind I hadn’t even thought of that. We must, must, get in touch with her.”
“Absolutely, we must,” Miranda says. And they giggle like naughty children, understanding that they won’t be doing it anytime soon.
• • •
They’re seated at one of a series of long tables, each covered with brown butcher paper. Only one dish is served at each meal, and your bill is calculated on the brown paper that serves as your tablecloth. When your bill is done, that part of the paper is ripped off and handed to you … and the rest of the paper is ripped and thrown away after you leave.
A few feet from where Adam stands, there is a salmon-colored wall covered by a bougainvillea, a blanket of sheer purple that makes the orange seem neutral, matte. How, she wonders, can these flowers grow so lush, and climb so high? It isn’t, after all, the tropics. They have winter here; the hints of it are in the air when she wakes in the middle of the night.
The waitresses that serve them and the others in the restaurant all seem related; their children run in and out. They are affectionate and tender to them, but to their customers, regulars and tourists alike, they are impatient, rough. A small, round-shouldered woman in English tweeds sits alone, reading a newspaper. Another—it is impossible to tell if it is a man or a woman—shares pasta with a fox terrier and takes half of it home. There is only one offering on the menu: pasta arrabbiata, and, for a second course, lentils and sausages. Come contorno they can order insalata mista or puntarelle, which Adam recommends: it’s a kind of chicory with a dressing made of oil, vinegar, and anchovies. It’s available only in the fall. They order wine and a bottle of mineral water but are given only one glass apiece. The roughness, the lack of cortesia, pleases her, as does the savory goodness of each dish she eats, the vivid flavors, spicy tomato, peppery meat and beans, bitter greens drenched in salty fish and vinegar and oil.
• • •
They walk together to the piazza. A bit overfull, her senses more fuzzy than she would like (she isn’t used to wine at lunch), she makes her way to the fountain to sit for a moment in the sun.
Her eye falls on a beggar woman, hunched almost double, her foot twisted inward. She is making mumbling, supplicating noises; she is invoking the Madonna, and calling all the women beautiful, the men generous. Miranda puts a euro in her filthy paper cup.
“You see, Adam, some things in the world have got better. It’s important not to forget that. This beggar woman. What do you see when you see her? Someone tragic, a victim, or someone pathetic, annoying, perhaps criminal, almost certainly manipulative? Whatever we see, she’s not what we want to be looking at. We want to be seeing the color of the walls, the angle of the sun on the water in the fountain. We don’t want to have to be thinking: What should be done for this woman, and who should do it? The church? The state? The family?”
“It isn’t the kind of thing I think about: what should be done with her, about her. I hope someone else is thinking about it, someone like you, maybe, who has an idea of what could be done that would be of real use.”
“I look at her and understand that she had polio. And that polio is gone from large parts of the world. And that it happened in our lifetime. Do you remember when we were little and every summer people were afraid there’d be another polio epidemic? Our parents were afraid of public swimming pools. They wouldn’t let us go to the movies, and the movies were the only place with air-conditioning. They might be afraid of sitting near a fountain like this. And then, suddenly, it was over. That gripping fear. Poof. Over. Because of human endeavor, human intelligence.
“When I worked in India on the smallpox project, and I would see face after ruined face, and afterward, after an exhausting day knocking on the doors of strangers, urging them to be vaccinated … and you know how I’ve always hated asking for things, I would say to myself, I’m doing this so there will be no more ruined faces. Except I never said it out loud. I don’t even remember what I said to the people whose doors I knocked on. We were given a script by UNICEF; we weren’t supposed to deviate from it by even a syllable. I couldn’t say what I was thinking, I’m doing this to work against death because the dead have become invisible. I couldn’t even think of it that way after a very short while, the idea of working against death, lessening the tide of death. It was overwhelming to contemplate the millions and millions dead to smallpox. Whereas if I could make my mind focus on one face, that could be seen and known and understood; if I could say, ‘I’m doing it so this one face won’t be ruined,’ then I wasn’t overwhelmed.”
“You did something that you know helped relieve suffering,” he says. “When we were young together and we spoke so easily in such high terms, you said, ‘I want to relieve suffering.’ And I said, ‘I want to create beauty.’ ”
“You could say we’ve both done something of what we wanted. And are still doing it. Not everyone can say that.”
“Come,” he said, “let’s walk off our lunch.”
They cross the Tiber, walk down the Via Giulia. She stops in front of the gigantic head, its mouth a spigot of running w
ater that falls into its marble bowl, and she thinks how strange it is: the face is tortured, but the sound of water introduces play, the element of joy.
In the Piazza Farnese, she asks: “Why do I like those fountains. They’re kind of like big bathtubs …” But he knows she really doesn’t want an answer.
The Campo dei Fiori, denuded now of fruits and vegetables, has become a wasteland, a garbage dump; the Roman street sweepers, as glamorous, Adam thinks, as fashion models, haven’t made their way here yet; they’re seeing the campo at its worst. They pass through it quickly, cross the ugly, threatening Corso Vittorio Emanuele, turning down too many streets for Miranda to account for, and suddenly they are there: the Piazza Navona, Bernini’s lolling gods. She imagines that if she should say to them, What is right? What is good? What is to be done about the poor?, they would answer, What are you talking about? There is sun and water. Here is my galloping horse, and the lion chasing him. How pleasant life is: how clear and swift the flow of water, how firm and supple human flesh.
“You tell me, I must admit some things are better,” Adam says, sitting on the railing by the statue of the god meant to stand for the Danube, “but you must admit no one could accomplish anything like this now. We’ve lost the grand scale. Who would spend what would be required on what they would think of as useless space, space whose only use is pleasure? For the gathering of people and the sound of running water.”
Does she trust him enough to say what she is really thinking, to confess her anxiety: her Protestant guilt for crimes committed centuries before she was born. A response she dislikes in herself, but cannot banish. Partly because it is also a source of her greatest vanity. Not physical vanity, which she gave over long ago, but ethical: Unlike you, I do not forget. But she wants to say it, if only because it was the kind of thing she could have said when they were young.
“To have accomplished this, grotesque inequalities were necessary. Such projects are possible only if one forgets about the labor involved, if one forgets about an ideal of justice.”
“But aren’t you glad they did it? Wouldn’t we all be poorer without it?”
“But what about the children of the poor …”
“Miranda, you just can’t be talking this way right now, not in this place, not on a day like today. Just save it, I promise we can talk about the poor another time. Right now, I’d like to buy you an ice cream. Fix your mind here. Choose now: three flavors.”
She sees that she has made a mistake. When they were young, he might have loved her for worrying about the poor in the midst of what seemed to be a great party: the sound of the water, the delights of harmonious space, the coming and going of all these people and the great fixed stone gods. But now, she knows, she seems ridiculous to him, pretentious, even boorish. She seems that way to herself, although she knows that everything she’s said is right.
“I will choose hazelnut, coffee, pistachio, and give up thinking about the impossible poor, the miserable dead.” She is trying to make a joke of her seriousness, because she can see that it is laughable, really, particularly here. Yet she means everything she said. But she knows she must pretend not to mean it. She must pretend to think herself absurd, to believe that nothing is more important than the best possible choice of ice cream. Or else she will be one of those unbearable people, one of those people no one wants to be with. And she wants him to want to be with her.
“For now,” he says, putting his hand on her shoulder. It’s the first time he’s allowed himself to touch her, and they both understand that something has changed and that they must not acknowledge that it has.
“Tomorrow,” he says, “we’ll only be able to take a short walk. And we’ll have to meet early. Lucy and I are going to see my cousins in Orvieto.”
“Yes,” she says. “How nice.” She’s relieved. He has a life in Rome apart from her, and she is glad to take her place among the things in his life that are unimportant, provisional, able to be let go. At the same time, a small wet patch forms below her ribs, coldish, thickish: she will be more alone tomorrow than he will. He will have his daughter, his cousins. She wonders if any of his aunts and uncles are still alive. She thinks of them and the long Sunday meals she was once invited to be a part of. Tomorrow, when he’s surrounded by loving, familiar people, she’ll be on her own.
Sunday, October 14
VILLA BORGHESE
“Certain Kinds of Weather Once Enchanted Us”
They walk up the Viale Magnolia; it pleases her that a road should be named for a tree. The park is empty, except for focused dog walkers. Serious runners.
“This is new,” he says, “Italians running. A few years ago, if you saw someone running here, you knew they were American.”
“How do you know they’re Italian?”
“Only Italians would be that carefully dressed and coiffed even for a run.”
She likes that he notices what people wear; it’s something Yonatan would never do. It makes Adam seem more feminine, safer.
He looks at his watch. “I’m afraid we only have time for a short walk, before Lucy wakes up. Before I wake her. If I don’t, she’ll sleep and sleep. She might not wake till the sun is down.”
“Don’t you remember, Adam. Those adolescent sleeps. So deep. They were like heaven.”
“It’s hard to call back that kind of memory. For so many years now, I’ve woken up at dawn.”
She pulls her jacket closer to her. “The weather has changed overnight. The atmosphere is different.”
“The whole question of weather is different here. A different kind of question. Less frightening. Perhaps, also, less exhilarating. I do remember, about being younger, that some weathers used to make me feel exhilarated and other kinds made me feel quite frightened.”
“Yes, that irrecoverable fall of darkness, like a knife blade. Just at this time of year: October. You just wanted to beg for it: a few more minutes of life outdoors, a bit more light, that precious sense of coldness, because soon you’d be called in, into warmth, into the smell of food, into safety, but at that moment it wasn’t safety you wanted, it was danger, the risk of cold, to be there for that sudden drop of bluish black. Part of you longed to be locked out. As if being indoors at all were a kind of suffocation, an imprisonment. You’d never be let out again; you’d never get the air, the light.”
“I used to be frightened by high winds, but of course I couldn’t say it. I was a boy … what kind of boy would be frightened by high winds? But my house always seemed insubstantial to me. Your house always seemed safer than mine. Perhaps because your father seemed more in charge than mine.”
“But your father was so much kinder.”
“I can’t call back the sound of his voice. But his presence, yes his presence was always kind.”
“I didn’t feel safe in my house.”
“It was so solid, though. Wasn’t it built in the eighteenth century? A stone house in a town where nearly all the houses were wooden. Oh, I guess there were some brick houses. But yours was stone. I thought that was so wonderful. And the fact that your father had built himself a greenhouse. I was in awe of that, and it seemed like a kind of holy place, I wanted to take my shoes off or cover my head. It seemed extraordinary to me, your father seemed the absolute perfection of the American man: a war hero, an engineer, so handsome and tall, and then he grew these beautiful delicate orchids.”
“Ah yes, my father and his orchids,” she says with a bitterness he doesn’t recognize in her. But he hears there is something else in the tone, something else besides bitterness, only he can’t identify it.
She feels the effort at keeping back the pleasant memories of herself and her father in the greenhouse, the unclear light, the overheated air, and in the unclarity the brilliant flowers, so that it was an atmosphere of mistiness and certainty, a dream of peace. But she doesn’t want to complicate her bitterness; she has determined she will shut her heart to her father’s virtues; to allow them in would be to betray her brother, which s
he will not do.
“When I was in that greenhouse, I always thought there was no need to worry about certain things,” he says.
“When you say ‘certain things,’ what you mean is money.”
“Well, maybe that was part of it. I think it was more a certain kind of display that I worried might be excessive. Too much loud laughing. Too much food. Too much gratitude. Too many angry words and then too many apologies.”
“My mother was both too grateful and too apologetic,” Miranda says. “My father: neither. Not at all.”
“And my mother was not apologetic. Nor was my father. I think it was the grandparents. Every Sunday. Grateful and apologetic. And my father, somehow ashamed in front of them, as if he’d had too much good fortune. Not ever taking credit for how hard he’d worked for whatever he’d got. Which made me grateful and apologetic: I was always aware of how hard he had to work to pay for my lessons. And so that I wouldn’t have to work so hard. I think he was always afraid that the good fortune of my mother in his life would be somehow snatched away. Which in the end it was.”
