by Mary Gordon
“But you, for example, kept in regular touch with Valerie all these years. I never answered her cards. I think I sent her birth announcements and changes of address and, well, when she came to the Bay Area I think I saw her, maybe once or twice in twenty years. But you, I know, kept writing. I only phoned her because I read in the Wellesley alumnae magazine that she had the business renting out apartments in Rome.”
“My friends are of long standing. But sometimes, we don’t see each other for many months, sometimes years. And I suppose, like you, I’m not that interested in making new ones. The people we see, well, we see them because of Clare.”
“I don’t think I want new friends and then I meet someone and I fall in love with them. I long to know them. I feel my life will be impoverished unless I get to know them. Like this German woman I met at the conference. She’s trying to set up mental health facilities in the former East Germany, which is much poorer than West. Her kids are just my kids’ age, though they’re girls, so of course we’ve planned marriages between our children and she was just so interesting. I wanted to order everything she ordered for dinner, and I admired her scarf, so she gave it to me. It turns out we wear the same scent. I know we’ll be friends now.”
“But you have too many friends, you said.”
“I do, but this woman, well, she’s wonderful, I’ll learn so much from her.”
“So it will be an educational experience.”
“Yes, like my trip to Rome.”
“No holidays for you!”
“Of course not, Adam. Don’t you remember: I’m a very serious person.”
“So I can’t buy you a gelato here.”
“Yes, maybe you can … that will be an intellectual exercise. To train my powers of discrimination. And increase my vocabulary. Martillo: what’s that, blackberry? You see, I’m learning something. And choosing something completely new.”
“A brave woman you are, Miranda.”
“Yes, a woman of discernment. And what will you order?”
“Strawberry,” he says. “Fragola.”
“Strawberry. That’s all you ever ordered. Here where you could get all these flavors you couldn’t get at home, why ever would you stick to strawberry?”
“Because I like it,” he says.
She punches him lightly on the upper arm. She feels herself leaning into him, and she hears the false note in her voice, in both their voices. She recognizes it: they’re flirting. But she and Adam? Flirting? No. This is wrong. Flirtation. Adam. No, the two words inhabit different universes. He was the love of her youth. There was no flirtation. They loved each other. Simply and directly they acknowledged their love. Simply and directly, they pledged themselves. And then unpledged. Flirtation, no. She tries to breathe more slowly. She tries to stop the vision she has of them walking somewhere. She cannot stop herself from seeing them walking together in a high, dim place she’s never been, a place that could be taken from a dream. Her own or someone else’s.
Tuesday, October 23
THE VILLA BORGHESE
“Vitae Laudae”
Down a path called the Via del Orangerie, they come upon three stone figures: Satyr father, mother, child.
“What a strange statue that is. Or is it a fountain?” Miranda asks.
“A fountain, I think, though not in working condition. That’s a little sad. This is where I feel the failure of my education. I have no idea who these figures are. Those great travelers, those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Englishmen buried in the Protestant cemetery, they’d know who these people are in a minute.”
“Let’s try to read the inscription. I’ll try to make it out using my pitiful Latin, which you didn’t have to take because you were given a course release to practice.”
“Well, I’m paying for it now.”
“Not at all. I’ve forgotten ninety-eight percent of any Latin I ever knew. I’ll try to pick out these few words. Of course, I don’t know the cases. It’s something about life and praise. Maybe that’s it: ‘Praise life.’ ”
“What kind of life are they praising?” Adam asks, in what she recognizes as his jokey tone. “The father’s a satyr, that tail can’t mean anything good for family stability. And those hairy arms holding all those grapes. The mother has very well-developed calf muscles. She probably supports the family treading grapes.”
“But look at the child. He’s sitting, happy as he can be, clutching grapes, too. Is he a baby drunk? But look at how comfortable he is. They’ve joined hands and made a bench, or a platform for him, of their arms. Perhaps they’re dancing. Just look at this child. He’s perfectly secure. Perfectly stable. A well-adjusted little boy.”
“What if they turn too fast or let go of each other’s hands or drop him?”
“It’s what we think, isn’t it, that pleasure-loving parents will produce monsters. Babies dead in their cradles or splattered on the sidewalk in front of some seedy bar,” Miranda says.
“Vitae laudae. Who could praise life when it’s so full of horror?”
“They obviously don’t think so. We’re the ones who are afraid. I remember on holidays when my cousins got together and my cousin John and I, whom I always loved, whose company has always been a sheer pleasure to me …”
“I liked your cousin John so much. What happened to him?”
“He did very well. Made a fortune in the dot-com bubble, whatever that is. Lives with an ex-priest in the Napa Valley. They have a vineyard.”
“Why were you talking about John?”
“Well, on family holidays John and I would sit together and laugh and laugh and my mother would start to get nervous, and John’s mother, who was really as mean as a snake, would separate us. She would say of our laughter, ‘This will end in tears, mark my words.’ Just this year, John said to me: ‘It was the first time I thought: Maybe grown-ups don’t always know what they’re talking about. Why do they think laughter will end in tears? Maybe it will end in laughter?’ ”
“What if the satyr parents dance with their baby and then go home for a nice meal and put him to bed and then get into bed themselves and make love and fall happily into a healthy sleep?”
“And the kid gets two eight hundreds on his SATs and gets a scholarship to Harvard.”
“There’s something in us that doesn’t want it to turn out that way,” Adam says.
“What I most fear as a parent and a human being is that disaster will occur and I’ll be called upon to do something heroic and I will fail.”
“Once I was with my son in New York and we were surrounded by a group of boys and they demanded my wallet. I just gave it to them. They took it and ran off and my son ran after them. He was only twelve. I stood there, frozen. He couldn’t catch up with them, thank God, but he came back, defeated and despising me. And I despised myself. He said, ‘I had to do something. You didn’t even try.’ ”
She feels a little thrill of alarm. A son. That’s right: he had a son. His child by Beverly. It’s the first time he has mentioned him. She guesses that his history has not been happy. Of all fates, she has always believed the worst is to feel that you have failed your child. Even though she has no evidence to support her, she feels she must reassure him, because you must always reassure parents that whatever they did, it was the best, at that moment, they could have done.
“You were right to do as you did,” she says.
“It was the beginning of my son’s conviction that he couldn’t depend on me. He was, in a way, right. I can’t defend myself or anyone. I have never been in a fight. Never. When I was young I had to be careful of my hands. Suppose people I loved died because I couldn’t use my hands to save them. My precious hands. Musicians’ precious hands.”
She thinks of Yonatan, who fought in the ’67 War. The thought makes her want to protect Adam.
“But, you see, that hasn’t happened.”
“Vitae laudae.”
“Something like that.”
“Will you tell your cousin John I ask
ed for him? And tell him that I hope he’s right.”
“Right?”
“That it won’t end in tears.”
Wednesday, October 24
THE PANTHEON
“The Smell of Drains”
She is, she tells him, feeling guilty about avoiding the great classical sites. The Colosseum. The Forum.
“I never know what I’m supposed to be looking at and looking for,” she says. “I always feel I’m pretending to be seeing something I don’t see, something that I’m sure isn’t there and other people seem to believe is there. To know is there. I go into a kind of trance. I pretend I’m seeing things I don’t see. And I end up saying things like ‘Oh, yes, the scale is massive.’ And then I want to leave. Also I keep expecting Victor Mature to be appearing from behind a column. There’s a part of me that doesn’t believe it’s real, that it was just made up for some heroic scene in a movie I wouldn’t dream of going to anymore.”
“Well, what we’ll do is look at the Pantheon. But only from the outside, the inside’s been destroyed, turned into a Christian church. And we’ll go at night, when the massiveness isn’t somehow quite so threatening.”
“They insisted on the massive, didn’t they? They had no ambivalence about the desirability of power.”
“None, absolutely none. Not being an imperial Roman, I wonder if I might just suggest that I take you to dinner. There’s a restaurant by the Pantheon that has wonderful pasta con vongole. That is, if you eat clams.”
“I do, actually, eat clams. Maybe that’s not the most consistent thing in the world, but clams are something that I eat.”
It’s the first time they’ve met after dark and the first time he has treated her. She feels a little ripple of unease. Is this breaking the rules, or bending them? She makes sure that she calls Yonatan before she leaves; she has told him about Adam; she mentions that they’ll be having spaghetti with clams.
“I envy you,” he says. “I sometimes wonder if my passion for shellfish is a kind of compensation for their rejection by generations of my ancestors.”
They meet at eight by the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva: Bernini’s saddled elephant.
“It’s such a funny presence here, this elephant, as if someone had set up a petting zoo down the road from the Pentagon,” she muses.
“At one time it was known as Porcino, ‘little piggy,’ then it was called Pulcino, which means ‘little chick,’ people don’t know whether it was called that because it was short or because the church belonged to the Dominicans and one of their major charities was to help young women needing dowries; apparently they made a procession here in the courtyard every year. By the way, right here to your left, this building was the headquarters of the Inquisition, where Galileo was tried.”
“So how do I understand this place: the little pig, the little chick, and the murderous Inquisition.”
“I have no idea. I never try. I just try to take it in, as if I were some kind of creature without a mind, one of those flies whose eyes are disproportionately large in relation to its body. A creature who doesn’t have a brain at all. Just an eye, a skin. A sense of smell.”
The restaurant is between Piazza Minerva and the Pantheon. The evening is unseasonably warm; she’s wearing a sleeveless silk shirt, lemon-colored, which she covers with a pumpkin-colored scarf she’d bought just that day. The conference is over; her friends have gone home. She knows that it’s something she won’t do with Adam, shopping, so she spent her day buying gifts for Yonatan and the boys. For him: a white straw Borsalino; for the boys, who seem to have no interest in clothes, cotton sweaters: two apiece, in shades of blue whose subtle difference one from the other they would never take into account. Having thought of her husband and her sons, she felt free to indulge herself; agonizing over the scarves—pumpkin or turquoise—she knew she should not choose both. In the end, the pumpkin won, though all day long she mourned the turquoise, lost for good.
It is warm enough for them to eat outside, although she sees that the regulars make their way into their customary inner tables, and although she enjoys the last of October’s warmth, she’d prefer that they were inside, away from the tourists, who order in English, all the wrong things. But the waiter seems to know Adam, seems to approve of his selections, and she relaxes in the pleasure of feeling that she is perceived, not as a tourist, but as someone who belongs.
He orders an expensive bottle of wine, and she worries that it is something that he really can’t afford.
“It’s from Orvieto,” he says when it’s presented to them. “Rose’s home. I thought we’d drink to her.”
She begins to tear, and pretends to have dropped her napkin. Forgive me, Rose, she says to the beloved ghost. Somehow I always thought there’d be more time.
“OK,” she says. “Tomorrow I’m going to call Valerie. Let’s meet her for lunch, maybe Friday.”
“Yes, all right,” he says.
Their pasta arrives and, although she’s said clams are something that she eats, she eats them rarely, and she feels a bit transgressive: they taste, after all, more like meat than anything she’s had in quite a while. But she thinks of Rose, and needs to believe that Rose forgives all her transgressions, among which the eating of clams is not, by a long shot, she knows, the worst.
The food and wine have made them quiet, and they walk the hundred yards in silence. Above the Pantheon, the sky is inky, blue-black with hints of silver. Miranda leans back to look above the overwhelming roundness of the dome. Tracing the insistent curve, then contradicting it, breaking the contact between stone and sky, two birds dive and wheel. Miranda wonders if they are the same gulls whose presence always comes to her as a surprise here. The lights meant to illumine the dark stone turn the birds’ wings metallic. The first birds, the irritable gulls, are followed by smaller birds … swifts, swallows (she had an English friend who insisted she know the difference) who quickly disappear in the night sky. What birds are these, so long after the sun has set? She can’t think of another place where birds seem so much a part of the look of the great monuments, a formal element rather than an intrusion. Not like the pigeons on Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. It’s one of the things that pleases her most about this city: the easy in and out of natural and man-made.
She is struck, suddenly, by a smell she hasn’t taken in for a long time. The smell of drains.
“Do you smell that, Adam? Just here. Now.”
“That bad smell? The drains.”
“So if we’re creatures with a sense of smell, we have to come to terms with bad smells, too. Like this one. It was everywhere when we were here before. To me, it was the smell of Europe. Suggesting a whole life more physical than I was comfortable with, really, though I would have died rather than admit it. It worried me at first because, of course, I knew it was the smell of shit. But it seemed to me that it was corrupt in the way I wanted Europe to be, in the way I wanted Europe to corrupt me. It reminded me that I had really got away from home. It was in the air; it was the air. And now, it’s gone. I wouldn’t have thought I’d regret the absence of what could only be described as a bad smell. Now I feel the loss of it is something I want to mourn.”
“I guess it’s one of the American victories: the triumph of excellent plumbing. Kind of like the Romans and their aqueducts.”
“When you smelled it you immediately thought, This is foreign. Now nothing’s really foreign.”
“When I read those old travel books I love, especially English ones, which I seem to have a particular fondness for, I come upon sentences beginning ‘The Italians.’ Just beginning a sentence with those words showed how much of a gap they felt between themselves and the people they were writing about. But now, those kinds of generalizations aren’t true, and to use them is only an affectation. MTV, the Internet, Italian kids listening to rap music: we’re not strange to one another. Not strangers. And yet we don’t really know each other. I still worry about presuming too much, carelessly giving offense.
”
“It’s hard to know in what ways we’ve become the same and in what ways we’re different when we all look the same.”
“When we were young, Italians looked different from Germans, you could tell the Spanish from the French. Now everyone’s wearing baseball caps backward. Except the girls: they’re wearing baseball caps the right way round.”
“When we were here in ’69, there were nuns and priests everywhere; you were always nervous bumping into them, young men in long skirts walking unlike any young men I’d ever known, kind of like they were on roller skates, and the nuns, women almost entirely invisible, always in black, always in pairs. All of them, you felt, making sure you weren’t going into one of the churches in a sleeveless minidress.”
“The churches are empty now. The cafés are smoke free. Italians jog and have salad as a first course. It’s no longer chic to be a Communist; it’s only now for ill-dressed fringe types.”
“I very much dislike nostalgia,” Miranda says. “I fear it. But the smell of drains … why do I want to weep because of it? I wonder what, some years from now, we’ll mourn the loss of. Something that we now think of as an irritation. Even a curse.”
“I think before we have the chance for that we’ll be taking our place among the dead.”
The mention of the dead is shocking: they look at each other, a bit frightened.
“I want to be like one of those marble effigies on the church floors here. Arms folded over my breast. Dog curled under my feet. Stepped on by people on the way to something they’re eager to see,” she says.
“You want to be unregarded? Underfoot?”
“I think of it as supporting the passage of the living.”
“The living in their backward caps, not knowing what they’re walking on.”
Thursday, October 25
THE CHAPEL OF SAN CARLINO
“I Don’t Want a Face”
