by Mary Gordon
“I’m feeling a little guilty that I haven’t given Bernini’s archenemy a chance.”
“I didn’t know he had one.”
“Borromini,” he says. “He kept losing commissions to Bernini … Bernini was charismatic and he was dour, a Northerner, a Swiss, and his aesthetic was demanding and austere, I thought perhaps the plainness might appeal to you.”
“Yes, sometimes all the ornamentation is overwhelming.”
They walk up a steep hill to the Street of the Four Fountains. She’s worried that the steepness might be a strain on his heart. She thinks she’s walking slowly, at a pace that won’t cause him strain, but she keeps stealing glances to make sure his color is all right.
At the top of the hill, she’s surprised that there actually are four fountains, one on each corner, each representing a lounging neoclassical goddess, filthy, moss covered, good-naturedly presiding at the top of the frenetic traffic-clotted street.
The entrance to the church is unremarkable: she hardly takes it in. But once inside, she is flooded with whiteness. Above her head, a dome that is a honeycomb of pure white circles, interrupted by crosses, not a hint of ornament. The arches are like waves of snow: they alternate, concave, convex.
She closes her eyes, opens them, allows herself to be carried by the alternating waves.
“I thought you’d like this,” he said.
“I like it very much.”
They make their way to the cloister. She’s struck by its emptiness. Not a possibility here of bush or flower: white stone, gray paving, black plain ironwork providing a canopy for the well which one could only imagine had always been and would always be empty. Her heels strike sharp on the gray stone; the sound flies, unencumbered, through the deliberate, neutral air. Her eyes travel upward to the windows—perfect ovals: plain, transparent glass recessed into the wall whose whiteness seems, though she’s been told this is impossible, pure white, without a trace of color.
“I’d like to look at the dome again,” she says, “and the wavy arches.”
The chapel is entirely empty. Pleased at the emptiness they take a seat at what they have determined, without speaking, is the exact center.
She opens her eyes. Closes them. Opens them and looks at what he understands is nothing he can see.
“Do you pray?” he asks, embarrassed, as if he has asked her to confess indecency.
“I have,” she says, “converted to Judaism. Still, I can’t say I’ve become a Jew. Or I’m a Jew. Or I am Jewish. It’s a strange thing. I don’t quite believe you can claim to be a Jew if you weren’t born one.”
“Did you do it for your sons?”
“You know me well. Of course I couldn’t stand to be at the margin of one of their important moments. So before they were bar mitzvahed, I began to study. But it wasn’t just that. I wanted a larger life. I wanted to be saying words people had said for thousands of years. I chose Judaism, yes, because of my sons, but because a Jew doesn’t have to believe in anything particular. We just have to behave in a way that … oh, I don’t know … that does the world good. I guess I like the sense of endless responsibility without the promise of reward.”
“You haven’t answered me. Do you pray?”
“In a very special sense. I don’t pray to anyone. I don’t want a face. I like the Jewish interdiction against making an image for God. I want to be able to say certain words: words that conform to certain categories. ‘Praise.’ ‘Lament.’ And you, Adam? Does Rome make you feel more a Catholic?”
“No, less. I don’t have it, the ear for faith, the way some people have no ear for music. I feel it doesn’t fit me; I’ve seen people whom it does fit. My father, when he died I found he had a lot of books on mysticism, and in the end, when he retired, he went to Mass every day. You remember my mother stopped going to church when the pope declared birth control illegal. Of course she was Italian enough to go on Christmas and Easter. And Ash Wednesday and Palm Sunday. But when we came to Rome she’d go into the churches and look in the back for anticontraception propaganda and pick it up and take it outside and throw it away. My father was mortified, but, I think, also secretly pleased. She would rail about the gold and the marble in the church, and carry on about the starving poor. Oh, where have I heard that,” he says, patting her on the head.
She sticks her tongue out at him. But she’s delighted that her scruples were shared by Rose, her beloved ghost.
“My father and I would visit the churches and let her walk the streets, talking to people, drinking her endless espressi. I would watch my father pray and think: My father is a good man. My father has the ear for goodness. And I knew that I did not.”
What he doesn’t tell her: how Beverly, in her last madness, became obsessed with a vision of the Holy Ghost and the saints, obsessed with Messiaen, convincing herself she was his unacknowledged daughter, making Adam’s father take her to Lourdes (he never told Adam a thing about it, only that he thought Beverly had a hard time). She kept hoping Adam’s father would join her in her mad vision; she wanted him to go with her to Latin Masses at an ultratraditionalist church, but he wouldn’t. Adam found it all sickening and frightening. And the thought of prayer, after that, sickened and frightened him.
“If there is a God,” he says, “it is the God of music. If there’s a life after death, it will be, I think, some kind of music.”
“I think it will be nothing or I will be with everyone I love.”
The door bangs open and a tall muscular man, cameras dripping from his neck like heavy vines, walks up and down, around and around, snapping pictures.
“Aren’t you not supposed to do that?” Miranda says. “This is where I’d like a police state.”
The man is flipping open several guidebooks, handing them to his companion, a slender, languid, unfresh-looking bottle brunette, whose long thin feet look tired in their platform espadrilles. He keeps telling her to look at things, pointing to pages in the books, pointing to the dome, the arches, the stones on the floor. She sits down and puts on her sunglasses. He leaves her, and they can hear his boots clomping on the stones of the cloister next door; they hear the swish swish of his camera lens.
His companion sits with her eyes closed. She has taken off her sunglasses.
He comes back into the chapel, nearly pulling her into the cloister, insisting that they make their way downstairs to the crypt.
“Tell me their story,” Adam says.
“Oh, that’s easy,” says Miranda. “He’s a professor of entomology at Tübingen. He met her on an expedition studying beetles in Latvia. He got drunk one night and let his colleagues take him to a brothel. She had the bad luck to draw him. He woke up beside her, in love, and said he would marry her and bring her to Germany. Of course she took him up on it, as she’d been sold into sexual slavery in the brothel as a twelve-year-old. But now, she’s thinking of going back to the brothel; she thinks it might be preferable to his endless enthusiasm, his endless attempts to educate her. It will break his heart, but in the end, he’ll find a graduate student to console him.”
They hear the man shouting in German words that Miranda thinks mean “marvelous” or “a marvel.” The woman says nothing.
“I hate to leave this place to them,” Miranda says. “I’d like to protect it from them.”
“I’m sure it’s been through worse. Though poor Borromini did kill himself here. Not right in this place, but here in Rome.”
“Maybe it was types like this guy who drove him to it.”
Immediately she is horrified at herself. What has she just said? It’s not a good idea to make jokes about suicide to the husband of a suicide.
She doesn’t know if he’s pretending that he hadn’t heard, but he says nothing, leans his head back, opens and closes his eyes.
“A dream of whiteness,” he says.
“Yes,” she says, swallowing her embarrassment. “Yes, a lovely dream.”
Friday, October 26
THE ENGLISH CEMETERY
“Writ in Wa
ter”
“I’d like to take you to the Protestant cemetery,” he says. “I have such sympathy for those nineteenth-century northerners. Down on their luck. Out of their element. Living here on nothing, going to the Anglican church on Sundays, with their headaches and their grand palazzi full of moth-eaten furniture, freezing all the time, knowing they should feel grateful, in love with the place but pining all the time for home.”
They cross a terrifying street surrounding the Piramide and walk along the Aurelian Walls. Ornately decorated brass wreaths celebrate the partisans who died fighting the German invaders.
“This is how the Italians live with their past,” Adam says. “It wasn’t them. It was never them. They never elected Mussolini. Everything bad that happened was someone else’s fault. The Germans. One of the rare human things is to tell the truth about the past.”
“Or even to know it,” she says. She is thinking of her infidelity with Toby Winthrop. It happened more than forty years ago. Adam never found out, because she kept it from him. She kept it in the dark. She allowed him to think the only infidelity was his. She would like to say, I too am guilty of lying, by omission. But she lacks the courage.
They pay to enter the Protestant cemetery. “I feel like the temperature’s dropped ten degrees here,” she says. “It’s so un-Italian.” They make their way, like everybody else, to John Keats’s grave. They bend to read the words carved into the stone:
This Grave contains all that was Mortal, of a Young English Poet, Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart, at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.
“Well, he really got it wrong,” Miranda says. “It’s a good thing to remember. None of us, really, has any idea of what we’ll leave behind. But look, Adam, it also says he wanted this written because of his enemies. So he died bitter because of bad reviews. That seems a kind of waste. And maybe it’s not so bad, something writ on water. At least the words were written somewhere. Which means they were thought. Does it matter so much that things should last? And for how long? And for whom?”
“It matters to me. I don’t want the music of Bach and Beethoven to be just washed away. And sometimes I think I’m just building sandcastles, or tending them, hoping they won’t be obliterated by the inevitable wave.”
When Adam talks this way, Miranda yearns for Yonatan, who does not fear the future. Who very rarely allows himself to mourn the past. Except at those times when the wave of what has been lost knocks him over. He thinks about his brother, killed in the ’67 War. He retreats into the bedroom, closes the blinds, turns out the lights. She does not go near him. She has learned that, after a certain number of hours, he’ll come out of the dark room. Finished with something, ready to go on. She’d like to shake Adam by the shoulders and say, If Yonatan, seeing what he has seen, living through what he has lived through, can be hopeful, why can’t you? She won’t do this, but she won’t continue what she considers a useless, a debilitating conversation.
“Look at this,” she says, pointing to a poem carved into the wall near Keats’s grave.
K-eats! if thy cherished name be “writ in water”
E-ach drop has fallen from some mourner’s cheek;
A-sacred tribute; such as heroes seek,
T-hough oft in vain—for dazzling deeds of slaughter
S-leep on! Not honoured less for Epitaph so meek!
“I never noticed that before,” he says.
“I wonder who wrote it?” she says.
“Let’s ask the man selling the books and postcards.”
A young man is sitting beside a computer, making stacks of postcards and bookmarks. Adam asks him who wrote the acrostic poem. “Non so,” he says, and turns to his computer. The computer does not yield the information. He asks his older colleague. Miranda thinks he must be nearly seventy in an impeccably cut gray suit, his silvery hair just the right combination, Miranda thinks, of straightness and wave.
“Hemingway,” the man says.
Miranda hears the name Hemingway and is outraged. “You must tell him that is impossible. Hemingway could not possibly have written that poem.”
“I will tell him, Miranda, but it won’t do any good. Italians feel that if they don’t know something and tell you so you will be disappointed. And he doesn’t want to disappoint you. He knows Hemingway was an English writer, so he tells you Hemingway wrote the poem.”
“But he must stop giving out that kind of misinformation,” Miranda says, really irate now.
“He probably won’t,” Adam says. He tells the man that he is sure Hemingway didn’t write that poem. The man looks at him regretfully, shakes his head, opens his hands in a gesture meant, Miranda guesses, to indicate helplessness.
As they leave, they pick up a single Xeroxed page headed “Guardians of the Departed.” It is a request for funds from an organization that cares for the cats who make their home in the cemetery. Miranda reads aloud: “ ‘Shielded from the outside commotion, the cats are safe from harm here. The green tangle of vegetation creates a secure haven for these little friends of the departed. As territorial animals, each cat has his adopted turf, overseen with pride. These feline guardians provide loyal companionship to the deceased, giving at the same time life and vitality to their resting place.’ ”
“I can’t bear thinking of these English spinsters devoting their lives to the cats. I much prefer the plates of spaghetti left randomly for the cats around the Forum, with no notion that they are ‘little friends of the departed,’ ” Miranda says.
“Perhaps it gives the English ladies a sense of meaning and purpose.”
“Well, Adam, that’s truly grim. Let’s get away from all this gentility and take a walk on the rough Roman streets. Maybe we will be lucky and someone with a switchblade will demand our wallets.”
“Let me show you this,” he says. “This hill is made of the shards of old amphorae. The port was here and after people had used the oil from their amphorae, they didn’t know what to do with them, so they just broke them up and made a hill of shards.”
“I wonder if Keats knew about this,” she says. “I wonder if it depressed him that this is what lasted. All those broken things no one wanted.”
They stop for a coffee. On a wall that must, she thinks, be ancient, a young man and a young woman are affixing political posters. For a few minutes, the young man makes desultory efforts with a brush and a pot of paste. Then he puts down his pot and brush and waves his arms around, giving animated directions to the young woman, who works faster now, attaching to the stone the bright-colored posters: a middle-aged man with a lot of teeth, representing a party Miranda has never heard of.
Adam sees she’s entirely absorbed in the comedy across the road. She isn’t thinking of Keats or Bach or Beethoven or the English spinsters. She puts her head in her hands. He doesn’t understand why she is weeping. Then he sees, she isn’t weeping, she’s laughing. She takes her hands away from her face, throws her head back; her whole body is taken over with her laughter.
“Hemingway,” she says, hardly able to catch her breath. “Hemingway.”
“Down, girl,” he says, reaching across the table, pretending to take her pulse. “You’re going to have a heart attack.” He is a little alarmed at her hilarity; he remembers now that he was always a little frightened when she laughed like this. Perhaps because this kind of laughter took her somewhere else, somewhere far away from him.
“Well, so maybe I’ll die laughing. That wouldn’t be so bad.”
“Not on my watch, please,” he says. And he is struck, as he is more and more lately, with the simple fact. At some point we will not be here. On this earth. At some point, Miranda and he will be … where. Not here. He takes her hand and kisses it, and they are both embarrassed, so he drops it quickly, and calls the waiter for the check.
What will I remember of this day? she wonders. Will it be Keats’s grave, or the Hemingway m
isinformation, or the cat ladies, or the couple and their posters across the street. Or his taking my hand and kissing it. Or my embarrassment. When I recall this day and start the sentence “That was the day when …” I wonder how the sentence will end. And how will it end for him?
Saturday, October 27
SANTA SABINA
“Why Is It There Are Some Things We Aren’t Meant to See?”
“How about a picnic?” Adam says. “It’s a wonderful day, and I’d like to take you to a place I love, orange trees and Rome in front of you, all laid out. We can buy food in a market where the locals shop … you don’t hear a word of English or German or French, just people shouting insults and giving in or not giving in.”
They met at the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. He runs up to her, takes her hands and spins her around three times.
“I called Valerie last night, to see if she wanted to join us for the picnic. She seemed really overwhelmed, incredibly apologetic that she hadn’t been in touch. She was just on her way out the door. Apparently her mother-in-law is going to some spa in Switzerland, and they need to be there with her for three weeks. She said she’ll be in touch with you about the details of your leaving. She’s sending her cleaning woman to pick up the key, you’re not to worry about anything, but she’ll phone from Switzerland.”
“I have to change my entire understanding of the universe. I now believe there is a loving God who cares about my personal well-being!”
“Maybe that’s not it at all,” he says. “Maybe she didn’t want to see us either.”
“Why wouldn’t she want to see us?” Miranda asks, genuinely puzzled.
It occurs to Adam that Miranda finds it difficult to understand that anyone wouldn’t want to be in her company. He remembers a conversation; they were still in high school. She was talking to one of her friends about another girl, whom she intensely disliked. “She’s so conceited, she’s really dumb, she’s a total brownnose,” Miranda had said.
