The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [115]
Taking her hand, he nearly pulls her along, and in the pressure on her wrist she hears, Not this, not that, don’t stop don’t look at that, it isn’t what we’re here for.
She is swept past rooms painted from floor to ceiling with the story of the Roman victory over the Etruscans. As they pass through the room devoted to the statue of the she wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, he tightens his grip, annoyed at the knot of schoolchildren and their earnest teacher who explains the origins of the city of their birth.
“Just here,” he says, a moment after. They stop before a marble head. Bernini’s Medusa.
He drops her hand and moves apart from her. She is uneasy being even this close to him. She feels like an intruder.
Her eye falls on the statue’s parted lips. Open—in anguish, or exhaustion? The blank eyes finished, overwhelmed. The snakes that are her hair are by contrast lively and amused. Their mouths are making hissing jokes. They are where they belong.
Miranda is afraid to say a word.
“She looks so miserable,” he says. “In the stories of the Medusa, the focus is never on her, what she might be suffering with a headful of snakes, her own horror at what becomes of people at the sight of her, at the sight of what she can’t help but be. I look at the snakes now as a kind of excess of vitality. Too much life for her, and there’s not a thing she can do about it. So I stand here and say to Beverly: I’m sorry. I feared you. I resented you. I couldn’t love you. I was turned to stone.”
She knows that what she says will not be of the slightest use, and yet she feels that she must say it.
“You know, of course, that it wasn’t your fault. It was an illness.”
She looks up at the suffering face. The face of marble. And Adam’s face, a suffering face of flesh and bone and blood. She thinks: For years that woman whose name I have not even been able to pronounce, this woman, Adam’s wife, whom I could think of only as the one for whom I was betrayed, the one who stole my hopefulness, my innocence, that woman was someone I felt free to hate. Felt free to say I hated. And so I felt free to be a person who says the words “I hate.” This woman whose death I did not mourn. Whose suicide meant nothing to me but a kind of bitter satisfaction. Grim, the satisfaction, nevertheless satisfaction is what it must be called. This woman whose suffering I would not credit, called manipulation, a thief’s sleight of hand.
And looking at the statue’s empty ruined eyes, the desperate mouth, and Adam’s posture, hands at his sides, spine rigid, she weeps as he cannot for the poor destroyed creature who brought in her wake such damage, such harm.
“You know this is Costanza, of the ruined face,” he says.
Is he expecting her to say something? Some reiteration of her earlier outrage, a rekindling of the Galleria Borghese coals? Some reassertion that all Bernini’s art was not worth one drop of her blood? She can’t bring her mind to such considerations now. She is thinking of something else. Something terrible she did. Or didn’t do. The harm inflicted on a woman dead three hundred years ago now seems, in comparison, a distant, an invisible horizon.
“I need to tell you something I should have told you long ago,” she says. “Can we go somewhere we can talk?”
“There’s a nice café here, it’s usually quiet.”
They pass the original Marcus Aurelius on his horse (the one in the piazza, it turns out, is a copy: this one is kept indoors out of the weather), gentler somehow in the modern room newly designed for it. The emperor is domesticated here, made kinder by his place among the disembodied heads, each ten feet high, surrounding him. They pass Etruscans, calm, reclining on their tombs. Peaceful. Connubial.
At the end of a series of corridors, flanked by showcases they ignore, they come to the café. The room itself is full of light, and it opens onto a terrace bordered by dwarf trees in terra-cotta pots, and a balustrade upon which one can lean to see the whole of Rome.
“Shall I get two coffees?” he says.
She nods, although she doesn’t at all want a coffee.