The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [16]
“Well, she was Roman. I guess that’s why I’m happy here.”
“The mother country.”
“Have you been in Rome since …” He doesn’t want to say, since the time we were here together. He says instead, “Since 1969?”
“No, I’ve only been to Europe for conferences since then. And not here. Paris, Berlin, London, but not here. Not Rome. As a family we traveled in the West. Hiking and camping trips. My boys liked that. I had a horror of trooping them through churches and museums. And if we went abroad it was to visit my husband’s family in Israel.”
Her husband is a Jew, he thinks. Are her children? Can they be Jews if she is not: the maternal line being the important one.
“I know the city very well,” he says. “I still have family here. There are things I’d like to show you. Things we didn’t see when we were here. Things you wouldn’t think to see when young, or living poor, as we were then, or thought we were, although of course compared to those living quite near us, it was a joke. And we were working hard here, both of us, and there were all those terribly long dinners at my cousins’.” He doesn’t say, And in the hours when we might have been sightseeing, we were making love, but they both understand this.
“There’s a lot of Rome you haven’t seen,” he adds. “Well, of course there’s always a lot no one has seen, but I want to propose something to you.”
The last time you proposed something, she wants to say, we were sixteen years old and what you proposed was marriage.
“What?”
“I suppose it’s a favor to me, and of course I understand I’m the last person in the world to whom you owe a favor. But walking with you, talking with you, well, we can have conversations unlike any others. The last time I saw you I was a young man. Now, well, I’m not an old man, but today a young woman got up to give me a seat on the bus. And I took it. You’re here for three weeks. If we could meet to walk, and I could show you the city, my mother’s city, the city I love most, and we could talk a little every day … well, I think it might be wonderful.”
What, she wonders, is at stake in his offer? What has she got to lose? She has three weeks in Rome, she has paid an exorbitant amount for the apartment, and it’s a city where there is no one she knows, except for Valerie, whom she has no wish to see. She had thought her sightseeing would be solitary or in the company of some colleague as unlearned as herself.
And if she agrees, what will she be giving up? Her position as a victim. The pleasure, like a sharp taste in the mouth, like the taste of vinegar, ginger, arugula, the darkest chocolate: the deep satisfaction of a cherished bitterness. He would like her forgiveness. Well, she wants to say, it’s too late. Because the truth is: forgiveness is irrelevant now because the pain he caused her is long gone and, painless, forgiveness is not difficult, therefore perhaps not worth much. But, then, if it is painless, why not give it? And there is that thing for which she needs forgiveness, the thing he doesn’t even know.
Most probably, it is a very bad idea. She doesn’t even know exactly what it is to which she is agreeing.
But she does agree. Partly because she is more off balance than she imagined she would be, more at sea. Yonatan, having lived many places, spoken many languages, never feels a stranger; she has depended on him to root her in a new place. When she’d thought of being alone here she’d considered it a luxury, one she’d been promising herself since the children were old enough not to need her.
Having felt at home in India, in Pakistan, in Bangladesh, she hadn’t imagined that in Rome she would feel overwhelmed by strangeness. But in those other places, she’d had a job; she was doing something that was of use, something she knew how to do. In a strange culture without work, she’d come to realize, you are a child. She doesn’t consider going to meetings at a conference real work. Talking and listening to people, foreigners themselves, in a hotel that could be anywhere on earth: it isn’t