The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [20]
“I suppose if you look at it like that, it’s amusing.”
“But you don’t want to be amused.”
“No, it disturbs me. I think it’s a mess. Some historians say the statue’s a mess because the funds were cut at the last minute, or because the sculptor was rushed. That it wasn’t his fault. But I think it was his fault, because he allowed something to be presented that should not have been presented. People said he was trying to be Michelangelo, which he had no right even to consider, because he was nothing but a hack. The statue became a laughingstock. He killed himself from shame.”
“What a terrible thing,” Miranda says. “It’s understandable, but that doesn’t make it less terrible. You want to grab him by the shoulders and say, ‘It’s not worth your life.’ ”
“What is, then, worth a life?”
“Nothing.”
“I won’t accept that. Then we’re only animals, living to survive.”
“I can see giving up your own life to save the life of another person, certainly your own child. But for a statue, an unliving thing. No.”
“I’m not sure. Isn’t it possible to no longer want to live because your work is a failure? If you’ve lived for your work, which is not, I think, the worst thing to live for. In our fantasies about the artist’s life we never include the reality that most art that is made is a failure. We believe that it’s important to leave a mark, but it doesn’t occur to us that it might be a bad mark, undistinguished or corrupt, a mark that would be better unleft. There’s no need even for mediocre art, to say nothing of bad art. Whereas in your field to be adequate is OK; it’s better to do an adequate job than to leave the job completely undone.”
“You know nothing about what I do,” she says, wondering when he became so rigid, so punitive. Should she take the time to educate him, or allow this to be one more thing she holds against him, one more grievance she can keep, like a stone inside her shoe.
“Mediocre work of the kind I do, of the kind people like me do, could lead to sickness and death. Real death, not just an unfortunate aesthetic moment. Nevertheless, I repeat what I said: a failure of proportion in stone is not something that should lead to death.”
She knows he hasn’t heard her. Or has chosen not to. Because she understands that he’s not really talking about the statue of Moses, about Michelangelo and the Renaissance popes and the suicidal sculptor. He’s talking about himself. He’s describing his life out loud. He wants her to know something: that he has given something up. But does he want her to know it, or does he want to know it himself? She doesn’t know whom his words are meant for. But she understands the sorrow behind the words, and like the sharp rattle of the lifting shutters, indicating morning on the Roman streets, some signal has been heard. Something has lifted in her, something has opened up.
“But what is it,” he says, to her, to someone else, she thinks, to no one, “this impulse to make a mark?”
He wants her to talk about this with him; he wants her to say something about his life. That it is all right, the way that he has lived it. Something has lifted, but not entirely. To give him what he wants, that understanding, would require a giving over of an old grievance. And she isn’t ready for that yet.
He takes her into Santa Maria della Vittoria, a church that in its overembellishment does not please her. Gold and marble: the materials of wealth and power. Everything she has devoted her life to being against. Why would he think this is something she would like? But then, why would he know what she would like? They haven’t seen each other for nearly forty years.
He leads her to the front left side, to Bernini’s Saint Teresa. “Is this not worth it?” he asks.
“Worth what?”
“A life.”
“It’s not a question I have to consider. Which is why I live as I do.”
He sees that she’s unmoved. He is angry with himself: he knows this isn’t the kind of thing she likes. Her taste always retained something of the American Puritan: she liked bare hills, slate skies, pastures fenced