The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [31]
Saturday, October 13
TRASTEVERE
“Some Things in the World Have Got Better. It’s Important Not to Forget That”
They plan to meet in the Piazza di Santa Maria in Trastevere. She has no memory of it. Perhaps they never came here, or perhaps she has forgotten: it was nearly forty years ago. But no, she couldn’t have forgotten this perfect space. The joy of a perfect space makes her feel like a creature made of lightness; almost, she could fly. But why this sense of joy … because of the color of the buildings, all beautiful, crowded against one another? Peach with green shutters. Dove’s wing blue-gray, ocher. Burnt sienna. Did the names of those colors come to her mind because she encountered them first in her box of Crayola crayons? The box she had to be old enough to deserve: a reward, a sign of growth, maturity, responsibility perhaps, even expertise. In those days, just seeing the words—“ocher,” “raw umber,” “burnt sienna”—was exciting. Not knowing why, she knew the words naming those crayons promised a larger life. In that large box was one crayon whose name was “flesh.” The assumption: all flesh is the color of pinkish chalk. She wonders if the Crayola people have become sensitive enough to have some different name for that crayon now. Maybe “chalky peach.” In the center of the piazza is a fountain around which tourists sit: disconsolate, regretful. Do they just, she wonders, want to be back home? The water sings, how can it not enliven them. But they are not enlivened. They are fagged out, spent.
She thinks at first that there are six frogs surrounding the fountain’s jets of water, but then she sees that they aren’t animals at all, only playful shapes, and that is what the fountain demands: an understanding of this place of playfulness. Which the glum tourists seem incapable of even beginning to understand. Beside them, young people smoke and flirt. With a hardly concealed urgency what seems like a small army of dark-skinned men are trying to sell electrified toys: mice, cats, dogs, frogs, or neon-colored circles of plastic tubing that make a whistling sound when they are swung, like a lariat, overhead. The church, with its gilded apse and mosaic saints who look down on the foolishness or beauty of the people who will soon be gone—as they are gone from life, but here now, in some way, taking part in something, stone that is, or some more permanent kind of life—these saints seem far beyond abashment. Nothing can shock them, she thinks, nothing can disappoint. Their inapproachability comes to her as potent reassurance. She does not know of what.
She sees that the square is the home for another kind of life, more habitual, more domestic. There are people who come here every day; it is their work to be here; they are homeless, and they sit or squat; they beg in a sluggish, aimless, almost offhand way, and their dogs, flea bitten, interested only in their masters, sniff the cobblestones, forage for the leftovers of the careless tourists, close their eyes ecstatically against the noonday sun. Established in a corner of the square, sitting on a camp stool, a woman with wild hair, ripped stockings, ruined shoes, is concentrating avidly on a piece of needlepoint. Miranda looks to see if there is a cup at her feet, if she is some specialized form of beggar. But she doesn’t seem to want anything from the others in the square. It is simply where she is, where she always is.
And walking in and out, chattering, seeing nothing but the place they need to be next, matrons with string bags make their way down the side streets. Some of them have settled down for a late morning coffee; two, perfectly but unfashionably coiffed, cut, with a fine precision, a cornetto into identical halves.
She turns up a little street, passes an ancient-looking stone building that is in fact a garage. The men inside it are wearing greasy overalls with their names stitched on the pockets. GUIDO, the names say, GIANNI, but they could as easily say BILL or RICK. The smell of oil