The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [32]
Adam is waiting for her at the workman’s café he described. There are four tables outside; he asks if she’d like to sit at one of them.
“No,” she says, “I’m too nervous about running into Valerie. This is her neighborhood.”
“Oh, God,” he says. “I guess I’ve done such a good job of blocking Valerie out of my mind I hadn’t even thought of that. We must, must, get in touch with her.”
“Absolutely, we must,” Miranda says. And they giggle like naughty children, understanding that they won’t be doing it anytime soon.
• • •
They’re seated at one of a series of long tables, each covered with brown butcher paper. Only one dish is served at each meal, and your bill is calculated on the brown paper that serves as your tablecloth. When your bill is done, that part of the paper is ripped off and handed to you … and the rest of the paper is ripped and thrown away after you leave.
A few feet from where Adam stands, there is a salmon-colored wall covered by a bougainvillea, a blanket of sheer purple that makes the orange seem neutral, matte. How, she wonders, can these flowers grow so lush, and climb so high? It isn’t, after all, the tropics. They have winter here; the hints of it are in the air when she wakes in the middle of the night.
The waitresses that serve them and the others in the restaurant all seem related; their children run in and out. They are affectionate and tender to them, but to their customers, regulars and tourists alike, they are impatient, rough. A small, round-shouldered woman in English tweeds sits alone, reading a newspaper. Another—it is impossible to tell if it is a man or a woman—shares pasta with a fox terrier and takes half of it home. There is only one offering on the menu: pasta arrabbiata, and, for a second course, lentils and sausages. Come contorno they can order insalata mista or puntarelle, which Adam recommends: it’s a kind of chicory with a dressing made of oil, vinegar, and anchovies. It’s available only in the fall. They order wine and a bottle of mineral water but are given only one glass apiece. The roughness, the lack of cortesia, pleases her, as does the savory goodness of each dish she eats, the vivid flavors, spicy tomato, peppery meat and beans, bitter greens drenched in salty fish and vinegar and oil.
• • •
They walk together to the piazza. A bit overfull, her senses more fuzzy than she would like (she isn’t used to wine at lunch), she makes her way to the fountain to sit for a moment in the sun.
Her eye falls on a beggar woman, hunched almost double, her foot twisted inward. She is making mumbling, supplicating noises; she is invoking the Madonna, and calling all the women beautiful, the men generous. Miranda puts a euro in her filthy paper cup.
“You see, Adam, some things in the world have got better. It’s important not to forget that. This beggar woman. What do you see when you see her? Someone tragic, a victim, or someone pathetic, annoying, perhaps criminal, almost certainly manipulative? Whatever we see, she’s not what we want to be looking at. We want to be seeing the color of the walls, the angle of the sun on the water in the fountain. We don’t want to have to be thinking: What should be done for this woman, and who should do it? The church? The state? The family?”
“It isn’t the kind of thing I think about: what should be done with her, about her. I hope someone else is thinking about it, someone like you, maybe, who has an idea of what could be done that would be of real use.”
“I look at her and understand that she had polio. And that polio is gone from large parts of the world. And that it happened in our lifetime. Do you remember when we were little and every summer people were afraid there’d be another polio epidemic? Our parents were afraid