The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [4]
Miranda need never know that.
He turns the heavy archaic key with the gold fob shaped like a pinecone. He walks down to the Via della Reginella, a narrow street between the Piazza Mattei and the Ghetto, his hands in his pockets, weighed down by the heavy key, and lets his right hand travel over its complex indentations, the overornamented fob.
He has left the flat too early. He plans a route that in its indirectness will consume the extra time. He walks half a block in the wrong direction to the Fountain of the Tortoises, four elegant flirtatious boys, flaunting their nearly childish sex, playing with their near girlishness, arranging, seductively, the unserious angles of their limbs. As a boy he was, he knows, never elegant, and never dared to be flirtatious. If it weren’t for Miranda he might never have been a boy. Only a musician. Nothing like these marble creatures offering sex as if it were a perfectly good but unimportant joke.
He turns and walks again up the street where he and his daughter live; they’ve lived there for two weeks and will for another three months. She is here to study at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia, with Lorenzo Perrotti, a master teacher of the violin. She has won a competition: coveted, worried over, prepared for with obsessive intensity and discipline. She has her chance.
The street, usually densely inhabited with work and domesticity, seems null on this Sunday afternoon. He reads the signs: the herbalist is offering consultations, free from a maharishi, assuring you that L’EQUILIBRIO E LA CHIAVE PER UN BUONA SALUTE. Next door, the furniture repairman’s shop is dark, and dark, too, is the shop he never understands, Il Museo di Libro, selling pictures from people’s family albums for five euros apiece. On the pavement outside the store is a sign, the words written, in a mishmash of French and English, in blue marker on a white plastic board, FIGURATION, EXPERIMENTALISM, ART PHOTOS, PHOTO JOURNALISM, CINEMA, MUSIC, FASHION, ARCHITECTURE, NUDES, GREAT PHOTOGRAPHERS, VINTAGE LATER PRINTS, LIFE LOST ARCHIVES, AMATEURS, ANONYMES, AND AUTRES IMAGES.
He passes through the Ghetto, signs in Hebrew, and thinks always of those taken away to their death. He passes the synagogue, its light extravagant façade, its palms and ground-glass roof suggesting a leisurely nineteenth-century urban civilization, a suggestion that must be quickly given up at the sight of patrolling policemen, armed with machine guns. He crosses the Lungotevere, never still, with never even the slightest possibility of Sabbath. He does this to get the benefits of the plane trees’ shade: so un-American, he thinks, these trees, with their wide flat leaves, yellowing now, their high limbs seeming as if they had always found their shape in relation to these bridges, streets, and buildings. The Tiber is a slow jade snake, largely untrafficked, unlike the rivers of other great cities: the Hudson, the Thames, the Seine.
He steps onto the Ponte Garibaldi. His eye is caught by a strange knot of inexplicable color. The river rushes into a man-made waterfall. A vortex. Plastic bottles, trapped, bob up and down in the whirlpool but do not progress downstream, appearing to be tied to something although he knows that they are not. They bob and sink, they sparkle, they wink; they are a clutch of throwaway jewels, delightful but unvaluable, emerald, ruby, sapphire. Yet what are they really? Containers for sweet drinks or carbonated water. Where did they come from? Where do they go? Does someone come and collect them every night, using a special net, a long string bag at the end of a pole or stick? It cannot be a good thing, plastic bottles in the river.