The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [54]
“And the darkness, what is that?”
“Everything we don’t know or can’t know or understand.”
“Yes, but we’re not being swallowed up yet. We haven’t been absorbed yet. And so now we fight the darkness. We do everything we can to understand.”
“I don’t want to fight the darkness. I want to understand its place in our lives. I understand that there are things I can’t understand. And I think to pretend otherwise is a kind of dishonesty. Because in the end we’ll be going into a darkness. And I think that’s all right.”
“Doesn’t it scare you, Adam? Where will Lucy be, when you disappear, when you’re absorbed into the darkness?”
“That’s where my courage fails, so I don’t think about it. Not what’s outside the darkness, not what I leave behind.”
“So you’re not afraid?”
“Oh, often, and of many things. But of that darkness? No.”
They sit again on the marble bench surrounding the urn, the bushes each with a single rose. Neighborhood children are running up and down the courtyard. They run up a set of shallow steps leading to a small wooden door. At the top of the steps: a wounded bird, flapping, taking some comic and pathetic steps, trying to fly, failing, flapping. The children are taunting the bird. Miranda wants to stop them, and then she sees from the sky, like fighter planes, six gulls swooping down, nearly grazing the children’s heads. The children are frightened, delighted.
Sitting near the fountain is a slim African woman and her baby son. Miranda calculates he must be nearly two. He is about to fall asleep. The gulls continue swooping, diving, their cries, coarse and threatening, pierce the light calmness of the place. The mother speaks to her son in French but, hearing Adam and Miranda, switches to English.
“Those birds frighten me,” she says.
“No, no,” Miranda says. “They’re nothing to be frightened of. Or we have nothing to be frightened of. They’re just trying to keep the children away from the wounded one. They’re just protecting one of their own.”
“Still,” says the woman, “I am frightened by the noise. And that they seem so close.”
“Nothing to be afraid of, really. It’s those children who should be afraid. But they of course are not.”
A nun appears from inside the wooden door, claps her hands, shouts at the children, and they run, screaming, through the archway.
“It’s quiet again,” says the woman, putting her sleeping baby in his stroller. “Nice. I like the quiet.”
“Yes, we’re lucky to be here in the quiet.”
“Yes,” says the woman. “Lucky. Yes.”
Miranda would like to ask her where she comes from, hoping that might help her to understand what the word “luck” might mean to her. But then she thinks: Perhaps Adam is right. This task of understanding, which she feels so often burdened by, is perhaps better let go, for now. Here in the quiet. In the dove-colored light falling on the rose-colored stone.
Tuesday, October 16
THE VILLA BORGHESE
“I Wish We Had Realized That We Were Beautiful”
A group of young men and women, ten of them, by Miranda’s count, perhaps fourteen to sixteen years old, are throwing a plastic ball at one another, running to catch it. The sun is vibrant in a hot blue sky; many trees seem to have turned overnight; the leaves are lemon yellow now. And the light falls through the lemon-colored leaves onto the boys and girls who are running, laughing, catching, or failing to catch a turquoise or perhaps aquamarine ball.
“They’re so beautiful,” Miranda says. “I wonder if they know it.”
“Do we hope they do, or hope they don’t?”
“Of course we hope they do.”
“But part of their beauty comes from their being unself-conscious.”
“But I wish we had, at that age, realized that we were beautiful. Why was it, at that age, we never thought