The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [58]
On the busy Via Arenula, they see three young people riding in what looks like a rickshaw with a red and yellow hammer and sickle painted on the back. Advertising their allegiance to the Communist Party, trying to gather votes for an election that will take place later in the week.
“They still believe in that old dream that turned into a nightmare. They are still capable of that kind of belief,” Miranda says.
“What is it, though, that they believe in? After what history has shown them? How can they still believe in it? What do they have faith in? Right here in this place where twenty years ago Aldo Moro was killed by the Red Brigade.”
“The Red Brigade: so serious once, now a kind of period piece, like transistor radios or Studebakers. Of course these young people don’t see that, in the future people may think of them as an irrelevant anachronism. Perhaps for all the things they have refused to see.”
“Is it possible that there can be no hope without some kind of blindness?”
“Were we wrong to be so hopeful?” Miranda asks. “We had our blindnesses, God knows. There were so many things we didn’t see. Or wouldn’t. How I argued with my father! I ruined so many dinners. The anguish I created for my mother, like a kind of weather she had to fear every night when the sun set. It was the age in which dinners were ruined regularly, not from private quarrels only, but for what was called principle. There were some things I was wrong about, and yet I’m certain even now that I was more right than my father. That he was deeply and centrally wrong. His vision could lead to nothing but hopelessness, suspicions, fear. The Cold War. It froze all life. It froze it dead. He said he was a person of faith, and yet he believed that human beings were inherently weak and corrupt and that it is our job in the world to stop the dark forces that are the truest thing about us.”
“I think he must have been afraid.”
“I know what he was most afraid of. What he feared most was disorder. The old order would be overturned: he really believed that if people just behaved themselves and worked hard, and were clean and sober and patriotic, they would prosper, as he had. But any kind of disorder made him crazy. He would come into my bedroom and see that it was untidy and that my mother was unable to compel me to tidiness and this would arouse a kind of raging despair. So I aroused despair in both my parents. In my father because of my untidiness and in my mother because of my insistence upon argument. Well, I guess my arguing made him despair, too: it was one more sign of disorder. Children were supposed to be subservient to parents. They were never to challenge them. God, if he heard some of the things my kids have said to me!”
He doesn’t want to say, Lucy is never rude. He says instead, “The state of your room made me feel hopeless, too.”
“Is Clare tidy?”
“She’s even worse than you.”
They laugh together.
How strange, he thinks, the first, the only, thing she’s asked me about my wife had to do with her tidiness. Is it that Miranda had, in the intervening years, learned tact? Is that why she hadn’t asked the first question: What does