The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [61]
He indicates the place where the bus that she needs will stop. The bus will take her down the Via delle Botteghe Oscure. He remembers in the 1950s there was a distinguished literary journal with that name: Botteghe Oscure. The fifties, a time of great cultural achievement in Rome. Fellini, Rossellini, Pasolini, Moravia, Ginzburg, Montale, Morante. Now Italian literature, Italian film, are marginal to the point, he thinks, of almost total irrelevance. Botteghe Oscure. The dark shops. They are standing in front of a shop that sells cheap shoes that can only indicate a willingness for cheap sex. The shoes make him sad; he can’t believe the purchase of gold plastic platform shoes, or white leather boots, red-sequined strappy shoes with thin high heels, can lead to any kind of lasting happiness.
“I think we were wrong in thinking that people who said they didn’t want to change would be happy to do it if we just showed them the way,” Adam says.
“How terrible, though, to be young and not to believe in the possibility of change! I felt, when I was young, as though the weather were becoming different. As if the light had changed and the shadows were thinner. My heart lifted at the possibility of the new world we would make!”
“The possibility of what?”
“The possibility of possibility. That people would be more just, I guess, was the most important possibility to me.”
“I sometimes think that there are horrors now that we could not even have imagined.”
“I refuse to live without hope.”
“What kind of hope?”
“Is there a wrong kind? A right kind? There is patience, isn’t there? Patient hope. When I came back from India, we were so hopeful. We had, you see, Adam, succeeded in eradicating one of the most lethal diseases in the world. We had got rid of smallpox. It was a fantastic success, the smallpox project. The whole world got behind it, and it was really rather simple. People going around talking to people and working with people in personal ways. We were responsible for the vaccinations of millions, and the disease was wiped out. And so we thought: Well, we have vaccines, we have antibiotics, these devastating epidemics are a thing of the past. And then AIDS appeared, and we realized that our hope had just been an illusion. That was when I changed my training from infectious diseases to environmental health. I wanted something smaller, something contained. If I could see a problem that, with patience and attention, I could do something about solving, then I could still have hope.”
“Of all the people I’ve known, you are the most impatient. I could never understand it: you were the most impatient, and yet often the most calm. And the most able to sit still and solve a problem.”
“I might no longer be that person you knew. Or thought you knew.”
“Who are you, then?”
“Someone to whom, like you, a great many things have happened. So the person I am was the one I was and also another person, perhaps many other persons.”
“And yet you consider yourself hopeful?”
“Because the opposite suggests a way I will not live.”
“I have to go to Lucy’s school now, to see if I can help her with her Bach partita. Which I hope, at her recital next month, she will play very well.”
“And so if you have hope in her you are by necessity a hopeful person.”
“If that is the way you want to see it, yes. But it isn’t the only way.”
“But, Adam, do admit: it’s not the worst.”
Thursday, October 18
THE VILLA BORGHESE
“We’re at an Age When We Must Take Care Not to Be Embarrassing”
“You see, it didn’t rain, after all, like you thought it would,” she says.
“And you want to see it as a sign of something.”
“No, a sign of nothing. A piece of luck.”
“What would a piece of luck look like? A coin? A shell? A hunk of bread and cheese?”
She enjoys this kind of play with him. It was who they were, people who played in this way. She doesn’t have people now who play in this way with her.
He angles his chin toward a boy and girl in identical black pants and boots, embracing on a bench. At their feet: two helmets, one garnet colored,