The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [78]
The arrangement for the apartment is part of Henry and Sylvia Levi’s plan, the plan to ensure that Adam is taken care of by Miranda. Later she will resent this, feel they were implicated in her entrapment, but for now she revels in the high ornamented ceilings, the dark wood of the furniture, the maid, very young with the single long braid, who comes three times a week and calls her signora and leaves behind her the smell of beeswax and lavender.
In Rome that summer, there is none of the dark buzz, the dangerous downed wires that seemed everywhere on every road Adam and Miranda walked on in the America of 1968. She needn’t argue with Renee and Marian (she is speaking to them again) about the Black Panthers. She needn’t worry that Lydia seems to be taking too many and more frightening drugs. She needn’t keep it from Adam that she is smoking pot with her friends; she wouldn’t dream of smoking marijuana here; she wouldn’t know how to go about finding it even if she wanted to, which she does not. She needn’t argue with Toby Winthrop, the Harvard junior, her fellow draft counselor, about the fascist implications of monogamy; she needn’t listen to him taunting her as “the suburban radical, the Westchester liberal.” She is tired of arguing with so many people and of trying to understand so many things. Here, it is impossible to think clearly about politics. Italian politics are so complicated that she thinks that in the course of a summer she could never come to understand them; they inhabit terrains ranging, from what she can gather, from Byzantine historical complexities, old grudges and old loyalties, to a dangerous love of violence. It isn’t her responsibility, and she feels she can “lay her burden down.” Just for a few weeks; she’ll take it up again when she goes home.
But here they are happy. Happy having their coffee and cornetto in the morning, served by an elderly man, who tells them they must not call him signore but Giuseppe, who adores Miranda, tries to explain to her who Padre Pio is, tries to explain the stigmata, and Adam is embarrassed because his grandmother also has a picture of Padre Pio, in her bedroom. Adam tries to explain to Protestant Miranda that this picture of the smiling, bearded monk, below which they drink their cappuccini and eat their cornetti, is the image of a man who was meant to bleed from wounds, like Jesus, in the place of Jesus, every Friday and most days of Lent. And that both Giuseppe and his grandmother believe this man could fly. She listens to his explanations as if he were speaking of initiation rites in Papua, New Guinea: she finds the story charming, not entirely understanding that these are the stories Giuseppe and Adam’s grandmother live by.
They are happy shopping, buying their peaches, their cheese, their tomatoes, their bread. Though she won’t cook, she loves buying picnic food and planning the location of their outings. Calm and pleased, she walks the aisles of the ancient covered market in Nomentana: rows on rows of fruits and cheeses and salamis, fish she doesn’t know the name of and wouldn’t know what to do with but enjoys looking at. She allows herself to be distracted. She follows Adam’s lead: this is his other home, these are his people. Certainly, it must be in his blood, this way he has of picking up a peach and turning it over, smelling it, putting it to her nose, telling her to bite it, taste the juice, no wait, he’ll take the first bite so she won’t have the trouble of the fuzzy skin, and he brushes the hair from her cheek with the edge of his palm. And surely he must have been born to it, to talk this way about food, to speak without embarrassment about the richness of the tomatoes, the sharpness of the basil, the smooth texture of the cheese. He praises the olive oil; he says its taste is the taste of comfort and hope.
He is passionate about Roman water. He shows her how to cover the hole in the spigot with her middle finger so she can drink more easily, so the delicious water can go