The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [84]
They pass the Colosseum, which, without saying anything, they both understand they will only glance at. They leave the bus and pass the church of San Clemente.
“San Clemente is famous for embodying the layering of Rome. At the bottom is a Mithraic temple, where bulls were slaughtered, above that an early Christian basilica, and on top a seventeenth-century church that includes Byzantine mosaics and Renaissance frescoes. But let’s not go there. You have to give me credit, Miranda: I’ve kept my word. Only one beautiful thing a day.”
She laughs. “I appreciate your restraint,” she says.
They climb up a hill to a much older brick structure, walk through a courtyard whose simple grand proportions, its emptiness, its openness, seem a desirable sign of something large and fine. They enter the dark church. Adam walks toward a far wall and presses a bell that for a time Miranda cannot see. As her eyes grow used to the dimness, a nun opens a door, and Adam says, so low Miranda can only just hear him, “Grazie, suora.” She wonders how he knows what to call nuns in Rome.
The nun, tall, pale, and smiling, closes the door behind them. They are directed to a cloister, a place that seems entirely apart from Rome, from everything she has known or ever thought of as Rome. The quiet falls, at first quite heavily, on her shoulders, then she feels it on her eyes, like a poultice, as if, without knowing it, she had been running a low-grade fever. Sitting on a stone bench, she gives to the stone all the accumulated tiredness of the unfrivolous traveler. She closes her eyes. Four sounds come to her: the sound of what she understands as seagulls, raucous, querulous, reminding her that Rome is near the sea, something she has not had the slightest sense of. Then there are the cheepings of better-tempered birds. Are there sparrows in Rome? she wonders. They somehow seem so Anglo-Saxon, not a bit Italian. Then a siren, then the sound of children’s heels on stone, and then their challenges, given, thrown back, and against it all the mother’s voice: Sta’zitta. Quiet down.
• • •
On the inside of the arches that surround the cloister is a pattern, bright red against ocher, of what appear to be teardrops. In the center of the cloister, the grass surrounding the well seems wild. Uncared for. And yet the wildness seems deliberate, an allowance rather than a neglect, and once more she is amazed that late in October there are roses, white, blooming only on one bush, the farthest from the door. She remembers that of the qualities she liked most about Adam, among the most important was his ability to be with her in silence. A silence that seemed like a very special kind of accompaniment. She allows herself to bask in silence now; she lowers herself as into a warm pool, or no, she thinks, a lake with just enough coolness in it to make you feel movement is possible, any movement you might like.
It is difficult to leave, to go back to the outside world. He feels this strongly and, as if to take the difficulty in his teeth, he brings up a difficult subject.
“What shall we do about Valerie?”
“Oh, Lord, Adam, you would think of that. You were always so responsible about that sort of thing.”
“Well, yes, OK, I’ve thought of it, but I haven’t the slightest idea of what to do about it. You were always better at that than I. Figuring out what to do. Then doing it.”
“That’s because then I believed there was a right thing to do, and if I just put my mind to it I’d discover it. That’s another one of the things I’ve given up.”
“We could send her a note. Thanking her.”
“For what? For a disastrous encounter? For the dinner we never got to eat?”
“For the drinks. For arranging for us to meet.”
She refuses to take up this last