The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [89]
She is struck, suddenly, by a smell she hasn’t taken in for a long time. The smell of drains.
“Do you smell that, Adam? Just here. Now.”
“That bad smell? The drains.”
“So if we’re creatures with a sense of smell, we have to come to terms with bad smells, too. Like this one. It was everywhere when we were here before. To me, it was the smell of Europe. Suggesting a whole life more physical than I was comfortable with, really, though I would have died rather than admit it. It worried me at first because, of course, I knew it was the smell of shit. But it seemed to me that it was corrupt in the way I wanted Europe to be, in the way I wanted Europe to corrupt me. It reminded me that I had really got away from home. It was in the air; it was the air. And now, it’s gone. I wouldn’t have thought I’d regret the absence of what could only be described as a bad smell. Now I feel the loss of it is something I want to mourn.”
“I guess it’s one of the American victories: the triumph of excellent plumbing. Kind of like the Romans and their aqueducts.”
“When you smelled it you immediately thought, This is foreign. Now nothing’s really foreign.”
“When I read those old travel books I love, especially English ones, which I seem to have a particular fondness for, I come upon sentences beginning ‘The Italians.’ Just beginning a sentence with those words showed how much of a gap they felt between themselves and the people they were writing about. But now, those kinds of generalizations aren’t true, and to use them is only an affectation. MTV, the Internet, Italian kids listening to rap music: we’re not strange to one another. Not strangers. And yet we don’t really know each other. I still worry about presuming too much, carelessly giving offense.”
“It’s hard to know in what ways we’ve become the same and in what ways we’re different when we all look the same.”
“When we were young, Italians looked different from Germans, you could tell the Spanish from the French. Now everyone’s wearing baseball caps backward. Except the girls: they’re wearing baseball caps the right way round.”
“When we were here in ’69, there were nuns and priests everywhere; you were always nervous bumping into them, young men in long skirts walking unlike any young men I’d ever known, kind of like they were on roller skates, and the nuns, women almost entirely invisible, always in black, always in pairs. All of them, you felt, making sure you weren’t going into one of the churches in a sleeveless minidress.”
“The churches are empty now. The cafés are smoke free. Italians jog and have salad as a first course. It’s no longer chic to be a Communist; it’s only now for ill-dressed fringe types.”
“I very much dislike nostalgia,” Miranda says. “I fear it. But the smell of drains … why do I want to weep because of it? I wonder what, some years from now, we’ll mourn the loss of. Something that we now think of as an irritation. Even a curse.”
“I think before we have the chance for that we’ll be taking our place among the dead.”
The mention of the dead is shocking: they look at each other, a bit frightened.
“I want to be like one of those marble effigies on the church floors here. Arms folded over my breast. Dog curled