The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [92]
Friday, October 26
THE ENGLISH CEMETERY
“Writ in Water”
“I’d like to take you to the Protestant cemetery,” he says. “I have such sympathy for those nineteenth-century northerners. Down on their luck. Out of their element. Living here on nothing, going to the Anglican church on Sundays, with their headaches and their grand palazzi full of moth-eaten furniture, freezing all the time, knowing they should feel grateful, in love with the place but pining all the time for home.”
They cross a terrifying street surrounding the Piramide and walk along the Aurelian Walls. Ornately decorated brass wreaths celebrate the partisans who died fighting the German invaders.
“This is how the Italians live with their past,” Adam says. “It wasn’t them. It was never them. They never elected Mussolini. Everything bad that happened was someone else’s fault. The Germans. One of the rare human things is to tell the truth about the past.”
“Or even to know it,” she says. She is thinking of her infidelity with Toby Winthrop. It happened more than forty years ago. Adam never found out, because she kept it from him. She kept it in the dark. She allowed him to think the only infidelity was his. She would like to say, I too am guilty of lying, by omission. But she lacks the courage.
They pay to enter the Protestant cemetery. “I feel like the temperature’s dropped ten degrees here,” she says. “It’s so un-Italian.” They make their way, like everybody else, to John Keats’s grave. They bend to read the words carved into the stone:
This Grave contains all that was Mortal, of a Young English Poet, Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart, at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.
“Well, he really got it wrong,” Miranda says. “It’s a good thing to remember. None of us, really, has any idea of what we’ll leave behind. But look, Adam, it also says he wanted this written because of his enemies. So he died bitter because of bad reviews. That seems a kind of waste. And maybe it’s not so bad, something writ on water. At least the words were written somewhere. Which means they were thought. Does it matter so much that things should last? And for how long? And for whom?”
“It matters to me. I don’t want the music of Bach and Beethoven to be just washed away. And sometimes I think I’m just building sandcastles, or tending them, hoping they won’t be obliterated by the inevitable wave.”
When Adam talks this way, Miranda yearns for Yonatan, who does not fear the future. Who very rarely allows himself to mourn the past. Except at those times when the wave of what has been lost knocks him over. He thinks about his brother, killed in the ’67 War. He retreats into the bedroom, closes the blinds, turns out the lights. She does not go near him. She has learned that, after a certain number of hours, he’ll come out of the dark room. Finished with something, ready to go on. She’d like to shake Adam by the shoulders and say, If Yonatan, seeing what he has seen, living through what he has lived through, can be hopeful, why can’t you? She won’t do this, but she won’t continue what she considers a useless, a debilitating conversation.
“Look at this,” she says, pointing to a poem carved into the wall near Keats’s grave.
K-eats! if thy cherished name be “writ in water”
E-ach drop has fallen from some mourner’s cheek;
A-sacred tribute; such as heroes seek,
T-hough oft in vain—for dazzling deeds of slaughter
S-leep on! Not honoured less for Epitaph so meek!
“I never noticed that before,” he says.
“I wonder who wrote it?” she says.
“Let’s ask the man selling the books and postcards.”
A young man is sitting beside a computer, making stacks of postcards and bookmarks. Adam asks him who wrote the acrostic poem. “Non so,” he says, and turns to his computer. The computer does not yield the information. He asks his older colleague. Miranda thinks he must be nearly seventy in an impeccably cut gray suit,