The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [96]
Adam and Miranda eat their cheese, their tomatoes, their rolls: thin crust, then air. Furtively, he chews on his salami, which Miranda would never eat. The brides, the grooms, their families, make them feel intruders, so they don’t linger, but walk quickly toward the church.
“These wooden doors are very old,” Adam says. He takes her hand and tells her to tilt her head way back. It is still unnatural for them to touch, and the same wire that she felt thrumming when she considered the implications of her past untruth starts up between her ribs again.
“There,” he says, “at the very top, there on the left, that panel is meant to be the oldest depiction of the unclothed Christ.”
She takes steps frontward and backward. She bends her neck back, then straightens it. She squints. She makes a frame of her hands. Then a tunnel. She closes her eyes. Shakes her head. Opens her eyes again.
“I can’t see anything,” she says, not concealing her annoyance. “What’s the point of all that work, just for the sadistic pleasure of letting people know there’s something they can’t see? What’s the point of something that’s there for us to see that can’t be seen?”
“Perhaps we’ve lost a certain way of seeing,” he says.
Her neck hurts. She’s afraid she’s twisted something in her back and will suffer in a minor way that will intrude on her last days. This, she knows, is a function of age. This, too, annoys her.
“I think it’s ridiculous,” she says. “Perverse.”
She walks ahead of him, clicking her heels aggressively on the stone pavement of the courtyard.
They make their way down the hill. In a garden, alongside a small brick church (Why do they need another church so close to the basilica? she wonders), three homeless men sit at the edge of a fountain. They are smoking cigars and washing their clothes in the fountain. They have constructed a clothesline by hanging a rope between two orange trees; under the leaves socks, underwear, T-shirts, flap recklessly in the light breeze. The men wave at Adam and Miranda, comment on the beauty of the day, and cheerfully ask for money.
Miranda gives them five euros each. Adam would like to stop her, but he sees that, in giving them money, her good temper has been restored.
Sunday, October 28
THE GALLERIA BORGHESE
“My Head Aches and I’m Tired”
It is a brilliant day; the sun has no inflection, no modulation, and it falls like a fist on the white obelisk of the Piazza del Popolo, the bemused lions, the lounging gods. The bright light is only a trial to Miranda; the night before she went to a dinner party given for her new German friend, given by Germans. She ate and drank too much, woke in the night with an overwhelming thirst, and when the alarm rang in the morning, she was headachy and nauseated. If she’d known how to telephone Adam, she would have called to cancel. All she wants to do is spend the day in bed. She misses Yonatan: he would bring her oranges and herbal tea and provide aspirin and cool cloths for her head. She wishes she were home with him. She’s tired of it all, the crowded noisy city where she does not understand and is not understood, the endless talk with Adam, full as it is of unanswerable questions. Am I the person who I was? What has become of me?
A creature, man or woman, it is impossible to tell, has silvered him- or herself and is standing stock-still in the middle of the piazza, representing the Statue of Liberty, at whose base is a paper