The Love of My Youth_ A Novel - Mary Gordon [99]
“I can imagine you might like that kind of power.”
“Well, who wouldn’t, Adam?”
“You might understand that not everyone would.”
“Bullshit. They would if they thought they could get away with it.”
“Can you bear to see one more?”
“Of course, Adam, I’m not that pathetic.”
“I was just worried that your head was bad.”
“I’ll decide how I’m feeling, Adam, and believe me, I’ll let you know. Now that we’re here, I’m very glad to be seeing this. He understands it all, Bernini, how vulnerable women are to that male force. And he understands her anguish: those wonderful tears on her cheeks … The pressure of his fingers into the flesh of her thighs: he’s denting her flesh, and he doesn’t even know it. He doesn’t know anything, he doesn’t see anything except his own desire. He really understood it, Bernini: that male blindness.”
“And yet he was capable of the most terrible brutality to a woman. When he found out that his model, with whom he was passionately in love, or at least he was sexually obsessed with her, well, when he found out she was also sleeping with his younger brother, he tried to kill his brother and then paid his servant with two flasks of wine to cut up his mistress’s face. The servant did as he was told. He cut her face up for two flasks of wine.”
“What happened to her? Did she die of it?”
“No, she lived on to old age, or a relatively old age. But she was sent to prison for adultery. Bernini went unpunished. The pope said: ‘Rome is not Rome without Bernini.’ He was told to marry, which he did, and fathered eleven children and then got religion.”
Her head pounds now and she says, “I wish you hadn’t told me that. Now I will always have to think of that when I think of anything of Bernini’s. It makes me feel there is no hope for people. If someone can have the understanding that he did, and for it to have no effect on the way he acts!”
“I’m sorry, perhaps I shouldn’t have told you.”
“Why, Adam? I’m not a child. It’s always better to know things.” She is contradicting herself, but she doesn’t care. She means both parts of the contradiction equally, and she’s too tired to articulate this for his sake.
“I should have waited to tell you until we’d seen this,” he says, taking her into a nearly empty room. Just left of the center of the room is a statue: two figures, a man, or boy perhaps, a woman, or perhaps a girl.
“Daphne and Apollo,” he says, “do you know the story?”
“No, I never wrote a paper about them.”
“It’s in Ovid. In the Metamorphoses. Apollo is taunting Cupid, calling him a foolish boy, saying he had no right to use arrows, which were the weapons of a man. To punish him, Cupid shoots two arrows, the golden one, the one that excites desire, into Apollo’s breast, and the leaden one, the one that repels love, into Daphne’s. Daphne was a girl, a nymph, who never wanted to marry. She loved the woods, she loved her father. She told her father, who by the way was a river god, that she wanted to remain unmarried, like Diana, and to stay with him. Her father said: ‘Your face will not allow it.’ She doesn’t understand. He tells her that her beauty is a fate she can’t escape. Apollo pursues her; she flees him and just as he’s about to catch and ravish her she prays to her father, the river god, to transform her into something impervious to Apollo’s advances. So her father turns her into a tree. See, just as Apollo touches her, her skin turns to bark, her hair to leaves, her arms to branches.”
Miranda walks around, wanting to see all sides of the sculpture, the beautiful foot of the young god, the girl’s hair turning to leaves, her lovely limbs becoming branches. What has been captured is the rush of motion. Impossible to tell if she is turning toward him or away from him. Can he see her? Does his hand on her stomach sense the agitated beating of her heart?
“They’re so young,” Miranda says. “They’re hardly even grown-ups. And he doesn’t even seem to notice that she’s turning into a tree beneath his hand. It’s there again, that male unconsciousness, a slightly different