Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [135]
He kept a place in Trastevere, a tiny apartment off Piazza di San Cosimato with a generous terrace where, between assignments, he recovered. A woman had brought Kaushik to Italy. Until Franca he had preferred Latin America to Europe, and even now the Spanish he had learned all those years ago got in the way of his serviceable Italian. Franca had convinced him to follow her back to Milan. She came from a family of minor nobility, her heart-shaped face and deep-set gray eyes speaking for a refinement she had not been able to hide when he first met her working for a relief agency in Cameroon. For years he had drifted across the globe without making meaningful ties, and suddenly he was sharing an apartment with Franca, driving out to Bergamo on Sundays to eat polenta and roasted rabbit at her nonna’s home, aware that her grandmother, who had spent years hand-stitching and embroidering a trousseau of nightgowns and bedjackets for Franca, approved of him. It had ended bitterly; though at the time he could never come up with a reason not to, he could not bring himself to propose. She had not taken hold of him; he could see now that that was the problem. And so he left the tears and fury in Milan and took the train down to Rome. At first he thought he’d stay a week, to see a little bit of the city, then move back to Buenos Aires. But the Second Intifada drew him back to the Middle East, and he stayed on in Europe, never telling Franca that he was living in her country, never once running into her.
He remembered Rome, of course, from the only other time he’d gone there, on the way back from Bombay to Massachusetts with his parents. His mother was dying, but at the time, apart from her thinness, there had been no signs. She had just turned forty, Kaushik’s age on his next birthday. He remembered the look of the hotel where they stayed, the marble steps they would ascend to go to the breakfast room. The strong shaft of light that poured through the dome of the Pantheon, and the glances of admiration the waiters could not conceal as his mother perused a menu. He remembered walking along the Janiculum and seeing clusters of swallows like giant thumbprints swiping the sky. And he had returned like a pilgrim to those places, recalled that the hotel was close to the Spanish Steps and managed to find it somehow.
Last year his father and Chitra had visited him in Rome, spending four days on their way to Calcutta. He had obliged, reserving a room for them at the Hotel d’Inghilterra and taking them everywhere. He stood in line with them to see the Colosseum and walked with them through the Forum. He took pictures of their stay, handing his father the rolls of film before they left as if it had been any other job. He ordered Chitra tea with milk in every restaurant, every café, because she did not like the taste of Italian coffee. But they had left no dent on the place, and he never thought of their presence on the streets of Rome as he continued to think, now and again, of his mother’s.
It was in the course of those days with his father and Chitra that a faint gray speck, smaller than the head of a pin, began floating across his left eye. He first noticed it the afternoon they went to Testaccio, his father wanting to visit Keats’s grave. In the lush grounds of the Protestant Cemetery, Kaushik had thought that a gnat was circling his head, and he kept swatting at it, putting out his fingers trying to flick it away. But the speck continued to accompany him wherever he went, quietly tormenting him, and he realized it