Translations of Beauty

by Mia Yun

  “You’re welcome. Not that you were any help!” Soon, the doors to our parents’ and Inah’s rooms shut in consecutive loud slams downstairs and upstairs. I stand at the sink, running my hand through the soap bubbles. After a while, I hear Mom come out and the front door open and close. She is running away to her church. To be alone with her Jesus. She finds us American kids pretty much useless in times of crisis. After cleaning up, I turn off the kitchen light. It is so quiet that I can almost hear the plants breathe in the backyard.

  On the way to my room, I try the doorknob on Inah’s room. As I expected, it is locked.

  “Inah, will you open the door?” No answer. I go back down to the kitchen and return with a stainless steel chopstick. I’ve done it hundreds of times before; I pick the lock easily, like a professional thief. I could always make a living as a locksmith. It’s a comforting thought.

  Inah is lying spread on the bed on her stomach, her face buried in the pillow. I flick the light switch on, and she hisses and digs her face deeper into the pillow. I sit down on the bed next to her. The box spring sags with a sigh and settles. Inah’s breathing and the tick-tock of the bowl-shaped clock on the desk fill the room.

  I know Inah is much, much more disappointed with Dad than she has been letting on. He has always been the bumper and the balancing force between her and Mom, who always pushes Inah along with a relentless drive, out of guilt. If Mom’s love was the breathing-down-on-you kind of love that singes you and brands you, his was the warm breeze kind of love.Mom stirs the water and Dad calms it, tipping the scale back, giving Inah much needed breathing room and equilibrium. And more than anything, Dad has always tried to show Inah that there are many, many beautiful and wonderful things to appreciate in life other than the obvious things the self-absorbed world makes her believe count. He was special and different. But now, of all people, it is Dad who has let her down.

  I look at Inah, lying on the bed. Under her T-shirt, her shoulder bones form cliffs and jut up sharply. Suddenly she looks so fragile and vulnerable. It is no longer the Inah I resent:Mom’s perennial pet, who always so effortlessly gets all her attention; the brilliant Inah who has breezed through all the subjects and skipped a grade; the Inah who, I assume, will go to Yale or Harvard, get a Ph.D., become a celebrated scientist by inventing a way of growing artificial skin from a single pig cell or something like that and get nominated for a Nobel Prize in science; the Inah, Mom’s hope, who will make it all worthwhile for her. It is just unhappy, miserable, teenage Inah in her stupid, plain, oversized T-shirts.

  “Inah, come on.”

  “Go away,” she simpers, hoping I won’t. I wonder whether she, too, lies in bed at night and thinks about Dad and his affair. Whether she draws all kinds of romantic pictures in her head as I do, desperately wishing Dad’s affair to be a romantic one because it is too hard to bear any other way: Dad at the wheel, speeding away on a winding country road, arched by trees, no longer green, his coy lover next to him, her long black hair and a red scarf blowing in the winds. Wet leaves whirring and falling after them like so many colored, festive confetti.

  After a long while, Inah turns over and fixes her eyes to the sky blue ceiling, where, the spring we moved into the house, Dad climbed a ladder and spray-painted lavender roses of Sharon, Korea’s national flower, surrounded with serrated dark green leaves. Inah and I shared the room then, and at night, with the lights out, from our beds, we would observe the flowering ceiling transform, in the faint light coming through the window, into a sort of half-realized, misty Oriental Eden, shifting and drifting, and imagine lying in the sky under a floating garden. It was so hypnotic that it was like gliding weightless, falling asleep.

  “Why did Dad have to do it?” Inah says, her voice cracking and splitting in a sudden spurt of anger. I don’t know if she is wondering whether Dad consciously made the choice. Her over us. I remember reading somewhere how life is all about making one choice after another. Connect those dots and see what kind of picture emerges: a portrait of a life.

  “I don’t know, Inah. Maybe Dad was lonely,” I blurt out and instantly realize that it makes perfect sense.

  “How could Dad have been lonely?” Inah springs up like popped corn, as if I’d said something outrageous. It simply has never occurred to her that Dad, too, just like us, has an emotional life, that he might be lonely now and then, and that more than simple daily worries might occupy his mind. To Inah, things are much more black and white. Despite all of her voracious reading, she remains puzzlingly innocent and rigid. She probably thinks sex is dirty, too. Anyway, when you’re an angst-ridden teenager, you don’t think there’s a bigger crisis than your own. And your parents? You sort of develop blind spots. You think they are immune to temptations. They should be. They forfeited those rights long ago. They should behave.

  “Isn’t it obvious? He ran off with a woman,” I mutter, suddenly feeling impatient and a little cruel. I probably sounded worldly and jaded to Inah, who could easily win Triple Crowns if there were contests for Miss Clueless, Miss Prude and Miss Innocence. Disgusted, Inah screams and throws her pillow at me. It is just too hard for her to digest the idea of Dad running off with “a woman like that.” It sounds so cheap and so vulgar.

  After a while, Inah slides back down and says, “I don’t want to see Dad ever again.” She sounds more sad, though, than defiant.

  SIX

  Inah and I walk to a trattoria on Via dei Neri for dinner. It’s that time of day, just before dusk when the lavish, gold-flecked and iridescent rays of the sun cast spidery webs, turning the buildings along the narrow, curving side streets into thin, pencil-line sketches, when the large and small piazzas, moped-terrorized, dusty narrow streets and stately boulevards all slowly turn up empty, and when Florence magically transforms into the pastoral Renaissance town in the paintings.

  Then, as we wait for a table at the tiny, treeless triangle piazzetta outside, the light turns blue all over, deepening into intense sapphire blue. And suddenly, it’s as if we are standing in the middle of a movie set. It’s not just the blue light or the austereness of the piazzetta, or the straight lines of the buildings around it but it’s also the craggy-faced middle-aged Italian man standing against the trattoria’s open doorway. (With about two days’ worth of stubble on his chin and in a blue sports jacket that is unraveling at the hems, he has that elegantly disheveled look.) It’s the way he uses his hand (his other hand holds a glass of white wine) to expertly excavate raw green peas out of pea pods and pop them into his mouth at regular intervals. The sagging pockets of his blue jacket hold an infinite supply of them, because his long-fingered hand digs up some more and still some more. And all at the same time, in his condensed baritone, he conducts a long-running, casual, public conversation with the horse-faced man busily pulling at the espresso machine inside, peppering it with short, guttural laughs and issuing contemptuous grunts.

  It’s absolutely mesmerizing and hypnotic to watch. The way his fingers expertly and nimbly excavate the lime green peas and pop them into his mouth…. And the contrast of the vivid green of the pea pods and the deep brown of his hands.

  That’s it. In a flash, the long puzzle is solved. I know why Inah travels. Traveling is like dreaming. In travel, your real life is put on hold. As long as you travel and keep on moving, you can defer it forever. You are safe from reality. Loneliness being the only consequence. You are not asked to participate. You observe and move on. You are forever a stranger and an outsider. It involves no emotional entanglements. You can just go on experiencing the moments of green pea pods in the brown hands of an elegant man. Is that what Inah’s been doing? Deferring life? Running away from reality? But how could I blame her? How could I begrudge her anything? I want her to go on, if she could, experiencing the magical moments of green pea pods in the brown hands of an elegant man. Anyway, aren’t we all living in the sustained illusion that life is worth living? Otherwise, we will have to give up sooner or later.

  * * *

&nb
sp; Then everything goes wrong. We end up sharing a long table with a group of American art students studying in Florence. I can tell right away that Inah isn’t too crazy about the arrangement. But it’s clear that our squat, no-nonsense, mustachioed waitress isn’t about to let herself be bothered with such a trivial thing as a seating preference. She throws down the menus on the table with that take-it-or-leave-it look and walks away. “Butchsky,” Inah mutters to her back with surprising malice.

  As we reluctantly settle into our seats, one of the students turns and says, “Hope you guys don’t mind sharing the table with us. With the exception of myself, these guys are real animals.” A roar of laughter erupts, and I laugh.

  “Yeah, I can tell,” I say, and Inah floats a disgusted look toward me.

  “Peter,” he says. “Where are you guys from?”

  “From New York,” I answer. Peter explains that they are all NYU graduate students and that he’s an art history major and has been in Florence for three months. He’s kind of cute, but not my type really. A little too sunny and eager. Anyway, for some reason, I omit revealing the fact that I am an NYU graduate myself but instead tell him that I live on Thompson Street. We then joke about how NYU is now more like a mighty corporation and is taking over the Village by putting up ugly dormitory buildings all over. Inah’s finally had it. Exasperated, in a show of displeasure, she lets the menu slip from her hand to the table and rolls her eyes. She hates people who gush.

  “Sorry, Inah,” I say, a little embarrassed and suddenly self-conscious.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and narrate your entire life story?” she says sarcastically.

  “Don’t be stupid, Inah,” I say, regretting it right away. “Know what you want? If you are ready, let’s order.” But she has already slipped into one of her black moods. She won’t look at me.

  Throughout the dinner, she keeps her eyes glued to the plate and barely breathes a word. And against my better judgment, I ignore her and talk to Peter and a couple of other students around him. Once or twice, I do try to draw her into our conversation, but she flatly refuses.

  In fact, she can’t wait to leave. Turning down dessert, she asks for the check and takes off to the bathroom. That would have been the end of the story, but no. When she comes back, she looks absolutely furious. She sails over, slaps down two ten-thousand lire notes on the table and walks out blurting, “See you outside.” I realize that on the way back from the bathroom, she saw Peter handing me a piece of paper (where he wrote down the names of “great, cheap places to eat” in Rome) and completely misinterpreted it.

  It could not have been more than five minutes later when I go out, but Inah isn’t there. I quickly scan the length of the darkening street. No trace of her. Cursing, I hurry up the street. At the first corner, I turn right. And just for the sake of it, I peek inside the tobacco shop and bar, where Italian rock music blasts. Of course, she isn’t there. As I race up the street, young kids hanging around the parked motorcycles whistle and shout, “Sayonara!”

  Then it occurs to me that she might have gone back to the bathroom as I was coming out (but why?) and she might still be there waiting for me. I should go back. I turn down a narrow sloping street, sure that it will take me back to Via dei Neri. In the night glint, the narrow deserted street seems to rise like a staircase out of a deep well of black fog. After about a couple of minutes, afraid I will end up completely lost, I stop. Across the street, inside a brightly lit closed barbershop, I see a white-haired old man sitting all alone in one of the barber chairs, still as a prop, watching a soundless soccer game on a small pink TV. It’s all very surreal. I feel as though I have wandered into someone else’s dream.

  Then it all comes back to me in a rush. All the hideous dreams I have been having: Inah’s body floating down the Arno River; Inah up on the cupola at the Duomo, ready to jump; Inah’s weeping face on the statue of Mary and her red, calcified tears. What if they were prescient? The old, unspoken fear comes back. Mom’s worried face flashes through my hot head. And I start to panic.

  I turn around and run back to the intersection. It’s only after a long while, walking up and down, that I realize it doesn’t make sense at all, roaming the streets like this. The chance of finding Inah this way has to be very slim, if not zero. My best bet is to go back to the hotel. I start walking, roughly aiming toward the railway station. But of course, having no sense of direction whatsoever, soon I am utterly lost. It seems impossible, but I have missed the Piazza della Signoria entirely. Instead, I end up on the deserted and mist-draped Via Cavour. The wide, stately boulevard seems to go on forever. I have to get to the Duomo. At least from there, I know I will be able to find my way back to our hotel. I turn around and walk, as I will realize later, away from the Duomo.

  It’s past eleven when I manage to find my way to the Piazza Santa Maria Novella. I am exhausted and hot and sticky with sweat but afraid to go back to the hotel. I don’t have the courage to walk into the empty room with Inah’s things lying about like remains. I head to the phone booths by the newsstand outside the piazza.

  It’s weird. At this late hour, all the phone booths are occupied. And not only that, outside the booths, there are about six or seven more men and women waiting their turn, rolling around heavy coins with their fingers, stacking and restacking them on their palms. They look like Africans, and they are here probably to call home. I join the end of the line and pace about, getting more desperate each second. Fear feeds on fear. I keep hearing Mom’s voice: “Don’t fight with Inah.” Mom will blame me if anything happens to Inah. And I will just die, too. Just then, a booth door clicks open, and I see a big, handsome woman squeeze herself out, laughing and talking to herself as if she is still carrying on the conversation on the phone.

  “Excuse me!” I rush up to the man at the head of the line, just about to walk inside the booth. “Would you please let me go ahead? Please, I will be real fast. Ten seconds!” I beg and gesture. I don’t know if he understands me, but I must look so pathetic. He stops and stares at me briefly and says, “No problem.” I thank him and fly into the booth before he changes his mind. I drop a bunch of palm-sweated coins and dial the hotel number. A hotel operator answers, and I give him our room number and wait, holding my breath.

  “Please, please, Inah, answer the phone!” But it just rings and rings, and with each ring that goes unanswered, my heart sinks further. At about the seventh or eighth ring, I put down the receiver and walk out.

  I cut across the piazza, looking shabby and tired in the dim, pallid lamplights. The green-and-white marble facade of the Chiesa di Santa Maria Novella up the piazza looks just that: a facade, painted on a cardboard. At the piazza, more Africans are standing around in small clusters, talking and laughing. They seem so relaxed and content and even festive; so completely contained in their own village, in their own world. Their happy language all vowels. Sung in vibrato. The women have high foreheads that gleam like smooth chiseled onyx, and they wear brightly patterned flowing gowns and matching tall, fancy, and elaborate head wraps. Even in the waxen light, they look beautiful, picturesque and as regal as high priestesses. For a second, I think I am somewhere in Africa, not in Florence. Even the misty night air seems to drip scents of bitter almond oil and orange flowers.

  Drained, I slump down on a bench. This is how it works: After anger dissipates, you worry, and then after a while, you get all worked up again. If Inah were here, I could strangle her. I watch the Africans. They look so utterly at home. Together. Wherever they go and however far they end up, instead of letting a place transform them, they transform the place, by creating a piece of Africa, a village. Even in the middle of a piazza in Florence. It’s the unshakable pride they have carried with them from home.

  I look up at the sky, a luminous sheet of cobalt blue. In sodden Venice, the night sky seemed so macabre. The shade of blackest ash. Nothing bad could happen to Inah under such a beautiful sky. I get up and slowly walk toward the hotel.

  From the hal
lway, I notice a wedge of light spilling out from under the door of our room. Relieved, I literally stagger ahead. I try the doorknob. It’s locked. I knock and wait. After long seconds, Inah finally comes and opens it. Not only doesn’t she say a word but she doesn’t even so much as bother to look at me. She just turns around and walks away nonchalantly. I shut the door behind me and stand leaning my back against it. I can barely move.

  She’s been packing for her day trip to Siena tomorrow. On the bed lies her unzipped blue Kipling backpack, looking like an opened-up belly. With my eyes, I follow her around the room, waiting for her to say something. Just a few minutes ago, walking back to the hotel, all I wished for was her safe return. Scared out of my wits that she had done something stupid, I swore I would do anything to have her back. But now I am all furious again.

  “Are you going to tell me where the hell you went?” I yell. “I’ve been looking for you all over. What the hell is wrong with you?” She doesn’t answer. Furious, I bound over and jerk at her arm. Inah winces but won’t look at me. “Don’t you hear me? Why do you have to be such a bitch?” I scream in rage.

  “What do you want from me?” Inah says tersely, in that flat, calm voice of hers full of disdain.

  “Who says I want anything from you, Inah? I don’t want a damn thing from you. Just tell me what makes you think that you can dictate to me how to behave. As it is, Inah, whenever I am with you, I feel like I am in some kind of prison. Always watching what I say or do, afraid to upset you or displease you. And you know what? I’m not going to live like that anymore. I’m not going to live in constant fear that you might not like what I say or do. From now on, I’m going to talk to whomever I want to and whenever I want to. And I don’t give a damn whether you like it or not.” Inah briefly looks up. In the pale, greenish light, her scarred face is haggard and gaunt. And her eyes show no sparkle at all. They are opaque and expressionless and remote. They are dead.