Translations of Beauty

by Mia Yun

  “All foreigners, no Italianos, these pickpockets. You know why? Italianos are spoiled! They like to go straight to the bank.” He’d then rub his stubby fingers. “More money in the bank. Ha-ha-ha!”

  We walk down to the corner of Via Maggio, cross the street and hail a taxi. I know that a city is nothing but a state of mind, but still, it’s as though Rome suddenly has made an about-face: The perennial sun is missing from the sky, and the city looks dull in soupy, gray air. I feel a little embarrassed. For all the shameless flattery I’ve uttered.

  In the taxi to Termini, remorse and sheer helplessness keep both of us quiet. Then, because it’s the only thing I can do, I try to give Inah money—the money in the envelope Mom slipped into my jeans pocket at Kennedy, asking me to take Inah to Korean restaurants and fatten her up. I don’t know how much it is, as I have never bothered to open it. It’s still inside the same white drugstore envelope, the kind Mom buys in a bulk of one hundred for weddings, graduations, birthdays and funerals, as if money, so vulgar and dirty, has to be cloaked and hidden. Inah adamantly refuses to take it. We push the envelope (now a little worn off at the corners and edges) back and forth, acting just like Mom, who fights relatives and friends to pay at restaurants, sneaking away from the table and rushing to the counter with the money in her hand, as if she’s playing out some kind of social ritual of strategic importance. Inah and I used to swear, too, that we would never become like her.

  We are early. Inah helps me carry my suitcase and her rucksack—we have finally gotten rid of Mom’s hideous suitcase—to the platform where the Termini-Leonardo da Vinci airport train stands idling. The sun has burned through the morning haze, and there’s a golden, fuzzy spectral ring around everything, like an aureole. I leave Inah with the luggage at the platform to get a train ticket from a ticket-vending machine. When I return, Inah is standing exactly the way I left her, but even more stiff with dread.

  After Inah helps me put the luggage away, I decide not to prolong the agony for her and to say good-bye. At least I can do that much.

  “I’m going in, Inah. Don’t wait around,” I say. Inah nods, visibly relieved. Maybe she has been expecting a long, sentimental sermon and tears. We hug. All morning I have been rehearsing in my head just what to say at this very moment, but with my arms around her, I can barely remember or pull out a word. I wish there was more time, but Inah doesn’t want me to stay any longer. In fact, she can hardly wait to be alone. I can literally feel her ache to be released.

  “Inah, I am …” I swallow the lump in my throat. “I am sorry we fought.”

  “Don’t, Yunah … ,” Inah says miserably. “Don’t start.” Loosening her arms around me, she pulls away.

  “Are you really going to be okay?” I manage to ask. Inah nods and turns her head away. “Promise me just one thing. Please!” Inah looks up, searching my eyes. I know what she thinks, but I won’t make her promise such a thing; it’s too hideous. “Get an email address, so I can write to you?” Inah’s face breaks into a wan smile. I pull out the envelope and quickly push it into the open palm of Inah’s unsuspecting hand, dangling at her side. In the morning at the hotel, I slipped the letter I wrote in Florence into the envelope. Inah angrily protests to my back as I board the train.

  Completely exhausted and drained, I sink into a seat by the window and close my eyes, crushing the lids tight. I just can’t bear to look out the window and see her walk away. Alone. So many people in the world but always alone…. Keeping my eyes shut, I wait and wait. Fighting the urge to look out.

  I don’t know how much time has passed. Startled at the rapping sound on the window, I open my eyes. It’s Inah. Outside the smudged train window. Standing on the sunblasted platform, looking like a cutout figure with phosphorous edges. Has she been standing there all the time? Inah lifts her hand, shielding her squinting eyes from the sun, trying to see. Her scarred face looks puffy and sallow, like an old oiled-paper.

  “Inah?! Why are you still here?” I shout through the smudged window. “Go! Go! I told you not to wait!” I point toward the Termini exit and wave her away with my hand. Inah nods but doesn’t move. She says something and smiles, pulling her scarred mouth in a crooked angle. Inah then lifts her hand that has been shielding her eyes and waves like a child. She hesitates, uncertain if I saw her, and then she finally turns around, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. Inah, you babo, fool, don’t cry. Through the tremor of tears, Inah slowly turns into a blurry figure. How small and lost and defenseless she looks. Then I don’t see her anymore. She’s gone. I cry like nuts.

  A middle-aged French couple come and take the seat across from me. I am grateful that they aren’t Americans from my confession-crazed, bare-it-all, shame-as-fame, talk-show-bazaar country. They would want to know if I am all right, offer me a wad of Kleenex and try to comfort me. Instead, they go on talking in their snorting, guttural language. As if it were exactly what they expected to see on the train to the airport. One more foolish girl crying her heart out over a short-lived romance in Rome. The train lurches forward.

  I keep my swollen eyes to the window. A mirror to the world. The gray, hazy sky stretches like a tarpaulin over the outskirts of Rome. It is strangely satisfying to see that even Rome is not immune to ugliness and urban blight. The apartment buildings, gloomy, paint-slapped cement boxes with graffiti on the walls, remind me of home. For a moment, I am almost giddy with the fact that I am going home.

  I hope one day Inah, too, will feel just as giddy and grateful to be coming home—home, to which we are all tethered by an invisible thread called love. I know she will, for we never forget where we come from. By then she will have realized how much we love her, everything of her. In our own deficient, even self-serving ways, but as best as we know how. Only then will she return. Hungry for that bone-deep and suffocating love.

  How I would like Inah then to have a home that she can call her own. A place she can return to at the end of a day, to rest and to refresh and to recuperate. Where at night, she can shut the windows, turn off the lights and go to bed, and in the morning, wake up and open them again. I will then get a print of the Horace Pippin painting of the Victorian living room she loves—with the armchairs draped with antimacassars, a round table with a vase flowing with flowers and curtain-pulled windows framing tree branches and wisps of clouds outside—and hang it up on her living-room wall. And when spring comes to Flushing, we will go back and go for a walk again with Dad. Down Ash, past the Chinese house on Syringa Place and down the blossoming Cherry. Just as we used to do the first spring on Ash Avenue. Mom will take out the pale green celadon plate she brought back from Korea the summer Grandma died, and wait for us at home with peeled and sliced apples arranged on it like flowers.

  But take your time, Inah. Everything can wait. For everything changes and heals and fades away over time. For time, which we measure by seconds and minutes and days and months, and distance, by yards and miles, are only imaginary obstacles. In our minds, we overcome all distances and time. I will always be there with you: a constant companion. You won’t be alone. Remember what Colette said: “ … a woman can never die of grief … she grows supple in the practice of suffering and dissimulation….”

  So go wherever your heart leads you. Go and gaze at the turquoise Mediterranean Sea. Roam Greek islands and watch sunlight play magic on white, geometric buildings. You have already walked the thronged, chaotic streets of Calcutta and gazed up at the immense night sky over Rajasthan and sat under the bo tree. You have immersed yourself in beauty, poverty, ugliness, richness and loneliness, and yet you’re not healed. So if you must, lose every boundary. If necessary, forget everything. Every language, even Korean, the language full of an untranslatable trove of words to express love, joy, anger, sorrow and pain. You can even invent a new one to express them.

  Don’t come back until you are aching with longing. By then, you will have lived all those feelings and emotions a thousand times over. You will come home, not wiser or happier, bu
t at least with a little bit of peace in you. Until then, try to hold on.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My deep gratitude and thanks go to Judith Curr, the publisher of Atria, for her warm and kind support; Suzanne O’Neill, my wonderful editor, for her wisdom and tireless work; and Joanne Wang, my superb agent, for her indefatigable efforts. And many thanks to Charles Palella, Barney Rosset and Astrid Myers for their discerning eyes, and the Tuesday pool nights; and Lewis Frumkes, the director of the Writing Center at Marymount Manhattan College for the support he gave me, beginning with my first book. I am also forever indebted to my great teacher, Cynthia Ozick. And I am truly grateful to my family in Korea and America for their nurturing love and unending faith.

  Finally, Jennifer, wherever you are, I hope you are happy. Thanks for giving me the first inspiration for this book.