by Mary Gordon
“Tomorrow, I have to go to Alitalia. My husband’s arranged an upgrade for me for the way home. He’s very good at things like that.”
Tuesday, October 9
THE VIA VENETO, THE PIAZZA BARBERINI
“I Wanted to Make Some Kind of Mark”
Her business with Alitalia is completed more easily than she had thought; the beautifully coiffed, beautifully made-up girls behind the counter are breathtakingly efficient. She knows she mustn’t call them girls, although they are, however competent, the age of her sons. They could be her daughters, the lack of which, when she sees a certain kind of young woman, particularly a competent and lovely one, she continues to mourn.
“Let’s walk up the Via Veneto,” he says. “Remember when we went into the city to see La Dolce Vita at the Thalia?”
“Oh,” she says, “we thought we were glamorous, didn’t we, sitting in the Thalia holding hands. Pretending we didn’t just get off a suburban train. They seemed so wonderful. Those Europeans who were truly glamorous in a way that we could never be, who, however glamorous we thought we were, would always be more glamorous. It seemed a real, an important category. Glamour. The glamorous. We were as susceptible to it as secretaries buying movie magazines, but we thought we were better because our categories were European. European glamour. Now I can’t even imagine that it would be important, or that it once was. Anouk Aimée driving at night in sunglasses. Why did we think that was so marvelous? It was pretty stupid, not to say insane. But she did look great.”
She thinks it’s all right to invoke the past this way; she can think of it as describing the behavior of a cohort rather than the behavior of Adam and Miranda as teenagers in love. The threat of intimacy has been bleached, dipped in the vat of the general.
“I watched the movie again, recently,” he says. “It didn’t age well. It seemed pretentious. All those people trying to be daring, trying to be wicked, like good children thinking they’re bad when they can’t even imagine what real badness would be like. What followed, in the way of rebellion, made their efforts look absurd. That made me sad, for myself, and for all the things that don’t stand the test of time but were, for some little time, important. Like this street, the Via Veneto. This street used to be considered important, the important place to be if you wanted to meet important people. Now it’s just a place for rich tourists who don’t know where they’re really supposed to be. But I’m still fond of it. Walking down this hill, passing these great hotels where probably only rich Japanese stay now. But I still feel the presence of the glamorous ghosts. I can imagine them happy here, in spite of everything, enjoying the lines of the buildings and the generous old trees.”
“Oh God,” she says, “there’s that horrible church, with the crypt we went into because that weird guy told us we should.”
“What was his name?”
“Dudley. Or Bentley … how did we know him?”
“I think he was a friend of Beverly’s.”
She doesn’t want to say: Well, of course.
“It was the first thing he wanted to see in Rome,” Adam says. “The Capuchin church with the crypt where the monks had taken the bones of their dead brothers and made things of them. Arches made of bones, light fixtures, working light fixtures, sockets with lightbulbs in them that were real sockets from pelvises. Bone filigrees and flowers. And then some skeletons in their monks’ habits.”
“I hated it. And I remember he said, ‘But aren’t they doing what all art does? Making something of death, something to be looked at, enjoyed. Only they’re a little more literal. But isn’t that just a kind of radical honesty?’ ”
“I remember how angry you got. And the angrier you got, the cooler, the more ironic, he became. You walked away, and left me to deal with him. I remember what you said, ‘Death is not a metaphor. It is real. The dead are not material. They had their lives. They should be honored.’ ”
“I remember he laughed at my use of the word ‘honor.’ I didn’t hit him, did I? I know I wanted to.”
“No, you just walked away. Leaving me to deal with him and his weirdo ideas.”
“I think I went just here, just where we are now, to the Triton Fountain and wet my handkerchief and cooled my face. I loved that fountain! They were my favorite thing about Rome, the fountains. Now of course I worry about the waste of water.”
“Is it waste? It seems to have been going on for a long time. I think the Romans have no shortage of water.”
“Yes, it’s been going on for a long time, but once it was really practical. People needed those fountains for water to drink and wash from. Now they’re merely ornamental.”
It occurs to him that in all the time he has been in Rome he has never once worried about the waste of water implied in his beloved fountains. And the fact that she does marks between them a very great difference. He doesn’t like what she’s making him feel; her concern seems willed, dishonest, and she is spoiling his pleasure for an idea he doesn’t think she can really believe in.
They risk their lives crossing the Piazza Barberini to stand by the fountain. The sun is at its height; they shield their eyes, but even so they look away, down to the ground from time to time, to rest them.
“Neptune, the sea god,” she says, looking up, continuing to shield her eyes from the sun. Refreshing, she thinks, refreshed, the sun is never a problem for Neptune; he’s always cooled by the water. Then she notices that in fact he isn’t drinking from the shell at his lips, but blowing into it: he’s making music. And the music, made of water, falls back down on him to refresh him again and again. She notices, too, that his hair, drenched, falls down his back stick straight, and this is unusual; usually the gods are curly headed. If she were in Berkeley, she thinks, someone would be making a point of that, a political point. Was Bernini trying to suggest a primitivism, is it an acknowledgment of the aboriginal presence destroyed by colonialism? That is the kind of thing people in Berkeley would say. And although she loves her home, she’s glad to be away from it.
Surrounding the god is a circle of dolphins. She wants to say—why is she so defensive—On one vacation my sons and I went to a place in Hawaii where you can swim with dolphins. Real dolphins, she wants to say, not stone ones. She dips her hand in the cooling water; she doesn’t want to be unpleasant. Or she does and doesn’t like it in herself; hopes she can keep it hidden; hopes she can keep from saying what she feels. To say what you feel, she’s learned, is a luxury; you can only afford it if you’ve built up a balance of trust. She didn’t know it when she was young, but she knows it now. It’s often better not to say what you feel.
They walk uphill on the Via Barberini. He points to a statue in an arch, flanked by two other statues. “This is meant to be Moses,” he says. “It’s a failure, obviously, but the artist’s failure was unusually public. It’s called the Acqua Felice. The ‘happy water.’ The pope, who was actually a peasant, commissioned it as a monument to himself, but he thought calling it the Acqua Felice rather than naming it after himself was a sign of modesty. Moses is holding the tablets, except that he shouldn’t have been given them yet when he brought the water into the desert, which is what is supposed to be commemorated. The proportions as you can see are all wrong. He’s stocky, like an overage, out-of-shape wrestler.”
He is doing it now, the kind of talking she dislikes in foreign cities: the tone of the tourist guide has entered, the art historian. She always dislikes commentary on the beautiful. What can you say—after you say, Oh yes, that’s wonderful—that isn’t diminishing, that isn’t more about you and your wanting to be praised than it is about the beautiful thing you’ve seen. Language, she thinks, should at such moments be banned. Pointing can be allowed: nodding, gestures with the chin. Perhaps jumping up and down. But words, she thinks: People should be fined for speaking in the face of something beautiful.
His words have made her mind shut down, like one of those metal shutters storekeepers pull down here at closing time. She remembers that he alw
ays had that potential; sometimes when he talked to her about music, she couldn’t listen. His attention to the formal details leached the pleasure for her. She calls up an old resentment: he had stolen music from her. She had loved to sing; their first encounter was about her singing. But after she took up with him, she didn’t sing again. Believing anything she could do with music would be, compared with what he did, inferior and false. So now she wants to pull him down from the false heights of his aesthetic pedestal.
She moves closer to the statue of Moses. “Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz,” she says. “And why the horns? They make him somehow more lovable or approachable than Moses usually seems.”
“I suppose if you look at it like that, it’s amusing.”
“But you don’t want to be amused.”
“No, it disturbs me. I think it’s a mess. Some historians say the statue’s a mess because the funds were cut at the last minute, or because the sculptor was rushed. That it wasn’t his fault. But I think it was his fault, because he allowed something to be presented that should not have been presented. People said he was trying to be Michelangelo, which he had no right even to consider, because he was nothing but a hack. The statue became a laughingstock. He killed himself from shame.”
“What a terrible thing,” Miranda says. “It’s understandable, but that doesn’t make it less terrible. You want to grab him by the shoulders and say, ‘It’s not worth your life.’ ”
“What is, then, worth a life?”
“Nothing.”
“I won’t accept that. Then we’re only animals, living to survive.”
“I can see giving up your own life to save the life of another person, certainly your own child. But for a statue, an unliving thing. No.”
“I’m not sure. Isn’t it possible to no longer want to live because your work is a failure? If you’ve lived for your work, which is not, I think, the worst thing to live for. In our fantasies about the artist’s life we never include the reality that most art that is made is a failure. We believe that it’s important to leave a mark, but it doesn’t occur to us that it might be a bad mark, undistinguished or corrupt, a mark that would be better unleft. There’s no need even for mediocre art, to say nothing of bad art. Whereas in your field to be adequate is OK; it’s better to do an adequate job than to leave the job completely undone.”
“You know nothing about what I do,” she says, wondering when he became so rigid, so punitive. Should she take the time to educate him, or allow this to be one more thing she holds against him, one more grievance she can keep, like a stone inside her shoe.
“Mediocre work of the kind I do, of the kind people like me do, could lead to sickness and death. Real death, not just an unfortunate aesthetic moment. Nevertheless, I repeat what I said: a failure of proportion in stone is not something that should lead to death.”
She knows he hasn’t heard her. Or has chosen not to. Because she understands that he’s not really talking about the statue of Moses, about Michelangelo and the Renaissance popes and the suicidal sculptor. He’s talking about himself. He’s describing his life out loud. He wants her to know something: that he has given something up. But does he want her to know it, or does he want to know it himself? She doesn’t know whom his words are meant for. But she understands the sorrow behind the words, and like the sharp rattle of the lifting shutters, indicating morning on the Roman streets, some signal has been heard. Something has lifted in her, something has opened up.
“But what is it,” he says, to her, to someone else, she thinks, to no one, “this impulse to make a mark?”
He wants her to talk about this with him; he wants her to say something about his life. That it is all right, the way that he has lived it. Something has lifted, but not entirely. To give him what he wants, that understanding, would require a giving over of an old grievance. And she isn’t ready for that yet.
He takes her into Santa Maria della Vittoria, a church that in its overembellishment does not please her. Gold and marble: the materials of wealth and power. Everything she has devoted her life to being against. Why would he think this is something she would like? But then, why would he know what she would like? They haven’t seen each other for nearly forty years.
He leads her to the front left side, to Bernini’s Saint Teresa. “Is this not worth it?” he asks.
“Worth what?”
“A life.”
“It’s not a question I have to consider. Which is why I live as I do.”
He sees that she’s unmoved. He is angry with himself: he knows this isn’t the kind of thing she likes. Her taste always retained something of the American Puritan: she liked bare hills, slate skies, pastures fenced with stones. He should have led her up to this; taken her first to something plainer, more austere.
Her resistance angers him. This is his favorite place on earth, and he won’t allow her to spoil it for him. He wants to say: This is greatness, this richness, this celebration of life, the gold rays, the flow of the fabric, what is done with marble that seems so light it can’t be stone, her abandonment, the sharpness of the golden arrow, the sweetness of the angel’s face. But he thinks it’s better to say nothing.
She wants to say, She’s having an orgasm. But she won’t. She focuses on the entirely relaxed foot, surrounded by plain air, the only plainness in the room.
“I like the pleased face of the angel,” she says. “But those guys on the balcony looking on: what creeps.”
“Just looking on, the donor’s family leaving no mark. Bernini’s life left a mark. He won’t be forgotten. Do you really mean that it doesn’t matter to you whether your work will be known after you die?”
“I never imagined it would. I just wanted to do something that would help people.”
“I wanted to make some kind of mark. For a time I thought I would. That my work would be remembered. That I would move something forward, maybe a quarter of an inch, and people for whom music was important would know. Is it really true that you never had such thoughts?”
So I was right, she thinks to herself with a grim pride. He is talking about himself. His acknowledgment of it softens her; perhaps she can begin to be a little kind.
“Never. Your life has been harder than mine.”
“Yes, I think it has.”
She’d like to say, I’m sorry, but she doesn’t think they know each other well enough for that. Not after all this time. Not yet.
“My Lucy, my daughter, is in for the same kind of difficult life. Trying for the perfection of a form, knowing perfection is impossible but trying, exhausting herself, over and over. Is that my doing?” He leans on the marble rail that keeps Saint Teresa from her onlookers.
“It’s a form of narcissism to think of that. We can’t take the credit for our children. We can, I suppose, take blame.”
“Your children, what do they want for their lives?”
She looks at the sculpture that she thinks her children will probably never see because they will have no impulse to. She knows that he would think her children “mediocre,” uninterested in perfection. They want to be happy. They want in some way to change the world, but their ideas are vague and connected to their ideas of personal happiness. They want justice. They care deeply about the fate of the earth. But whatever they want … well, she knows they don’t want it enough to interfere with the enjoyment of their lives. And the fate of art … this means, she knows, exactly nothing to them. She erases, as soon as it appears, the impulse to feel disappointment in her children. That, she has always believed, can only be destructive. It is something she will not allow.
His daughter, Lucy, is studying the violin with a master teacher. Her Benjamin is in Nepal, hoping to make a documentary film about the Tibetans. Jeremy is working for a foundation that is trying to teach environmental consciousness to inner-city children. He says he is thinking of law school, but he has made no moves in that direction. She knows that if she says these things to Adam, he will pretend to think it
’s fine. But he will think that Lucy has chosen the better part. So she only gives the barest outlines of their plans, suggesting that their fates are more fixed than they are.
“Their lives sound much more open than Lucy’s.”
Does he mean this, or is he condescending? No one speaks about the vanity of parents, that it is almost impossible to hear even the slightest criticism of your children without the impulse to take a knife to the speaker’s heart. She will give him the benefit of the doubt: that he is speaking out of his worry for his daughter.
“But I know you wake up every morning grateful for your daughter’s gift.”
“Yes. Yes and no. I worry for her. What she’s already given up. What she will have to give up. What might not come to fruition. Serious music is growing less and less central to what’s considered important in the world. And yes, I think, unless people like Lucy lead a certain kind of life, give up a certain kind of life, a certain way of living, the world will be poorer. So she is, in a way, a sacrificial lamb.”
“A sacrifice to an ideal of greatness.”
“To a possibility.”
“And if she decides it’s not for her?”
“Then she decides,” he says, bowing his head toward the marble woman, concentrating, though Miranda doesn’t know it, on the relaxed and undemanding foot.
Wednesday, October 10
THE VILLA BORGHESE
“What Have We Given Up for an Ideal of Health?”
She has a meeting that begins, unusually, at ten o’clock; they agree to meet for a short, early morning walk.
The day before had been a disappointment to the both of them; each had found the other wanting; both telephoned their spouses, flush with the pleasure of being able to speak critically, yet truthfully: to make the point that really, there was no danger. “I had forgotten what a pedant he could be,” she told her husband. “What did we do in the days before we could invoke the term ‘politically correct’?” he asked his wife.