We’ll both laugh. Inside, of course, I won’t be laughing.
I’ve been thinking a lot about artists who have been battered by the world but still managed to create, like Munch or Van Gogh. Sometimes the strain was too great. You’d think that having created even one jewel such as the church of Sant’ Ivo, Borromini would have felt safe, embodied forever in stone that seemed to dance around you as you stood inside. But he not only killed himself, he did it painfully, punishingly. Perhaps he thought of it as art, the sword he used, a ceremonial blade that would have pleased a Samurai warrior. Of course there is the art of living too, and man must choose, as Yeats so eloquently pointed out, perfection of the life or of the work. A blade in the gut perfects neither one.
Yeats insisted on keeping his journals natural, not honing them or imposing a structure, just following his thoughts. He insisted on not even linking them for fear of surrendering to literature, when what he wanted was casual thoughts, an expression of his life. Isn’t that what I want too? Whatever life is left to me.
Yesterday, Hannah brought home a new biography of the great painter Arshile Gorky, written by an Armenian compatriot of his. I wasn’t up to doing more than flipping through it, but I got the impression that the author was making an elaborate plea for the importance of Gorky’s Armenian heritage. Funny how when he was alive and poor his American patrons—friends of my friend Lucian—had to beg the museums to take a painting as a gift. Can you believe that in his lifetime only nine paintings were sold! And now that he’s dead everyone wants to claim him. Poor man. But God, the paintings are beautiful. And after his last show, when that self-important critic Clement Greenberg gave him suggestions for improving his technique, only one sold. No wonder he was depressed. How would I fare with a colostomy? A broken neck, a prostate operation, my work destroyed in a fire? Badly, I think, though no one knows ahead of time just how much he can stand before he breaks. Perhaps the worst thing was that Gorky’s wife retreated to her parents’ home in Maine when he was at his worst, leaving him with his despair.
I came here to help Hannah after her heart attack but now I’d be lost without her. Lost. Dead in a month.
Towards the end Gorky needed his wife—Mougouch, as he called her—to be with him around the clock. If she was gone even for an hour his anxiety would drive him to the point of insanity. I shudder reading this. I sometimes have anxiety attacks in the middle of the night, but they can be quelled by moving closer to Hannah, sniffing her, reassured by the warmth radiating from her skin like a young animal. If she was out and I wasn’t sure she’d come back, how excruciating that would be. Even if she is five minutes late coming back from a lunch date, I have to struggle with my fears. What if she’s had another heart attack and is even now being rushed by ambulance to the hospital? I can soothe that worry by remembering she has a cell phone with my number. Someone would call me. But what if I had cause to think that she was meeting another man, someone I knew well? Luckily we are old and even at my worst I can’t imagine it, but Gorky was still young, and his wife was very beautiful. Besides, hadn’t she told him about her weekend with Matta?
My mother didn’t have betrayal as an excuse. My father adored her. But that’s the thing about losing control of your thoughts. They proliferate inside your skull, sending out tendrils everywhere. Time changes into something murky, like mud. You have to swim through muck and you can’t, and no one is there to help you so you load your pockets with stones and go down to the river.
I don’t think that could ever happen to me. I’ve been inoculated against suicide. But other things frighten me. Becoming a fool, a Punch in a Punch-and-Judy show. At the gym under the Spanish steps—Hannah arranged for a taxi to pick me up twice a week—something upsetting happened. There was another old man who was mumbling to himself as he dressed. I couldn’t really make out what he was saying but I was struck by his clothes. They looked like Armani sport clothes. Very trendy and too tight for his thighs. He could barely squeeze into them. A few minutes after he left, they made an announcement asking people to cover up, and soon his wife came into the locker room to search for his clothes because in the early stages of a memory disease, he had taken someone else’s. His wife was mortified and could hardly hold her head up. You know how important the bella figura is in Italy.
I would hate for Hannah to be humiliated by my behavior if I start to lose it. I see old people on the street sometimes, laughing or singing, happily freed of their inhibitions. There are stories about an uncle of mine who moved to New York with his family, running away from his Park Avenue apartment and skipping down the street. He always ended up at Bloomingdale’s bargain basement, happily stroking the fabrics on the ladies’ lingerie table.
The days before he died, Gorky was manic. He walked the streets in Greenwich Village, yowling, calling friends out of bed to help him escape his loneliness. A few months before that, he’d broken his collarbone and fractured two vertebrae in a horrific car accident. The treatment involved painful traction—foretelling the noose? He told the nurse that he felt like an onion peeled down to the core. Feeling even the trembling of a leaf. His wife wrote to Wolf and Ethel Schwabacher, Gorky’s most devoted patrons, saying he needed a place to live that was his own. The uncertainty about his wife was killing him.
Somehow as I was reading, I felt tears trickling down my face. I wiped them away but more came. Gorky was so afraid. He needed a home as much as he needed his wife. I was suddenly transported back to our house in Rome in the gardens of the Villa Borghese. The ambulance men dressed in blue smocks were carrying my mother away on a stretcher.
“Quickly. Fai presto,” I heard one say: “hurry.” For some reason he was carrying an axe.
I sat with my brother on the piano bench and watched as though it were happening to someone else. The way you’d look at a movie. Inside me nothing moved. It was too unbelievable to take in.
Later, I heard them talking in the villa’s kitchen, the cook and someone else talking about who might take me in if my mother died.
My tears come faster and I put my fingers up to feel them, hot against my hands. I remember now how I stood trembling beside her hospital bed. Was it the hospital on Via Ripetta? Or San Giovanni? No, that’s where they took Hannah after her heart attack. When she couldn’t talk for almost a week. She hardly speaks of it but I know she never likes to be far away from help. I don’t know where they took my mother, but I remember now how I stood beside her bed in intensive care and begged her to wake up.
“Please. I need you,” I said. “Please.” There were tubes in her everywhere.
I go on reading about Gorky. How he was almost insane with rage at his wife for betraying him with Matta, for leaving him just when he needed her most. He called his friends one by one, hinting that he was going to do something, asking obscurely for help.
His friends waited too long, his biographer tells us, they strolled through the house looking for him. Seeing a rope in the barn and another in the garden. Finally, hearing a dog bark, they found him in a shed hanging from a rafter, his neck free of the brace. His feet almost touching the floor. A foot away he had written a few words with white chalk. “Goodbye, my loves.” Amazing: I never cry, but now I cry harder, as though all the tears stored up since my boyhood are pouring out.
“I need you,” I heard myself saying to my mother. How could you do this when I was so young? How could you force me to witness you with your bruised eyelids like wilted violets shutting you away from me. I had forgotten until now that one fearful moment when I touched the oxygen tube, so angry that I was tempted to pull off all the wires.
The nurse who had been watching me came nearer.
“Best not to touch your mother now,” she said putting her hand on my shoulder.
I guess after that I went dead inside. I certainly stopped crying. I didn’t cry at the funeral, still angry, wanting to punish her by my stony silence.
The sunset tonight took me by surprise. It turned the sky into a furnace,
a refining fire of orange and rose banded by purple clouds. It offered me something delicious, like a mother offering a taste of some special food to a child—raspberry ice, or coffee-colored caramel, or toffee. Suddenly I remember how my mother sometimes set up taffy pulls for my birthday. Because my brother and I were both Leos, she insisted we share a party. It annoyed him to have my friends and me in the same space, but I was in heaven.
I remember when I was showing off to a little girlfriend, I grabbed the taffy while it was still hot and scorched my fingers. I didn’t stop though and we—her name was Chiara—pulled and pulled, twisting it into fanciful shapes as it got thinner and lighter. Unlike the sunset colors, it didn’t disappear. It made good on its promise, only melting away when it was safely in my mouth. Looking back, I am struck by how normal Mother looked, just like other mothers I knew, and so beautiful in her hat with the violets. But I’m not complaining. I’m glad to have the image of her laughing and licking her fingers. It’s as if the horrible images of her unconscious in the hospital slipped aside for an instant and let it through.
Hannah got me an audio book. I’ve never listened to books on tape, so this is new to me. At first the voice doesn’t seem quite right for the words, but after a while I get used to it. Hannah chose the book on a whim because of the title: Crying at the Movies. The book about the author’s experience of the death of her father. She had not cried when he drowned or at the funeral or afterwards. Then suddenly one day she found herself crying at a movie—House of Cards—where a character experiences a loss but can’t speak about it. The book was eloquently written, no doubt about it, and the force of the voice magnified the effect. But after a while I began to be angry with the author for her self-indulgence. I mean, she certainly wasn’t alone in losing a parent at a young age and having no one to talk to about it.
“Other people have fits of depression, too,” I say to the voice on the audio book. “Don’t take yourself so seriously. Moods go up and down.”
I laugh a bitter cackle. Fine thing for me to be telling someone else to perk up. I turn off the audio and go to the kitchen, looking for Hannah. I peer at her dolefully, feeling as if a black hole is expanding inside me, sucking the colors of life away. I can see at a glance that she is preoccupied, probably over that rift with the director who wanted to do a treatment of her last book—the one about the young survivor whose cousin, sent to welcome her into their family, initiates a torrid romance by raping her! I think it is one of her most powerful, cutting close to the bone. In any case, she’s in no mood to baby me and I don’t blame her. I think I am becoming younger every day now, like Benjamin Button. It’s hard even to remember how I cared for Hannah in the early days, comforted her, taught her, surrounded her with love.
I feel myself diminishing more and more now. It makes me want to feel whatever pain I’ve shoved down and put out of sight. I’ll never be like Hannah, who insists that life is sweet, but at least I’ll have experienced my despair before I give it up and just go around giggling at my own foolish jokes and patting the mink coats of ladies at the opera.
What grieves me most is that my body is turning against itself. My eyes, once bright instruments of seduction, are inflamed and tired. They need to be moisturized and heated to bring back circulation. Soon there will be no circulation. The cells of my gums are turning against each other. Instead of eating other creatures, they are eating their brothers. Even my teeth are being hollowed out from within. My gut gives me constant low-level signals of distress. My prostate doesn’t bear thinking about.
“You know darling, you are getting to be a bit of a bore,” Hannah says.
“It’s mortality. Just think how awful it would be if people lived forever.”
A terrible thing has happened. Our neighbor’s brother and sister-in-law have been killed in a car accident, leaving a seven-year-old boy. There are no other relatives—both sets of grandparents are dead, so our neighbor, whose name escapes me at the moment, has taken him in. When I was on the terrace throwing some bread crumbs to the gulls—Italian baguettes don’t crumble well, they’re too crusty—I sensed movement on the adjoining terrace and saw a little face, lit by extraordinarily blue eyes, peering through the lattice separating our terraces.
“Would you like to come visit and help me feed the seagulls?” I asked him. He nodded, mute, and I unlocked the lattice gate. Something about his face as he ran to look over the terrace wall at the gulls reminded me of Giulietta Masina when she studies the bug on a leaf by the road after she has lost everything. His face was begging to be surprised by life.
“I have a new mommy now,” he says, as though it is the most natural thing in the world.
“Maybe you should have asked her if it was okay to come over,” I say, half to myself. He shakes his head. “She said it would be good for me to go outside and get some sun. Sunshine has a lot of vitamins in it. It’s not like going into a bathroom.”
I must have looked puzzled because he added. “You can only go with a relative, boys with boys, girls with girls. It’s a very important rule.” He had a book tucked under his arm and he leaned down and put it carefully on the wooden table next to the sofa. It was an Italian translation of one of the Oz books. Then he looked at me to see if it was all right to stand on the sofa. It had big white cushions. “Don’t worry. It’s all washable,” I told him. He had to stand on the sofa bench to see over the terrace wall.
I am always frightened when children get near the edge of things. Imagining cliffs crumbling or little bodies slipping between guard rails. Maybe in the end that’s why I didn’t have children. With my anxieties and Hannah’s memories of unspeakable violence, our child would have been a nervous wreck.
The roof where the gulls are practicing for flight is about fifteen feet below us and it’s slanted, so if you fell you’d probably roll right off onto Corso Vittorio. Sometimes the wind takes the young birds near the edge.
“What’s your name?” I ask him.
“Roberto,” he says. I put my arm around his waist, taking no chances on his losing his balance, with the other hand I give him some bread and table scraps. “Don’t throw it all at once” I tell him but he isn’t listening and is clearly enjoying himself. He really is the most beautiful child, with his golden hair and rosebud mouth.
“Where do they go when it rains?” he asks. The three small birds are huddled together next to the chimney where one of their parents stands guard.
“You see those tiles down there, next to the wall with what looks like hay or straw next to it? They cuddle up there. When they were smaller they slept under their mother’s wing.”
I stopped. Why did I have to bring up mothers? It seemed like the idea was on the tip of my tongue, ready to roll off. He didn’t say anything but I’m sure he was thinking: what if they didn’t have a mother? I felt a moment’s anger at the young signora next door. Why didn’t she invite the boy to do something with her? Was he just supposed to sit outside and sun himself or play jacks with the little ball I saw in his pocket? Ah well, she had her baby to think of.
I went in to get some more bread and we continued in companionable silence. After we finished he noticed some tiny red spiders running along his arm.
“They won’t hurt you,” I told him, but he was methodically squashing them. They left tiny points of red on his jacket. He looked up at me to see if I approved. I grunted, softly noncommittal. “They are a bit of a nuisance,” I said.
Were I a Kleinian psychoanalyst, I’d have asked him if he was imagining the crash that killed his parents, expressing his anger, or covering himself with blood-like stains, participating in their fate. But he didn’t need to tell me that or anything else. Several of the red spiders were crawling up his leg. He was wearing shorts and his leg was very white and shapely. I thought of Thomas’s Mann’s hero, Gustav Von Aschenbach, in Death in Venice, and how he is completely undone by a boy’s beauty. In my case, seeing the boy’s youthful beauty doesn’t make me want to disguise my age by dying
my white hair black and patting my face with makeup, and of course I know there is a vast difference between a boy of six or seven and an adolescent. Just as there is a vast difference between a man in his fifties, like Mann’s hero, and a man of eighty-eight like me.
Roberto tires of squashing spiders and goes over to look at the wall fountain. “May I turn it on?” he asks, and when I show him the switch, he pulls it with pleasure and then holds his hands in the flow, rinsing them clean. Soon after that his new mommy calls him for merènda, the mid-morning snack, and I am left thinking of what he has given me in that short time. For at least an hour I have felt not young but ageless, my body simply a container, a shell that enables my “me” to interact with beauty. Nothing hurt me while the boy was here. Is pleasure the best antidote for pain? I’ll have to make a list of pleasurable things. See more art shows, cuddle more with Hannah. But mainly I think there needs to be a change in attitude, though I’m not sure exactly what that implies. Perhaps a coming to terms with death. I look at a small white flower in the pot that Erminia brought me from the country. When I sit very quietly looking at it, the petals seem to exude a milky light.
Some time after that, I am sitting on the terrace, trying out the new eye drops my doctor has given me. Artificial tears. “It saves me the trouble of crying,” I tell Hannah. But really my eyes feel a lot better. I like to look over the terrace wall into the windows of all the apartments gathered around the palazzo’s stone courtyard. I also look at the terraces to see how their roof gardens are doing. Ours is by far the most beautiful with its olive tree, ferns, cacti, and oleander, with purple passionflowers climbing on strings above the doorway, making a shaded place when the sun is too strong. My favorite roof garden is at our level and every morning around nine, a woman comes out to it and takes the hood off a canary cage, and the canary, a splash of lemon yellow, bursts into glorious song.
At the same time, I hear the boy’s high-pitched voice on the next terrace and, peering through the lattice, I can see his head moving along under the laundry hung up to dry. He is talking to the young signora, his voice full of polite respect for the grown-up. After a minute or so, he puts his head against the lattice.
After Auschwitz: A Love Story Page 9