The life they led together was outwardly mild, except for a series of peculiar accidents. Getting up from a chair in the living room one afternoon, Caroline lacerated the cornea of her right eye on a leaf of an avocado plant Ivan had grown from the pit. Gasping in pain, she asked a neighbor to drive her to the emergency room of the hospital. The eye healed, but she said his putting the plant so close to the chair was a deliberate risk. He was sorry it happened, but said the inference was absurd. A while later a small fire downstairs destroyed some notes for his book on the phases of Roman architecture. She must have left a cigarette burning, said Ivan. She was sure she hadn’t; it was faulty wiring in the old house. Even the firemen agreed. But Ivan persisted in feeling she had destroyed his book. He had worked on it fitfully for almost seven years, Caroline reminded him; it was not she who had aborted it. Anyhow, he should have kept the notes upstairs in his private study. Ivan raised the seat on her bicycle, using it when his own was broken, and forgot to lower it. Caroline fell, sprained her ankle and walked with a cane for two weeks. Soon after, she used his razor on her legs and left the blade on the rim of the sink. Groping the next morning without his lenses, he sliced a finger. It looked very suspicious, she thought, but they were accidents.
Once more she realized that Ivan, besides being intelligent, was prescient: you can have sex with anyone. Twice with a persuasive French professor, who plied her with home-baked brioches, and many times with her most brilliant graduate student, Mark. Mark was an amiable young man, unexceptional aside from his mathematical wizardry. Sex was not the best part of their affair, at least for Caroline. The best part was relief at being with someone who did not know her so well. He thought he knew her, but young and lacking the imagination of Ivan, he had no idea of all there was to know. She talked to him about her work, which Ivan did not understand, about the vanishing thread in the Minotaur’s cave that she still pursued. Late afternoons they sat together on his bed with multicolored pencils and paper, drawing pictures and making conjectures. They were working on a new knot invariant and constructing covering spaces. Mark was a wonderful find: he had flights of algebraic genius, while her flights were geometric. They complemented each other, and together they wrote a paper. She insisted he get top billing, and deliver it at the next conference.
The worst part of their affair was her getting pregnant. Mark arranged for the abortion locally—students knew all about such things—and she paid. There was no question; she cut off at the root any tenderness she might feel for it. This was no child of love, but an unwanted excrescence, like a fungus, to be scraped off her inner walls. Without any anesthesia, she felt her pain as a scraping that made an excruciating sound, like fingernails scraping frost off a window. The pain helped, recalling the pain of the other bizarre accidents, and yanking this one into that orbit of mutual injury, except this one could be caught before it harmed Ivan. There were some injuries too terrible to inflict. In topology, spaces might be infinitely twisted, tugged and pushed, provided that no shapes were snapped in two, or poked with holes, or forced inside out. That was the contract the mathematician accepted. She trusted Ivan would accept the same: no irreparable wounds. The underside of the marriage contract, in invisible ink. So she lied and told him she was going away to a two-day conference on manifold theory, and when he inquired on her return why she seemed so pale and wan, she said she had picked up a stomach virus that was going around.
She was easier with him after, and more companionable, and nearly forgave him for his assault, now that they were even. She could not forget how they had battled on the floor, but she dared to hope that someday she might recall it without shuddering, might even find a tenuous place for it in a large design, as yet invisible. Meanwhile, they spent time together like discreet old friends, avoiding difficult subjects. One evening she had a real stomach virus. Helpless, drained, her flesh like watery dough, she felt the way she imagined people feel when death is near. Her forehead throbbed, she was dizzy and she had just vomited in the bathroom.
Ivan helped her undress and spread the quilt over her gently. “Go to sleep now.”
“No.” She raised the pillows. “It will be better soon. I want to stay up. No, don’t go yet.” She caught his hand and pulled him down to sit near her on the bed. “Stay with me awhile. Talk to me. I feel so weak.”
She felt more than weak. She felt despair. She was afraid to be alone, afraid to think, for every thought became a pain that wound its way to the pounding center in her head.
“What shall we talk about?”
“I can’t talk. You talk. Anything. What did you do today? Tell me. Or tell me a story.”
He was silent for a while. When he spoke his voice penetrated, to diffuse warmth from inside her to her chilly skin. “Remember Lucca? Remember when we went to Lucca? We walked around and heard the music in the churches. It was your birthday, the festival of Sant’Anna. Remember?”
She nodded. She remembered. The words made her want to cry. In her weakness, they sounded beautiful, spoken like an incantation. She hadn’t expected anything beautiful. Tears might release the awful tightness in her head, but she didn’t want to cry while he was there. She pressed his hand.
“Remember we walked on the walls of the city?” Ivan said. “Stone walls encircling the city. It was raining, soft gray rain. The festival of Sant’Anna, your birthday. We walked on the walls in the rain. We saw Lucca. Remember? It was your birthday.”
“I remember,” she whispered. Saint Anne was the patron saint of pregnant women, a man in the tobacco shop had told her, while Ivan waited on the street. What was it like, a baby kicking around inside? Probably like the stomach cramps, an inner tormentor.
“Lucca.” He paused. His eyes were far away, seeing rain on the stone walls. “Are you crying, Caroline?”
“No. It’s nothing. I remember Lucca very well. I had forgotten.” She held his hand in hers, spread out his fingers and touched them, one by one. “Tell me some more about that trip.”
She was empty, waiting for him to fill her up, feed her with memories. He was silent again, then he laughed. “Remember Arezzo? There we were both sick. God, how sick we were.”
“We stayed in that little room for three days.”
“Yes. First I got sick and you took care of me, then we were both sick, then I got better and took care of you. We couldn’t eat anything. We just lay in bed and groaned.”
“We had them send up tea sometimes.”
“Yes. Remember how they looked at us? And the boy who brought up the tea? He wore knickers. They thought we were on our honeymoon. We didn’t leave the room for three days.”
“Finally we went out,” she said.
“Yes. You were embarrassed to pass by the desk.”
“We told them we’d been sick but they didn’t look like they believed us.”
“Then we walked, and we went to that restaurant up the hill and ate chicken soup with noodles. Our first meal.”
“I remember that,” Caroline said. “We pretended it was a feast.”
“Yes.” He held her hand in both of his and stroked it absent-mindedly. “Do you feel a little better now?”
She could tell he wanted to go back to his desk. “A little better. Tell me once more about Lucca, then I’ll let you go.”
“The second time around, you know, nothing sounds as good.”
“Just tell me.”
“Lucca. It was raining. A gray soft rain. We walked on the walls in the rain. It was your birthday, the festival of Sant’Anna. We held hands and walked. We heard the singing in the churches. Their voices—remember—were high and glorious, streaming upward, as if they could make the sun come out. You remember Lucca, Caroline, as well as I do.”
They could never part, she and Ivan. They were locked together, locked in the memory of Lucca. She let her hand fall out of his to the blanket.
He stood up and kissed her forehead, then turned out the light.
“No. Leave the light on.”
&nb
sp; “Don’t you want to sleep? You look so pale.”
“I may sleep. But leave it on. I don’t want the dark.”
“All right.” He turned the light on. “Call me if you need anything.”
Lucca was a dream. Shifting around carefully, Caroline found a position, lying on her side with a pillow propped near her stomach, that made her body feel no longer there, anesthetized.
Besides beautiful, he could still be funny, he could be gallant, he could be intriguing, if she would accept these gifts. On a Sunday in early spring he came up with an intriguing idea. They were having hero sandwiches and Chianti on a blanket spread on the small back lawn. Ivan’s daffodils had just sprung: the square of grass was rimmed with shimmering gold.
“If I play my cards right,” he said, “and work through the summer, I can arrange to have about six weeks off next fall.”
“That’s terrific. You could certainly use a long vacation. You work so hard.”
“I thought maybe we could take a trip.”
“But it’s right in the middle of the semester.”
“I thought we might go to Rome.”
“Rome!” She looked up. Her hand, raising a glass, stopped in midair. “Oh, I wish I could.”
“Do it, then. Take the semester off.”
“How can I? It’s not even two years. I’m not due for a sabbatical for ages.”
“Just take it without pay. Don’t ask them, tell them. Personal reasons.”
“They’re not keen on personal reasons.”
“Listen, you’ve made yourself practically indispensable there, especially with the tutoring program. They’re getting a bargain and they know it. Don’t worry, I know how these things work. I’ll tell you exactly how to go about it.”
He would. He knew how everything worked, and he would plan the perfect strategy for her. He should have gone into politics, only he was too reticent and would despise campaigning. “You really think…?” she said.
“Did I ever lead you astray?” With a cavalier flourish that recalled his younger self, he raised the straw-covered bottle.
“It’s too early to say,” she replied, holding out the wineglasses for him.
“Well, think about it, anyway.”
It was unlikely that they would fire her. With women making faint noises about professional inequities, it was an unpropitious time to let one go, especially one who could be outspoken and had credentials in so exotic a field as topology. The two graduate seminars could be deferred. As for the undergraduate courses—a stroke of genius: she would recommend Mark. It would lift his spirits—she had avoided him since the abortion—and it was safe. Mark was more than competent for the job, but not sufficiently entrenched to take it from her. Ah, she thought, drinking the wine, such fiendish tactics were not native to her. They had seeped in through Ivan.
“You have a devilish grin,” Ivan said. “What is it?”
“Just figuring,” she replied. “Just figuring. Oh, but we have hardly any money left. The house. How are we going to manage it?” They had recently bought the house. Ivan decided after a year and a half that it was foolish to keep paying rent; they should make an investment and build up equity.
“We’ll do it very cheaply.” He smiled. “Remember how to do it cheaply, Caroline?” A breeze ruffled the grass. The daffodils swayed this way and that in unison, like a row of dancers. Ivan reached out to pick a flower and put it behind her ear. “Remember?” he said, and his eyes, green and shining, held in untouched completeness the memory of everything that had happened in Rome, so that gazing into them, it was as if the surface of an ocean had become transparent and she saw all the buried treasure beneath, as well as hope, and the risk engendered by despair.
Ivan could hardly wait to see his old street. It was morning and the doors to La Taverna Romanaccia were closed, but the sign still beckoned, faded and a little dingy. Four filled garbage cans stood at the side door from which the horse used to emerge every night. Clusters of flies buzzed around them. Ivan’s ancient five-story building was the same—shuttered windows, broken cornice and spotted façade—as were the other weathered stone buildings on the square. The only difference was more people, a steady stream of them, all going in the same direction. Following, they found a large new five-and-tencent store around the corner and down half a block. Ivan frowned at the display of plastic household articles in the window. Then back at his front door, he said, “I bet she’s not here any more. Look.” He pointed down to the two marble steps at the entrance, dulled and marked with the scraping of many feet.
“She may be getting old,” said Caroline.
“No, she’d never let them get this way.” They stepped into the outer hall with its rows of mailboxes, unpolished. The paint was peeling and the floor was dusty. An empty Stop cigarette pack lay crushed in a corner. The inner door was locked. Ivan was morose as they went back out.
The portiera of the next building appeared carrying a string bag and, like Signora Daveglio, dressed in black, but without an apron. She was slight, with sparse white hair and soft features. Ivan stopped her. She did not remember him, but at the word “Fulbright” she gave an “Ah!” of recognition and smiled broadly. In answer to his questions she produced a swift flow of inflected words, and spreading her palms to the heavens, shook her head from side to side sadly. As she gazed toward Ivan’s building she repeatedly made a rolling, descending motion with one arm. Waves in the sea? thought Caroline. The ceaseless flow of life? Something like that. Ivan thanked her and she walked briskly off in the direction of the new store.
“Well?”
“She had a heart attack about two years ago,” said Ivan. “Very sudden. That was it.”
“Really? How did it happen?”
“You’ll never guess.”
“Scrubbing the stairs?”
“Very good. Preciso. She was at the top and she keeled right over. The pail spilled with her. The building has been going downhill ever since.”
“She kicked the bucket,” said Caroline.
“That’s right.” They were at the corner. Ivan turned to look at the building once more, shading his eyes against the glare of the sun. “The Communist Party has lost a loyal supporter.”
“She liked you a lot too.”
“Yes. She used to bake me these little pastries sometimes and bring them up after supper, to have while I was working. Sfogliatelle, they were called. They were very delicate, very light. That was before you came along.”
“I never knew she baked.”
“Yes, she was a great baker. Oh well,” he sighed.
They walked to the river. “Over there”—he pointed—“is the Castel Sant’Angelo. A fortress. Did I ever tell you? The Renaissance Popes used to take refuge…”
She listened politely, but she had heard it before. She had heard all that before.
Later, leaning against the balustrade, she said, “You know what I’d like to do, Ivan? I’d like to have dinner in that restaurant, Romanaccia.”
“What on earth for?”
“Just to see what it’s like. Don’t you ever have that feeling—you’ve looked at something from the outside for so long, you’d like to see what it’s like inside?”
“I know exactly what it’s like inside. Noisy, a long wait, the waiters snicker at you, the food looks better than it tastes, and they probably have the menu translated in some sort of quaint English.”
“Still,” said Caroline.
“Oh, all right, if that’s what you really want.”
At night under the garish lights the dingy old sign looked jolly. Signora Daveglio was not outside in her club sweater reading l’Unità, but the horse was there, with its red pompons, and so was the Renaissance man.
“Do you think it’s the same horse?”
“How could it be, Ivan? It’s close to seven years. It’s not even the same Renaissance man.”
“No, this one is younger and taller. But he has the same costume.”
“You’d sti
ll like the costume?”
“If I had known they needed a new Renaissance man I would have flown over and applied.”
The restaurant was low-ceilinged and lit with yellow globes. Its red stucco walls were hung with paintings in the style of Caravaggio—faces miming intense emotion in lurid contrasts of dark and light. Interspersed were paintings of the ruins of the Forum and the Colosseum. The wooden tables were crowded with Germans and Swedes with loud voices. The waiters spoke English to the Swedes and to Ivan and Caroline. “A Martini or a Manhattan before dinner, signore?” Ivan asked for Campari and soda in Italian. On the menu the prices were outrageous, and below each dish, in parentheses, was a translation in quaint English.
“Oh, look at this.” Caroline laughed. “‘Noddles’ for noodles. ‘The large noddles covered in anchovies and a sauce of garlic, oil of olive, and parsleys.’ And look how they spell asparagus!”
Ivan glared.
The accordion broke out, a gaseous sound slurping and gulping through a rampaging arpeggio.
She hoped the accordionist would not play the tune. That would be sacrilegious. She remembered the curve of the tune precisely, though she had never learned its name and had never heard it played since the night they crossed the square with Signora Daveglio’s eyes boring into their backs, after Ivan made love to her on the lumpy mattress on the floor and said he wanted to marry her so she would always be there, and that they would not become like other married people. Ivan hummed it sometimes, but he hummed it off key.
The accordionist, approaching their table and drowning out the sound of human voices, was playing “Là ci darem la mano,” from Don Giovanni. Caroline knew it well. Don Giovanni was trying to persuade the innocent peasant, Zerlina, to sneak off with him. He says he wants to marry her, “Quest’ istante.” This instant. In the opera the melody was sweetly and irresistibly seductive. “Vorrei e non vorrei,” she says. I want, I don’t want. “Io cangierò tua sorte!” I’ll change your destiny. “Presto, non son più forte!” Quick then, I have no more strength. “Vieni! Vieni!” Come! But this accordionist was jazzing it up, converting the smooth lyrical line into a dinky common beat that unmasked the self-seeking Don, the fine lord, so that anyone, even the gullible Zerlina, would know enough not to trust his words. At last he passed on to other tables. The food, when it was finally brought, looked better than it tasted.
Rough Strife Page 11