Find Me
Page 9
“We’re spending the week here in Rome,” she told her father when he opened the door to us. She had bought enough food to last him three weeks.
“Nice!” he stuttered, scarcely disguising his joy. “And what will the two of you be doing for a whole week?”
“Don’t know. Eating, taking pictures, visiting, being together.”
“Strolling,” I added. It was clear her father had understood we were lovers and wasn’t shocked, or at least pretended not to be. You could read it on his face: Yesterday you were strangers on a train and barely touching … and now you’re fucking my daughter. Nice! She’ll never change.
“Where will you stay?” he asked Miranda.
“With him. It’s five minutes away on foot from here, so you’ll see me more than you’ve ever bargained for.”
“And this is bad news?”
“It’s great news. Can I leave the dog with you though?”
“But what about your work?”
“All I need is my cameras. Plus, I’m tired of the Far East. Maybe I can discover parts of Rome or northern Italy through his eyes. Yesterday we saw Villa Albani, which I’d never even seen before.”
“I also want to take her to see the Archaeological Museum in Naples. The statue of Dirce being tied to a bull by two brothers needs an expert’s camera.”
“When are we going to Naples?”
“If you want, tomorrow,” I said.
“More train rides. Perfect.” She seemed truly overjoyed.
When Miranda left the room, her father took me aside: “She’s not all she’s cracked up to be, you know. She’s impulsive, and there’s always a tempest brewing inside her head, but she is more delicate than the most friable china. Please be good to her, and be patient.”
There was nothing to say to this. I stared at her father then smiled, and finally placed my hand on his. It was meant to reassure him, a gesture imparting warmth, silence, and friendship. I hoped it didn’t seem patronizing.
Lunch was quiet and mostly an extension of breakfast. Miranda made a large omelet. How did he want his, she asked. “Plain,” he said. “Maybe some spices?” she asked. He liked spices. “And not a dry omelet this time, please. Gennarina makes terrible omelets.”
It had gotten warm and we had lunch on the terrace again. “And the walnuts?” he said afterward.
“The walnuts, of course.”
She went back inside, took out the large bowl of walnuts then stepped into the library, where she found the book she was looking for and said she’d read for twenty minutes.
I had never read Chateaubriand, but on hearing her, determined that this was what I wanted for the rest of my life. Every day, just after lunch, while sipping coffee as we were doing now, if she wanted and wasn’t busy, twenty minutes of this great Frenchman’s prose would make my day.
When we had drunk our coffee, her father did not accompany us to the door; instead he stayed on the terrace, seated at his table, and watched us leave.
“It mustn’t be easy for him,” I said as she shut the door behind her.
“Actually it’s awful. And shutting this door behind me is always agony.”
On our way to Piazza di San Cosimato, she looked at the darkening sky and said, “Looks like rain soon. Let’s go back.”
It was too early to head back to the hotel, so we strolled into a large housewares store. “Let’s buy two identical mugs, one with your initials, and one with mine,” she said.
She insisted on buying the mugs, mine with a large M, hers a large S. But she wasn’t satisfied. “How about tattoos? I want you permanently inscribed on my body. Like a watermark. I want a tiny lighthouse. How about you?”
I thought for a moment.
“A fig.”
“Tattoos then? I know of a place,” she said.
I looked at her. Why am I not even hesitating?
“Where on our bodies?” I asked.
“Next to … you know.”
“Left or right?”
“Right.”
“Right it is.”
She was silent a moment.
“Is this going too fast for you?”
“I love that it is. Will it hurt?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never gotten a tattoo before. Never even had my ears pierced. What I know is that I want our bodies never to be the same again.”
“We’ll sit and watch each other get tattoos,” I said. “Then when I go to meet my Maker and am asked to get naked and expose myself and he sees this fig tattoo to the right of my junk, what do you think he’ll say? ‘Professor, what’s this next to your flibbertigibbet?’ ‘A tattoo,’ I’ll say. ‘A fig tattoo, is it?’ ‘Yes, Lord.’ ‘And the reason for disfiguring the body that took nine long months to make?’ ‘Passion is the reason.’ ‘Yes, and?’ he says. ‘I wanted a sign carved on my body to show I wanted everything changed, starting with my body. Because for once in my life I knew there’d be no regrets. Maybe it was also my way of marking my body with something that I always feared might otherwise vanish as easily as it breezed in. So I carved her symbol on me to remember. If You could tattoo my soul with her name, You should do it right now. You see, God—may I call You this?—I was on the point of giving up, of living the life of someone who had accepted his sentence, and cowering before his menial little lot, living as if life were an extended waiting room far below room temperature, when suddenly here was this beautiful commutation—I know I’m using big words, but I trust You understand, Lord—and from the dark, silent, muddy, narrow, shanty lane that was my life it swelled into a huge mansion facing a wide-open field with beach views all around and large rooms with large, flung-open windows that never rattle and never shake or slam shut when a sea breeze wafts through a house that has never seen darkness since the day You lit the first match and knew that light was good.’”
“So you’re a comedian! What does God do then?”
“God lets me in, of course. ‘You’re in, good man,’ he says. But then I ask, ‘Pardon, Your Lordship, but what good is heaven to me now?’
“‘Heaven is heaven. It doesn’t get better than this. Have you any idea what people have given up to live here? Want to take a look at the alternative? I can show you. In fact, I can take you down there and show you where you could just as easily be skewered and roasted for having that piece of nonsense punctured you know where. But you’re pouting. Why?’ ‘Why, Lord? Because I’m here and she’s over there.’ ‘What? Do you want her to die too so that you can coddle and canoodle and have your little fun-and-slop in my kingdom?’ ‘I don’t want her to die.’ ‘Are you jealous that she’s likely to find someone else, because find someone else she will.’ ‘I don’t mind that either.’ ‘Then what, my good man?’ ‘It’s that I would love one more hour, one measly hour in the million trillion bazillion hours of eternity to be with her, a tiny speck of nothing in the realm of unending time. It costs You nothing, I just want to go back to that Friday night at our enoteca, holding hands over the table as they keep serving us wine and cheese as the place empties out while only lovers and very close friends stay behind and all I want is a chance to tell her that what happened between us, if it lasted twenty-four hours, was worth the wait of untold light-years that came before evolution even started, and are to follow after our dust is no longer even dust, until that day in a quadrillion years on some other planet in some distant constellation a Sami and Miranda will happen again. I wish them my very best. But for now, good Lord, all I ask for is another hour.’ ‘But don’t you see?’ he’ll say. ‘What don’t I see?’ ‘Don’t you see that you already had your hour. And I didn’t just give you an hour, I gave you twenty-four of them. Do you have any idea how difficult it was for me to let your organs do what they may normally fail to do once at your age, let alone twice?’ ‘Correction: three times it was, good Lord, three times.’ He pauses for a few seconds. ‘And besides, if I give you an hour now, you’ll want a day, and if I give you a day, you’ll want a year. I know your type.’
“I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine. And how long does this idyll last?”
“Do we need to know? No limits.”
The tattoo artist was booked for the day. So we dropped the idea. Instead we ambled about until we decided to head back to the hotel. In our room: “I cannot believe how beautiful you are. Tell me what you like about me … Is there anything?” I asked. “I don’t know. If I could open your body and slip into it and sew you back from the inside, I would do it, so I could cradle your quiet dreams and let you dream mine. I’d be the rib that hasn’t become me yet, happy to hang on and, as you said, see the world with your eyes, not mine, and hear you echo my thoughts and think they’re yours.” She sat down on the bed and began unbuckling my belt. “I haven’t done this in a while.” Then she unzipped my fly and took off her clothes and stared deep in my eyes with a gaze that said if love had never existed on this planet, it was born in this tiny, rinky-dink so-called boutique hotel bedroom facing a narrow street and so many windows where people are welcome to look in. “Kiss me now,” she said, reminding me how lucky I was to see this raw, savage, unkempt, gritty moment suddenly in my life. After our long kiss, she looked at me with something verging on defiance. “Now you know,” she said. “Do you believe me?” she finally asked. “I’ve given you everything I have, and what I haven’t given means nothing, just nothing. The question is what more will I have to give next week, and will you even want it?”
“Then give me less. I’ll accept a half, or a quarter, or an eighth. Shall I go on?” A while later: “I can’t go back to my life. And I don’t want you to go back to yours, Sami. The only good memory I have of my father’s home is of you in it. I want to go back to that moment when you held my hands as I was fixing your collar and I kept thinking, This man likes me, he does like me, why doesn’t he kiss me, then? Instead I watched you struggle until you finally touched my forehead, like a child, and then I thought, He thinks I’m too young.”
“No, I’m too old—that’s what I thought.”
“You’re such a fool.” She stood up and removed the paper wrapping around each mug. “They’re lovely.”
“I have the house, you have the mugs, the rest is just details. Every day at lunch we’ll eat the same frugal foods: tomatoes, cut into quarters, with country bread I love to bake, basil, fresh olive oil, a can of sardines, unless you broil a fish for us, eggplants from the garden, and for dessert fresh figs in late summer and persimmons in the fall, berries in wintertime, and whatever else grows on trees—peaches, plums, and apricots. I am so eager to play for you that short pianissimo from Beethoven’s sonata. Let us spend our time this way, until you grow bored and tired of me. And if before that you’ll expect a child, we’ll stay together until my time is up, and then we’ll both know. And there will be no sorrow from me, and none from you, because you’ll know as I’ll know that whatever time you’ve given me, my entire life, from childhood, school years, university, my years as a professor, a writer, and all the rest that happened was all leading up to you. And that’s good enough for me.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ve made me love this, just this. I was never a big fan of planet Earth, and didn’t set great store in this other thing called life, but the thought of eating tomatoes with salt and oil at lunch and drinking chilled white wine as we’re sitting stark naked on our balcony basking in the early noonday sun watching the sea, sends shivers down my spine this very moment.”
Then a thought crossed my mind. “If I were thirty years old would any of this have been more tempting?”
“None of it would have happened if you were thirty years old.”
“You’re not answering my question.”
“If you were my age, I’d pretend I was happy, I’d pretend I loved my career, your career, our life, but I’d be faking it as I’ve been faking it with everyone I’ve known. My problem is discovering what not faking is—and this is difficult and scary for me, because my bearings are always pitched to who I ought to be, not to who I am, to what I should have, not to what I never knew I craved, to life as I found it, not to the life I’ve let myself think was only a dream. You’re oxygen to me, and I’ve been living off methane.”
We lay on top of the bedspread, which she said had probably never been washed. “Any idea how many people have lain on this as naked and sweaty as we are now?”
We laughed it off. Without saying anything we showered for the first time since we’d met on the train and got dressed to meet Elio.
* * *
Elio was standing by the entrance of the hotel. We hugged, then after I released him he noticed that the person standing next to me was not a stranger who happened to be stepping out of the hotel at the same time as I was. Miranda right away extended her arm and they shook hands. “I’m Miranda,” she said. “Elio,” he replied. They both smiled at each other. “I’ve heard so much about you,” she said. “All he does is talk about you.” He laughed. “He exaggerates, there’s so little to tell.” As we walked out of the pebbled courtyard, Elio gave me a discreetly quizzical look that meant Who is she? She intercepted the questioning glance, and said right away: “I’m the person he slept with after picking me up on the train yesterday.” He laughed, though slightly uncomfortably. Then she added: “Had you been waiting for him at Termini yesterday I wouldn’t be standing here telling you this.” She immediately took her camera and asked us to stand by the gate. “I want to do this,” she said.
“She’s a photographer,” I explained, almost by way of apology.
“So what should we do?” asked my son, who was a bit at a loss for how to proceed.
Miranda sized up the situation right away. “I know the two of you have your vigils to perform, so I don’t want to intrude,” she said, emphasizing the word vigil to show that she was already familiar with our father-son lingo. “But I can tag along and I swear, I won’t utter a word.”
“Promise not to laugh at us, though,” he said, “because we are ridiculous.”
It was the way we walked—together yet not together—that allowed a touch of awkwardness to stand between us. I was trying to keep in step with her without letting him think that his place in my life was in any way altered or diminished by her presence; but then, a few steps farther, I caught myself walking much closer to him, almost on the verge of neglecting her. I was also worried that he might resent her presence and had wanted to talk about important personal matters. And perhaps he wasn’t ready to meet her yet, and certainly not so suddenly. He must have noticed my discomfort and tactfully began walking ahead of us. I knew he was doing it on purpose, almost deferring to her, because we normally walked elbow to elbow. If there was tension between the three of us, his move helped defuse it and restored the comradeship we felt while crossing the bridge together.
We had spoken of going on foot to the Protestant Cemetery, but it was cloudy and it was already getting late. The cemetery is perfect on a sunny, quiet weekday morning, I said, not a bustling Saturday afternoon. So we decided to repeat our walk on Via Giulia and headed to a café we all knew.
On our way I asked Elio what he’d played the night before, and he told us Mozart’s E-flat Major and D Minor con
certi with an orchestra from Ljubljana. He’d had to practice throughout the night before the concert, and all during the day itself. But it had gone very well. He had to be in Naples for another concert Sunday afternoon.
“So which vigil shall we start with today?” asked Miranda. “Or will it be a surprise?”
Once again I worried that vigils were to be celebrated between us only, not with a third person. So to lighten the mood, I told him that I’d cheated and had already done one vigil with Miranda: the third-floor apartment on Roma Libera where I’d lived as a young teacher.
“The chick with the oranges?” he asked.
It made all three of us laugh.
“Wasn’t there another vigil on Via Margutta?” asked Miranda.
“Yes, but let’s not do her today.”
“Actually, the café where we’re headed is sort of vigilly,” said Elio.
“Whose vigil, yours or Sami’s?” she asked.
“Well, we’re not sure,” I said. “It started by being Elio’s, then by dint of coming back here with him, it became mine too, and in the end ours. So you could say that we’ve overwritten and lived each other’s memories. Which is why coming here means something more, something extra for which even the professor in me has no words. And now, Miranda, you’re in these vigils too.”
“See, this is what I love about him,” she said, turning to Elio, “the way his mind twists everything, as if life were made up of meaningless scraps of paper that turn into tiny origami models the moment he starts folding them. Are you this way as well?”
“I’m his son.” He nodded self-consciously.
Caffè Sant’Eustachio was so crowded that we were unable to find a table and decided to drink our coffees at the bar. Elio added that in all the years he’d been coming here, he’d never once had a chance to sit down. Tourists spend hours occupying all the seats, reading maps and guidebooks. He insisted on treating. While he slid between the throng of customers who were either waiting to order or to pay at the cashier, she sidled up to me and asked, “Do you think I shocked him?”