Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (27 page)

The bodies of the students
surged and broke on the seawall of the police. The tear gas rose like spume in
a nature documentary, in slow motion. The cries of the crowd and the grinding
engines of CRS vans churned the dirty panes of class with their vibrations. The
slogans were muted but I moved my lips to them. I’d been reading them for so
long, on walls and alleys, in men’s rooms, in the Metro, at the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts I’d stenciled posters by the dozens, sweating and cursing without
rancor, in the joy of solidarity, high on turpentine and spray-paint fumes,
handing stacks out the door into the arms of lithe young comrades, their Mao
caps rakish, their trousers pencil-thin and impeccably creased.
Soyons cruels!
we
cried, lashing out in our rage and joy. And I’d listened to the speeches and
debates, had even taken part in a few; I’d shouted with crowds, I’d wedged my
fat blunt body into the ranks of sitters and marchers, I’d raised my fist and
shook it over the others, like a priest shaking out sacred oils on the
congregation. So why then, that particular evening, the day of the
counter-demonstration, the surge of Gaullists (the old folks, our parents,
every one of them it seemed a Resistance-fighter, a martyr, and we their
ungrateful children, drinking Marx, reading Coca-Cola), why did I sit there in
the darkened window, invisible to the history that was passing us by, watching
the revolution dying by inches?

They were down there somewhere. Events,
les Evenements
, had thrown them together.
In my mind the film we’d seen last weekend,
Bonnie and Clyde
, how they went out
together, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, alone on a country road, riddled with
bullets. And who was I, I persisted narcissistically in asking myself, what was
my role in their solipsistic drama? Part of the scenery, part of the
violence—the response, Charles taught, to powerlessness, response as proper as
poetry. So much blood, Technicolor red, spraying up and out at the screen in an
Artaud fountain. We loved it, we loved the shock, we came out laughing like our
laughter was a spell, protecting us from the knowledge the movie had carried
with it, Hollywood wisdom, across the ocean bearing its message of the glamour
of death. They were down there without me. Were they together? Was she holding
the bottle while he lit the rag? Were they locked arm in arm with others, the
avant-garde that had been left behind by the convulsive reaction of a nation
remembering its nationhood? Was she crying from the gas? Would he vomit? Would
they get their skulls cracked, methodically, at the hands and clubs and shields
of the masked CRS men? Did they not themselves at that moment wear masks of
righteousness and beauty, mirrors of each other, mirrors on the faces of all
the young men and women,
les jeunes
, mirrors reflecting the arc lights of the cops and
the neon of the Champs de l’Elysees and the smoky torch of cinemas showing the
films of our actual, dreamed lives? I reached up and touched my own face,
half-visible to me in the greasy glass, felt the stubble, my chins folding into
one another, the pendulous nose, the flesh bunched around my eyes that made
them appear piggish and small. The back of the canvas rebuked me. Where was my
own mask of youth and beauty? Had M taken it? Or had she thrown it away? What I
had pressed into her hands, the night I knew she couldn’t love or pity me, but
could only be there, in my gravity well, fellow American. It was out there,
somewhere, the mask that had been meant for me, my moment in the waning sun of
revolution, forgotten or smashed somewhere on the streets, youth’s canvas,
where her body lay. I went out into the counterrevolutionary night.

Windows follow me, Elsa, when I walk the narrow
streets at dusk, making me feel more invisible, not less. Sometimes my life
seems like one long disappearing act. And now that I, from your point of view,
have actually vanished, you will read these words with disbelief, if you read
them at all.
Because I write to you not as your mother but as
a dying woman, trying to say goodbye to you and to my life.

My time now is pared down
to a few essentials, a limited catalog of moving images. When I lie in bed at
night with my eyes closed I seem to watch them on a screen. Very early I see
myself awaken, the whites of my eyes showing in a room where dawn is reddening
the curtains.
A kitchen, a kettle, coffee.
Though I
quit smoking long ago there’s a line of smoke unfurling from the cigarette in
my hand or in the ashtray, doing its part to compose an atmosphere. A solitary
woman of a certain age walking on a narrow street, sometimes into a shop then
out again, like Mrs. Dalloway with no flowers to buy. Sometimes my steps return
me to the vast truncated dancefloor of the Piazza della Unita, fronting emptily
the empty sea. You will sometimes find me in a café or library with a folded
newspaper by my side, fingers busily knitting. I make scarves hats and sweaters
that I donate via the good offices of a pleasant pasty nun, Josephine, half my
size and twice my weight, who administers a program for cancer patients at the
hospital. Once and once only she put her large white hand on my own when I came
in with a shopping bag of cloche hats in assorted colors, fixing her watery
blue eyes on my own.

La signora si sente bene?

Si.

E’stato chiesto di
te
ieri.
Il
dottor Maggio.

That’s very kind, I said.
Grazie.

Signora.
Ancora non prenere in
considerazione
il
trattmento?

Grazie, grazie.
I fled.

I did not return for three
weeks, and when I did return, the incident was not repeated. She only turned
her head on one side and smiled at me helplessly,
But
I do not know if I can bear the sympathy, the frank solicitude of those eyes,
for much longer. I will go on knitting; I need to do something with my hands.
But perhaps I’ll just leave my creations where I finish them, for whomever
wants it, or doesn’t.

There was a time when I
would have found this absolute solitude delicious. Before I abandoned or was
abandoned by America, your father, you. It seemed that there was never time for
me, just myself to be myself, to meet myself, except fleetingly—meeting my own
eyes in the mirror while dressing for dinner, or in the waiting rooms of
dentists and doctors where I felt myself released from the charge of amusing
myself and simply waited, not even knitting, hands in lap. You remember the
books, the endless mysteries I consumed, and before that my morbid research
into a past as incomprehensible as it was unchangeable. You thought that was
time stolen from you, but it was time stolen from myself as well. Now I never
read any more; I sometimes allow my eyes to pass over the print of a newspaper
or novel, but I take nothing in except the rhythm of sentences, a sort of white
noise on the page. It passes the time when the hours are too full of memories;
yet when I look up in the late afternoon, the sun having passed on to more
glamorous destinations, I remember nothing, scarcely my own name or how I’ve
come to be here, washed up on the fringe of Europe, where my American life—yes,
American, in spite of everything—can’t quite catch hold, even now that it’s
ending. I remember nothing any more. Then a dinner, not always solitary, for
there are one or two ladies, neighbors, a widow and a spinster, who sometimes
ask me up out of curiosity for a plate of cuttlefish pasta, a glass or two of
wine. The widow, who lives in the apartment just above
me
has me to dinner every Tuesday evening, always attended by her middle-aged bald
bachelor of a son, a foreman at the Illy plant who speaks excellent English,
though apparently in Italian he’s something of a stutterer. We
sit,
the three of us, a little lost at the large formal
dining table that’s been shifted out from under the yellowing chandelier so the
table’s tail abuts the window, open on a mild evening to the shouts and sounds
of the street below. The widow is thin, nearly emaciated, and wears a thick
pasty white make-up in a misguided attempt to smooth out her wrinkles; she’s
eighty if she’s a day. Her son, not twenty years younger, sits next to her so
that I feel fronted by a sort of tribunal: she gazing directly with a luxurious
sort of charitable contempt, he with eyes lowered, lidded, only occasionally
flashing upward to display a startling eagerness,
even
an ardor. It’s uncomfortable and amusing, especially after a third glass of the
sharp Terrano wine with a finish like the karst cliffs that line the coast
where the Balkans begin. There is a daughter as well, I am told, married with
grown children of her own, living in Udine, to the north. She never liked it
here, the widow said through her son. She didn’t like the wind, the noise it
makes in the winters. Many of the young people go there. She never comes
back,
I have to go to her. But I’m getting too old.

I wanted to ask how she
managed living in a fourth-floor walk-up at her age. But the answer was there
in front of me. Her son was a constant presence, though he did not actually
live there. Every day he brought up her groceries, newspaper, mail; every other
day some flowers, a box of chocolates, or one of the paperbacks stacked
haphazardly against the wall of the living room—for the bookshelves were all
crammed with knickknacks, including one shelf devoted entirely to a set of
glass and ceramic pigs. It was hard not to notice a resemblance between one of
the larger and more whimsical pigs, dressed in a frock coat and monocle, and
the heavy, jowled, delicate figure of her son, whose manicured hands moved
carefully and precisely as he served the dinner he had, in all likelihood,
cooked himself. It fascinated me, their attachment, the long tail of motherhood
that had come so tightly to enfurl a grown man, even a boss of men. He had
never married, though—this was said in Italian while her son was in the
kitchen—there had been a girl once, many years ago, whom he had been engaged to
for a year and a day (that was her phrase, un anno e un giorno) but she (or
perhaps he, my Italian is very imperfect and I often miss genders) had gotten
cold feet at the altar. In any case, she was no good,
non abbastanza per lui
, and he loves his mama who
looks after him,
lui ama la sua mamma che si prende cura di lui.

The son returned to the
room at this point with his eyes lowered, oven mitts on his hands, bringing in
a steaming bowl of mussels in white wine broth. His lips were pursed
slightly—ironically? He was an excellent cook and took pride in being so.

The last time we ate
together the widow made her excuses before the coffee was served, complaining
of headache. I rose to go but she told me to sit, sit, enjoy—Bernardo had
brought a strudel and I must taste it at least or hurt his pride. Knowing as I
did that pastry was not among Bernardo’s accomplishments, I realized with
mingled alarm and amusement that the widow was trying either to set me up with
her superannuated son or—less alarming, more amusing—I was being presented to
the son as a sort of cautionary tale, an example of what to avoid, a feckless
American. Either way, it meant my secret was safe, in the building at least.
She could not know of my illness.

With no one to translate
for, Bernardo was silent at first. He poured coffee from a French press without
bothering to ask whether I wanted it or feared the sleepless hours it might
bring, which I took as a tribute to my having been adopted as at least
half-Triestino. My appetite had waned in recent weeks and it had increasingly
become a chore to do even the minimal duty toward Bernardo’s cooking that
politeness dictates. I would soon have to stop accepting his mother’s
invitations, and my world would contract even further, the clock advance toward
midnight, toward the moment I vowed would be of my choosing. Bernardo ate his
strudel quickly, methodically, his eyes fixed on the window to the darkening
street; it was easy somehow to imagine myself married to him, a solid man who had
mastered the art of taking up little space. Yet I could not, would not play
mother again, to any man. That’s all they want, Elsa; you have no doubt
discovered this. Even your handsome lawyer with the squared-off jaw, does he
not in the still of the night tuck his face into your bosom with the rapacious
helplessness of an infant rooting for the breast? They are incapable of seeing
what’s in front of them, what’s before their faces. Bernardo at least still had
his own, actual mother, which made him a bit more attractive: he had no need to
serve me, was in fact in serving me really serving the only woman, I was
convinced, he had ever loved. When she died he would sit here, in her
apartment, in that very same chair, hands limp in his lap, waiting and listening
as the city goes quiet around him, night after night. Should someone have the
misfortune to marry him she would find him as I found him now, courteous and
even affectionate but remote, attuned elsewhere, like a dog whose master has
left him with a friend for months and years but whose ears nevertheless prick
up at every scrape of a key in the lock, whose tail starts beating until the
accepted but unbeloved form enters the room, at which point all movement ceases
and the animal returns gravely to his accustomed bed. Oh, Elsa, these thoughts
do one no good. I hope you will not indulge them. I hope your silence means
what it says, that these letters go unread, straight into the fire or into a
shoebox where they will remain until long after I am dead, past the possibility
of a pitying reply. If I have been a poor mother to you, it would be past my
dignity to ask that you, at the end, be a mother to me. I write these letters
to you, but for myself. Never forget that simple truth of my selfishness, Elsa,
which I hope you can learn some part of for yourself, for your own sake. They
will try and take everything you have—they
will
take it, unless you don’t
let them.