Memory II

Back to the beginning, two

There are no barriers to where your thoughts will take you.

I was back once more in 1957.

Perhaps it wasn’t so strange after all that I should be a little afraid. Up until now everything seemed to have moved with a kind of fatality that made every act seem normal and inevitable. Giving up my job, closing the apartment, which had never really been established anyway as if I had known all along it wouldn’t be permanent, sailing from New York, then a train trip through Holland and Germany with a family friend. I remembered now she wasn’t at all interested in the same things as I was. All seemed an effortless part of my life, as natural as getting up in the morning, having breakfast, and going to work. The last weeks had been hectic, with parties and presents, last meals with this friend and that. And only now was I beginning to wonder. For people can change in a year. There had always been a certain formal element to our friendship, so that it was only several months after meeting him that Mario dropped the formal Lei for the familiar tu in a letter he wrote me in Rome. And he had kissed me for the first time when he had seen me off at the station in Florence as I left Italy for the States. But he had kissed me only as a friend, on both cheeks. And now – now, I was coming back to a man who had asked me to marry him, who was here beside me and with whom I would share my life.

My memories jumped back to that journey, into the past but also into the future. The train had moved on, just as my thoughts had moved on. “Look out, someone’s coming through,” a voice said. A small boy wriggled out of the corridor and stood perplexed in front of the door to the rest room which was blocked by boxes and suitcases. “Come on, we’ll lift you over,” said a tall man across from me, wrapping the roll he was munching on into a piece of newspaper and sticking it into his pocket. We all leaned back a little and the boy was swung up and over. “Knock when you want to come out,” he was told and the interrupted conversation was resumed. “But of course these gentlemen will help you with your luggage,” the girl said, rather pointedly placing the emphasis on the word gentlemen. “I’m not worried,” I reassured her. “I’ve always found the Italians to be most polite.” “Hmmm,” she shook her head. “Yes, until a woman gets to be about 40, they are.” “Oh, I wouldn’t put it so low,” someone responded. “Even 50 is passable.” “He’s ready to come out,” said the tall man, and again we leaned back out of the way as the little boy was lifted over into the crowded corridor.

We had by now left the flat plains north of Bologna and were in the hilly country close to Florence. Tall pointed cypresses stood very dark and formal against the horizon and under the silver green of the olive trees the hills were brown where the hay had been cut. Here and there a farmhouse, its stones covered with pink or beige plaster, sat surrounded by its haystacks, like a hen with her chicks. A man in a blue work shirt was bent over hoeing. It all made me think of Van Gogh. The afternoon light was already touching everything with the Florentine gold that I loved so well.

---

Almost there. I combed my hair, forgetting that the wind would muss it up again, and thought of Mario as I had last seen him, his raincoat slung low over his arm, peering out from behind very thick glasses. He wasn’t any taller than I was. No more high heels, I thought ruefully. And he had a wonderful smile. It lit up his whole face, even those times when he had rather needed a shave, a condition I had come to accept as normal among most Italian men, no matter what their profession. But it’s what he’s like inside that’s important, I told myself. Maybe one could call it his soul. And you know and love that. And besides you were good friends. And then suddenly we were in the station and my suitcases were being handed out by my traveling companions. I would find out soon enough if Wall Street or the Ford Foundation was right. I stopped daydreaming and returned to the more immediate past, to yesterday and our wedding and the banquet and the fact that we were now on our honeymoon in a friend’s villa on the coast of Italy.