“I like this. I like how quiet it is now. You and I sitting alone in a quiet room. You don’t have to talk. Just tilt back your head and swallow.
“If I met someone from my town, would I still be able to speak in dialect with him? I don’t think so. You made me speak the national language like they do in the army, or, I suppose, in the king’s house. I used to feel so embarrassed, like I was putting on airs, when I was first learning to talk the way you wanted. I said to you, ‘For the love of God, I am not from Sienna, I am not a baroness.’ But I was ashamed.
“When we were first married I was so unhappy. We had running water and two rooms to ourselves, and the coal was delivered every month to our building, into a bin in the landlady’s stable. It was so much more than I had hoped for. But I couldn’t bear to look you in the face. And once, you came home from the shop, and it was late, and I had put out boiled beans and fresh broccoli and some chicken necks for your supper. And you washed your hands and face in the kitchen sink, and you sat down to eat. And you watched me as you related the plain innocences of your day, but I could not look up. And you told me to look up. But I couldn’t bear it. And there had been months of this. And you stood up and came to my side of the table and told me, perched enormously over me, to look at you. And I would not do it. And then you struck me with the back of your hand, hard, on the side of my head, so that I could feel my hairpin cutting me. It wasn’t too hard. And you asked me why I wouldn’t look at you. And I said I didn’t know. And you said, ‘Why did you say you would marry me and come all this way, and do it, too, marry me, if you didn’t want me?’ And I should have said it wasn’t true, I should have said I did want you. But instead I told you the truth. I said, ‘You aren’t what I expected.’
“You dashed out of the apartment. I heard your feet going so fast down the shallow stairs that I was afraid you would fall. Then, in fact, I heard you stumble and I heard your body fall down to the landing. You had probably hurt yourself, but I didn’t get up to see. And then I heard your feet going more slowly down the rest of the stairs. And I heard the big door come open and the din of the street gushed up to our rooms. And then the slam of the door. And then silence.
“I like to do only the one thing at a time. Today, for example, I know I should have put the roast in by three, but I had cut out the blouse pattern from the bolt of organdy, and I had told myself I would finish stitching the sleeves before I did anything else. There, done. I like to have a little box and to take everything out of the box and then put everything back in. There, done. I like to read a book from one cover to the other. I like to read every letter inside it and then close it. Therefore, having embarked on the sleeves, I did not so much as peel a carrot for supper until I had finished them. Therefore, having embarked on supper with you, I am going to stay here until you eat something.
“My consciousness is like a very bright light I shine on one thing I have in my mind or on another. Often the light is shining too directly on something and it begins to dry up right in front of my mind’s eyes. There was a you I had in mind for three years, while you were in this country and I was in the other one. In the orchard, staining the map with my oily finger, I could not think of you directly. I could not see you. I could not call to mind the exact sound of your voice. You existed only along the edges of my thought and so could be beautiful. And then — it seemed very sudden — I was living in those two rooms with only you. And I did not love the you across the table. And I was looking down at my feet, trying to remember the face I had had along the shadows of my mind in the orchard, because I wanted to say to my heart, Look, they are the same man. But I could not remember that other you, that idea you.
“Everything I look at head-on, think of directly, give a name to, turns to stone.
“You were not what I had expected. It was at least as bad as you feared: You were a disappointment to me. Unless you open your eyes and tilt back your head, I will tell you something else. I will do it.
“I will do it.
“You are still a disappointment to me.
“I want to take my remorse for feeling this way and put it in a little box and close it. My darling, I have been trying to close it these many years. And yet there is the emotion, unclosed, unclosable; and there is no There, done, ever, there is more in the shadows sometimes, and sometimes less.
“You could say I have no right to notice my heart’s feeble follies, these elusive regrets I feel for an honest confession confessed unkindly, when my conscience has vastly bigger fish to fry. I have practiced and perfected and take pride in my facility with a vicious act for which I take money. I’ve tried to find remorse in myself for this, but where is it? If I wanted to, I’m sure I could invent a defense, but I would only want to if I felt remorse.
“Why must everything be explained? Why must we say ‘because’? We name our reasons for doing, we tell ourselves these private fables, all the time knowing they are at best incompletely true.
“Once, you were eating a pear, you were scraping the meat off the core with your teeth. You were being very meticulous, as you are. (We were walking arm in arm from the theater, where we had made a game of whispering made-up translations of the words of the play, which we had not understood.) We were talking, and I made a joke in English, my first one, that you had pared the pear to the bone. And you laughed. And then you popped the core in your mouth and chewed it and swallowed it down. And later we wondered why you had done that. What had come over you, to eat the core of the pear, stem and all? And here is what at long last, two nights later, after we had given up on the hope for an explanation, you said, snatching sense (such as it was) from the jaws of nonsense (so to speak): You said, ‘I did it on purpose.’ Which was not a because at all, we both knew. But it was the answer.
“My darling, my penance, my consolation, I do not love mess, as you once said I do; I only feel everything and also its opposite, and often I feel them at the same time in the same part of myself. You were falling down the stairs, and I hoped you would keep falling and also that you would climb back up to me and close the door behind you when you came in.
“I wish it would stop raining. I wish those mules did not look so piteous, asleep on their feet, the rain pelting them and also rising as steam from their gray sides.
“I return again and again to my father’s house on the evening after I left it. Darkness falls. As it is October and it is early in the evening, there is a weak shower, which will pass soon. Here are the vegetable skins rotting in our garden. There are the lanterns of the last people coming off the vineyards in the hills. In the house, my mother is pulling a chain to draw a piece of wood over the window to keep in the heat. She assumes I am on my way back from my father’s father’s mother’s house, where I told her I was going. I am late, however. I have, alas, been caught in the rain, she supposes. I am often late. (In fact, I am by now already in Rome, at the station, and the emaciated cats are slinking among the rubbish heaps.) My father and my three brothers and my five sisters and my aunts and grandfather come inside and wash the dirt out of their hands in the same kettle of water. My absence is noted without alarm. Look at them, wet and stinking, they are all already dead, and they don’t even know it. They’ve all already been transformed into my ideas of them, as you may be someday should I outlive you. There is so little light in this room that they all of them stoop over the soup bowls to see what they are eating.