James Salter - Light Years

“Nice. Didn’t that once belong to Italy?”

“Everything did once,” she said.

The names she told him, the history, the incidents of her childhood—all of it was new, all of it glinted like the energy in the black of her hair. She had a resigned intelligence, she was fastidious, she was shy. The great unhappiness of her life was that she had never married.

From the moment he had seen her sitting confident and small behind her desk, when he saw her type or use the telephone, he realized how capable she was. But she had ventured nothing, she was merely waiting, all these years she was waiting for a man. She was a kind of brilliant cripple; she could imagine anything, but she could not walk. And he was only slightly better. Though from the first he felt enormously drawn to her, he was uncertain; he had not hunted in so long and had been poor at it even then.

They went to dinner in a restaurant named for the baker’s daughter, La Fornarina, who had been a mistress of Raffaello. It was winter, the garden was closed. She had wanted to talk to him as soon as she saw him, she said. She had formed an idea of him from having heard him talked about and from letters, but no expectation could explain the closeness and recognition she felt when he entered the reception room for the first time.

“You are one in a thousand,” she told him. “Yes, you are very special.”

A warmth flooded through him, a dizziness as if he had fought an enemy. With a word, a glance she embraced him; she had opened the dull sky, the light poured down. It is always an accident that saves us. It is someone we have never seen.

She knew Rome as a lifelong prisoner knows it. She knew its shops, its sun flats, its streets with a special view. She would show him some of that. His hungers returned to him, his yearnings, his capacity for joy.

She filled his glass with wine but took only a little for herself which she did not drink. She told him, without the slightest urgency, that she had no power to resist him.

“I think you know that,” she said. Her hand slid beneath his. The touch of her fingers took his breath away.

She had a small car, many pairs of shoes, she said wistfully, some money in Switzerland; she was like a meal all prepared.

“And you have come to sit down to it,” she said. “Yes, it’s a marvelous dinner, it’s the meal of a lifetime.”

Zuppa, carne, verdura, formaggi . The procession of worn, white plates upon the tablecloth, the coarse, simple bread, the waiters in their jackets, slightly soiled. The wine had no effect on him, he was too stimulated for it. When she leaned across to help him with the menu, he could feel the warmth of her face. She ate very little, she smoked a few cigarettes, she talked. Her father was a grain dealer. He was conservative, small, bitterly disappointed in her brother. His daughter he had loved perhaps too much; it had sometimes been too heavy, too carnal. He kissed her always on the mouth, deep, unflinching kisses. When her mother died, he used to say, he was going to marry Lia. He was joking, of course, but he once touched her breast on the bus, she had felt revulsion.

“Am I boring you?”

“Of course not,” he said.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m marveling at you. You have such an astonishing vocabulary. How did you learn to speak English so well?”

“I’ve spoken it for a long time,” she said.

“Why is that?”

“I suppose I was waiting for you, amore.”

Should one describe the act of love which united them, it may have been this night? She had the key to an apartment that belonged to a friend. She unlocked the bolt three times; a narrow, varnished door, one of two, fell open. There were no rugs, the floor was cold. He felt no hesitation, no fear. It was as if he had never seen a woman before; the sight of her nakedness, the darkness of its core overwhelmed him, his mind mumbled devotions, his ears were filled with whispers. The city opened like a garden, the streets received him and poured forth their names. He saw Rome like one of God’s angels, from above, from afar, its lights, its poorest rooms. He blessed it, he fell into its heart. He became its apostle, he believed in its grace.

She left him at the entrance to his hotel, and her car, noisy, plain, sped off. Every detail of going up to his room—the face of the portiere , the heavy key, the coming together of polished doors, the rising, his slow walk down vaulted corridors—everything affirmed his feeling of triumph. He lay in bed content to be alone at so solemn a moment, to be able to savor it. In the streets of the sleeping city, along its bare, new avenues, across its empty squares her car still dashed, its headlights jumping nervously on the roughness of the road, his thoughts enclosing it, sheltering it as it went.

In the morning, the telephone rang. “Ciao, amore ,” she said.

“Ciao.”

“I wanted to hear your voice.”

“I was sleeping,” he confessed.

“Yes, of course. The sleep of the blessed. I too…”

Her words stirred him. The maids were dropping brooms in the hall.

“I imagine you lying there…” At last she was free to speak. She had so many things to say, so much that had waited. “I picture you taking a bath. The water is pouring into the tub, filling the room with a luxurious sound.”

“Are you at home?” he asked.

“ Sì . At home, in my bed. It’s only a small bed, it’s not like yours.”

“Like mine?”

“You have a big one, don’t you? At least, I imagine it so.”

She was calling from her room in a voice that was slightly guarded, even though, as she said, her mother spoke no English. He was in Italy. The girls on the street, the mechanics, the boys in the outskirts driving motorbikes home from work on winter evenings with newspaper wrapped around their hands—suddenly he felt he might share their lives.

They went again to the apartment with its wooden doors. In the daylight it seemed abandoned. The floor had a vague pattern of flowers, the walls were tan. The owner’s English clothes, pushed to one side, were hanging in a wardrobe. The sun, as if by chance, fell in one window. It was bare and chilly, but visit by visit it became theirs.

They went on Saturdays. He sat sketching the ruins opposite. There were stacks of torn magazines near his elbow: Oggi, Paris-Match . In the street the sound of occasional footsteps, the racketing cars. He seemed calm but he was terrified. I will never learn it, he thought, the language, the hours, the life. He concentrated on the drawing, searching for the right colors.

She appeared at his side. “Does music bother you?”

“Not at all.”

She put on a record. She watched him work. In the afternoon they went to a film. They parked three blocks away. Approaching the theater he felt like a boy who has not studied his lessons and is entering class. He mingled uneasily with the others. They sat in the audience and she whispered important lines to him in the dark.

The radio was playing softly. It was cold in the evening; they were chilled. The light, even in these southern latitudes, was fading. She had put the kettle on and was arranging the cups and spoons—faint, homely sounds that struck him like voices from afar. He felt the first touch of panic at her kindness. It was not kindness he needed. His life was being washed away, it was coming to pieces, floating like paper on the tide; he needed hours that were useful, work, responsibility. He smiled wanly as she brought the cups to his chair and knelt beside it. Silence. In the manner of a servant girl she began to remove his shoes and socks. His feet were bare. She drew them to her.

“You are cold,” she said. She held them in her hands. “I will warm you.” She spoke to them as if they were children. “There, that’s better, isn’t it? Sì . Yes, you are not used to winter, not these winters. These are something new. They can be cold, more cold than you imagine. In your nice English shoes everyone thinks you are warm and content. Look, how nice your shoes are, they say, such fine shoes. Yes, they think you are warm because you look nice; they think you are happy. But happiness is not so easy to find, is it? It’s very difficult to find. It’s like money. It comes only once. If you are lucky, it comes once, and the worst part is there’s nothing you can do. You can hope, you can search, anger, prayers. Nothing. How frightening to be without it, to wait for happiness, to be patient, to be ready, to have your face upturned and luminous like girls at communion. Yes, you are saying to yourself, me, me, I am ready.”