Джумпа Лахири - Whereabouts [calibre]

I call her when there’s an exhibit I want to see, or when the sales begin at the end of winter and the start of summer. I’d promised my friends I’d keep an eye on her, even though this girl doesn’t need very much from me.

I watch her as she cycles through the piazza. She could be my daughter given that I’m thirty years older. But she’s already a woman, with a beauty that’s disarming. A girl who smiles as she speaks, as if to declare to the world, See how happy I am. Nothing like I was at that age: still a child, no boyfriends, ill at ease. I’m envious. I still regret my squandered youth, the absence of rebellion.

She’s just come back after spending a week with her family. She’s relieved to have put some distance between them again. She tells me that spending seven days in a row together is rough: that her father and stepmother are always bickering and that they should separate.

“Don’t they love each other?”

“I doubt it. My dad just wants to paint and she’s at loose ends, she waits on him hand and foot and it drives him crazy.”

“And your mother? Did you see her?”

“She got married again, to a guy I don’t like.”

She drinks a glass of pomegranate juice. It looks like a glass of blood, though I don’t tell her that. She says she’s hungry and asks for a cornetto. She splits it in half, then divides one of the pieces. She takes a small bite, then arranges the rest of the pieces on her napkin.

People turn to look at her as we’re sitting in the piazza but she doesn’t pay them heed. She’s fluent in the language her parents struggled to speak. She doesn’t look like a tourist or foreigner, she’s the type that fits in anywhere.

The parents are worried, they’re hoping she’ll change her mind and decide to go to a university that’s closer to home. I don’t tell them, when we speak on the phone, that they’ve already lost her.

Full of dreams and plans, she believes it’s still possible to change the world. She’s already brave enough to stand up to authority and she’s determined to make a life for herself here. I’m fond of this girl, her grit inspires me. At the same time I think about myself back then and feel depressed. As she tells me about the boys that want to date her, amusing stories that make us both laugh, I can’t manage to erase a sense of ineptitude. I feel sad as I laugh; I didn’t know love at her age.

What did I do? I read books and studied. I listened to my parents and did what they asked me to. Even though, in the end, I never made them happy. I didn’t like myself, and something told me I’d end up alone.

“I talked to your father yesterday, he told me it’s raining a lot in your city.”

“It’s not my city anymore.”

“Why don’t you like it there?”

“Because I can’t stand my stepmother, she has no life, no voice of her own. My mom was basically the same, that’s why my dad left her. That dynamic doesn’t work anymore. I want to be a strong woman, independent, like you.”

I might have said the same thing to her. Instead I say nothing. I watch as she arranges the pieces of uneaten cornetto inside the paper napkin, making a small bundle that she then nestles inside the juice glass. And I ask for the check.

In the Waiting Room

After turning forty-five, after a long and fortunate phase of hardly ever going to the doctor, I grew acquainted with illness. A series of mysterious pains, odd afflictions that would arise out of the blue and then go away: an abiding pressure behind my eyes, a sharp twinge at my elbow, a portion of my face that seemed to have gone numb for a time. Scattered round red spots on my abdomen once generated a stubborn itch so persistent I’d had to go to the emergency room. In the end all it took was an ointment.

For the past few days there’s been a strange sensation under the skin at my throat, something along the lines of an irregular palpitation. I only feel it when I’m sitting at home, reading on my couch. That is, when I’m most relaxed, when I’m expecting to feel at peace. It lasts for a few seconds, then passes. When I explained this one morning to my barista—a person I confide all sorts of things to, though I couldn’t tell you why—he said:

“I’d get it checked out. There’s a vein there that connects your brain to your heart. Take my advice.”

And the gentleman standing next to me at the bar, a retired history professor who drinks a glass of beer at the start of each day, added:

“My poor wife, God rest her soul, had complained of something similar.”

So I went to the doctor, and after he saw me, after he checked my heartbeat with a shoddy-looking device, he referred me to a cardiologist.

“It’s most likely nothing, signora. But given that you’re no longer a young girl, it’s best to make sure.”

And so here I am at this clinic.

The room’s a bit dark, the lights are off. The heat feels excessive even though in general I tend to prefer the heat. I start to take off my jacket and scarf right away. There’s just one other patient waiting, another woman trapped with me in that room. She looks about twenty years older than I am. She watches me carefully, without warmth in her eyes. Her gaze is impenetrable. I can’t manage to remove the scarf, it’s gotten tangled up with my necklace. How ridiculous. The woman keeps looking at me as if there were a screen between us, as if I were a person on television. I unhook the necklace’s clasp, feeling rattled, and sit down. I ask:

“How is this doctor? Any good?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

I wait fifteen minutes, I go on waiting. The other woman also waits. They don’t call us in. She doesn’t read, she doesn’t do anything. She doesn’t look at me anymore, not even as if through the television screen.

Unfortunately I forgot to put a book in my purse. There are no magazines. Only a few brochures about health, about taking care of one’s heart.

What’s this woman’s ailment? Is she afraid? I’m tempted to ask her these questions, to break the ice. After all, it’s just the two of us. But I know better.

Even though I don’t feel any palpitations at the moment, I’m certain that, sooner or later, that vague, worrisome tic will act up again, below my skin, where there’s a vein that connects my heart to my brain.

No one keeps this woman company: no caregiver, no friend, no husband. And I bet she knows that in twenty years, when I happen to be in a waiting room like this one for some reason or other, I won’t have anyone sitting beside me, either.

In the Bookstore

Inevitably I bump into my ex, the only significant one, with whom I was involved for five years. It’s hard to believe, when I see him and say hello, that I ever loved him. He still lives in my neighborhood, alone. He’s a small but handsome man, with thin-rimmed eyeglasses and tapered hands that lend him an intellectual air. But he’s never amounted to much, he remains puerile and full of complaints, in spite of his middle-aged man’s body.

Here he is today in the bookstore. He stops in often, he fancies himself a writer. He was always writing something in a notebook, though I have no idea what. I doubt he’s ever managed to publish anything.

“Have you read this?” he asks me, pointing to a book that just got a prize.

“I don’t know it.”

“You should.” He looks at me and adds, “You’re looking well.”

“You think?”

“I’m a mess, I hardly slept last night.”

“Why not?”

“The kids in the bar under my apartment are too rowdy, it’s an ongoing problem. I need to find a new place.”

“Where?”

“Away from this godforsaken city. I’ve been thinking of buying a little house by the sea, or maybe in the mountains, far from everything and everyone.”