Mothers and Daughters

The room was in a side street off the Via Arenula, overlooking the river and the island of Tiberina. There was a bed in the room, and a dresser, and a naked light bulb over which they hung a colored paper bag. In September, the room was comfortably cool. Later, in the winter, they bought a kerosene heater, and they put it very close to the bed and huddled together under two heavy quilts. But in September, the room was delightfully cool. They kept the wooden shutters on the single window closed against the sun. The room was usually in shadow. She would remember it as a secret pocket, shadowy, moving with shadows. She would remember it, too, as suddenly bursting with light, Renato opening the shutters and the golden sun limning his naked body, and then splashing over the bed where she lay watching him. She would remember this room as an essential part of her life, and the memory of it would continue to amaze her forever. There was nothing distinctive about the room except the fact that she shared it with Renato. A bed, a dresser, and a paper-covered light bulb. A shabby room transformed by Renato until there was no room at all surrounding them, no four walls enclosing them. The room itself was essentially meaningless, and yet whatever they did in that room, whatever they whispered to each other, whatever they laughed about or fought about, seemed to be the only meaningful and important things. The room was small, and it enclosed them tightly, but it did not contain them. Instead, it closed out the rest of the world. The walls did not exist for Julia and Renato.

They spoke only Italian in that room. She said things alien to her native tongue, and somehow alien to the person she had always thought of as Julia Regan. She learned vulgar Italian with remarkable facility. She learned in that room that Renato was truly a farmer who could possess a farmer’s crude big hands and a farmer’s vocabulary when he wanted to. His language excited her. She never knew when his facile charm would turn to brutish obscenity, when his gently stroking hands would turn suddenly fierce. He taught her to say things she never would have said in English, and she found these more descriptive somehow of the love they made. Perhaps she would have blushed in English — in Italian, the words she whispered, the words she sometimes shouted urgently, only stimulated her the more. She felt like a slut sometimes, but there was nothing shameful about the feeling. Oddly, and dispassionately, she began to understand that her love for Renato, and his love for her, was something that prompted and perhaps nourished their love-making, but that really had very little to do with their real physical enjoyment of each other. She accepted the fact that she loved him and would not have been in bed with him otherwise. But she proceeded from that premise to bring a newly discovered harlot’s skill and a gutter wastrel’s language to their embraces. There was no need for her to say, “Love me,” when she meant something quite different, something quite more basic. She knew that he loved her, and the euphemism would have demanded something he supplied with his every glance. Nor did she choose to say, “Make love to me,” because this implied to her a fabrication, a construction, the phrase “fare a l’amore” meant to make love, to build love, there was no need for its use; and it implied besides a selfishness, make love to me, rather than a sharing, a mutual giving of love. No, she preferred a word she and Renato coined, a word based on an expression he had learned from the troops. There was nothing poetic about the expression. It was perhaps common and coarse, based on the word “chiavare,” to key, used in the vulgar sense to express a key entering a lock, “Si sono fatti una bella chiavata.” But they turned its usage into poetry, they took the verb and used it the way no Italian would ever use it, “Chiaviamoci,” they said, key me, enter me, let us unlock each other.

Unlocked, locked in each other’s arms, they would talk later in whispers. Entered, the key turned and twisted in the lock, opened, unlocked, love found a voice afterward, not in flowery images of romance but in seemingly inconsequential and meaningless exchanges of thought and feeling and memory, understood immediately, shared instantly, confiscated at once until more than bodies lay entwined, until mind touched mind and in the touching was rewarded and enriched. The accepted premise in that small dark room was that they would make love and enjoy it — but the richest thing they shared was the exchange of what was most important to both of them, the things they would never tell another living soul.

She learned eventually how important the concept of family was to Renato, and perhaps to all Italian men, though she never equated him with the faceless Italians she passed in the street. He was Renato, inimitably himself, impossibly, miraculously her own to touch and see and hear. He would lie back against the pillow with his hands clasped behind his head, and tell her of his boyhood with such unrestrained joy of memory that once she kissed him in the middle of a sentence, and he stopped speaking and stared at her, and said only, “Why?”