The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,2
my heart.
I have often imagined that I would never have met Ramon had I had companionship in those tired, dusty afternoons. In Rome, I slept in a hostel run by nuns. Ramon was visiting his mother in Terracina, not two hours from Rome, where he’d come to stay with friends, and he too was unaccompanied when we met in Santa Maria in Trastevere.
My mother’s sadistic touristic rigor had put me off cathedrals altogether—villages across France must bear the heavy marks of my dragging footsteps as I was pulled in to investigate each town’s church—but on this trip they offered relief from the heat, and I remember walking out of the sun and into the familiar musty darkness.
Why do synagogues contain light, churches darkness? I wondered at this, looking up at the dusky ceilings, the dark walls embossed in gold, the carved decorations. I crept into the chamber behind the altar, where their relic was stored: Saint Apollonia’s skull encased in glass on a bed of red velvet.
There was a slot to insert a coin and when I dropped a lira in, the skull lit up and in the trembling church light I could see its grooves, the wavy lines separating the different parts of the cranium. The light did not last long and when it switched off I turned to see Ramon waiting behind me.
“Want to watch again?” He held a coin between his thumb and forefinger.
And then there it was, illuminated. Like a heartbeat, I thought.
I had not been thinking of a child’s then. Once all the math I did was mere subtraction: I had been ill—I’d had cancer—but I had survived my illness. Perhaps I was thinking only of the surprising durability of my own heart.
That first night, Ramon spoke with the nuns at the convent where I had secured my little cot in the row of women, the bed’s sheets pulled up tight like a scared child’s, like the girls in the Madeline books, as I retrieved my bag from the convent. As I walked away, I knew the sisters were thinking that the stories they’d heard about American women—especially the Jewish ones—had been true. That night in Rome was the first time since I’d had my surgeries that I’d let someone touch me. The moonlight streamed in through the window, and when I lifted my shirt, tentatively, the line that bisected me, that jagged cut, was illuminated in the eerie gray light.
Ramon had paused. “Looks like you lost that catfight,” he’d said before moving on.
_______
After two days of pizza and pasta and coffee and ice cream and fried artichokes and street cafés and piazzas filled up with pigeons, and the exchange of stories about our separate lives in New York City, where Ramon now lived, we sat eating at a place in Campo de’ Fiori. The restaurant boasted a choice of no less than 3,456 types of mozzarella and as far as I could tell not one of them was not the most delicious, creamy, delectable morsel I’d ever tasted. I was on not my first, second, or third “taste” when Ramon asked me if I’d like to meet his mother.
Beneath my deep uncomplicated love of the mozzarella, I liked Ramon. But I did not know if this was a lasting relationship. So, no, I was not dying, just then, to meet his mother. And yet I was intrigued. When Lucy and I traveled with my parents, they sought out a farmer to cook a typical meal for us, or a restaurant with four chairs in the mountains one couldn’t find in a guidebook (or without one, it turns out), a special ceremony only locals—which somehow seemed to include us?—could attend. The goal: a true experience that legitimized the privilege of our tourism, rendering it authentic and therefore qualifying us as atypical Americans. When traveling, never turn down the opportunity to visit the home of an indigenous person, I thought, and so I told Ramon that I would love to meet his mother.
I thought of all the indigenous objects my mother had brought from her travels: a mask from Kenya that had been danced in a renewal ceremony and so had once come alive; a voodoo doll from Haiti with rusted pins in its back; a Moroccan woven basket. As we drove from the highway onto the dirt road that took us to Ramon’s home in an agricultural section outside of the commune, I wondered what I could bring back, proof that I had traveled there.