Roman Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

She looks at all the things I look at every day. But I wonder what else she sees in them.

They say that being here is all they need, that even the air is different, that it cleanses. How lovely, they say, being together like this, away from everyone.

I realize how much the guests like this rural, unchanging landscape, how much they appreciate every detail, how these things help them think, rest, dream.

At the same time I wonder what they know about the loneliness here. About the identical days in our dilapidated cottage. The nights when the wind blows so hard the earth seems to shake, or when the sound of rain keeps me awake. The months we live alone among the hills, the horses, the insects, the birds that pass over the fields. What would they make of the harsh quiet that reigns here all winter?

They think, since he’s a foreigner, that he doesn’t speak the language. Sometimes they even think he’s mute.

he always says the same thing: that he couldn’t make anything of his life. All he wants me to do is study and finish school, go to college, and then go far away from them.

Shopping lists in the faint, small script that the mother used, on other sheets of paper, to write all about us.

The two women liked to remark on this coincidence: the fact that they’d both lived on the same street in different stages of life, under different circumstances.

Regardless, she thinks that it’s good to live in a place that’s both familiar and full of secrets, with discoveries that reveal themselves only slowly and by chance.

“It’s like we’re in their home,” the woman in mourning says, amused, when she returns to the table.

Inside the bathroom, the professor reflects on her friend’s observation—that it’s like being in someone’s home. It’s just an ordinary bathroom in a trattoria. And yet she feels ill at ease and in the way.

They let go, but the levity of their old goodbyes is missing.

She doesn’t just feel bad and embittered; she’s humiliated, gripped by a sadness she can’t control.

You’d encounter two distinct groups, like two opposing currents that crisscross in the ocean, forming a perfectly symmetrical shape, only to cancel each other out a moment later.

They came from different countries, for work or for love, for a change of scenery, or for some other mysterious reason.

In no time at all they’d manage to visit nearly all parts of our country, tackling the smaller towns on the weekends, skiing our mountains in February, and swimming in our crystalline seas in July. They’d pick up a decent smattering of our language, adapt to the food, forgive the daily chaos. Overnight they’d become minor experts in the historical events we’d memorized as kids and had all but forgotten—which

They had a strategic relationship with this city without ever fully being a part of it, knowing that sooner or later their trip would end and one day they’d be gone.

They were so different from the group I belonged to: those of us born and raised in Rome, who bemoaned the city’s alarming decline but could never leave it behind. The type of people for whom just moving to a new neighborhood in their thirties—going to a new pharmacy, buying the newspaper from a different newsstand, finding a table at...

three boys in quick succession, and then, like a simple but welcome dessert after a three-course meal, a girl.

It had a certain effect on me, coming to that house from our pleasant but compact apartment, where every book, every spoon, every shirt had its proper place, where I knew every shelf and hinge, and seating ten at the dinner table was a squeeze. An apartment whose windows looked out only onto other apartments, other windows, other lives like ours.

We were detached from our flawed, finely tuned lives, from our frustrations. I could sense time lengthening and the suspension, at least for a few hours, of all responsibility. I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish one party from the next, the incidents, the particulars, until one year when something out of the ordinary occurred, an ultimately banal disruption that remains a caesura in my life.

My wife didn’t mourn his absence—if anything, she was eager for him to become more and more independent. According to her, the fact that he was getting by on his own for the most part, and now had a woman in his life, and was far from us, was a much deserved and happy ending to our long and exhausting road as parents.

I found her lack of worry astonishing: she who’d hovered over our son his whole life, who’d taken such exacting care of his every meal, every soccer game, every test, every report card. But then I realized that she was always looking ahead, very rarely behind, which was why she now had her sights on his career, his love life, his future children—in short, his complete separation from us.

I was proud of him, yes, I was excited about his prospects, but I still had a hole in my heart.

They fascinated me precisely because, even though we were crammed into the same house, celebrating the same mutual friend, partaking in the same collective ritual, we remained two species, distinct and unmistakable.

They evoked a world beyond my horizons, the risky steps I’d never taken: a world that had perhaps snatched my son away for good.

had a kind of prematurely weathered beauty. Her dark hair was tied up in a bun at her nape. She must have been around ten years younger than my wife, with a sharper gaze and, I felt, a more turbulent inner life.

The woman spoke in a strange mix of her language and ours, but it was easy enough to follow.

“Today I brushed up against the worst thing that could possibly happen.”

Who was that woman? Why had she been so open with me, so unguarded, instantly bridging the solitary distance between two strangers? Why had she revealed to me, out of the blue, that she was in crisis?

I worried that he wasn’t mature enough, that deep down he felt unhappy, that he’d end up in some kind of trouble. But that naïve and vulnerable boy was not my son: he was me. Or rather, he was the version of me I’d never allowed to form, that I’d neglected, blocked out—a version that, even without ever having existed, had defeated me.

What was she reading? Who was writing to her? Hundreds of messages poured in every day from mysterious senders. A densely inhabited world, buzzing with activity, hers alone.

As if the year gone by were nothing, nothing the passage of time. We hadn’t even shaken hands, there was just that flash of understanding. So why was I feeling a little guilty?

The more I looked, the more she evaded me, unfazed. Until all of a sudden she lifted her gaze, for an instant, and revealed her eyes to me—filled (I thought) with fury and exasperation, blinding eyes that were shining (I hoped) for me.

The idea appealed to me: a relationship punctuated with gaps; a fixed date, ours alone, in the middle of the party. It seemed like an acceptable form of infidelity, entirely forgivable, a bit like when I thought of the girl from the pool while I was already with my wife. In truth I wasn’t looking for trouble. Just a few blazing hours spent together, checked by a year of separation.

I’d never betrayed my wife in this city, where everyone’s always cheating on everyone.

As with any couple, things left unsaid enter in to maintain your aging affection. Which was how we’d survived twenty-three years together with no major disruptions, no earthquakes.

We were, all of us, each on our own, replaying our previous lives: lives still in progress, foolish, makeshift, splendid lives. I glanced around at the women who refused to play the role of signora, who’d kept up their looks. And yet we weren’t getting any younger, we were accumulating wrinkles, health scares, disappointments. The songs took us back—to our first kiss, our first relationship, ancient emotions, our first heartbreak, minor grievances we’d buried, unresolved, but had never shaken off.

She and I danced, together, on our own. It was a torment, also a triumph. We would lock eyes for a moment, here and there I’d feel my body brushing hers, a shoulder, a hip. The two of us were still nailed to our respective lives, but underneath it all I sensed that we were being reckless, conspiratorial.

I envied my wife and yet at the same time I was grateful. There was no way, when they went out together on their walks or to see an art exhibit, that L didn’t think of me.

After more than twenty years of marriage, I knew what happened when women talked—all that archived information which loosens in the vapor of friendship, which floats to the surface while they’re out buying shoes, eating salads, admiring paintings.

That moment seemed more transgressive than any erotic act. What had we shared? An intimate exchange, inexplicably charged. And now, just as inexplicably, we shared my wife.

my embellished version of events had fused with reality: it had driven me to wound and demean my wife, in a way that she, with her discreet behavior, had never done to me in our long years of marriage.

We ate, we conversed. But in the wake of a death even your own breath, your own shadow come as a shock. Everything feels inappropriate, indecent, for a while.

Unlike me, P, to whom I owe these pages, didn’t make it out of the story. She’ll never visit her children in other countries, or cry about distances or the passing of days, that merciless, automatic plot device that propels us forward and brings us to our knees.

Her parties, however, have stayed with me, and the thought of them still quickens the heart: the secluded house packed with people, the sunlit lawn, those hours of sublime detachment. A setting I cherished, a promising start I tried to finish, to put into words, in which I’d been, briefly, a wayward husband, an inspired author, a happy man.

white butterflies flitting above the sea’s surface, a frantic but cheerful swarm traveling alongside us, almost seeming to lead the way.

When I was twenty I married a girl from my country who left behind all she knew to live with me on the other side of the world.

But even inside the house, even with the windows closed, those words seeped in and began to darken our sunlit rooms, like clouds mounting in a sky on the verge of splitting open.

They’d grown silent, our children, who spoke the language so well you wouldn’t even think they were ours.