Roman Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

I didn’t know what to do or where to go, and it felt like the only way forward was to give up the home that had brought us such joy in the beginning, to find any other solution.

At least there, she said, despite its many dangers, we’d never be forced to suffer such disrespect. It hurt to see them go, but I knew she was right.

I must say I was a little taken aback, and maybe even a little jealous of him, a man who felt so at home in this coffee bar, who couldn’t care less about barriers, who wasn’t afraid to be a nuisance. Observing him now, it dawned on me that my whole life I’d felt like an intruder or someone passing through. All this time and still I hadn’t found a place of my own. Now my family, too, was gone.

Again I woke to the sound of traffic, but unlike the camps I’d stayed in, at least it was a space of my own. In some ways it felt like a big, long, narrow, palazzo, with two enormous windows on each end, always open.

And there, I noticed something I’d never seen before in all the years I’d lived in this city: a swarm of moths fluttering around, dark and frantic.

The mother thinks that the steps in this city, though made of stone, are something like the sea, where everything washes back, eventually.

What does that strange, contorted language, cryptic and hideous, even mean? She’s able to pick out a letter here and there—some letters look more like numbers than letters, to be honest—but never a whole word. Even though she can’t make out what it says she feels insulted. It’s a bit like when she hears foreigners talking on the street. Not the tourists who come to admire the neighborhood and then go away, but the others who work at the market stalls and have children and talk among themselves. The incomprehensible writing strikes her as an affront even though it’s silent. It feels disrespectful.

Rome, for him, is a point of reference, a place to leave from and come back to. He’s moved his whole family to Rome but he really doesn’t live there.

More than anything, she’s scared, very scared, of anesthesia. Not the partial numbing at the dentist or for an epidural but total anesthesia: the complete disappearance, for a time, of any thought, dream, or sensation. To be merely a body, incapable of reacting to anything.

Every day, for two or three minutes, feeling at once exposed and imperceptible, she merges with the collective organism—with their arms and their smooth uncovered legs, with their loose hair—and imagines that she’s one of them, without their knowing it.

their mother, who wanted so desperately to live in Rome, to do her research and write her book, was the one who seemed more often sad and on edge, while their father was mostly cheerful. He wasn’t ashamed to make mistakes when he spoke Italian in restaurants and shops, but their mother would be mortified.

that was where the father told them that he loved the other father, very much. Not just as a friend but the way he loved their mother, and that what he felt for her had evolved over the years into another type of bond.

the two brothers, after seeing to some details and spending a few days with F after the funeral, have come down to Rome on their own, to visit the old neighborhood and sit on the steps

“That was the most radiant moment of my life,” F had said after the funeral. In that brief exchange on the steps, both men had seen with piercing clarity what would happen, without knowing how or when. And the brothers, who love their wives and their children dearly, confess to each other that they’ve never felt such passion, with such certainty.

His wife spends her days chatting with friends she grew up with, maybe bumping into an ex-boyfriend or two at the coffee bar, and if she has to run back to the house, for whatever reason, she leaves her towel and creams nonchalantly on the sand.

paradise where the sun sizzles on the water at sunset—a place where the screenwriter never gets any work done.

At night the steps turn into a kind of ancient amphitheater, with groups of teenagers seated out in the open, waiting to watch some tragedy unfold. Except they themselves are the spectacle: the nightly drama lies in their exchanges, intense or completely casual, private even though they’re in public. They pay attention to nothing but the cliques around them.

Still feeling like a version of Dracula, who emerges only at night, he drinks in the splendor of his city, even if it’s a splendor under siege and always in decline. Unlike his wife, he loves and forgives Rome in every season.

At forty-two, she still looks like one of the girls worthy of sitting on the staircase in the evening.

every effort, and even every pleasure in life, every goal that’s reached and achieved, every recollection, lasts only for an instant, just like the water that throws itself onto the beach, leaving a spontaneous imprint whose wavering contours, like the line drawn by a heart monitor, are never quite the same.

She’s been to my country a number of times, so now and again we strike up a conversation. She travels there in the winter, to a town along the coast I’ve never seen.

Her transparent dress exposes her black bra and nearly the full length of her legs. Her shoulders are bare and she wears flat sandals. But like the signora told me, no one mentions it here. One of the thin straps of her dress has fallen from her shoulder, but she doesn’t seem to care. She never bothers to adjust it. She’s still talking with the woman behind the window. They have so much to say to each other, it’s as if they’re friends.

They have their own little grocery stores. They put signs in their windows that my family can’t read. They pray barefoot in squalid buildings. Their kids play soccer on the other side of the aqueduct, on a dry patch of ground. My parents complain that before long, they’ll outnumber us.

For a few hours after midnight, this ancient city seems to belong only to the young: a joyful kingdom, ephemeral, all their own.

Among them, I notice a few kids with different features, with darker complexions like mine. A strange harmony binds them together: nocturnal complicity, identical gestures. I like watching them chat with each other, scattered but gathered from all around. They’ll never know that their presence soothes me, even though, at the same time, I feel a pain in the center of my chest, as if one of those pellets were lodged in my heart, and I nearly die from envy.

That long before they met, when she was nineteen, she’d studied there for a year and fallen in love for the first time, with a Roman boy.

“I don’t think there’s anything I’ve done the exact same way every year of my life.” “Here the same things happen, again and again.”

“I wish I could exaggerate. I’d like to weigh ten pounds less, or even more, and pull it off like they do. I love their wrinkles and heavy makeup. The emphatic figures, the worn-out sandals.” “Why?” “Because it means they’re above perfection. Because they don’t worry about it, which only makes them more beautiful. Because life marks their faces, and they live hard.”

“Get ahold of yourself. There’s nothing waiting for you in that room. Nothing but the grief already inside you.”

“Next year he’ll have been gone as many years as he was alive.”

the twins were the ones to find their father in our bedroom, already dead from heart failure. They thought he was taking a long nap, but instead he’d left without saying a word to anyone.

They say they don’t miss hectic city life, so they rarely come back to see me, but I understand, they’re caught up with their jobs and that’s a good thing.

Though at least at the tailor’s I can avoid the sensation I sometimes feel at home, a pang in my chest, my breath caught for a moment in the night, a wave of sadness that rises from my stomach and clogs my throat: all tied to the equally wonderful and painful memory of having raised two sons and having once been a wife within those walls.

When they left home it was as if I gave birth a second time, and I say second because in my mind that first time at the hospital was only one birth. Living alone for the first time in my life seemed just as revolutionary a moment, though without that same joy, as if I’d passed into a realm of continuous worry. It’s strange that maternal anxiety grows with time, that you get worse with the years. I’d have thought the opposite, but how can we bear the distances, the absences, the silences our own children generate?

I was astonished that he was still there, the same man, after all that time, and just as astonished at myself, too, for having lived so long in the same city, and for having spent twenty years on the other side of the world.

felt a pang of insult, but it didn’t fully sink in; it was like the slip of a dull knife while you’re idly chopping onions, causing a vaguely irksome cut but not a bloody one.

I knew right away what I needed to do, and began feeding the bits of paper into my mouth one by one. They dissolved in an instant, leaving behind a not unpleasant taste on my tongue. It didn’t take me long, no more than ten minutes, and soon enough those messages disappeared along with the bitter taste in my throat.

I absorbed these private revelations with a tremor impossible to ignore. On the one hand, I felt excluded, left behind, but at the same time I knew how much it mattered to my friend to confess all this to me and to no one else.

It was just that she was the one in the throes of it, the one with a boyfriend, the one who’d crossed an emotional threshold—namely, the anxiety of never coupling up that looms over at least a part of everyone’s adolescence—while I, her faithful audience, waited my turn.

He didn’t seem happy to see me. In fact, having me there beside him, and (if he desired) all to himself, seemed to torment him all the more.

“Every desire becomes a decision.” It was from the diary of a famous author, he explained, and then

I quickly circled the piazza to rouse the part of me that lives here, that still lives part-time in Rome. Every time I come back I feel rejuvenated—and also like a kind of ghost, picking up its former life in fits and starts.

And if I, too, were to survey my life from above? Would I gain some perspective? Or would it only upset me? I loro occhi si sono chiusi su ciò che ci seduce, su ciò che ci fa smarrire.

My parents were totally oblivious to my first romantic crisis. They tended to be unaware of my thoughts, problems, and worries. They didn’t ask many questions, as if their curiosity, once activated, would reveal too much about the creature they’d made together.

And through that ongoing, furtive contact with his words, I really did betray my friend. I knew I had been disingenuous with S and with myself: in spite of everything, I still harbored some hope in my head.

That’s how I learned the real meaning of that fictitious name on the envelope, and realized that I would have been loved only in theory—that Dante Alighieri would have adored me only in his mind, that he would never have kissed me on the bench, needless to say, given that I wasn’t even a girl in flesh and blood. I discovered that Dante’s lines were filled with prophecies, but that those who uttered them—Tiresias, for instance, and his daughter, poor Manto, with her face turned tragically backwards—were among the damned who suffered punishments in hell.

I never went back to America with my friends. Instead I made do in Rome, where I was happy. I went on to rid myself of the guilt I felt for not having studied economics, and for not having paid attention to my mother when she tried a few times to arrange a marriage for me, with the idea (I’m guessing) of linking me up with her own destiny and passing down her unhappiness. I wasn’t sorry to put a little distance between me and those two, who didn’t even know what to get me for a present.

if there were a contrapasso, an inverse suffering to punish people who ruin things by mistake, who insist on making new lives for themselves.

I was quietly so thrilled that I feared I was on the edge between life and death. All this seemed to me the clearest and most convincing proof that I had made the right choice, that I’d been wise not to put the lid on this unexpected future, to have finally exposed my life to sunlight and to have reached some sort of paradise.

My parents believed that living in another country for the sake of marriage was a sacrifice I’d been fated to endure as opposed to a liberation. I’d stopped studying Dante, I’d become a housewife abroad like my mother, but this coincidence didn’t bring us any closer. They weren’t impressed that I had grown skilled at living in a new world, that I had gained fluency in a new language