Roman Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

Around my parents I felt out of place, as usual: the only child of two people who had never really taken stock of the person I was. I feared I’d betrayed them just as I’d feared long ago I’d betrayed my best friend; every time I went back to that town I thought of the day I sat on the edge of her bed, feeling doomed already in that room with its sour smell, and the way her parents had looked at me askance, and how she’d declared: You’ve ruined everything.

You travel a certain distance, you desire and make decisions, and you’re left with recollections, some shimmering and some disturbing, that you’d rather not conjure up. But today, in the basilica, memory dominates, the deepest kind. It waits for you under the rock—bits of yourself, still living and restless, that shudder when you expose them.

I, meanwhile, because he asked, told him things I’d never mentioned to my husband—nothing terribly secret, just a few of my impressions about how it had been to start a new life in Italy,

All this he took in without looking at me but with remarkable concentration,

Even though, at first, most of the time we spent together was outside, being with him was like finding yourself in that extra room that mysteriously appears in dreams and makes your house feel surprisingly more spacious.

The discovery of that room took me back to a moment in my distant past, when I was afraid to love but also afraid that no one would want me. Until, after Dante Alighieri’s letter, I felt suddenly in the wrong, tormented by an impossible situation. Once more, temptation and hesitation on a bench:

I still loved my husband and naturally I felt guilty, incredibly guilty, like a worm, really, but I also felt liberated, I must admit, from the false virtue that had hindered me in the past. Maybe I was afraid to die without ever crossing the line. In any case, every evening at the dinner table with my husband and every night as he snored beside me in bed, I knew that I’d damaged, perhaps ruined, regrettably, the solid relationship we’d had, the same way I’d bend the stalk of a fresh flower at a tragic angle as I adjusted a bouquet just picked out at the flower stand.

Having lost one parent, I didn’t want to miss out on the time I had left with the other. Those trips, grueling as they were, brought me peace.

Poco più oltre, sette alberi d’oro / falsava nel parere il lungo tratto / del mezzo ch’era ancor tra noi e loro.

With all the ups and downs, we’ve stayed married, we’ve remained friends, and when I go back to Rome, when we both have the time, we might still have lunch together.

Certain stories are hard to bear, as are certain things we’ve lived or observed or fumbled or explored with great care. They transmit an energy that extends beyond the disposable day-to-day. Our deepest memories are like infinite roots reflected in the brook, a simulacrum without end. And yet every story, like every life, lasts only so long.

Ma ora, Signore, hanno trovato la pace, la pace che doni loro e che rimane, una serenità che nulla può turbare, una calma imperturbabile.

These women in the middle of life’s journey are the third family I’ve had. But we, too, have placed a big collective lid over our wounds, our disappointments, our anguish.

Distances help, as does changing one’s perspective on a regular basis—they make the end of a long marriage easier to bear, they lighten the load of an unhappy childhood and an adolescence spent under a rock and the fear of having ruined nearly everything.

I wonder what it would have been like to live without moving so often between places, without the migrating spirit that has befallen me.

I’d call the academic side of this two-sided life a sort of purgatory. Rome switches between heaven and hell. By now it’s chock-full of things that have been broken, mistaken, bent, tossed, killed, but I can’t cut my ties.

A few regrets endure. I still wait to be forgiven by my husband, and to say, when I’m seventeen, to a tortured and fearless boy, that I love him, too.

I still dream about him: he’s arrived on foot with a flashlight in his hand, he waits for me on the other side of the storm door, he’s come to visit.

It’s strange to feel married, in the end, more to a place than to a person. I hope to die here and nowhere else.

How long must we live to learn how to survive? How many times incipit vita nova? I make plans to have dinner with my friends. A clear blue sky extends over the piazza. “This city is shit,” one of us says, breaking the silence. “But so damn beautiful.”