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Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World. Anthony Doerr
Читать онлайн.Название Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007390533
Автор произведения Anthony Doerr
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
John Keats, whose grave I want to see, is buried near the corner. The stone reads:
This Grave contains all that was mortal, of a Young English Poet, who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his heart, at the Malicious Power of his enemies, desired these words to be Engraven on his Tomb Stone: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.
Keats died in a little room beside the Spanish Steps, two miles north of here, within earshot of Bernini’s perpetually leaking marble boat. It was 1821; he was twenty-six; tuberculosis had stalked his family for years.
Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water. Did he mean that to write your name in stone is vanity? That all of us, foreigners or locals, are ultimately anonymous?
The tombs sleep heavily in the grass. The babies squirm. I gaze down rows of memorials into silent corners. We are hemmed by brickwork, ivy, history. A line from a Tom Andrews poem comes back to me: “The dead drag a grappling hook for the living. The hook is enormous.”20
As far as I can tell, Henry, Owen, and I are the only people here. It’s serene, but disquieting, too; it feels as though we are vastly outnumbered. Again I feel, acutely, that we are outsiders—that there are things in Rome that I will never come close to understanding. The grappling hook drags through the trees, the lawn. I want, suddenly, to get my sons away from here.
On the bus home I hold Owen at the window, put my finger in Henry’s fist. Owen leans his head against my neck and sighs. I get off in Monteverde, wheel them home. In the elevator they smile into the mirror from beneath their hoods. We rise through the stairwell. Owen reaches for the bakery bag in my fist. Henry fumbles for the keys.
I heap the boys onto their mother. They laugh and laugh. We eat our croissants; we drink pineapple juice from a box. Yesterday, Shauna tells me, Owen clapped his hands twice. Henry can now roll halfway across the room.
That evening I am reading Pliny in my studio when two parrots, bottle green, flash across the lawn below the window. They are there so suddenly I am disoriented: Is this Italy? Or the Amazon? Their size confuses scale; they are like fat, green herons; their wingspan looks as if it is as wide across as my desk.
They circle the garden once, one above and slightly in front of the other, screeching to one another. Then they dip over the wall and are swallowed by the trees.
What do I give thanks for this Thanksgiving? The boys, and Shauna, and the veal meatballs the butcher rolls in bread crumbs and packs in waxed paper. I’m thankful for music and the taste of the little chocolate coffee cups from the cioccolateria Shauna found in Trastevere, and the heat from the radiator beside me, and for the pencil box Shauna bought me two days ago made out of handmade paper. I’m thankful that everything sweet is sweet because it is finite.
THE EARTH TRUNDLES ALONG. AUTUMN SEEPS away from Rome. Good-bye, tomatoes; good-bye, tourists. Good-bye, whitethroats and warblers, and good-bye to the little brown corn bunting who landed on our terrace yesterday and sang a few notes before continuing on. Tonight I press my face into the pillow and imagine the migrants sweeping south through Europe, down the length of Italy, swallows and kingfishers, bean geese and sand martins, a tide across the Alps, darkening the moon, chasing the sun.
The vegetable stand we buy from is located in a little convergence of alleys between the hardware store and the bakery, called Largo Luigi Micelli. The sisters who run it are stubby-fingered and wear gumboots. “Buongiorno,”
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