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Taking Anna to Italy
by Susan Swetnam
Of course I’m not jealous. Jealousy would be absurd, for it was my idea to bring Anna to Italy, thinking it was time to show her what the world might hold. She’s eighteen, in Florence as a graduation present, skipping redundant high school classes with ease and our permission. Anna is not my literal child (for I am childless, a widow now, at fifty-five), but she is mine, as I am hers, by mutual choice. Daughter of friends, in the last five years Anna has become my apprentice cook, my apprentice on the mountain trails around our Idaho town; she is the one who watches what I do with such close care, the one whose voice sometimes sounds like mine. Her parents have been gracious about sharing her with me, and on this trip her mother Nancy and I laugh together at her instant ease.
Three days ago, Anna lived in a world where high school sports defined conversation and Old Navy defined fashion. This afternoon, she strolls easily down the cobblestones, her head high, eyes bright, looking in shop windows that are worth looking in. In the cold March sunlight, she is worry- and heart-free, light in every way. For a year, I’ve been calling her the most beautiful human being on the planet, using superlatives for fun; today, on the stage of Florentine streets, it appears that this observation has some justice.
- - -
“Ciao, Bella. Ciao, Signora,” calls the smiling beggar taking the sun on the steps of San Miniato, as Anna and I come out. I’ve counseled her to ignore beggars, but this one is so clearly harmless, so jolly, that we both smile back. We have the whole sweep of stairs to ourselves, plenty of room to dodge him. We’re in a good mood, congratulating ourselves for braving the long, steep walk up to this hillside church, a place for insiders.
Then his words penetrate, and I realized that I’m “Signora.”
- - -
I was just forty when I first saw Florence, brought by my husband, Ford. That first week was full of sunlight and joy, and we let our feet take us where they would. Once we happened upon a schoolyard full of happy children at recess. We stopped for half an hour on that sunny afternoon, watching them play hide and seek in the manicured shrubbery, the two littlest girls shushing us and grinning up when they hid at our feet, just inside the fence. Another day, we spied on a shoemaker working in his shop, doors open to the light and air. Sometimes we stopped, baffled at a curving street corner, and enjoyed the gifts that being lost again had brought us – a new café, an icon-painter’s workshop, a shop of singing birds -- before we asked directions. Now and then, we even walked with purpose and a map to see paintings or churches, or to fetch armfuls of artichokes, bouquet lettuce, goat cheese from the San Lorenzo, the Santo Spirito markets, bearing the bounty back to our tiny apartment in the Oltrarno. One day, when we had each wandered alone (for we were blithe and confident in those days, and all streets led home), we found that we had each brought an armload of cardoons, and dissolved, laughing, into wine, then into bed, the cardoons cooked only much later, windows open to the spring darkness, to laughter in the streets. Everyone looked at me, that trip, everywhere I walked, with him or alone. “You’re beautiful,” my darling said.
- - -
Anna has bought herself a leather coat, buttery, single-breasted like my jacket, the one I bought myself when I returned to Florence four years ago. Ford had just died young, of cancer. I thought I’d sense him in this city he loved, that rainy November week, but all I encountered were my own imaginings. That trip, I wandered and saw nothing. I felt myself invisible in the streets, and, later, had only the jacket to prove that I’d not dreamed the trip.
Anna’s coat is three-quarter-length and darker brown than mine, to suit her chestnut hair. It’s tight, skimming her tiny frame to show her high breasts, her lithe waist, her slim-but-undeniable hips. She’s wearing black pants and good black shoes, as I advised. “This city lives on style,” I warned her as we packed, for her mother Nancy is sensible, devotee of L. L. Bean, Lands End, and Sears. There is no fear about Anna looking dowdy; indeed, she has adjusted to Florentine ways so quickly that even I, who know her cleverness so well, am stunned. On our first morning in the city, as we roamed the San Lorenzo market, Anna bought rose and garnet cashmere scarves. I showed her how to loop them as Florentines do, but she’s already invented a variation, and it’s drawing admiring notice, even from Florentine women, especially from Florentine men.
I’ve brought my own coals-to-Newcastle scarves, two shades of fern green, to suit my lighter hair. I’ve brought my high-heeled boots, too, and that leather jacket, for Florence will be a cautious experiment in flirtation for me, this trip. A month ago, I finally thought that I was ready to try a man’s company, though no viable man had presented himself. “You should go on line,” said a young friend, and, although I raised my eyebrows, I sent my profile and my picture. Within a week, I had a hundred hits. Too fast, I thought, and I deleted all of them. Not quite ready for a physical man yet. But I’m ready to feel a man’s gaze, I think, for I’ve made my body slim again with running, and I’ve finally shaken out the ponytail in which I’ve worn my hair, these last four years. Florence will be a good place to practice, I’ve told myself.
- - -
The sidewalks are narrow, so as we walk on the second morning, we three are staggered. We pass two lovely men in lovely suits; their eyes flick over me, flick over Nancy, to linger behind us. When we stop for traffic, Anna is laughing, quiet laughter. “I made eye contact with that man,” she says, “and I smiled. He stopped talking to his friend, and, when I looked over my shoulder, he had turned around and was still watching me, with his mouth open.” She is sweet, saying it, delighted in her own power, discovered literally yesterday. She isn’t gloating. She’s basking in the turn from spring to summer, the most natural thing in the world.
After lunch, as we run out of conversation, I suggest that we split up. Anna goes to the Science Museum (for she will begin engineering school this fall); Nancy to the Academia to see David. I, too, am purposeful, and I cross my favorite bridge, the Santa Trinita, to walk alone the neighborhood I love best, back to the Oltrarno. I’m present here this time, in contrast to that dark November, I realize to my delight – and I really see the Arno rolling beneath the bridge, the crazy five-pointed corner on the bridge’s south side where I’ve been almost killed by Vespas, the hotel where Ford and I vowed to stay if we ever won the lottery. I stop to read the menu at our favorite enoteca, and then it happens: a man passing checks me out from the corner of his eyes. I’m jolted by a little thrill, and I walk on holding myself straighter, tossing my hair a little, smiling again with the happy mystery that makes them look longer. And they do. This is more like it, I tell myself. Take that, Anna.
Of course I’m jealous, I realize, and I stop in wonder. Who am I? I’ve always told myself that I was not my looks, but my brains and wit and quickness. Who are you fooling?, I ask myself, disgusted. Admit that you’re proud to look much younger than you are. Admit that you’re vain.
And ridiculous? In that instant, I remember the stories about old women, widows, playing young. Boccaccio saw such women in this very city, and he lambasted them with glee. I’m playing young, indeed, in more than just my grooming, with my on-line subscription, my assumption that I will naturally be the focus of men’s eyes. I’m surely not one of Boccaccio’s indiscriminately lustful widows, as my flight from all those balding, bespectacled, but eager men suggests. But who am I to think of love at all? I’ve had my share, perhaps – Ford and I walking these Florentine streets once, knowing without words what the other thought, but words were welcome, too, and touch, always touch. Few people had such happiness, we said to one another. Who am I to act now as if I thought the world were all before me?
Last week, packing to come here, I sang with Bruce Springsteen, “No retreat, baby, no surrender.” Standing this afternoon in the stone canyon of the Borgo San Jacopo, already in shadow at three o’clock, I hear instead Saint Francis de Sales, who once asked a widow friend, “Why don’t you lower your flag?” Perhaps it’s time to lower mine.
Nancy’s lowered hers, though she’s my junior by half a decade. Happy in a long marriage, she’s easy with her aging body. She’s packed for comfort: jeans and shapeless sweaters and sneakers in this dressy city. Her hair is greying – not for her the craft that keeps my own undimmed. When I take the two of them to the enoteca that night, Nancy dresses down with no apologies, draping her warm sensible nylon jacket over the chair back as Anna and I shed our leather coats, then rearrange our scarves over black sweaters. I envy Nancy.
But I’m alone, and I’m frightened.
- - -
Anna and I walk in the Bobboli Gardens. I take her to see the men playing bocci, and they glance at us. One of them, perhaps seventy, for whom “dapper” is a risible understatement, strolls over. “Sera, Signoria,” he says to Anna, smiling at me over her head.
I have taught Anna enough Italian that she knows this is a pleasantry, and she smiles brightly back. He switches to English, chats with us about our trip, about the gardens. He tells me that he misses his own granddaughter, off in Milano. “I have a great favor to ask, Signora,” he says to me. “Will you let me borrow your daughter for an hour? I used to walk with my Beatrice in the gardens, and it will bring back old times for me.”
He seems harmless. The daylight will last for another five hours. Anna’s father has trained her in Tai Chi, and she runs cross-country, while this man appears to need his cane. Why not?
And so they stroll away down a dappled lane, leaving me to tour the gardens on my own. I visit the walk where the stray cats hang out, and I pet the ones I can cajole to my hand. I walk to the terrace at the garden’s top with its vista over Florence, and sit alone, watching the couples climb the stairs to gasp at the view and move together, as Ford and I once did. I kill time, here in this place that I have loved.
At exactly the appointed moment, Anna and her escort come to our rendezvous, and Anna is laughing, on his arm. “She is a charming girl, your daughter,” he says, and bows to Anna before he goes.
“What did you talk about?” I ask her.
“His granddaughter, a lot at first,” she tells me. “Then he asked me about my plans. He flirted a little, but he was nice. Very respectful.” He told her, she says, that she should remember that love was what mattered and never sacrifice love and family for work. She smiles at the quaintness of this, my Anna, for she has told me that she is determined to earn her first degree, maybe her second, before she thinks of moving beyond casual dating.
“He was SO Italian!” she says, sure in four days’ knowledge. “He said, ‘Without love, life is not worth living.’” She grins at me. “Thank you SO much for letting me go with him. I feel like I’ve been part of Florence for a little while.”
I struggle to return her smile.
- - -
On our next-to-last night in the city, I wake to watch the streetlights on our hotel room ceiling, so late that the noise below has quieted. I’m remembering as I come to consciousness how a man my age stared at Anna that afternoon as if I were invisible. In that moment, I consoled myself by imagining that she’d quickly bore him if they spoke, for she knows nothing of art, of music, of books, of history. Deep in the night, however, I know that I’m fooling myself. She’d learn in thirty seconds, as she’s learning Italian. She recognized San Miniato for the glorious church it is; she’s reading Boccaccio in translation, as I suggested, toiling away under the glow of her bedside lamp each night. I’ve been proud of her taste, her quickness. Anyone would enjoy teaching her, as Ford enjoyed teaching me, when I was young.
To my horror, I realize that I suddenly understand the unnatural mothers of Shakespeare’s imagination, and the historical unnatural mothers of flesh and bone in this city, too, who urged their brokenhearted daughters to expeditious marriages fixed with cold and formal strangers. Tonight, I glimpse the bitter satisfaction that might come in extinguishing the light that reveals what one no longer has. Good thing you didn’t bear children of your own, I tell myself. You, too, are unnatural.
But no. For I remember my own mother, as I bloomed, fretting aloud over clothes that did not look well, hair that thinned as her body thickened. I was aghast and tried to comfort her, but she would not be comforted, fretted loudly enough for me to hear, again, again. After my father died, when she was sixty, she settled quickly into a new marriage, is still married in her eighties. No public stage for her. No unseemly ridiculous competition she can’t win.
When Ford died, at first I told myself that I would live alone, work and friends forming my vocation. I would devote myself to celebrating this lovely visible and invisible world. I told myself that the energy of men and women drawing toward each other was synecdoche for larger energies, energies that could fill a life, and for a long time I made myself believe that. This night, though, as I watch the lights, fighting down panic, fighting down envy of this child whom I love, for whom I wish all joy, I know that such vocation will not be enough to fill my heart.
- - -
On our last morning in Italy, Anna and I wander the streets without a plan, laughing as if we were sisters, not Bella and Signora. “I want to come back,” she says, and we plot to rent an apartment, the Christmas after next, each contributing a friend. “We have to be careful who we pick,” she says with great seriousness. “They have to be people who would appreciate this.”
“I trust you to pick well,” I tell her. “After all, I knew you’d appreciate Florence. That’s why I asked you.” I grin; her eyes sparkle.
In a narrow street, Anna stops, her profile illuminated, to peer at a cat sleeping in the sun high in an overhanging window. In that moment, she’s one with all the lovely, respectable young girls who have walked this street for eight hundred years, girls whose modesty didn’t preclude bright eyes and a sense of adventure. Girls in new clothes, newly aware of the space they filled, hearing the wings of a future which they could not yet see but was even now arriving in the next street, palpable. Girls who all turned into signore (if they were lucky) soon, soon enough. A man smiles, and I realize that he is smiling at both of us, at me gazing at Anna as much as at Anna. We live in each other’s gaze, I imagine, then. An instant. A profile against the light. As mine once was. As mine is now, and Anna’s, changing with each moment.
And my heart is filled with pity for her, suddenly, and with pity for myself, pity for the gazing men, sweet and tender pity for all of us, who cannot stop this turning world.
Radha's Shrink
by Susan Swetnam
Though Radha is little-known in the West, she is among the most beloved figures in the Hindu pantheon. She is said to have been an ordinary woman, a wife and a cowherd – until the god Krishna came to her home in the Vraja district of northwestern India, incarnated and biding his time as a late adolescent while waiting for the day when he would reclaim his throne. Gorgeous, luminous, energetic Krishna inspired instant love from all of the cowherd women – the gopis, they are called – as he tarried in the district, playing his flute, teaching them to dance . . . and more. Many stories, dating from the twelfth century on, are told of his love affairs among them in this time, when he was also called Govinda and Gopala. By the eighteenth century, the poets who write about Krishna in this phase of his existence begin to mention Radha, specifically, and she becomes the most vivid female character in the tales of Krishna’s Vrajain sojourn. She is said to have been a woman who fell particularly hard, so hard that she betrayed her husband and trysted with Krishna again, again, though he had other lovers besides her.
Radha is celebrated in Hinduism as a prototype of the human longing for God – a longing so intense that the seeker abandons earthly obligations, earthly attachments as she begins to recognize her connection to the eternal. Later folk traditions even make her explicitly divine, and, if you see the image of a round-eyed girl accompanying the image of Krishna playing the flute on a Hindu altar, that’s Radha. In many of these depictions, she looks like his twin, and the Bengal Vaisnavas insist that they are one: Radha/Krishna, male and female united in a godhead and wreathed with garlands.
Over time, songs and stories of her have proliferated: Radha has grown more romantic, more carnal, more independent, more tragic, in turn, as literary conventions and the spirit of the times have changed. Perhaps we remake gods and heroines regularly to suit our own images; perhaps mythic figures become mythic because all ages see themselves reflected. Whatever the case, there is no doubt that Radha has been among the most appealing figures in human legend for many centuries – in the Indian districts where she is most beloved, in fact, people still call each other by her name as a sign of friendly love. And so I trust that it will not seem too forward to tell a new story about her, one for our own day.
In this story, Radha goes to see a counselor. Suspend your disbelief for a moment, and imagine that psychotherapy had been invented thousands of years ago. She was, after all, in exactly the sort of situation in which women seek counseling today, having lost herself in a man who seemed to be using her – for, god or not, Krishna was a piece of work, back when he was lord of the gopis. “Promiscuous” doesn’t begin to describe him. Radha raged, the poems say, burning with love and anger, sick with desire as he flitted from cowgirl to cowgirl to cowgirl. Phyllis, Chloe, Phoebe, they’d be called in western pastoral, and the fact that they were generic wouldn’t have made Radha feel any better. To complicate the situation, Krishna didn’t even pretend to be contrite. He insisted that he loved all the women equally, that god belonged to no one devotee. Once, he punished Radha for presuming to be a favorite. They were walking to a tryst, the story says, and – either tiring or showing off – she asked him to carry her. He vanished instantly, and the image of her weeping, bereft, is a favorite subject of artists.
Of course, Krishna wasn’t really fooling anybody: he was egging her on, as co-dependent as they come. Though he dallied everywhere, it was Radha whom he always invited to dance in the center of the circle with him. Radha was his favorite, the most eloquent poem insists; he was mad with love for her, and once, when she somehow mustered the gumption to turn her back on him, he even begged her pardon. Their joyful reunion after she accepted his apology is another subject that artists love. Hindu tradition makes her unambiguously his true love: it is she, after all, who stands on altars with him, whose name is linked with his in kirtan, sacred singing, into one name, Radha-Govinda.
Still, even the most Radha-centric texts note that Krishna’s love did not preclude betraying her. Even more sadly, they all confirm that he abandoned her for good when he came to maturity and returned to the city to claim his inheritance. Thus, if a psychotherapist had been available, you can imagine that Radha would have found him, for she would have needed him, all through their affair, and after.
Her therapist would have found her interesting, and he might have labeled her problems as classic. She was trapped in a loveless marriage, one that her parents had arranged apparently because of the man’s prosperity, one that she had not found the self-esteem to oppose. Her husband, Ayana, was clearly unsuitable for her. He seems to have been a coward, as well as a bore, lacking in self-esteem himself, for the stories do not tell of him objecting to her affair. Radha, her therapist might have decided, had been dying for some excitement; dying for some cause into which she could pour her dammed-up energies. She needed to find herself, her own work. Because she had led an unexamined life, one in which she always defined herself in terms of men, she was now defining herself in terms of Krishna – a horrible mistake, and one that suggested self-loathing. Why else would she keep letting that libertine Krishna back into her life, after he’d made a fool of her, letting him walk all over her? She’d need to learn to stand up for herself, her therapist might have decided, to build a sense of personal worth on her own terms, to realize that sex – or a moment in the center of the circle – was not the answer to her problems.
He would have booked her for regular sessions, six months, at least. But, since Radha was goddess material, she would certainly have been able to snap herself back to reconciliation with her lot, rather quickly, on her own, once the talk therapy gave her a little distance. “Krishna is with me, and I with Krishna,” she might have reminded herself, “though I cannot see him now. He is beyond the illusion of this moment, and so am I.” Yet the moments of this world would have helped her, too. As she watched the light come into the trees in the Vrajain forest, mornings when she led her cows to graze, she might have felt deep peace, might have known, somehow, in a way beyond mere knowing, that all was well. Dancing herself to the flute that she recalled, in those sun-dappled woods, she might have felt an ecstasy as lovely as their love-making, though different in kind, and she would have been comforted. Sometimes, she might even, amazed, have felt for a few minutes like Radha-Krishna, a new world opening ahead.
She would have been gracious to her therapist, however, for divine nature is always gracious. “Thanks,” she might have told him, after a few consultations. “The talking helped. I’ve remembered who I am.” And then she would have smiled at him, across the room. “I’m god’s beloved,” she would have said, with quiet pride. “Actually, I’m god, myself, in some way I’m just starting to discover. What do I owe you?”
“Now we really have a problem,” Radha’s shrink would have thought. “Delusional. Ego galloping. A narcissist, as well as a masochist. She’s avoiding the problem entirely, and it’s just a matter of time before her depression returns.”
“Maybe you should keep coming back for awhile, just to tell me about that,” he would have suggested, delicately. And so, not wanting to be rude, she would have gone to see him, faithful to their appointments, once a week. What he heard would have shocked him. It didn’t matter to her that she was a byword – and would be forever – for deliberate and unapologetic adultery, she said. Now she was free from her false attachment to her husband, better able to seek real truth. The fact that Krishna ignored her a great deal of the time, or had abandoned her, was actually a good thing, she would have told her shrink, for she was beginning to recognize that she was an archetype. Her abandonment demonstrated that faith was seldom easy. She might even have quoted Bob Dylan to him: “Ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe.” God was like that sometimes, she said. Humans just had to put up with it. But the putting-up-with was glorious, in its way, for it emptied ego, that false and grasping sense of control that she had always attempted to feel. Now, in contrast, she told him, she felt like she was part of a great cosmic dance, and she was glad to suspend her disbelief and float along, confident that she had a central role in the mystery, embracing each day as it came.
Gently, firmly, he tried to bring her back to reality. He would have asked her how she felt when Krishna abandoned her, why she thought he had a right to do so. He would have worked to make her talk about a time not including Krishna when she felt happy. He would have asked about her father.
Radha would have been polite, but puzzled. He didn’t get it, she would have thought, sadly. In the afternoons after she saw her therapist, she might have taken extra care to be alone, watching her cattle graze in the woods and meadows. She would have let peace wash over her again, in that forest smelling of lilies and lotus, catching sight of peacocks as they wandered into splintered sunlight. At evening, she would have taken the cows to drink at the Jumna (“Come along, Devi, Sita”) watching the glow worms begin to shine in the trees, reflected as bright pinpricks in the river, itself pink with twilight. Krishna is all of this, she would have thought. And all of this is me. How can I help the man see?
Perhaps he never did, and so they would have gone on, Radha and her shrink, at cross-purposes. But let’s imagine, for a moment, that she was luckier, and found a good one. In that case, her therapist, instead of diagnosing her with easy cliches, would have begun by listening. He would have asked a few questions to help her, but the work was hers, he knew, and he let her do it. With such a shrink, who wasn’t obviously inviting her to rage at her beloved Krishna or to admit that she had made a big mistake, Radha would have acknowledged her loneliness, even her anger. She might have said that she was still uncertain about what she should do next, though she was sure that she should not return to Ayana, even if he would have her. “My life is moving on,” she would have said, “of that I’m sure, though it frightens me. What do you think that I should do?”
This therapist would have been wise enough not to answer, except with a question, and so they met, session after session, and Radha would have been forced to listen to her own heart, letting it lead her sometimes into false paths, but, surely and more surely, into true. The conclusions that she reached, of course, would have been the same as in the other version of the story. “I’m god’s beloved,” she would have announced one day, grinning happily, and would have insisted on this, week after week. Though this might at first have shocked this therapist, as it did the other, he would have taken a deep breath and held his peace. “Tell me about it,” he would have said, foregoing agenda, and so she did, circling from conviction back to doubt, back to conviction, working through the darkness. Now and then, he would have asked a quiet question, but mostly he would have been simply a sympathetic human presence in the room, letting her find her way herself, surprising herself, surprising him.
Because he knew how to listen, he would have really heard, as it evolved, her vast, sustaining joy; would have recognized her complicated healthiness; no talk of self-actualization or co-dependence here; no pressure to assert herself and have a primal scene; no taking literally the charts with lists of goals and numbers measuring success, which we probably should assume that ancient insurance companies demanded, as such concerns do today. “Of course it’s not fair,” Radha might have said, one day, grinning ruefully. “I probably should stay angry. But I can’t. God’s just like that. Besides, I have work to do.” She would have smiled. “After all, I’m lucky. Krishna speaks to me in everything, and my soul answers him.”
As she spoke, Radha’s therapist would have found himself thinking of things that he had seen – a day on a high cliff over a strait, the sun bringing the swallows in; light in a child’s eyes. “She’s saying what I know,” he would have thought, “with different words,” and he would remember other transformations that he’d seen. So many human beings, bereft and lonely, talking themselves back to peace. So many people in that chair, all those years, and in other chairs, reclaiming a presence in themselves which they had not imagined. “Call it what you will,” he might have thought. “Divine’s as good a word as any.” And he would have marveled, for the hundredth time, at this process in which he had such faith; he would have wondered at the fate that had drawn him here, to be an instrument of strange and lovely work, and he might have blessed it. “Namaste,” he might have said to Radha aloud (being Indian, after all), the mystery in him acknowledging her mystery.
And so the shrink and Radha, in this version, would have talked themselves into a dream in which their hands were open, and their minds quiet. Not always easy, no, this life, they would have agreed. Not always lucid. Even painful, when we glimpse a radiant mystery, and then, as quickly, it is gone. Yet how can we lament its coming? For it helps us break with what we thought we were, and grow into the vexed and radiant beings that we really are. If Radha had seen this therapist, you can be sure, she, too, would have grown, even beyond what her own native intuition told her, even beyond their time together; and that the luminous, smiling girl on all those altars would not be just a reproduction of her younger self, or of her heavenly presence, but of her essential nature, through all her years on earth.
---
And that’s the story’s end, or, rather, the ending of the second version. This, of course, is the version that Radha’s devotees would prefer. A happier story, yes, you may remark, but still a silly one. No shrinks in early Vraja – pure foolishness. Not so, I tell you, no more foolish than any of the stories told for these long ages, and no less true. Truth, after all, has nothing to do with literal accuracy, and, archetypes being archetypes, this story also has its claim to speak to us. For all therapists, I insist, if they but knew it, are Radha’s shrink. And all of us, Radha.
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