thinking of her. She was the shadow in which he was always walking. Maybe he didn’t want to be free.
Once we had retrieved the car, a pale green BMW convertible, from the island of parking, Bernard cheered up. Tucking his hat under the seat, he pressed the button to retract the roof, and the clean blue sky spread placidly above us, a few puffy clouds scattered picturesquely. Before long we were speeding down a shimmering narrow highway between black and yellow fields, and Bernard began to sing in Italian, something bold and melodic that I supposed was opera. He sped around a slow-moving Fiat with a great roar of the engine and a hot blast of wind. I laughed, holding my hair back with my hands. I felt safe, as though we were on a roller-coaster ride on a closed track, enjoying the thrill and the speed, knowing there was no real danger.
“Do you like to go fast?” he shouted over the noise of the car and the road.
I nodded. “Do you keep a car in every city?” I yelled back.
His bristly grizzled head gleamed silver and black in the sun. “It belongs to a friend of mine!” He passed a semi truck on the straightaway, and my heart, like a sun inside my chest, glowed. We sped past fields of waving grass, neat vineyards on a gentle hill, stands of tall frondy trees. I shut my eyes and gave myself up to the rush and the sun. It was too noisy to talk, and what was there to say anyway? I was happy, happy in a way that seemed, like a great painting, to make words superfluous. I didn’t care if we never got to Padua.
But we did get there, after only about an hour. We strolled down the streets of little shops and old painted doors and flowered iron balconies. We walked slowly, arm in arm, pointing out merchandise in shop windows: a scarf, a glass, a pair of shoes. Bernard moved through the streets solidly, gracefully, like a man on horseback. The top of my head came up just to his shoulder, and I smelled the clean cloth of his jacket, the old stone of the buildings, smoke, earth, and, faintly, the briny orange of his cologne. I leaned closer, breathing it in.
We came to a restaurant, a long low room a few steps down from the street, where Paduans on their lunch hour ate plates of thinly sliced veal with anchovies. We ordered the same, and a carafe of wine, which we drank out of tumblers, talking of the summer weather, the Italian roads, the landscape. I told him I was surprised at how empty the fields had seemed: in Wisconsin the corn stretched right up to the highways. All the land was organized, improved, accounted for. You could measure the progress of summer by the height of the corn. How did you measure the season here, I wondered. Or did the Italians drift through time, marking centuries rather than months, permitting fields to grow their own crops of grasses and wildflowers?
“Where else have you been in Italy?” Bernard asked.
“Nowhere.”
“Not to Florence? Not to Rome? No junior year abroad? No whirlwind art history class trip in college?”
I explained that at my college almost no one went abroad. I had begun to understand that this wasn’t the norm in the kinds of colleges art-world people generally went to, but it didn’t seem unreasonable to me. Wasn’t the leap from the farm or the small town to the college campus enough cultural dislocation? Wasn’t college education itself enough of a voyage? All around us, well-dressed people ate their veal, keeping their knives in their right hands, their lyrical, unintelligible speech rising and swirling like music. It was as though we were alone, Bernard and I, on a green island floating in the lapping sea. Leaning over the table to refill my glass, he touched a finger to my earlobe. “Look,” he said. “You don’t even have pierced ears.”
Over coffee, Bernard told me about growing up on Cape Cod, where the land was always changing, literally reshaped year after year by storms and tides. “When I was twelve, my father had our house raised up and
Once we had retrieved the car, a pale green BMW convertible, from the island of parking, Bernard cheered up. Tucking his hat under the seat, he pressed the button to retract the roof, and the clean blue sky spread placidly above us, a few puffy clouds scattered picturesquely. Before long we were speeding down a shimmering narrow highway between black and yellow fields, and Bernard began to sing in Italian, something bold and melodic that I supposed was opera. He sped around a slow-moving Fiat with a great roar of the engine and a hot blast of wind. I laughed, holding my hair back with my hands. I felt safe, as though we were on a roller-coaster ride on a closed track, enjoying the thrill and the speed, knowing there was no real danger.
“Do you like to go fast?” he shouted over the noise of the car and the road.
I nodded. “Do you keep a car in every city?” I yelled back.
His bristly grizzled head gleamed silver and black in the sun. “It belongs to a friend of mine!” He passed a semi truck on the straightaway, and my heart, like a sun inside my chest, glowed. We sped past fields of waving grass, neat vineyards on a gentle hill, stands of tall frondy trees. I shut my eyes and gave myself up to the rush and the sun. It was too noisy to talk, and what was there to say anyway? I was happy, happy in a way that seemed, like a great painting, to make words superfluous. I didn’t care if we never got to Padua.
But we did get there, after only about an hour. We strolled down the streets of little shops and old painted doors and flowered iron balconies. We walked slowly, arm in arm, pointing out merchandise in shop windows: a scarf, a glass, a pair of shoes. Bernard moved through the streets solidly, gracefully, like a man on horseback. The top of my head came up just to his shoulder, and I smelled the clean cloth of his jacket, the old stone of the buildings, smoke, earth, and, faintly, the briny orange of his cologne. I leaned closer, breathing it in.
We came to a restaurant, a long low room a few steps down from the street, where Paduans on their lunch hour ate plates of thinly sliced veal with anchovies. We ordered the same, and a carafe of wine, which we drank out of tumblers, talking of the summer weather, the Italian roads, the landscape. I told him I was surprised at how empty the fields had seemed: in Wisconsin the corn stretched right up to the highways. All the land was organized, improved, accounted for. You could measure the progress of summer by the height of the corn. How did you measure the season here, I wondered. Or did the Italians drift through time, marking centuries rather than months, permitting fields to grow their own crops of grasses and wildflowers?
“Where else have you been in Italy?” Bernard asked.
“Nowhere.”
“Not to Florence? Not to Rome? No junior year abroad? No whirlwind art history class trip in college?”
I explained that at my college almost no one went abroad. I had begun to understand that this wasn’t the norm in the kinds of colleges art-world people generally went to, but it didn’t seem unreasonable to me. Wasn’t the leap from the farm or the small town to the college campus enough cultural dislocation? Wasn’t college education itself enough of a voyage? All around us, well-dressed people ate their veal, keeping their knives in their right hands, their lyrical, unintelligible speech rising and swirling like music. It was as though we were alone, Bernard and I, on a green island floating in the lapping sea. Leaning over the table to refill my glass, he touched a finger to my earlobe. “Look,” he said. “You don’t even have pierced ears.”
Over coffee, Bernard told me about growing up on Cape Cod, where the land was always changing, literally reshaped year after year by storms and tides. “When I was twelve, my father had our house raised up and
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