"John Locke/David Hume—I'm not sure which. "
Rick had to go to the toilet and so Gabriele was left in awkwardness at being with Michael all alone. He grabbed her hand and led her to a bench. He kissed her and she liked it even though the nearness of him felt as if she were being stung by Houston fire ants. It was a sweet inimical sting. It was a contract of mouths and joint breath, of two becoming one but not of equal parts—more of a stronger company forcing a large competitor in a merger.
And the days of the week proceeded on—that day closing most eventfully on a surrey, a four seated bicycle, peddling and encircling Roman sculpture at the Borghese Garden, and then watching a mock chariot match in a field known as the Circus Maximus. The ensuing days were of seeing the bones of 400 monks at the Cappuchin Cemetery, going to the ancient Pantheon temple of the gods with its open portal to the sky, sitting in outdoor restaurants near fountains still spurting from ancient aqueducts, St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, and the catacombs. Their final whole day was filled with Etruscan art, a return to the Coliseum, another meandering around the ancient statues at the Borghese Garden, and back to Laneur Parco di Luna amusement park for a ferris wheel ride and trampolines. For all her brooding on life she realized that such contemplation was just hiding from it. She thought that motion and community were natural and having opposed them all along had been foolish. Like diving into a pile of leaves, these simple pleasures were transcendence into the entity. When she was again alone at the airport showing her boarding pass she walked to the plane like a propped up cadaver.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Lightning flashed into Hispanic Betty's makeshift bedroom and she woke up to the artificiality of her life ensconced in a room that was not her own with things in it that she was a little uncomfortable to touch even with a dust rag. She was here and off the streets but the glitter of being such seemed dimmer as she woke up in the flashes of lightning.
Her first self-coerced thought was of Nathaniel and needing to be responsible for him. She was compelled to perform her newly delegated responsibilities of guardian despite not really knowing what they should consist of. This role of guardian, as she saw it, consisted of the same cooking, shopping, and cleaning she always did plus maternal functions that varied with each woman like checking on him at strange hours even if, fettered in language barriers and stumbling about in her illegality, she might not know what to do if something were really wrong.
Resenting the fact that this had been thrust upon her, she nonetheless was able to drag herself out of bed to see if he was okay for the maternal instinct to attend to the young during a storm was in the collective consciousness of all female fauna. She knew that the true challenge would be for her, who had no family or friends in this country, to perform this maternal role without caring for him inordinately. She put on a bathrobe and snuck down the hall to his door where light slid under the crack like an urgent note.
He was chatting with one of his Internet friends, seeking an affinity with those acrimonious others who construed themselves as being abandoned and neglected but hid it in cynicism of all other matters. But to her who knew nothing of chat rooms or anything in particular about computers the boy was simply writing a report for a class and so she was hesitant to knock on his door and tell him to go to bed.
Hearing the pecked tapping of the keyboard, she imagined the sliver of light at her feet as a computer printed note that said, "Mind your own business, Betty, and go back to bed"; and, smiling from an amusing end to her ambivalence, that was exactly what she did. From her bed, her lair (if she could call it hers), she ruminated about what had happened to her recently: Gabriele having picked her out of the homeless shelter from the other strays; the proud and sagacious confidence, if not hubris, which Gabriele possessed in bringing her into this home without even asking her to forfeit her passport; the loyalty generated from such trust; fear that the ringing of the telephone was the attempted connection of immigration authorities; barely getting around on the crutches of the English language, which she had ineptly cobbled together from scraps; the fear of the six and sometimes seven day a week servitude in this remote home diminishing what little chance she, a homely 22 year old, might have of creating her own family; this fear motivating her to get a cheap efficiency downtown although she was rarely ever there; and how the imposition of taking care of someone else's child was a calamity waiting to happen.
Over the course of the week she worried excessively. She worried that she hadn't heard from Gabriele to know when she would return. She worried about having this awkward tenderness for the child (this wanton thought of him) caused by having to care for him and make him her exclusive concern and pleasure. And she worried that she would resent Gabriele's return since it would inevitably pry away this maternal fusion. She also had specific worries of the present day: that this act of absconding in his room, not wanting to play cards or board games like Checkers and Monopoly, meant that he might not like her anymore; and that he was now in his room for two hours and she wasn't exactly sure what he was doing in there.