“Either that,” my mother said, “or she was actually visited by a cherubic angel with a steel-tipped sword who pierced her several times, causing overwhelming pleasure and pain all mixed together.” She shrugged. “My money’s on the orgasm. Eros and Thanatos, Nina,” she said. “Sex and death. That’s what everything reduces to, in the end.”
I’d never heard my mother talk like this—about sex, or art, for that matter. She was just . . . Mom, the woman who bought my school supplies and made sure my laundry was done and liked to play tennis even in the hottest days of summer. The woman who drank vodka with diet tonic, no ice, always in her favorite crystal tumbler.
I didn’t want to look at her now, with these new words between us, so I let my gaze wander over the statue. The fabric-like folds of Teresa’s clothing. The light shining down from the hidden window. The angel and his spear of flame.
“So this is where you met Dad?” I felt shy asking, and I still didn’t look at Mom.
“It’s almost poetic, isn’t it?” She was answering my question, but she wasn’t talking to me anymore. Her gaze was fixed on the angel that hovered over Teresa, and I had the sense that she was seeing something there that I couldn’t see. “I was photographing her for my thesis, and your dad wandered over to ask me about her.”
I imagined them here, my mom as a college student and my dad as a young man, wandering away from his wife and to my mother’s side.
“I told him what I knew about Teresa, and he gave me his card. He said he’d be interested in reading my project, when it was finished.”
“Oh,” I said. “What about . . . Judy?”
“She wasn’t paying attention to him,” she said. “Some women get too wrapped up in their own heads and forget they’re with a man. And then the man wanders away.”
We stood there side by side, watching Saint Teresa. Her toes, I saw, were flexed and strained. After a minute, Mom spoke. Her voice was brusque, like she was angry. She said, “People don’t change, Nina. Remember that.”
???
Visiting all the Roman places over the next few days—the museums and the churches, the Vatican and the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps and Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon and the Campo dei Fiori—all I could think was Eros and Thanatos, sex and death, over and over again, like a drumbeat, a terrible reckoning.
I bled for three days and then I stopped, and I did not tell my mother. I lay in a bath full of tepid water, imagining myself as Teresa, massaging myself with a rough washcloth, pretending it was the hand of God, until I came, suddenly and hard, for the first time. My mother was in the next room, and she heard me in there, she heard the sound I made, a sharp inward breath, a little high-pitched cry.
“Nina?” she asked. “Are you okay?”
It was several seconds before I could answer. “Yes,” I said. “I’m fine.”
I pretended not to listen to my mother on the phone with my father, pretended not to notice her red swollen eyes, pretended not to care on the nights when she said her head hurt too much to go out.
I spent those evenings on my phone, learning everything I could about Eros and Thanatos, starting with Saint Teresa and following her down a dark and twisted path that my mother had started me on.
The stories of the martyrs—the awful ways women died—I read these over and over, hearing them in my mother’s voice, seeing in my brain so clearly the men who did the torturing and the killing, the men who told their stories, and the men who turned them into art, carving their flesh into marble, painting the rivers of their blood.
I saw images of their bones, preserved in wax and set on altars, transformed from women into relics.
I recited their names in my head, the virgin martyrs, at night with the lights out and the curtains drawn, our hotel room as dark and silent as Santa Maria della Vittoria must have been, just a few blocks away.
Agatha of Sicily, Christian saint and virgin martyress. Agnes of Rome, virgin martyr saint. Catherine of Alexandria, Christian saint and virgin. Valerie of Limoges, virgin martyr saint. Victoria, virgin martyr saint. Lucia, martyr saint virgin. Petronilla, virgin saint martyr. Philomena, saint virgin martyr. Ursula, martyrvirginsaint. Cecilia, martvirgsaintyr. Dymphna, saintlyvirginalmartyr. Irene of Tomar, martyrlysaintlyvirgin. All virgins, all martyrs, all saints.
All tortured. All ruined. All dead.
???
We ate our meals in cafes and restaurants most of the time, and I got used to eating the way my mother did. That is to say, not often, and not much when the sun was in the sky. She would have a roll of bread and a piece of fruit for breakfast with espresso, one packet of fake sugar. There were pink packets and there were blue packets, but their contents tasted equally like poison to me.
“Coffee makes you regular,” my mother told me, which was just gross. I didn’t want to think about that. And it was something she never would have said if my father were with us. It was like there were different parameters for conversation, now that my father wasn’t around. Sex and going to the bathroom—she never talked about anything messy or gross at home.
We spent mornings visiting landmarks and museums. I’d rent the headphones wherever they were available, listening earnestly to the self-guided walking tour, following along in guidebooks and reading all the signs, taking pictures with my cellphone that could never capture the enormity of what I was seeing.
Mom would stand, her expression inscrutable, staring at things in which I saw no meaning—the bottom step of a staircase in a museum, where the granite had been worn down by centuries of feet stepping in the same place; a crippled pigeon, one of its legs ending abruptly in a gray-tinged stump, hopping after scraps of bread thrown by greasy-fisted toddlers; the face of a broken clock in the lobby of our hotel which read, eternally, 11:59.
It was my job to provide the conversation, the levity, the propelling engine of excitement forward through Rome. I knew that it was, and I did my best, though she didn’t make it easy. I pretended I didn’t notice the way she’d disappear behind her eyes, and I fought to keep my tone bright and energetic, as if I could snap her back into the present moment if I managed to be perky enough.
For lunch Mom would eat a salad, usually with black olives, oil, and vinegar; I’d have salad, too, though I’d dress mine with Ranch whenever the restaurant had it.