Page 682 - A Little Life: A Novel

For a long time we were silent together, sitting in the heat, and then he
suddenly said that he remembered this square, that he had been here with
you once, and that there was a famous gelato place just two streets away.

“Should I go?” he asked me, and smiled.
“I think you know the answer,” I said, and he got up. “I’ll be back,” he
said. “Stracciatella,” I told him, and he nodded. “I know,” he said.
We watched him leave, the man and I, and then the man smiled at me and
I smiled back. He wasn’t so elderly after all, I saw: probably just a few
years older than I. And yet I was never able (and am still not) to think of
myself as old. I talked as if I knew I was; I bemoaned my age. But it was

only for comedy, or to make other people feel young.
“Lui è tuo figlio?” the man asked, and I nodded. I was always surprised
and pleased when we were recognized for who we were to each other, for
we looked nothing alike, he and I: and yet I thought—I hoped—there must
have been something about the way we were together that was more
compelling evidence of our relation than mere physical resemblance.

“Ah,” the man said, looking at him again before he turned the corner and
disappeared from sight. “Molto bello.”
“Sì,” I said, and was suddenly sad.
He looked sly, then, and asked, or rather stated, “Tua moglie deve essere
molto bella, no?” and then grinned to show me he meant it in fun, that it
was a compliment, that if I was a plain man, I was also a lucky one, to have
such a beautiful wife who had given me such a handsome son, and so I

couldn’t be offended. I grinned back at him. “She is,” I said, and he smiled,
unsurprised.
The man had already left by the time he returned—nodding at me as he
went, leaning on his cane—with a cone for me and a container of lemon
granita for Julia. I wished he had bought something for himself, too, but he
hadn’t. “We should go,” he said, and we did, and that night he went to bed

early, and the following day—the day you died—we didn’t see him at all:
he left us a message with the front desk saying he had gone for a walk, and
that he would see us tomorrow, and that he was sorry, and all day long we
walked too, and although I thought there was a chance we might see him—
Rome is not such a large city, after all—we didn’t, and that night as we
undressed for bed, I was aware that I had been looking for him on every
street, in every crowd.