Motion Sickness Read Online Free Page B

perspective and the vanishing point. The other says he likes skewed perspectives. I agree silently. Perspective wasn’t necessarily advantageous, he continues. Even the discovery of fire wasn’t really an advance, says the other one. The lecturer continues, the figures in medieval paintings, the incongruent relationships represent a different world view.…I’m getting too close to them, and linger in front of another painting, losing their conversation. It’s the way we draw as children, I hear the other one say finally. Looking at the two men, I remember being told about a filmmaker who taught his classes that vision was an erection of the irises, which makes me wonder if learning perspective is something akin to and as traumatic as circumcision.

Chapter 6
     
Indulgences
     
SAN GIMIGNANO
     
    Walking along a dark alley whose paving stones were trod by grander feet, nearing an historic site, I take in, as best I can, the fact that so-and-so died or lived or passed through, then look again at the innocuous structure that once housed him, sometimes her. Immortality continues to elude me. Alfred’s learned commentary makes our trip more like a documentary than a narrative film. We are investigative reporters about to discover clues that everyone else had overlooked, not romantic leads in an adventure or mystery. Which would be more to my liking. But we do fit into an ecology. Without us equals not seen.
    The sun’s pernicious rays make everyone happy. Men in white jackets and black trousers carry small cups of espresso on round silver trays, moving from table to table or from shop to shop, shouting pronto, sometimes with annoyance, and
ciao
with pleasure. On the street women sell blue-and-white-striped umbrellas made of linen, a local product, or they work inside stores behind counters, standing on high-heeled leather sandals, their well-padded feet spread over the sides of their shoes. I look at feet almost as much as teeth. Their feet look healthy, brown and pink, but probably are not. Late at night the women must rub them in their hands, exclaim at their exhaustion and soak their feet in soothing salted water held in ceramic bowls they’ve had in their families for years. That’s what I imagine when I look at these saleswomen who smile patiently rather than broadly and murmur
grazie
without obsequiousness.
    Medieval houses teeter on the edges of narrow streets. I’m drinking an espresso in the Piazza della Cisterna, having persuaded Paul and Alfred to go off without me and do all the seeing they can. My stack of postcards grows, progeny of these travels, and I look from one card to the other like a proud mother, if I can understand that feeling. I try to as I watch women I take to be mothers walking by with children, doing the marketing and not stopping for an espresso. And because years ago one of these little girls could have been coffee-shop Claudia, I select a postcard to send her in London, one of a man and woman locked in an embrace, their lips barely touching, with “Amore” written in red letters across their chests. On a black-and-white real-photo postcard of the San Gimignano medieval “skyscrapers,” I write Zoran’s name and address just as Alfred sits down. I put the card in my diary. He tells me how much I missed by not going with them. He always says that.
    Paul sleeps in the car, and Alfred and I find cheap hotels in Siena or Florence, which are home base for most of our day trips. We take single rooms, even though it’s more expensive and I think Alfred would prefer it if we shared one. He doesn’t say so. He doesn’t insist. He’d never say so. And he’d never insist. They don’t insist. With them I experience a kind of liberty—license, maybe—because their reticence or self-censorship permits a wide berth. I utter half-statements, which are met with cocked heads and attentiveness, but not with exhortations to explain or to finish. I tell them about a never-released thirties