A story of lives galloping in retreat.  

The old elevator cart clanks and shakes at each floor on its descent. Then there is Mimi, always watchful, her eyes fixed on the door.  Of course, she has lots to say in Italian that I barely understand. It doesn’t quite matter. Her eyes are lovely, its edges soft under the folds of her parchment eyelids. She pats the sleeves of my coat and then reaches for my hands. Coarse, quivering fingers wrap around my five, tight as if her life depends on it. Her loneliness chafes into my skin. Then I stomp my misgivings under the spring of my step and the sweep of my newly acquired Max Mara coat—primed for office.

This morning, Mimi is pacing at the exit of the elevator. Something in her kitchen wouldn’t work, she says, and the apartment manager is nowhere in sight. By now, I have built my own networks. Give it six months, I tell other Indians in office. (such claims of immersion are embarrassing, but I can’t seem to stop). This time, it is the help at the patisserie in the basement of our apartment complex, a Bangladeshi, who is quite a handyman. Turns out that it is just the knob of Mimi’s forno that needed oiling. I look away when Mimi hands two euros to the grumbling Bangladeshi, making a mental note to compensate him later. She leads me to her living room and seats me on a plush leather sofa. “Tea”, she says in a tone which isn’t a question and heads back to the kitchen.

The living room is dimly lit with indigo blue walls. Almost the entire floor space is overrun by stuff. Arrayed on a series of closely spaced rails are clothes swathed in thick transparent plastic. Coats and dresses in red, blue, and black. Outrageously out-of-fashion hats as if out of a set for a period drama. Rows of shoes, one a high stiletto, lined along the wall. On a low stack, skin-coloured sheer stockings hang tender on metal clips.

Hidden behind the cloth rails, is a white grand piano which might have once been the heart of this room. A girl may have practiced a much-loved piece and touched scales she didn’t know her little hands could reach. I imagine a woman leaning on the piano, an intense moment with a lover who is playing for her. Perhaps Mimi herself. Old couples may have relived a forgotten tango. But now the piano has been pushed to the wall for the sake of convenience. How could these dresses, the silly hats, the stiletto, possibly be hers? Oh, I have turned into a voyeur.

Yet my eyes rove. Thick blue velvet curtains shut the daylight from the room. From between the cloth-rails near the window, I thrust my index finger and part the curtains, my eyes in search of the river. The Tiber isn’t sparkling after all. It is a grey canvas, still, and imprisoned in the stone façade of its embankment. An approaching shuffle of footsteps gets me back to the sofa. This unauthorised detour to the window too feels like a betrayal of Mimi’s trust. She switches on the radio and Maria Callas’s voice rises triumphantly: “Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore”.

That summer (my first in Rome), I had watched ‘Tosca’ with a friend at Terme Caracalla. Two weeks later, we were to go for ‘Aida’ together, but he didn’t show up. For the opera and later, for much else. When the lights dimmed, I shifted to a 60 Euro ticket but so did the others from the higher rows. Although not all could have possibly had my excuse of having in hand two tickets while occupying one. Still, it wasn’t like watching ‘Tosca’ with my friend. How he had gently lifted a curl and twirled it behind my earlobe to whisper the words in English. Of ‘Aida’, I got nothing at all. There was only so much I could see between the sniffles, the tears.

Mimi lowers the volume with the radio’s remote and smiles. She makes a ceremony of the tea. Then suddenly she says, “I don’t see you with that man so much.” Her eyes wouldn’t have missed my startled look. I take a moment to compose myself and say, “Which one?” Even at forty-five, I can stitch back my heart; the promise between two operas will be behind me, in due course. Although none of it is Mimi’s business. My impertinence doesn’t amuse her. She attempts a description in English, but I am no longer listening. She isn’t going to get me to dance along.

Pointing to a portrait of a strapping young man on the wall, I ask, “Husband?” She shakes her head which seems like a no. A collage on the left wall traces Mimi over the years. In the one on the extreme right, the middle-aged Mimi at a beach, sports a smart bob and leans back with her palms on the sands to look at the camera, smiling, just like she is now as she shakes her head.

I pick up a biscotti from the plate and lean back on the sofa. The dresses that I had put out on the clothesline last evening, would have dried by now. What if right now, Mimi and I were to jumble our clothes coats into one pile? Like a barrelling mountain of clothes in the centre of a living room, the sleeves flailing from inside their flaccid bodies? Tosca wails on the radio for a love that is to be extinguished, but it seems like an aria to us —Mimi and I—and to our lives galloping in retreat. Which woman wouldn’t yearn for such an unattainable life like Tosca’s? To have lived for art, for love. Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore.