I am moved to revise my thinking about Ezio Tarantelli and Virginia Woolf. For I see ways they do connect, after all. It’s not so much that Ezio could be a character in one of her novels—he resists that still. But Virginia Woolf helps me better to understand how, growing older, one looks back to the loves of youth. Clarissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh remembering each other young. Classira remembering Sally Seton. Mrs. Ramsay remembering Mr. Ramsay handing her into a boat. Lily Briscoe seeing again the dead Mrs. Ramsay seated on a rock. And I remembering Ezio Tarantelli, who similar to Mrs. Ramsay, persists only in memory, his future comprised exclusively of the memories others have of him. I defy time with these memories—at least in those moments I muster sufficient heart and stamina to yield to their full power. That’s Virginia Woolf’s insight along with her concomitant sense of each moment’s terrible fragility. Being and annihilation, retrospection and anticipation, loss and recovery, remembrance and also forgetting—these are the conditions of mortality that enter the very rhythms of her sentences.
It is now thirty years since Ezio Tarantelli’s death and fifty since I fell in love with him in Rome during the summer of 1964. I can see him in the Villa Borghese, proffering the crumpled laurel leaf for me to smell. I am with him on a boat returning from a half-day excursion to the island of Iscia, the two of us lying side by side on the deck with our legs stretched out and the afternoon sun in our faces. We had been sea-sick on the trip to the island, but coming back we had taken Dramamine and were sleepy. I sit next to him in the Fiat, which he drives with locked elbows—the safest way to drive, he tells me—and he talks about the beauty of the colors of landscape when the sky is overcast. I remember his smile and his opinions, his way of sleeping and sitting and walking and making love. For years after we separated, I would be behind some man on the street who had broad shoulders and a lopey walk, and my heart would quicken at the chance it might be he.
Virginia Woolf understands how you might love one person a great deal and yet have good reasons for choosing to be with someone else. I am not sorry that Ezio and I parted. I have no doubt at all about that. But he was someone, like her heroine Mrs. Ramsay, who could make of shared moments “the thing . . . that endures.” Or perhaps we did that together. Of course, his horrendous death, a kind of bracket of violence in the flow of time’s more commonplace erosions, intensifies my sense of an idyll at once lost and reclaimed.
ii
THE EMOTIONAL CORE OF To the Lighthouse has always for me been Mrs. Ramsay, the character who dominates the first section of the novel, dies within square brackets and in a subordinate clause in the second, and suffuses the memories of survivors in the last, a character of intense inner and outer beauty. (These sections are respectively “The Window,” “Time Passes,” and “The Lighthouse.”) “Mrs. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay!” Lily Briscoe cries, and I cry with her, drawn into her consuming desire. I cry for the mother of those eight fictional children, for the life Mrs. Ramsay creates for her family and that motley assortment of guests at the prewar summer house in the Hebrides, all dining on Boeuf en Daube and merging into a magical unity when the candles are lit, a creative wholeness, the ineffable achievement of Mrs. Ramsay, in which the moment at hand seems enough. And I cry for the mother I myself had and didn’t have. By virtue of class alone, my mother couldn’t be a Mrs. Ramsay. She was too busy, all her life, running from the grim poverty of her childhood. There was no time to be a gracious lady who visits poor cottages and knits scarves for the lighthouse keeper’s son. But my mother did knit for her children. I take from my closet—the same closet in which I’ve stashed my master’s thesis on Woolf—a fragment of green scarf she was knitting for me when she died, all knit and no purl, because her eyesight had grown too bad to do both stitches. Though it’s hardly more than a rag, I can’t bear to throw it away. My mother, too, created moments of which I might say: “The thing is made that endures.” She led a very different life from Mrs. Ramsay and was a very different mother, but she, too, had a mesmerizing—and maternal—beauty.
My students write almost as many papers about Mrs. Ramsay as they do about Jane Eyre. Last year I directed a master’s thesis on “Silence in To the Lighthouse and Murk Amand’s Untouchable,” written by a young woman of Bengali descent who grew up in New Jersey. The student was interested in silence as a mark of women’s oppression but also silence as a form of resistance and inviolability. She brought together Mrs. Ramsay with Sohini, the untouchable sister of the untouchable hero of Amand’s novel. My student saw Mrs. Ramsay both as a victim of patriarchy and as a survivor who escapes, through silence, her husband’s excessive demands. When she handed in the finished manuscript, she told me of two developments in her own life: she’d got engaged to another Indian American, a medical student at Columbia, and had landed a promising new job in publishing. As a twenty-first-century young woman, she enjoys far wider opportunities than Mrs.
