Scenes that did not make the final cut of this text: me at the police station trying to find out what happened to Little Vespa, who is he with, where was he taken, who is caring for him. Me wandering disconsolately down Fourth Street, kicking at a pebble, my hands jammed deep into my pockets, my head down. And finally, me in a lawyer’s office in Midtown while he reads me a document, then hands the document to me, and I nod, I’ll let you know, and leave. Too much exposition. The scene that matters is this one, the two of us and the piece of paper in the day’s first light.
I never thought he’d do it, I say. And if he did, she would have challenged it, saying he was no longer of sound mind.
The mother.
Yes. The mother, his wife. But now there are no next of kin. There’s just this document. If some harm should befall us both, I appoint as the boy’s guardian Mr. René Unterlinden.
You know what you are asking, she says.
Yes.
First she persuaded him to accept another man’s child as his own. Now you want me to accept the same child, another woman’s child, as mine. And you know that children were not a part of my plan.
Down below us the runner with the red hair and the tiara has paused. She stands, hands on hips, breathing deeply, her head tilted up. As if she too is waiting for an answer. But of course she doesn’t see Suchitra and me and knows nothing. We’re up on the twenty-first floor.
Will you think about it, I say as the camera moves past my face.
She closes her eyes and the camera stops, and waits, and goes in closer. Then she opens her eyes and there are only her eyes, filling the screen.
I think we can do this, she says.
Then a jump-cut. Now a different pair of eyes fills the screen. Very slowly the camera pulls back to reveal that they are the eyes of Little Vespa. He stares at the camera without any expression at all. On the soundtrack we hear the lawyer’s voice-over. The estate is being examined by lawyers from both countries and there are many irregularities. But in the end it is a very large estate and there are no other heirs and he is only four years old.
Now there are the three of us, Little Vespa, Suchitra and myself, in an unspecified room, a room in the Brooklyn home of the foster family to whom he was brought for temporary safekeeping. The camera moves to the midpoint of the triangle and begins, very slowly, to rotate upon its axis, so that each of our faces passes by in turn. All our faces are expressionless. The camera begins to turn faster, then faster still. Our faces blur into one another and then the camera is spinning so fast that all the faces disappear and there is only the blur, the speed lines, the motion. The people—the man, the woman, the child—are secondary. There is only the whirling movement of life.
To Alba and Francesco Clemente
through whose friendship and hospitality
I came to know the Gardens