The Meagre Tarmac by Clark Blaise Page B

For one month they will return to Bangladesh, bringing gifts to their children and parents, and doubtless, enlarging their families.
    The cousins had come to Italy four years ago, starting out by spreading blankets on the footpaths and selling China-made toys. Now they have transportable stalls and in a couple of years the six cousins will pool their money and buy a proper store, somewhere, and bring their wives and children over. Right now, they send half of their earnings back to their village, where the wives have built solid houses and the children are going to English-medium schools and want to become doctors and teachers. Their wives have opened up tea-stalls and stitching-shops. “We are Bengalis first, then Hindu or Muslim after,” said Wahid, perhaps for my benefit. “If anyone says he is first a Muslim or a Hindu, I give him wide berth. He has a right to his beliefs, but I do not share them.”
    All of this I translated for my girlfriend, Rose. Then we sat at a sidewalk café and drank a glass of white wine, looking out on the Tower and the ant-sized climbers working their way up the sides, waving from the balconies. I was happy.
    â€œI think you’re a little too harsh on the Tower,” she said.
    We reached Florence in the dark. There seemed little question that we would spend the night together, in her hotel or mine. Outside the bus-park only one food stall was still open. I bought apples and a bottle of wine. The young man running it did all his calculations in Italian, until I stopped him, in Bangla. “That’s a lot of taka, isn’t it?” and the effect was of a puppet master jerking a doll’s strings. He mentioned the name of his village, this one far, far in the east, near Chittagong, practically in Burma. His accent was difficult for me, as was mine to him. “Bangla is the international language of struggle,” he said.
    The unexpected immersion in Bengal had restored a certain confidence. It was the last thing, or the second-last thing, I’d expected from a trip into the wilds of Tuscany. I was swinging the plastic sack of wine and apples, with the urn tucked under my arm, and Rose said, “Let me take the urn.” I lifted my arm slightly, and she reached in.
    â€œOops,” she said.
    My religion holds that the body is sheddable, but the soul is eternal. My uncle’s soul still exists, despite the cremation. It has time to find a new home, entering through the soft spot in a newborn’s skull. I felt he was still with me, there in Italy, but perhaps he’d remained back in California. The soul is in the ether, like a particle in the quanta; it can be in California one second, and Kolkata the next. But he’d wanted to find an Italian home, and now his matter lay in a dusty, somewhat oily mass on the cobblestones of Florence, amid shards of glass and ceramic. It will join some sort of Italian flux. It will be picked up on the soles of shoes, it will flow in the gutter, it will be devoured by flies and picked over by pigeons. If I am truly a believer in our ancient traditions, then it doesn’t matter where he lies like a clot of mud while his soul still circles, awaiting its new house, wherever that house might be.
    â€œIt’s all right,” I said. In fact, a burden had been lifted.
    Her hotel was near at hand. This was an event I had not planned. It had been three years since any sexual activity, and that had been brief and not consoling. In the slow-rising elevator, she squeezed my hand. Sex with a gray-haired lady, however slim and girlish, lay outside my fantasy. How to behave, what is the etiquette? She’d taken off her glasses, and she was humming something wordless. Under her University of Firenze sweatshirt, I could make out only the faintest mounds, the slightest crease. Even in the elevator’s harsh fluorescent light, I saw no wrinkles in her face.
    As we walked down the corridor, she slipped me her