“Oh, papà” Tina said, “I’m not leaving for good—I’ll be back. So will Weezy.”

“Can you trust this Jason you’re going with?”

“Perfectly.”

Yes, she could trust Jason. He would take charge, he would be there, she would simply follow. The trip was like some safe isolating container for her; she always felt that way starting out for someplace—detached, disembodied mentally and physically from the surroundings she passed through. A surveyor, a noninvolved viewer of things. Distancing from Rome—from the fact of her mother, her father, her future—was what the trip meant. The trip was a reprieve from all the choices; it meant belonging nowhere and having no past, no future, just the day on the road to accomplish. The trip as container, as isolation ward, as safety compartment. The trip as tripping.

“Remember whose daughter you are,” her father said as he kissed her good-bye and the elevator doors closed.

39. Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Twenty-nine

The trip was going well, Jason said.

They got a succession of rides as far as Salerno, and from there decided to take the inland country train to Paestum. It was a primitive train of prewar stock. They jounced on the hard wood benches of a former third-class car thronged with peasants and heaped with their bundles. It was dusk when they pulled into the unprepossessing station of that secondary line and read a sign that said Pesto.

“How do you like that for a name! They might just as well have called it Pasta al Pesto,” Tina said indignantly. “Imagine changing it from dignified Paestum—”

“And before that it was Poseidonia, for the god of the sea, which was even better,” said Jason.

“Anything’s better than Pesto.”

They walked from the station a kilometer or so along a wall-enclosed property on a road called Porta Sirena. They were walking seawards with the mountains to their backs and the sun setting before them. At the main road they turned a corner and saw what the wall had heretofore obstructed from sight: the plain of temples with Poseidon’s huge one nearest to them and all of them glowing orange from the accumulated warmth and light of ancient times absorbed into the porous stone.

They both stopped, staring at the sight.

“It’s so beautiful,” Tina said. “Era già l’ora che volge il disio/ai navicanti e ’ntenerisce il core.”

“What’s that?” Jason asked, as he focused his camera to get a shot in the last light of day.

“From the Comedy, at the beginning of Canto 8, in Purgatory. It’s this incredibly beautiful passage about the nostalgia sailors at sea feel at sunset toward those they love and are far from, and it’s echoed by the souls in Purgatory who feel the same nostalgia for earth.”

“You are certainly into Dante. Everything reminds you of something in him.”