Hyde Park

Hyde Park is the setting for a small, decisive episode in Piero Morini’s London visit: a solitary wheelchair journey, an encounter on a bench, and a second passage past the park in Liz Norton’s car. The park first offers Morini a place to move and read outside his hotel; on the following day, the same route becomes charged by memory, as its appearance prompts a silence and sadness he does not explain aloud.

Morini’s solitary visit

Between breakfast with Norton and dinner at her apartment, Morini spends the day alone. At first he hardly dares leave his hotel room; boredom eventually drives him out as far as Hyde Park. He wanders without a clear destination, absorbed in thought and barely noticing the people around him. Some passersby look after him with curiosity: they have not seen a man in a wheelchair moving with such determination and at such a steady pace.

Morini comes to a stop outside the Italian Gardens. Their name prompts a dry, private observation: nothing about them seems Italian, though people can be astonishingly ignorant of what lies under their noses. The thought briefly redirects his attention from his own wandering toward the gap between a place’s name and what is actually visible there.

The bench and the book

After stopping, Morini pulls a book from his jacket pocket and reads while he regains his strength. A stranger approaches, says hello, and drops his heavy body onto the wooden bench. Straw-haired, graying, dirty, and apparently weighing at least 250 pounds, he asks Morini whether he is a foreigner, where he lives, and what he is reading. Morini replies that he is Italian, does not live in London, and is reading Il libra di cucina di Juana Ines de la Cruz, by Angelo Morino, an Italian book about a Mexican nun’s life and recipes.

The stranger asks whether the nun liked to cook. Morini gives a qualified answer and adds that she also wrote poems. The exchange places a work about cooking and poetry inside an encounter with an unknown Londoner, briefly making reading the means by which two strangers establish contact. The book remains a concrete detail of Morini’s visit rather than a clue that the encounter will develop into a lasting relationship: by the time he reaches the recipe for dolce di mamey, the stranger seems to have fallen asleep, and Morini leaves the Italian Gardens.

A route repeated

The next day resembles the first, but the movement through London is no longer solitary. Norton meets Morini at his hotel; as he pays the bill, she puts his only suitcase in the boot of her car. She drives along the same way he had taken to Hyde Park the day before. Morini recognizes the route and watches the streets in silence. When the park comes into view, it appears to him like a film of the jungle, its colors wrong and terribly sad, yet also exalted. The car turns away and disappears down other streets.

The return is brief, but its contrast with the previous day gives the park a second function. On the first visit, Morini’s movement is self-directed: he goes out because boredom has overcome his reluctance, chooses his route, and stops when he needs to rest. In the car, the familiar way unfolds around him while Norton drives. What had been a stretch of London he crossed alone now arrives as an image tied to her presence and to the memory of their time together.

Memory and narrative significance

The book presents the park through Morini’s limited, inwardly attentive perspective. Its first appearance follows his thoughts and bodily effort through a long, loosely directed day; the later passage compresses that experience into recognition, a silent watch, and a sudden shift in how the landscape looks. The repeated route links two consecutive days without turning Hyde Park into a permanent home or an abstract symbol detached from the scene.

Instead, the park’s significance rests on this small change in perception. Its visible landscape becomes a screen for Morini’s sadness and exaltation, while its recurrence gives the reader a concrete way to register what he cannot say during the drive. The stranger on the bench and the book in Morini’s pocket belong to the first day’s incidental openness; the second day’s quiet recognition replaces that encounter with the private weight of a shared route remembered.