I. The Cause
Duomos crumble on
land unsatisfied. Stomach
grumbling. Craving veal.
II. Fragment in a Museum Case
Cherub’s face. Giotto’s
fresco wrecked. Fragments displayed
for travelling show.
III. St. Francis’s Valuable Reliquaries
Earthly faults destroy
structure—once beautiful, monks’
treasures in rubble.
IV. Prayer for St. Francis
You with stigmata
could not prevent your church’s
instability.
After a reasonable sleep in a neat and unassuming pensione and a breakfast of hard roll and jam plus tea, Elena stepped into the crisp Florentine morning. On her way out the door, she nearly ran head-long into an Australian. She immediately envied him for his boyishness and for his backpack. He was wearing socks with smiley-faces on them. "Hullo," he nodded to her, his blond hair shaking with his greetings. He bounced down the cobblestone street, his backpack seeming to weigh nothing upon his back. He looked perfectly filthy. Not a care in the world. Barely enough money to make it from town to town.
She fit better with these aimless souls than the world back home. It wasn't an enormous trust fund, but it was enough—enough to live a modest life and do absolutely nothing, an accepted quality in a place like this, among people like this.
Though it was early spring and the tourists had not yet begun to swarm the street, the novelty painters sat at easels outside the Uffizi. Elena went to each station and thumbed through the paintings. Some of the painters did terrible tourist portraits in charcoal or watercolor. Everyone had an assortment of views of the Arno. She pondered a painting of the Ponte Vecchio, to send back to her friends and family, a kind of expensive post card that didn't tell them she would be home soon or that she wished they were here.
“Gianni is the best of them,” someone said to her in unaccented English.
She barely looked up at him. She continued to look at the paintings on the easel. They were indeed the best she had seen, his mustards and olives more closely matched the matte palette of the city. The young man began to speak to the painter in perfect Italian. She was surprised as she thought he was American. She looked more closely. He wore black-rimmed glasses too large for his simple face and his hair was fuzzy at the temples where it was beginning to disappear. Still, he was young, probably just a few years older than her—surely not yet even thirty. He was short and badly dressed—not very Italian at all.
"So, are you going to buy it?" He asked her, again, in English.
She shrugged, but he pressed her: the usual questions of where she was from and how long she was in town and had she been to the Uffizi. After several days, she was learning to be evasive—San Francisco, a week or so, and a shake of the head.
"You have to see the Uffizi. Would you like a ticket? I work here." It was disappointing, really, to meet someone who worked in Florence but wasn't Italian. She also realized it was a strange response; it occured to her that it was perfectly reasonable for him to be an American working in Italy. Then he introduced himself. His name was Massimo, and he wasn't an American in Italy, he was just an Italian who had spent too much time in Kansas. This was truly disappointing—an Italian without an Italian accent. "I'm pretty good at picking up accents, I guess," he said when she commented on it. "So, did you want to go in or what?"
She bought the watercolor, and let him lead her to back entrance, where he worked in the offices. He told her to come round after she had looked through the gallery—perhaps they could fetch a drink. He seemed vaguely harmless; more important, he seemed useful. What other back doors could he open?
In truth, she had been to the Uffizi before. When she was ten, her uncle brought his brother and his brother's family—her uncle's only family—to Italy for two weeks of vacation. She barely remembered having walked these long hallways before; it all seemed vague and unfamiliar. The Birth of Venus, she remembered. In truth, she was finding that she didn't remember much of Florence from their trip—perhaps only the gelato and seeing Michelangelo's David for the very first time. Even then, she knew she wanted to come back.
She lingered in a small octagonal room that she admired without necessarily thinking much of the paintings in it. In retrospect, she recognized that her uncle may have been a lonely man, if pleasantly so. She remembered him on his own in a big house filled with art, books, and musical instruments he could not play. The clutter of it reminded her of this room, which he might have liked, back then. She wished she remembered.
The grand hallways echoed back to her the sound of her boots against the tile, a delightfully cavernous sound.
After her tour, Massimo walked her to a place on the opposite side of the Arno. The bar displayed a beautiful spread of foccaccia, olives, pasta salads, and potato chips. On Massimo's recommendation, she ordered some sort of Campari cocktail; it arrived with a twist of lemon, was bitter, refreshing. He sat across from her and put his cellular phone on the table. He spoke English to her, which made the bartender, with his slick black hair, think they were both Americans. The bartender also spoke to them in English, which bothered Elena. She was in Italy after all. She needed to practice her Italian. Also, in Italian, she could hide the fact of her stutter under the ruse of not knowing the language very well. But Massimo spoke English too well, it was easy to fall back into it. When he came into the full realization of her stutter, she looked down so as not to see the pity in his eyes—the pity and the realization, too. She knew what it looked like and she knew what it meant. She was ultimately conquerable, now.
During their second set of drinks, Massimo took a call. His Italian blended with the other Italian being spoken in the bar, so she could not always hear him, even less understand. As he spoke on the phone, she ate and thought about speaking Italian and also how she was not at all attracted to Massimo, but had allowed him to buy her two drinks now. He hung up the phone. “My friend was berating me for not taking you out to dinner,” he said. “But I can’t.”
Elena’s face grew warm. “I’m certainly not expecting you t-t-t-t-t-“ she breathed, “t-t-take me out to dinner.” The stutter made it sound unintentionally as if she did expect him to take her to dinner—the stutter was helplessness, the rest of the sentence, delivered aggressively just so she could get it out, sounded angry. She was about to be misinterpreted again, she could tell, and she didn’t want to lead him on through dinner, too, after which he might expect to kiss her.
“Well, he’s right. I should. Massimo—yes, his name is Massimo, too—always knows how to treat women. He’s better looking than I am and when we go out the women all go for him. I’m very jealous of him. He would take you out to dinner if he’d met you, but I can’t.”
Maybe dinner would not be so bad.
“You’ve been so nice to bring me here after just meeting me.”
“You make me wish I didn’t have a girlfriend.”
She suddenly felt very lucky. He had bought her drinks and he had a girlfriend, so he wouldn’t be kissing her. “I didn’t know you had a girlfriend.”
“I don’t think I wanted you to know I had a girlfriend.”
“Is that why you can’t take me out to dinner?”
“No. I just can’t. I have to go somewhere.”
“Oh. Your friend should take me out to dinner, then.” She said it with a laugh. She couldn’t believe she said it, then she couldn’t believe he agreed with her.
“He should. I can call him back.”
“But he doesn’t even know me!” By now, of course, she was hoping that Massimo would call his friend who was more handsome and knew how to treat women. She was pleased when he picked up his phone.
“You’ll like him.” Massimo held the phone up to his ear and showed his teeth, which were as oversized as his glasses and surprisingly white. He was not bad looking, just mediocre looking. She had high hopes for his friend, but when the friend showed up a half hour later he was mediocre looking, too, though impeccably dressed in a dark sweater over an even darker shirt. He had olive skin and large murky green eyes framed with thick eyelashes. She could see how some women would find him attractive, but she found him short. Still, he had an accent, which improved his looks considerably.
“What kind of food do you want?” He asked.
“Why, Italian food, of course.”
He waved his hands. “I never go out for Italian food. What’s the fucking point? I know a great Japanese place.”
She tried not to look too disappointed, but if he was going to take her to dinner, they should go to a place he liked. “OK,” she said.
“My car is outside.”
“Your car?”
"It is too far to walk.”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.” She measured him.
“He’s a good driver,” Massimo #1 said.
“I drive a Volvo stationwagon.” He was young and prosperous looking, but most of all, he seemed harmless—harmless because he was trying to seem dangerous, with his black leather jacket and his cellular phone and... his Volvo.
“Well,” she said again. "That's a very safe car."
As she said goodbye to Massimo #1, he asked: "have you seen the Piazzalle Michelangelo?"
Of course, she had not.
"Call me tomorrow," he said, giving her his phone number, written on to the flap of a pack of matches. "I'll take you there." Then, as he walked away from them, he yelled back. "Don't let Massimo take you there before I do..."
[In the next episode, Elena lives her Italian fantasy—sort of.]
On the matter of eating alone: a single woman peering into the interior of a restaurant creates an odd set of anxieties. A couple or a group in the process of evaluating a potential dining establishment possesses a collective confidence. But a woman alone—a woman standing and staring, breeze catching the edge of her coat and face illuminated by the interior lights—she appears unsure, naive, lonely. It does not matter how studied her approach. She seeks comfort, lovely plates, alluring odors, friendly staff, and a table in a corner where she will be left to her own. Looking up, guests are startled by her, other patrons brush past her on their way in, the wait staff wonder if she is a mere begger.
Elena hated the thought of it, so she rushed into restaurants and regretted her rashness—or she spent hours walking quickly, confidently, hungrily, past restaurant after restaurant. She could not decide which was worse, a faulty choice (regretted instantly), an appearance of hesitance, or enduring the terrible walking hunger that dragged her toward the deepest kind of sadness.
On her first night in Florence, she walked hours, miserable. Finally, she settled on the small storefront of Casalinga, a trattoria near Piazza Santa Trinità. Inside, the space opened to fit many tables. Like most trattorias, it was extremely well lit, as if the restaurant owners wanted to display the clean floors—and they were very clean and very white. The whole place with its pale peach walls and pink tablecloths was altogether cheery and not at all romantic.
Italy was supposed to be one of the most romantic countries, lush in its languor. Elena thought of siestas—bed in the middle of the day—and long late dinners to be taken only after the sun went down. Indeed, the satisfaction of human needs—bodily needs—was taken seriously, artfully. Sex. Yes sex. Elena was afraid of sex, but in the same way she was afraid of traveling alone. The thought of it exhilarated her even as she drew back from it. It was all related really: sex and food and traveling and art museums and Italy. She wanted all of it, or at least something.
The hostess hesitated. A tall, impossibly beautiful, young woman standing alone—surely she must be meeting someone or perhaps was part of the crowd entering. In that case always consult the tallest man in the crowd, or the oldest. Elena lifted one finger. If she had wanted to speak—but she didn’t; she never did—she might have said solo me but the woman, with her brown curly hair, broad face, and sparkling white apron, wouldn’t know that.
The waiter seemed confused, too; he waited, as if for someone to sit down across from her, not helped by her remote look of a woman who had always had everything she could want and too much attention because of it. Elena opened her shoulder bag and removed a novel about people who left home to live in other countries. She set it on the table in front of her and then looked at him. He was forty-something with dark hair, fair skin, and earnest brown eyes. He was not fat, but he looked like he enjoyed food and life; his cheeks were ruddy. Elena could pass for Italian and so he spoke to her in Italian.
“P…p…parli inglese?” When she replied, her stutter betrayed that she was American even before the words. This, she thought, was fascinating to him and she rather hated him for that. She managed to seem terribly bored. Near her, ten patrons were eating through the entire menu. The antipasto and the wine were just starting to go around and already everyone was very jolly. The waiter circled them and offered up all of the best morsels from the menu and they took. In reality, he did not offer, he simply made a statement and asked how many they wanted: a bowl of minestrone, a plate of anchovies and olives, perhaps some gameroni, caught fresh this morning. A few raised their hands and he counted them off with his fingers.
She tried to pay attention to her novel. He eyed her again, brought her the quarter-liter of wine and the bottle of acqua minerale she had pointed to on the menu and left her to study her choices. She eyed the tripe, scribbled on the menu in pen. She had heard that the Florentine method of preparation was quite good. She enjoyed reading menus in restaurants because it gave her something to do. It was the one time during the meal when she was occupied in a way that didn’t make others curious about her. The waiters and guests still assumed that someone would join her; perhaps they wished to join her. In the past few years, she had sometimes sat at bars in restaurants where other patrons made her acquaintance. She was often joined by men and usually two of them. Now that she thought of it, she had not recently sat at a bar in a restaurant to eat her dinner wherein a man had not eventually made her acquaintance. It was a new world, cause and effect: eat dinner at a bar, meet a man. She had only recently come to an age where such things happened. Now, if she sat at a bar, she might meet a man and perhaps he would be attractive. But perhaps he would be unattractive and that’s why she didn’t always sit at the bar. Not that all the men she met and talked to needed to be beautiful, but if she was going to eat dinner next to him, he might as well be attractive—so much better for the digestion.
When the waiter returned to her table, she shrugged. She looked back at the menu, then back again, then pointed to the special. He took a step back and measured her. He said, “the chicken is very good tonight." She felt sure he thought that she did not know what it was. It took the air out of her. Maybe she was wrong to want the offal of a grazing beast.
He seemed to sense her disappointment, considering her again. “Trippa, eh?”
She gave him a long, slow-blooming smile.
The tripe looked like wide pasta in a tomato sauce. It didn’t taste much different, but before the bite melted away, cilia brushed across the roof of her mouth. It was furry, luxurious. The waiter returned to ask her how she was enjoying it. She had enjoyed her wine and was feeling relaxed.
“Molto b-b-b-bene. Grazie.” She took a deep breath and another sip.
He tipped his head to the side and smiled. “Where are you from?”
“San Francisco.” She was no longer stuttering, but all of her words started with long slow consonants that slithered between her tongue and teeth.
“How are you enjoying your trip?”
“Firenze is very beautiful.”
“That it is,” he said. “There are many place to see. You must go to the Piazzalle Michelangelo. The best view of Firenze,” he said.
“Oh,” she said.
“What would you like now?” he asked her.
The trippa was heavy and rich, but she ordered insalata mista and then tiramisu.
He served dessert to the group of ten Italians and then brought over a bottle of grappa. She followed the bottle of clear liquid with her eyes. He noticed her glance and raised the bottle toward her. She shrugged and then nodded. He brought her a glass and poured it out for her. She raised it to her lips and took a sip. It numbed her lips and burned her mouth. Then she took the second draft and this dropped into her throat with stunning warmth.
“Are you finished?”
She nodded.
“Allora,” The waiter leaned over her table and wrote on the white paper square that protected the white cloth below. He listed off each of the things she had ordered and wrote the corresponding amount on the table. He listed tripe and salad, the wine, her espresso and then he totaled it.
She shook her head and looked at him inquisitively.
He waved the pen in the air and pouted his lips. She paid slightly more than he had written and stood.
“So you have not yet seen Piazzalle Michelangelo,” he said to her.
“No.”
“You should see it,” he said. “The best view in the world. I could take you there—I am off work in . . . ” he looked at his watch, “an hour. At ten. You come back here and I will take you.”
She considered him. She had mistaken his charm for the false courtesy of a waiter. She was almost startled enough to take him up on his offer, but perhaps he asked every American woman to Piazzalle Michelangelo. And why would she say yes anyway? She didn’t find him a bit attractive, though he certainly wasn’t ugly. He was too old, though perhaps the difference was only fifteen years—not unimaginable but not desirable either.
“Sono stanca,” she said and yawned to punctuate it.
“Perhaps another day, then,” he said.
She smiled and made her way to the door.
[In the next episode, an aimless Elena meets Massimo and his friend Massimo and must decide which one of them will take her to Piazzalle Michelangelo.]
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