by Jo Walton
They looked fine at a glance, anyway, and there were only two of them. This apartment was smaller, it had just one room, which contained a bed, a table, and two chairs, with a tiny kitchen and a tiny bathroom. “All I need,” Sylvia said to the guy from the rental office, but she was wrong. Both chairs turned out to be hopeless, too low for the table, and completely lacking in back support. They were sturdy enough, but shaped almost like folding chairs. She couldn’t type for ten minutes without getting a backache. We lost a day moving, and then another, and another.
We kept going to places—we went to the Palazzo Davanzati, which is a palazzo that’s decorated inside with furniture as it would have been in the fifteenth century. It’s the basis for Ficino’s house, though of course it doesn’t have a tower, and Ficino’s house is in the Via del Corso, or it would be if it wasn’t in Thalia. It’s the Palazzo Altoviti, and she chose it to be Ficino’s house long ago, because it has a seventeenth-century façade with bas reliefs of famous Florentines, with Ficino prominent on the bottom row. But it’s privately owned still, and you can’t go inside it, so she keeps using the Palazzo Davanzati as a model. It has the kitchen under the roof, which really was the Renaissance norm. We went to San Marco to see the Fra Angelico frescoes, and for the peace. We went to the Horne Museum, which is also in a palazzo, and to the Laurentian Library, which had an excellent exhibition about women and books, with an ostrakon with a Sappho poem and medieval manuscripts copied by nuns. Sylvia spent a lot of time looking at them. Then she thought a lot about stairs, and how they were not a solved problem in the Renaissance. Michelangelo’s stairs in the Laurentian Library were an affectation, but one whole side of the Horne Museum is stairs, and in the Palazzo Davanzati they go around the courtyard and then there’s a covered portico on each floor open to the air of the courtyard which functions as a hallway. In the afternoons we went to the Uffizi or the Palatina Gallery in the Pitti Palace and looked at paintings, paying attention to details of period clothes our characters might wear, and jewellery and hairstyles.
She’d sometimes talk to me then, if she couldn’t strike up a conversation with somebody there. She didn’t enjoy looking at paintings as much without being able to talk about them. And she always had new thoughts about these paintings, even though she’d seen them so many times. But she was always worried now, if she talked to me in public, in case she moved her lips, or even spoke aloud, the way she would when we were in private. She thought somebody would see her and think she was mad. “Senile,” she says. “That’s what worries me now. They’d see somebody grey haired muttering away and think I ought to be in an institution. If I’d spoken aloud to you the first time I was in Firenze, when I was young, that’s when they’d have thought I was mad.” She laughs her sharp laugh. “But if talking to you makes me mad, they’d better lock me up now.”
She went to bed every night early, and ate well enough. She always eats better in Firenze. Montreal is a good food city. But on a scale of one to ten, where Grand Rapids, Michigan is a one, Provo, Utah is two, Chicago is six, and Montreal is nine, Firenze is twenty-five. Italy has unfairly great food. It’s the terroir and the habits of life, and perhaps the fact that they didn’t have railroads in the nineteenth century so people never got used to eating stale processed food. The fruit and the dairy and the meat are of a quality you can’t even imagine unless you’ve been there. It makes it very easy to believe in Plato’s analogy of the Cave. If you’ve been used to eating strawberries and tomatoes and carrots elsewhere and then you go to Italy, you do naturally realise that what you’ve had all your life is like a shadow on a cave wall thrown by this transcendent thing. Even the nuts are better. (How can the nuts be better? Do they have better pine trees? Better hazel trees? Better macadamia trees? How could they? Macadamias are Australian!)
So she was sleeping and eating and even taking her medication regularly, which she doesn’t always remember to do. But she wasn’t writing. She was even neglecting her correspondence, because sitting up at the computer even for the short time it takes to do email hurt. “This is no good,” I said, as she was getting ready for bed on the evening of the fourth day she hadn’t opened her laptop.
“The chairs hurt my back,” she said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
I have been torn apart by wyverns. I have sacrificed myself with a stone knife. I have lost a leg and been in a wheelchair for forty years. I have fought dragons and fallen in flame. I have run, and swum, and ridden, with a broken hip, to get a message through in time to save the kingdom. I know what pain is! But I didn’t say that. I was quiet while she brushed her teeth in the sink that didn’t wobble, with water that ran at a consistent temperature.
“Maybe we could move again?” I suggested as she left the bathroom.
“I paid the rent upfront, from now to Worldcon. And I already asked the landlord if there were any other possible chairs, and he just shrugged helplessly and charmingly in that typical Italian way, as if to say he’d do anything short of actually help—that’s unfair. He probably doesn’t have any other chairs. But I don’t want to waste four thousand dollars—that is, four thousand euros. Five thousand dollars.” She could. She just got paid for the Chinese edition of the dragon books. She has it. But I understand that she doesn’t want to, that it violates the ideas of frugality and good sense she learned as a child. It is also the kind of thing that would have appalled Idris, who was always so careful with money. She has become more so since his death, and even remembers most of the time that euros and dollars and gold florins are worth different amounts. Sometimes she even remembers that American dollars and Canadian dollars are different, though they confusingly use the same name and symbol. (American dollars are bigger, which is good, because she mostly earns American dollars.)
“Maybe we could write in the library?” I suggested.
“I thought of that. But the road up to I Tatti is so steep! And there’s never any room at the Oblate library unless you get there at nine o’clock. And anyway—you know how I like to pace about and mutter.” Pace and mutter isn’t the half of it, she’ll act out swordfights and do dialogue aloud and sometimes shout or cry. She is not one for sitting still at the computer, even when she has a chair.
“Maybe you could do the pacing about and muttering part here, and do the actual writing it down when you get there,” I said.
“That’s all very well if it’s flowing well, but I do often want to get up and pace and mutter in the middle. It helps me think things out.”
“Do I get the feeling maybe you don’t want to write?” I asked, tentatively, though she didn’t feel stuck.
“No!” she snapped. Then she sat down on the end of the bed and started crying. “I want to. I really do want to. We left them just talking after dinner, and Orsino and Drusilla about to go up the tower to see Geryon. I really want to go on and find out what happens, especially to Tish and Dolly. And the whole dilemma with Geryon—that’s the next thing, really, their conversation. I can’t wait. It’s such an interesting quandary. I really do want to get on with it. But sitting on that chair hurts so much. And pain and wasting time and thinking about it makes me think about…”
“Mortality,” I completed her sentence. “Maybe we could buy a chair? Even if we have to leave it when we go.”
“Well, we’re hardly shipping one back to Canada! But a cheap chair, maybe. Even a cheap chair will be better than this. The table is so high, though. Hmm. How about an office chair, with adjustable height? They have to have office chairs in Italy.”
And thus began the saga of the chair. Firenze doesn’t have chair shops, at least, when she googled to find out if it did, it turns out they’re all far from the centre. There’s an Ikea out by the airport. But it didn’t seem necessary to trek all the way out there. She found a chair online quickly enough, in a Google ad. They had a chair, had many chairs, and she found the right kind, adjustable in height, and back. It wasn’t as good a chair as the one she has in Montreal, but then it was also only six
ty euros. Well, €59.99. In the Renaissance, when most transactions were done in credit, small change practically didn’t exist. Then when Italy had lire, the first time she came, small change was all there was and everything cost hundreds or thousands of lire, and sometimes people would give you a piece of candy as change because organizing the specific value of lire was too hard. Now that they have a sensible currency for the first time since the fall of Rome, they’ve become obsessed with pricing things at a penny under the next euro, as if—as if what? Do they think people will think 59.99 is less than sixty? Do they think people are that stupid? Are people that stupid? Does this work? People do it in Canada too, where they’re going back to a credit economy and don’t even have pennies anymore. It must have some psychological effect, but I don’t understand it.
The shop claimed to have the chair in stock and to offer free next-day delivery, which would have been great, except that they didn’t come. They claimed she’d been out, when in fact we’d been in the apartment, listening for them, the whole time. This went on and on, wasting even more time, because we weren’t even going out and looking at things, we were just sitting (or in fact lying on the bed, as there wasn’t anywhere to sit that didn’t hurt) in the apartment with the door open, waiting until late in the day every day. When we gave up, or received an email from them saying delivery had failed, we’d go and have a gelato and an evening walk.
Waiting for the chair wasn’t as bad for me as being ignored and banished to the bone cave with no access to anything and the fear that she’d just leave me there forever. She let me see through her eyes, and she talked to me. In fact she talked to me a lot. We also did a lot of reading. We read John Barnes’s Tales of the Madman Underground, which was great once I stopped expecting it to have spaceships. It reminded me in a weird way of The Wednesday Wars. Then we read a biography of Vittoria Colonna. She likes biographies, because people’s lives don’t fall neatly into periods, they cut across expectations of time. Vittoria Colonna was a poet, a friend of Michelangelo and Pietro Bembo, a member of the important Roman Colonna family. Pope Clement, a Medici pope, refused to allow her to become a nun, because he valued her as a sane adult member of the Colonna, though they were his enemies. Then we read Rosamunde Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers, which went down fast. Then we started reading a book about Sigismundo Malatesta and his paganism, which was annoying, very detailed but without any breadth. Alternating fiction and research nonfiction is her usual habit, but she stopped the Malatesta book in the middle and read a new translation of the Bhagavad Gita.
On the fourth evening of waiting for a chair, and the seventh, no the eighth without writing, we were walking back from Perché No!… with the taste of their astonishing pear and rose gelato on her lips. The gelato was as excellent and the staff were as friendly as always, so that had cheered her up a little. It had rained in the afternoon, and we had missed it, waiting in for the stupid chair that didn’t come, lying on the bed reading with the door open, starting up at every sound, and engaging in exasperated email in simple declarative Italian with the chair people. “I need my chair. I have been waiting too long. This is unacceptable. No delivery came. I cannot lose another day.” They responded that the driver had left, they never deliver after five, but it would be delivered tomorrow for sure. She no longer believes their assurances. She is considering the possibility of threats, but she is unused to making them in the real world. “Canadians don’t make threats,” she says, which means that if a Canadian sounds like they’re making a threat you should take it very seriously. Besides, what could she threaten them with? Exposure on the internet could make thousands of her readers hate them, but that probably wouldn’t hurt them very much, as very few of those fantasy readers are in Italy, and even if they visit they’re unlikely to buy office chairs there. She is small and the forces of chair delivery are grinding her under their wheels.
She’s feeling a little better because of the gelato, but she’s thinking about this, and about her plan to stand on the doorstep for the whole delivery period tomorrow, when she stops suddenly at a leather stall that is just closing for the night. She has noticed that they have the kind of leather book covers, black, embossed with a Florentine lion, that she likes to use to protect her Kindle. She has been using them for ten years, through generations of Kindles from the clunky original one to the streamlined Oasis of today. (She buys a new one every time one comes out with more space for books. Idris only read in codex form, so their house in Montreal is still full of paper books, but she travels a lot and likes to have her whole library with her all the time so she doesn’t have to decide in advance what she’s going to read.) These particular leather covers have been scarce this year, but this stall has a big pile of the exact kind she likes. She buys two, which I see as a sign of hope, as each lasts for several years. Then, on impulse, she buys a third. The man tries to persuade her to take one with the Florentine lily instead of the lion, but she shakes her head. “It means something different in Quebec,” she says.
The fleur-de-lys was Firenze’s symbol long before France adopted it, and some say the city is named after the irises that grow wild about it—Florentia means flowering—and that the city’s lily is really an iris. Quebec’s lily is one of the last relics of France’s symbol, retained even though France itself has abandoned it; Quebec and New Orleans, the remnants of an empire that didn’t want to be conquered by a different empire, still cling to it. When it comes to the Quebec lily, Sylvia feels the scars of old wounds, the separatists, the referendums, the long fight with the library about whether the fleur-de-lys should adorn the spines of her books, or only those of writers who write in French. She would like to have the lily as her symbol too, but it would mean too much, and the wrong things, if she tried to claim it. And while the Florentine lily and the Quebecois are different, they’re not sufficiently different as not to be easily confused for each other at a glance. The lion treads on no toes.
“Ah. Canada!” the salesman says. He puts his hand on his heart. “Love Canada. Good. Good.” Then he slides from broken sales-pitch English into Italian and explains that his brother works in Vancouver, and that Canada has resisted fascism, not like the US, and everything is efficient, not like Italy. This warmth towards Canada is universal, but always a little surprising. Sylvia finds herself in a conversation she has often had in Europe, and had even on her first trip in the seventies, about emigration. She tells him Canada would welcome him, but he should improve his English and his French. She sometimes feels she has had this conversation herself with more people than ever do choose to try Canada’s slow, complicated, and expensive emigration policy, which on one level nobody can admit exists mainly to keep out Americans who are desperate for healthcare. It’s strange to think that people from Burkino Faso and Syria and Italy would find it easier to move to Canada if the US adopted single-payer healthcare like a civilized country, but this is the way the world fits together. She goes through her standard explanation. He really could have a better job in Canada than selling leather goods from a street stall. And for his children, there would definitely be more opportunities. Canada isn’t perfect, but it has much more unnepotistic opportunity than Italy does. (And when they say they’re going to deliver a chair tomorrow, they actually do it.) “But it is so, so beautiful here,” she finishes, as she always does in Firenze.
He nods fervent agreement. “When my brother comes home, he cries.”
“When I come here I cry too,” she admits.
He insists on giving her a fridge magnet of the city of Firenze, as a gift. He slips it into the bag with the book covers. “Come back, come back often,” he says.
After all the hassle with the hot water and the chair, Italy at its worst, it cheers us no end to have an encounter like that. We walk on, down past the end of the Ponte Vecchio, where the view opens up.
Because of the rain, the swallows are down low over the river, and the sky is full of clouds in white and pale grey and dark grey and black, on a backgroun
d of pale blue, and all lit from below, and behind us, by the sinking sun. The shapes the clouds make are like billowing angels holding hands, half allegorical ceiling and half Escher. Below is the Arno, and on the other side the Tuscan hills, with the tower of San Niccoló, the too-perfect terracotta-and-white Palazzo Serristori, the gazebo, the Belvedere fort, and the abbey of San Miniato al Monte, already lit up although it isn’t dark yet.
The wind is blowing the clouds, and the sky swirls, and I wonder if this might be my chance—absurdly, I feel unready, only partway through my plan, without everything in place. But maybe we could accept Ficino’s dinner invitation after all. What happens isn’t that. The clouds move, and suddenly the others burst out and they’re all there, pressing up with me behind her eyes. It’s Tish first, and immediately she’s shocked at the twenty-first-century fashions. More than half the women are wearing trousers, but they clearly aren’t dressed as men, because their shirts are skimpy. Also, everyone is showing a lot of flesh and she’s horrified. “It’s hot,” I say.
