by Jo Walton
Whenever Sylvia goes to Teatro del Sale now she remembers the time she first brought Idris here. He liked the entrance but fidgeted filling in the form. Then he approved the cool interior, with the crimson chairs and dark wood tables in the grey stone space, which fit his sense of aesthetics very well. They filled decanters of cold water and red wine, which you get for yourself from the space just outside the main room. He sat down, looking around at the other diners, the mix of ages, the mix of cultures. There was a little dog there that day, a bay weiner, sitting quietly by its owner’s feet and staring at the other diners. Then the food started coming. First they had plates of vegetables. Then they had gnocchi—it was March, a slack time for Idris in work, when everything in Montreal is still frozen, but well into spring in Firenze. That was followed by spinach mousse with parmesan, which melts on the tongue, subtle and delectable. As he was eating this, slowly, savouring every bite, Idris said, looking around, “How can this exist? And given that it does, how can there only be one like it?”
On this trip she’s been coming alone at lunchtime, once or twice a week. She doesn’t drink wine, because she wants to write in the afternoon and needs a clear head. There is a porcini mushroom soup today. It’s pale brown, with dark green olive oil floating on the top, and it tastes rich and dark, like earth, like Earth, like mother Gaia. It coats her tongue, and her tastebuds immediately feel not just satisfied but fulfilled, as if tasting this soup is why tastebuds evolved in the first place. We pretend sometimes that this food is made from food grown outside Plato’s Cave, in the ultimate reality. If you tell people you went out there, they get angry, Plato says, so people—Fabio Picchi and his friends and coworkers—just sneak out of the Cave to grow vegetables. Talking about Teatro del Sale it’s easy to use words like “incredible” and “unbelievable,” but when you’re there it feels instead like the ultimate reality, the way things ought to be. Famous chefs ought to want to give things like this back to the community. Food ought to taste this way. It’s so like a wish-fulfillment narrative that it’s hard to suspend disbelief, but yet, here she is again, eating mouthwatering food, familiar but never taken for granted.
“I’ll miss this,” she says to me, as she unabashedly licks her bowl.
“They have this in Illyria,” I say.
“Really?” She doesn’t speak aloud when she’s talking to me in this kind of situation, but her facial expression does change, and when she says this her eyebrows shoot up and she tucks her chin down, expressing her scepticism. So from an outside perspective she’s sitting alone making faces to herself. Fortunately, in Teatro del Sale, they’re used to her.
“Yes. Exactly like this, exactly here in the equivalent place, with this exact food, and the bust of Fabio next to the picture of Karl Marx on the shelf in the kitchen, just the same, except it isn’t Marx, it’s some saint with a huge beard. What saints have beards? Maybe it’s Poseidon. St Poseidon. This is perfect, and so they have it there, and they always have, and Fabio has been running it for three hundred years, and that arched wall right there has a fresco of Maria Cassi instead of a photograph, and over there on that one is a frieze of lute players and dancers.”
“Why would it be the same?” she asks, eating a piece of rigatoni with tomato and basil, so simple, but just right, the pasta cooked just the right amount, the basil so fragrant, the tomato so sweet.
“Because it’s perfect. And because it’s like the Renaissance.”
“It’s nothing like the Renaissance! They didn’t have anything like this. When Leonardo and Botticelli tried to open a restaurant called the Three Frogs it went bankrupt. It was down by the Ponte Vecchio. I think it was where that awful gelateria with huge piled-up gelato is, just as you get to the bridge.”
“Well, that does prove the nonexistence of time travel,” I say. “Because it would be the most exciting inn for time travellers.”
“Or maybe time travellers made it go bankrupt, to ensure that Leonardo and Botticelli got back to their paintbrushes and didn’t waste their time on such ephemeral art,” she muses.
“Not that it would have been wasting their time. But time travellers might have thought so,” I say. “But what I meant was, while they didn’t have dining clubs in the Renaissance, and they didn’t really have anything like this—and they won’t ever have tomatoes or zucchini because they don’t have the New World—it’s like the Renaissance in that Fabio’s made something and is excited to share it with people. And the kitchen is like a workshop with apprentices, except that the art is food, and he asks people to respond to art with art, all the acts he has in the theatre, and having people tell others about food. And he was so happy when you put it in a story that time, remember? And that kind of sharing and excitement is part of the spirit of the Renaissance, so I say that Teatro del Sale is in Thalia just as it is in Firenze, and when we’re there we’ll be able to go together, and the real difference is that I’ll actually be able to eat for myself and nobody will think you’re mad when you talk to me.”
Sylvia finishes the rigatoni. Osso bucco is announced, with a ringing of the bell and a loud call, and when she has finished clapping and cheering she goes up to the front to get some, piling her empty plates at the hatch neatly on the way. When she comes back, with a little plate of shredded beef tail and a little pile of salt to dip it in, she looks dreamily at the poster of Maria Cassi. “We were wrong about Progress,” she says, taking her first bite. “My goodness that’s good.”
“Wrong how?” I ask.
“We wanted it to be the Renaissance forever in Illyria, and so we said it was. By divine fiat, we said Progress didn’t work in Illyria, as part of what Pico and Ficino did to stop death. But if it is forever, then it stops being the Renaissance.” She takes another blissful bite of the oxtail. “You’re absolutely right about Teatro del Sale being like that, and that it’s the excitement. But if Fabio had been running it for three hundred years, would he still be excited? Excited by new ideas for food, maybe, and new artists, but sooner or later it’s all going to feel too familiar, well worn, not innovative anymore, and he’d want to do something else, and maybe hand it on to new people who have different ideas. If you don’t have Progress, they are going to run out of new things. Art can stay at that pinnacle, maybe. Let’s say the fresco of Maria Cassi replacing the photo over there is done by, oh, Donato Bonnini, in 1758.”
“And Donato is a girl in disguise?” I offer at once.
“Yes, and she came from Verona to apprentice and to be healed of depression by Ficino, who healed her by balancing her humours and telling her to eat more red meat—this beef is so amazing—and drink orange juice and wear blue, which she still does.” This is how you make up a character, by the way, when you don’t go into the mist and have one coalesce. Donato could become real or she could just stay as a piece of brainstorming, she could even be in a story without being any more real than this placeholder set of attributes, that would all depend what happened later. “And she’s every bit as good as Ghirlandaio,” Sylvia went on. “And her portrait of Cassi there—she’s in that pose she’s in in the photo, and she’s making a funny face because she’s a clown and because making funny faces in art is a thing in 1750s Illyria, and it’s all technically perfect and wonderful. But it’s just … more. More is good, I wouldn’t get tired of it, but … nobody’s going to invent perspective and turn everything upside down. It’s going to be lovely, really lovely, but it won’t be exciting. And you only have a golden age when people are excited to be doing new things and showing each other.”
She’s right and I know it as soon as she says it, and it’s being in Teatro del Sale, which is having a golden age right now, that makes me see it. And I have to be honest, because art is too important. I can’t say that being lovely is enough, tempting as that would be. “So should we start Progress again?” I ask.
“It would move more slowly anyway, with everyone living so long,” she says. “But if I were going to live there, yes. I’d want the stars to b
e destinations, not destiny. The real Renaissance was a time of total innovation. It wasn’t ever static. I don’t think any time in history was, not really. They talk about the Dark Ages, but they saw the widespread use of waterwheels, the introduction of stirrups—”
“The loss of menstrual sponges,” I put in.
She eats the last bite of beef and wipes her fingers on her napkin. “Well, yes, it isn’t always all going forwards. But it isn’t all doom either. It’s complicated. And in the Renaissance there were new inventions and new methods and cross-pollination of cultures all over the place. Life expectancy fell, compared to the Middle Ages, but still it was a fast-moving time. And right after that, they found the Americas and that widened Europe’s sense of possibilities, even though it was devastating for the cultures they encountered.” She gets up and goes towards the front table. “I left the New World out on purpose, and not so they wouldn’t have tomatoes,” she says, scooping some spelt and tomato salad onto her plate. The tomatoes are small and dark and bursting with flavour. “I came here and looked at all this beauty, and I thought it was the best Europe could be, and the genocidal colonialism was the worst. We were only just starting to confront the issues then, in Canada. I just wanted nothing to do with it, so I left it out. That isn’t what I’d do now.” She adds a scoop of carrots and a spoonful of anchovy butter to her plate and makes her way back to her table.
“And anyway you can’t put everything into everything,” I say, as she sits down again. “Every piece of art can’t address every issue.”
“No. You can’t. But really, a lot of what was important about the Renaissance was that golden-age feeling, people making things and being excited. Stopping that dead and removing the possibility of progress by fiat kills half of what matters about it. And the other half is really just decoration. Very beautiful decoration, admittedly, but still just decoration.”
The bell rings suddenly and loudly from the kitchen window, a wild joyous clangour. Today’s kitchen master announces that something incomprehensible will be available at the window. She goes up to collect it, in a crowd of others. She exchanges a few words with an old man who is here almost every day, about how good the carrots are today. The new dish turns out to be pieces of mackerel baked in lemon juice and oil.
“We could start it up again,” I say, when she is sitting down again and has taken the first blissful bite.
“I’m not really a god,” she says.
“Not in this world. In Illyria you are.”
“Why am I Hekate?”
“Because you are. You are the one who works your will, the goddess of boundaries and crossroads and edges, the mistress of creation.”
She takes another bite of the mackerel, which is sweet and rich and juicy all at once. “I’m not sure I want to be a goddess.”
“You wouldn’t only be. And how come you’re suddenly interested, after weeks and months of repeating over and over that it’s impossible?”
“Nobody else is offering me any form of immortality. Nobody looks ready to invent one, or a cure for cancer, not in time. Oh you know I tried to keep it from you, tried to shut you away, but we know how well that worked. You wouldn’t listen to me. You immediately started telling your own story.”
“Building my lifeboat.” High above, the sun goes behind a cloud and the room dims. I knew it. I knew that’s why she came.
“I could have stayed at home and gone through it all again. But it would have been hopeless. And—” A tear slips down her face. She takes out a paper tissue and wipes it away. “This is ridiculous, but I’d have lost my appetite again, and coming here seemed—”
“Like in The Bone People,” I say, as she takes another bite of carrots followed by another bite of fish.
“Yes, but Kerewin couldn’t really have had cancer … or it was magic. And Firenze is hardly the middle of the wilderness where I could leave decorative bones. And I don’t feel sick. The chemo would make me feel terrible, like last time, but now I feel so well. I can finish the book.” She takes the last bite of her fish and savours it. “But I don’t want to die. Idris died and the world went on and he wasn’t in it, and I had to go on too. I can’t imagine the world going on without me. Or rather, I can imagine it, but it feels … imaginary, not like something that could really happen. If it were a story idea I’d dismiss it as not hanging together.”
“What we need to do is get you into Illyria,” I say, as I have been saying all along.
She mops up the olive oil and lemon on her plate with a piece of sciacchiata. I think she’s going to say once more that it isn’t possible and I don’t understand, but she surprises me. “So what else do we have to do? You’ve told all the stories about me, about my childhood, and about coming here and starting to write, about Idris, and even about Steve. What more do we need? Do we need to tell all the stories about you again, the stories that are in my books? How you were a dragon and a prince and a poet and a Viking and all the other things?”
“I think we told those already. I don’t think we need to put those details in this book. But I think there’s a little more about you,” I say. “And we have to tell them what they need to do. And you know where the moon was in that picture. The next new moon is July thirteenth, and it will look like that two or three days later. So that’s when it will be. That gives us a couple more weeks.”
“We can get the book finished, and sent off, though not edited. It’s a very strange book, but if it’s posthumous that won’t matter. Nobody will believe a word of it anyway. I mean, look!” She looks around at the happy people enjoying their food. Some are hanging around the window waiting for the last course and watching chickens being pulled off the spits and cut apart. “I’m not sure I could even get people to suspend their disbelief in the carrots.” She eats another forkful of them. “I’m not sure I could even describe the carrots.”
“Slices of sunset, melting on the tongue, offered, accepted, loved by old and young, sweet, and a treat, but earthy, rich, and strange—”
“Using Shakespeare is cheating!”
“You say that? You?”
And as we laugh, the bell rings out again and the last course is served.
31
SATURN DEVOURING HIS CHILDREN
Dolly wakes in the night in complete darkness and for a moment he has no idea where he is, or even who he is. He reaches out an arm and finds embroidered bedcovers, which he pulls up around his shoulders. It feels momentarily strange to him to be embodied, to have a hand, to be able to distinguish threads and textures and the weight of cloth, to be aware of the warmth of his own skin. He had such a strange dream, and even though the ragged remnants of it are melting away now, the strangeness clings to him as he sits up, as his foot meets the cold tile of the floor. “Methinks I was, methinks I had…” he says aloud, and as he quotes Shakespeare he centers himself on himself. He remembers that he is in Ficino’s house in Thalia, not his parents palazzo in Firenze, or his rooms in Cambridge, or the strange half-remembered realms of dream.
The room is dark. Any child in Thalia can light a candle with a gesture, but Dolly can’t. His feet are cold, but he doesn’t know how to dress in the darkness. He feels his way tentatively across the room, stubbing his toe on one of his own shoes. (His shoes, which were not stuffed with rags like Tish’s boots, have shrunk a little from their soaking and now pinch him slightly, so he has not been wearing them.) He puts out his hand and finds a window shutter, which he opens. It is deep in a quiet night, the moon has set, and all the sconces people set by their doors for light have been extinguished or burned themselves out. He sees high above the remote intense burning points of the stars, which remind him of his dream. By their distant light, that has crossed so much space and time to reach him, he makes his way to the door.
He fumbles his way barefoot and in his nightshirt around the courtyard and up the stairs in the deep darkness, up past Ficino’s study, past Tish’s closed door and the room where Miranda is staying, up and up to the
top of the tower, where Ficino is sitting in a wooden armchair under the crystal dome, staring up at the stars. “Dolly,” he says, as soon as he sees him. “Only a dream would have brought you up here at this hour, it’s past three. Come and sit down and tell me about it. Are you cold? Would you like a blanket? Should I light the fire?”
“I am cold, and yes, it was a dream,” Dolly says.
There is wood laid in the fireplace. Ficino makes a gesture towards it very like a conductor signalling to the violin section to begin, and the fire leaps obediently to an immediate conflagration, each branch and log leaping with a gush of orange flame, which then settles back to a more ordinary blaze. Dolly warms himself in front of it, then takes the offered blanket and wraps himself in it. He sits down in the other chair. He leans back. The sky is very clear, a rich velvety black, and even with the fire burning the stars still look very bright. Dolly has spent his time studying the Classics, Shakespeare, and the Florentine Renaissance; he doesn’t know one star from another. “I dreamed of Saturn devouring his children,” he says, still staring up into the star field. “He was an old man with a dirty beard and worn, stained finery. He seemed almost like a tramp, a vagabond. But he was immensely fat, and swelling more and more as he ate. Some of the children were children, but others were paintings, and operas, and telescopes, and a steam train. He was grabbing them with his hands and stuffing them into his mouth, then chewing and swallowing them and reaching out for more. In my dream that didn’t seem strange. I was watching. But then there came a woman, a huge, thin, hungry woman, and her skirts were stars. She was wearing one of those skimpy shirts like we saw in the oracle, and on it was scrawled I never come. She seemed to have a broom, and to be sweeping away everything, the whole world, everything, sweeping it all towards Saturn who was devouring it and getting bigger. Some of it started to circle his waist, and float there, turning when he turned. Then her broom became a roaring stick, not as big as the loud two-wheeled vehicles, but reminiscent of them, and with a long tube, and instead of sweeping everything towards Saturn, who was still reaching for it, the tube was sucking it all away.”
