The Truth About Death

by Robert Hellenga

  When the slideshow was over, I sat down at the computer and went to the YouTube video, the one with the smiling woman. The men you see at the opening are Italian, and the man wearing headphones says something in Italian—too fast for me—and counts down in Italian. The voice of the singer sounds like an old black man from the Delta, but the video doesn’t match the audio. The young man playing a guitar in the video is strumming away wildly with a flat pick, but what you hear on the audio track is someone fingerpicking a slow blues: Corrina, Corrina, where you been so long? And then, during the second and third verses, you see the young man and this lovely woman sitting together. Talking. She turns to him and smiles.

  “Look at her smile,” I said. “It’s like the smile in the etching.”

  Rosella looked at me, astonished. “That’s Joan Baez,” she said. “And Bob Dylan.”

  “Really? It doesn’t say that on the website.”

  “Porcamadonna! How could you not recognize Joan Baez and Bob Dylan? You’re kidding me.”

  “No, I had no idea.”

  “Well,” she said, “they’re very young.”

  “That’s not Bob Dylan singing, is it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “He can do gravelly,” I said. “And he’s the one who made that song popular.”

  We went back to bed. Rosella left the light on. She couldn’t stop smiling. “I can’t believe you didn’t recognize Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.” And she—Rosella—seemed to have three hands like the woman in the etching, all pinching, tickling, massaging, scratching, poking.

  Afterward she fell asleep, but I was wide-awake. I propped myself up on one elbow and watched her for a while, and then I got up and went outside. I slipped on my leather jacket, which I’d bought at a discount store in Chicago, and put an apple in one of the side pockets. I turned the porch light on. A bicycle was leaning against the side of the house, and I was tempted to go for a spin. The road, or lane, led back down to Fiesole or up to the villa. But it was too dark to see, and the house was too isolated. Low streaky clouds covered the moon, and there was almost no light except the light from the house itself—the porch light and a lamp on the table next to the bed that I’d left on. I could see into the bedroom. Rosella had covered herself with a sheet.

  I walked out to the edge of the darkness, out of sight of the house. I could sense trees, but I couldn’t tell what kind they were. Maybe olive trees. I felt a branch but couldn’t find any olives. It was too early anyway. It wasn’t cold, but it was chilly, and after a few minutes I was ready to go back inside. But I’d forgotten about Elena. Two hundred fifty kilos. A third of a ton. Pure white like the moon. She was standing under the light, between me and the door. I walked around the house. There was another door that opened into the kitchen, but it was locked. I knew enough about pigs not to challenge her. I’d helped my girlfriend’s father rustle hogs a couple of times when I was in high school, and what I knew was that if a farmer had a heart attack in his field, the pigs would eat him.

  I took the apple out of my jacket pocket and held it out to her. “Elena,” I said. “How about a nice mushy apple?” She really was enormous.

  “Elena, Elena, vieni mi qua, come and get this nice apple.” I took a bite out of the apple. She moved her head, and I could see she was tempted. It took about five minutes to lure her away from the front door. She moved toward me in her stiff-legged gait. Closer and closer. She seemed interested, rather than hostile, as if she were interrogating me. I thought about throwing the apple down on the ground, but decided against it. I held it in the palm of my hand as she came closer. She knocked it off my hand with her snout, waited for my reaction, then picked it up with her mouth. I walked around her, slowly, on my way to the door, trailing my fingertips over her back, which looked furry but felt as scratchy as sandpaper.

  She raised her head, looking for another apple. I went inside, brought out the bowl of apples, and fed them to her one at a time till they were all gone. And then I got back into bed with Rosella.

  On Tuesday morning I met with the director of the Museo di Storia della Scienza, who was pleased that I spoke Italian. He didn’t make any promises about the second telescope, but he sent me to the Fondazione Scienza e Tecnica on Via Guiseppe Giusti, near the Protestant Cemetery, where I spent a pleasant afternoon, though our own collection at the MSI already contained most of the sixteenth-century astronomical and mathematical instruments that we needed for the exhibit.

  On my way to Piazza Santa Croce to meet Rosella I stopped and browsed the windows of several real estate agencies. I liked the looks of a two-bedroom apartment on Borgo Pinti for six hundred thousand euros. It would be perfect. Rosella could walk to work. The words of the notice embedded themselves in my brain: appartamento luminoso. It was on the piano nobile of an old palazzo that had been recently restored. Large living room. Modern kitchen. Two bedrooms. Two baths. Rooftop terrace. I was feeling optimistic that evening as the waiter at the Osteria dei Pazzi, who knew Rosella by name, seated us at a table by the window. But Rosella was preoccupied, because out of the blue the Italian government had decided that it needed to exercise more control over restorers. The first step was a decree that all restorers would have to have a university degree.

  “All of a sudden twenty thousand restorers aren’t restorers,” she kept saying. “This country is impossible. You can’t live here.” She tore off a chunk of pane toscano and put it in her mouth. “And this bread is ridiculous. Everywhere else in the whole world they know enough to put salt in their bread. The Florentines are the only people in the whole world who don’t know this. What is the matter with these people? It’s insane.”

  “That’s because their food is so salty already.”

  “Instead of putting so much salt in the food they should put some of it in the bread. Twenty thousand restorers won’t be restorers if the Italian government has its way.” She shook her head.

  She ordered the antipastone for both of us. I understood that antipastone meant “big antipasto,” but I didn’t understand that it meant that the waiters would keep bringing us food till we couldn’t possibly eat any more, not even one more olive: salami, prosciutto, cheeses, octopus salad, anchovies, roast vegetables, roast beef, lardo Colonnata—thin white slices of lard that has been specially cured in marble basins at Colonnata, near Carrara. But lard nonetheless, a Tuscan delicacy.

  It was while we were eating straight lard that I proposed to Rosella. I didn’t know what I’d do if she laughed in my face. My clothes, my suitcase, were at her house, so I couldn’t have just walked out of the restaurant. I was trying to stay focused in the present moment, to detach myself from the result, to identify with the watcher watching myself rather than with my ego.

  She didn’t laugh nor did she throw herself into my arms. She listened as if she were listening to a business proposition. The fact that we were in love was very important, but it was only one part of a larger picture.

  She called to the headwaiter, a man who burst into song every so often, and asked for another quarto of wine. It wasn’t a fancy place. Comfortable. Not too expensive.

  I told her about my father’s death, though I didn’t mention that he’d died on Easter Sunday, only four days ago, and she became tender and understanding. But, she said, she had her own situation to consider, the situation that was too complicated for an American to understand, the situation that involved a rich older man who had a life of his own—a wife, several children, old money, old aristocracy, a big estate with several houses, animals … She was right. I didn’t understand.

  “How would we live?” she wanted to know. “Fresco restorers don’t make a lot of money. How would you find a job in Italy?”

  I had in fact given this question some thought, but I didn’t want to play my trump card, didn’t want to tell her that now that my father was dead, I was a rich man too. I wanted her to meet me halfway.

  “Museum jobs,” she said, “any state jobs, are impossible to get. You’d have to
enter a concorso, a competitive examination, along with hundreds of other people. And even if you won, which you wouldn’t because the exams are rigged—there’s a lot of horse trading—you might be sent to Calabria.”

  “One of the American programs? There are forty-three of them in Florence.”

  “You wouldn’t make enough money.”

  Our waiter had cleared the table and brought a bottle of vin santo and some biscotti di Prato. Rosella dipped a biscotto into her glass of wine.

  “Rosella,” I said. “I want this to matter. I want us to matter, you and me. I want us to be important. This isn’t a little adventure.”

  “You never know what’s important and what’s not important till it’s over, do you?”

  On Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, around five o’clock, we met at the statue of Dante in Piazza Santa Croce and then took the number seven bus up to Fiesole, where she’d left her Alfa Romeo Brera parked near the Roman amphitheater. Sometimes she took the tunnel-like lane, sometimes a regular road that took us past the villa where her sugar daddy lived.

  We made love first thing every evening, early, so we could enjoy our dinner later. Elena did not reappear, but on Thursday we went up to visit her in her pen behind the villa. The signora was in Rome; the signore and his older son were still in the Dolomites, where the slopes were covered with snow year-round.

  “She’s got a very low center of gravity,” Rosella said as we admired the gigantic sow. “But she’s very fast. If you want her to move forward, you have to enter her flight zone from behind the point of balance, which is right between her shoulders, and you have to remember her field of vision is almost three hundred sixty degrees, so the only time she can’t see you is if you’re right behind her. If you want her to back up, you have to enter the flight zone from in front of the point of balance.”

  “You know a lot about pigs,” I said.

  “I know a lot about Elena,” she said.

  She’d borrowed a guitar from a fellow restorer so I could play for her. I tuned it down to an open G and played “Corrina, Corrina” while she cooked. I used a table knife as a slide.

  “You know,” she said. “I don’t like the second verse of that song. He doesn’t have his girlfriend and now his life ‘don’t mean a thing’? I don’t think you can look to another person for your salvation, to give meaning to your life.”

  “Then I won’t sing it again,” I said.

  On Friday morning—we were going to have lunch later at the Osteria dei Pazzi—we met at Dante’s cenotaph in the right aisle of the basilica. She wanted to take me up to the vault at the top of the apse, where she was working on the feet of Saint Francis himself. The vault at the top of the apse was about the last place I wanted to be. The scaffolding was massive, not at all like the sort of thing painters put up at the side of a house. It filled the entire apse of the Capella Maggiore. Even so, looking up into that airy dome—I counted nine levels or floors—made me a little bit seasick.

  I had secured the second Galileo telescope as well as an unusual astrolabe, so I wouldn’t be going home empty-handed. There were still contracts to negotiate regarding the insurance, method of transportation, dates, and so on. I wouldn’t be carrying the telescope, which looked like a piece of broom handle, in my suitcase, of course, but I would finish up my part on Monday. The MSI lawyers would worry about the fine print. But I was not in a mood to congratulate myself because I didn’t know if I’d see Rosella again after today, didn’t know if she’d be back from organizing a demonstration in Rome, didn’t know what she’d decided or what would be settled up in the apse, didn’t know if whatever it was we were doing was important or if it would turn out to be just a piccola avventura; I wasn’t going to tell her about the luminoso apartment. Not yet, anyway.

  The elevator made me nervous—though it was huge—so we put on hard hats and took the stairs. Up nine stories, each floor supported by metal braces inserted into holes in the wall that had been made when the church was built in the thirteenth century.

  Rosella stopped to chat with someone on each level and to introduce me and to explain what was going on. You could see the joins where one day’s work, or giornata, had overlapped another. In places you could see traces of the preparatory drawing in verdaccio, a sort of second underdrawing that repeated and corrected the sinopia or first underdrawing. You could see places where the pigment layer was flaking and areas where the pigment itself had been weakened by the binding medium or by surface abrasion. She explained the properties of the different fixatives (organic and inorganic), emulsions, and solvents (volatile and polar) that were used to remedy these problems.

  We stopped on the eighth level for a cup of coffee in a large office, the sort of office you might find in downtown Chicago—full of desks, wastebaskets, lamps, a copy machine, a fax machine, telephones, and an espresso maker.

  The apse had been frescoed by Agnolo Gaddi, who had learned from his more famous teachers—his father, Taddio, and Giotto—but who had done something different, moving toward the International Gothic style. But the scaffolding made it impossible to take in the big picture, Scenes from the Legend of the True Cross.

  Rosella was working on the frescoes between the ribs of a vaulted arch at the very top of the apse. We were face-to-face with Saint Francis, the four Evangelists, and the risen Christ, and we had to take off our hard hats so we wouldn’t scrape the ceiling.

  “Vaults need special treatment,” she said, “because the undersurface is lath rather than stone.”

  “What about these big cracks?” I asked. “Are you going to seal them up?”

  “No,” she said. “If you fill them, that just redirects the stress. You smooth them out and seal the raw stone at the edges so it doesn’t disintegrate any further.”

  I was so overwhelmed just by the idea of being up there that I forgot to be afraid. Overwhelmed and feeling very special, very much the insider. I even let Rosella walk me to the edge of the scaffolding so I could look down into the big barnlike nave. She put her hand on my back to steady me, as she had done when Elena first appeared at the glass wall of her bedroom.

  Far below us groups of tourists followed guides holding bright umbrellas, stopping in front of the famous tombs: Dante’s (empty), Machiavelli’s, Michelangelo’s, Galileo’s, Rossini’s. A service was being conducted in one of the smaller chapels directly below us. We couldn’t see the priest, but we could see the people in an area that had been roped off. Everywhere you looked people were taking photos. Isolated worshippers were scattered here and there. In the right aisle a mother and father consulted a guidebook while two children ran up and down the aisle. They had to make way for a mother and teenage daughter pushing an infant in a stroller. Workmen rolled a cart of stuff to the elevator. Some women in blue aprons were polishing the altar railings. (The main altar had been relocated to make room for the scaffolding.) A priest hurried toward the sacristy—we couldn’t see the entrance from the scaffolding. Two other priests, crossing paths in front of the pulpit, stopped to chat. A line snaked out in front of a confessional. Two young lovers held hands. Two middle-aged women held hands. A beggar sat on the pavement by the ticket booth. You couldn’t just wander in anymore. You had to pay. A bridal party had gathered around the ticket booth and the bride was arguing with the woman who sold the tickets. Probably a wedding party on their way to the wedding hall in Palazzo Vecchio.

  What had happened to the original Franciscan vows of poverty? Legend has it that one of the friars responsible for the construction of the elaborate basilica was now in Purgatory being struck on the head by two hammers continuously.

  Rosella pointed out the line of the floodwater from the big flood of 1966. The basilica—the whole Santa Croce district—was in the flood plain. The water had burst the huge doors.

  I thought this view of the nave was what Rosella had wanted to show me. But I was wrong. What she wanted to show me was in a corner, in a small space at the base of one of the ribs, where the intonac
o had been completely worn away. She pointed to a small oval portrait. A man in a floppy medieval hat, bright red—a jester? A peasant? A noble? A holy fool? I didn’t recognize him at first. I was reading it as a late-medieval portrait, and I was only semiliterate. It didn’t make sense. I had to adjust my eyes. And then I recognized myself. It was me. This was her gift to me. At first I didn’t understand, and then she put her hand on my back, and I did. I understood that she was saying good-bye, that it was too late now to play my trump card, my ace in the hole. Too late to say I was rich, too late to tell her about the appartamento luminoso on Borgo Pinti with the terrace on the roof.

  “It’s true affresco,” she said. “The lath, then the arriccio, the sinopia, the intonaco, the paint applied to the wet plaster. Then a few details al secco. Certain pigments you can’t use in true fresco. It will be there for centuries. You can see Saint Francis and the Evangelists.”

  “And they can see me,” I said. “Can you do this?” I added. “I mean, can you get away with it?”

  “I’ve already gotten away with it.”

  My sister and I spent the week before Christmas in the old family home surrounded by old familiar things—the bright blue table in the breakfast nook, the deep red davenport in the living room that was always threatening to collapse, my mother’s walnut Steinway piano, the silverware and the plates we’d eaten off as children, the glasses we’d drunk out of, Dad’s typewriter on the desk in the little office off the front hall, a copy of the letter still curled up in the rollers. Two of the keys—the s and the t—were completely broken, but he’d kept typing anyway: ALHOUGH I AM NEIHER RICH NOR POWERFUL, NONEHELE, IF YOU HINK …