They’re standing on the sidewalk, in the shade of an awning on the corner of Via degli Strozzi and Via Pellicceria, squared in by four hunkering churches. As they start walking down Pellicceria, past Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, May remembers with relief the odd little building with the bright-lilac roof that Gwen explained was a betting booth. Already men and women are milling around it, consulting their papers for upcoming dog and horse races. Next door is the post office, which she also remembers passing this morning, with the same old men out front all meticulously dressed in their suits and polyester vests, rattling their newspapers, arguing politics and racing odds. All familiar. Good.
She touches the nearest wall — smooth, real, now — tears streaking her face. “I’m losing it, Li. What time is it?”
He shrugs, glancing at her leg, his eyes wide with worry. “I dunno. Ten thirty, maybe. You’re shaking.” He lifts his fingers to wipe the damp from her face again, almost reflexively. “You’re not losing it. You just got lost.”
“You have no idea what an understatement that is.” She feels too stupid to look at him, but he lifts her chin with his thumb.
“Hey, it happens. Didn’t you bring a guidebook? You didn’t, did you? I knew it. Did you even bring your phone? You weren’t gone long, but you always text back, so I got . . . worried.”
Ten thirty. She’d left the apartment just after nine. How could she have been through all that — Cristofana and the river and the man in the artist’s workshop — in the time it took to get to and from Mercato Nuovo? Impossible.
It worries her, how calm she feels now that it’s over, how accepting. Does madness come over you that quickly, like a wool blanket thrown over your head . . . and you just learn to live in the dark? This calm adaptability is almost worse than whatever’s causing these weird delusions. She thinks of her guidebook and phone in her bag and smiles. She thinks of the man’s amber eyes looking right into her, the feeling of his warm, capable hands on her skin.
“You hurt your leg. You OK?”
May nods. She is. Now. The bandage, though, is mysteriously gone, and a scab’s already forming.
“Let’s get out of here, huh? This city’s like a maze. It’s starting to get to me. And I’m tired of all these people.”
She puts out her arm, and he links his through, looking away. When he doesn’t ask it out loud — what happened? — May is glad. She can concentrate on breathing. On taking one step and another. Liam’s so easy, so steady. Always has been.
They find the depot and don’t say much, waiting to board the Number 7 bus to Fiesole — a village perched on a hill just north of Florence — along with other tourists and a few early-bird locals lugging shopping bags.
Gwen said it was a short ride past beautiful villas, only a half hour or so to the town square. If it wasn’t too hot and they wanted to walk awhile, they could get out at the hamlet halfway between, she’d said, and enjoy the green hills. They do get out, peeking in first at the shadowy convent and church in tiny San Domenico.
They’re breathless on the steep walk to Fiesole, May trying not to limp, and she can’t keep her thoughts from racing or her mind on the scenery, but it’s turned into a beautiful day, and that helps. Liam was right that she belongs where it’s green. Decadent Old Florence might be Gwen’s kind of place and her mother’s, but to May (and Liam, she’s getting), it’s like rich food: you can only eat so much before it makes you sick.
They enter the main square in Fiesole, park themselves on a bench, and stare down at the red-tiled rooftops of Florence, the cypress-specked hills of Mugello. There’s a real breeze up here. The air smells clean, and swifts sweep past, diving in the open air high ahead. The two of them sit in comfortable silence: May processing the morning, Liam probably wondering what got her so upset. She isn’t one to cry or panic, even in a crisis, and May can’t remember the last time she’s cried in front of anyone, least of all Li. He took it in stride, though, and she’s grateful for that.
“Should we go to the Archaeological Museum?” he asks finally, his voice jarring in the silence. “Gwen’ll kill us if we don’t.”
“I’m starved.”
“Yeah, me too. Let’s do lunch first and then walk.”
The ancient Romans built a theater and baths up here, and according to the guidebook, here they are still, crumbling under the Tuscan skies. The ruins are just off the square, partly enclosed by cypress trees with descending hills visible beyond.
She and Liam are the only people inside the open park, and the hush is huge. There’s something eerie and comforting about the orderly rows and stacks of stone, an outline of vanished lives.
“It’s crazy”— Liam produces a thin blanket from his backpack, spreading it carefully, reading her mind —“that these things were built more than a thousand years before the Renaissance.”
May gazes off at the ruins while Li finishes unpacking. The ragged rows are humbling, in a way. A sign on the way in said that there were Etruscan ruins here, too, dating back several hundred years before the Romans.
Cheese. Sliced apples. Olives. Crusty bread. “This here’s all very Martha Stewart of you, Li. I’m impressed.”
“You like?”
“I like,” she says, tearing off a hunk of break to dab in the oil from the olives, then twisting the bread in her molars, chewing thoughtfully. “Do you ever think about how the past is always with us?”
“No.”
“I’m serious,” she says, swallowing. “I’m talking about my parents, the life we had as little kids. But way back before all that, too, before we were born. A bunch of people in togas walked around these ruins once, naming constellations and telling stories about Zeus and Hera.”
“Who?”
She glares up at him again, and, again, he smiles. Of course he knows who Zeus and Hera are. Liam knows everything, probably. They’re both academics’ kids, spoon-fed this stuff, myths and histories, since before they could walk. It’s only with grown-up life looming just out of the frame that May is grasping how little she knows, how none of it seems to add up.
“You’re philosophical today.”
May rips off another hunk of bread. “I’ve just been thinking how you can’t stop it. The future’s always coming at you like a train, and you can’t see it to get out of the way.”
“Yeah, but not all change is bad. Your parents are splitting,” he ventures, “but they love you. They did their best all these years, and you’re OK. You’re like a grown-up now, and you have choices. They have to be able to choose, too.”
“That’s bullshit. You know it is.”
“What? Which part?”
“‘They’re splitting up but they love you.’ That’s not the point. The point is they don’t love each other, and that’s not OK.”
“Anymore,” he adds firmly.
“Anymore,” she echoes.
“Which isn’t to say they didn’t, or that your whole childhood was a lie, or any psych-shit like that.”
In the same instant that May reaches out for more bread, Liam leans and tries to kiss her, almost missing her face completely. He grazes her cheekbone instead, and his lips feel wet and raw and surprising, not because Liam repels her — not that — but because he’s Li, and Li isn’t supposed to kiss her. “Whoa” is all she can say. Whoa.
Liam only looks at her, mortified probably, and May can’t say what’s worse, him hitting on her or him feeling embarrassed about it.
“Sorry,” he mumbles. “Really bad timing. You were trying to say something —”
“Timing? Shit, Li. What are you doing?”
He looks sort of stunned, his face unnaturally red, and all she can think of is when they were about six and seven and for no discernible reason she threw sand in his face at the beach. She’d sat there with her hands in her wet lap while he howled about being blind. He hadn’t cried but sort of gulped and stuck out his pudgy hands and groped the air, repeating his announcement —“Blind, blind”— in a small, vague voice a
s the waves rolled quietly over their legs and a seagull hovered on a current beside them, screaming. Finally Gwen (or was it Mom?) had seen him sitting there in his sagging fire-truck swim trunks, arms out in front of him like a deranged robot’s, and came and brushed him off and walked him back to the blanket. Alone, May listened while the ocean murmured without judgment. It was soothing, just as the wind on this hilltop and the boundless blue Tuscan sky are now. Sorry didn’t do it, the waves seemed to say, but there are bigger things . . . bigger than him, bigger than you, bigger than now.
Laced in with a feeling of excitement and curiosity about the morning’s weirdness and the man she met is a kind of profound sadness that she can’t explain to Liam, her childhood best friend. She would like to grab his arm and explain, to say that it won’t always be like this, weird and wrong, that someday it will be like it was before, or some other, better way, but not this way.
But Li, whose hands are no longer pudgy — they’re broad and long, with tapered fingers, she noticed when he was wiping away her tears — is already gone.
May sits a long while on his picnic blanket, feeling guilty, imagining he’ll come back when he calms down. He’ll come back when he’s taken a breath or two, had a look over the rooftops below, had a minute to think.
But he doesn’t, and at long last she cleans up those few scraps he didn’t take with him and starts down the hill. She takes her own time getting back, doesn’t want to arrive at the apartment before Gwen does, doesn’t want to run into Li before Gwen can make things right again with cheerful updates on shroud-sucking vampires.
She bears right onto Via Vecchia Fiesolana, the old road, passing a tabernacle with a Madonna and Saints, and on the right, the church of Saint Jerome. Next is the Villa Medici. Yet another handy sign explains that the villa was built by Michelozzo in 1458 for Cosimo the Elder and used by Lorenzo the Magnificent to host his literary friends. Besides the beautiful gardens, which she meanders through absently, there isn’t much remaining of the villa.
Heading out again, she reaches the terrace view that Queen Victoria liked so much she had her own bench installed there, and — was it left, now, or right . . . right — at the first intersection, the spot where the bishop of Fiesole, who lived in Florence, would rest on his way to his cathedral. These people are all dead now, May thinks with despair, circling back into San Domenico, with its church and convent, struggling out her phrase book so she can order a gelato in the shop across from the bus stop.
Ice cream is the only thing that makes sense anymore. This one’s a rich hazelnut chocolate and tastes so good she lets the first Number 7 bus go by. It’ll be a while before the next, an hour maybe. She knows that and just sits there taking long, slow licks like an animal cleaning its wound.
When she boards, she’s the only passenger and watches wistfully, trying to hold on to the taste of chocolate as the landscape blurs past in a flicker of late-afternoon sunlight.
May slips back into the apartment and isn’t surprised to find it empty. She settles on the overstuffed silky couch under the vaulted ceiling. That ceiling and the awesome terrace overlooking the Arno are the only real luxuries — the rest of the apartment is plain and modern; white stucco walls, terra-cotta tiled floors, a throw rug here and there. It’s airy and light, and May feels just fine with that after visiting all those dank, dark churches yesterday, however beautiful their contents or contours. She picks up her novel from the coffee table and tries to read, but a clock somewhere in the still-strange house ticks ominously, and she can’t concentrate.
Retreating to her room, May heads for the pile of research books on her desk, Gwen’s mostly. “You have all these papers to write, so why not choose a topic that draws on where you are,” Gwen advised, “or overlaps with the work I have you and Liam doing for me? Teachers — trust me; I am one — love visuals . . . the more, the better . . . so visit archives, take photos. Take advantage of this setting.”
Yeah, but write about what? To crowd out the fact that she’s possibly, probably, going insane, May closes her eyes, opens Gwen’s copy of Florence: An Encyclopedia at random, stabs her forefinger down, and opens her eyes again.
Black Death (see also Plague).
Some lucky teacher’s getting a paper on plague.
Medieval travelers carried home exotic cargo, money, and spices, she reads, surprisingly drawn in, but also tales of terror and wonder. May sits back down and cracks the book’s spine in a way that would infuriate Gwen.
At the hearthside or a packed table at the inn, they murmured of strange beasts and stranger men, of lands where dragons swept the skies, of seas swarming with monsters. To the average European — a peasant born into poverty and hardship — the places in travelers’ tales seemed remote indeed.
Rumors of calamity began to reach major trade centers like Florence as early as 1346, but, like unicorns and dragons, distant disaster was not of immediate concern. Merchants spoke of famine in the fabled East, of drought, floods, and swarming locusts. They told of earthquakes bringing down mountains, enormous hailstones battering the earth, of fire raining down “in flakes like snow” from skies that might as easily bring storms of serpents, frogs, and scorpions. Worst of all was an infected wind, one so poisonous you could see it — a vicious, stinking smoke. Any who breathed this smoke dropped dead in the space of a day. This wind had mowed down millions, and there were fearful rumors of its progress.
Lifting the book, May snatches a notebook and pencil from the desk, then pads in bare feet out to the terrace, her favorite part of the apartment. From there she can look out over the rooftops at the edge of the city, which butt right up to the wide Arno, with its ancient bridges and green hills beyond. She settles into an iron chair beside a planter, with her feet on the railing, enjoying the sun on her face a moment, and reads on.
According to the book, the outbreak that people of Cristofana’s day called the pestilence or the Pest, which was formerly confined to the Far East, now began to fan out in different directions, tearing through Indian Tartary, Mesopotamia, and Syria, and settling in the Tartar lands of Asia Minor in 1346, where it left 85,000 dead in Crimea alone.
In the chaos, the Tartars seized the chance to launch a campaign against Genoese merchants at a trading base in Tana. They chased their quarry to Caffa, another fortified Genoese trading center on the Crimean coast, pitched camp outside the city walls, and got ready to bombard Caffa into submission, but the Tartar invaders didn’t figure plague into their strategy. It locked on with a vengeance, leveling their ranks. Those left standing moved to retreat, but first the Tartars gave the Genoese a taste of their woe. Using giant catapults, they lobbed the corpses of their fellows over Caffa’s walls.
May lifts her pencil and scrawls biological warfare across the top of the first blank page in the notebook, underlining it three times. There. She’ll compare the way the Black Death arrived in Europe to modern forms of biological warfare. Her world history teacher will love it.
She looks up when she hears the front door of the apartment open, her heart racing when she deduces from the tread that it isn’t Gwen. May left the terrace doors open, so he’d know she was out here, but Liam retreats without a word, first into the bathroom and then to his own tiny bedroom at the far end of the apartment, beside hers, and through his closed door she hears the musical lilt of his laptop firing up.
Following Gwen from arch to nook to nave in search of the day’s reliquary weirdness, May tries to crowd the artist, an enigma, out of her mind and focus instead on Cristofana, on the problem of time. But in May’s world, it’s Liam, who’s Princeton-bound and actually wants to study physics, who does the supersize cosmic thinking, and he’s been glued to his text screen all day, scowling over it, his thumbs roving the keyboard whenever he has service.
May seems to have alienated the only person she would even dream of telling.
She half remembers her dad talking about some theory proposed a few years ago at MIT or someplace, about time existing i
n slices like bread, all lined up to make a loaf. And sometimes the slices shift and overlap, and you aren’t here anymore — you’re there — and there are wormholes between. Or something. God, she should have paid attention.
Liam, across the room, looks up and away again.
Why didn’t she pay more attention — to everything, the good things — while she could? Before they were gone and there were these choices to make. Before everything changed. Why can’t things just stay the same?
May must have said something out loud, because Gwen gives her a look that promises, Hold that thought, bringing a finger to her lips. Hush.
They are in the quietest, dimmest, grimmest church they’ve been in all day — which is saying a lot — in search of the remains of Saint Juliana Falconieri, which turn out to be in an ornate glass box edged in filigreed gold under a side altar. The leaflet May thumbs through says that the body, Juliana’s, is incorrupt. But Gwen points out (to May only, since Liam keeps to the opposite side of whatever echo-filled room they find themselves in, squinting at his blue screen) that a mask has been applied to her face and hands, so who knows.
Another body, preserved under an altar in another church, was well preserved and never decayed or discolored, even though that saint died in 1459.
Next up is the habit worn by Saint Francis when he received the stigmata, preserved in the church of Ognissanti, which puts May over the top. “Remind me why we’re doing this?” she mutters.
May’s seventeen years old, barely out of the starting gate, and spending her summer surrounded by corpses and remains. Yet she’s rarely felt so alive as she did looking into the liquid darkness of that artist’s eyes.
They were doing this because May made the mistake of asking what relics were, after seeing the term one too many times in her guidebook, which lit the bulb over Gwen’s egghead and got her planning and phoning all over the city, vowing, “I’ll show you. I have a few stops to make anyway.”
Plague in the Mirror Page 4
