I had already heard Antonio’s thoughts on the importance of quality, so I understood that he was insisting I buy less rather than inferior quality. He wrote down an address on a scrap of paper with a stub of pencil he fished from his pocket (and actually spat on the nib, much to my delight), and sent me off. I bumped into Giuseppe en route, ambling toward the market. He examined the paper as if it contained the secrets of life, and eventually said: “Ah, Pegna, yes, a very good place. And Kamin”—he stopped me as I made off—“they have some unusual cleaning products you will probably want.”
I set off, laughing quietly at the thought that Giuseppe spied on me as keenly—and discreetly—as I did on him.
I dodged into the streets behind the Duomo, where I discovered Pegna, the sort of old-fashioned emporium that I’ve always found irresistible. It stocked everything from the cleaning products that Giuseppe had mentioned to shockingly expensive cans of very yellow butter. It seemed populated solely by fierce old Florentine ladies wearing furs that fell down to their ankles. Short and squat, their hair set, their coats wrapped tightly around them, they were more stoic than glamorous. As I browsed the shelves, their carts clipped my ankles, their profiles set as hard as their hair as they swooshed past without a glance.
The whole experience was intimidating—not to mention bruising for the legs—but I located the olive oil Antonio had recommended, winced at the price, swapped it for a smaller bottle and picked up a few other things—excitingly efficient cleaning unguents and a bag of dark chocolate–covered figs it would have been rude to ignore—and headed to the two registers at the front of the shop to pay. At one was parked an old lady as scary as her customers and, at the other, a young woman with a sad Renaissance face and large lugubrious eyes. I chose her register and lined up behind the fur-clad ladies. The radio was on and Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black” was playing. This song had been the soundtrack to my heartbreak after Nader left me and I knew all the words. The girl at the checkout was surreptitiously singing along under her breath. I was too, an automatic and unconscious response that has, over the years, irritated colleagues to no end. For one heartbeat, our eyes locked. Then she sang the next line a little more loudly and looked up at me, a challenge in her eyes. I sang the next line and looked back at her, raising an eyebrow. She took up the next line, her eyes never leaving mine, and so it went on, a kind of singing duel, until finally we duetted through the chorus in full voice as I swept up my shopping bags and left, waving to each other through the window, having not exchanged a word. A few weeks in Florence and I felt like I was living in a musical. Which was how I have always thought life should be. I caught sight of my reflection in a shop window as I walked away. I stopped—for a moment I didn’t quite recognize myself. I searched my reflection for changes: all that looking up had improved my posture and my sparkly earrings added style to my black coat and boots, my lip gloss was shining…but it wasn’t just that. I was wearing an expression that it took me a while to place.
I looked happy.
* * *
—
I obeyed Luigo and took my medicine four times a day, like a good girl, sometimes just drinking the olive oil straight from a tablespoon. Drinking the oil neat made me appreciate the value of Antonio’s mantra: invest in good quality. He had taught me how to identify good oil by shaking it and judging its viscosity, the amount of bubbles it made in the bottle. I peered at the color—was it golden or was it greenish?—learning that the greener Tuscan oil was fresher and contained even more chlorophyll and antioxidants than the golden oil. It was still only February, and the “new oil” was harvested in late October or early November, Antonio had told me, and still considered fresh for a year. The bitterness to its tang stimulated my taste buds and its, well, oiliness promoted good gut health, something my stressed-out intestines apparently appreciated. Soon, though, I was not taking my oil just as medicine, but enjoying it, learning to love the subtleties in its oleaginous flavor.
Within ten days my cheeks were fuller and there was a different feel to my skin. Plumper, brighter, it had lost the sallowness from years of working in a neon-lit office, a certain grainy quality that no amount of facials had been able to shift. Even better, the last traces of the acne had disappeared, as if retouched by an expert graphic designer. The spots themselves had magically left within weeks of leaving work, but some scars had remained and I had gotten used to not looking too closely in the mirror. Now, looking in the mirror was no longer upsetting; I could peer at myself under the brightest light and see none of the previous marks or lines. Just firm, glowing skin.
And that wasn’t all. My eyes now shone and my hair was glossy. The dullness that had settled over me was being sloughed away, from the inside out. My rambling explorations of the city had added color to my cheeks, brought some much-needed oxygen to my cells; sometimes as I returned from these epic walks and swallowed my extra-virgin cold-pressed green olive oil, I was sure I could feel every cell in my body singing with vitality, vibrating with energy.
That evening, I paid my first visit to San Miniato, the church that sat on the hill above the apartment, its marble façade etched on the horizon. The glinting gold mosaic at the top had been my guide home more than once, crowning the terraces that rose up behind San Niccolò. Although I walked up in the hills often, I had never gone in, prioritizing the art of Michelangelo, of Giotto, of Boccaccio instead of the little Romanesque church so close to home that held the relics of Florence’s patron saint.
I slowly climbed the central staircase, which led to the church. Halfway up, I lifted my face to take in the marble façade, as every bride who climbs these stairs on her wedding day must do. I fantasized that Nader was waiting for me inside that church and I swallowed down the lump that rose in my throat. Would this sadness never end? It had been more than a year now since he had married, surely I should be over him. But now that I was living a leisurely life, the protective barrier of the hectic routine of my former life gone, his memory had returned to haunt me, and I could not put the image of him from my mind.
I stood on the broad terrace in front of the church. San Miniato presented a superlative view over the city. I sat on the wall above the church’s cemetery, gazing at the sunset, which was putting on a spectacular show of color and light. I hardly saw this, I was so lost in thoughts of Nader.
We had met in the Napa Valley five years earlier, and it hadn’t taken long to make the connection of our shared past—before the revolution, we had attended the same school in Iran. We had stayed in touch, and over the years we had met every time we found ourselves in the same city. He had taken me out for a drink when he had passed through London for business, I had seen him in Washington, D.C., while there on a magazine trip, we had driven in his green Mustang convertible through Tehran when I had been visiting family, speeding along the highways as everyone pointed as if we were famous. Our meetings, always in some different part of the world, were a metaphor for the shifting spaces that we both occupied as uprooted Iranians.
The last time I had seen him had been at a conference in New York when the chemistry between us was so electric that our fellow delegates instinctively cleared a space around us when we all went out dancing on that Saturday night. And yet nothing had happened. After we had bid farewell, a mutual friend had told me that he had a long-term girlfriend in Tehran.
And then suddenly, months later, a brief Skype conversation full of flirtation, and a few days after that I was watching him lug his suitcases up the staircase to my apartment. He was bent double, one suitcase lying across his back, reminding me of the old porters in the bazaars of Iran. He dropped his bags in my apartment’s tiny entrance and we smiled politely at each other across the small space. “You see,” he said, “I came. You shouldn’t have offered…you are too polite for your own good, Kamin-jaan.”
I had laughed and disclaimed. But it was true in a way—I had not really thought he would take me up on my impulsive offer to visit London. He had put down his bags an
d taken me out for dinner. In the balmy Hampstead night, we sat out on a restaurant terrace to eat. He had told me then the reason for his unexpected visit, how he had had to leave Iran suddenly for his own safety, how he had landed in Dubai with no plans and no ideas for the future—his life wiped clean with one flight. That was when he had Skyped me and jumped at my invitation.
It was not the first time that our country had broken our hearts. Once before, as children, our lives had been wiped clean with a flight out of Iran. And now it had broken his heart again, forcing him to flee the life he had reconstructed so painstakingly as an adult, fulfilling his dream—all of our dreams—to call Iran his home again. We talked late into the night, wandering the leafy streets after dinner. Somewhere in that conversation he told me that he was no longer with his girlfriend, whom he had left behind in Iran. He was free, single at last. With that we had gone back to my apartment, and the sofa bed had remained unmade.
For three months we had shared everything. My little apartment, my cat, my hours off—a life. I had a reason to finish work on time: I didn’t care if I didn’t get through that day’s to-do list—at 5:30 I was racing out of the building and back to Hampstead, where Nader was waiting for me, the long light evenings our playground to be tumbled through together. Over those days, which turned into weeks, which turned into months, we fell in love. As if it was always meant to be that way. Nader was the first lover who understood both my identities, who could laugh at Western jokes and sing along to Persian songs with me. He had completed me, and I had fallen into him with total abandon. I was convinced he would be my husband.
The fiery shades of the sunset roused me. I went into the church. A beamed and gaily painted Romanesque ceiling stretched above a marvel of marble: worn marble on the floors, an intricately carved marble pulpit, slabs of marble delicately inlaid with more marble on the walls. I ran my hands along their cool grooved surfaces. I had found plenty of Islamic undertones to the loggias, perfectly spaced-out arches and inner courtyards in Florence. Every tour guide I overheard lectured about the neoclassicism of the Renaissance, the genius of Brunelleschi in copying the Romans, the Etruscans, the Greeks, but I could see reflections of uncredited Islamic influence everywhere, and here in San Miniato, the pattern in the marble, the inlay work, the motifs used all came from the perfect geometry of Islamic art. The sound of monks singing vespers pulled me down to the crypt, their thick robes falling around them as they chanted in Latin. The ceiling here was low, arched; there were fat, squat columns. I sat and the sacred music vibrated through me, here in this womblike room, protected, at home in that Florentine crypt bearing motifs of the Middle East.
When the monks had finished their chanting, lit their candles, and processed out, their rough robes scratching on the stone floor, I went to explore the church. Up some stairs I was confronted by a huge mosaic Christ built into a demi-dome. A small old monk came out of the shadows, pointing to a sort of slot machine that asked for a euro to light up the wall. I rifled through my bag but couldn’t find a euro. The old man paused, reaching into the folds of his robes, and pulled out a coin, pushing it into the slot, and pointed up to the flood of light that illuminated the mural. The gold mosaics shined brilliantly and, in the middle, Christ stared at me with Byzantine eyes, dark brown and soulful. The eyes of the men of the Middle East. The eyes of my people. The eyes of Nader.
I stared until the time ran out and the light clicked off. In the sudden dark, I stepped, confused, through a doorway, entering an empty square room lined by carved wooden choir seats, throbbing with stillness. I sat in the corner, leaning back, hiding in the hard wooden seat, looking at the four frescoes that covered the walls, the two tiny stained-glass windows at the top, feeling breathless, my heart racing. My eyes fell on an angel in the stained glass; it appeared to be radiating light. The stillness around me deepened until it was broken by a deep choking noise. I realized, with detachment, that the noise was a sob and it was coming from me. And then I sobbed violently, my body convulsed.
All the pain poured out: the pain of losing Nader, who was my animus, the male me, the one who understood because he had lived the same story. I felt again the agony of his desertion, of his choosing to go back and marry the old girlfriend, the humiliation of being made a footnote, our beautiful romance just a parenthesis to the real story, their story. To be turned into just an affair, an aberration. I howled for the offense to my soul, the blow dealt to my dignity. I felt all the betrayals of the last few years: the duplicity of the Big Boss, the disappointment of my career, the treachery of my body. I don’t know how long I was there, but eventually I looked up and saw the angel, and it looked as if it was smiling down at me, still mysteriously illuminated, and my cries died down, and, finally, exhausted, I sat there, spent, a deep peace washing through me.
In that moment, I forgave Nader. For playing with my heart and for being careless with it. I forgave it all, and I forgave myself too for being so angry, so hurt. Suddenly it felt okay to have had that love; it had been so sweet, so poignant. For those brief months, I had felt understood and contextualized by someone just like me. Someone I didn’t need to explain myself to, to spell out the names of my relations, to explain the courtesies of Iranian culture. Someone who understood it all because he was made of it just as I was.
Eventually I left the sacristy and the church. It was now dark outside, and walking down the winding road back to San Niccolò, I felt so light that I started to run and skip all the way home.
The next day, I woke up happy—pointlessly, mindlessly happy. After breakfast (supplemented with a shot of oil), I dressed in the brightest colors I could find and donned the sparkliest earrings I had. At Rifrullo I threw a cheery “Ciao” at Pavarotti, taking a seat at my usual table. My cappuccino appeared, delivered with a snatch of “Nessun Dorma.” As I smiled at Pavarotti, the vegetable delivery man walked by as usual, pushing his trolley past my table. As he did every morning, he looked at me and nodded, and as usual I looked back at him and said “Ciao.” I gave him a smile—that was usual too—but what was not usual was that he looked at me for so long that he crashed his trolley noisily into the next table.
Vegetables tumbled everywhere, potatoes thudding to the floor, onions shedding skins as they spun under tables. He scrabbled around, picking up his wares; Pavarotti came out from behind the bar to help, raising an eyebrow fractionally my way. I wasn’t sure what had just happened, but I knew that there was something different about today. Something had changed; I had changed.
About ten minutes later, as he wheeled his empty trolley back through the bar from the kitchen, the vegetable delivery man tossed a folded-up napkin onto my table. And then he was gone.
I picked up the red napkin and unfolded it. Written in a bubbly hand it said:
“Ti piacerebbe di vederci una sera? Ti lascio il mio numero 335 777 2364.”
I didn’t understand the words, but I got the message. I folded it up and slipped it into my pocket to show Luigo later.
That wasn’t the only weird thing that happened that day. On my way to the market, crossing the bridge, I smiled at a man on a moped and he smiled back so enthusiastically that he wobbled dangerously and narrowly missed a bus.
Later, sitting as usual in Cibreo, I saw a new face arriving for work—the manager, Beppe, back from his vacation, tall and good-looking, with jet-black hair and a suit so sharp I could have cut myself on its lapels. As he passed me, he did a double take. And I smiled at him broadly, drinking in his tall, dark, and handsome form. He smiled too, looking at me so intently that he tripped, nearly falling as he entered the bar.
I couldn’t ignore this any longer. Once may have been an accident, twice a coincidence, but three men falling over after seeing me smile—surely this was a hallucination? I looked around dumbly for a candid camera, waiting for someone to jump out of the bushes and tell me that it had all been an elaborate joke, or to discover that my morning coffee had been laced with LSD by the Rifrullo Pavarotti. I had been in
visible to men for the best part of the past decade—with the exception of Nader—and after the last disastrous relationship many years before him—with a well-soaked writer who I had left after a year of him repeatedly cheating. Until then, I had been practically celibate, years could pass—had, indeed, passed—without my touching another human being with desire. Typical of publishing, my workplace largely comprised women. With the exception of the genial double act of the two elderly ex-army boys on reception, and the guy who ran the staff café—despite an astonishing lack of aptitude, a man capable of burning even coffee—most of the other men that worked on magazines were gay.
I had had high hopes for Italy. My first experience of the country had been a working trip to Sicily with Kicca. There the men were so intensely predatory that if you caught an eye, he would follow you all night. At times it got wearing and a little worrying. But after a month of this, when I got back to London, I felt bereft. When I walked past a group of workmen and not even one of them raised his head, I confided in Kicca that I missed the attention of Sicilian men. Kicca had laughed. “Imagine what it was like to move to London aged twenty-five, having grown up like that. No one looked at me. I felt ugly.” She told me that in the first year after arriving in London she had taken to eating Mars bars for consolation, put on twenty-five pounds in weight, and become depressed.
I went back home and peered at myself in the mirror, looking for an answer. Were my pupils dilated? Was I, in fact, tripping? But my eyes looked normal, if bright. I could see nothing that might signal such a dramatic reaction.
Later, Luigo listened to me carefully from behind the bar. I explained how this sort of thing never happened to me. “For years I have hardly dated at all. Apart from Nader”—who I’d already told him about—“no boyfriends or regular dates. There was a famous actor once who I thought was interested…”
Bella Figura Page 6
