by Naomi Ragen
She remembered that summer. She’d been thirteen years old. And all summer long, the disc jockeys had been wearing out records of Arlo Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and the incomparable Joan Baez, whose lovely voice filled you with a longing so painful that your whole body ached with joy. She’d spent that entire August with a Joan Baez song book and a guitar, sitting on her bed singing about lost maidens and drowned sailors and unfaithful true loves, feeling as lonely and lost as she’d ever felt in her life.
Lovely singing voice!
She’d never even been able to carry a tune! And it had made Madre so happy! What could that mean? Living in the same house at the same time with someone, and yet not even having your memories vaguely intersect? Had they been part of each other’s lives at all? And were they now, and would they ever be?
She downed the coffee in one long, lukewarm sip of displeasure, wondering if Kenny’s lawyer had responded to her lawyer’s latest proposal. Wondering if she could take an hour or two off to go down to Bendel’s to walk through the perfume counters, to shake off the smell of hospital antiseptic. Wondering how much longer this was going to take….
She reached into her handbag for a tissue, and pulled out the note she’d written. Call, do, tell. Memunehs and guardian angels! Foolish, all of it. But Madre wouldn’t forget. She’d ask about it later, fainting spell or no. I’d better get to it immediately.
Trust the future, she thought, wondering what in heaven’s name that could possibly mean.
33
The fog rose from the water like steam, hiding the houses in a fairy-tale mist that made you feel you were walking open-eyed through a dream.
“It can’t be real!” Francesca murmured.
“Come!” Marius took her arm, guiding her to the vaporetto.
“A boat?”
“There aren’t any streets. Think of it as the local bus.”
She felt disoriented looking around at the flooded spaces, reminiscent only of places declared “disaster areas” on American television news. “The suitcases?”
“I’ve arranged for a porter to bring them around to the hotel. Relax.”
She did. It was really nice having him take care of the luggage, she thought, standing beside him on the prow. It was true that everything he did for her she could have accomplished pretty easily by herself, but how lovely not to have to! Not to have to struggle and be self-sufficient all the time. To simply lean.
She leaned. She could feel his muscles brace, accepting her weight. She felt protected and cushioned as her ear rested against his arm and her soft curls brushed his shoulder. Since the incident on the road to Cáceres, he had been careful not to touch her, even casually. She looked up at him. He was smiling down at her with a look of perfect contentment. She smiled back. Suddenly, strongly, she felt a wave of happiness.
The boat moved slowly through the water. Francesca gazed, enchanted, at the magnificent old palaces and charming bridges that appeared and vanished, ghostlike, in and out of the fog. Venice and Cáceres, she thought. Places that wear their history neither as shroud nor costume, but simply as a fine old gown lovingly preserved. Yet, as much as she wanted to be absolutely charmed, she found she couldn’t ignore the patches and tears: the polluted smell of the gray-green water, the peeling shutters and crumbling stonework, the way the entire dreamscape seemed to be sinking like a rotting tug into oblivion.
Why do you always have to do this? she complained to herself bitterly. Why do you have to examine everything under a microscope until the little, swarming microbes appear, ruining everything? Why do you have to constantly talk yourself out of feeling joy?
The image came to her of a child in a sporting-goods store being outfitted for Rollerblading by his anxious mother: the crash helmet, the chest protector, knee guards, elbow guards.
When had she acquired all this protective gear?
After Peter? Or was it even before? Daddy walking out?
Or was it Darren Stockwell?
She shivered.
“Are you cold?”
She shook her head. Still, he took off his light summer jacket and draped it around her shoulders.
Put it out of your mind!
But it wouldn’t go. It sat there, as if once again the door were locked and the big football jock, whose father had worked with Kenneth Barren, were standing in front of it.
It had been her first big date for her first Homecoming weekend. They’d both had too many beers and she’d invited him up to her dorm for a minute. He’d been so nice. A senior, pre-med, beautifully built. Rich. Courteous. Up until the moment he’d locked the door of her dorm room and put his hands around her throat.
Getting “carried away” is what he called it before leaving her. And she hadn’t corrected him, hadn’t called it by its rightful name, the name the police would have used, had she not been too hurt, too confused, and too ashamed to call them.
The only person she’d ever told was Suzanne, years later, and more as a warning than a plea for comfort and protection. She’d found ways of protecting herself.
The first step was not to connect: to turn down the pages of the newspaper, to turn off the radio and TV news; to live in a building with security guards, where you didn’t know anyone, and no one knew you. To concentrate all your efforts not on saving the world, but on saving yourself.
So far, she’d succeeded, she thought, straightening up.
The boat made regular stops, docking to take on and leave off passengers, just like a normal, wheeled vehicle of public transportation. They got off at Piazza San Marco. It was only a short walk to their hotel.
Even from the outside, Francesca knew this couldn’t be the one on her itinerary.
“The Gritti Palace? There’s got to be a mistake.”
He patted her arm and slipped it through his. “Nothing less will do for the descendant of Doña Gracia Mendes.”
“I don’t have a budget for this, Marius!”
“Tut, tut. My treat. I insist.”
It seemed more like the private home of fabulously wealthy aristocrats than a place that accepted Visa and MasterCard.
“A perfectly restored fifteenth-century Gothic palace,” Marius murmured, taking her into the lobby.
It was lavish. Yet, the sumptuous overstuffed period furniture seemed intimate and cosseting. Porcelain vases held huge, fresh flower arrangements reflected in ornately gilt-framed mirrors. Through tall, heavy, wooden doors, she glimpsed a charming crowd of well-dressed strangers basking in the magical light of dazzling crystal chandeliers. That and the staff, so diffident and spoiling, really did make her feel like traveling royalty.
“Shall we have lunch after we freshen up? The Club Del Doge is one of the finest restaurants in the world.”
She looked at him curiously. He never spoke about money. He didn’t dress or act like a wealthy man. But if he was offering to pick up the tab for all of this…? She didn’t know what to think.
Her bags were already in her room. She pulled back the heavy drapes and looked down into the sea. The soft sound of the anchored gondolas tapping their pointed prows against each other drifted up to her. It was a sound that would forever bring back to her this particular place, this particular time, she thought.
They sat facing each other in the exquisite dining room, sipping tall, cool drinks in lovely colors, watching the boats drift by on the Grand Canal. She ran her fingers through her curly hair, realizing that it had grown since she’d left home. It was past her neck, almost touching her shoulders in a thick mass of uncontrolled curls.
He reached across the table, taking the lock from between her fingers, rubbing it tenderly.
“I’m not good at this. I take these things seriously,” she said, shaking her head.
“I mean it and have meant it seriously from the very beginning. From the first moment I looked at you. Francesca, you must know how I feel.” He leaned back, looking away from her out to where the sun had begun its slow, golden fall into the sea. Then he l
eaned across the table, taking her palm tenderly in his. “I think I’m in love.”
The words went through her like a crack of thunder from a clear sky. Could this really be happening, she wondered, their palms electric and warming against each other. Or was it simply a strange dream? “But why me? We’re such opposites!”
He shook his head and began to protest. She covered his mouth with her hand. “Don’t deny it! Of course it’s true! I was meant to have the kind of life where the most exciting thing that happens is that my treasury bonds go down two percentage points. I’m a homebody. If I ever did travel along with you, all I’d ever do is hold the ladder and scream: ‘Be careful! Be careful!’ Trust me, you don’t want me.”
He looked at her, enclosing her hands in both of his. “Oh yes,” he said. “I do.”
“But why?”
He grinned. “Because I think you’ll do a very good job holding the ladder.”
“Seriously!”
He stretched out his legs and put both hands into his pockets, his gaze shifting from her face to the fading light blushing over the horizon. “A few years ago, the day I decided to break up with my first love…”
Francesca swallowed. “You had a first love?”
“Oh, yes, indeed. She was a doctoral candidate, studying archaeology at Oxford. She was dark, like you. But she was very adventurous. She liked to jet off weekends and disappear, joining digs in Iraq or Turkey. Summers were always spent in the hottest climates, in the worst possible conditions. She took her work very seriously.
“With her schedule and mine, we could never make plans—and there was this constant competition. She constantly asked me to prove things to her, and I don’t think I ever did. She wanted the kind of freedom I knew I could never give her, not if I wanted a family.”
“Do you? Want one?” A surge of strange warmth passed through her stomach.
“Of course. Anyway, one weekend we went away together to a lovely old hotel in the Lake District. I’d gone down to breakfast and she’d decided to sleep late. I was sitting there with my coffee and hot rolls and marmalade, feeling forlorn, when I looked across the room. There was this couple, a man and his wife. The man had gray hair and looked about fifty, and the wife was pretty and small, about the same age. And as I was watching them, I saw her reach across to him and smooth down his hair. You could sense they belonged together. And in that instant I just knew that Christina and I didn’t.”
“So,” she said, exhaling deeply, as if having surfaced from beneath the sea, “what next?”
“It’s up to you, Francesca. It’s all up to you.”
She didn’t protest.
She had wanted this to happen, she realized. But now that it had, she immediately felt herself backing away, filled with doubts. Could she really envision a life together with this man? The “what do you want for breakfast, have a nice day, ’bye honey, don’t forget to pick up the dress at the cleaners” kind of life?
Nothing about their relationship had been ordinary. It had all been a kind of magic: exotic places, hotels, foreign languages. Was there really a place with an address on the firm landscape of the reality she knew that would take them both in? And when it did, how long before either one of them began to feel like moving?
She waited for him to press her for some kind of answer or declaration, and wondered—almost frightened—what she would say.
He didn’t.
Instead, they ate in almost palpable silence. When they had finished, he took her by the hand and led her down the winding old stone steps to where the gondoliers had gathered to wait patiently for tourists.
They climbed in. “Lentamente,” Francesca heard Marius whisper to the gondolier.
They sat side by side in the softly rocking boat as the gondolier swept the immense oar slowly through the water, sending them into the lazy current of the Grand Canal. The fog had lifted, and in its place was the softly glowing reflection of the pink and lavender sky.
The light, Francesca thought, was like a stage set in a Christmas matinee of The Nutcracker; a wondrous pink glow that turned even the most ordinary prop into a thing of enchantment. Even I, she thought, must look enchanting.
She turned around, leaning back into his arms, and felt the brush of his lips against her forehead, so sweet it could have been almost fatherly if her own body had not responded with such unfilial passion.
“Marius…” Francesca began, but the gondolier began to sing a lively Italian song with much more enthusiasm than skill, winking and grinning at them in pure delight.
“Amore, amore, amore,” he sang.
“Amore, amore, amore,” Marius repeated in a whisper she could almost feel entering her ear and mind and heart.
Slowly, like some fragile plant seeking out the sun, she turned her body toward his. Trembling with fear as she felt the cast-iron shields encasing her melt, she placed one hand on his shoulder and the other into his thick, dark hair. Looking deep into his startled and delighted eyes, she kissed him.
His whole body moved up to meet hers, his arms catching and holding her close to him, creating a magic circle of connectedness that she had never before experienced, nor even imagined possible. All her senses suddenly woke up and laughed with a vigorous new joy of life. His body, his smell, the texture of his warm skin against hers, it was all so precious, so new, and yet so very familiar. It was as if she had always known him, and he had always been a part of her.
Because an old woman had changed her mind at the last minute, Suzanne had gotten a seat on standby on the first available flight out of Malaga. It happened to be going to Rome. It was as good as any other place, she’d told herself.
Listless and with no real plan in mind, she spent a few days wandering around the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, and the Vatican Museums, detaching herself from the Italian guide who spoke three languages, all incomprehensibly. There was a sinister echo in the silent stone seats of the great amphitheater, and the irradicable sense of cruelty, blood, and pain, both human and animal. If she closed her eyes, she could almost hear the echo of long silent screams.
The Forum, with its broken stone reminders of the fleeting nature of power, was even more depressing. Rulers of the world! Reigning now over a landscape of crumbling old marble, their heirs purveyors of fashionable leather goods and well-designed furniture.
Feeding Christians to the lions, burning Jews at the stake. There was no place in Europe you could wander joyously once your ears insisted on hearing the echoes, and your eyes persisted in seeing ghosts. Depressed, she abandoned the idea that had flitted briefly across her mind of retracing her epiphanous college trek with Renaldo. It all seemed so different now, so changed. On the spur of the moment, she decided to take a train to Florence, to the one exhibit she and Renaldo had missed that summer, either because it had been closed for renovations or on tour—she couldn’t recall which. Only the image of Renaldo’s disappointed face as he stared at the locked gates was clear in her mind. “We’ll come back here many times,” he’d promised. A promise he hadn’t kept.
Galleria dell’Accademia. She walked through the gates into the vast room.
And there it was: Michelangelo’s statue of David.
She staggered to a spot where she could sit down, shocked by the otherworldly, almost crushing immensity of the encounter. Whatever reproduction or photograph of it she’d seen had done nothing to prepare her for it; quite the opposite. They had been outright lies that made the revelation of truth that much more astonishing.
You could believe in G-d, she suddenly realized. For here, truly, she thought, was proof positive that man was created in His image. How else could you explain the touch of Divine in Michelangelo’s hands that had allowed him to release such incredible warm beauty from the cold stuff of marble?
She tried to analyze its power. It was not classically beautiful. The proportions were off, the powerful arms and shoulders far too large for the boyish, short legs. The neck and the face, the epitome of male beauty,
were filled with courage, fear, and doubt.
Michelangelo had been twenty-six when the Cathedral Works Committee tossed him a ruined piece of marble abandoned by another artist, she’d read. As she looked into David’s face, she could see clearly reflected the young sculptor’s own courage and doubt as he flung his masterpiece in the face of the Goliath of established powers like some slingshot stone.
That night, she dreamed of David, his hard, cold body suddenly thawed into flesh, the blank, stone eyes warming as they looked at her, all fear and hope gone, replaced by longing. And suddenly she felt herself enveloped by the strange creature, part stone, part man, whose icy-cool cheek she touched with warm hands.
She awoke in the dark and cried until daybreak.
In the morning she called Paris. Renaldo wasn’t there, they told her. Professor Barrie had unexpectedly received an award and flown to America, and Renaldo had taken over his graduate seminar in Venice.
Venice.
Can I stand it? she wondered.
34
They walked arm in arm back into the lobby, lost in each other’s eyes. Francesca looked at the elevator that would take them upstairs, wondering how and where they would spend the rest of the night. It seemed to her that now a decision had to be made. She felt on the verge of making it.
“Signor.” A clerk respectfully cleared his throat.
Marius looked up, dazed, his eyes moving from Francesca’s face and back into the everyday world.
“There are some messages for you,” he said, handing Marius some white envelopes.
Francesca wondered at the sudden rush of color that bathed his face as he read them.
“I knew my hunch would pay off!” he kissed her hand hurriedly. “I’ve got to go.”
“What?!” she caught his arm and shook her head in disbelief. “You’re leaving me? Now? After everything that we’ve…”
“You don’t understand, my love! They’ve found it! Part of the manuscript! In the Bodleian Library, mistakenly attached to a fifteenth-century manuscript of de Camoes The Lusiads! Imagine! It’s taken months for my graduate student to go through this stuff, but I didn’t give up!”
