I got up and walked down the aisle to the most private place in the Confined Space and, as I did so, I observed the atmosphere in the different rows of seats. All the nations were sitting quietly now, eyes closed and either asleep or half-asleep. The only exception was a woman from Madrid, who had a strange face, as if carved out of stone. “Se piangi, se ridi, io sono con te,” sang Bobby Solo again, but she cared little for the singer’s feelings.
“What a rubbishy song!” she said when our eyes met. Her voice was made of stone too, a kind of metal-plated stone. She sounded as if she came from Lavapiés or some other old quarter of Madrid. I smiled faintly and moved on.
I found it hard to go to sleep, and started looking out of the window. The lights of Genoa were not far away. I remembered a poem written by a man born in that city, Eugenio Montale, unforgettable lines that I first came across when I read them in Francisco Ferrer Lerín’s Spanish translation: “I would have liked to feel rough, elemental as the pebbles you tumble about, pocked by salt, a timeless shard, witness to a cold, persistent will.” As I recalled the poem, I could feel the sea close to me and imagine the wet pebbles the waves were depositing on the sand – one, two, three – and then I fell asleep.
*
The longest section of the journey was over, and the forty-two members of the Confined Space were standing in the Piazza del Duomo in Pisa, feeling happy and contented. The sun had taken the place of the melancholy stars; the blue sky had taken the place of the night. Before us, on the young grass, stood three white marble buildings. The one nearest us was il campanile, the most famous tower in the world.
“Quina meravella, Déu meu!” Eugeni exclaimed.
“Absolutely marvellous!” agreed the madrileño from Tres Cantos.
There was nothing more to be said, and the rest of us stood in silence.
Then came that stony, metal-plated voice:
“What a disappointment!”
These words pierced the silence like a dagger,
“What a disappointment!” the voice said again. I recognised the accent. It was definitely from Lavapiés.
Most of the members of the Confined Space turned round.
“It looks good in photographs, but it’s no great shakes in the flesh, so to speak,” the woman said. We travellers from the three nations looked at each other, dumbstruck.
“Let’s go!” said someone briskly. It was our guide, the newly-wed, the potential psychologist. “The tower has 294 steps. Let’s climb up to the point where Galileo used to stand.”
Eugeni shook his head.
“I’m not sure I can climb that many steps. I’m not as young as I was …”
“If Galileo Galilei could do it, why shouldn’t you, Eugeni?” said our guide encouragingly.
A member of the Basque Minority suddenly broke away from the group and trotted over to the foot of the tower.
“How do we get there? Through here?” she asked. Needless to say, it was my mother.
“Yes!” responded another member of the minority, running after her. Needless to say, that was me.
Most of the members of the Confined Space joined us, and, after a few moments, we were all at the spot chosen by Galileo for his experiments.
“He would stand here and throw different objects out of the window: objects made of steel, wood or gold,” explained the guide. “He assumed that the heavier objects would hit the ground first, but that wasn’t the case. They all landed at the same time.”
We looked down at the ground below, but saw no objects, whether of steel or wood or gold. We did, however, see the Stone Woman. She was sitting on a bench made of the same material as her.
The following day, we stopped in Lucca to take a look around and have some lunch. It seemed a lovely, cheerful city, but, as our guide pointed out, it lacked any exceptional buildings or works of art, and so it would be best if we explored it on our own, with no fixed itinerary. Nevertheless, the group stayed together initially because Eugeni asked the Stone Woman a question, and no member of the Confined Space wanted to miss her answer.
“What have you got against the tower of Pisa, may I ask?”
That was his question.
“Look, Señor Eugeni,” began the Stone Woman in her heavy Lavapiés accent. “I have nothing against the tower itself. But let me ask you a question: Have you ever seen a film?”
Setting aside for a moment our divergent identities, the madrileño couple from Tres Cantos stood up for the Catalan representative.
“Oh, come on! Do you really think there are no cinemas in Barcelona?”
The Stone Woman replied in a cold and even more metallic voice:
“There are lots of cinemas in Barcelona. I know that. If you’re interested, there are nearly two hundred and twenty cinemas in the whole province, and nearly seventy in the capital. But that isn’t what I meant. What I was asking Señor Eugeni was if he had ever seen a film being made.”
The bells of Lucca began ringing very loudly, interrupting the conversation. When silence was restored, the Stone Woman continued her argument:
“Because I have. I’ve worked in the film industry all my life and have been on many film shoots. And do you know what? It’s all a great big lie. You see a shipwreck on the screen, but that shipwreck has been created by the director with a toy boat in a washing-up bowl. And they have a particular way of photographing the tower of Pisa, so that when you …”
I was intending to stay and hear her out, but the other member of the Basque Minority, needless to say my mother, was heading briskly off to some indeterminate part of the city, and I felt obliged to follow her.
We reached Florence in the late afternoon, and our guide advised us to make the most of what was left of the day to visit the city on our own. We, the Basque Minority, chose to go for a stroll along the banks of the Arno, knowing that the following day we would visit everything else – the squares, the churches, the museums – along with the other nationalities from the Confined Space.
We walked a couple of miles along one bank and the same distance back along the other. There was a breeze blowing, and I thought I could hear or feel, like a still gentler breeze, Dante’s famous line: “Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare la donna mia…”
We returned to the hotel at around midnight. While we were waiting for the lift, we noticed two shadows in the foyer. It was the newly-weds, our guide and his wife. They were sitting in a corner, facing each other and looking very down in the mouth. Suddenly, the man made an abrupt gesture, and the gesture the woman made in response was equally abrupt.
“I think they’ve had an argument,” I said.
“Couples nowadays have no patience with each other. That’s why there are so many divorces,” my mother said.
On the sports channel, they were showing a replay of the game between Fiorentina and Sampdoria. It was a hard-fought match. Passarella, who played on the left wing for Fiorentina, was limping so badly that he asked to be replaced and withdrew to the sidelines. The substitute who came on in his place was a member of the Basque Minority – my mother, needless to say. She came from behind with the ball, but just as she was about to enter the opposition box, a Sampdoria defender, the Stone Woman, needless to say, planted herself in front of her, saying in her strong Lavapiés accent: “Stop right there!” I woke up sweating. The television was on. Sampdoria were winning 2–0.
The following morning, our guide took us to the cathedral and had us stand outside the Baptistry of St John, before the Gates of Paradise.
“This is the work of the great Lorenzo Ghiberti. There isn’t a more beautiful door anywhere in the world. Observe the details on each panel.”
Some members of the Confined Space went to have a closer look, but the group was fragmented. Some were looking over at the cathedral; others, especially my mother, were already walking towards the campanile.
“What do you think, Eugeni?” our guide asked.
“Well, I left my glasses in our hotel room, but it certainly looks
like a lovely door,” Eugeni said.
Those of us still standing near the baptistry looked inquisitively at the Stone Woman. She held our gaze for five long seconds. Then she sighed. Then she summarised her thoughts:
“They look rather like picture cards. Nothing very special at all.”
I looked up at the sky and saw a head wearing a green scarf peering down from the top of the campanile. It was, needless to say, my mother.
Galleria degli Uffizi, Ponte Vecchio, Piazza della Signoria, Santa Croce, Le Cappelle Medicee … We visited all those places and more in our five- or six-hour tour; but the forty-two members of the Confined Space felt oppressed, as if beneath the weight of a heavy stone slab, and the most weighed down of all were Eugeni and the man from Tres Cantos.
“What will that miserable woman say now?” the man from Tres Cantos kept muttering, while Eugeni’s constant refrain was: “I can’t see a thing without my glasses.”
When we were in the Uffizi Gallery, standing before Leonardo’s “Annunciation”, our guide finally reacted. He said to Eugeni rather tetchily:
“Look, give me your room card, and I’ll go and fetch your wretched glasses!” Then, turning to the rest of the group: “Let’s meet in twenty minutes’ time at the exit. We still have two marvellous things to see: Fra Angelico’s frescos and Michelangelo’s magnificent ‘David’.”
“Molt be,” Eugeni said, cheered by the prospect of recovering his glasses. Meanwhile, our guide disappeared down the steps of the Uffizi.
“I wonder where his wife is. I haven’t seen her at all today,” my mother said.
Contrary to expectations, the day went downhill after this. In the Convent of San Marco, standing before another “Annunciation”, this time by Fra Angelico, the Stone Woman spoke again. She waited until most of the members of the Confined Space had stopped speaking and our guide was ready to give us a brief talk about the painting, then she gave her succinct opinion:
“A bit old hat, don’t you think?”
Her scornful remark dropped like a rock into the waters of a pool.
“Why didn’t that woman stay in Lavapiés?” the man from Tres Cantos said.
“I think the angel’s wings are really lovely,” Eugeni said, now with his glasses on.
“Yes, they’re beautiful. Like the wings of a butterfly,” my mother said.
However, it wasn’t easy to forget those stony, metal-plated words, and we slouched irritably off to the Galleria dell’Accademia to see Michelangelo’s “David”.
The white marble sculpture was in a small room. It was very hot, and when the forty-two members of the Confined Space entered, the temperature rose a couple more degrees. The physically oppressive atmosphere only increased the irritation most of us were feeling, especially the man from Tres Cantos, whose cheeks were already scarlet, his gaze sombre, his chin jutting forwards. A confrontation seemed imminent. Then suddenly, a woman looking at the sculpture fainted and fell to the floor. There was something of a commotion and – by one of those mysteries of the human mind – all the members of the Confined Space forgot their problems and relaxed.
Three burly men helped the woman to her feet. She was small and blonde and was wearing a Stars-and-Stripes badge on the lapel of her jacket. Was it Hillary Clinton and her bodyguards? I didn’t have the chance to confirm this, because another matter demanded my attention. Public Enemy Number One, namely, the Stone Woman, took advantage of the silence filling the room to state her opinion:
“It’s so much smaller than in the photographs!”
Our guide turned pale, but did not faint.
“He doesn’t look at all well,” my mother said. “Besides, his wife hasn’t been seen all day. That would be the last straw if they were to split up having only just got married!”
And she laughed gaily, in the way conservative people of a certain age do laugh at the foolishness of the young.
When we returned to the hotel, we found his wife sitting in an armchair in the foyer, reading a magazine. When her husband, our guide, arrived, they exchanged an affectionate kiss.
“That’s a relief!” my mother said.
At this point in the journey, after Pisa, Lucca and Florence, my mother was gripped by an anxiety that went way beyond the problems of modern marriage.
“We’ve seen some really beautiful things, haven’t we?” she said as we were making our way back to our room.
“And there’ll be more to see in Rome,” I said.
“As far as I know, we don’t have such fine sculptures and paintings in the Basque Country. And to tell you the truth that makes me a little sad.”
“This place is unique in the world. Even Americans have to come here to see Michelangelo’s sculptures,” I said, going off at a slight tangent.
As we went round a corner, we came face to face with our guide and his wife. They had come up by the stairs. They were positively glowing and had their arms about each other’s waists.
“In Rome, we’ll see the ‘Pietà’, Michelangelo’s masterpiece,” remarked our guide, the husband, the keen-eared one.
“I don’t think they’re going to split up,” I said to my mother. “Not at least on this trip.”
We were standing before the “Pietà”. The body of Jesus lying across his Mother’s lap, his right arm hanging limply down, his head fallen back; his Mother, head bowed and reaching out with her left hand. The shapes that Michelangelo had carved out of a block of white marble from the Alps.
It was still very early, and the members of the Confined Space were almost the only visitors to the basilica of St Peter’s. The silence was broken only sporadically by a whisper or the sound of heels click-clacking over the marble floor. Even the organ was quiet. We were all looking at the sculpture. Intently, or, rather, expectantly.
And yet there was no scornful comment, no rocks, no daggers, no sharp remarks, only the murmur of someone struggling to get her words out:
“But this … this …”
It was the Stone Woman. She couldn’t find the words to express her feelings. Something was holding them back. We gave her time to say what she had to say.
“This,” she cried at last, “is utter perfection!”
Suddenly, the organ music flooded the basilica. It wasn’t a hallelujah, but a graceful melody, worthy of the birds fluttering about in the vaulted ceiling.
“L’art ha triomfat!” Eugeni exclaimed.
“Yes, victory!” said the madrileño from Tres Cantos.
“All’s well that ends well,” added my mother.
Most of the members of the Confined Space thought that the visit to the basilica and her emotional response to the “Pietà” would bring the story of the Stone Woman to a close, but as the newspapers say, it wasn’t over yet. A still bigger surprise awaited us. It happened when we left Rome and went to Assisi, birthplace of St Francis.
The basilica of St Francis of Assisi is on the top of a hill from which you can look down over the countryside for miles around. That summer, the fields were yellow; the olive trees, planted in neat rows, were green and leafy; the distant forests black. It was a sunny day.
We visited the church and the tomb, we studied the frescos by Giotto and Cimabue, and we went out into the atrium. It was nearly dusk, and the sun was already low on the horizon. Our guide – the newly happy husband – jumped up onto a parapet and called us to order. A young monk, a very skinny fellow, did the same and stood by his side.
“I’ve asked Giovanni for a favour,” our guide said. “With his help, we are all going to recite the “Canticle of Brother Sun”, which St Francis composed in this very place. Giovanni will give us the Italian, and I will read the words in Spanish. I have the translation here.”
Travellers from other Confined Spaces joined our group. Most were Italians. In the end, there were eighty of us standing before Giovanni and our guide.
“Altissimu, onnipotente, bone Signore …” began Giovanni, pressing his two hands to his chest. Yet again, the first lines
of the song reached the ears of believers and non-believers alike.
As if it were a litany, the Italians who had joined our group repeated each line. Then our guide read us the translation:
Laudato sie, mi’Signore cum tucte le Tue creature, spetialmente messor lo frate Sole […] Laudato si, mi Signore, per sora Luna e le stelle…
“Be praised, my Lord, through all Your creatures, especially through my lord Brother Sun […] Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars …”
Giovanni intoned the last lines of the hymn: Laudato si, mi’ Signore, per sora nostra morte corporale, da la quale nullu homo vivente pò skappare …
The sun was sinking below the horizon. No cars could be seen on the motorway. A donkey walked slowly along a path accompanied by a boy.
I heard someone sobbing beside me. The Stone Woman’s eyes were full of tears.
“Don’t cry, Concha,” someone said, although I don’t know who.
The crying didn’t stop. Not knowing what to do, the group stood motionless until, finally, our guide thanked the monk and, jumping down, headed off down the hill with his wife.
“Right, let’s go and have supper!” he said.
“She lost her husband six months ago,” he told me as he passed. Then he went over to her, to Concha, and told her what was on the supper menu that evening.
No, that isn’t what happened at all. The visit we made to Assisi didn’t end like that. Our guide did organise a reading of “The Canticle of the Sun” and brought a monk called Giovanni to join him, but the Stone Woman wasn’t there, and no-one told me that she had been widowed recently or anything of the kind. That was a fantasy created in the head of the second member of the Basque Minority, needless to say, me.
The Stone Woman did not change. She remained exactly the same, like a block of stone. Her reaction to the Pietà was an exception. On the day of our visit to Assisi – I found out later – she decided to stay in the hotel, because she thought the town looked “pretty crappy”.
Nevada Days Page 23
