To escape, they duck into a wine shop. The friendly merchant offers a tasting, cradling in his arms a Jack Russell terrier, which gives Cia a slobbery kiss. Stroking its ears, she reminds Keith that it’s almost six. They have yet to find the Uffizi, the famous Uffizi with the Botticellis she’s dying to see. Travel-packing two expensive bottles—souvenirs, si, of our beautiful Firenze!—the merchant ushers them outside, closing early, he explains, because, after all, tomorrow is the first of May. Unofficially the first day of summer, a day for people to party-hearty, as you Canadians say. Keith nods. Europe’s Labour Day.
“Si, si. To celebrate everybody, all the museums, you know, are free.”
Though not particularly heavy, his purchase is unwieldy enough to make managing the throngs and holding Cia’s hand impossible. Moving with the crowd they’re swept along, luckily, to the huge central square—the Piazza della Signoria—where the famous gallery lies past the crenellated, bell-towered palazzo of the same name, and its copy of David. Just opposite, under an arched portico, flute players and guitarists dressed as jesters perform; their instruments’ cases lean against statues—so many statues, he remarks, that after a while you stop seeing them.
They’ve read about the line-ups to the Galleria degli Uffizi. A coup! The queue is astonishingly short, fewer than twenty people. Cia squeezes his arm, delighted at this stroke of luck, the issue of lost bookings forgotten. But at the entrance a fresh problem arises. The sign, in French, Inglese, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, and Italian, prohibits umbrellas, sharp objects, food, drink—bottles of any kind—being brought in. An armed guard points to an overflowing bin.
Shit. Shit. On the fly—just arrived, a sudden crush presses impatiently at their backs—it only makes sense, Cia says: they’ll take turns, visit in shifts. Since the wine is his doing, he’s happy to wait and go second. He proposes a meeting place in exactly an hour. An hour to tour one of the world’s greatest collections? The look on Cia’s face is—or would be, if she weren’t his wife—priceless. Someone steps on his heel; someone’s lens nudges her waist. “Yep,” she says.
Frankly, it’s a relief to be on his own for a bit, his parcel a minor encumbrance. To think his thoughts and not have to voice them; to marvel inwardly at the marvellous and have that be sufficient. Braving a tide of gelato-slurping tourists, he passes under the museum’s archway and walks along the Arno. The sun is just beginning to sink behind distant mountains which look a lot like Cape Breton’s low, rounded ones. In fact, gazing downstream—or upstream?—beyond the reddish tiled rooftops he can almost see the Margaree. It is beautiful. Pushing, elbowing his way—pardon, mi scusi—he lets himself be pulled along by the crowds baby-stepping across the fairy-tale, cobbled-together jumble that’s the Ponte Vecchio, past its hole-in-the-wall jewelers—their claim to fame, the guidebooks say, their having existed since the Medicis’ time, gold a happy distraction from the offal dumped by butchers and tanners sharing the bridge. The very bridge, he guesses, from which the fifteenth-century heretic Savonarola’s ashes were dumped after he was burned—the thanks he got for renouncing the world’s vanities. Becoming fuel for a bonfire all its own when his famous ones were turned against him.
Fighting the masses to reach the opposite bank, the Oltrarno, he glimpses the bright blue message above the Uffizi’s glowing windows, its neon veracity set against the sky’s pale indigo: All Art Has Been Contemporary. It’s a work, he’ll find out later, by an artist he’s never heard of.
Forty minutes zipped by. He cut short his stroll, any further need for solitude thwarted by sightseers tripping over each other, and hurried back to the square. The Piazza della Signoria was swollen with partiers crammed cheek to cheek, elbow to elbow, circling packs of dancers, drummers, flag-bearers and flame-throwers costumed in Renaissance velvet and silk. The lushness of red, blue, and gold was deepened and freighted by the Florentine dusk. So much for watching the sun set with Cia—Cia no doubt swooning in some vaulted, gilded room, gaga at endless depictions of madonnas, babies, and crucifixions, at Leonardo da Vinci with his “knowledge of beings” that flew “between the air and the wind.”
See one religious painting and you’ve seen them all—not that he’d have said so.
Thunderous, the revelry around him pitched from feverish to frenzied gaiety. Drumbeats were like gunfire volleys chased by wild cheering and shouting—the crowd surging and swaying around swirling pennants and banners, the dizzying swaths these cut through the masses. The hawkers’ glow-in-the-dark doodads rose and spun overhead, the wobbling rings of made-in-China Saturns. Drunk on cheer, the intoxicated teetered toward debauchery—a scene that was vaguely threatening, all the more so for being incomprehensible.
Raising his elbows, hugging the wine to his chest, he managed to shove his way through tangled humanity across the square, where, in the shadow of fake David, Cia had agreed to meet. Okay, so one hour in the Uffizi was a little unfair. But wasn’t the whole trip a compromise, squeezing in as much as they could? Someday they’d return: there’s always a next time.
The evening had cooled considerably, a tangy chill coming off the river, and he regretted leaving behind his sweatshirt, wrapped as it was around a jar of tapenade in his suitcase and the little Bernini figurine he’d bought for Cia, to surprise her with at dinner. Their anniversary was in three days, to be celebrated in Venice if all unfolded as expected—if anything could be expected in a country where craziness ruled and still the trains ran, impeccably, on time. Now that was mysterious.
Underlying the sharp breeze, the sewage smell wafted again, a reminder of the need to suspend, dispel, feelings of undue romance and diffidence.
But where was she? It was twenty minutes past the appointed time, and still no sign of her. Reluctantly they’d left the phone they shared charging in the room. Twenty minutes became forty. He hadn’t moved; dared not stray a foot from the spot. But, shoving in to pose for selfies under David’s massive genitals, a pack of teenagers forced him to meld with the mob’s fringes churning toward the middle of the square. All he could see of the pageantry were the peaks of celebrants’ caps, the hawkers’ spinning toys helicoptering through the air.
After an hour and still no sign of her, he wondered if Cia too had got caught in the swell and stranded in some other, unlikely location. Looking down—the only way to keep steady was by gazing at his shoes—he found himself planted on a round metal plaque naming Fra Girolamo Savonarola and two other fras, a date in Roman numerals. The site of the famous conflagrations, the monk’s Bonfires of the Vanities, where he had burned books, mirrors, and paintings not “of God” before he was torched. Even Botticelli himself was thought to have willingly tossed a canvas or two to the flames, the artist Cia would gush about when she appeared. If she appeared—where the heck was she? By now a full hour and a half had lapsed.
Annoyance—a sharp impatience, a heated indignation—filled him. The musicians had long disappeared, defeated by the drumbeats ricocheting from walls and crenellated roofs, punching their deafening holes in the sky. The crush staggered and reeled. Skulking hawkers began to fling and bundle trinkets into blankets, weary, perhaps, of their own preying and pleading.
Dread descended, a bloat of worry and fear. Squeezing between leering drunks he found the museum’s exit, where a guard was hustling people outside. He tried asking if the fellow had seen her—the drumming as relentless as shelling—then loitered the ten minutes till closing time.
She’d got lost, was struggling to find her way to the hotel?
It was two hours past their meeting time. He pushed his way to the museum’s entrance, now locked. The guard behind the glass, who’d overseen the pitching of umbrellas and bottled water, barely shrugged.
She’d hailed a cab, got back on her own steam, and now, in a panic, awaited him? But no, no, she wouldn’t have done that, gone off alone, left him hanging.
Two and a half hours past, the unthinkable stalked him.
>
She’d done this on purpose. She was leaving—she had left: had dragged him across the ocean and how many time zones and up and down how many vias and calles to silently give him the slip?
He thought of finding a policeman, getting directions to the police station. What would he say? A missing person. What, your wife, she go shopping? She get hungry, she go find some pasta? His head pounded. Each drumbeat usurped his heart’s: an invasion. And meanwhile the frenzy would continue till, what, dawn? Till one by one, the revellers dropped to the cobblestones, exhausted?
He pictured her cabbing to the airport, flashing her passport, her credit card.
His stomach grumbled. His ears ached. He shivered, the wind off the Arno now bitter. She’d dumped him. Five years of his life, their lives—as good as clothes, photos, and furniture thrown onto a pyre and lit.
He pictured himself riding the rattling, shaking elevator up to the room, crawling between chilly, sour-smelling sheets. Almost without his noticing, a dusky blackness had settled over the square, the sky barely punctuated by stars—what stars were visible suddenly enviable for their distance. Dumped. He’d been dumped.
Along the clogged street down which they’d gambolled by daylight—jostling elbows, holding on to each other, laughing—artisans lined the dark sidewalk selling pottery and wooden carvings now barely visible. As he started to cross to the other side, something snagged his sleeve.
“Hey! Where’s the fire?” She was laughing, peering up at him, craning for a kiss. Her face was pale and round and happy. Looping her arm through his—“Keith? What’s wrong?”—she was shouting—“You look like you’ve seen a Medici ghost. What’s your problem?”
“Where the fuck were you?” was all he could think to say.
The tense walk to the hotel—not a cab to be seen or a stretch of pavement clear enough to accommodate one—allowed only this:
“I waited three hours. As long as one of your fucking classes.”
“I lost track of time. Know what? Up close the waves in Venus look like birds done by preschoolers.”
“I thought you’d died. I was—I thought—”
“Do you realize how fast an hour goes, standing in front of a da Vinci?”
“I thought you’d left me.”
“Well I didn’t. Haven’t—yet—have I.”
Lying together in the bed, careful that his back didn’t touch hers, he felt his anger settle to a slow, slower, burn, sensing hers: it was bright, fierce and hateful.
But the sun rose on Florence, beautiful Florence. Not speaking, they found themselves together in the breakfast room, the only ones beside a Slavic-looking couple snapping pictures of each other.
What a disappointment, the breakfast. It was laughable: plastic tablecloths, vending machines dispensing Froot Loops and instant cappuccino.
Sitting there, they let their hands creep closer, then touch, paging silently through guidebooks, each to a fresco on the Oltrarno: Masaccio’s Adam and Eve skulking away from Paradise, grief-stricken, banished.
“The Academia opens in half an hour.”
“If we hurry, we can cross the river too, then get back for the train.”
Packing up first, Cia wrapped the expensive vinegar in a plastic bag, placed the ruined camisole in the wastebasket beneath the sink. He found room in his bag for the wine. Weighing convenience against better judgment, they left both suitcases to be retrieved just before checkout time.
The ugliness on poor Eve’s face made the race across the Ponte Vecchio and back more than worthwhile, even he had to admit.
Before grabbing their bags, he says he’ll meet her downstairs, pleading the need for a quick, final pit stop. “Going once, going twice, Cia? Last chance to sit on the Panorama’s throne.”
She promises, with a roll of the eyes, to wait in the lobby, not to go anywhere.
In the bare-bones bathroom—the sun streaming through pebbled glass lighting porcelain dull as old teeth—he unpacks the Bernini figurine. It’s an impromptu purchase he’d made on impulse in Rome, in an upscale souvenir shop in Prati, because they had missed seeing the real thing—maybe next year?
Representing a god groping a nymph, its molded plastic was meant to resemble marble. It is a little tacky; no, more than that, it is straight-up cheesy.
But his heart had been in the right place buying it—yes, it had. At the time.
This much he feels sure of, enfolding it in the camisole and leaving it for the chambermaid.
if My Feet Don’t Touch the Ground
Berlin is a city of pietàs, of hard goodbyes—but perched high above Mitte drinking wine, I lock out the thought, let it drop like a useless key to the courtyard many stories below. By some fluke we have the balcony all to ourselves—it wraps around the entire top floor—the hotel gods, the gods of hospitality, having blessed us? Jet-lagged, woozy, we toast Christopher, his father and I no less blissful than the day our son was born, no less stunned by the ease with which certain things work out: the crush of connecting flights forgotten, our year-long separation—the length of Chris’s absence—is today erased.
It’s a balmy April evening; the air has a blush. Our laughter sweetens the birdsong that fills it; we can’t see them but we can hear them, a multitude of birds, as if there’s one on every railing, every rooftop, every tree. The scent not of currywurst but of blossoms drifts up from the courtyard’s garden, once a square of pavement divided by the Wall. A hot-air balloon bearing a map of the globe and the newspaper logo Die Welt, hikes itself closer to the peach-coloured sun. Our mood is just as weightless. There will be no tears. Gil and I and Christopher will make these days together last. We’ll apply hard brakes against their ending, sure; for now, feeling unbroken joy in such a city seems slightly akin to gloating.
“Dankashun,”—Chris elbows his dad, topping up his own glass—“that’s ‘thank you very much.’”
He is the same but different: thinner, definitely, sporting a gauntness that matches his Hitler jugend-style fade. His Berliner’s lisp is just for fun, but its softness genuine. It draws us more tightly around the little glass-topped table, no one but the dive-bombing swallows to overhear.
“Say ‘excuse me,’ again. One more time.”
“Entschuldigung. Ent-shool-d’goong.” His laugh is patient, wry, worldly as any twenty-five-year-old’s.
Breathing a moment’s silence, we drink in our surroundings: the glass façades of sleek new architecture briefly tinted coral. Except for the language, we could be in Toronto. But any street sounds are too remote to catch—odd, because Mitte means the middle of things, the street we’re on, Schützenstrasse, once demarking West from East. It’s a pigeon’s hop from Checkpoint Charlie, and mere steps from the museums remembering victims of the secret police and of the Nazis, the outdoor Topography of Terror set in the Gestapo’s ruins.
“You should check them out,” Chris says, that worldliness again. “I haven’t been yet—no time. Really, I’m not too into this stuff. Nobody here is.” He mentions some Canadian dude recently busted for going ‘heil’ outside the Reichstag. “Hitler’s just not something you bring up, you know? So, don’t go dropping the H-bomb, okay?” Classic Chris: he’s kidding, and he’s not.
Putting out snacks, Gil smiles. “We’re here to see you.”
There’s so much to catch up on since he left home with a backpack, not even taking along an instrument.
Guitarist of a thousand licks, no longer the plaid- and tuque-wearing indie kid he was when he left Halifax, he pulls on the grey cashmere coat he was wearing to meet us at Tegel, says he’ll see us in the morning.
It’s not ideal waking up slightly hungover on your first full day in a foreign city, having your husband snap a photo of you by a chunk of Wall while skirting sites of past horrors. But by the time Chris meets us, at a café near Checkpoint Charlie, I’m pretty much recovered, back in bliss mo
de.
Are we really together, Chris and Gil and I, sidestepping the sandbagged garden-shed piece of Cold War America meant to jog a tourist’s pulse?
“No pictures—not here.” Chris is adamant, until we stumble across Oldenburg’s Houseball, a giant dust bunny of a sculpture, its displaced chairs, buckets, ladders, and mops done in playground colours that entice Chris to pose, dwarfed by it—this boy of ours once the architect of Duplo castles, light on his feet as seafoam, racing waves at the beach. I shoot a zillion pictures of him in his elegant coat, a perk, we hear, from a recent gig. A good thing he lets me, because next stop is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and its aisles and aisles, block upon block, of steles grey as tombstones—2,710 of them in all, says the guidebook, a number as random yet calculated as the deaths they mark. A measure of evil’s way of swamping then feeding on banality, they mount in height as our child leads the way. He melds with them, all but vanishing into grey.
The soft brown of his half-shaved head, the pink of his neck and hands are the only living colours. These and a narrow plank of blue above and a needle’s eye of green ahead—leaves in bud—draw us through.
Sunlight and ivy lace the barbed-wire voids in this beautiful city with a lushness and manicure all their own, nature’s tempered resilience. At the Brandenburg Gate, Chris takes our picture, then Gil takes Chris and me together, our son’s smile hovering, and mine showing the wear and tear of a Maritime excuse for spring. But under its surface happiness chugs, the Little Engine That Could: the resolve to want, to expect, nothing more.
A bird on every tree Page 5
