Louise visualized the cramped apartment in the decaying west side Chicago neighborhood in which she hunkered down alone in life. It was startling that this Finger knew her secrets, those desires so near her heart that she never told anyone.
“How dare you pry into my private thoughts?”
“My cherished contessa, you must trust me that your dreams will manifest.”
“You’re ridiculous. Stuff like that only happens in romance novels.”
“Ah, but your so-called reality is but a miasma, a collective hallucination. Have confidence in me, bellissima. I will protect you. I will shower you with gold florins and the love of a generous patron.”
Louise contemplated the Botticelli Venus gazing out from a poster hanging crookedly on the wall.
“That’s a joke. I’ll never find anybody. I’ll never be happy, never, ever. I’m resigned to it. Why am I even talking to you?”
“Darling Luisa, I adore you and had my master Galileo known you he would have suffered madly for you, with inexpressible and unrequited love-longings, even as the divine Dante idolized his benedetta Beatrice. I am requesting only the most infinitesimal of favors. I promise, if you transport me to the Teatro, and bury me, I swear to you, by the holy pigment formulas of the incomparable Raphael, fortune will shower her blessings and you will be deliriously rich and happy.”
Louise scrutinized the serene poster Venus. Annoying, how blondely complacent these Renaissance females seemed. The Finger argued a persuasive case. After all, the severing and display of fingers was not right, and when in Rome, one ought not necessarily to do as the Romans do if it involved say, throwing perfectly respectable people to lions. This was an almost identical situation. But this was all nonsense. She must be coming down with a fever.
She opened the flap of the bag and whispered into the opening. “Stop it, please. Leave me alone. Please, please go away.”
“Ah, bellissima, your mellifluous voice is enchanting. Do I sense your acquiescence? You will be rewarded, I promise you. Now, I will guide you to the autobus. You will experience a pleasant ride, ascending through fertile hills to the stupendo Teatro.”
Of course it would be lovely to see Fiesole once again. She had been meaning to go back. Besides, what if the Finger really had the magical powers which It claimed?
And so, she picked up the saddlebag, left a five thousand lira bill on the counter (that poor girl works so hard, and that machine looks impossible), trudged to the Piazza Maria Novella, and boarded the autobus. She was the only passenger. Stepping to the back, she set the saddlebag down on the seat beside her. The bus lumbered five miles, up and up into the Fiesole hills, and stopped in the Piazza Mino, the main square, where she disembarked. The rain had cleared, and the façade of the cathedral gleamed in the sunlight.
She walked toward the Teatro on the hillside behind the cathedral. Near the entrance a group of twenty Germans stood silent, listening to the precise gutturals of their guide, a sturdy woman with clipped gray hair. Louise skirted them and clambered down a side aisle. In ancient times, devotees had sat rapt with attention on these stone seats.
At the bottom of the theatre she crossed the expanse of the stage. She strolled into a grove of evergreens that encircled its perimeter. She removed the glass egg from the saddlebag. Scooping up the damp mud she dug a hole six inches deep. The earth smelled of clay and moss. Thus had the earth smelled to the actors as they waited for their cues, their faces covered with the frowning mask of tragedy or the laughing mask of comedy.
She pried open the hinge on the glass egg and tugged the Finger free from a dab of plaster. She laid the Finger in the tiny grave, and covered It with mud and evergreen needles. Rest in peace, oh Finger. And what had Galileo said under his breath to the Inquisition judges? “Eppur si muove! And yet the earth moves anyway!” But it seemed to her that at that moment the earth stood still.
She placed the glass egg back in the saddlebag. She climbed up an aisle of the theatre, and returned to the Piazza Mino, where she sat for an hour, breathing in the cool clear air. Sunlight played on the orange tile roofs of the villas and the hills studded with dark green cypresses rising from the silvery green mantle of olive groves. Ah, yes, she saw as for the first time, the landscape that the Renaissance artists saw, as they painted the loggias in which their serene Madonnas sat, and in the far perspective, the lines clear and true to the vanishing point in the upper quartile of the canvas, these hills, these trees, this light.
She was famished after her great odyssey. Her chest seemed congested, and every few minutes she coughed. She felt an impulse to spend money, to rebel against the cruel strictures of her budget. She splurged on a hearty meal in a trattoria in the piazza. Each table was set with a white damask cloth and miniature pink roses in a majolica vase. She ate a dish of grilled chicken and truffles recommended by the waiter, and dipped crusty fresh baked bread in virgin olive oil. The waiter brought a bottle of Chianti with a black rooster label (the genuine thing). She drank the red wine, and its warmth settled at the level of her chest, soothing the cough.
Five years later, on a Sunday morning in May, Louise reclined in a cobalt blue silk dressing gown on a flowered chintz sofa near the bay window of a townhouse on the Gold Coast of Chicago. She had shed thirty pounds and metamorphosed into a blonde.
Her attorney husband Steven sat in a brown leather armchair. He was sipping coffee from a Lenox porcelain cup and reading the New York Times. On the polished walnut table next to him she had placed a green faience platter piled high with cantaloupe slices, croissants, scones, clotted cream and raspberry jam.
He rustled the pages of the Times. “Sweetheart, look at this.”
He pointed to a small item on page eighteen and handed over the newspaper. The headline read:
Galileo’s Finger Last Catalogued in 1950
Disappears from Museum
Authorities Baffled
Official Heads Roll
“They apparently don’t know how long it’s been gone. Didn’t you see it on a trip to Florence, before we met?”
Louise smiled her practiced Botticelli half-smile.
“Why, yes, I did. I’m sure I’ve told you the story before, darling, how I arrived back at O’Hare and collapsed with a 102 degree fever. A severe case of pneumonia. How silly of me to go traipsing about in the rain. But those were my salad days. It cost me two months’ salary to go even in the off season.”
“It’s odd that they simply lost track of it.”
“Of course that’s Italy’s greatest charm. The Italians focus on beauty, on pleasure. But they have no patience for cataloging things. How many treasures disappear only to surface hundreds of years later?”
She glanced over at the mahogany cabinet. A collection of Murano glass refracted the rays of the sun and cast rainbow fragments on the ceiling. The centerpiece was a glass egg encircled with gold filigree. She got up from the couch, sashayed over to her husband, and caressed his gray hair.
“Would you like more coffee, dear?” she said.
The Beautiful Lady
ONE MORNING just after sunrise in the Eastertide of 790 CE, the merchant Tarasios opened his stall as he always did on market days. The church of Hagia Sophia towered over this quarter of Constantinople, and its epic dome shaded the kiosks that lined the narrow cobblestone streets. His only child, six-year-old Theodora, played hide and seek among the cedar tables stacked with icons. She was crosseyed, constantly stumbling and bumping into walls. She tugged at her father’s robe and held up two gold coins.
“Papa, let me help today. I can tell a good coin from a bad. See, this one has a picture of the wicked Caliph of Baghdad. If I see one of these, I ask, please instead, for this other kind with a picture of our emperors or of our blessed Christos the Lord.”
He beamed at her. Precocious, this child, so like her mother, his beloved wife Euphrosyne, who had died in agonized delirium before hearing the baby’s first squalls. Well, why not let her try? Customers might find her
irresistible.
Tarasios was a dealer in painted icons and ivory carvings, as had been his father and grandfather before him. For the last hundred years, those carping Iconoclasts had ripped out mosaics and torn down icons from the walls of churches. But now the regent Irene had cracked down. Three years before, her loyal bishops had met in council at Nicaea. Under her orders, they proclaimed that icons were not sinful graven images. To the contrary, such icons were holy objects to be blessed and venerated. The artisans rejoiced. Their workshops were humming with new orders.
Through all these twists and turns of official dogma, Tarasios only shrugged. What did he care about religion or politics? It was no skin off his back, either way, as long as the authorities left him alone to trade. The common people had never stopped buying his merchandise. The soldiers, with their ready money, were his best customers. They bought sacred objects in high fever and for high prices. Against all odds they hoped to ward off the accusing eyes of the severed heads they stuck on poles in the public squares and the angry souls of the bloodied, mangled bodies they dumped in alleyways.
The throng milled about, haggling and gossiping. Many stopped to admire the little girl as she pointed out the gold leaf on the polychrome and the intricate carving of the ivories. She charmed dozens of gold coins out of the hands of strangers.
At dusk, Tarasios set about closing up. Theodora wandered around among the trove of icons: Christoi, Virgin Marys, bearded patriarchs, archangels with rainbow wings. With her far-sighted right eye, she noticed a glimmer near the entrance to the alley. She walked toward the light. With her myopic left eye she made out a wood panel propped against the back wall. On the panel an artist had painted a Virgin cradling the Christ Child. Her kohl-rimmed black eyes stared straight out. The gold-leaf halo around her head glinted in the gloom.
“Papa, where did we get this beautiful Lady?”
Tarasios was busy fastening the shutters, and not paying her any mind.
She picked up the panel, half her size, and lugged it to the front.
“Look, Papa. Where did we get this Lady?”
He glanced at his daughter.
“My child, I don’t remember buying this one. How could it have gotten in here?”
“Please, please let me keep her. I just know she likes me.”
He smiled. He could never refuse her anything.
“Well of course, my little precious one. And where do you want to put her?”
He placed the panel inside a large protective sleeve of blue silk. They walked the two miles to their house, Tarasios carrying the panel in his right hand, and holding Theodora’s hand in his left.
He set the icon into an alcove built into the wall of Theodora’s room. Every morning, the little girl gathered clusters of pink oleander and purple bougainvillea that bloomed in bronze pots near the fountain in the center of the tiled courtyard. She arranged a bouquet in a terracotta vase on the alcove shelf, and dusted the icon with a white egret plume. On her knees before the icon she prayed for small things: that the geckos scampering over the walls would sit still so she could pet them, and for big things too: that her cousins would stop taunting her about her squint and that her father would marry a kind woman.
One morning, as Theodora nestled bougainvillea sprigs in the vase, she noticed drops of water trickling from the eyes of the Virgin.
“Why are you crying, beautiful Lady?”
She dabbed at the Virgin’s eyes with her finger. The clear liquid tasted salty, like the sea. She rubbed the water on her eyelids. Its pleasant warmth tingled and soothed her.
At noon, father and daughter ate their meal of fava beans and dates on stone seats in the courtyard. Tarasios sat silent, frowning at the marble lions carved into the corners of the fountain. Theodora was used to his brooding, to his melancholia.
“Papa, listen to me. The beautiful Lady has been crying.”
“What lady?”
“Our icon, our Lady.”
“My dear, you’re dreaming. Perhaps you saw the night dew gathered on the wood.”
“I rubbed her tears on my eyes. I see better, somehow.”
He was observing her now, his little one with the lively imagination. To his surprise, it seemed to him that her black eyes no longer wobbled, but gazed straight back at him.
“My child, you aren’t squinting anymore. What if the icon….?”
He did not finish the sentence, but got up and walked into her room. Amazed, he gasped aloud. The eyes of the Virgin were crossed, the angle of their vision askew.
Tarasios immediately carried the icon in the silk sleeve, together with a woven basket filled with bread and fermented goat cheese, to Phosterios, the blind hermit. The merchant was in luck, for it was a visiting day. The hermit sat on a boulder just outside his cave. A long line of pilgrims filed past, kneeling and exchanging words with the holy man. Tarasios waited several hours. Finally, it was his turn. He knelt before the monk and whispered his story. The hermit listened, while touching the icon and stroking his long, bedraggled gray beard. After a few moments of silence, he raised the vacant whites of his eyes toward the sky, and held up his wrinkled hands, his arms shaking with palsy, his jaundiced palms facing out in blessing.
“You have sinned grievously. You are possessed by the demon of acedia. You have scorned the commandment to remarry. But this is a miracle, blessed be the Theotokos, the God-bearer, the all-holy Mother of God, and blessed be her holy child the Christos. Anathema to all heretics, to the Frankish barbarians, to the Mohammedans. You must praise God, Blessed Be He, every day of your life. Go in peace, and sin no more.”
And so it was that from that day, Theodora’s eyes untangled and she saw the world straight and true, as other children did. And the eyes of her icon, of the beautiful Lady, remained crossed. Tarasios soon married a lovely woman who embraced Theodora as her own. It is not recorded whether any gecko ever sat still long enough to be petted.
The family built a little chapel with a simple wall niche near the marketplace, and placed the icon in the niche. For many generations thereafter, the faithful believed in the miraculous powers of the Lady. With her far-seeing right eye, she watched over the entire city, and with her near-seeing left eye she recognized and blessed anyone who knelt before her.
Sappho Resurgent
SUNRISE IN THE AEGEAN SEA begins with red splinters striping the gray fog that obscures a midnight-blue sky. That’s why Homer intoned “the rosy fingers of Dawn.” Because it’s really like that, Eos the dawn-goddess tiptoeing in her silken sandals, preceding the sun-god Helios who gradually turns the black hulking reptilian island-shapes to gray rock and silvery-green foliage.
It was in an odd giddy moment, on the sixth day of a twelve-day Aegean cruise, with Phosphorus, the huge morning star, visible on the horizon, that Barbara understood she was channeling classical Greek poetry. She leaned over the burnished brass railing of the cruise ship Calliope, and shouted into the wind, “An ancient Greek bard! Alive today!”
Her sister Marsha materialized beside her.
“What did you say?” Marsha said.
Barbara blinked, hesitating the tiniest microsecond, then plunged ahead. “I’m a lyric poetess, and passionate odes are welling up!”
Marsha frowned. “What’s with you this morning?
Barbara suddenly remembered that she herself, Marsha’s elder by two years, was the sensible one. Even a half-century ago in Albany when they shared a room, two single beds docked side by side in a sea of exuberant pink, Marsha had been the frilly giggly one, addicted to Barbie dolls and shirking chores, while Barbara had dutifully memorized the Baltimore catechism and kept her underwear and socks military-straight in the two dresser drawers assigned to her. To this day, she carried a rosary, often caressing the beads in secret.
“Oh, you know, when in Greece do as the Grecians do.”
“What Grecians? The ones we’ve met seem down to earth, not airy-fairy.”
“Well, OK, when in Greece do as Byron did.�
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“This is not good, whatever you’re doing. You seem weirded out.”
Barbara bristled. “Can’t you let me play a little, the way I want to?
Marsha shrugged and pointed toward the front of the ship. “I need a bite of something. You should eat, maybe that would clear your head. Should we go in to breakfast?”
“Why don’t you go in without me?” Barbara said.
Marsha winced, turned on her heel and disappeared. Uh, oh, Barbara thought, she’s really mad at me now. Her surface politeness had begun to fray even on the first day of the trip.
Why couldn’t it be easy between them, Barbara reflected, as she watched the sea-foam thrown up by the ship’s engines, the ship transformed into Aphrodite’s seashell. Her longed-for daimon had finally appeared, urging her to cast aside her humdrum life, to follow the secret overgrown path, that road-not-taken, of an artist. Her jokey comment about Grecians was a feint to stave off questions from her uncomprehending sister. But how (and to whom) could she dare communicate the pith of what she was experiencing? It seemed urgent, to transcribe on paper, and to declaim in public and for the entire world to hear, the Greek stanzas suddenly bubbling up inside her mind. Forget what anyone else thought. This included Marsha, who swam with elegant synchronized strokes in the conventional shallows of life.
“Poikilo’ thron’ athanat’Aphrodita pai dios doloploka, lissomai se me m’asaisi med’ oniaisi damna potnia thumon.” Barbara chanted the uncanny syllables, not in the well-tempered scales of her beloved Bach or in the strict tempo of the Gregorian motifs she had learned as a child, but in an odd wavering nasal voice, the wailing tones and pitch slides she associated vaguely with Balkan folk music. And an English translation occurred to her, written out to be read, as if in an academic essay, which she burbled under her breath: “Many colored throned immortal Aphrodita, daughter of Zeus, wile-weaver, I beg you with reproaches and harms do not beat down O Lady, my soul.”
Curious Affairs Page 6
