by Bill Barich
We debarked in Genoa and went by bus to Florence. The school was located right across from a small piazza presided over by a statue of Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican monk whose apocalyptic fervor had dulled the spirit of the Renaissance. All the students were to live with local families; an old woman in a shiny black dress stepped forward to claim me. Her hands were leathery and her cheeks were glossed with broken capillaries. The administrator called her marchesa but either the title was honorary or she’d been deposed like the monarchs, because her flat was dark, musty, cold, and impoverished. She shared it with her son and his wife and their son Paolo, who was thirteen. For dinner the marchesa served soup, boiled beef, and fennel but no wine, not a drop of it, and we had a circumscribed conversation about New York and spaghetti.
“You are from New York?”
“Sì. Mi piace questo … soup.”
“You like soup then?”
“Sì. Very good.”
“Grazie. Tomorrow I give you spaghetti. You like it?”
“Sì. I like it very much.”
“Do they eat it in New York?”
“Sì. They eat it.”
“Buono,” the marchesa said, tossing her napkin on the table, “domani spaghetti.”
After supper I went to my room and a few minutes later Paolo showed up, wearing a baseball cap and carrying a new mitt, which smelled of the olive oil he’d rubbed into the pocket. He played shortstop for the Firenze Lions, a group of adolescent soccer refugees, and he wanted to hear all about the Yankees. I told him what I could, in sign language and gestures, and he suggested we play catch in the hallway. It was so dark I had trouble seeing the ball. It kept bouncing off my chest. Next Paolo brought out a baseball board game his uncle in Chicago had sent him and we played it until midnight. He beat me badly. “Someday I’m going to America,” he said, signing off, and finally I got into bed. The mattress was soft, though, and I couldn’t sleep. The image of Paolo with his cap and mitt haunted me. I had the feeling that wherever I traveled, Luxembourg, the Seychelles islands, some native would take my hand and lead me into a dark hallway and ask me to play catch. This seemed an unavoidable circumstance, an aspect of my birthright.
IV
The Florence I chose to live in wasn’t an actual city but instead the legendary Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent. His face was the map of the territory, fleshy, broad, shrewd, a little flushed from drink, and his pursuits, I imagined, were mine: art, women, wine, and poetry. I never thought about villainy or political machinations or conspirators like the Pazzi family, who’d been hung from gibbets outside the Medici palace. I wanted to forget about such things, even as I was forgetting for the moment about home. My favorite hangout was the Piazza Signoria very early in the morning, before the tourists had arrived, when the museums and sidewalk cafés were still closed and waiters were just taking the chairs down from tables and sweeping up cigarette butts with long-handled push brooms. They looked half-asleep, their hair uncombed and their chins unshaven. They seemed to move in slow motion, unhurried. I thought this had to do with the statues along the Loggia dei Lanzi, with the copy of Michelangelo’s David in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. The elegantly carved marble on view extended into a historical vastness and seemed to imply that Florence had once been peopled by giants, beings of such magnitude and roundness that the waiters were only echoes, soft discordant notes played upon a vaguely recollected scale. So the waiters moved slowly, without struggling under the weight of expectations, and I relaxed on the Loggia next to Cellini’s statue of Perseus, letting the morning go.
When the Uffizi opened I went in and moved through its galleries as through blocks of time, down long sunlit corridors hung with tapestries, watching the black-robed priests, visitors from Padua, from Genoa or Livorno, as they tracked Christ’s image around the museum. With a half-liter of chianti under my belt I could follow the course of the river flowing behind Piero della Francesca’s portrait of the Duke of Urbino to its logical terminus in some perfect valley beyond the frame, or be stood on my head by the lances, horses, hounds, and hares colliding in Uccello’s “Battle of San Romano.” Uccello, a nickname, the bird, was really Paolo di Dono, a gentle soul who loved animals and passed interminable hours reducing the world to a series of shaped and interlocking planes, earth-toned but broken on occasion by the brilliance of horses—white, rust, gray, silver—and crimson lances piercing the sky. Quit studying perspective and come to bed, his wife shouted, but Uccello remained faithful to the geometry of his flying forms. Piero di Cosimo was more eccentric still and painted nymph-and satyr-ridden landscapes from which suffering was excluded. He hated priests and doctors and loved instead wild savage things, essential Nature. The isolative drumming of a good hard rain pleased him greatly, although he disliked lightning with its hint of technological futures. His cottage was overgrown with fruit trees and vines, which he wouldn’t prune, and these unruly tendrils seemed to reach across centuries and touch me there in the Uffizi. All the linked canvases were a stream and moved like blood through the building, through the stones of the city, and when I stepped outside at last the streets and domes were bathed in gold, and bells were ringing everywhere, signifying dusk.
V
Naturally I fell in love, first with a short dark-haired girl who wanted no part of me and then with a pretty girl from Tennessee with highlights in her hair. She loved books and music and tolerated the bad verses (some about the sea) of would-be poets. We rode bicycles through Cascine Park and bought watermelon slices from vendors and later, when the weather turned cold, chestnuts in newspaper cones. This seemed remarkable to us, the shift of seasons echoed in commerce, autumn ripeness giving way to gloves, embers, and bursting shells. After our relationship was firmly established Suzanne presented me with the address of one of the few places in town serving draft beer. It was called Tredici Gobbi, Thirteen Hunchbacks, and we went there often at my request. One night I chained my bicycle to a window somewhere and never found it again. Love is dangerous, I thought, but Florence pushed its lovers to extremes. There was Pico, of course, and also that excessive lyric of Lorenzo’s that compared his mistress’s pale beauty to the soft white fat around a kidney.
At midterm Suzanne and I hitchhiked to Rome, which was a great adventure, the first time I’d stayed in a hotel room with a girl. I tried to be orderly, to pick up my socks and underwear, but after a day or two I saw that intimacy, for all its revelations, was more natural than the politely enforced distances of society. Rome was more metropolitan than Florence, more forward-looking and contentious. Modern apartment buildings were threatening useless antiquities like the Coliseum. On the Via Veneto fashionable types studied themselves in plate-glass windows, and we kept expecting to see Mastroianni or Fellini sitting at one or another of the cafés. Michelangelo still dominated the old city, but for the preening ragazzi of the boulevards, Cinecittá supplied the necessary icons. We tried to see the frescoes at the Sistine Chapel but without scaffolding it was almost impossible. The heavenly continent was vast, but dulled by poor lighting. It amazed us to see people eating bananas and salami sandwiches while walking around the chapel floor searching for Adam. In a biergarten one night we met a German who told us they set up bleachers in there whenever the Pope made an appearance, but we didn’t believe him. He was from the Protestant lowlands and surely antipathetic to the Church. At night we crawled into bed, warm beneath the coverlets, and listened to whores bargaining with their clients on the Spanish Steps.
Things turned sour on the return trip when a crazy man picked us up. He was pig-fat, with an ascot stuffed into his shirt and kidskin driving gloves on his piggy fingers. When we stopped for lunch at a roadside trattoria, he called for the manager and asked if the doorknob, a heavy but unspectacular bronze item, was for sale. The manager shrugged in the provincial manner, unscrewed plating and knob and accepted a few thousand lire. Outside the crazy man laughed hysterically. “A real bargain,” he said, wiping his eyes. He stopped next at an ancient fortif
ied town on a hillside and told us to look around while he did some business at a local hotel. We waited an hour and then I went to check on him. “He’s taking a nap,” said the desk clerk. Two shady ladies in mesh stockings and tiny skirts sat at a bar adjacent to the lobby, ready to take naps with other adventurers. We tried to hitch another ride, but the town was so medieval that not a single car passed through the square.
Finally the crazy man emerged. He was apologetic and I thought maybe his performance was over, but twenty miles from Florence, just at nightfall, he lifted the flap of his sport-coat and said, “Look at this.” He had a leather sheath attached to his belt. A hunting knife was in it. Minutes later he turned off the highway and onto an unmarked dirt road which led to the lights of another hillside town. He was whistling some popular song between his teeth and I still remember its annoying pitch. The road was bad and he had to drive slowly, and I thought if I slugged him on the next curve and grabbed the wheel I could ram us into the hillside without killing us at the same time. But then the crazy man spoke again.
“There’s a nice hotel ahead,” he said. “We’ll spend the night there.”
“We have to get back to Florence,” I said, “Maybe you’d better let us out.”
And here I expected the knife to come flashing out of its sheath to press against my neck, but the crazy man, being crazy, just braked to a halt.
“Too bad you don’t like me,” he said, reaching across to push open my door.
When he drove away, I could hear the doorknob rattling in his trunk. We hiked three cold miles through stunning darkness, back to the highway, and when a family in a little Peugeot picked us up and gave us cigarettes and heat, I felt as if we’d been saved from drowning, snatched from the edges of the sea.
VI
One afternoon I stopped at the Piazza San Marco and toured the cloister. In a rear corridor I came upon Savonarola’s cell, cold and sparely furnished, and saw the portrait of him painted by Fra Bartolommeo. It had a chilling effect. His face, shown in hooded profile, was almost white, as though dusted with powder, and his cheeks were sunken and his powerful black eyes were set back in bony hollows. He looked cadaverous, the antithesis of Lorenzo. I remembered the omens that had supposedly preceded the Magnificent’s demise: a hurricane, a lion devoured by other lions in a den at the Signoria, a Medici escutcheon blown free of the roof and shattered on the left side of the palace, a la sinistra, the sinister side, and the story told in some quarters of a fire-breathing ox seen chasing a woman through the streets. Lorenzo’s doctor gave him a solution sprinkled with powdered diamonds, the prescribed remedy for a financier, but he died anyway. Savonarola visited him on his deathbed; two years later the city was caught up in moral fervor.
VII
My friend Nelson lived in a rundown villa in Fiesole, the Etruscan hill town from which the original settlers had descended to build Florence. I used to visit him there in his dukedom of olive trees, vineyards, relics, chapels, broken cisterns, lizards, and crumbling stones. Fiesole was a magical place, the ancient outpost of sorcerers. In the evenings, wearing ethereal costumes and masks, they crept from their grottoes to draw water, and on some nights you could still feel their presence, a sudden chill when the light shifted and the city below fell to darkness. Nelson’s marchesa, who resembled Sophia Loren in miniature, drove off this chill by putting another log on the fire and serving some rum. Before dinner she would call to her children. The eldest, Eduardo, a Communist studying at the university, came readily to the table, and so did the middle son, Tommaso, a ravaged kid who’d starved himself down to ninety pounds to avoid conscription into the Italian Army, but often we had to go looking for the third child, Giorgio. He was a sweet boy whose brain was tuned to inaudible sounds and he got lost in the ruins, chasing birds or mice or shadows. After the meal Tommaso played his guitar and sang folk songs, or Eduardo lectured us on the political realities of contemporary Europe, but Giorgio never said anything at all. He just stared at his plate and scratched his head, which made the hair stand up in black bunches. Tommaso took a weekend trip with us once to Viareggio on the Ligurian coast north of Pisa, and he was astonished to see what Americans were willing to pay for food and rooms. The hotel seemed inexpensive to us, especially at sunset when we could stand on a balcony and look out at the Apuan Alps. Pale declivities were revealed within the folds, coloring pink and rose and even red. Tommaso told us these were quarries, exposed veins of marble. The village of Carrara was nearby and the great blocks chipped from the mountains were destined to end up there, just as they had done in the days of Michelangelo.
VIII
Around Thanksgiving, Paolo insisted on taking me to the Firenze Lions’ ballfield and giving me a workout. It was a tufted square on the outskirts of the city with an old screen backstop and a nearby church for slumping batters to pray in. All the Lions, ten or twelve of them, congregated in centerfield and I hit them fungoes, towering fly balls that impressed them mightily. They were only children, of course, and none of them had ever seen a Major Leaguer play. Afterward they crowded around me just the way sandlot kids used to crowd around the Babe when he paid a visit to Baltimore. Their adulation made me uneasy, though; I wanted to be celebrated for my aspirations, not my skill with a bat.
On the bus back to the city, Paolo asked me if I’d send him a Yankees cap when I got home.
“I’m not going home, Paolo,” I said.
IX
School let out just before Christmas; by mid-December I was in a panic. Another ocean crossing loomed ahead, the motion this time unmistakably retrograde. I told friends I was going to stay behind, rent a room in a cheap pensione, write a novel, and live, if necessary, off crusts scavenged from tourists’ plates, but I didn’t have the courage. Instead, after final exams, like everyone else, I started packing, filling my suitcase with souvenirs, photos, postcards of the Duomo and the Gates of Paradise. For my mother I bought a portfolio of art prints, Maestri dei Colori, but this proved to be another error in judgment. When she tore off the cellophane wrapper, the prints inside were bright and out of register, untrue to the originals.
Chapter Seven
But my experience in Florence renewed me in many ways and for years after I took sustenance from what had happened to me there. In bad or difficult times I would retreat briefly into memory and think about the Uffizi or evenings spent on the roof of the British Council Library reading Yeats, who was my favorite poet then, and looking across the alley to an apartment window in which an old woman sat framed before her sewing machine, patching together fragments of cloth. She was always there in the evening, whenever I was there, and in my mind she became associated with the cathedrals’ ringing-out at dusk. “Then bells,” I would write in a bad Yeatsian imitation, “and a familiar machine.”
So far at Golden Gate I’d felt nothing comparable to that Florentine release. The sadness was still with me, although for hours at a time my attention to the races did manage to obliterate all other concerns. Originally I thought this would be enough, nine shots of adrenaline every afternoon bracketed by the deep concentration necessary for handicapping, but I was learning too much about how the track worked, which took the shine off my enthusiasm. Betting was indeed a shock to the system, but it was the most obvious hit, the surface stuff. I still believed something special was going on at the track, at any track, but I was starting to suspect it had more to do with nesting birds than with money, speed, or class.
Still it was impossible not to be hopeful with spring firmly established at last. Even the stoopers who scoured the grandstand in search of carelessly discarded winning tickets were in bloom. They’d put away their winter clothes, fedoras, furs, and oversize topcoats, and were resplendent now in detoxified Salvation Army windbreakers and new sneakers with laces. On the backstretch everybody was talking baseball, the ascent of the Giants, the descent of the A’s; and then one evening, in absolute vernal confirmation, I saw two jockeys playing catch on the infield grass. They reminded me of Fire
nze Lions, emblems of cross-pollination.
II
Soon the jockeys were joined by other jockeys and valets still in their track-issue uniforms, white shirts and dark green trousers, and grooms and a few trainers and an agent or two and a couple of girls in pigtails and argyle socks. Dale Steward, the ultimate cowboy trainer, hit fungoes in the general direction of the barns while somebody else arranged shirt and sweater bases to form a diamond. The jockeys took the field. Art Lobato pitched for them, and Richie Galarsa, who’d ridden seven mounts that afternoon, played second base. Both were in terrific shape. Galarsa, nineteen, stood about five feet one and rode at a hundred and eight pounds, and you’d need a scalpel to find any fat on him. His shoulders were very broad, like those of a weight lifter, and his arms were thickly knotted with muscles. His torso tapered down in a classic V to a flat stomach and narrow boyish hips, composing the sort of physique advertised in strength-and-health publications.
But Galarsa didn’t have to exercise, riding kept him fit. His legs were his greatest asset. Like all jockeys he rode not so much sitting as standing, hunched forward in a crouch with his boots hooked into the stirrups and his buttocks poised a few inches above the tiny saddle. If he let himself go or missed a few days owing to an injury or suspension, an afternoon’s work could reduce his upper thighs to mush. Jockeys’ knees often buckled or developed calcium deposits, and cartilage and tendon problems were commonplace. Riding when you were tired was another danger. Then you got careless and your legs gave slightly and your feet slipped suddenly from the stirrups. This was called losing the irons, and it was the most immediately painful experience a rider could have, for it brought him down testicles-first on his mount’s spine.
