Women in Sunlight

by Frances Mayes

  Onward. We drive to Palmanova. This is where I think most of Colin because the Venetians devised this nine-star-shaped fortress also as a utopian place to live. Palmanova, built as a moated fortress, was as an ideal city. This would intrigue Colin. I read in W. G. Sebald that forts designed like this almost inevitably were outmoded by the time they were built because of interim advances in armature. This ties into Sebald’s whole philosophy of a constantly dissolving world, that everything falls away as obsolete in the moment it appears. We are perpetually in arrears. Such a melancholy, well, tragic world view. (Margaret would agree with him.)

  Palmanova, built in 1593, was meant to protect residents against raging Turks, Austrians, whoever tried to scale or batter the walls. The Venetians conceived the idea: beauty reinforces the good of society. What a lofty utopia. Everyone was to have the same amount of land. The plan was idealistic, the centro a hexagon, with eighteen concentric streets radiating from the center, and four ring streets intersecting the radials, a beautiful design. The trouble was—no one came. Finally, in 1622, Venetian prisoners were released to occupy an otherwise empty town. I think it’s true, as Sebald observed, “The more you entrench yourself the more you must remain on the defensive.” I would not like to live in a fort, no matter how ideal the hexagonal central piazza.

  Interesting as it is theoretically, we wonder about a tour stop here. Julia is madly taking notes. Chris thinks not, though the history is compelling. Susan stops us at a café for coffee. “I’d bring them here,” I say. We’re standing at the bar. “There are many things to think about.” Susan reaches across me for the sugar. Like the Italians, she’s taken to copious amounts in her coffee.

  I’ve read a bit. “What I immediately think of is three paintings on the ideal city by unknown artists around 1480 (one used to be attributed to Piero della Francesca). Palmanova must have been influenced by that prior century’s obsession with mathematical cities. They were laid out with specific proportions, perspectives, and vanishing points (all without the mess of actual humans, markets, animals).”

  “I agree,” Julia says. “Chris would just have to prepare the background—everyone would be fascinated.”

  (For my notebook: I wonder if these paintings of groups of buildings had anything to do with mnemonic memory palaces I’ve read about. The layout of this town could be one. So many windows and doors to store words. I can imagine locating information in each quadrant created by the web of streets; then each becomes a memory prompt. I’ve tried the method myself, using the rooms of my childhood home as repositories for stanzas of a long poem I wanted to memorize, Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes.” It worked, though the poem is forever tied to the blue bedroom of my parents, the breezeway with bamboo furniture and ceiling fans.)

  Like an Italian, Chris stirs in two sugars. “You are right, Julia, Kit. Walking around here makes me want to study the plan. From above it must look like an angular mandala.”

  “You are a California boy!” I say.

  Julia laughs. “Well, I’m entranced.”

  “So am I. Maybe that’s what we all have in common—easy enchantment.” Damn, I’m missing Colin. He should be here. I want to talk about all this with him. We grab a quick pasta for lunch—mine with veal cheeks—and drive to die-and-go-to-heaven Udine.

  * * *

  —

  Julia has located a hotel in the center, adequate but not up to Chris’s guests’ expectations. Who can blame them; they’re paying un sacco di soldi for their grand tour. Many of them will not come this way again—why not splurge? Julia apologizes—it didn’t look dated in the photos—but the place is fine, a bit tired but with large rooms and bathrooms fitted with old marble sinks.

  Susan and I take off for a long walk around town. Julia and Chris are entering info notes and researching possible atmospheric agriturismi (farms open to guests) nearby. (They’re in his room, I note.) “Take notes and photos, please.” Julia waves good-bye. Susan is great with directions; I tend to get happily lost. We search out the museum, the lofty Tiepolo ceiling in the Oratorio della Purità, and the dusty-looking Caravaggio portrait of Saint Francis in the Galleria d’Arte Antica, which turns out to be a good copy.

  “Couldn’t you buy that house with the vines? Couldn’t you move in your books and set up immediately?” Susan gets Udine. It’s a livable, dignified town. “One thing learned, since I have been living here,” she continues, “the good life is available for the asking. Why settle? It’s incomprehensible to me that we earnestly entertained the idea of moving into a nice, oh, yes, retirement community. What we did not know!” We pass well-dressed matrons with their dogs on leashes, kids on bicycles, men playing cards and taking in the afternoon sun at a café. We pass a shop for baby clothes. I barely glance at it.

  “All true,” I agree. “But not close to a major airport. Impossible for me.”

  “Oh, right.”

  * * *

  —

  Having found a country inn at a vineyard for the tour, Julia goes back to her room. She needs a shampoo and to organize her clothes for tomorrow. She wants to chat with her father. It’s late morning his time. He’s probably taken his coffee out on his balcony overlooking the river. How she would like to slide open the door and join him. She looks quickly at her calendar. Just over three weeks until he arrives for the holidays. She hasn’t spoken to him for a week. He would love to see the little towns of Friuli. She needs privacy to think through what has transpired on this trip and what she wants to happen. Last night after the three desserts, after a strong digestivo, she and Chris drove back alone from the restaurant to the hotel. “Come up for a moment,” he’d said. “We can go over the rest of the trip. Seems like there are some choices to make.” Inside his room, he closed the door and they kissed. The kiss was sweet, then ignited. I don’t want this, she remembers thinking, to be like one of those clichéd movie scenes where they start backing toward the bed, flinging off clothes, ravenous, and placed in impossible positions, impossible for the woman’s pleasure anyway—backed up, standing against a wall and battered. But he held her, kissing her throat, her ears.

  “You are marvelous,” he said.

  “No, you are.” She writes on a piece of hotel stationery, telling herself the story. We kissed. Finally, we sat on the edge of the bed and he flopped backward, his hands over his head. “I never expected to feel this way. You are someone I know, have known all my life. I’ve never known anyone as easily. Are you sure we didn’t meet in another life?” I am both thrown by and drawn to his eyes, one tawny like a tiger’s-eye bead, the other the faded blue of an old chambray shirt.

  “I know. I know.” I laid my head on his chest, listening to the solid thud of his heart. We talked about the vintners, the evening, the shock of roebuck on our tongues, about whether Kit is pregnant. He loves Susan and Camille. He says, with all of us, he feels released. I know that feeling as well. My friends multiply my life.

  After those umpteen tastings of wine, I simply drifted, fell asleep. I said, We’re all right. Silence. I remember saying, Your eyes excite me, then hearing a low honking snore. Later I woke up and found that we’d stretched out side by side on the bed, Chris curled around me, holding my hand, his even breath behind my ear. I disentangled and crept out to my room. Kit was turned away, though I suspected that she’d awakened. I crawled under the blanket, still in my clothes.

  * * *

  —

  (My composing methods may sometimes be suspect. How do I know about this scene? Her pages were folded into our guidebook.)

  * * *

  —

  Susan went to the room to call her daughters in California. Morning there; evening already falling here by five in the afternoon. We’re swinging toward the darkest day of the year. Does my little sugar spoon of protoplasm feel the earth moving on its axis? I walk back by the baby shop and examine the onesies, the minute yellow sweater, fragile embroidered dre
sses only grandmothers would buy (my mother will miss everything), lace-trimmed socks, impossibly tiny lambskin shoes—this is Italy, after all. The other window displays folding strollers, room monitors, bouncy chairs, and high-and-mighty navy blue and white carriages that look constructed for royal bairns. I’m stunned, not having thought until now of all the paraphernalia in my/our future. I share the Italians’ fearful superstitions. I wouldn’t think of buying anything until I’m practically on the way to the hospital. But I snap a photo of the shoes and send it to Colin.

  It seems like longer than yesterday that we were in Aquileia. That’s travel: time expands and compresses in unexpected ways. Just to take in one of the most pleasing piazzas I’ve ever seen, I order a hazelnut gelato at a café on Piazza della Libertà, and spend half an hour looking at passersby and patterns of shifting shadows. The great poet Czeslaw Milosz was right. The tragedy of living is to have only one life when there are many possibilities laid before us. Shouldn’t one spend a life, or at least part of it, in Udine?

  * * *

  —

  Camille has covered a lot of ground during her afternoon in Venice. She’s sent home vials and packets of pigments from a miracle of an art supply store. Her project is coming clear to her now and she hasn’t even picked up a brush. She stocked up on handmade paper and will work with Matilde and Serena as she needs more.

  Browsing in venerable bookstores, she’s spent almost a thousand euros on decaying leather books with pages of drawings and etchings of Venetian buildings and country villas, a few tomes of renaissance poetry, and in a regular bookstore, she’s splurged on art books—Giorgione, Palladio, Veronese. How she feels, she only can liken to falling in love, when every sense is heightened and intensified, when extraneous emotions fall away. She feels like a lens in the sun. After two trains, a vaporetto, and miles of walking, her new knee throbs. Her calf muscle wants to cramp with every step back to the hotel. Even so, you just should not have room service in Venice.

  After a rest, she hauls herself up and slowly walks back to a six-table trattoria she passed earlier. Without the others to hear, her Italian improves. She orders with no hitch. Over a bowl of mussels and a grilled fish, she meets Americans at the next table, a young couple from Baltimore traveling to Europe for the first time. After the usual where-are-you-from conversation and observations about Venice, the woman asks Camille, “Are you retired? Or do you work?”

  Camille answers, “I used to teach, now I’m a full-time artist.”

  * * *

  —

  She has the whole next day to play. The buoyant excitement gives her bolts of energy slightly tamped by her irritated knee. She frequently stops for coffee or water. They didn’t get to see the Carpaccios when they were here before. She adores the painting of Saint Ursula sleeping in her bedroom while the angel pauses at the door bringing her palm frond of martyrdom. Why is she martyred? She fled her father’s marriage plan for her, taking along with her on several ships eleven thousand other virgins. He’d betrothed her to the barbarian Conan. She’s about to suffer her fate. She’s peaceful now in her lovely room with the little dog by her bed.

  By chance, Camille discovers the hidden-in-plain-sight Carlo Scarpa museum, actually his office design for Olivetti typewriters, right on Piazza Grande but inconspicuous. A place to fall deeper into whatever she’s falling into. She lingers on the details, the brass cylinders supporting the marble stairs, adamantly modern lines so quietly executed that they seem timeless, the sculpture on a square of water, always water, reminding you that you’re in Venice. Here I am, she thinks, with Scarpa, the amazing architect. I’m beginning a long romance with him. She returns to the bookstore and buys a detailed and illustrated Scarpa book, then rushes to the Querini Stampalia palace and garden for a quick look at the Scarpa revisions. Susan should be here for the garden. Camille raises her arms over her head and shakes back her hair. Now I’m on fire, she thinks. Timorous to tensile. She limps a little on the way back to the hotel but hums as she goes “I Set Fire to the Rain.” We must have a dinner with Colin and talk Venetian architecture. Scarpa loved Roman lettering; I’ll tell Rowan all about that.

  After dinner, she falls asleep with Scarpa, savoring what he loved: Japanese design, polished stucco, base materials used with precious ones, water, always for this son of Venice, water. Water, lapping doors, seeping under doors, doors opening to water, back doors opening to narrow streets, damp, water, the mind soaked, the body soaked and drifting.

  * * *

  —

  Seven hours later she wakes up with Charles in her vision from a dream of walking along Spit Creek in their backyard. No narrative: there he is, Saturday clothes, tennis shoes, just walking as he did a million times along the path to the bridge he built himself over to a short woodland walk. He’s going to see if the white cyclamen are blooming, Camille thinks as she hauls out of sleep. Then she is awake. She parts the drapery just as the prow of a gondola passes her window. From the canals of Venice to Spit Creek. Charles, good for you. I’m glad you’re checking on the garden.

  * * *

  —

  We spent our last day wrapping up their research. From Udine, we chased a lead up to Maniago, a town famous for the production of knives. Chris wanted to find one place his clients could find unique items to buy or import for their retail stores.

  The artisan knives could inspire elegant murders. Slim and sculptural, the stiletto points make you want to pick up one and perhaps pierce someone’s heart. They look way too refined to gut or skin something. I bought a jade green one for Colin. The handles are horn, antler, or the pretty colors of Perlex, whatever that is. Maybe he will cut the string on packages. (Oh, cut the umbilical cord.) After a brief visit to the cutlery museum, we knew all we wanted to know about knife making and drove back to Cormòns for our last dinner.

  * * *

  —

  Up early and on the road, Chris ramps up the sound of k. d. lang, all of us belting out “Hallelujah” and then her incomparable hookup with Roy Orbison, “Crying,” bare poplars on the roadside whizzing by, everyone happy with having seen new sights, Chris weaving around tractors, beating out time with the heel of his hand on the steering wheel, until we hit traffic and the van subdues, everyone in a travel trance. I fall asleep.

  * * *

  —

  Camille made her train easily, arriving in Padova station in time to wait and wait for the others. Their trusted navigating systems neglected to know about road construction. She’d been standing in front of the station for an hour before she sees the van swing into the taxi-stand lane, Susan leaning out the window, waving.

  “There’s Camille, look at her—she looks sort of disheveled but vibrant.” Susan threw jackets into the back so she could get in. “Do you suppose she met that Rowan in Venice?”

  Camille piles in. She’s picked up a sack of panini in the station. We fall upon them and Chris turns up the music again. Sam Cooke. All of them know the words to “You Send Me,” and “Change Is Gonna Come.”

  Outside San Rocco, the gang needs to organize. Chris stops at a supermarket and they gather supplies for the evening. He is coming to dinner and Camille has invited Rowan. Kit demurs, wanting an evening alone with Colin. They pick up Archie, who seems reluctant to rejoin his family after the tasty lamb bones, after being allowed to sleep on the foot of the bed and to run wild chasing dumb guinea hens around the farm. They drop off Chris at his hotel, and then Kit, who leaps out as Colin jogs down the driveway to meet her, his arms flung open and a big smile lighting his face.

  Susan turns into their drive and the three of them breathe a collective sigh. Great trip, but great to be home. As they slow to descend the driveway, Julia leans forward. “Oh, no. We left the front door open. Wait. We wouldn’t leave the door open.” A packing crate stands off to the right. A panel of light falls from the doorway into the garden. “The lights are on.”

 
Susan stops in front rather than driving around back as they usually do.

  “The door is open,” Camille repeats. “Damn! Someone has broken in.”

  “Maybe Grazia is here. But her car isn’t.” Julia slides open the van door. Archie leaps out and runs inside.

  “Archie,” Susan shouts, “come here!” She’s afraid that someone possibly is still inside. “Archie!” She irrationally leans on the horn. Silence. Julia and Camille get out cautiously and walk to the side of the house, to the kitchen door they always use, since they have only the big iron key to the front. Silence.

  Susan keeps leaning on the horn. If thieves remain inside, she wants their attention. The entrance looks normal. But Julia and Camille find the window by the kitchen shattered. A garden table pulled up underneath allowed someone to climb in. Julia points to two clear footprints. They walk back to the front and the three decide to enter together. Suddenly they hear someone from behind the house shouting their names. Here comes Leo, asking what’s wrong, uttering Madonna curses with every breath, what’s the matter, oh, Dio, and Annetta running up behind him almost squawking.

  Together they cautiously enter the house. The hallway looks normal. The first thing they see in the kitchen is Archie, transfixed and rigid in his best pointer mode, glaring at the kitchen fireplace. Three white kittens curl in a bread basket lined with a towel. Ample food and water surround them and their donor has taken the time to spread newspapers for their convenience. In the sink, plates and forks, two wineglasses. Julia recognizes the leftover pasta with ragù she’d left in the freezer. “Christ on a cracker, they had dinner.”

  “Can you believe the wineglasses? What wine did they open? Oh, where’s my cherry still life?” Susan notices.