Urban Venus

by Sara Downing

  I grab the brand-new notebook that I’ve labelled simply ‘Dreams’ and write down ‘Maria’ with a big question mark next to it. Then I cross out the question mark. Yes, I am Maria, I’m pretty sure of that, if nothing else.

  Ten

  The librarian dumps another pile of books on my table and scuttles off in her very noiseless, very librarian-ish sort of way. How odd that even Italian librarians, with heaps more flair in the fashion stakes than their English counterparts – silk shirt and well-cut pencil skirt replacing twinset and tweed – still have that authoritarian air about them which whole-heartedly conveys the message: ‘Make a noise, and I will ram the largest and most unwieldy volume down your throat and you will be barred from this institution for life.’ I’ve yet to meet a librarian who doesn’t instil the fear of death in me.

  Anyway that aside, here I am, in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. Or in other words, the biggest, grandest library Italy has to offer. And big and grand it certainly is; awe-inspiring really, just like the rest of this city. It’s another one of those buildings, two-a-penny in Florence, which don’t actually need a raison d’être; they are historical and architecturally significant enough just to exist as a work of art in their own right. But the fact that this one is crammed with books and other articles of reference makes it all the more inspirational.

  When I’d sat down yesterday to document my dreams and attempt to derive some significance from them, I expected to feel a sense of clarification about the whole thing, just by virtue of the fact that I was actually doing something. Instead the process has left me more baffled than ever. Where I’d thought there were images and memories that would pull everything together, vast gaps now yawn and I find I have even less of an idea where the dreams are supposed to be taking me, if indeed anywhere. Yet again I wonder if I have been reading too much into them. Is it just coincidence that I always fall asleep in front of that particular painting, or is someone, or something, a higher power of sorts, really trying to get a message to me, tell me a story? Despite my muddled brain, I still have this odd, underlying feeling that so much of this is ‘beyond my control.’

  As well as trying to catalogue the dreams, I’ve also taken Vincenzo’s advice and attempted to sketch ‘Maria’ from memory. When we’d gone out for dinner that night he was far more sceptical than I’d expected about the whole thing, so for a ‘non-believer’ to come up with an idea like this was surprisingly pragmatic. No doubt he will be amazed (as I was initially) that the image I’ve produced actually bears a striking resemblance to the woman in the Venus of Urbino painting. Looking for some affirmation for this train of thought, I’d decided immediately to back-track across town to the University, sketch-book in hand, to pay him a visit.

  ‘Well, you do spend hours in there, so is it any wonder your picture turns out like her?’ he’d commented tartly, his attitude once again dismissive as he returned with a shrug to rearranging the books on his shelf, his back towards me, mind clearly made up.

  ‘But that’s what she looks like, or rather, how I look in these dreams,’ I’d said to him. Why was I bothering? He is no more convinced that I’m not totally bonkers than he was on our night out together. ‘Don’t you see, I’ve even dreamt about having my hair done like her,’ I’d continued.

  I don’t know why I so desperately want him to believe me; his opinion shouldn’t really matter, but for some bizarre reason, it does. He’d turned to look at me with one of those half-pitying, half-mocking smiles of his, made to say something but then stopped mid-breath. Instead it was as though a light-bulb had come on in his head, and rather than uttering a small flippancy in an attempt to get rid of me, he’d climbed the library ladder propped against his vast bookshelf, reaching upwards to the top rack. What he pulled down and presented to me was a book about Titian – written by none other than our great Signore Di Girolamo.

  ‘Take this,’ he said. ‘It’ll get you started. And go to the library, too, there’s a ton of stuff on Tiziano Vecellio in there, as you’d expect. I don’t think you’re mad, Lydia, I just think you need to be careful. You don’t know what it is you’re getting dragged into here – but try and keep a check on reality, won’t you?’ Finally a sign that he was taking me seriously, but more than that, some show of concern!

  I’d left Vincenzo’s office feeling confused. After giving off signals initially that he thought I was nuts, then coming over all supportive and worried about me, I didn’t really know what to make of him. But once again I surprised myself just how much I wanted him to believe me. Finally I did feel I had him more on-side than off, and it shored me up a bit against the barrage of confusion that was – and still is – blasting around inside my head.

  I’d gone directly over to the library as Vincenzo recommended, the walk along the north bank of the Arno soothing me a little and providing some time to ruminate on my situation. I pushed on through what was easily the most bustling part of Florence, that patch around the Ponte Vecchio which never seems to be free of tourists, shopping and taking photos, whatever the time of day. Onwards I walked, past the southern end of the Uffizi, gazing upwards at the exquisite renaissance and gothic architecture as an escape from the hubbub of the sightseers’ enthusiastic meanderings around me.

  Approaching the entrance to the library, there was none of the flurry of the rest of Florence and with a huge sigh of disappointment I spotted the reason why: ‘Mercoledì – chiuso’. Damn. I just wanted to get on with my research, now I knew that research was what I needed to do. Trust the Italians, closing a huge institution like this on a busy weekday, with no regard for the fact that students like me might be in desperate need of something important which just couldn’t wait. I suppose we Brits have become an impatient race, getting too used to everything being open twenty-four-seven, always available on demand. Which isn’t necessarily a good thing for the culture of a nation, I suppose. I just hoped all those library workers were off somewhere exciting, enjoying the sunshine, to justify the frustration I was suffering that they weren’t here when I needed them. Oh well, it looked like I’d be back the following day then. At least I had Signore Di Girolamo’s volume to be going on with.

  As for today, my visit is a more fruitful one, and after three hours of library time my head is reeling. For an artist who is quite poorly documented compared to some of the other great masters of the Renaissance age, there is a veritable mountain of stuff about Titian in this place. The trouble is that the majority of books in here look to be mostly about his work and the purely historical facts about him, which is inevitable, I suppose. There’s precious little surrounding his private life, other than the bare-bones details about when he got married, to whom, where he worked, which commissions he undertook, all that sort of stuff, and even then some of the facts are pretty sketchy.

  Could the Tito in my dreams actually be Tiziano Vecellio? If Maria is the girl in the painting, then is he the artist, the man she is in love with? If that’s the case – and there’s a growing feeling inside me that it is – then these books aren’t going to bring me any closer to the real man behind the paintbrush. But then history books don’t do that, do they? Especially since many of these ones were written sixty or seventy years ago, a separate historical era in its own right. They are factual record books, and nothing more.

  Thinking back to my own history lessons at school, there was a lot of parrot-fashion learning, memorising kings’ and queens’ names and dates, and I clearly remember reciting the dates of Henry VIII’s wives and their fates as though my life depended on it. My Maria and Tito seem so far removed from that text-book memory of an era, when in fact is their very same era. At school, the ‘realness’ of history was never brought to life for me, but these two characters in my dreams are making it jump off the page and into 3D. I question what use I really have for these books, when I can get to know Maria and Titian more intimately from my dreams than from a dusty old tome, written by a long since deceased academic.

  History boo
ks just don’t tell you what sort of person someone was, what their likes and dislikes were, what idiosyncrasies they possessed. I can imagine having been heaps more engaged with Henry VIII if he’d been sold to me as an athletically handsome womaniser who, despite his great physical attributes, had some major insecurities about his own personal worth and just wanted to be loved. Instead he is portrayed as a war-mongering monster with a habit of despatching his wives in one form or another when he became bored with them.

  So maybe I am wasting my time trawling through all these books, particularly as the main issue for me is that although I suspect dear old ‘Tito’ to be Titian, under the pet-name which Maria has given him, and therefore a valid historical figure, I know absolutely nothing about Maria, and is she a significant enough person to have an entry on record? Somehow I doubt it. I have no idea who she was, other than the snippets I have gleaned from my dreams. I don’t even have a surname for her – maybe I will dream that later?

  I know she was a prostitute, albeit a high-class one with a very selective clientele, in Bologna; I think I remember that city being mentioned in one of the dreams….. But apart from that I know very little about her. Being a low-class citizen of her day, she was probably pretty invisible and there might not even be a record of her birth and death. One thing in all this is certain: the history books aren’t going to reveal any links between a world-class painter and a lowly whore, are they? I’m sure I could keep delving into the life and times of Titian himself until I’m blue in the face, but in doing so I may never learn another single fact about Maria. How frustrating it all is. However, being a glass-half-full sort of person and therefore not inclined to give up at the first hurdle, if there’s any chance of there being just one teensy weensy little snippet of something about her for me to discover, then I will stick at it. Hence the three fascinating but fairly fruitless hours I’ve spent here already.

  A beep from my phone brings me out of Maria and Tito’s world and back into my own. I see that glamorous-but-scary librarian scowling at me from across the room and smile my humble apology to her. I thought I’d switched it to silent, but never mind…

  It’s Leonora: ‘Need to see you, come to Café Strozzi asap?’ I feel a moment’s guilt that I still haven’t managed to catch up with Leonora after turning her down yesterday. She didn’t come back in till late last night, and I was already catching up on my beauty sleep by then. This time I can’t let my friend down so I send back by return of text-post: ‘In library, can be there in 20mins. Lxx.’

  I hope she’s OK. Leonora is one of those eternally good-natured people for whom life’s ups and downs don’t generally seem to cause too many hurdles. She’s had a pretty privileged upbringing from what I can gather, but it hasn’t spoiled her, and she’s just a gorgeous, kind and caring sort of girl. I feel bad about not being there for her yesterday and hope to goodness that there’s nothing too major troubling her. In the few months I’ve been over here, she has been my rock, and I owe an awful lot to her. Let’s just hope it’s a case of man-trouble, or something simple that can be ironed out over a coffee and a pastry. She keeps her love-life pretty close to her chest, so I don’t actually know if she’s seeing anyone, seriously or casually, at the moment.

  As I walk into the café, Sophia and Leonora are huddled in the depths of the smoky gloom – no chance of smoking being banned in public places over here, just imagine the outcry! – and its pungency hits me full in the face as I cross the room towards them. Leonora looks dreadful, her face pallid even through the olive glow of her complexion, her hair unbrushed, and she looks as though she hasn’t slept in days. What have I been missing here? I’ve been so caught up in my own dramas that I’ve failed to pick up on the fact that one of my friends is in trouble.

  ‘Lydia, so glad you’re here,’ Sophia starts breathlessly. ‘Leonora’s pregnant.’ Whoa, there’s nothing like coming straight out with it. I haven’t yet sat down but feel the need to very quickly as Sophia delivers this pretty major bombshell, and I pull out the one remaining chair at their table and park my bottom quickly before my legs buckle. I don’t know what to say. That was the last thing I was expecting and the ability to speak seems to have been knocked from me. As I look at Leonora properly, I realise that it was probably the last thing she expected too. Fear, worry, shame and horror all pass across her face in turn. I reach out towards her and pull her close, and she starts to sob gently into my shoulder.

  ‘I can’t believe I was so stupid,’ she says. ‘God knows, we’re always telling each other to be careful, aren’t we, and there you are, I go and do it myself. I can’t believe this is happening to me. What am I going to do? What’s my Dad going to say?’ Her concerns all start tumbling out, one after another.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’re here for you,’ I say, realising how insipid and patronising that statement sounds, but all we can really do in times of trouble is resort to such platitudes.

  Once Leonora has had a few moments to get over the initial shock of having to tell me, she expands on the details a bit more. Apparently the father is one of her tutors. What is it with these oversexed tutors in this place? Can’t they just get on with the job they’re meant to be doing instead of trying to get into their students’ underwear the entire time? I am furious with a system that allows this sort of behaviour to happen as much as it does, but then how difficult it must be to enforce a policy of ‘No student/teacher relationships’ when all the parties involved are consenting adults.

  Poor Leonora, I think, vowing that there is NO WAY I am ever getting myself into that situation. Life’s great plan for Leonora has just been rocked on its axis in one fell swoop.

  Eleven

  Bad idea numero uno, this was. Here we all are, the ‘gang’ in its entirety, in one of Florence’s loudest, trendiest, and bizarrely, gayest, nightclubs. The room is dark and noisy, the music – to give it its due – incredibly good, the drinks extortionately expensive, and the clientele, well, interesting. How we ended up here I really don’t know, but apparently it’s a variation on a theme cooked up by Dante, Lanzo and Stefano, with all the best intentions they could muster between them, called ‘Getting Leonora Out of the Apartment and Cheering Her Up a Bit’. Hmmmm, jury’s still out on that one, as Leonora is not currently up and dancing in some lurid, barely-there outfit, nor is she drinking herself into oblivion (the poor girl is pregnant, after all), nor does she appear to be having a particularly good time and partying hard.

  At the moment she’s hemmed in between what look like a couple of rejects from one of those once flamboyant, now middle-aged, eighties’ pop groups who have all been making a comeback recently. These two young and very colourful ladyboys appear to be having a bit of a lovers tiff and Leonora, for some bizarre reason only known to her, is acting as mediator. Returning from a trip to the bagno I decide she needs rescuing and park myself on the other side of ‘Blond-spiky-hair-lots-of-eyeliner’. Leonora quickly introduces him as Matteo, who, it turns out, is a fellow law student, although you wouldn’t recognise him if you saw him in his ‘day’ clothes apparently. The other guy, ‘Dark-asymmetrical-haircut-and-red-lips’, real name Alberto, is a ‘true’ Florentine, a local, and works in some administrative role or other at the arts faculty. Well at least she knows them both; it’s not as though a couple of complete – and slightly unconventional – strangers have foisted themselves upon her in the hope that she will sort out their tangled love lives.

  There seems to be a bit of a truce in this ‘Handbags at Dawn’ scenario as soon as I arrive on the scene, with both parties settling back into their seats and calming down a little. I suppose it’s one thing airing your dirty laundry in front of someone you know, but when a complete stranger – me – pulls up then it’s easier to put it all into perspective and come to the conclusion that the argument wasn’t worth having in the first place. Within minutes of my arrival, Alberto has wiggled his pert, leather-clad bottom round next to Matteo, arms have stopped being waved around windmill-style, and t
hey sit together, legs crossed neatly and holding hands as marital bliss reigns once more.

  I consider that maybe Leonora is having more fun than I’d first suspected, as she leans in to have a bit of a giggle and a gossip about this curiously surreal situation we find ourselves in. ‘You lot couldn’t have picked a better place to take my mind off things,’ she laughs. ‘What a distraction! Although I can’t believe what some of these guys are wearing in here. I thought all that went out with the turn of the millennium. I’d never have recognised Matteo if he hadn’t spotted me first.’

  A week or so on from her life-altering announcement, Leonora looks much better. She’s had time to digest the news, I suppose, work out what to do and get her head round everything. She’s been amazingly strong; she has decided to keep the baby – she’s in her third year after all so will have just about left uni by the time it’s born – and the father has said he will stand by her. That’s half-decent of him, I suppose, when it’s his career on the line too…. More than some would do. Although as far as I know, at the moment he is still in his lecturing position and barely an eyelid has been batted by the academic powers that be. Obviously that’s just the way it happens around here.

  ‘Fancy moving off somewhere a bit quieter soon?’ Leonora suggests, much to my relief as it’s nigh on impossible to have a conversation without some sort of semi-permanent damage to your vocal chords and a voice like a forty-a-day smoker for the rest of the weekend. However did I get to be so sensible and grown up?

  ‘Fine by me,’ I reply and set off to round up the others. None of them looks too engrossed in their current activity; they don’t take much coercing to down what’s left of their current tipple, or prise themselves from the dance floor, and within minutes we are heading off. As we move through the darkened streets in search of somewhere slightly more sedate to end our evening, Leonora is at the centre of our little group, as though to shield her vulnerability from the big, bad world outside.