Florence in Ecstasy

by Jessie Chaffee

  The Unnamed Press

  P.O. Box 411272

  Los Angeles, CA 90041

  Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © 2017 by Jessie Chaffee

  ISBN: 978-1944700416

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937451

  This book is distributed by Publishers Group West

  Cover design & typeset by Jaya Nicely

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to info@unnamedpress.com.

  For my parents, Heide and John, and my brother, Joshua.

  And for my husband, Brendan.

  And then at once she was filled with love and inestimable satiety, which, although it satiated, generated at the same time inestimable hunger.

  — The Book of the Blessed Angela of Foligno

  You imagine the carefully-pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn’t. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it’s in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.

  — Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  This morning is every morning. I’ve been here almost a month, and still I wake too frequently, too early, to the buzz of mosquitoes, gray light, and the window shutters swinging open and closed. I wake from violent dreams filled with strong winds and slamming doors. Bodies thrown against windows loose in their frames, frames loose in their sleeves. I wake in Florence, afraid. The shutters swing open and each time I catch just a glimpse of the Palazzo Vecchio’s tower against violet sky before they swing closed again. The image is familiar now. This empty apartment is mine. Still, this is not quite life. On this morning, I relight the citronella coil and walk to the window. In the alley, a man puts on a magenta helmet, climbs onto a moped, and pulls out onto Via Malenchini, the last to leave the bar below. Once he’s gone there are only the birds that shoot past my window like darts thrown screaming from an unseen hand. It is feeding time.

  I wait, as I do every morning, for the sun to come into view. When it does, it shines at such an angle that the hidden city emerges. I no longer see edges and perimeters. Instead, the roof tiles, drainpipes, plaster walls, cobblestones, and glass panes become a single canvas for the pattern drawn by this glow. All I see is the pattern, etched in light and shadow. I am in a new place, unmarked and alive. This moment is an answer, a stopping point. This morning is every morning. This is when I do not feel alone, when I feel held by this city. Until the sun is fully up and the pattern fades like exposed film, the rooftops, drainpipes, stones, and windows regaining their edges and returning to the foreground. Another long day stretches ahead. But something is shifting.

  I walk to the bathroom, pull my T-shirt up over my head, let my pants drop to the floor, and drag the orange scale away from the wall. It rattles across the blue tiles, catching in each valley. I adjust the needle to zero. Not cheating—never cheating—I watch the numbers spin like a slot machine until they stop, predictably. “It’s good,” I say aloud, running my hand along my face, my arm, my stomach. “It’s good,” I repeat, overly decisive and sober, trying to coax my reflection into agreement. Today, I think as I dress, tie back my hair, and climb the three stone steps to the kitchen, will be different.

  I open the long slatted doors and step out onto the small balcony, which is so steeply pitched it feels like it may topple into the courtyard below. It is one of the reasons I took this apartment, even when the landlady quoted the rent and I felt my stomach drop. She felt it, too, saw the fear in my face, and showed me another place, smaller and darker, said, Much better price, in her raspy voice, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t. I needed the light. The other one, I said, the bright one, as she eyed me skeptically and repeated, Caro, caro, caro. It’s not a problem, I lied, I need the light, the light, the light. When I pass her on the stairs now, she always gives me that same look.

  It is the end of August. For weeks the other windows have been quiet and dark, except for the apartment across the way and one floor down, where an old woman sits all day, her arm spreading on the sill. She is sometimes staring out, sometimes cooking sauce I can smell as steam climbs out and over the terra-cotta roofs. But even her window is vacant this morning. The Italians have fled the cities for the coast, and all over Florence there are handwritten signs taped to shop doors. CHIUSO PER FERIE FINO AL 1 SETTEMBRE. The type of scrawl that normally says “back in five”—only, in this case, it’s “back next month.” The signs do not deter the tourists who fill the piazza around the Duomo, who line up at dawn to be the first into the Uffizi Gallery, who haggle and hassle at the Mercato Centrale, who shout at the buses that lumber down the narrow streets and heed no one, who walk the bridges with gelato dripping down their hands in the evenings and watch Italian bands playing the Beatles. A manic, frenzied movement repeated day after day, night after night. They are looking up, always up. Up at the frescoed ceilings of churches; at the parade of Madonnas in museums; at the oversized head, hands, and feet of the David; at the performers dressed as mummies who move only at the sound of money in their jars; at the buildings edged in angels that circle and circle.

  I am no different. I still cannot cross Piazza della Signoria at night without looking up to the golden lion at the top of the Palazzo Vecchio, to the harsh glare of Neptune who rules the fountain outside, to the writhing sculptures in the loggia at the piazza’s corner—lit from below, the Sabine woman twists and twists out of the grasp of her attacker, all that stone tapering from the massive base to the single point of her finger reaching toward the sky. There is something more, it says.

  Chapter One

  “Signorina.”

  Signora Rosa. Such a delicate name. She must be someone’s grandmother, stout and soft with a halo of white hair; this had tricked me into thinking that she would be soft with me. But she is all hard edges. No sooner have I closed the door than she is there on the stairs with that same side-eyed look. Why? It is almost September. Almost a new month. Only cash, she’d said when she agreed to rent me this bright apartment, even though it was caro, caro, caro. Only cash. Up front.

  “Signorina,” she rasps. A term meant for someone much younger than me, a little girl, and I’d like to upend her assumptions, tell her I had every intention of paying her, but I can’t form the words. Instead I mumble, “Sì, sì, mi scusi, momento,” and scurry around the corner to the bank to face my dwindling funds. I have enough to get through September, and that will be it. Every last cent. But as soon as I hand her the bills in that old stone lobby, I feel free.

  And then I walk. Every morning I walk, circling the bones of Florence, treading a well-wo
rn path through the bodies of transients to whom I am invisible. Today I walk until my skin is on fire and my legs are slick and shaking. Until I’m ill with the smell of sewage that the heat pulls from every crevice. Until I grow dizzy and my mind grows numb and I arrive at the place where I always end these walks: by the wall of the Arno River at the city’s center. I lean into it, feel the heat coming off the stone, feel the bodies pressing against me, tourists burrowing in to snap photos of the Ponte Vecchio, their cameras storing the same image again and again.

  The rowing club sits below on a narrow embankment in the bridge’s shadow. It is a launching point for the boats that, even in this heat, cut lines up and down the lazy Arno. For days I’ve watched from this perch the young Italian men carrying sculls down to the river. There is something calming in their movements, in the quiet way that they shoulder those boats, like pallbearers, and lay them down on the water’s surface.

  But today is different. Because for the first time, a woman emerges on the embankment, a boat balanced on her shoulder, oars balanced on her hip. She is alone. She is at ease. I watch as she lowers the body into the water, slides one oar into the metal U-ring, then the other. She pauses, glancing up and down the Arno—there is no one else out yet, it is hers alone—then steps carefully into the shell. She nudges the dock with one hand, and the river offers no resistance as she pushes off gracefully, adjusts the oars, and begins her course, making her way toward the next bridge with purposeful movements. It is a separate existence, one far from this city with its crush of bodies and sounds and smells. I watch until she disappears from sight, a single body at peace.

  Tucked into the busy street behind me is a green door that I have also watched on these mornings and, beside it, a small plaque—SOCIETÀ CANOTTIERI FIRENZE, it reads, “Florence Rowing Club”—half hidden by a vendor’s cart heavy with belts hanging thick and dark like vines. To the right is the long courtyard framed by the arms of the Uffizi Gallery; to the left is this green door.

  Today will be different. I inhale sharply and push against bodies, launching myself across the street. But before I reach it, the door swings open with a rush of cool air, and a group of teenagers clambers out, jostling by me with a chorus of permesso, scusi, permesso. Another figure is behind them. A man, tall, with dark hair brushed back.

  “Attenzione, ragazzi,” he calls as they disappear down the street in an explosion of sound. “Scusi, eh?” he says to me, his hand propping the door. The skin gathers around his eyes in bursts as his cheekbones stretch to accommodate an expansive smile. I feel surrounded by it.

  “Dove va?” Where are you going?

  I look past him into the darkness, my face still hot from my walk, my dress sticking.

  “Mi dica,” he says then.

  Tell him what? “Questa è la Canottieri Firenze?” The words catch strange in my mouth, half swallowed.

  “Sì, sì.” He gestures for me to enter. “Che cosa vuole, signora?”

  “Vorrei…” I put my arms out to the surroundings, foolish, and I can smell my sweat now. It smells sour to me, acrid, like an infection—it has for months, and I don’t know if it is my sense or the odor that has changed. “To join,” I say finally, hugging my arms back to my sides.

  “Va bene,” the man says, and chuckles. He pushes the door open wider. “Allora, you must speak with Stefano.”

  “Grazie,” I mumble, scooting past him into the dark foyer.

  “Certo. Arrivaderla, signora, arrivaderla.” I hear him still laughing until the door abruptly shuts, taking with it the heat, the light, and this laughing man.

  I walk down a flight of steps, blind until my eyes adjust—an office glowing fluorescent, another door. There is no one here. I should leave. But I think about the woman on the water, and then I hear distant punctuations of sound that must be human. Stefano. I cling to the name and keep going, through the door and down more stairs. I am tunneling into a cave, a warren, down and down until I reach a low stone doorway I have to bend under to clear, and when I do, I’m accosted by the smell of coffee and sweat. A little bar filled with tables, and daylight beyond. An old man in a unisuit looks up from his paper, squinting like an angry gnome. I wait for him to ask me a riddle, but he shakes the paper and lowers his eyes.

  Behind the counter a man with a white mustache fills a glass with bright pink juice. He’s watching me. “Buongiorno,” he says. “Americana?” He places a spoon in the glass, then points to himself. “Manuele.”

  “Hannah.” I relax. No riddles, no tricks. “Is Stefano here?”

  “Anna,” he says, losing the h. “Anna di…” He raises his eyebrows.

  “Di Boston.”

  “Anna di Boston—ecco Nico.” He nods at the old man, who sighs and shuffles to the counter.

  “’Sera,” he mumbles, before taking a sip of his juice.

  Manuele winks, then calls, “Stefano!” and a third man appears in the sunlit doorway. He’s tall and deeply tanned, his mouth a sharp line. Manuele speaks to him too quickly for me to follow until I hear “Anna di Boston.”

  “Hannah,” I say. “I’d like to join. The man upstairs told me—”

  “Sì, certo.” Stefano’s smile is still tight, his brow now furrowed. “You row?”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  I hesitate. I know how I must look to him—it is written across me in spaces and hollows. But I’ve come this far, and so I continue. “No. I’d like to learn, though.”

  Stefano says nothing, then, “Va bene. You’ll learn. Andiamo,” and gestures for me to follow him out into the sunlight. Above us, the Ponte Vecchio sprawls, a triple-bellied beast, reflections catching in its arches and water pouring between its supports like a churning shadow. Tourists lean over the river’s wall where I stood moments before, but that world is distant now. It feels like the city itself has opened up, as though I’m peering out at it from the inside.

  “Oh,” I exhale softly.

  “Bello, no?”

  I look around for the woman I’d seen, but the river is empty, and there is no one on the stretch of grass or the long brick steps that lead to the Arno’s edge.

  “Today it is quiet,” Stefano says, “because of vacation. But tomorrow people will return.” Then, in a mixture of English and Italian, he explains that this was originally a stable for the Medici horses. As he speaks, his smile loses its tension. He is the club’s manager and his father was before him.

  “Hey, Stefano,” a young man says brightly as he passes us on his way down to the dock.

  “He’s American, too,” Stefano explains. “A student.” He leads me back inside and shows me the locker rooms, the weight rooms, then walks me down a dark, boat-lined corridor—at the end, an old man is tending to one of the sculls, laid out like a body before him. He gently polishes its bowed wooden sides.

  “Ciao, Correggio,” Stefano calls, before leading me into a room crowded with rowing machines. Against one wall is a raised pool of water, four sliding seats balanced along its lip. “For practice in the bad weather,” he says. “This is a special room. You know why?” I look at the quiet ergometers, the placid water, our reflections in the mirrored wall, until Stefano points to the ceiling, smiling wryly: “Uffizi,” he says, letting me in on the secret. “C’è state?”

  “Of course.” I smile, really smile, for the first time in days, maybe weeks. We’re right below the museum. I imagine the crowds wandering the galleries above, and that could be me, had been me, and yet in a month, a day, a single afternoon, you can become something new, can become undone but also transformed.

  And so when Stefano tells me the cost of membership and says, “It’s okay?” I nod, though I barely have enough to get through the month, but still I nod.

  “It’s perfect,” I say.

  “Okay. Tomorrow my assistant is back—you register with her. Then you begin here, in this room—to practice, to learn, okay? One week, two weeks. And then the river!”

  “So quickly?”


  “Sì. Certo. And why not?”

  “And why not,” I echo, taking the warm hand he offers me.

  Before I leave, I walk up and down the hallway lined with wooden boats. They are overturned on shelves, spines raised, bodies stretched, stacked floor to ceiling in rows running from the largest eight-man boats to the small one-man sculls at the far end. I have the sensation of the past hovering just below the present, as I so often do here, my own past leaping out, fast and fierce, and suddenly I remember. I walk slowly, examining the names stenciled in white block letters along their sides—FORTUNATO, BOREA, PERSEFONE. I search for inconsistencies in the repeated symbol of the red-and-white rowing flag that ripples across each boat, trying to find a place where the human hand had wavered.

  Boston. The museum was dark. It was a Monday in July and after hours—it had been planned this way, so that I could come and go barely seen, and now I was going, or was supposed to be. I ducked into the bathroom, eyed my face in the mirror, hollowed. I threw up.

  Then I walked through the vacant galleries, clutching the envelope—a severance, handed to me with lowered eyes because I had brought myself to this place, to the bottom—until I reached the painting. A sea-filled nocturne. Blue and silver, but up close, mostly gray, a fog heavy with shadows, the only break in the haze a few orange gestures, the brightest near the center—a fire on a distant shore?—but so faint and far off you knew you’d never reach it. That was how I had felt. For years, maybe. As though everyone around me had figured something out that I couldn’t quite grasp. And so I remained in this fog.

  I was exhausted, in fact I could barely stand, but still I stopped in front of this painting to stare at that bit of orange near the center, that place beyond this place where I found myself, inexplicably. I put my hand out to touch it—and why not? what could they do to me now?—to touch, only lightly, that vanishing point where everything disappeared and came together. It was a shallow valley, rough under my finger. I felt the events of the previous months slipping away. I felt a door opening, the crack widening into something I could slip through.