Florence in Ecstasy

by Jessie Chaffee

  In Boston, I would look over the rooftops, leaning out my window with my stomach resting against the radiator. I knew that landscape, its edges and extensions and how they all connected. Knew the pinpoints within it—the people and places of my past and my present, the constellation of my existence. I held that periphery always in my mind. I did not realize then, but now I know how much I held. I did not think then, but now I know that every time I spoke the name of a street, a neighborhood, a friend, I was saying, too, This is mine, this is mine, this is mine. Now I am a single point and the distance of my gaze: that field to the left, that edge of trees to the right, these girls before me.

  The listener reaches back into her bag and finds a little package of dried soup mix and a tin of crackers. The girl who is a painting finally abandons the novel and slices the cucumber thin onto a napkin on the seat between them. Then I watch them both, concentrated and silent, place the cucumber on the crackers and sprinkle the secret mix on top. It is a meal they have stolen from their mothers. Their task complete, they glance up at me and I turn back to the window, embarrassed. I am known somewhere, I want to shout. Late June. It is impossible that it was less than three months ago. I stood at my sister’s window, looking out. The world below was a toy set: the tops of trees, bodies stretched out on a square of green, a playground, and, beyond it all, half hidden, the Charles River. It was manageable, reasonable, ordered. I wished I were a child looking at those pockets of life. I wished I were a child reveling in spring, anticipating the summer, the days growing longer. I didn’t know what to attach my unhappiness to—loss, work, stress. Julian was the easy one. Leave me alone, I’d said. Until he did.

  Kate’s apartment was a clean slate, untouched by wars and recession. You could stand in her living room—with its white couch, white walls, nothing to compete with the view over that toy world—and believe that none of it had happened. But it had happened. It was real. And what had happened to me was real, too.

  “You can see the river in the winter,” my sister said, coming to stand beside me.

  “I lost my job.”

  “I know,” she said quietly.

  “I embarrassed them in front of the board. That’s the only reason. They wouldn’t have cared otherwise.” There’s more, but Kate didn’t need to know about the rest. She wouldn’t understand.

  “It doesn’t matter now. You need to take care of yourself,” she said. She was a mender, the mender since our parents split, our father disappearing into a new family, our mother disappearing into work, unshaken and unshakable. She was not a mender, my mother. She was a pull yourself together. Kate was both. A survivor and a mender.

  “You can stay here. Give up your apartment.”

  “I’m subletting.” I wished I’d beat her to it. “I have a plan.”

  “What plan?”

  “I’m going to leave Boston. Get away for a while.”

  “For god’s sakes, Hannah. I’m sorry, but this is serious. You need help, not a vacation.” She said nothing for a moment, then softly, “When did this start?”

  I stopped breathing. She was thinking, I knew, of my near tears over dinner, when I’d admitted to her what she’d already figured out. I was a child, a child.

  “It wasn’t Julian, was it? He seemed so nice. I still don’t understand why—”

  “Stop trying to blame something.” Julian was nice, had been nice for months, and then concerned, and then suspicious, like Kate. And now he was gone and the ache remained. It had been there long before him, and it always returned, like an old injury before rain.

  “I’m alone and I’m fine,” I said, turning to face her, turning on her. “What else do you want?”

  “I just want you to be—to be yourself.” Kate said this in the same voice she had used on the phone that morning. That voice that had found me in my bed where I’d been for three days, unmoving. It was a voice that could break my heart if I let it.

  “I am myself,” I said louder. “Quit trying to help.” I should have stopped there, but I was angry. I was so angry. “Maybe you’re the problem. You think I don’t notice you watching me? You watch me all the time. I’m not an experiment.”

  She dropped her head.

  “I know what you’re doing,” I said, “and it’s not helping. I wish you’d leave me alone. You’re not helping.”

  She put her hand to her face, but I continued throwing words at her, hard, until she whispered, “When did you slip through the net?” and began to sob. Still I kept going until she went into her bedroom, locked the door, and I could hear her on the phone. I stayed by the window. It was getting dark and people were leaving the park, filtering out through different gates with languid steps.

  She doesn’t know what I can be, I thought then, looking out over that ordered world. There were these things that I could be. I just needed to get away from the eyes, from the watching.

  Following signs that lead me through the original walls, I walk into the old center of Siena. It’s early afternoon, the church services are over, and the shop windows are dark. Only the occasional coffee bar is open, the interior a cool rectangle broken by no more than one or two bodies gripping espresso and glancing up at a small television. Soccer.

  The streets are tighter than Florence’s and the buildings on either side too close to me, slicing the sky into narrow strips. Siena is an older generation, cloistered and closed, and I feel trapped with nowhere to look but up at the church towers or down at my feet. Medieval. So this is what it means. Tunneling between buildings, I find my way to the only open space, the Piazza del Campo, a cobbled Tilt-A-Whirl of a square edged in cafés. I visit the unfinished duomo, then drift to the edge of town, to a church balanced high on one of Siena’s hills. It is massive but plain, and a worn wooden door on its side is almost unnoticeable. The door is open a crack, and I enter to find a similarly sparse interior, cool and hushed. I like the simplicity of this space—the walls are light stone, the ceiling wooden beams. I would like to stay here to read and write and think. I would like to stay here to wait for answers. I breathe out and then in and catch the scent of incense. Halfway up the nave a woman kneels by a side chapel, but otherwise the basilica is empty. As soon as I take a few steps, however, a priest appears. He is small and old with tufts of white hair around his ears. He squints at me, smiling, his lips folding into his face, and offers me a tour.

  “Grazie,” I say, and then realize my error. He begins speaking rapidly in Italian but with such excitement that I don’t stop him. He takes the edge of my sleeve and leads me to the back of the church, to a small fresco.

  “Conosce Santa Caterina?” he asks.

  I nod. Catherine of Siena. I studied her in college—or paintings of her, anyway, and this one is familiar. She wears a black-and-white habit and holds a stalk of lilies. It is pre-Renaissance—her features are flat, her almond eyes lowered without expression, the proportions slightly off, and she has a greenish glow. Eerie. On each of her hands sits a drop of blood, the stigmata. What else? She had visions and ecstasies like St. Teresa, I think. And she claimed that she had married Jesus in a dream.

  We stand for a moment longer, the priest gazing up at the portrait and shaking his head. He looks close to tears. Then he takes the edge of my sleeve again and we are off—he speaking and I not understanding, his feet shuffling along the marble floor with a shhh, shhh, shhh, and I try to step more lightly. He walks me up the left side of the church, stops at several paintings along the way, gestures to the ceilings and I catch a series of dates. When we get to the front of the cathedral, he points to each of the stained-glass windows, naming them. Then he leads me to a chapel that is frescoed on three sides. At its center is a small ornate shrine, a mini-cathedral.

  “Questa è la sua testa,” he says gravely.

  “Her head?” I ask.

  “Sì, her head,” he confirms.

  Indeed, within the shrine is St. Catherine’s mummified head shrinking into a crisp white habit. The cheeks are sunken, the nos
e almost gone, the upper teeth visible, the eyes closed but the eyebrows seemingly raised. I look around to see if there are any children who might be traumatized by this medieval mummy, but it’s only me and the priest and St. Catherine now.

  “E anche il suo dito.” He gestures to a glass case off to the side where a single finger, crooked, points heavenward.

  “Her finger?”

  He nods happily and points upward, too. He keeps smiling—this must be the end of the tour. He shakes his head when I offer him money but gestures with great enthusiasm to the frescoed walls of the chapel and bows slightly before disappearing.

  I leave the dismembered saint to herself and look at the frescoes, which piece together Catherine’s life. These images are more relatable. They must have been painted a century or more after she died. They have perspective and expression, and instead of a blank background, Catherine is out in the city, architecture and landscape behind her. In one image she is collapsed, receiving the stigmata. She looks upward in ecstasy, her body not her own. On another wall, she prays for a man’s soul as he is executed. His head, like hers, has been torn from its body.

  The third fresco stops me short. St. Catherine, right hand raised, stands over a young woman possessed by demons. A crowd has formed, but the people peer at her from behind pillars or hide their faces, shrinking back from the scene. Cowards. Only St. Catherine is calm, her eyes down, her raised hand unmoving. The possessed woman writhes on the ground beneath her, her arms straining up at unnatural angles, her head thrown back.

  Which of these women am I? The one straining madly toward something unseen, or the calm one looking on? I have been both. In this past year, I have been both. I have been the madwoman screaming, straining, digging ditches around the bone. Sculpting.

  When did this start?—my sister’s voice, a flat note as she watched me disappear. And still I could not stop digging, could not stop sculpting. I would be well sculpted. But I was not mad. I was calm. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t see that I was not only taking away. I was reaching for something. I was creating.

  I stand for what must be a long time in the little chapel in front of this fresco. Catherine’s face belies nothing as she gazes at the possessed woman, but even the saint, I decide, was more than her patient reserve. I look at the first painting of Catherine in ecstasy and then back to the image of this writhing woman. They seem the same, and I wonder if, in looking at this madwoman, St. Catherine recognized herself, frozen in one of her ecstasies, envisioning. Of course, she had been told that the woman was inhabited by an evil being, not God. Still, it seems to me that Catherine is looking in a mirror, and I wonder if she realized this and if it struck her as odd that she had been asked to heal her own reflection.

  I stop in a gift shop, the only place open, and find a book on the saint’s life. But as the train pulls out of the city at dusk, I can’t focus on the words. I put the book on the seat beside me and close my eyes.

  I see myself already back in Florence. For a moment I am in two places at once. It is always this way when you travel. You exist in two places at once, as two people at once. There is the place you are now and the imagined place you are going, where you are already wandering streets, having dinner, strolling back to your hotel. There is the you that is here and the future you already there, smiling and confident. And that future place is not a busy intersection in Florence at night, or a darkened alley where words chase me. It is not the place I feel I am perched, always precariously perched, these days. The future place is better and in it is a better me. Not the me riding lonely on a train, running from everything I knew and everything I was, but the me that is knowing, flirtatious, unfettered, savvy, healed. The thought is reassuring, but then it turns and is terrifying. That future woman is not me and I know how she will look at me, the past her. I know how she will pity, patronize, want to expunge, destroy. She will say, I remember what I was, before I learned. She will want to erase what is mine. But this is me and this is mine. This lonely train ride is mine, too.

  Out the window is a parade of shadows and I am a single point in the dark, one lit window passing by. This is the first day, I think, looking out at the darkness and seeing suddenly my own face. This is the first day of the rest of your. The rest of your. The rest. This is the first day. This is the first. The rest. Your life. Then: The rest of your life. What if this is the rest of your life?

  But this is the place where I am: on a train in the dark. And, in truth, the place that I’m going doesn’t exist. She does not yet exist.

  Chapter Four

  At the stadium the next night, the crowd is roaring before the game has even started. The rain has kept no one away. As I take out my ticket by the entrance, I hear my name and I see someone running toward me, his umbrella flying behind him.

  “Hey!” He grins once he’s upon me. The American student. His cheeks are red, his nose dripping. “I’m Peter. From the club.”

  “Hannah.” I put out my hand, but he swings an arm around me, gives me a wink, and exclaims, “I know!”

  We enter together and I scan the bleachers for familiar faces as we make our way closer to the field where the serious fans cram together, all purple and red, the colors of the Fiorentina.

  “Isn’t this amazing?” Peter shouts as we pull out our tickets for another official and walk down a level. “First game of the season. I bought a scarf at the market, even though it’s too warm for it. Damn, this is great. Ever been to a game?”

  “No, I haven’t!” I try to match his enthusiasm, an impossible task, especially as I’m beginning to feel uneasy. High Plexiglas walls on either end of our section separate the home fans from the visitors. I look across and down, across and down, and finally see a row of red windbreakers that identify the club members, Stefano and Luca somewhere among them, but before we reach them I feel a hand on my arm—Francesca.

  “Ciao!” Her eyes are wide, encircled with dark makeup. “Come here, you two. Sit by me.”

  I want to join the rest of the group, but I don’t want to go down there alone, so I squeeze past Francesca and take a seat next to the clear wall. She and Peter immediately begin speaking in Italian, and I look away and find an old woman staring at me through the divider. Beyond her is a sea of bodies, all in yellow. The Parma fans. I turn my gaze to the field, where the players are warming up. Aligned behind the goals are police officers with guard dogs and guns. Francesca and Peter are still completely caught up in each other and I try not to listen in, try not to judge this woman, who had cautioned me with such alarm but who clearly has her own plans for this much younger man. This boy, really. Can’t she see that he’s a boy?

  There’s a gust of wind and I cross my arms tight, wishing I’d brought a jacket. I spent the afternoon with St. Catherine, reading in a park near the river. She was born to cloth-dyers and her parents had hopes of a good marriage, but she had a vision of God at age six—saw him quite clearly hovering above her, blessing her with the sign of the cross, as she walked one of Siena’s narrow streets—and from then on she thought of nothing else. When she turned twelve, her mother tried to take her out to be seen, to attract a husband. Instead, she shaved her head and wrapped it in a scarf. She refused visitors, slept on a board, and wore a thin cross-covered chain with small hooks around her waist, pulling it tight so that it drew blood when she moved. Take that is what those hooks said to her parents, to her would-be suitors, to the people who didn’t believe her visions. Believe this. That was as far as I got when it began to rain, the skies opening up and drenching me.

  The whistle begins the game, and instantly I can see nothing as all the spectators have risen. A flare gun goes off somewhere in the stands, and the guard dogs shift uneasily as smoke descends over the stadium, obliterating the figures in purple and yellow. There is history here tonight, centuries of competition on the faces of the people shouting around me. These regional rivalries run deep. Tonight it is Parma, but it could be any team.

  “Great, huh?” Francesca
roars beside me.

  Mariotti, the great hope of the Florentine team, has the ball. He flies down the field, his long hair trailing behind. He has a casual ruggedness that has secured him a spot on the cover of every gossip magazine. He misses a goal and the Parma fans begin to chant, “Vaffanculo! Vaffanculo!” Fuck you! Fuck you!

  As if in response, Francesca weaves her arm through Peter’s.

  “Are you coming out after?” she asks twenty minutes into the match. There is a postgame party at a dance club owned by one of the rowing club’s members. “Mariotti is supposed to be there. But who knows if he’ll show his face now, huh? Anyway, you must come. It’ll be fun.”

  There’s another surge from the crowd before I can answer—the Fiorentina have scored—and a large man pushes between us, fist raised. I try to speak around his protruding middle, but as the big belly falls back, Francesca’s face—her eyes wide, her mouth open and laughing—turns away from me and into Peter, her thin fingers grasping his cheeks. Then they are lost to the crowd as people jump up on their seats and I feel pressure against the backs of my knees. My right side is pressed into the divider, and there is no room now to even step back onto my own seat. The shouts around me rise and meld until a song grows out of the chaos, the tune familiar. Francesca’s voice climbs in sharp staccato, breaking off only when I squeeze her arm: “I’ll see you at the party.”

  I slide by her and then Peter, who continues belting out the song, his eyes luminous. When they reach the chorus I realize that it’s a version of “Yellow Submarine”—“Fuck your yellow submarine,” maybe. I push through bodies and fight my way up toward the exit. I’m almost there when I feel a vibration against my shoulder and turn to see a young boy—his hair slicked back and his yellow Parma jersey pressed against the wall—glaring at me and pounding on the glass. He begins shouting, “Vaffanculo! Vaffanculo!” And how could he know that his curse is wasted on an outsider? I continue to watch his busy lips until they are obliterated by a great wad of spit that makes me jump back even as it is caught, squashed, on the divider between us.