Florence in Ecstasy

by Jessie Chaffee

  “Ah, okay,” Luca says, “but this is the problem. She was not crazy with love. She does not love me, non credo. I loved her. She was for me the only one. She was saying always she knew of this lady or that lady, but there was no one. Dopotutto, I think I was the crazy one, to not understand that she did not want me. I wanted her. I wanted marriage. I wanted children.”

  “And now?” I ask after a moment. “Do you still want those things?”

  Luca looks out over the dark landscape, his eyes catching the candlelight. The entire valley is in shadow. We are surrounded by darkness. We are a single light in all this darkness. It feels as though everything else is slipping away. It makes me sad, as though I’m slipping away, too.

  “Maybe it was my fault,” he says. “Non lo so.” And with that, a door closes.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

  “Non fa niente,” Luca says, his eyes coming back to our table. “You do not know me so well. I understand.”

  “It’s not that. It’s not you. It’s… I’ve had a bad time myself.” I can’t finish. I look down. Don’t cry. You have survived the bathroom. Don’t give the rest away now. Don’t be the woman crying in the middle of the restaurant, the woman who needs saving. You don’t need saving.

  “E poi?” Luca says gently.

  “Or maybe it was me that was bad.” Because who else was to blame? Leave me alone, I’d growled at Julian. Pushing him, pushing everyone, away.

  “You, bad?” He pauses, deciding, then says, “No.”

  “Well, you didn’t know me then.” I force a smile.

  “That you were bad? Non è possible.”

  I stare at the candle, pulling things back to center. I won’t cry now.

  “Allora.” Luca ducks his head down to catch my eye, his face bright again. “Too serious, no? We need something. Something sweet?”

  I shake my head.

  “Un espresso?”

  I nod, grateful, as he calls for coffee.

  On the ride home it begins to rain, and I watch Luca, who is no longer a stranger. He concentrates intently on the dark road ahead. The radio is tuned to a classic rock station and Bruce Springsteen is singing. Il Boss. You’d think Italy had more of a claim than New Jersey. His voice is everywhere—in the shops and cafés, at sporting events, in clubs and bars. All the associations I have with the music enter fleetingly before they are lost to the passing night. It is too distant, too difficult to try to incorporate old memories into this moment. The rain picks up, rushing toward us with force. Through it, I see the lights of Florence.

  “Che pioggia,” Luca says. What rain. He speeds as we descend into a valley and the city disappears again. “Povero Argo.”

  “Argo?”

  “My cat.” He smiles.

  “Oh. You have a cat.”

  “Sì. Argo. Like the dog of Ulysses.”

  “Is your Argo as loyal?”

  “He is a cat, allora, more independent. But tonight, for sure, he waits by the door. Crying, penso. The rain—I did not expect it. He is outside.”

  We climb up another hill and seconds later we’re approaching the Porta Romana. The streets are almost empty and the few figures we do see are hunched over without umbrellas. It feels cozy in the car and I don’t really want to go home, but then we’re at the river, crossing the bridge, and turning onto my street.

  “Eccoci,” Luca says, pulling to an abrupt stop. We sit staring ahead as though watching a film projected on the rain-splattered windshield, a kaleidoscope of light. I can hear the bass thumping in the bar.

  “So,” I say finally, “thank you.”

  Luca’s jacket brushes against his seat as he swivels, and then we are kissing. I lean into him, awkwardly bent in front of the gearshift. After a moment, we part, inhaling the warm air between us, this new atmosphere.

  “What do you want to do?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

  “I would like to kiss you more,” he says matter-of-factly.

  I put my hands around his neck and lean in to meet his lips again, slightly parted and surprisingly delicate on the outside, his tongue rough within. This is not a tunneling, but it is something. I remember, I remember, I remember.

  He pulls back and looks at me, serious. “I respect you.”

  I nod.

  “Davvero,” he says, “I respect you. It is important.”

  “I respect you, too.” I try to match the graveness of his tone but I can’t help smiling.

  “Oh, I sound stupid.” He looks out the window.

  “No!” I say, putting my hand to his face. “Not stupid. It’s good. It’s nice to hear.” I examine the crevices of his cheeks and neck with my fingers until he finally looks back at me.

  “You are a woman particolare,” he says.

  I don’t know how he means it. Unique. Peculiar. Before I can ask, he pulls me in and I stop wondering. I don’t know if this is moving backward or moving on, but it feels good, it feels earnest. I kiss the rough skin around his collarbone, feeling freer, feeling not myself.

  “Poor Argo,” Luca says between kisses. “He must wait nella pioggia. In the rain.”

  I laugh and finally pull away. “I have to be up early,” I say.

  “Va bene. Allora, vai, vai!” He grins, then leans over and gives me a kiss on each cheek. “But only if you say we see each other soon. Tomorrow? At the club?”

  “Okay,” I say, climbing out. “Until tomorrow.”

  “Povero Argo,” Luca hums as I close the door. “Povero Argo nella pioggia.”

  Chapter Eleven

  I was closer to something, I thought proudly. I was closer to something they couldn’t see.

  Until I saw.

  One afternoon in a shop window on Beacon Street, in a sliver of glass for a sliver of time, I saw. Everything was written across me in spaces and hollows.

  Boston hurried around me, cut through me as though I were no longer there. And I was no longer there. It was someone else in the window. She was alone. And she was disappearing. She was almost gone.

  Just before lunch the next day I find St. Angela.

  I’m reshelving books, grateful for the redundancy of the task, for the appearance of a new subject in my mind with each text as I slide it into place. In the daylight, the previous evening is unreal, me naked in the bathroom as impossible as the intimacy in Luca’s car. I had survived the night, more than survived it, yes—and still.

  And then St. Angela appears. I’m not looking for her, and if I were, I wouldn’t have looked here. The Book of the Blessed Angela of Foligno—a slim volume sitting on the shelf at eye level as though waiting for me. It doesn’t belong in this section. Someone had been careless. Lorenza would be horrified. I pull the book out. It is old, yellowed, and as I leaf through it, the pages seem as though they might disintegrate in my hands. The back cover is gone, the last paragraph ends midsentence, and there are no numbers on the binding. I flip through, looking for any other markings, and a phrase jumps out at me—

  I stripped myself of everything.

  —just a flash of words quickly lost to the turning pages. I flip back in the opposite direction, and then reenact the first motion, the crumbling paper fanning out behind my thumb, until I find the phrase again.

  I stripped myself of everything. Of all attachments to men and women, of friends and relatives, and even my very self.

  I read it and then read it again. The words find their way in, settle somewhere deep. And they do not settle gently.

  I stripped myself of everything.

  Last night, shivering and sobbing in the bathroom, the panic mounting.

  Even my very self.

  And then this morning, fear. Even before I remembered its cause, it was there. The knowledge that I had slipped, that past woman reemerging, violent and biting at my heels.

  And there is something else, something beneath the slip, beneath the impulse that drove me to the bathroom, drove me to my knees, stripped o
f everything, again, as it had so many times before. Even my very self. It is the feeling that it inspired. The familiarity of being in that place, even with the tears and panic. The certainty it promised, alone but not alone. I stripped myself of everything. I’d been eating better, sleeping better, thinking about it less, and still it had reappeared. The thing that says, This isn’t behind you, as though it would never be behind me, its hooks too deep in me to loose, and already I can feel its draw, can feel my old friend waiting, that friend for whom I’d lost everything before and for whom, I fear, I would gladly lose it all again. I stripped myself of everything. It is the last year of my life. It is every moment in every bathroom. Even my very self. It is every lie I told, every person I lost, every piece of myself that I let fall away—though the truth is that I didn’t just let it fall away, a passive onlooker. I stripped it away, actively, violently, proudly. All of it. Even my very self. It is as though St. Angela has reached out to me from the past and placed a hand on my heart and a hand on my throat. I stripped myself of everything. It compounds and compounds and compounds.

  And so instead of returning St. Angela to her improper spot and meeting Luca at the club as I’d said I would, I lock the library’s door, carry the book to the Arcelli Room, and settle in by the sunlit window. There is a brief introduction. Born into a wealthy family, Angela married young, and her transformation came only after tragedy—the death of her children, husband, and mother. She entered the Third Order of St. Francis and, like St. Catherine, she experienced a mystical marriage to Christ. The rest of the volume is Angela’s account, or the account recorded by her confessor, a Franciscan friar, and the translation is archaic. It opens with “Treatise I: Of the Conversion and Penitence of the Blessed Angela of Foligno and of Her Many and Divers Temptations.” The pages that follow are the eighteen spiritual steps that led to her conversion. The many ways Angela had sinned, the tests that she endured before she was saved. Then her instructions on how to live according to the controlled existence of faith. All solemnly penned, all carefully measured.

  But even though the writing is restrained, St. Angela’s devotion is not. When her mother, husband, and children die within months of one another, she grieves but is also grateful—the loss answers her prayer that she be freed of all earthly things. What kind of woman is grateful for her family’s death? I stripped myself of everything. And when Jesus appears to her, the images are grotesque: Christ shows her his wounds—the hairs plucked from his eyebrows, every spot where his body has been scourged—and instructs her to drink from the gash in his side. What can you do for me to match this suffering?

  The cadence of the words, the repeated language of love and pain, becomes hypnotic, lulling me.

  Until I reach step eighteen. I forgot to eat, Angela confesses.

  I forgot to eat. I’d said that phrase—used it—so many times. It was an easy cover, especially at the beginning. I wasn’t alone—women say it all the time, with pride, with pleasure. Oops! I was too busy. I forgot to eat. Though it is innocent, there is a challenge in it, too: Try to prove me wrong. Angela’s fasting isn’t unique, especially not for a devoutly religious person in the Middle Ages. Food is just one of the earthly pleasures she is stripping away. What is strange isn’t the fasting, but what it inspires. Because it is in forgetting to eat that Angela first experiences an ecstatic vision: The fire and fervor of such divine love in such a degree that I did cry aloud.

  And there is something that is missing, a gap between the loss of sustenance and the onset of visions. I reread the section—it is only a few lines—two, three, four times, looking for some acknowledgment of the connection between the denial of food and the moment of ecstasy. But there is nothing, no explanation for why these two experiences occur together in this final and, presumably, most vital step of Angela’s conversion. No sense that they are connected at all. They simply exist side by side. I forgot to eat. I began to have visions. The gap remains, unacknowledged. And it is this that gives me pause. Why? I am not Christian, am not enamored with the love of God that fills Angela. But there is something in it that I know, that is mine.

  “Hannah, you can’t forget.” This was the mantra of the doctor I saw at Kate’s insistence, waiting each week in a roomful of women much younger than me, some of them with their mothers, and I wondered if they were all waiting for my daughter to arrive. It was June, I was jobless, I was alone, and so my only task was the assignment she gave me: to keep a journal of everything I ate.

  “Everything?”

  “Everything.”

  I looked not at this doctor but at the photos over her shoulder of the smiling women, all younger, who must have been the lucky ones. Healed.

  One yogurt.

  One coffee.

  Two teaspoons of milk.

  It wasn’t hard. I’d been doing this for months already in my mind.

  One salad, no dressing.

  One apple.

  One piece of cheese.

  There was something about seeing it on paper, though, stripped down to its parts, that made it more expansive, even as each week this woman looked at the journal and looked at me:

  “And dinner?”

  “I forgot.”

  “Hannah, do you understand what will happen to you?”

  Three sticks of gum.

  One glass of wine.

  “This isn’t enough.”

  But it was more than enough, my bloated list a permanent reminder. It was too much for me to look at, though I did look—before our sessions I read over the words again and again, hoping they would suffice, like the people I used to see on the train each morning, hunched over tiny Bibles with their lips moving silently as their fingers traced the lines, the passages read and reread so many times that the pages wore thin and the ink smudged, one word bleeding into the next.

  In the Arcelli Room, the clock chimes one thirty, and outside on the river, a boat passes. Four bodies I know, Luca in the second seat, his features indistinguishable but his movements undeniably his own, and I almost duck before I remember that he cannot see me, the sun’s reflection off the windows hiding what would only be a tiny pinpoint of a figure to him. The boat disappears under the bridge and I keep my eyes on the water until it reappears going the other direction. Then I return to my reading. When the clock chimes two thirty, I unlock the library’s door, return to my desk. The men will be having lunch at the club, chuckling as Luca recounts our evening and confesses, perhaps, that I’m odd, sad, una donna particolare. Or maybe he won’t tell them anything. Maybe he is instead waiting for me to appear. When the clock chimes three, I imagine him leaving, confused at my failure to arrive.

  A few hours later, I lock the door behind the last student and return to my seat by the window, the river now dark and silent. As St. Angela describes her visions, I have again the sensation that this woman who lived so many centuries ago is here in the room with me. In ecstasy, she sees herself without a body and without a soul, as she had always wished to be… as if she no longer existed. I knew that feeling. I had felt something of it. I had disappeared, too.

  Where are you?—Julian on our last night together, when my mind kept drifting, when I couldn’t stay with him.

  How did you get to this point, Hannah?—Claudia after it all came apart.

  I defended myself to them, but I was lying. I was always lying in those days. I didn’t know where I was. And I couldn’t remember anything. I was somewhere else. I was someone else. I was gone.

  I am continually in this state, St. Angela writes. It seems I am no longer of this earth. And when I am in this state, I do not remember anything else.

  I arrive home to my phone ringing.

  “Ciao, Hannah. It’s too late to call?” As soon as I hear his voice, I remember his kindness the night before, the quiet way in which he coaxed conversation, the edge of regret he let show.

  “Ciao, Luca. No, no. It’s fine.”

  Then the warmth of his hands, his lips smiling when we kissed, and I c
rave him and want to believe that there is hope in this. That he won’t witness that other woman, the woman who lies.

  He asks about the day and I talk about work, though not about St. Angela. Then, finally, it comes: “So for this you did not go to the canottieri?”

  “Yes,” I lie.

  “Oh,” he says, “I was looking for you.” There is no accusation in it, only a bit of sadness. “Allora,” he continues, recovering quickly, “when do we see each other?”

  “Tomorrow? This weekend?” I say, and then feel foolish for being so completely available.

  “Sì.” He pauses. “Tomorrow I cannot, but Saturday, sì. In fact, there is a festival. We can go.”

  “A festival?”

  “Yes,” he says, the vowel bending. “For Santa Reparata. I explain Saturday, va bene?”

  After I hang up, I try to hold on to his voice, to the hope, to the things that are real in this, my new beginning. But the day has changed me. St. Angela has changed me. There is in my soul a chamber in which no joy, sadness, or enjoyment enters, she wrote. And who would not defend that place that is for one’s self and only for one’s self, that cannot be touched by the criticisms of confessors, by the insistent pull of earth, by the sharp blows of existence? It is isolation, but it is also ecstasy. It is both and all. My soul languished and desired to fly away. It is the last thing I read before I drift into strange dreams of burning flesh, blinding light, eyelashes raining from the sky.

  Chapter Twelve

  Is there any saint who can tell me something of this passion which I have not yet heard spoken of or related, but which my soul has seen, which is so great that I find no words to express it? Saturday afternoon I’m reading, still, this book on St. Angela, tucked into the corner of the Arcelli Room during lunch. But it is past lunch when Lorenza Ricci’s voice shakes me from my reading. Lorenza, who will be leaving me in charge beginning on Monday.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize how late it was.”

  “What are you reading?” is all she says.