Florence in Ecstasy

by Jessie Chaffee

  I find a pack of cigarettes on the bookshelf and take one and smoke it out in the garden and think back on the night. My panic before the calm. St. Angela’s words: There is in my soul a chamber.

  Were their ecstasies real? Luca had asked. There was no intermediary between God and myself, Angela said. She was so certain. Not fearful in her raptures. Even as she disappeared, consuming nothing, consumed by love, her confidence in that singular truth didn’t falter. I think of my refusal to look at my body, the impossibility of letting go of my own truth even as Luca gently asked me to consider a different one. Would it always require such coaxing?

  I’m reaching for another cigarette when I hear ringing inside Luca’s house—not the sharp shrill of a landline, but the manufactured tune of a cell phone, the melody unfamiliar. The ringing continues for what seems like a long time before it cuts off abruptly. I wait in the newly thick silence. Sure enough, the tinny tune begins again. I go back into the house, where Luca’s phone sits on the dining room table, forgotten. I watch it until the tune plays out. It would be intrusive to pick up, but who calls with such urgency on a Sunday morning? A few seconds later, it starts up again and I pick up the phone quickly but don’t say anything.

  “Luca, dove sei?” A woman’s voice, fast and confident, a sharp point of business in this slow morning. I say nothing, my face growing hot. A woman. Of course.

  “Luca, stai arrivando?” the voice continues. “Silvio deve partire alle due oggi.”

  “Pronto,” I say, as if I’ve only just answered, my voice rough from the cigarette and catching in my throat.

  “Luca?” The voice is confused now and the quality changes, as though the caller has taken the phone away from her cheek. “Ma questo è il numero di Luca. C’è Luca?”

  “No.” I explain, brokenly, that it is Luca’s phone, but Luca isn’t here, he’s just left.

  “Ma chi parla?”

  “Hannah. Un’amica di Luca.” A friend of Luca’s. Take that, whoever you are.

  “Oh?” The voice lilts up, light but laced with judgment, and suddenly I can see this woman, can see her eyebrows raise before her mouth settles down into a frown.

  “Allora,” she says then, speaking quickly in Italian, though she must know from my poor accent that I’m American. “This is Simona, Luca’s sister.” His sister. “We are expecting him for lunch. If you see him…” She pauses as though I’ve been lying to her, as though Luca is right here in the room with me, both of us naked and giggling at our little joke. “If you see him, Hannah,” she repeats, saying my name in a way that makes me wish she didn’t know it, “tell him that he’s late and we’re here waiting. Di nuovo.” Again. With a ciao, grazie, she hangs up, and I feel as though something has been lost. As if with that single word swinging upward—Oh?—she has taken something from me, from us.

  When I leave Luca’s house, the streets are empty and the piazza is silent except for music muffled by the doors of the church. I don’t call a taxi—I need to walk. The hills around Florence are threaded with roads, and there must be one that will deliver me back to its center. My body is buzzing with an excess of energy as I imagine Luca driving toward his sister’s house, where I’ve now made myself a presence. I pass through town quickly, stopping at a small bar for a bottle of water that I slip into my bag with my rowing clothes. I take one road until it dead-ends, then make my way back to the still-empty square and choose another road that curls out of town. Almost immediately, stone walls rise on either side of me. I eye the flowers and ivy that spill over their tops and imagine the beauty on the other side: olive groves funneling into valleys, green oases of cypresses, and, farther below, Florence trapped under the haze, where the shops are now closed but tourists are still tracing and retracing the city’s bones. I can imagine it all, but I cannot see any of it. The view is saved for those who live behind the walls, and the non-member is left to wander the negative space.

  A number of roads cross the one I’m on, but none look promising: the smaller ones are too risky—narrow and dark—and the larger ones hold their own dangers because of traffic. So I keep to my chosen path. It is level, and though I’m not going down yet, I’m also not going up.

  It is so quiet up here, an absolute silence I have not yet experienced, not even on the river. There is only the occasional cry of a bird and the wind moving through the cypresses. Nature finds its way in, and with it, the evening before, the awkward phone call, even the image of Luca arriving at his sister’s, become as distant as the city and dissolve into the solitude of my steps. Dry leaves dance, scratching the ground. The sun emerges full from behind the clouds, and for a moment there is nothing of me but my shadow.

  Rounding a bend, the path levels to reveal an intersection and three figures. A family: a man, a woman, and a boy. Their bikes are propped and they are looking at a sign that reads VILLA ALBA. They nod as I pass but don’t say anything, the young boy following me with silent eyes. Family. A concept so distant now, though I can remember being that boy’s age—frustrated by the imposed interruptions on any given outing, the adults always needing to stop, take a break, reassess. And I tethered by that invisible cord, unable to break free and make my own way. It was a time when I had, still, that feeling of invincibility so specific to childhood, when I didn’t think about my body, when it was nothing more than the necessary vessel I used to navigate the world. I wonder what Luca was like at that age, if his eyes ever looked so solemn as that boy’s, if he waited impatiently, tethered, too. I can only picture him smiling and charging ahead.

  I round another bend and the walls shrink, tapering until they reveal a stretch of land, a villa spreading yellow into the hill. Across the property a smattering of olive trees pitch away from the building, diving toward Florence, and I realize I’ve cut a long curve around the city without having made much progress toward it. If I continue in this way it will take me days to wind my way to its center. I need a faster route.

  The family bikes by me, the boy ringing his bell once before they disappear, and I am, again, alone. I follow their path, hoping this road doesn’t end around the next bend—because this home was a destination, must have been the destination, the long road I’ve taken only its driveway perhaps. But the family doesn’t reappear, which gives me hope, and after a few minutes I come to another intersection. Via del Rosario disappears up into the hills on my left. I take the road to my right—Via Virgilio, not too wide and not too narrow—and begin to descend.

  The sun is high overhead by the time that I stop. On the side of the road, the strong, twisting roots of an olive tree have created a jagged gap in the wall, splitting the stone. It is a mouth smiling sideways, welcoming me. I should keep going—I have no idea what time it is—but this opening beckons. Maybe it was seeing that young boy that urges me on. The freedom in knowing that there is no one here now to make me pause, rest, reassess; no one to tell me who I am or am not. And so I place my foot on the broken stone and, using the craggy roots as handholds, step up to find a large olive grove stretched out before me, a valley beyond it, the rise of another hill across the way. Ducking under branches, I creep in, staying low as though someone might leap out and cry, Trespasser! But there are no buildings in sight and these olive trees are not in use. They are overgrown, shrubs and weeds crowding their trunks. And unlike the pruned grove across the valley, the pattern of this field is invisible.

  I stand up straight, walk to the edge of the grove, and take a seat on the dry grass. Ahead of me is a familiar view. I’m on the other side of the horseshoe from Fiesole—I have come farther than I thought. The hill hugs the town and the sounds of Sunday echo across the valley and make their way cleanly to me—the crunch of gravel, a woman’s voice calling. Below is Florence, and I recognize the towers of each of the city’s churches, read them left to right, the length of Santa Croce ending in a triangle, the mast of the Bargello, the ballasted Palazzo Vecchio with its small lion unrecognizable but visible, the cap of the Duomo shrunken from here.


  In Fiesole, bells ring the quarter hour. A large jackrabbit runs by and two cicadas call back and forth. The sun is so bright that it cuts through the leaves and everything sways, everything moves. I have the sense that this place has been waiting for me to arrive on this day at this hour, each step of my journey funneling to this spread of sky. Involuntarily I let out a small, soft “Oh,” not rising like the Oh? of Luca’s sister, but level and filled with air and wonder.

  The bells ring short on the half hour and then again fifteen minutes later. Still, I don’t leave. I love this messy grove, love the rebellious tree that granted me access to it and the overgrown trees that now hide me, and I feel, again, centered. Wholly certain. Is this how Angela had felt? No one could convince me otherwise, she wrote. Even if the whole world were to tell me otherwise, I would laugh it to scorn. I knew that feeling, I knew that conviction. I’d held tight to it. And for what? I lost honor, dignity, peace, Margaret writes. I lost everything except faith. Was it all for faith? For the heart of Christ that Catherine felt beating in her chest, for the ring that was visible only to Clare, for the body Angela lay beside in a cold sepulcher? And always left wanting. I remember, then, St. Margaret’s words as she begged to be admitted to the convent, pleading in that voice that would not be sated. I have fled from the world… I have changed my life. Is it not enough?

  It is only when the bells begin to ring on the hour, echoing across the valley, that I realize that I haven’t eaten. I haven’t eaten all day. It is three o’clock and I haven’t had anything aside from coffee and a cigarette. For a moment, I feel flush with it, light. I used to do this—hold out until I couldn’t hold out anymore, triumphant as I became dizzy, high on my emptiness, the air around me vibrating with it, objects and people glowing through the fog. Right here in this moment I could give in to it, give in to the ease of it, ride it out, see where it goes. But I know where it goes. I know where it goes and I cannot go there. I cannot not eat, because there is this other path now that I need to see through. I will wait until the quarter hour, I think, wait until the next set of bells and then go.

  But then I decide to leave right away, knowing how even the most solid of bottom lines can become flexible and slide. I leave the grove with speed, propelling myself forward, pausing only to take care as I climb back down through the break in the wall. It feels as though I’m exiting a fairy tale, the modern world distant, the only darkness the silhouetted trees as I hop down onto the road, the only sound my feet hitting the pavement, loud. I am filled with the magic of the afternoon, changed by it. And in that instant I have again the sense of being ahead of myself, far in the future. Only this time I’m not afraid of that future woman, who would look back on the younger woman whose journey was more difficult, covered in sharp edges and dark crevices, finding her way for the first time to this place, uncertain of which way she would pitch or how she would emerge. I don’t look back then but walk quickly ahead before anything else takes hold. I leave the saints and their insatiable ecstasies, leave that lost woman. I walk quickly toward the city, toward food, toward all the things that are just beginning to grow.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Ciao, cara,” Luca says, when I approach the club the next evening. It is almost dark and he is waiting outside the green door. We’re going to a movie and it feels like an oddly American thing to be doing.

  “Allora, you spoke with Simona,” he says with a smile as we stroll to the theater. “Mi dispiace. Simona is un po’—come si dice?—in charge?”

  “Yes,” I say, relieved. “My sister, Kate—she’s the same.”

  “She is older, your sister?”

  I nod.

  “Ah, then we are both the babies,” he says knowingly, drawing me closer.

  The city is emptier than it has been, and a lone saxophone plays “Autumn Leaves” in the Uffizi courtyard to almost no audience, the sad melody slowly rising and falling. But I’m not sad now, walking with Luca. I’m full—not with saccharine elation but a sort of glowing calm.

  The movie is a second-rate American horror film poorly dubbed into Italian, and still we gasp at the arrival of each apparition—“My heart is in my throat,” I whisper to Luca.

  “Anch’io,” he says dramatically, his eyes wide, before grabbing my arm tightly and huddling close.

  He walks me home after the film, comes upstairs, and this time, when I invite him to stay, no voices stop me. I’m not as self-conscious as we undress, and we take our time, learning each other slowly. St. Angela doesn’t reappear.

  For the next two weeks, my life takes on an easy rhythm. With Lorenza back, I’m able to spend lunch hours at the club with Luca and the others, some days acting as coxswain, other days rowing alone. When it is sunny, we are out on the water. When it rains, we train indoors. After we train, I eat with them on the embankment below the ivy trellis that Correggio prunes every few days. I am tired, hungry, and eating becomes easier. Conversation is easier, too. There are few women here and the men are different—there are none of the side comments. They discuss politics, soccer, pick up a small detail and argue it loudly, every disagreement a sport. And Luca creates space for me. He is more comfortable at the club as well. The things that set him apart from his friends, the things he doesn’t have—the family, the overt machismo—don’t matter here. The men have the same conversations they had before wives and children and mistresses and divorces. They train together, eat together, spend every afternoon this way, the rest of the world dropped away. They’re well into their forties, but on the river, in the gym, on the banks of the Arno with a bowl of pasta between them, breaking off pieces of the bread that Luca arrives with tucked under his arm each day, they are thirty, they are twenty, they are teenagers around a table they have shared for years.

  I’m not a part of their history, but I am, more and more, a part of their present. And though no one states it directly, suddenly and without ceremony, Luca and I are a couple. Couplehood suits Luca, and when he turns to me midstory with a broad smile and puts a hand on my arm, I feel I’m witnessing him in his most natural state—as though he is more Luca when he is one of two. Am I more Hannah with him? I don’t know. I don’t feel like I’m slipping away. I don’t feel lost in Luca. But when I watch him bustling around his kitchen or observe him quiet, his face content, before he wakes, I cannot imagine tiring of these things.

  Evenings without Luca, I cook for myself and climb into bed early to read. At Lorenza’s suggestion, I’ve taken out books on art history to revisit the works I’d studied years earlier. On Sunday, when Luca goes to his sister’s, I take my walk down through the hills, stopping at the grove to let the afternoon drift for an indeterminate amount of time.

  I write Kate consistently, but no one else from back home. Not even Claudia when I receive a second e-mail from her that promises “good news!”—I delete it without reading on. When I think of my life before this, it seems further and further away. So distant that when I’m out on the water in my small scull, I can imagine letting it go, a leaf lost to the current. I don’t think of the past and don’t think of the future, but try to live as Luca and his friends seem to, always in the present.

  During the second week, the rain arrives. It rains consistently from one day into the next and the men agree, with long sighs, that the rainy season is here to stay, and now we spend each afternoon at the end of the boat-lined hallway in the training room. I arrive on Friday to find the room empty, all the men running late—being late is a given when it rains in Florence, I’ve learned. I choose my usual rowing machine, strap in my feet, and reach forward for the T-bar, pulling it back against resistance. By the time Gianni waltzes in singing, I’m exhausted. I nod at his reflection in the wall of mirrors and he continues humming with a smile. Behind me is the raised rectangular tank of water. Four oars float on its surface like the splayed legs of a water bug. Gianni settles onto the first of the four sliding seats at the tank’s edge, grips the oar beside him, and warms up with slow strokes.

 
A vent near the ceiling provides a partial view into the Uffizi courtyard. Feet go by, and some days I’ve seen faces appear, trying to locate the source of the club’s sounds—the whirring of the ergometer belts, the deep suction each time oars scoop water in the tank, the voices that echo through the hallways. On these rainy days, even two or three men bantering sounds like a crowd. Today it is too loud outside, though, windy and raining steadily, and no one takes the time to peer down at us.

  I hear Luca’s voice before I spy him crouched behind the rack of oars near the entryway. He peeks over it, then runs up behind me, and I laugh and pause to give him a quick kiss.

  “You’re late,” I say.

  “Certo. It’s raining,” he says with a smile.

  Sergio arrives with Stefano, and once everyone is seated, they begin making slow waves in the tank. In the training room, Gianni leads, and after giving the signal, he goes hyperspeed, grinning as the rest try to keep up, before settling into a regular pace. I miss acting as coxswain. When we train indoors I’m not really a part of it, even as I try to match their rhythm. I glance at Luca in the mirror. Under these harsh lights—his face concentrated, his hair stringing wet, each stroke sapping the last ounce of energy in his body until, miraculously, he musters the next—he looks older again. Thunder shakes the walls and I hear Correggio shuffling up and down the hallway outside, preparing to take the dock up onto the shore in case the rain becomes heavier, as it looks to this afternoon. Another round of thunder and the lights go out. The oscillation of the tank’s water stops as the men come to a rest. The only sound is the exhalation of my machine, the belt winding and unwinding. Then there is another sound above it.