Florence in Ecstasy

by Jessie Chaffee

  We dance from the hot pool to the cold, together and then separate. I swim laps while Luca stretches out on his back, drifting on the water’s surface. Then we both rest our heads on the ledge, hands together, and stare at the sharp blue of the sky. By the time we look around, the pool is empty. Free of spectators, we kiss until I begin to shiver in spite of the warm water.

  “Andiamo,” Luca says between kisses.

  I take my time in the locker room. After I shower, I moisturize my whole body—my skin is dry and flaking from the spring water. I feel content, in a warm fog. Somehow this feels like our first date again, and I dress slowly and wonder where we’ll go next. I stand under the dryer for a long time, running my hands through my hair, which still has a faint odor of sulfur. When I step outside, it’s colder and the baths are closing up for the day. I see Luca, his back to me, pacing where the parking lot drops off into the valley. I feel enamored with the shape of his shoulders and the slope of his arms that have become so familiar.

  I catch up and walk just behind him, smelling the sweet, clean fragrance coming off his body. He is thinking intently and doesn’t hear me. Finally I reach out and grab hold of his sleeve. He turns and a smile, almost apologetic, stretches across his face as he comes out of his trance. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a bottle of water.

  “It is very important to drink now, sì? Otherwise you become sick.”

  “Dehydrated,” I say, taking a long sip.

  We stop at a walled medieval town not far from the baths. It is perched on a hill, and the buildings stand crooked where the ground has sunk. It is desolate except for several old women who sit outside on folding chairs, and children whose voices echo but whose figures we never see. We take a table outside the one open bar.

  “A sandwich?” Luca asks.

  “Sì. And also a coffee.”

  “Americano?”

  I feign insult at the offer of regular coffee. “Un caffé normale!”

  “Okay.” He smiles, the word lifting and stretching again, before he ducks inside.

  Across the street, the late-afternoon sunlight pools on the uneven windowpanes, and in the alley between buildings, floral-patterned sheets blow in the breeze, forgotten.

  Luca returns, followed by a very young waiter who smiles shyly as he sets down our sandwiches, coffees, and a small plate with two powdered pastries—more bones of the dead.

  “For the holiday,” he says to me, his English stilted, and hurries back into the bar.

  “Very nice,” Luca says.

  We eat the sandwiches quickly, hungry after hours in the water. While Luca is paying, I take my espresso as a shot and then eat the bone cookie. When he reemerges, he’s on the phone, and he waves to me and holds up a finger before walking in the opposite direction toward the end of the street where the hill drops off. It seems like there is nothing beyond this place, the day’s vistas a false memory. I watch Luca’s back as he approaches the edge of town, imagine that he might just keep going into that nothingness. I wonder what shape he would leave in his wake. It has a shape to it, loss. The contours of the missing, the angles of absence. When my father left. With Julian. And then with myself. Less distinct with my father, the lines softer, broken by his brief appearances. With Julian, it felt inevitable. But the loss of myself was something altogether different. Where are you? he asked. But even as I could clearly see my own edges changing, the flesh falling away, I didn’t feel loss. I had that other thing with me. It became a part of me, in the way that people do. They bleed into you, stay with you even when they’ve gone, the shape imprinted. Like Angela after ecstasy, the absence acutely present, palpable and growing.

  Luca returns without saying anything but leans over to wipe some sugar from my lip, followed by a kiss.

  “Is everything okay?” I ask as we walk back to the car, our arms brushing lightly.

  “Sì,” Luca says. “This was my uncle, Silvio. I have a dinner with him.”

  “Tonight?”

  “We must speak. To decide some things.”

  “About your father?”

  “Sì.” He pauses, clears his throat. “Tomorrow he goes to the coast, so it must be tonight. I forgot.” He squeezes my hand. “The water made me crazy, no? Mi dispiace. Allora, I will take you home. I would invite you…”

  “Of course not. It’s your family.”

  “Also, Silvio is a little strange.” Luca speaks quickly, as though he’s been waiting to say this.

  “Strange? How?”

  “Lui è molto tradizionale. Capisci?” He looks at me, concerned.

  “Traditional.” I put my hands in my pockets and watch my feet.

  “Sì. He would not understand…” He gestures between us.

  This. He would not understand this. Because I’m younger? Because I’m foreign? Because I don’t quite fit here? I remember his sister’s Oh? And in Luca’s silence now I hear it—that absence that keeps returning.

  The bells of the town’s crooked church start ringing, and he puts his arm around me. “It’s okay?” he asks for the second time today.

  I don’t answer but slide my hand around his waist. I’m tall compared with most of the women here, but he is taller still, and we walk the rest of the way out of step. He pauses after he opens my door, taking in my expression.

  “Why would you tell me that?” I finally ask. “What does that mean? That you want to end things?”

  “No! No.” He takes my hand, but I pull it loose.

  “Or is it some sort of warning? That this can never be anything more than… whatever this is. Jesus, I’m not asking for anything more.”

  Luca sighs and looks back up at the town. “Non lo so. Mi dispiace. I don’t like that Silvio is like this. But sometimes I think of it. I think of the future.” He looks back at me. “I try to imagine what it would be. Because I like being with you. But my family—they are not easy. Not even for me.”

  “It’s okay. It doesn’t matter.”

  “No, Hannah. It’s important. Really. For me, this is good. Isn’t it good for you?”

  “It is.” I sigh. “It is good.”

  “And what do you think? Do you think of the future?”

  “Of course.”

  “E poi?” Luca asks, waiting for more. But I don’t know what to say. He knows so little about me. If he knew who I was—who I really was—would he still be speaking about the future? I feel far from him.

  “I’m tired,” I say. “It’s okay, really. I’m not upset.” I duck under his arm and climb into the car.

  “Va bene,” he says softly.

  We don’t speak for much of the ride home, the radio tuned to the same station, and Luca hums along softly as Bruce Springsteen cries about dancing in the dark.

  “Cazzo,” Luca says when we pull up to my building. “I am an idiot. We had a beautiful day. It is a holiday. We should not end it like this. I will call Silvio from home.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sì. Sono sicuro. Silvio wants things only one way. But we can speak on the phone.”

  And minutes later, we’re climbing the hills back to his house.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Time picks up. Each day, we lose a minute of light, and now there is the suggestion of winter, arriving later than it would have at home, but still it has arrived, the air cold as soon as the sun goes down. I feel the wind shifting, carrying with it the smell of chestnuts from the vendors who are roasting the seasonal treat in all the major piazzas, anticipating the revelry to come—and in this, there is a question. Where will I be when nature takes another turn, cycling and recycling, and winter sets in for good? Because this is no longer the Florence of my arrival, but it is also not the city of the previous weeks, autumn holding on and on.

  When I sit out on the balcony in the morning sipping my coffee, I wear a coat and hat. Across the way, the old woman still stands guard, but the scent wafting from her apartment has changed—I smell meat and, occasionally, something sweet and light. The
shifting season, the shorter days, the approach of the holidays that I will or will not participate in, all make me feel I need to come to some sort of decision. And my other life, the one that runs on a parallel track but miles away, reasserts itself. Claudia writes me again—“Hannah?”—and again I delete the message. But the messages from Kate I can’t ignore: Will I be home for Thanksgiving? For the holidays? Where will I be when the decorations go up, and the club closes its doors, and the Duomo and every other church fills, and… and… and… And then there are the questions about Luca. Though our routine has remained unchanged, and Luca is the same, I imagine more often that world to which he is attached in which I don’t belong, and the questions about the future crowd in, crowding him out.

  I respond by digging into my life here. I take a longer route to and from work. I begin ticking things off an invisible checklist. I buy a cookbook and try out Tuscan specialties. Bread and tomato soup, stuffed calamari that leaves my apartment reeking of fish. “Buona,” Luca says, smiling through the stench.

  I’m reading all the time now about the art this city holds, going deeper than I ever did as a student. I seek out the pieces I haven’t yet seen. Lazarus miraculously raised from the dead on the walls of the church of Santa Trinita. The frescoes tucked away in the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine. In one, Masolino’s wooden Adam and Eve accept the apple with hollow smiles. In a mirroring panel, Masaccio depicts their expulsion from paradise, bodies melting, faces horrified.

  And a week after our trip to the baths, I go to the Uffizi. The last time I visited was in August, on my second day in the city, jetlagged and delirious. The museum was packed and it was impossible to get close to any of the art. But now it is November and an hour before closing, and so there is no wait and little noise except for the sad song of the same lone saxophone. The museum has thousands of works from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, but I don’t make it past the 1400s on this trip, spending most of my time in one of the first rooms with three different versions of the Madonna enthroned. Two are flat, sober Marys, elongated heads tilted down at odd angles, arms stiff, corpse-pale hands clutching an equally alien child. They are both seated before the gold backdrop of Heaven, outside of place and time. It is the third painting that holds my attention. Up close, I understand, for the first time, its power. Because out of these solemn Madonnas—and all the virgins on all the altarpieces before them—this Mary, Giotto’s, sways sensually into the world, her eyes wise, her royal-blue cloak falling away to reveal her breasts, two globes shining beneath the soft folds of her white shift. She is framed by the architecture of the day, and the angels, drawn in perspective, reach toward her with bright hands, and at her feet are vases of flowers, real flowers, the kind of flowers that come from the earth. Mary holds the rotund child with love but without concern, in the same way that she is unconcerned about the veil slipping back off her head, and her not-so-sorrowing almond mouth approaches a smile. Giotto has created a marvel. She’s the first real woman since antiquity—and she knows it.

  I’ve made it to only the fifth room, where an altarpiece depicting the life of my old friend Santa Reparata has stopped me, when a guard arrives to announce the museum’s closing. And so I move quickly through the rest of the galleries, taking in the bodies growing into their humanity, the repeated female faces looking down at a child or glancing with fear at an approaching angel, Venus on a shell and, centuries later, stretched across a bed, knowing.

  “You need at least three full days in the Uffizi,” Lorenza tells me the next morning. “Did you see Alessandro Allori’s Isabella de’ Medici?”

  I shake my head.

  “A beautiful portrait, but a tragic story—she was killed for adultery. Strangled. Just awful. Did you see the Lippis?”

  I feel inadequate, as I sometimes do around Lorenza. I cannot remember all the specifics, only bodies and eyes. “I don’t think so.”

  “There are two. Filippo and Filippino, father and son. I prefer the father’s work. He was a monk, but he painted beautiful Madonnas—always the same woman. A nun.” She pauses for effect. “His lover.”

  “Really?”

  “There are plenty of sordid details in that museum if you know where to look. They ran away together—Filippo and the nun—it was a true Renaissance romance.”

  Later I find the paintings in the oversized reference books. The pieces done by the Lippis—both of them—are ethereal. Allori’s portrait of Isabella de’ Medici is disturbing, though. The young woman with the pouting lips and ivory neck is so far from the accusations, real or created, that would end in the strangling of her older self. How did such events get set in motion? When did she realize things were out of her control?

  I cook and eat and read and observe and kiss and make love as the days grow darker and the air grows colder, and suddenly it is mid-November and holiday lights are creeping up—it seems every night there are municipal workers perched on ladders to string a star, a basket, a lit canopy, along another cobbled street. And I think, Already? and then, Where will I be?

  I run into Pam on a Friday afternoon. I’m leaving the library as she enters with a group of girls. She waves them on and stays to chat with me, exuberant until I ask about Peter.

  “You haven’t seen him? He hasn’t been in class, and when he was there, it was like he was a ghost or something. Maybe he went home. Do you know what happened?”

  I shake my head—it’s the least I can give him. “He hasn’t been at the club, either.”

  “Huh.” She looks at me with doubt.

  “Only one more month of class. You must be excited. Back to real life, right?”

  Pam shrugs and pulls her scarf tighter against the wind. “I don’t know. It’s funny—I’m really starting to like it here. I kind of can’t imagine leaving now.”

  “I know what you mean,” I say, and I want so desperately all of a sudden to ask her advice, this woman who is so much younger than me, but she’s already on to the next thought.

  “Yeah, well,” she says, smiling, “it helps that I have an Italian boyfriend. Anyway, good luck. Say hi to Peter for me if you see him, all right?”

  On Sunday, Luca leaves for his family’s and I return to the grove. As soon as I climb through the break in the wall, time collapses, as though nothing has occurred between my last visit and this moment, as though my existence in this place is a continuous line, uninterrupted. I settle in the brush overlooking the city and stay for a long time. I look down into the valley and think of home, valleys and valleys and a sea and then an ocean away. I examine the twisted gnarls of the olive trees and the parched grass that is always so dry it is hay. Why is it that the grass never grows while the olive trees flourish, absorbing all the nutrients, all the life? Why is one supported and the other not? And then I think of my old life and wonder if I was just in the wrong place, like these low-lying grasses.

  The sun drops, painting the tips of the leaves. The colors and sounds are different from last time. There are evening insects now, and a crow calling insistently. On the other side of the valley, the scene washes out with the twilight. It grows lavender, blue, and then gray as the sun leaves it in shadow and Luca’s town fades into the monotone of the hillside, a blank canvas for whatever might appear the next day. The crowing and buzzing rise and then pause as the sun descends. Just before it sets, everything is still, even the wind, as though anticipating the night ahead. And then Florence comes into focus, no longer hidden under the sun’s bright eye. Its own lights twinkle on and claim the evening, beckoning. I look at my feet, sloping down, toes pointed toward the city as though I’ve mounted a sled, the light fading and fading around me. I exhale into the view. And then I decide that I’m not ready to leave. Not yet. There are things to be done. There is something to be done. There is something I’ve forgotten to do. I wait for the last bit of light to disappear before making my way down my familiar path in the dark.

  “Will you be home for Christmas?” Kate asks.

&n
bsp; “I think so. I’m not sure.”

  “Well, let me know,” she says. But there’s something behind it.

  “What?”

  “It’s just… there are things to manage here. There are bills. There’s the apartment—”

  “But it’s subletted.”

  “And I’m managing it for you. The way that you left, well—”

  She stops, and I can hear in her hesitation the ways she’s been careful with me, the things she hasn’t said. I hear her holding it back, until I say, “I needed to deal with this in my own way.”

  And then it spills out of her. “You just left. You left a mess, Hannah. Do you think it’s easy to answer for you all the time? To act like I know what you’re doing? To worry about you and check on you and not know if you’ll even call or write?”

  Her words try to pull me in, but they don’t. I feel too distant now. “I’m sorry, Kate. I didn’t ask you to cover for me.”

  “It’s been months. I have my own kids to take care of. I mean, there’s a limit. It’s just like when you were sick. Nothing’s any different. It’s so… so…”

  “What?” I prod.

  “It’s so selfish,” she says, and then immediately, “I didn’t mean that. I’m worried about you.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I’m okay. I’ll sort everything. I will. I just need a little more time.”

  She sighs. “And, Hannah? Please don’t get angry—but be careful. This Italian guy isn’t going to fix everything.”

  I bristle. “This isn’t about him, Kate. It’s about me. This is about me fixing me.”

  I have a life here now, I want to say, even if it’s not quite like yours. But she’s right about one thing—I am selfish. And I was selfish before. I couldn’t see anything beyond myself. And at the same time, I didn’t care if I lived or died. That stopped mattering, too. And isn’t it better for me to be here now, far from her, than a shadow of a person with her? I escaped it, I’m surviving it, I have more flesh on me now than so many months ago. I… I… I… It was selfish, is selfish, and yet I couldn’t have gotten out of it in the way I’ve gotten out of it here. And as I sit on the balcony later that night watching the stars come out, I breathe a sigh of relief not to be leaving yet, selfish as it may be.