Let the tongue of the flesh be silent.
They were erasing, but they were creating.
I saw a fullness, a brightness…
A persona, a voice, a belief in something more.
…with which I felt myself so filled that words failed me.
The body disappears, language disappears, the self disappears, but something remains. Something beyond language.
Wholly true.
They had God, but what did I have?
Wholly certain.
Why was this where I found my meaning?
Wholly celestial.
Why was this my anchor?
For you will have understood…
Why was this my answer?
…that you cannot understand.
I was born in the wrong time, I think.
This is my last thought.
Chapter Twenty-One
My phone is ringing. My head is pounding and each shriek punctuates the pain. I listen until the wailing stops. It is probably the library. By now Lorenza will have discovered my late-night activities, the empty shelves. I’m in my bed—I must have found my way here during the night. I watch the shadow of the shutter move across the wall, listen to the city humming outside. It is light, but I’m not sure what time it is, what day it is. I concentrate on the details in the room: the faux-gilded mirror frame curled in a smile, the dark armoire in the corner, the wool blankets piled heavy on top. If I stay here a few more weeks, I may need those blankets. The radiator turns on and off without warning and this apartment could grow cold. I think about the books still in the kitchen. There is more to read but not with this pain in my head. I feel light, like I might disappear. I drift off again.
I wake sometime later to the sound of music across the way—a piano. Scales and scales and scales. The pain in my head is gone but there is an ache in my stomach. I can’t remember when I last ate. Time is bending. I try to fall back asleep, but the pain persists. I throw off the blanket and walk to the kitchen, take the pitcher of water out of the fridge, and pour myself a tall glass. There are ways of tricking your body. This is one of them. I drink the entire glass and look at the clock. It is just before three thirty. It will be dark again soon. I pour another glass and stand out on the balcony. I’m dizzy as though I’ve been playing in the sun too long, holding hands with someone and spinning in place. In my backyard. In my backyard. And now the courtyard is off-balance, moving just slightly. Focus on a single point. I remember my legs tucked into the wooden shell, remember gripping those wooden handles. Focus on a single point. And slowly the vertigo passes.
But the pain will not be ignored. I go back inside. My options are limited. I take out a box of crackers. Stale, but I eat one, then another. Still, the pain lingers. I open the refrigerator. Mozzarella floating in a jar. I take out the jar and lift the cheese from the water, let it drip over the sink. I cut off one thin slice and then another. The third I place on a cracker. Then one more of the same. I drop the cheese back into the jar and return it to the fridge, snap the cracker box shut. I feel awake, better, and I sit down to continue reading, but the old feelings return immediately.
Doubt. Regret. Guilt.
I begin with the crackers, stack them one on top of the other. I can’t remember how many, not exactly.
The cheese there’s no way to account for. I can feel it moving inside of me.
And the wine—I cannot think about the wine. I know better than to convince myself that it doesn’t count. Everything counts. And now there’s nowhere to put it all. Why had I eaten?
I feel the pull from the end of the hall. I squeeze my eyes shut and then open them. It is probably broken anyway. I stand up, walk down the hallway, my bare feet sticking with each step, and into the bathroom. I slide the scale away from the wall, drop my pants to the floor, pull my shirt up over my head. I step on. It is freezing and I can feel my flesh rise into goose bumps as I wait, the scale shuddering beneath me. The wheel spins. It is not broken. It was never broken.
It stops.
The numbers stare up at me.
Heavy.
How could I have let this happen? It is too much. Too much weight, too much wine, too much guilt. I’ve added instead of subtracting. I feel it all expanding in my stomach. I will never recover from this. Tomorrow I’ll be even heavier. I lean down over the toilet and throw up. But not all of it, I don’t think, not everything.
I get dressed, walk back to the kitchen, and look at the books fanned out across the table and floor. There are no answers here. There are no answers. The problem is mine and only mine, and now I’ve made it worse instead of better. It’s not real, Pam had said, sitting on the curb in Cortona. It is real, I’d wanted to say then, but maybe she was right. Maybe it’s only because it’s not real that I have survived here for so long.
And still it had returned. So much talk about this disease, so many doctors, so many studies, so many voices. And still it has been here for centuries, and still it exists, continues to exist. Like a rat or a cockroach, a pest capable of outliving us all.
The pain at the center of me is howling now. I pour a glass of water. This is what you get. This is it. I’m pouring another glass when the sound of the buzzer crashes through the silence. My hand shakes and water spills across the counter, and my first thought is not Who is it? but How do they know? The empty bottles, the strewn books, my bloated body come momentarily into focus. I hold my breath. A minute passes. I set down the glass, begin to sop up the spill. But the buzzer sounds again and then again, the shock reverberating off the wall. Then the phone is ringing. It is a full-scale attack. When the ringing stops, the buzzer kicks back in, a long moan. I cover my ears until it cuts silent. I wait for a full minute. Then I walk to the living room window on tiptoe. I can see a figure on the street below. The head raises and I duck back but then remember that my apartment is dark, hiding me. I peer down again. The person is no longer looking up but down at his wrist. I recognize the jacket, the hair, the stoop of his shoulders.
Luca rubs his hands together. He looks up and down the street. I remember. He buzzes again. I remember my panic that first evening at his house. There is in my soul a chamber. His hands framing my body. I remember his kindness. But what would he do with this? He could not sustain this. It would not hold. It is too heavy for him. It is too heavy for me, too, but I can bear it more easily alone.
And then I see the door open and Luca disappears inside. Someone’s let him in. Sounds in the stairwell. Voices, confused. Then steps and more voices, rising and rising. I walk down the hallway, not breathing, steady myself against the wall. Luca’s voice and then the rasp of that witch, close now. What are they doing? They can’t, they can’t.
A knock on the door, loud.
“Signorina?” Signora Rosa.
“Hannah?” Luca.
Don’t breathe. Don’t breathe. They’ll have to leave.
But he’s trying to convince her to open the door, calmly and then not as he argues with sharp words I’ve never heard from him, his voice interrupted by the stubborn rasp, that rasp that I am suddenly grateful for. She will not. She will not. There are laws, after all. And she is all hard edges. She will not. Then the voices descend and I go back to my window. Luca steps into the street. He glances up at my apartment, and I want to cry out with the tenderness that finds its way to the surface, and then I think I will call out to him, ask him to come back, fill this apartment with life. But it is impossible. My time with him is so long ago—it seems like years ago that I woke up beside him. There is no way to reconcile it with this moment. I stay silent. Luca turns and walks to his car. His head is bent. He looks broken. But what can I do for him? Nothing. This is not the woman he knows but it is the woman I am. I have nothing to give him.
And now this place isn’t safe. Not anymore. He may come back. It is time to go.
The sun attacks me. It doesn’t seem like winter with all this light—an orange hue growing deeper by the minute. The color is nauseating and
I’m sweating in spite of the cold. I can feel the food in my stomach, can feel the wine, can feel all of it heavy within me, thick and slopping side to side, absorbing into my form. I squint as I walk, but I cannot make out details. I pass the silhouette of a woman, shoes clicking—Claudia? But she’s gone. She’s been gone. I put my head down. I must seem mad. I turn around when I reach the corner to look back at my street, a river of light and bodies, my apartment tucked silent and dark above it.
I keep going. I almost collide with two silhouettes of men rounding the corner—we dance right and then left, right and then left, until they laugh and split around me. I wipe my face on my arm. What do they care? A bell cries out somewhere far off. I need to get to the water, follow it east, find my way up to the grove. I turn onto a busy street and am hit with sound, evening noises stampeding with vibrancy and volume: the bars packed for the aperitivi, jammed with bodies and laughter; the cars rattling in an endless line down all the streets and funneling toward the bridges; the shopkeepers closing metal gates with a definitive crash; the bells of churches all over the city crying, Evening, evening, go home, come out, to the hills, to the city, to the family, come, come, go, go. I arrive at the Arno where the mopeds congregate at the river’s edge. They dart around me like so many shining silver fish, and their buzz, that searing buzz, envelopes everything, inescapable. I cover my ears and walk away from the center, turning only once to look back at the Arno’s curving body and then down to the patch of green that is the club, where figures are gathered for sunset. I turn away. They would not recognize me. That has nothing to offer me anymore.
I take the easternmost gate, the Porta alla Croce, into a residential area where the streets grow wider and the buildings larger. I look for a way north across the railroad tracks that cut a divide between here and the hills. Along the tracks are thick glass walls stenciled with the silhouettes of birds, as though they’ve crashed there and remained, a grotesque smattering of corpses. I keep looking for the place where I have crossed, only from the other direction, on my way home from the grove on so many Sundays. But somehow it doesn’t work, everything looks strange, and I see only busy overpasses for cars.
I pass a small food stall where men are buying bowls of tripe, hot and dripping. I feel ill and stop with my hands on my knees, but I don’t throw up. I keep going, each dip in the sidewalk an effort, each step shaking me, until I spot a small sign for a footpath. It is growing dark, but I take the path under the train tracks to the other side, where I find another busy road. It looks nothing like the road I’d taken on those Sunday afternoons, but I follow it and look for a way up into the hills. I will know the turnoff when I see it. Three boys fly by on bikes, shouting phrases at me that I don’t understand. Trembling, I hurry on until I see a smaller road, an offshoot. That could be it, might be it. I take it, the stone walls embracing me, the road beginning to climb as I walk up and up toward the light. The road splits and I follow a still smaller road up to the next divide. One of these must be the road, my road. I trace a long arc, and the city appears and disappears, growing brighter before it grows dark, and then I can no longer see it at all and no longer know where it is. I know only that I am going up and not down.
It is cold here, but the sun is still warm on my eyelids, the hills clutching at its rays. And it is quiet, finally, except for short beeps announcing cars or mopeds around blind corners. Otherwise there is no sound, only my feet on the stones. Images drift in and out and then fall away. The numbers that stared up at me; the thousands of words on the hundreds of pages; Luca, bent, waiting by my door. He must be home in his small town now, where the church bells will be ringing, and the silverware clanging, and the voices rising. If I were with him, I would be going south instead of north. South to dinner, to the baths, to another town. These memories pierce, but they are nothing compared with everything that came before and everything that has happened since—it circles and consumes them.
The road ends at a commune of vertical homes—this is unfamiliar. It is a small town, but not Luca’s, not one I’ve ever seen. I don’t want to backtrack, so I walk into this town, nothing more than a street with quiet homes and a single bar. A group of construction workers is packing up for the day. “Ciao, bella,” one says languidly, out of interest or habit, I cannot tell. I say nothing. I place my hand on the rough surface of a building for balance, pushing off with each step, drawing energy from its warm walls. And then I am alone again, the town disappeared behind me.
The road splits and I choose the path to the right. This will take me to the grove or it won’t. Either way. The sun begins to drop, glinting off the bits of glass that are dug into the tops of the walls like broken teeth. I’m tired. So tired. And something else. Deflated. The subtle descent. When this feeling comes, it always enters this way, small wings beating against the heart. Soft. Unpredicted. Then consistent.
I could vanish. If I lay down on the other side of these walls, I might never be found. I stop and lean back against the stone with my eyes closed, slide down until I am out of the light, sitting on the ground, the cold seeping in through my coat and then my pants and up my back, the chill making its way to the front of my body. I’m becoming part of the road, part of the wall, welded to it by the cold. If only things were this simple: to be an object on someone’s path, to be a wall anchored to a road. I begin counting, try to remember the crackers, the cheese. I stack them, set them apart. I look in the faces of the empty wine bottles. How many glasses in a bottle, how much liquid in a glass? I separate out each bottle, measure it. Even so, it must be gone. I imagine the path up, which looks long in my mind. I must be empty by now.
The walls and the road grow hazy and my vision swims. I feel ready for anything, close to something, and light, as though I might float off this road, up above these walls, out over the city. Who would believe it? Who would believe any of it? And yet, it is true. I am continually in this state. If I stayed here long enough, I know that I would feel myself separate from this place and float right up to that vanishing point where everything disappears and comes together.
My soul languished and desired to fly away
languished and desired
and desired to fly
desired to fly away
in this state
away
I open my eyes with a start. I’m cold, damp, and there is a sharp pain in my chest. I’m still in the same spot on the same road, but the sun is lower, everything around me flattened by long shadows. I draw my legs in tight. I can smell smoke somewhere far off, I can smell night descending, and I want to close my eyes, but something stops me—when the sun drops fully, there will be nothing to light my way except the slivered moon. And I have no idea where I am. All I know is that I have gone up and not down and that the walls have grown higher and the houses farther apart. The grove is nowhere. It has disappeared. I am lost, again, but there will be no Sergio this time. There is no one up here now to point the way. There is no one. No one here and no one who knows that I’m here. Even the city, hidden somewhere below, doesn’t notice my absence. I do not exist. I am not missing because I am not missed. I am a woman alone on the empty, caged roads outside Florence. I am a woman alone. I am alone. And all the life in the city below, everything I’ve done in the past months, everything I’ve done in all the years leading up to this year, is separate, is gone. I stripped myself of everything. It does not matter who I was before or who I had become.
I lean back against the stone, cold again, and I hear that familiar voice. Because the truth is that I am not alone. I haven’t been alone for weeks. I’ve had my companion, that companion that has been with me, always with me, since I first invited it in. I’ve been denying it. I’ve sought solace elsewhere, turning my back on my old friend, and still it was there in the shadows, hushed. Even as I rowed and kissed and ate, it kept its nails in me.
I will never leave you, it is saying now with its grip. I imagine it silenced, frozen by the cold, but it persists. I do not breathe. I do no
t make a sound. I cannot silence it.
I will never leave you. Though what it means is I will never let you go.
No.
No.
Dark. It is almost dark. I stand up, my legs shaking, my coat catching on the wall’s surface. I begin to walk downhill—slowly, evenly, and then quickly. The town. I will walk back to the town and decide what to do from there. Decide there. The road becomes steep, the stones sliding easily under my boots, but by the time the sun is almost gone, and with it any warmth, I’m still not back at the little piazza. I stay to the right, take a turn at a narrow fork. Over a rise, I glimpse the hills in the distance, blue and gray, climbing and falling. The town must be this way.
And then I know it isn’t right, cannot be right. If I were walking in the right direction, the roads would not be growing narrower. They would be widening, spreading. But the roads are growing narrower. I could just as easily be descending into an empty valley as the lit bowl of Florence. There is a monstrous pain in my chest and my head and I’m getting dizzy. I come to another fork and go left this time, trailing my hand along the wall until my fingers jump at the cold bars of a gate, the house behind it crouched silent in the dark. There is no one home. There is no one here but me and that other figuring traveling these channels alongside me. It is only me and it. I keep moving, faster now.
I will never leave you.
I begin to sweat, tear off my coat as I speed up. I try to hold on to the belief that the next turn will be the right one, but around the bend is more unfamiliar road. I start to run, around more strange curves, more strange road, filled with the truth that I might not find my way out. I might never be found.
I will never leave you.
I run faster and faster, until it is fully dark, the night stretched out before me, waiting to engulf me with every turn.
I will never let you go.
I cannot. I cannot. I cannot. This repeats and repeats as I run with no care of direction. My heart is pounding. I just have to keep running, keep moving. The road curves sharply up and then down, now blue with the moon, now black without, now narrow, walls squeezing from either side. I trip and splay out, my teeth clattering, my body skating, the stone tearing into my pants, my knees. I leap up and keep running, my purse beating against my side, my shoes slapping, the slaps echoing, the echoes following me down and down and down. I see myself from above then, a small shape darting up and down this game board, ready to meet that figure at every dark corner.
Florence in Ecstasy Page 24
