Florence in Ecstasy

by Jessie Chaffee

  “Carlo has children?” I ask Luca, remembering this revelation when we are at his house reading later that evening, my feet propped up in his lap.

  “Sì, sì. Due. One boy, one girl,” Luca says without looking up.

  “I’m surprised.”

  “Why?”

  “I only thought of him as Carlo the Wolf.”

  Luca laughs. “Sì. But any person can have children.” Luca returns to his reading, then adds a few seconds later, “E davvero, he is a good father.”

  The next day, Francesca waltzes into the club during lunch with her daughter and a small bag of gifts in hand, to wish everyone a good holiday. Each person receives an embrace and a chocolate.

  “Buon Natale, Hannah,” Francesca says. “I’ll see you in January?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m going home for a while.”

  “You can’t leave!” Francesca exclaims, and she looks legitimately concerned, but then she tempers it. “I mean, you’ll come back, right? You got your man here. We have a lot to talk about, no?” and with two kisses, she’s on to the next. Marco arrives a few minutes later. He shakes hands with everyone and kisses his wife for all to see. Francesca accepts his affection without hesitation. There is no eye rolling or sly commentary from the crowd, even after the family departs. I wonder if Francesca and Marco do this every year, if life simply resets for them and everyone else.

  “It is always the same,” Luca says later. “People talk but then she is married. And also it is Christmas.”

  It is Christmas and the city glows with it, the lights around Florence transforming every street, painting every piazza gold. It is odd to witness the holiday preparations I’d dreaded when I didn’t know where I would be or where I was going. I still don’t know where I’m going, but it is good to be where I am. It is a gift to walk around Florence with Luca, stopping for roasted chestnuts or slipping into one of the oldest bakeries for ricciarelli, a holiday treat. It is a gift waking up with him, the day stretching ahead of us.

  One evening I take him to the olive grove. He’s surprised, impressed even, that I had found it.

  “My town,” he says, pointing across the valley.

  I nod.

  “And from here you watched me?” he asks slyly.

  “No,” I say, laughing. “Sometimes I thought of you, though.”

  As it turns out, Luca will be leaving the day before me to be with his family. He invites me to join him, and I remember when I thought he would never invite me into that circle. “Next time,” I say. The evening before his departure, we exchange gifts. For him, a warm scarf from the market. For me, a book on the saints. “In Italian,” Luca says. “You practice.” It brings tears to my eyes.

  “I’ll go with you,” I say that night as we lie next to each other. “To the station, I mean, to see you off.”

  He is already sleeping. I grasp for his hand to ensure that he’s still there.

  “Say something.”

  “Cosa?” His response is delayed.

  “Dimmi qualcosa.”

  “Say what?”

  “Anything,” I say. “It’s too quiet.”

  There is a moment in which the silence is full of his thinking. “Ci sono troppo poche lune per la gente.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Non lo so. I made it up.” I can hear his smile in the dark. Then, “It means I’m happy you’re here.”

  I move into him and he shifts to gather me.

  “You could stay,” he whispers again a few minutes later. He means this, I think. It comes from a place that is sincere, that believes the future could be as easy as the now.

  I squeeze his hand. “I’ll see you off tomorrow.”

  “Mmm,” he mumbles, already gone.

  The next morning we drive to the station in the rain. In the daylight, it feels a bit overly dramatic to be going with Luca. But people do these things, after all—in real life they do. They see off their lover who has not hurt them and whom they have not hurt, but who may soon be gone from their life forever.

  We make our way up Via Camillo Cavour and Luca pulls to a sudden stop.

  “Aspetta,” he says, heading out into the rain with his jacket tented over his head, and I remember that first evening when he drove me home, stopping the car to get water and bread, the small pieces he passed to me slowly. And still he did not run away.

  “Panettone,” he says upon returning, wiping the rain from his face. “For the evening.” I open the bag and find a small Italian Christmas cake wrapped in brown-and-gold paper.

  The train station is packed, the people harried. Everyone is going somewhere—to family or holiday homes, or to Rome or Bologna for flights elsewhere. As always, many of the trains are delayed, and Luca and I have more time than we’d imagined on the platform. We kiss and then sigh, leaning into each other.

  When his train finally pulls in, Luca says, “You are sure you will not come?”

  I nod.

  “Va bene. A presto. A prestissimo. Until very soon. Hai capito?” He raises his eyebrows.

  “Sì. I understand. A prestissimo.”

  Luca climbs onto the train and I look for him through the amber windows among the many bodies searching for seats. I cannot find him and feel panicked, but then I hear a small tap and see him a few windows down, his head against the glass. I walk down the track and align myself with him. We smile, but there is nothing to say now. I shrug my shoulders and look away but do not leave. Next to me, a tall woman blows a kiss to the train and then shifts her hip to one side with a large smile. Beyond her, an older man grips his son tight, then watches him board. We stay, committed to our stations. There is a promise in the waiting. I will remain here, just as I am, until you return. Finally, the doors close; the train exhales, leans back into the bumper, and crawls forward. I wave to Luca a final time and try to hold in my mind his broad smile as I watch the train curl out of the station and feel the loss setting in.

  But when the last car passes under the station’s overhang and out of sight, I find that it is not unbearable, not yet. Beside me, the father looks at his watch and walks away with small, brisk steps. The tall woman sidles down the track, her head thrown back. Then they are gone and the face of the station is already changing as a new set of travelers arrives. I stay for a moment and watch the crowds, before the reality of my own departure propels me out into the city and toward the things that remain ahead of me. There are things to be done, after all—cleaning and packing, a final meal. The panettone in the little bag at my side helps, as perhaps Luca knew it would.

  I’d planned to row today, but the weather isn’t cooperating, and I walk back to the center in the rain, feeling Luca’s absence, feeling my own time slipping away with each step. It is still early enough that I witness the complex choreography of Florence in the morning, when it is owned by the Italians, and I take in the sights and smells and sounds as though I might carry them all back in my person. The urgent, lyrical voices of two men who hurry by me, gesticulating wildly; the young mother weaving her children through the tight streets with a repeated “Andiamo, ragazzi, andiamo!”; the crowded coffee bars, humming with conversations; the ding of so many small spoons dropped onto saucers, and the smell of sweet pastries slid onto plates, and I remember the cookies I had with Luca on All Saints’ Day.

  I keep going, past the Duomo, where the thump thump thump of suitcases sound on cobblestones as tourists follow this well-worn route. I walk through Piazza della Signoria, the arms of the Uffizi, and across the Ponte Vecchio to the Oltrarno. Here the streets are quieter and I have a strange sense of déjà vu as I recognize a shopkeeper on the adjacent corner. I’ve never been in his shop, but I’ve seen him always outside. Even on this rainy day he stands under the awning, smiling and giving a small “Ciao” to a passing friend. As I round the corner, a man passes a woman with a young child.

  “Dove vai?” the man exclaims, putting a hand on the boy’s head. “A tua nonna?” and the boy squeals and runs into
a café.

  Francesca was right—this is a small village. This morning is every morning, and every morning, this morning. It is reassuring to think that even when I’m gone, these movements will continue, will repeat each day, and that when I return they might all still be here waiting. It is always the same, Luca said, and I hold on to the phrase. It cuts the feeling of loss. It promises a future here.

  I stop for breakfast at my favorite bar. After I eat, there is a break in the rain, and I race home to grab my rowing clothes. It is already drizzling on my way back, but I remain hopeful. I pause at the green door of the canottieri and take a deep breath before I push it open and make my way into the cool foyer and then down and down until I reach the small coffee bar where Manuele is behind the counter reading a paper.

  “Ciao, Hannah of Boston,” he says, offering a hand and a cheek.

  By the time I’ve changed, it is raining heavily again. There will be no rowing today. Still, I walk down the quiet hall of boats and stop by my scull, Persefone. Seeing it, I realize how badly I want to be out on the river one last time, to feel the oars drawing against weight, to pause under one bridge and then another, to look up at the bodies lining the walls, to look down at the silent water, to feel the soft clanging against the dock when I pull back in and the weight of the wood, dripping, on my shoulder. The prospect of it not happening seems unbearable.

  I hear a faint shuffle and turn to find Correggio walking toward me.

  “Posso?” I ask when he reaches me, the plea leaping out involuntary. May I? As though he might not notice the weather, might, in this moment, act against the core of his character, which is utterly consistent, made of the very it is always the same that is the fabric of this city. But a crack of thunder shakes the club, making my request ridiculous, and I’m embarrassed. Correggio looks at me, looks at the boats, looks at me. He doesn’t say no or laugh. He pats me softly on the shoulder with a smile.

  “Alla prossima,” he says, until next time, and then continues his shuffle down the hall.

  I work out in the empty room of ergometers, feel the stretch in my arms, listen to the slow exhale of the wheel. I take a long shower, and when I emerge, I find that Stefano has already left for lunch. Manuele gives me a piece of paper, and I take my time composing a note of thanks that he promises to deliver.

  I don’t go home immediately, but walk up two bridges and cross to the library. I want to say good-bye to Lorenza, as I had promised I would. I step quickly—my final trip to the club has made me late, and I fear the library will already be closed for lunch. And it is. The door is dark. I’m deflated. No final afternoon on the river, no good-bye to Stefano or Lorenza. How can I leave without these things?

  As I reach the Ponte Vecchio, it begins to rain harder, and by the time I step into Piazza della Signoria, it is coming down so intensely and with such wind that I’m forced to duck into an open vestibule. I stand there and watch as the storm empties the piazza and paints the buildings, adding to their facades a new sheen. Thunder smothers all the street sounds, and an old man flies by silently on a bicycle, grinning as though fleeing the scene of a crime. My vision is blocked then by a couple, drenched and kissing as they pass my doorway. I remember walking across this piazza at night with Luca, the lit tops flying high into the air, and the memory softens the day’s disappointments. I look across the square to the loggia of statues where the Sabine woman is safe from the rain but still not safe from her attacker, her body twisted and her jagged finger pointing upward to where she might go if she could only escape. She is unwilling to recognize the futility of her efforts. And maybe they aren’t futile; maybe she’s already beyond the hands that hold her—and what then?

  You have to let it go, too, no? Luca had said. I had known it before he said it. I had known it that evening in the hills. And I had known it months earlier. You have to let it go, too. But here is the truth: I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t want to let it go. It gave me a center. That void became my center. It had the capacity to kill me, but it was exciting. On the brink, always. Of death, of life. I could do anything because I was outside of everything. With all else stripped away, things came into focus, sharp and clear. Long after Julian left, after I lost my job, after I lost friends and alienated family, it remained the constant. I had disappeared from my life, but I was not alone. I had that other being with me and I loved it. It had hurt me, but I still loved it. It was mine. I loved the body that had been wrecked by that stranger. I loved the body and the stranger. I loved that other self even as I was horrified by it. How could I wish it away? How could I wish myself away?

  Control, beauty, insecurity, failure in love, perfectionism—these were the explanations I had been given. But having known it, the allure is something different. It is the promise of something closer, something separate, something the mystics knew. An existence. “I, Catherine.” “I, Angela.” “I, Clare.” There is nothing of mine, St. Angela wrote, and yet in the “I,” a being is created, a self of one’s imagining. And wasn’t that worth something? I remember the description of Angela in rapture: rays of astonishing beauty, some thick, others slender, radiated from her breast, unfolded or coiled as they ascended upward toward heaven. The body disappears but the outline remains, a burning profile lit from behind, created out of the dissolved figure.

  My own insistent disappearance. It isn’t a way to live. And still, as I lean against the doorway of the vestibule and watch the sky grow lighter and the stones grow darker, there is a part of me—not a small part—that longs for it, desires it. Even in this moment when I have just, again, escaped it. I know there will be evenings, my eyes between bottles in a bar mirror, when I will see it, taste it. I can tell myself that I will keep it at bay, hold a steady course. But the truth is that I don’t know. Because it is not the reminders that I’m afraid of. It is this missing. It is in the missing that I will need to remember who I am now and will need to see that past without envy, so that I mourn it instead of inviting it back in. Because I will miss it. In those glimpses, I will miss my old love. More than I will miss Luca’s arms, or the perfect afternoons in the grove. More, even, than the feeling of the oars pulling water smoothly, finally balanced.

  The wind finds its way into the lobby, swaying the old glass lantern above me, and slowly the rain lets up. On the hour there are bells from many directions ringing at different times. A small chime close by. Then one far off—in the hills, maybe. They are out of synch. The bells of the Duomo sound the loudest, layered, completing the chorus and singing the longest until there is only a single bell striking the time. You are here, it rings solid. You. Are. Here. The square is empty now, the crowds chased indoors, the final drops of rain chased into the drains, leaving only puddles and reflections. As I step out into the piazza, my existence becomes vivid and hovers before me and around me, quivering with possibility. Each nerve stands at attention, ready to receive a breeze, a chill, a caress. The beauty of this moment is too blinding for any fear to exist. This moment has its own force. I can breathe easy, without knowing.

  This, too, could be life.

  Author’s Note

  While researching the lives of the saints and the history of eating disorders, I was fortunate to have at hand the books of people who have done this work for decades. I used a variety of translations when quoting the saints, making occasional adjustments for clarity and consistency. The following texts informed the book: Holy Anorexia by Rudolph M. Bell (University of Chicago Press, 1985); Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa by Joan Jacobs Brumberg (Vintage Books, 2000); Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women by Caroline Walker Bynum (University of California Press, 1987); Butler’s Lives of Saints: New Concise Edition, edited by Michael Walsh (Burns and Oates, 1985); The Book of the Divine Consolation of the Blessed Angela of Foligno, translated by Mary G. Steegmann (Chatto and Windus, 1909); Angela of Foligno: Complete Works, translated by Paul Lachance, O.F.M. (Paulist Press, 1993); The Life and Doctrine of Sa
int Catherine of Genoa (Christian Press Association Publishing Co., 1907); Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue, translated by Suzanne Noffke, O.P. (Paulist Press, 1980); Saint Catherine of Siena as Seen in Her Letters, translated by Vida Dutton Scudder (Kessinger Publishing, 2010); St. Catherine of Siena by Johannes Jørgensen, translated by Ingeborg Lund (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2012); The Life and Revelations of Saint Margaret of Cortona by Fra Giunta Revegnati, translated by F. McDonogh Mahony (Burns and Oates, 1883); The Life and Miracles of Saint Margaret of Cortona by Fra Giunta Bevegnati, translated by Thomas Renna, edited by Shannon Larson (Franciscan Institute Publications, 2012); Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi: Selected Revelations, translated by Armando Maggi (Paulist Press, 2000).

  Acknowledgments

  While writing is often solitary, it does not happen without the generous communities of people who make it possible. I was fortunate to have many people who were a part of the life of Florence in Ecstasy.

  Thank you to my brilliant agent (my saint!), Sarah Burnes, for believing in this book and its author, for your wisdom and counsel over many drafts, and for finding Florence in Ecstasy a wonderful home. Thank you to Logan Garrison Savits, Rebecca Gardner, and Will Roberts at The Gernert Company for all of your support and for inspiring enthusiasm for the novel, both here and abroad. Thank you to the unparalleled team at The Unnamed Press for ferrying this book out into the world with such care: Chris Heiser, for your sharp editorial eye and mind, which made this a better novel; Olivia Taylor Smith, for your passion, creativity, and savvy in getting others excited about the book; Jennifer Tanji, for helping to publicize it; Jaya Nicely, for the stunning cover; Nancy Tan, for the excellent copy edits; and J. Ryan Stradal, for your matchmaking in bringing the novel to Unnamed. Thank you to Kimberly Burns, publicist extraordinaire, for championing this book and for your vital support and advice throughout the process.