The Sixteen Pleasures

by Robert Hellenga

  “Well,” I said, “tourists or no tourists, you’ve saved the frescoes, and I think it’s fantastic.”

  “A strappo is always a defeat,” he said, “not a triumph. We’ve torn these frescoes from their natural environment. We’ve turned them from architecture into easel paintings. And that’s only the beginning: all the undulations and irregularities of the underlying ground, which gave them weight and density, will be smoothed out before I’m finished. The paint has been traumatized by the operation, and the new backing will create different optical properties, and as I’m tapping away here the crumbling intonaco is pulling away a fine skin of paint.”

  So gloomy! And yet Sandro was the most cheerful person I’ve ever known and these moods were as ephemeral as fruit flies. That night we went to the Trattoria Maremmana, one of our favorites, and ate lasagna al forno and grilled shrimp, and drank more wine than usual. On the way home Sandro sang, in English, “The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring” from The Mikado, and I was sorry I didn’t know my Gilbert and Sullivan well enough to accompany him, though I did join in on the tra-la’s.

  *

  It was, all in all, a period of pregnant calm and intense happiness. I knew from Papa’s letters that he’d sold the house in Chicago and bought an avocado grove near Mission, Texas, on the Rio Grande, so I felt oddly cut off from my old life, my old self, like a planet without a sun. But I had a new life, a new self, a new sun, so I didn’t let it worry me.

  Sandro and I continued to live together as man and wife, except for one thing: we never quarreled. I don’t recall a harsh word, in fact. He was always attentive, considerate and generous, even though his finances were going from bad to worse. His own lawyer—not Gianozzo but another—had threatened to “denounce” him. The fast-food restaurant had closed its doors, so there was no chance of recovering on the note he’d cosigned. The dispute over who had the right to distribute the low-calorie wine had not been resolved. But we ate out every night, and hardly a week went by without a present of some sort, small but expensive: a gold chain, a special lipstick, fancy underthings.

  Sandro was a popular man, a man who knew everyone, and though we were never invited out as a couple, we saw other other people, discreetly. I had my own circle of friends, too. Florence is a small town; it was only a matter of time before I started running into old friends on the street. The problem was not running into them but recognizing them. But once I’d met Silvia in front of the Marzocco I was in touch with everyone, including Fabio, who ran a butcher shop on the Via Pietrapiana, not far from Santa Caterina Nuova.

  I didn’t go back to Santa Caterina, though whenever I crossed Piazza San Pier Maggiore I felt a strange attraction and was tempted to knock on the door. Somehow, though, I didn’t want to have to explain. I wanted to wait till I’d sold the Aretino, though I still didn’t have a plan for doing so.

  *

  Two weeks after the strappo, Sandro told me that he had accepted a position as director of conservation for the Vatican Museum. There was talk of cleaning the Sistine ceiling; it was a wonderful opportunity; he couldn’t afford to turn it down; it gave him more scope, and it paid him more money. His brothers-in-law had arranged it. He would be going back to Rome and to his wife, who had, in any case, refused to submit to another vaginal examination. There was nothing he could do. But they would be keeping the apartment in Florence, he said, as a pied-à-terre, and I was welcome to stay there as long as I wanted.

  It was eight o’clock in the morning and I was cooking an egg; Sandro was drinking caffelatte. I felt hot tears boil up instantly, hot as the water in the pan on the stove. I looked at my watch and watched the second hand for three and a half minutes. I took the pan to the sink, poured out some of the boiling water and ran cold water over the egg. I didn’t ask him any questions, like: “How long has this been in the works?” or “When did you decide?” I just said, “When will you be leaving?” as if he’d told me that he was going up to Milan for a couple days to offer his advice on the restoration of some fresco, something old and beautiful and priceless that wouldn’t survive into the next century without his expert intervention.

  “Not till the beginning of March,” he said. “We’ve got another two weeks.”

  I cracked open my egg, spooned it into a dish, and ate it without salt or pepper. He finished his caffelatte and kissed me good-bye just as he did every morning. “I’ll be at the Limonaia all day,” he said.

  I went to the window and watched him cross the piazza. He must have spoken to a dozen people before disappearing into the Via Verrazzano. I thought it was the worst moment of my life, but it wasn’t.

  I didn’t make scenes. I didn’t beg him to stay, I didn’t ask him what was going to happen to me. I just kept on doing what I’d been doing all along: making my rounds and taking the bus out to the Certosa every day. I had even been given an official title: “Friend of the Italian People,” though as a friend, unfortunately, I was not entitled to a salary. As the end drew near we stepped up the pace of our lovemaking, but even so, I began to have trouble sleeping: I’d lie down and then in a few minutes my whole body would start to freeze up and then to twitch, just as if I’d had too much coffee, way too much coffee. And I started talking to myself, telling myself that I was going to be all right, that I was all right. I went to the Certosa every day. I didn’t miss a day.

  I was even planning to go there on the day, the third of March, that Sandro left for Rome. But I went down to the station instead to see him off, and when he got on the train I got on, too. I couldn’t stand to let him go. That’s why I followed him onto the train even though he was trying to push me back, but there were people getting on behind me and he had to let me on. So we went to the club car and ordered two beers. Italian beer is good. It’s got more taste than American beer, more taste than German beer, too, if you ask me. German beer and American beer are about the same.

  I’d never asked Sandro what he and Martelli had been up to, but I asked him now, and he told me.

  “That Martelli’s a real prick,” I said in English. “A first-class prick.”

  He didn’t argue with me.

  “What would you have done with the money?—not that you’d have gotten it—your pal Volmaro would have cheated you just the way everyone else has. You need someone to look after you.”

  “I’d have paid off my debts and asked you to marry me.”

  “Why didn’t you ask me for the money? Why didn’t you ask me to give you the book, instead of sneaking around behind my back, double-crossing me with that first-class prick?”

  “You wouldn’t have done it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know you. I thought if I could get it away from you without you knowing . . .”

  We ordered more beer.

  “Was it just the money that stopped you?”

  “Margot, listen to me. I’m glad we’re having this talk, because . . . because I don’t think you fully understand my position. I’m fifty-two, fifty-three in September. You’re twenty-nine. I’m December, you’re May. You’re in love with Italy. So are a lot of American women. I’ve seen it too many times. You fall in love with Italy, you marry an Italian man . . .”

  Everything he said made sense, but there was something stale about it, as if he’d gone over and over it in his mind so many times that it had begun to sound like a recording.

  I finished my beer and ordered another. The train seemed to be going faster and faster.

  “You’re not going to make a scene when we get to Rome, are you?”

  “No, I’m not the type.”

  The landscape was flat and unattractive, spotted with public housing developments, flat surfaces broken up by little balconies too small to sit on. I could see what was happening. I could feel it in my whole body. But I couldn’t do anything to stop it, anymore than I could have stopped the train by willing it to stop. Thinking
of Ruth and Yolanda, I looked around for emergency cord and there it was, at the end of the car. But it wasn’t the rapido I wanted to stop. It was the train inside me. But this train had no brakes.

  It was time to go home, but I didn’t have a home. I think this was the first time it really hit me, like a blow to the stomach: I didn’t have a home.

  We got to Rome about noon, and that was the last I saw of Alessandro Postiglione.

  I bought a sandwich in the station but didn’t eat it. I wasn’t hungry. I’d been to Rome a couple of times with Mama on student excursions, and then with Sandro, but I didn’t really know my way around very well. The sensible thing to do would have been to get on the next train back to Florence. I had two hundred thousand lire (a little over a hundred dollars) in my book bag that Sandro, who suddenly had plenty of money, had given me to tide me over. I could afford to stay in a hotel. I also had my plane ticket back to Chicago.

  But what I needed was to walk. I told myself I was going to be sensible. I was not going to waste the opportunity to see more of Rome, maybe see an old church, the way people do in English detective novels, or even go back to San Luigi dei francesi and look at the Caravaggios again. Even though I didn’t know my way around very well, Rome felt familiar, like a big city, like Chicago, with traffic roaring down wide streets. Not like Florence, all dark and cramped.

  I knew that the Via Cavour would take me to the Roman Forum, and that the Forum must be close to something, because I’d been there with Mama. It would be something to do. But the Roman Empire has never figured importantly in my imaginative scheme of things, and when I got to the Forum it didn’t look like much and I didn’t want to pay to get in. The beer had gone to my head and I was confused, but I wanted another one.

  Drinking it, at a bar, I could remember parts of Sandro’s body, his way of holding a brush (between thumb and third and fourth fingers; so why couldn’t he hold chopsticks?); little scars and nicks, the hair on his belly, his little uccello, uncircumcised, like Isaac’s penis on the Ghiberti doors. And these memories were like memories of home.

  Outside the Forum I had the feeling that someone was following me, that someone was looking at me. This was absolute nonsense, of course, but there it was. I wanted to call someone, but there was no one to call. I knew I shouldn’t have come to Rome. I looked in the phone book. Several Postigliones. I looked at my watch. Only five minutes had elapsed since I’d left the Forum. Impossible. It must have been an hour and five minutes. I wound my watch, but it was already too tight. I’d overwound it. I had another beer at a bar, and then I went to another bar and ordered a cappuccino. I was warm from walking and thinking about Mama’s funeral. I sat so near the casket I could have reached out and kicked it during the service. Suddenly I wanted to go to the Protestant Cemetery. It’s not frightening, like the Protestant Cemetery in Florence. It’s open and lovely. Keats is buried there, and Shelley, or Shelley’s heart. I went with Mama. But I had no idea how to get there. I knew the Keats-Shelley Memorial was in the Piazza di Spagna.

  What had it been like when Mama parted from Signor Bruni? Had she cried, too? But she’d had a husband and family to go home to. Home. That really bothered me. Where could I go that, when I got there, they’d have to take me in?

  I tried to calm myself, but my mind was going in spurts and sprints. I could hear the sound of water, the sounds of the city blending together to make a sound like the ocean. Not a roaring. More like a growling. Like a waterfall.

  Coming out of a bar on the Via Veneto, where I’d stopped for another beer, I almost walked into a car. There hadn’t been any women in the bar; I had been uneasy. I had a headache, I could feel it pulsing, and there seemed to be a gaping hole in the sidewalk. Only a shadow, but I couldn’t bring myself to step on it. I couldn’t see what was making the shadow, what was coming between the sun and the sidewalk. I kept looking up in the sky. No trees. No skyscrapers. Just a spreading patch of dark at my feet, and a muffled sound.

  I wandered around for a while, heading in what I thought was the general direction of the station, till I came to a huge church—which I now know was Santa Maria Maggiore. I climbed a long flight of stairs and entered. There was nothing handsome about the interior. It was just big. Not big like a Gothic cathedral, not “big” as in huge or immense or soaring or magnificent or overwhelming, but “big” as in bulky. There were long rows of confessionals on either side of the nave, like portapotties at an outdoor rock concert, with Libero and Occupato signs on them, like the signs on the toilets in a train. And there were signs to indicate the language or languages spoken by the different confessors: not just English, French, Spanish and German but Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Urdu. The place was an international crossroads. At some of the confessionals people were lined up waiting, mostly foreigners. I had a sudden impulse to get in one of the lines, to confess. “Unload,” I suppose, would be a more accurate description of what I wanted, but at the time I thought I wanted to confess.

  Of course I didn’t have the faintest idea how to go about confessing. I knew there was a formula—“Forgive me Father for I have sinned,” something on that order, but where did one begin? Should I try to fake it, or should I begin by explaining that I wasn’t in fact a Catholic? Would I have better luck in English or in Italian? I decided on Italian because there was no one in the Italian line, though the little sign at the top said Occupato. After ten minutes I began to think I’d made a mistake—the other lines were moving right along—but then the door opened and a woman emerged, dressed in a simple black sheath, very elegant, her hair pulled back in a chignon like Princess Grace. Her dark eyes, mysterious with grief, were downcast and she didn’t recognize me but I thought I recognized her. Margeaux, my ghostly double, outdoing me even in grief! I banged open the door of the confessional without knocking. There was a bench seat and a kneeler. I sat down and began to explain: “Excuse me,” I said. “Scusi. Padre, are you there? Yoo-hoo?”

  “What is it?”

  “Excuse me, Padre. I’m not really a Catholic, but—” and that was as far as I got.

  “You Protestants!” he shouted. “You come to Italy and all of a sudden you want to confess your sins. I can’t do anything for you. If you want to confess why don’t you join the church?”

  “Right,” I said. “And why don’t you join the human race?”

  I hadn’t gotten very far, but far enough to turn myself around. Instead of sinking I was soaring. I felt wonderful; I was flying in the upper atmosphere, not in an airplane or a space ship but with my own wings. I could look down on everything, take in the big picture. It was like being in tune with a man and knowing he’s in tune with you, and it’s coming, it’s going to happen, nothing’s going to stop it. Only I felt that way with the whole world.

  I started walking. I didn’t know where I was going, but every once in a while I’d recognize something that looked familiar, something I’d seen with Mama or Sandro: the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain, the Castel San Angelo, the Pantheon. When I hit the Pantheon something clicked—Sandro’s postcard shop. I wanted to buy some postcards with old postmarks on them so I could rewrite the past and make it turn out differently. I searched systematically, making larger and larger circles, like a dog trying to pick up a scent. I found it on the third circle: La Casa della Stilografica. The House of Fountain Pens.

  The place was full of pens, literally thousands of pens. Mechanical pencils, too, but mostly pens. Ballpoint pens, roller pens, quill pens, drawing pens, and of course fountain pens, new and antique: Watermans, Esterbrooks, Parkers, Scheaffers, and many unfamiliar names too: Dupont, Lamy, Omas, Niji, Élysée, Pelikan. They came in every color, and some were multicolored, piebald. They were long and short, thick and fat. I fell in love with one of those big black Mont Blanc pens that cost nearly sixty dollars.

  “How can a fountain pen cost so much?” I asked the clerk.

  “Gold,” he said. �
�Eighteen-carat gold. Look.” He brought the pen from under the glass counter, removed it from its case, and unscrewed the top. “These are gold strips, you see how they come together there?”

  I nodded.

  “The gold is good because it won’t corrode; but it’s soft; that’s why you see this line right at the tip, right?”

  “Right.”

  “That’s iridium. You know how they put that tip on there?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s fused in there with a blowpipe, the kind a glassblower uses.”

  “I want to buy a postcard,” I said.

  He acted as if he didn’t know what I was talking about, but a five-thousand-lire note brought him to his senses. He sent me up a fight of stairs to a long, narrow room where various postcards were on display along with inks, more pens, uncanceled stamps and a huge array of rubber stamps to cancel them with whatever city and date was desired.

  Another clerk asked me what I had in mind and I said, “Nothing in particular. I just wanted to look.”

  The postcards were grouped by location. The largest section contained postcards from Rome—mostly pictures of monuments and works of art—but every province in Italy was represented. I choose a black-and-white card of Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne.

  “Just one?”

  “That’s all.”

  He shrugged. “And the cancellation date? What time are we talking about?” He looked me up and down. “Nineteen-fifties, right?”

  I had to think about that. I thought.

  “Roma,” I said. “Two thousand seventeen.”