The Sixteen Pleasures

by Robert Hellenga

  “Two thousand seventeen?” He looked at me closely to see if I was joking. “What are you, crazy?” He shook his head. “That don’t make any sense. I can’t give you no postmark for fifty years from now. Lady, I think you got the wrong idea. Why don’t you just wait? What’s the point? You’ll be lucky to be alive in 2017. We all will.”

  “It makes sense to me, that’s enough.”

  He shook his head again. “You could cause big trouble,” he said. “Some priest takes a look at this and sees it’s in the future, he’s going to say, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’”

  “No priest is going to see it. I just need it. Please don’t ask me why because I can’t tell you.”

  “Okay but I got to charge you extra, you understand. For the risk. It just don’t make sense.”

  “It makes sense to me.”

  “I can’t give you no 2017 stamp though. There ain’t no such thing.”

  “A 1967 stamp will do fine.”

  “Okay, lady, if that’s what you want.”

  “That’s what I want.”

  “This stamp,” he said. “They been making these for ten years now. You want to put it on?”

  I licked the stamp he gave me and stuck it in the upper righthand corner of the card. He adjusted a wheel on his postmark machine.

  “What date you want? You know, what day of the month?”

  “Today. What’s today, March second?”

  “It’s the third.”

  “Good, put March third.”

  He turned some more dials. “You know,” he said, “this don’t print the first two numbers anyway, so it’ll just be seventeen. He pulled a lever, removed the card and handed it to me: “roma ordinarie 3.—3.17.”

  He charged me twenty thousand lire for the postcard, another twenty thousand for the postmark, three hundred for the stamp, and another five thousand for canceling it with a handstamp. The total came to forty-five thousand three hundred. Close to thirty dollars.

  Was it worth it? I don’t know, but I was in a spending mood. Most of the money I had left from what Sandro had given me I spent on one of the big Mont Blanc pens I’d been looking at. Big and black and beautiful. “It will last a lifetime,” I told the clerk, as if I were trying to sell it to him. “Everyone should have a good fountain pen. And besides, I need something to write with.”

  “It’s the finest writing instrument in the world,” he said.

  “Could you show me how to fill it, please?”

  “Certamento.” He unscrewed the cap again. “This is the filler button. When you turn this, it actuates a diaphragm. You turn it all the way, see, and then put the tip of the pen in the ink and turn it back. Now you’re forcing air out through the mouth of the breather tube. When the air goes out, there’s a vacuum, right? And as long as the tip of the pen is under the ink, the ink’s going to be sucked into the vacuum, see?” He made a sound with his mouth to signal the rush of ink into the vacuum. “Then you turn it like this,” he said, holding the pen over the open bottle of ink and twisting the filler button slightly so that four drops of blue-black ink dripped into the bottle. “That way the ink will have room to expand in the barrel.”

  I wasn’t sure I understood the process perfectly, but I thought I knew how to fill the pen.

  “Do you want a bottle of ink?” he asked.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I have to get back to Florence tonight. I don’t want to carry it in my bag.” I indicated my Harvard book bag.

  He nodded to show that he understood.

  When I left the store I knew that the most important thing was to get back to Florence as soon as possible. But I didn’t know how to get to the station, and I was afraid that if I took a cab I wouldn’t have enough left for a ticket. Instead of counting the money in my wallet I tried to remember exactly how much Sandro had given me and exactly how much I’d spent on beer and on the card and on the pen. I tried to picture Sandro handing me the money—we’d been standing in front of his apartment waiting for a cab—but I couldn’t remember if he’d given me two hundred-thousand notes or a hundred-thousand note and two fifties. And when I tried to retrace my steps and add up how much I’d spent on beer, and how much I’d shoved in the poor box at the church, and how much for the card and for the postmark and the stamp, and how much for the pen, and did he charge me anything for the ink, and I’d forgotten the five thousand lire I’d given the clerk downstairs, it came out different every time, so I sat down at a table across from the Pantheon and ordered another beer and wrote a card to Sandro:

  Caro Sandro—

  When we got out of the train in Rome you kissed me on the cheek and told me that you loved me, and I believed you. I followed you into the station, about twenty paces behind you. Your wife was waiting for you. She was taller than I expected, and better looking. Handsome, sleek, fashionable. You whispered something in her ear and she laughed and then you got into a taxi and drove off. You never looked back. But I still believed you, and I still do, and I always will.

  All my love,

  Margot

  But I didn’t have an address, so I couldn’t send it. I never did send it. I kept it. I still have it. I still believe that he loved me, and I always will.

  16

  Remedia amoris

  I closed the shutters in Sandro’s apartment so I wouldn’t have to look out at the piazza, at the green-and-white facade of Santa Croce, at the admonitory statue of Dante (who showed no sign of fainting at my predicament, as he had at Francesca’s), at people coming and going about their business as if life held some meaning and purpose.

  Sitting in the big farm kitchen in the Abruzzi with Sandro’s sister and mother, eating bread toasted with garlic and olive oil, I’d been so sure that Sandro was going to propose, and so happy at the prospect, that no other future had seemed possible. When he didn’t propose I wasn’t disappointed, because no occasion suitable for a proposal had presented itself and we still had Rome ahead of us. And then when he didn’t ask me in Rome, I didn’t give it a second thought, because he was upset about the Sacra Rota and had a little trouble getting it up—though we’d had a wonderful time the first night in Rome—and then I wouldn’t turn the book over to that creep Martelli.

  I knew he’d tried to hornswoggle me, but it hadn’t mattered. It hadn’t mattered that the Sacra Rota was going to hold up the annulment for another year; it hadn’t mattered that he couldn’t get it up once in a while (it was kind of nice, in fact, just to snuggle); it hadn’t mattered that he didn’t have a head for business, we’d have gotten by. At least none of these things had mattered to me.

  And then when we were back in Florence he was nervous about the strappo. But I was so confident that we were meant for each other, and that he was about to speak at any moment, there in the darkness of the Badia, as he tapped away at the intonaco on the back of the Lodovici frescoes, that I’d been on the point of saying something myself. But something had held me back and I hadn’t, and now, like an athlete whose fatal error has cost her an important game, I kept replaying that moment in my mind, off and on, as I lay in Sandro’s bed, on dirty sheets, reading a copy of Emma that I’d borrowed from the library at the Ameri­can Church. I’d had it up to here—up to my chin—with Italy; I needed to escape. I needed English countryside; I needed English country houses and vicarages, amiable eccentrics like Mr. Woodhouse, sensible people like the Westons; I needed a clear-cut world crisply organized in a series of meaningful social and cosmic hierarchies.

  I didn’t go out, I didn’t get dressed. I didn’t wash my hair or brush my teeth. There wasn’t much to eat because we’d always eaten out, in a circle of expensive trattorie and ristoranti where Sandro always left generous tips for the waiters without ever actually paying the bill. But I wasn’t hungry. I made do with a half kilo of spaghetti, a couple of cans of tomato pulp, a dozen eggs, and half a loaf of pane toscano that was so h
ard I had to soak it in hot tea before I could chew it. I turned Sandro’s cheval glass to the wall so as not to see myself as I wandered in and out of the bedroom. My workstation at the front of the living room was still in place, and sometimes I sat on my old orange crate and fiddled with some of my tools; I folded sheets of paper into gatherings with a bone folder; I opened the edges with an Opinel knife; I pasted bits of leather onto the old boards from the Preghiere cristiane to make a kind of collage. I looked over my worksheets, going over the restoration process in my mind. I made lists.

  I would have grieved longer but I couldn’t afford to. All I had was thirty thousand lire—under twenty dollars—left from the money Sandro had given me. And of course my Icelandic ticket to Chicago. By the end of the week there was no food left. I could either . . . or I could . . . I wasn’t sure what I could do.

  On Sunday night, one week after I’d come back from Rome, I walked to the Piazza San Pier Maggiore. The streets were already crowded with tourists, mostly German, a few Japanese. I bought a hamburger at the friggitoria and ate it standing under the Arch of San Piero, one of the gates in the old medieval wall. When a new bishop was appointed—in the Middle Ages, that is—this was the gate through which he’d enter the city—after spending the night in the convent.

  From my position under the arch I could look down Borgo Pinti, the street Mama and I had lived on when I was fifteen, and I could see the big doors of Santa Caterina. I reminded myself of Madre Badessa’s words of warning about Sandro: a man with no center, no soul, no inner core. I’d had no experience of love affairs. I didn’t know what to expect. I knew people didn’t die of broken hearts, but I was a little frightened anyway. I wanted a prognosis. I wanted someone to tell me that I was still young, that I still had my whole life ahead of me (though who doesn’t?), that in another two weeks I’d be able to get around on crutches, and that in a month or two I’d be as good as new.

  Is this what Madre Badessa would have told me? I experi­enced a strong pull, an urge to knock on the convent doors, as I had knocked late one night after making love to Sandro, and Madre Badessa, instead of scolding me, had taken me into her office, and into her heart, and given me vinsanto and biscotti di Prato.

  But I didn’t knock. I finished my hamburger and walked to the Central Post Office, which was so crowded with tourists I had to wait in line for an overseas phone booth. I hadn’t talked to Papa since he’d moved to Texas, but I carried his number around in my purse, along with the letters I hadn’t answered. I’d put off writing because I’d wanted to send him the good news I’d always thought was just around the corner. I’d always imagined writing first, just for the pleasure of putting the words down on paper; and then telephoning, for the pleasure of saying the words out loud: “Papa, guess what! I’m getting married. You didn’t believe me before, did you, when I called you on Christmas Eve?” But when my turn came, I didn’t place the call. I went back to Sandro’s apartment and read Emma.

  In the morning—Monday morning—I opened the shutters, washed out some socks and panties in the sink and hung them up to dry. I kept the clothes that Sandro had given me, but pawned the jewelry at the pawnbroker’s in the piazza, where I learned from the pawnbroker that this was where Sandro had bought most of them in the first place. It was all very high quality—genuine Etruscan scarabs carved out of red carnelian; expensive jade (jadeite, not nephrite, or the other way around); the chains and bracelets were not silver but white gold, eighteen carat; even the watch, which was quite ordinary looking, turned out to be valuable. I came away with nine hundred thousand lire in my purse, almost six hundred dollars.

  In the afternoon, I went back to the Certosa. Everything was sottosopra, as the Italians say—topsy-turvy. Professor Panuccio, who was in charge of the restoration program, had quarreled with the abbot and returned to the Istituto Patologia del Libro in Rome. The special sinks that had been ordered in January had finally arrived, but the abbot had refused to allow the plumbers into the crypt, so they hadn’t been able to hook them up to the water supply. The drying ovens, a gift from the I. G. Far ben Company in West Germany, had been installed in the smaller of the two refectories but could not be connected to the gas line without a special application that required the abbot’s signature. Many of the student volunteers had left, and those who remained—about twenty—working without supervision, had become demoralized and were not following the procedures we had established.

  Julia, a medical student from Stockholm whose job was to photograph the books before they were scraped free of dried mud, collated, and disbound, had run out of film and didn’t have money to buy any more. She was staying on only because she was in love with Mario, who was living in a friend’s apartment in Scandicci, but the friend was returning from the States. Mario, who was from Milan, was going have to vacate the apartment . . . And so on.

  That night I treated the students to a good meal at the Trattoria Maremmana, where Sandro and I had often eaten, and the next morning, at the the Palazzo Davanzati, just outside Sandro’s old office on the third floor, I explained the situation to Signor Giorgio Focacci, the Soprintendente del opificio delle pietre dure, Sandro’s former boss, and told him that I would make everything arrange itself, but that I needed a stipend of at least half a million lire a month.

  “The honor of my city demands it,” he said.

  “Well,” I said. “I’m glad you see it that way.”

  “To see things as they really are,” he said, “to call things by their proper names, to show strangers the way. Those are the principles by which I live my life, Signorina. I only wish I could say the same for everyone.”

  I assumed he was referring to Sandro, whose office, I noticed, did not appear to be occupied.

  “But un mezzo milione, Signorina. You deserve every lire; un milione, due milioni, tre milioni, quatro, dieci, but consider . . . a foreigner . . . the difficulties . . .”

  “I have to live,” I interrupted. “I have to eat. I have no money. I know that you can arrange everything, that you know whom to talk to, what strings to pull. You’re a man of the world, Signor Focacci, a man who risked his life in the Vasari Corridor. I’m just a poor stranger. You must show me the way.”

  “Tre cento mille,” he said, turning to the window and holding his hands behind his back.

  “Mezzo,” I said, “and I’ll need a permesso di lavoro,” the Italian equivalent of a green card. I stood beside him and held my hands behind my back.

  On the Via Pellicceria, below us, workmen were replacing a plate glass window in a pharmacy but I wasn’t really looking at the workmen; I was looking at my own reflection in the win­dow in front of my face. If I’d been appealing to an Ameri­can, I might have shown up in my work clothes, but that strategy wouldn’t have impressed an Italian, so I’d put on a dress Sandro’d picked out in Rome, a black sheath, abbastanza décolleté, stiletto heels, a pair of gold earrings I’d had since I was in high school.

  “You’ve got to do something immediately, Signor Giorgio, or the student volunteers will be gone. I spent a hundred thousand lire to give them a decent meal last night. Without me, they’ll go home or they’ll go someplace where they can feel they’re doing something useful. They’ll go to work for the Americans at I Tatti, or the British at the Biblioteca Nazionale. You don’t want the Certosa to be a disgrazia, a black mark on your record.”

  “Very well, Signorina.” He sighed.

  “Thank you, Signor Giorgio. You won’t regret it. You’re a man who sees things as they really are.”

  Out in the street I took another look at myself—in the new window of the farmacia. How serious I was, like someone working out a chess problem—black to mate in three moves. The pharmacist must have thought I was looking at him, because he touched his cheek with the tip of his finger and rotated his hand back and forth. I tried out a smile. There was work to be done; it was nice to be needed.

  By the end of th
e March it had begun to look like spring. The shops changed to their spring schedule. Middle-aged women and old men were putting in gardens along the Via Fortini, which led up to the Certosa. The apricot trees in the cloister were budding, and the monks could be heard in the choir, practicing the Quem quaeritis, a dozen old White Benedictines—the last of their order—in white robes and black scapulars, still hanging in there.

  I’d been hanging in there too. I arrived on the first bus every morning, at six o’clock, and worked into the evening. Chal­lenging work, as everyone knows, is an excellent tonic, and the work at the Certosa was certainly challenging. Physically and spiritually. We were adrift on a sea of books. Books everywhere. Stacked under the loggias, piled on the floor of the refectories and the sala capitolare: illuminated Bibles, psalters, books of hours, prayer books, late-medieval and classical texts—an early-fifteenth-century manuscript copy of Augustine’s De Civitate Dei with beautiful illuminated capitals; a codex of the Divina Commedia dated (under the colophon) Ravenna 15 maggio 1320; volumes one and three of an Aldine Aristotle; Alopa’s Homer (the first Greek text printed in Florence); Stephanus’s edition of Plato’s Republic, bound together with a Latin translation.

  But work wasn’t enough to make me forget Sandro. No matter how hard I worked, no matter how tired I was at the end of a long day, he remained as clear in my memory as if I had left him at the Limonaia only that morning. And sometimes in the evenings, as I sat at the long table in the refectory where I kept my restoration records, I’d hear footsteps coming up behind me and would turn to greet him, but it would only be the old abbot, coming to show me out so he could lock up.

  One evening, as I was planning the next day’s triage—deciding which of the wounded books could survive on their own, which would have to be abandoned because they had no chance of survival, and which would be admitted to our little hospital—I put my head down for a moment on the table, and Sandro presented himself to my imagination in startling clarity, as radiant as a vision, holding his arms out like the archangel Gabriel in the Pontormo Annunciation in the sacristy, where I kept a supply of Japanese rice paper and thymol crystals. Was he trying to tell me something or was he asking me for something?