Why do you have to make sure Ingrid knows how much you detest putti? queries Subra. You’re spoiling her pleasure, dragging her over the hot coals of your rage, as sadistically as Quintianus dragged Agatha…
To Rena’s surprise, Ingrid fulminates in turn. ‘Would you mind telling me,’ she says, raising her voice, ‘why it’s unthinkable for you to take an interest in pretty things? Why, to your mind, pretty can only mean insipid and despicable? Not just the cherubim and seraphim but flowers…landscapes…You haven’t even been taking pictures of our holiday! It’s not worth your while, is it? To you, anything that’s merely nice is a waste of time, isn’t it? You claim your photos tell the truth, and yet you intentionally leave out half the truth — the pleasant half. As far as you’re concerned, pleasant things are a load of…crap!’
To use that sort of vocabulary, Ingrid must be really mad.
‘Sorry,’ Rena says, contrite. ‘It’s silly to stand here fighting over putti. I’m just…allergic to innocence, that’s all. I don’t know why.’
Silence. Her head is spinning. Whatever happened to Renaissance painting?
Simon is sitting there snoring in a corner…
Might as well give up on the Palazzo Pitti.
Fuoco
All of a sudden the world is heavy. Everything they set their eyes on is heavy. The heavy sky seems clamped like an iron lid onto the heavy city of Florence. They go plodding heavily past the souvenir stands along the wall across from the museum, oppressed by the sight of the vendors sitting on their little stools looking bored to death.
Not exactly a thrilling existence, Rena thinks, to sit there from morning to night trying to convince tourists to buy your postcards and calendars, cups and various bits of junk embossed with reproductions of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century masterpieces, then take a two-hour bus ride home to an ugly distant suburb, catch up on the world’s bad news on TV while bolting down a plateful of spaghetti at a table covered with a wine-stained oilcloth, and fall into bed with your wife. Would you still have the modicum of energy and optimism you need to make love to the little lady? And what has her day been like? Did she tear her slip? Snap a heel off one of her sandals? Scream at the kids for getting on her nerves? Why doesn’t Aziz call me back?
Leaden thoughts, weighing her down. She feels like sinking to the ground in the middle of the Via Guicciardini and never getting up again.
Gee, what a fun holiday, Subra says.
Seeing a colourful sign advertising ice-cream cones, Ingrid realises she wouldn’t mind having one — her stomach is growling. What do they think? Ah, a plan at last!
They file into the café to choose their flavours. Simon insists on paying for the cones — but when the bill arrives it horrifies him. ‘You can get a quart of ice cream for that price at the local supermarket!’ And that’s just for take-away — if they eat their cones here they’ll be even more expensive. Humiliated at the rip-off, they file back out of the café.
A few yards down the street, Rena finds a charming little courtyard for them to sit down in. Perched on a low cement wall graced with flowerpots, they can admire the gay blue-and-yellow crockery in the nearby store window and slurp their cones to their hearts’ content. Okay, she doesn’t want to die anymore, for now.
Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso—oh, Dante, Dante! They’re inside of us — you knew that, didn’t you?
Suddenly they hear a commotion in the street behind them. They all get up, then rush to see what’s going on. A building is on fire, directly across from the little courtyard. Up and down the Via Guicciardini, crowds of people shout and jostle one another. A chaos of cars, sirens, fire engines, fumes of black smoke, panic-stricken faces. No way they can walk back across the Ponte Vecchio.
The hubbub reminds Rena of May 1968 in Paris as described by Kerstin. Simon would probably get a kick out of those stories, but Ingrid definitely would not.
Tell me, Subra suggests.
‘The funny thing about my Maoist lover — no, the sad thing, really,’ Kerstin told me, ‘was that in private he just couldn’t get it up. We were lucky, though — the lovely uproar of May ‘68 came to our assistance. Barricades, street battles, riot police — all that worked just fine, so when June rolled around I discovered I was pregnant. Naturally, fatherhood was out of the question for my handsome Trotskyite. While libertines endlessly repeat the platitude that eroticism is connected to death, they refuse to entertain the notion that it might be connected to birth. Anathema, for the bellows of transgressive orgasms to give rise to the gurgling of babies! So their charming libertine girlfriends frequently wound up on their backs with their feet in stirrups, having their entrails mauled by metallic instruments that gave them internal hæmorrhages and horrifying nightmares…A couple of my closest friends had been rendered sterile and depressive by that sort of butchery, so I was scared stiff of abortionists and had no intention of putting my life in their hands. My handsome, red-neckerchiefed revolutionary vanished into thin air. After the birth of our child, Pierre, I’d sometimes call Alain-Marie in the middle of the night—”Here, your son wants to talk to you”—and hold the receiver to the baby’s screaming mouth.’
I nodded, imagining the scene. ‘And did you ever tell Pierre he’d been conceived at Saint-Médard’s?’ ‘Not in the church. In the middle of the Rue Gay-Lussac at five in the morning.’ ‘Did you ever tell him?’ ‘Are you kidding?’ ‘And did he see his father, growing up?’ ‘No, virtually never. But I married Edmond five years later, and he was a father to Pierre — a marvellous one — until his death last year…’ ‘I’m sorry, Kerstin, forgive me for prying but…what about Alain-Marie?’ ‘Listen, Rena. Get this through your head. Alain-Marie has hated his son at every stage of his existence. Disgusting fœtus, bawling baby, mumbling toddler, pimply teenager, and now — by far the worst — tall, dark, handsome young rival!’
I couldn’t help laughing. The idea of an ageing libertine devoured by jealousy of his own son was irresistibly funny.
Paradiso
Night is falling by the time they get back to the Piazza San Giovanni; the tourists have dispersed and the Baptistery stands deserted. Here’s their chance to study the famous gilded Doors of Paradise. But…do they feel like it?
Putting on her reading glasses, Rena holds the guidebook up under a streetlight. ‘Ghiberti, 1425,’ she reads. ‘This door is his masterpiece. It took him twenty-five years to complete.’
Silence.
‘Before becoming a sculptor,’ she goes on, ‘he was a goldsmith.’
More silence.
‘His techniques’—one last try—’range from high relief to a mere shiver on the chiselled surface of cast metal.’
Hm, that’s not half bad. Not easy to translate, though. Can gold shiver in English?
No, it isn’t working. They don’t know how to look at this door. Don’t have the strength to identify the ten Biblical scenes — this one’s Noah, that one’s Esau, and over there must be Abraham’s philoxenia…
What the hell is philoxenia, anyway? wonders Rena.
Maybe it’s like xenophilia, Subra suggests. People who, like yourself, are keen on foreigners? Sorry.
Ingrid, however, still has the strength to talk about World War Two. She tells them how the Wehrmacht soldiers marched down the streets of Rotterdam singing at the tops of their lungs in German, giving her a permanent allergy to that language. Obligingly, Rena denounces the Third Reich’s cult of obedience. Simon chimes in, wondering why people are so often happy to abdicate their will… nicht wahr, Abraham?