The only other time I had been in a church of this size was when Umberto had taken me to the Basilica of the National Shrine in Washington, playing hooky after a dentist appointment. I could not have been more than six or seven years old, but I vividly remembered him kneeling down next to me in the middle of the enormous floor and asking me, “Do you hear it?”
“Hear what?” I had asked, the little plastic bag with a new pink toothbrush clutched in my hand.
He had cocked his head playfully. “The angels. If you are very quiet, you can hear them giggle.”
“What are they laughing at?” I had wanted to know. “Us?”
“They take flying lessons here. There is no wind, only the breath of God.”
“Is that what makes them fly? The breath of God?”
“There is a trick to flying. The angels told me.” He had smiled at my wide-eyed awe. “You need to forget everything you know as a human being. When you are human, you discover that there is great power in hating the earth. And it can almost make you fly. But it never will.”
I had frowned, not quite understanding him. “So, what’s the trick?”
“Love the sky.”
While I was standing there, lost in the memory of Umberto’s rare, emotional gush, a group of British tourists came up behind me, their guide talking animatedly about the many failed attempts at finding and excavating the old cathedral crypt-allegedly in existence in the Middle Ages, but now apparently lost forever.
I listened for a while, amused by the sensationalist bent of the guide, before leaving the cathedral to the tourists and strolling down Via del Capitano to end up-much to my surprise-back in Piazza Postierla, right across from Malèna’s espresso bar.
The little square had been quite busy the other times I had been there, but today it was pleasantly calm, perhaps because it was siesta time and sizzling hot. A pedestal with a wolf and two suckling babes stood opposite a small water fountain with a fierce-looking metal bird hovering above it. Two children, a boy and a girl, were splashing water on each other and running to and fro, shrieking with laughter, while a row of old men sat in the shade not far away, hats on, jackets off, looking with mild eyes on their own immortality.
“Hello again!” said Malèna when she saw me entering the bar. “Luigi did a good job, no?”
“He’s a genius.” I walked up to her and leaned on the cool countertop, feeling strangely at home. “I’m never going to leave Siena for as long as he is here.”
She laughed out loud, a warm, knowing laughter that made me once again wonder about the secret ingredient in these women’s lives. Whatever it was, I was clearly missing it. It was so much more than just self-confidence; it seemed to be the ability to love oneself, enthusiastically and unsparingly, body and soul, naturally followed by the assumption that every man on the planet is dying to get in on the act.
“Here”-Malèna placed an espresso in front of me and added a biscotto with a little wink-“eat more. It gives you… you know, character.”
“Fierce-looking creature,” I said, referring to the fountain outside.
“What kind of bird is it?”
“It is our eagle, aquila in Italian. The fountain is our… oh, what is it?” She bit her lip, searching for the word. “Fonte battesimale… our font for baptism? Yes! This is where we bring our babies so they become aquilini, little eagles.”
“This is the Eagle contrada?” I glanced around at the other customers, suddenly all goose-bumpy. “Is it true that the eagle symbol originally came from the Marescotti family?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding, “but we didn’t invent it, of course. The eagle came originally from the Romans, and then Carlomagno took it over, and since the Marescottis were in his army, we had the right to use this imperial symbol. But nobody knows that anymore.”
I stared at her, almost certain she had referred to the Marescottis as if she was, in fact, one of them. But just as I opened my mouth to ask the question, the grinning face of a waiter came between us. “Only the people who are lucky enough to work here. We know everything about her big bird.”
“Just ignore him,” said Malèna, pretending to hit him over the head with a tray. “He is from Contrada della Torre-the Tower, you know.” She grimaced. “Always being funny.”
Just then, in the middle of the general amusement, something outside caught my eye. It was a black motorcycle and rider, visor closed, pausing briefly to look through the glass door before speeding up with a roar and disappearing.
“Ducati Monster S4,” the waiter recited, as if he had memorized the ad from a magazine, “a real street fighter. Liquid-cooled motor. She makes men dream of blood, and they wake up in a sweat and try to catch her. But she has no grab rails. So”-he patted his belly suggestively-“don’t invite a girl on board if you don’t have a six-pack antilock braking system.”
“Basta, basta, Dario!” scolded Malèna. “Tu parli di niente!”
“Do you know that guy?” I asked, trying to sound casual while feeling everything but.
“That guy?” She rolled her eyes, not impressed. “You know what they say… those who make a lot of noise, they are missing something down there.”
“I don’t make a lot of noise!” protested Dario.
“I was not talking about you, stupido! I was talking about the moscerino on the motorcycle.”
“Do you know who he is?” I asked again.
She shrugged. “I like men with cars. Men on motorcycles… they are playboys. You can put a girlfriend on a motorcycle, yes, but what about your children and your bridesmaids, and your mother-in-law?”
“Exactly my point,” said Dario, wiggling his eyebrows. “I am saving up for one.”
By now, several other customers were getting audibly impatient in the queue behind me, and although Malèna seemed quite comfortable ignoring them all for as long as she damn well wanted, I decided to postpone my questions about the Marescottis and their possible present-day descendants to some other time.
As I walked away from the bar, I kept looking around for the motorcycle, but it was nowhere to be seen. Of course, I could not be sure, but my intuition told me this was the same guy who had bullied me the night before, and, honestly, if he really was a playboy looking for someone to hug his abs, I could think of better ways to start that conversation.
WHEN THE OWNER of the bookstore finally came back from lunch, I was sitting on her front step, leaning against the door, very close to giving up on the whole thing. But my patience was rewarded, for the woman-a sweet old lady whose spindly frame seemed to be propelled into motion by little more than an enormous curiosity-took one look at the index card and nodded right away.
“Ah, yes,” she said in fluent English, not the least bit surprised, “this is from the university archive. The history collection. I think they still use the old catalogue. Let me see now-yes, see, this stands for Late Middle Ages. And this means local. And look”-she showed me the codes on the card-“this is the letter of the shelf, K, and this is the number of the drawer, 3-17b. But it doesn’t say what is in it. Anyway, that is what the code means.” Having solved the mystery so quickly, she looked up at me, hoping for another. “How did you get this card?”
“My mother-or rather, my father-I think he was a professor at the university. Professor Tolomei?”
The old woman lit up like a Christmas tree. “I remember him! I was his student! You know, he was the one who organized that whole collection. It was a mess. I spent two summers gluing numbers on drawers. But… I wonder why he took out this card. He was always so upset when people left the index cards lying around.”
THE UNIVERSITY OF SIENA was scattered all over town, but the history archive was no more than a brisk walk away, out towards the city gate called Porta Tufi. It took me a while to find the right building among the inconspicuous façades lining the road; in the end what gave it away as a place for education was the patchwork of socialist posters on the fence outside.