At the point of no return, where France is closer than England, the sky clears, very suddenly, and turns a bright cloudless blue, and some English people on deck raise their glasses to toast the sun, which hovers on the horizon like an apparition or, more comically, like a mark of punctuation.
Switching trains in Paris at the Gare du Nord, there’s time to telephone Arlette, just to say hello. She’s probably at her bookstore. But I don’t. I change money, receiving large colorful notes for smaller English ones, buy black-and-white real-photo postcards of places I haven’t visited and French and English newspapers, drink a bowl of café au lait, wonder at French bread, reminisce about the smell of Gauloises and the nice Frenchman in Paris who ecstatically began at my ears and the nasty one in New York who wanted me to work harder, as he put it. Wantonly I enjoy hearing the French language, knowing that in a few hours it’ll be Italian. I write postcards. All this can make one feel like a traveler.
Chapter 5. Ruin
VENICE
The hotel was once a convent. Down the road, or canal, is a church of the same name that’s no longer used for services. This parallelism doesn’t escape me and surprisingly I like to go into the church just as I like sitting in the hotel’s lobby and garden. The empty church has a dank smell, maybe it can be said that it reeks of disuse, although this may be too vivid. Its aroma, redolent of mortality and the ephemeral, embraces one in a perfume of long ago, much too ripe, too long past, where the present couldn’t intrude. I breathe in, very deeply, the sweet old air, reminded that in that movie, Putney Swope, it was admonished that you can’t eat atmosphere, and I’m not sure that’s absolutely true, especially when you’re not physically hungry. A man sitting close to me, the church’s other lone visitor, hears me, shifts on the velvet seat and may believe I’m sighing. I think he’s Hungarian but have little to base this on. As I’m wearing black, he might imagine I’m a devotee of some sort, an ambiguity I momentarily enjoy and have already played with while temporarily sequestered in the ex-convent. All my devotions are secular.
Another visitor makes her presence felt by moving from alcove to alcove and dropping fifty lire in slots in metal boxes which activate spotlights. Sudden illuminations fiercely disrupt the quiet dark spaces, making visible the Madonna with child, saints in ecstasy, chubby angels hovering above the holy couple. Tintoretto, the Hungarian hisses as if we’re in collusion. Beautiful, I answer, not knowing what else to say. He nods. These paintings are beautiful, because they’re everything they’re supposed to be and nothing more. They’re constant, like pets or old friends, the ones who ask for the same old stories and jokes. The friends to whom you want to tell the same old jokes. As if you and they were identical twins. And then tell them, word for word, gesture for gesture, just the same, like the last time, and wait for their response, as if your life depended on it. Today, breathing in church air, I’d like to be an extra in someone else’s story. The young American woman in black who intrudes upon the reverie of the somewhat older Hungarian man in tweed. The Hungarian crosses himself as he rises from the pew, murmuring Adieu or something like that. I mumble too then bow my head toward the altar penitentially.
Two men walk in and point at the paintings. They’re speaking English in sober whispers and I follow them, to hear what they’re saying. One is lecturing the other about perspective and the vanishing point. The other says he likes skewed perspectives. I agree silently. Perspective wasn’t necessarily advantageous, he continues. Even the discovery of fire wasn’t really an advance, says the other one. The lecturer continues, the figures in medieval paintings, the incongruent relationships represent a different world view.…I’m getting too close to them, and linger in front of another painting, losing their conversation. It’s the way we draw as children, I hear the other one say finally. Looking at the two men, I remember being told about a filmmaker who taught his classes that vision was an erection of the irises, which makes me wonder if learning perspective is something akin to and as traumatic as circumcision.
Chapter 6. Indulgences
SAN GIMIGNANO
Walking along a dark alley whose paving stones were trod by grander feet, nearing an historic site, I take in, as best I can, the fact that so-and-so died or lived or passed through, then look again at the innocuous structure that once housed him, sometimes her. Immortality continues to elude me. Alfred’s learned commentary makes our trip more like a documentary than a narrative film. We are investigative reporters about to discover clues that everyone else had overlooked, not romantic leads in an adventure or mystery. Which would be more to my liking. But we do fit into an ecology. Without us equals not seen.
The sun’s pernicious rays make everyone happy. Men in white jackets and black trousers carry small cups of espresso on round silver trays, moving from table to table or from shop to shop, shouting pronto, sometimes with annoyance, and ciao with pleasure. On the street women sell blue-and-white-striped umbrellas made of linen, a local product, or they work inside stores behind counters, standing on high-heeled leather sandals, their well-padded feet spread over the sides of their shoes. I look at feet almost as much as teeth. Their feet look healthy, brown and pink, but probably are not. Late at night the women must rub them in their hands, exclaim at their exhaustion and soak their feet in soothing salted water held in ceramic bowls they’ve had in their families for years. That’s what I imagine when I look at these saleswomen who smile patiently rather than broadly and murmur grazie without obsequiousness.
Medieval houses teeter on the edges of narrow streets. I’m drinking an espresso in the Piazza della Cisterna, having persuaded Paul and Alfred to go off without me and do all the seeing they can. My stack of postcards grows, progeny of these travels, and I look from one card to the other like a proud mother, if I can understand that feeling. I try to as I watch women I take to be mothers walking by with children, doing the marketing and not stopping for an espresso. And because years ago one of these little girls could have been coffee-shop Claudia, I select a postcard to send her in London, one of a man and woman locked in an embrace, their lips barely touching, with “Amore” written in red letters across their chests. On a black-and-white real-photo postcard of the San Gimignano medieval “skyscrapers,” I write Zoran’s name and address just as Alfred sits down. I put the card in my diary. He tells me how much I missed by not going with them. He always says that.
Paul sleeps in the car, and Alfred and I find cheap hotels in Siena or Florence, which are home base for most of our day trips. We take single rooms, even though it’s more expensive and I think Alfred would prefer it if we shared one. He doesn’t say so. He doesn’t insist. He’d never say so. And he’d never insist. They don’t insist. With them I experience a kind of liberty — license, maybe — because their reticence or self-censorship permits a wide berth. I utter half-statements, which are met with cocked heads and attentiveness, but not with exhortations to explain or to finish. I tell them about a never-released thirties Hollywood movie based on the life of Schubert in which various characters walk up to the composer and ask, “Why don’t you finish The Unfinished?” They don’t think that’s as funny as I do.