Her loving father would always take her back, say a few kind and gentle words, offer support, moral and financial. Twenty-eight and as lost as a child. It seemed pathetic, selfish, and she wasn’t like that, not at all.
The close, high walls of the fortress museum began to oppress her. She walked out into the street, went into a nearby café for a macchiato, sat alone on a stool at the counter idly watching the TV. The core of her planned essay — to try to fathom the reason behind inexplicable, insane attacks against works of art — seemed to be growing more distant by the hour. Someone committed this very act almost in front of her yesterday in the Brancacci Chapel, and her immediate instinct had been to shrink from the deed. To seek an explanation for it from books or interviews with dry city officials, not the obvious sources: the police and the people they hunted. That was why she was still no closer to understanding the riddle she sought to solve. A lack of effort, of determination, of curiosity. Of courage. Though, if she were honest, even Fratelli — who possessed all those in spades — was wrestling with those strange bloody daubs on the Brancacci’s walls.
She remembered him wandering off in the Sant’Ambrogio market, leaving her with the nervous young carabiniere who’d blurted out the truth about his illness. He was looking for something there. From the expression on his face, she suspected he’d found it. Or a kind of answer anyway. And here she was, waiting on Sandro Soderini and the feckless Tornabuoni, begging for appointments that might never be kept, instead of attempting what the sick Fratelli did as second nature: hunting for direct answers; sifting for clues in the narrow, grubby streets of Florence, among the detritus of the centuries.
There was no excuse. No good reason to drift back to England, a failure twice over in less than a year. On Thursday, she thought. In San Marco. That’s where I begin. In the meantime…
Time to kill, and her head too full of paintings and statues. More than anything all those smug dead faces that lined the Vasari Corridor, staring mutely back at her as if accusing her of complicity in the unsolved crime of being alive for no good purpose.
She needed an escape. Julia walked back into the centre of the city, found a cinema and sat in an almost-empty theatre watching a harmless American comedy new to Italy, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, laughing infrequently, mostly at the strange way the subtitles translated High School American English into Italian.
It was dark by the time she came out. She felt better. A Negroni with Fratelli, some news of what he’d found, would be welcome. Could she sit and listen to him, be charmed by him, without mentioning she now saw behind his mask? She’d no idea. But he was the only man in Florence she’d warmed to, and his presence and pyrotechnic conversation, forever leaping in unexpected directions, amused her. The man appreciated her company too, she thought. It was an agreeable bargain on both sides.
There were few tourists in the Piazza della Signora when she walked across the square towards the river. Lights still burned in the offices of the Palazzo Vecchio. She wondered what Sandro Soderini, the slyly lascivious mayor was up to. Working? Plotting? Bawling out Vanni Tornabuoni for missing an appointment with a woman Soderini wished to impress? Or fixing a date with a girlfriend? She doubted he had just the one.
She stopped and stared at the bronze circular plaque set in the cobblestones in front of Michelangelo’s David. The inscription said this was the exact spot where Savonarola and his two fellow priests were hanged and burned almost five centuries before. The place too, she realized, where the friar himself had organized the famous bonfire of the vanities in which paintings by Botticelli and perhaps Michelangelo had perished in the flames. A few yards away, in the shadows of the Loggia dei Lanzi, stood another reminder of the past’s ubiquitous presence around her. Benvenuto Cellini’s brutal bronze of Perseus, holding the head of the slaughtered Medusa.
Julia strolled over to look more closely at this fierce figure on its plinth at the edge of the loggia platform. Even under the weak lights, the intentional savagery was evident, in the muscular stance of the warrior, the severed head gripped in his fingers, its realistic tendons, sinews and cortex dangling beneath, seeming to drip real blood on to the stones of Florence. It wasn’t hard to see there was a shocking facility for violence in the artist who made this ferocious scene real. Not that this was obvious in his majestic bearded statue, which she’d seen midway on the Ponte Vecchio that morning, and from Hitler’s window in the Vasari Corridor. There was a hidden side to the Florentines, as there was to their city. Both concealed their interior nature with a fluent, casual ease.
The light from the street lamps was poor and forced her to get nearer. Close up the nature of the statue changed. Now she could see that Medusa was no monster at all. Her naked body, on which the victorious Perseus stepped in triumph, appeared voluptuous, a middle-aged sculptor’s sexual fantasy. Her dead face, frozen in the severed head held aloft in Perseus’ left hand, which gripped her snaking hair, was guileless and bewitching. Medusa’s features were not unlike those of Perseus himself: young and preternaturally sensual. Some struggle was going on here, between male and female, oppressor and oppressed, and it seemed to her that Cellini was hinting that there was precious little to divide victor and victim. Julia thought again of the couple on the walls of the Brancacci Chapel, naked and innocent on one pillar, shamed and made all-too-human on the other. Florence appreciated such a war of opposites, liked watching this struggle between dark and light, and with it the opportunity to dive into the swimming, grey ocean of moral and sexual uncertainty that lay between the two.
A memory from a guidebook. She stepped on to the loggia itself and walked to the rear of the statue. There, sculpted on the back of Perseus’s helmet, like a death mask reproduced in bronze, was Cellini’s own face, bearded and strangely contorted. She shivered and checked herself. So much art, so much of the past… so much blood.
A voice came out of the darkness at the back of the loggia. It was coarse and aggressive and a little unsound and it said, ‘What are you looking at?’
She staggered against the Medusa statue in shock, reeled round and saw — just — a shape in the shadows.
‘Nothing,’ she said loudly. Then in Italian, ‘Niente. Niente.’
A man came out of the gloom and for the first time since she’d arrived in Italy, Julia Wellbeloved felt afraid. He was tall and strong. Around his powerful shoulders was a full black cloak with a hood that rose to cover most of his features, giving him the appearance of a violent, fanatical monk. What she could see of his face was pale and hairless, with a prominent nose and sunken eyes that gleamed in the light of the loggia’s lamps. She felt she ought to know him for some reason, though the idea seemed ridiculous.
‘Nothing,’ she murmured in English again, retreating to the steps down to the square.
He had what looked like a boathook in his right hand and a huge canvas bag, weighed down by something heavy, in his left.
As she watched, a little more of the face came out from the hood and his large, canine mouth opened and shut, with a snapping noise.
She turned and strode quickly away, down towards the arches of the Uffizi and the river. It was dark and empty in the gap between the galleries on both sides and she wondered whether he would follow. At the end there were a few hawkers’ stalls on the raised pavement by the river, beneath the Vasari Corridor. Julia hurried over, stood in the lights of the nearest, and then, only then, turned to look behind her.