I refuse the doctor and the hospital point-blank. I will see the Raphael Stanze, no matter how much it hurts. To go to the doctor would take all day. Instead we will go to the pharmacy. But the pharmacy near the hotel is shut. We ask a passerby the reason: it is Sunday. She thinks it will open for a short while at eleven. We sit on a bench and wait. It is pleasant to sit down in the shade. It is all I can think about, how pleasant it is. This is not because I am tired: it is because the pain, when I stand, is unbearable. When I look down at my foot I notice it is swollen. I worry, vaguely, about the time: our Vatican hours are being steadily consumed. If only I could stay on the bench, all would be well. I imagine the others pushing me on it around the museum, while I lie on my back and gaze upward at the Sistine Chapel.
At last the pharmacy opens. The pharmacist touches my foot and I shriek. She gives me painkillers, and a tube bandage like a thick white sock. She does not involve herself in what the matter might be: she’s only a pharmacist. She does not have the doctor’s duty, to bring the crimes of the body to justice. I intend to get away with it, and she is my accessory. For a while, on the bus, I am buoyant. The bandage has a placebo effect: when I held it in my hands in the pharmacy, my foot seemed to speak. It affirmed that the bandage was what it needed. It throbbed with belief. But the truth is that the bandage makes no difference at all. When I put it on, it was like putting on a sweater to address a stomachache. There was a moment of disjointure, of failure to connect, before the pain thrummed on, resuming its separate journey. It has a masklike virtue, at least. It makes what lies beneath it more horrible to me, but more bearable for everyone else.
The bus arrives at Vatican City. There is a walk, short enough, but deep in its dimension of agony. When we reach the Piazza San Pietro I look up, and in my vulnerable state its blinding white vastness seems awful and ominous. It is as huge and cold and hostile as a glacier. These are the pilgrim spaces, these gigantic man-made voids — the piazza is said to be able to hold three hundred thousand people with ease — but to me they are inhuman and terrifying. The piazza is rounded at its open end. It is meant to be shaped like a shell. But there is nothing shell-like about it at all. A shell is small and delicate. If a shell were the size of the Piazza San Pietro, it would belong in a horror film, a monstrous bivalve that rampaged around the world, shovelling three hundred thousand people at a time into its scalloped jaws.
I limp across the white, diamond-hard expanse, trailing after the others. It is midday, and the sun is ferocious. With my limp and my bandage I could be a true pilgrim, come to St. Peter’s to be healed. I have always been somewhat afraid of the pilgrim character. When I was fourteen, I went to Lourdes with my convent school to assist the pilgrimage of sick people from England. We took the boat and then the overnight train. I shared a carriage with a man whose wife was dying from cancer. She lay in her bunk, a swollen woman with terrible coarse threads of hair trailing from her bald scalp. The train rocked, and pulsed continually with its shuttered yellow light. Her face was grotesquely enlarged; she groaned, and sometimes flailed helplessly in her sheet. It was as though she had discovered something awful, on the very edge of life. Her husband thought she might not survive the journey to Lourdes and back. He said so, repeatedly. The train was so pell-mell, so indifferent. It sped through the night, rocking, as though it would stop for nothing. I tended numerous women during that week in the Lourdes hospital. Their bodies were so contorted, so satirized. It made death seem like an unpleasant kind of joke. There was mockery, as though of the sincerity with which they had lived in their own flesh. One of them had gangrene in her leg. We became friendly: I had to clip her blackened toenails, both of us shaking with laughter. On the boat on the way home there was a storm in the English Channel, and I remember empty wheelchairs pitching up and down the corridors, and the sound of groaning that came and went as the cabin doors swung back and forth on their hinges.
We pass in front of St. Peter’s, where Mass is being said, and people are queuing to have their bags examined by the security guards. Then we sheer off into a narrow street that runs beneath the high Vatican walls to the museums. It is shady here and the children run ahead, leaping up in the coolness like water leaps in a fountain. The walk is long. My foot aches, but I don’t care quite so much. It is enough, to be in this quiet, shady street away from the blinding white tundra of the pilgrim square; to be alone, ourselves, in Italy, with no God to beg from or placate, with the Raphael Stanze and the Sistine Chapel before us. The children run ahead and come back, run ahead and come back. Tomorrow we are leaving, going north. But we will still be together.
I sit down on the curbstone, underneath the high wall. It seems that I can go no further. The others stand and look down at me. I perceive their consternation in vague, shadowy blocks with the sun behind like a halo. Then they say that they will go on to ascertain the length of the queue, while I rest here. They go, and a short time later they return. There is no queue. The museums are closed on Sundays. We should have checked: we are losing our touch. We have missed our chance.
For a while we stay where we are, idling on the pavement in the shade. I think of Alberto Moravia’s stories, the Roman Tales, where disappointment is always the springboard to some kind of truth, a truth that lies beyond desire and motivation. The others sit on a bench. I remain on the curbstone. Presently my daughter takes a photograph of me. I look at it sometimes, back in England. I am a woman of thirty-nine, casually dressed, with a white bandage on her foot. The place where I sit, in the right angle of the curb and the wall, is so old that the stones have been worn into rounded shapes. In a minute I am going to get up: I won’t be there anymore. It is almost as though I am not there at all. It is the stones that are really there, not me. Maybe one day I’ll go back and sit in the same place, to prove something. But all the same, I look happy. I am smiling.
IN THE WOODS
We have a tent. It is Tiziana’s: she lent it to us. Before we left to go south, she erected it for us on the grassy slope of her garden, beside the wooden hut. It is a small tent, dome-shaped, faded blue on the outside, with a faded pink interior. The bleached colors are intimate: it is Tiziana’s use that has faded them. We all get inside, while Tiziana’s huge black dogs lie down on the hot grass at the flap. It is like sitting in a shell, or a teacup. The brilliant afternoon disappears: the tent is filled with a diffuse, rose-colored light, and the unbodied sounds of outside, of the dogs panting softly in the heat. Tiziana strokes the worn material, recalling her travels. She has been happy in this tent. She has taken it with her everywhere. She wishes to bequeath it to us, this frail shelter that can simply be unfolded and become a place, as familiar as a room, then cease to exist again. She doesn’t like the thought of it ceasing to exist. We promise to send it when we get back to England, but Tiziana shrugs. She doesn’t think she’ll be camping anytime soon, dug in as she is on Jim’s doorstep, awaiting an opportunity to strike.
It is July, and the summer lies heavy on the landscape; the heat extends everywhere, across night and day, unbroken. We pick up the car in Arezzo and drive to the coast, past the port of Piombino with its ships and steel foundries and boats to Elba, out across the deserted countryside of the headland, and north to remote Populonia and the Gulf of Baratti. The light is dry, ancient, on the earth-colored shoreline. The sea is a sheet of glitter. The tufted green headland, the grassy dunes with their crescent of pine trees, the brown-hillocked mystery of the Etruscan necropolis that stands beside the water, the fortified village on its hill above the bay: it is like a secret fold in the earth, inviolate. We pitch Tiziana’s tent in a big, dry glade with straw-colored fields all around its perimeter, a kilometer from the sea. The pine needles and brown, brittle eucalyptus leaves are soft underfoot. We tie a length of rope between two trees as a washing line. We spread a sheet on the floor of the tent to sleep on. There is a shower block, and a little café that sells cappuccino and cornetti for a euro.