The Italian Lover

by Robert Hellenga

  Esther was wearing the leather coat she’d bought on her first recce. She kept it on for a while and then took it off and asked one of the waiters to hang it up for her. “The waiters like to push you around in a place like this,” she said. “If you want to have a good time, you’ve got to show them who’s boss. You can’t let the waiters intimidate you. It’s like the old Ma Maison in Los Angeles. Or the Tour d’Argent in Paris. They tried to intimidate Harry at the Tour d’Argent, and he sent everything back at least once, sometimes twice. The wine, the soup, the steaks. Everything.” But Harry was living with another woman in L.A., and without him Esther was just a little intimidated—by the Murano glass chandeliers, the pale pink table linens, the silver water pitchers, the liveried waiters. She was too tired; she was talking too much. There were no prices on the menu, and she was starting to worry about the bill.

  They had put five people at a table for four, and Esther complained. Margot tried to shush her, but she wouldn’t shush. The waiters knew English, she could see that, but they were pretending not to, and this irritated her. They were going to have to struggle to have a good time here. But she was determined to have a good time, a great time. She ordered a bottle of Prosecco to show them that she knew her way around an Italian meal, and when the Prosecco arrived, she proposed a toast to what was going to be a great film.

  They ordered the chef’s tasting menu, which was wonderful. Goose liver terrine with figs and star anise; sea scallops with celery and caviar in a basil vinaigrette; lobster with asparagus tips; baked baby lamb with deep-fried brains. Her guests were enjoying themselves. Esther sat between Woody and Franco Bevilacqua, who were talking Italian politics. Margot and Paola were tracking down mutual acquaintances. Esther was relieved that Margot wasn’t asking about how they were going to do the flood, and she was relieved that the lambs’ brains were edible. Pretty good, actually.

  “You’re not a film person, are you?” she said to Woody during a lull in the conversation.

  “I don’t suppose I am,” he said.

  “Too bad,” she said. “Film is the great art form of the twentieth century. Film has pushed everything else into the background. Nothing can compare with it.” Woody speared an asparagus tip and put it in his mouth. “It’s got everything,” Esther went on. “Narrative, scene, intimate detail, visual, sculpture that moves, images that move.”

  “I liked it better when it was the movies,” Woody said. “Painting, sculpture, symphonies, literature . . . They were for the rich. They were highbrow. But movies were for everybody. Like Homer. And everybody could afford it. When I was a kid, it cost fourteen cents for a movie and ten cents for popcorn. If you took a quarter, you had a penny left for candy. I went every Friday night. I don’t think I missed a Friday night for two or three years running. I can’t remember any of the movies, mostly Westerns, but I can remember what it felt like.”

  Esther was taken by surprise, ambushed. “You know something,” she said, “that’s what we’re going to make—a movie.”

  After the special desserts and the Vin Santo and the cognac, Esther discovered that her credit card wouldn’t cover the bill, which was almost a thousand dollars, and she had to ask Margot to put it on her credit card. This was the sort of thing that Harry would have shrugged off, but Esther felt humiliated, even though Margot said it was all right. She remembered Harry sending everything back at the Tour d’Argent, and how the waiters had fallen all over him, apologizing, asking for his advice. And the funny thing was, Harry didn’t know squat about French food, but he gave them advice anyway. She thought that if Harry were here they’d take a cab up to the big piazza overlooking the city, Piazza Michelangelo, or they’d go back to the hotel and make love. She thought that if Harry were here she wouldn’t feel so alone, but she kept her thoughts to herself and didn’t allow herself any tears till she was in the big double bed in her five-hundred-dollar-a-night room at the Excelsior.

  Midwestern Christmas

  A sign at the base of the tower warned visitors, in Italian and in English, not to make the climb if they had weak hearts. Margot’s father had died of a heart attack, but she wasn’t worried. She looked at Woody, who was talking to the woman at the counter where they sold maps of the city and official guides to various museums. He didn’t look worried either. Florence was a tourist town, no getting around it, but it was her tourist town, and in winter, when the weather was bad, the streets weren’t too crowded. Not that they had a real winter. But they’d had rain mixed with a little snow—the first snow she’d seen in four or five years—and they had the tower more or less to themselves.

  Margot and Woody had settled into a comfortable friendship. The moment for a little avventura had come and gone on the night they’d met, the night the stronzo had dragged Biscotti behind him around Piazza Santissima Annunziata. They’d written a screenplay together; they’d watched a lot of movies and they’d eaten a lot of buttered popcorn and a lot of apples. On Saturday nights they’d eat at Trattoria la Maremmana, or at the Osteria de’ Pazzi in Via Verdi, or at the little restaurant in Piazza Tasso—Il Tranvai—or Woody and Biscotti would come over and Woody would fix dinner and they’d watch another movie and eat popcorn and apples, and then Woody would put his shoes back on and head for home.

  Margot didn’t want him to leave, to go back to St. Clair. She wanted him to stay in Italy, and now every moment they spent together felt charged with meaning, fraught with danger. Something would have to be settled. But how? How did you seduce a man like Woody? With an Italian man, all you had to do was catch his eye and smile and then let him do all the work. But Woody?

  On the other hand, Woody was no Puritan: she knew that he’d lived for two years with a woman in Bologna, and he’d admitted, on the way to the tower, that he’d almost lost his job at St. Clair for shacking up with a student whose mother was an important trustee and whose father was a major donor.

  Margot pried the details, some of the details, out of him as they climbed the narrow winding stairs to the first level. The mother, Allison, had been Woody’s girlfriend at the University of Michigan. She’d taught at St. Clair and when she left she’d recommended that they hire Woody to replace her. The father, Alireza Mirsadiqi, a wealthy Iranian rug merchant, had intervened on Woody’s behalf, saving his job, but by the time the scandal had played itself out, Woody had decided to sell his farm and come to Italy for the trial of the terrorists in Bologna. Alireza had insisted that a position be kept open for him at St. Clair. This is what worried Margot.

  “Well, Alan Woodhull, aren’t you the naughty boy,” Margot said. “I had no idea. No idea. Not just the mother, but the daughter too. And then her father takes a shine to you . . .”

  Woody laughed. “They’ve invited me to Rome for Christmas.”

  “They live in Rome? These same people? Woody, you’re full of surprises. Will the daughter be there? What was her name?”

  “Turi. Yes. She’s teaching at Harvard now. She was a terrific student.”

  “I’ll bet she was.”

  They had the first landing to themselves. “Two years in Florence,” Margot said, “and you haven’t climbed Giotto’s tower, haven’t been up to the cupola of the Duomo, haven’t been to the Uffizi, haven’t seen Michelangelo’s David in the Accademia, or Donatello’s in the Bargello. I’m going to have to take it upon myself to teach you about the Renaissance.”

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Woody said, adopting a professorial tone, “the Renaissance was the creation of later historians— Michelet and Burckhardt—and accomplished nothing of substance, nothing comparable to the works of Plato and Aristotle, nothing comparable to the institution of chivalry or the gothic cathedrals and universities of the Middle Ages, or to the scientific advances of the seventeenth century. Besides, who reads the Renaissance humanists? Even Pico della Mirandola was a lightweight. There was nothing to compare with Homer or Virgil. Not till Shakespeare.”

  “What about Dante?”

  “Dante, of course. F
or Dante, Florence was the center of the universe, and by the Quattrocento it really was the center of the universe. But Florence ignored the developing trade routes, ignored the economic opportunities presented by the discovery of the new world. Florence turned inward, and what happened? The kings that the Medici financed went bankrupt, and so did the Medici. Florence never recovered.

  “Look at Illinois in the nineteenth century. The old trade routes were north–south. The new ones were east–west. They were made possible by the railroad. Illinois didn’t turn inward. It financed the bridges across the Mississippi that made the railroad lines possible. Illinois invested in the railroads.”

  “But Woody,” Margot said, “I want you to see what I see.” They were looking out at the massive red dome of Santa Maria dei Fiori, and she told him the old story: The medieval cathedral builders had learned by trial and error. Some cathedrals in France had collapsed because the builders hadn’t known how to calculate stresses. Woody hadn’t known that. “The folks who built the Duomo in Florence wanted something to really dominate the region, so they built a cathedral so big they didn’t know how to put a top on it. Just a big hole.”

  They looked out through the heavy wire screen in the tower window. Woody put his hand on the screen and tried to shake it. “Like hog panels,” he said.

  “Florence was a laughingstock,” Margot went on. “They had nice cathedrals in Pisa and Siena. But all Florence had was a big hole.”

  “Till Brunelleschi came along. The egg, and all that.”

  “It was Columbus who pulled the egg trick. Brunelleschi went to Rome and studied the Pantheon. The Romans knew how to do it, and he figured out how to do it too. Not by trial and error, but by thinking, by figuring it out. That’s the difference.”

  On the second level she explained the double dome construction, which she didn’t fully understand. But she understood enough.

  “There used to be brick works near St. Clair,” Woody said. “I used to go out there with Hannah and the girls. There were arches everywhere formed by the old burned-out kilns.”

  The problem with Woody, in Margot’s opinion, wasn’t the Renaissance—the discovery of the world and of man. The problem with Woody was that he lived in a different Italy. Her Italy lay spread out before them, and if you went to the Uffizi, where the paintings were arranged in chronological order, you could see that something had happened, something astonishing. Even Woody would have to admit that, if she could get him there. Her Italy was the bus stop on Via del Proconsolo, where you could stand between the Badia, the center of the old medieval city, and the Bargello, the symbol of the new civic authority; her Italy was her old high school and her studio on the Lungarno Guicciardini; it was bars and trattorias where the waiters knew her by name; it was the piazzas where she always ran into a friend or two. But Woody’s Italy was the train station in Bologna, where his daughter had been killed by a terrorist bomb; his Italy was the young people who had put the bomb in the second-class waiting room of the station, and the esecutori, who had arranged the bombing; and the mandanti, the shadowy figures in the background who had commissioned it; his Italy was the corrupt judiciary that had failed to protect Judge DiBernardi from being assassinated; his Italy was the courtroom in Bologna where the terrorists had been tried; his Italy was the old-boy Fascist network that even now had obtained the release of Angela Strappafelci, the young woman who’d put the bomb in the station, dressed like a German tourist; his Italy was Rinaldo, the stronzo who’d dragged Biscotti behind his car, who’d threatened him in Piazza Tasso, and who had denounced him and was threatening to sue him to get his dog back. Woody had had to get his own lawyer, someone he’d gotten to know at the trial in Bologna. Rinaldo’s father had offered Woody a million lire, almost a thousand dollars, to return the dog, but Woody had refused.

  At the top of the tower they were going to create a memory chain. Woody had bought a book on memory that promised to cure absentmindedness and to keep the reader from losing things and to give the reader total recall of names, places, dates, and even shopping lists.

  Margot had read the book too and had been helping him with absentmindedness, and she’d noticed a definite improvement. The reason you lose your glasses or your shoes or your shopping list is that you don’t register anything when you put them down, so there’s nothing in your memory to recall. You need to register the fact that you’ve put your glasses down on top of the refrigerator by creating a fanciful association at the time you put them there. That way you’ll have something to remember. You imagine, for example, that your refrigerator is a big rectangular head that’s wearing a pair of glasses. Then when you start to look for your glasses, you’ll associate them with this refrigerator head.

  The same principle could be used to create a memory chain, a technique that appealed to Woody because it had been developed by the Greek orators. First you create the chain—a list of places. Then, with your chain in place, when you create a list, you put the first item in the first location on your chain and create a fanciful association; then you put the second item on your list in the second location, and so on.

  The list that Margot had created for Woody began in Fiesole, the earliest Etruscan settlement in the Arno Valley. From where they were standing now they could see the bell tower of San Romola up in Fiesole. The second location was the Ponte Vecchio, the narrowest spot on the Arno, where the Romans had built the first bridge, part of the Via Cassia that linked Rome to northern Italy. The third location was the Piazza Repubblica, the center of the old Roman campo, which had been laid out at right angles. From the top of Giotto’s tower they could see it all, the city spread out before them. Margot’s memory chain went on in chronological order: San Miniato, the Baptistery, the Badia Fiorentina, Santa Maria Novella, Santa Croce, the Signoria, the Duomo, the Bargello, and so on. It was the story her mother had drilled into her when she was fifteen, and her mother, she learned later, was having an affair with Bruno Bruni, a man who’d befriended them when they first came to Florence, and who was now buried up in Settignano.

  “Now Woody, I want you to fix this picture in your mind, okay? You’ve got twenty locations in your memory chain. That will do for starters. Maybe we’ll add a few more later. Now I’m going to give you a shopping list for tonight. I’m going to give you things in random order, and I want you to put each item in one of the locations, okay? Do you want to run through the chain again first?”

  “I’m all set.”

  “Let’s start with some salame toscano.”

  “Okay. Fiesole. I’m going to picture the bell tower as a big salami. Next.”

  “Some olives. Different kinds. Kalamata, and some of those little Ligurian ones.”

  “I’m at the Ponte Vecchio, but instead of gold in the shop windows they’ve got all kinds of olives.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m going to need some stamps.”

  “Okay. I’m in Piazza Repubblica, and it’s paved with stamps instead of stones.”

  Margot went through her list till they got to the last two items: parmigiano reggiano and clementini.

  “I’m standing in Piazza Santa Croce. I’ve just imagined that the statue of Dante is made out of Parmesan cheese, and now I’m looking up at your balcony. You’re standing on the balcony, looking down, but instead of your regular breasts you’ve got about twenty clementini, like the breasts on the statue of Artemis in Ephesus.”

  “Perfect, Woody. Everything’s in place. You’re ready to go shopping. You don’t need to worry about losing the list because it’s up here, right?” She tapped his head. “You’d better run through it, okay, just to make sure.”

  Woody ran through the list without a mistake. “Pretty amazing,” he said. “This is how Demosthenes —”

  But Margot put her arm through his. “Woody,” she said, “don’t go to Rome for Christmas. Stay here. We’ll get a tree and we’ll put up some lights. We’ll make ornaments out of baker’s clay, and we’ll go shopping and you can roast a turk
ey. We’ll watch A Christmas Carol in Italian.” Her heart was pounding the way it always did when a man propositioned her, though this time it was the other way around. “We can go to the Christmas Eve service at the American Church and sit way in the back so they don’t put us on a committee. I haven’t been in years. Last year I went home to see my sisters, and . . .” But she stopped herself because she realized that she was talking too much.

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not? I’ve got a meeting in Rome in January anyway. I’ll stay with the Mirsadiqis then.”

  On Christmas Eve, after the service at the American Church, after the traditional Florentine Christmas Eve dinner—spaghetti alle vongole followed by barnyard-smelling cottechino sausage— Margot asked Woody to undress her in front of the cheval glass. Everything you do after a certain age is a variation on something you’ve done before. Woody was hardly the first to undress her in front of this cheval glass, which had belonged to Francesca, who’d become her best friend. And yet this didn’t feel like anything she’d ever done before. It felt like something new. Like starting over. As if her adventure were just beginning. After they’d made love and had drunk a glass of Vin Santo, Woody started to leave, as he always did, but Margot asked him to stay. “I don’t want to wake up alone,” she said, “not on Christmas morning,” and of course he stayed, but he had to go home to get some food for Biscotti. Margot stood in the window and watched him and the dog cross the piazza. And then she waited right there till she saw him coming back out of Via Verdi into the piazza.