The Truth About Death

by Robert Hellenga

  “Acqua Arno?” This time it was a tentative question. She had given up. She was a damsel in distress, and I was her knight-errant; but without the sword of language I couldn’t come to her rescue, so I pointed her once again in the direction of Via Verdi, extending my arm toward the river—acqua Arno—and watched as she crossed the piazza. As she approached Via Verdi the enormous suitcase teetered, tottered, and fell over again. She struggled to set it on its wheels, and then she disappeared around the corner and was gone.

  Je peux parler un peu de français. It was ridiculous. It was maddening. Je peux parler un peu de français. It didn’t occur to me at the time that if I’d gone on in French, in school, instead of switching to Italian I’d probably be in Paris instead of Florence, or that if she had spoken Italian, she wouldn’t be in the middle of the piazza asking for acqua Arno. No, all I could think of was that my whole life had been leading up to this point, and I’d studied the wrong language.

  I caught up with her in front of the Banca del Lavoro on Via Verdi. I hadn’t made a decision; I’d just paid for another glass of wine, and then, without drinking it, I’d started to run after her. She hadn’t gotten far because of the suitcase. Between the two of us, we managed to keep it upright—two police officers escorting a troublesome drunk—until we reached the river.

  “Pension,” she said, looking up and down the lungarno.

  “Pensione,” I said, not knowing if she had a particular pensione in mind or if she were looking for a pensione, any pensione. “Indirizzo,” I said. Address. No response. “Uhndrezz.” I gave the English word a French twist, but she didn’t understand.

  The third week in December was not cold as we understand cold in Chicago, but it was chilly and I thought the French woman needed more clothes, warmer clothes.

  The small albergo where I’d reserved a room for my daughter was not far away, just past the Biblioteca Nazionale. Since I hadn’t collected my deposit earlier in the evening—I’d paid in advance for two nights—I considered the room reserved.

  Volmaro, with whom I had quarreled bitterly only an hour earlier, gave me a puzzled look, as if there’d been some mistake. “Professore,” he said. “Your daughter has arrived after all?”

  I explained the situation and Volmaro smiled. Nothing enigmatic, just a smile.

  “You can put my deposit toward her bill.”

  “Of course, but let me remind you that the policy of the hotel …”

  “Please.” I interrupted him. “Let me help you with the suitcase and I’ll be on my way.”

  Together we maneuvered the suitcase up a small flight of stairs to the elevator landing while the French woman watched, her image reflected ad infinitum in a pair of gilt mirrors on opposite sides of the landing. She was a woman in her mid-thirties, dressed from top to toe in the very latest fashions: a short jacket, cinched at the waist, leggings that were soft and clingy. She had forest green boots on her feet; her hair had been dyed a metallic copper color; and on her wrist she wore a bulky Russian watch. She was more fashionable than beautiful. But she was beautiful too.

  Volmaro pushed a button and the elevator door clanked open and he rolled the suitcase into the elevator and my left knee began to quiver and quite suddenly I remembered another phrase in French. It came to me as a gift, rising to the surface like a cork that’s been held underwater: “Dans le fonds des forêts votre image me suis.” In the depths of the forest your image follows me. It was a line from Racine, something that had stuck in my mind, because as a young man I’d once written it on one of those little cards that florists give you when you send flowers.

  She colored slightly and smiled.

  “Alle undici,” I said. Eleven o’clock. I held up two forefingers, side by side.

  “Onze?” she said.

  “Onze,” I repeated. “Qui.” I pointed at the floor, the ceiling, the four walls.

  “Ici,” she said, nodding her head as she stepped backward into the elevator.

  In the morning I bought a shirt and a pair of corduroy pants at Raspini, across from the Baptistery. There was a jacket in the window, too, a really splendid jacket. I’d never seen such a jacket before, rich dark-chocolaty suede, soft as butter. It fit perfectly, but it wasn’t really any warmer than my Windbreaker. It was totally impractical, in fact; DO NOT WASH read a tag, in English, that I pulled out of the inside pocket; DO NOT DRY-CLEAN. And the salesman admitted that it would be ruined by rain. Besides, it was outrageously expensive—I could have spent two weeks in Rome for what it cost—and when I asked, just to double-check, I found that the price in the window was incorrect. The jacket really cost a great deal more, so I settled for a green silk scarf, which I knotted around my neck like a tie.

  Leaving my jeans and turtleneck at Raspini to be picked up later, I crossed Via Cavour and admired my new clothes in the window of the Mazocco bookstore, where I picked out a French–Italian dictionary that was small enough to fit into my jacket pocket and included a brief outline of French grammar. I also bought a Michelin Guide to the city, in French. Then I made my way to the albergo, where I found the French woman waiting in the lobby, dressed in black stockings, a short apricot-colored skirt, and a flowery silk blouse. Her makeup, minimal but skillfully applied, matched the skirt.

  “Bonjour, madame,” I said.

  “Bonjour, monsieur.”

  I gave her a complete tour of Santa Croce, because it was close, and because I didn’t know what else to do, and because I had the Guide Michelin and could read to her in French, which took her so completely by surprise that she laughed and covered her mouth with her hand, on which I noticed a ring. The more I read, the more she laughed; but when, embarrassed, I handed her the book, she handed it back. “Lisez,” she said. “Lisez.”

  It was one o’clock by the time we left the church. I ordered sandwiches—schiacciatta with prosciutto arosto and pecorino and salsa di funghi—in a bar in Piazza San Pier Maggiore, and while she ate I read aloud from the guidebook: “ ‘The tower that dominates the piazza was built by the Donati family at the beginning of the thirteenth century. In 1308 Corso Donati, captain of the Black Guelphs and brother of Piccarda, Dante’s inconstant nun, was besieged in the tower by his enemies. In an attempt to escape he was dragged to his death by his own horses on the present-day Via Pietrapiana.’ ”

  I could understand the guidebook French because the subject matter was familiar; but I couldn’t talk, couldn’t put together a sentence, couldn’t tell her that I myself had lived in that very tower with my family, that I used to stand in the window with a glass of Gallo Nero, waiting for my wife to come back from I Tatti, how she’d get off the bus in front of the post office looking beautiful in the red dress I’d bought for her on the Via Tornabuoni, how happy we’d been then, that my image of happiness was bound up with that tower apartment, with that piazza, with the pizzicheria, the forno, the latteria, and the polleria, even the dry cleaner with its peculiar odor; and how our neighbors and the teachers at the language school and the parents of the children’s classmates and even people I met on the bus had been happy to sit at our table, to talk: food, love, philosophy, religion. But I tried, with a handful of words from my French–Italian dictionary: famille, femme, enfants, appartement, convives, table, manger, parler. She leaned forward so as not to drop crumbs in her lap. “Heureux,” I said. She looked at me thoughtfully, the way an adult would look at a child who was trying to explain a complicated dream that he didn’t fully understand.

  She nodded. She was a nodder, and she nodded that evening in the Trattoria Maremmana, where my wife and I, on our last night in Florence, asked if we could have the last of our bistecca alla fiorentina for our dog, and the waiter, after he’d taken our plates, brought us a large sack full of old bones: femme, dernier nuit, bistecca, bourse pour les os, garçon, os pour le chien.

  That night I made a frontal assault on the French language: I studied the grammar in my dictionary, conjugated parler, finir, and répondre in the present indicative (which i
s all you really need), memorized a list of irregular verbs, reviewed prepositions from à to vers, tried to formulate some hypothetical phrases, and fell asleep with the dictionary in my hand.

  In the morning we went to the Uffizi. Aesthetic response is my special subject, my academic raison d’être. What is aesthetic experience like? Why do we value it? How can we translate it into words? After four months it was nice to experience the real thing again—the tug of beauty like the tug of a kite on a long string. If only I could speak—if only I could tell her—but all I could do was read from the Guide Michelin—clichés as universal as international traffic signs: cette Venus couchée … symphonie harmonieuse de coleurs … intense et vibrant … chiaroscuro doucement modelé … le realisme du petit chien endormi sur le lit …

  Her response was more physical, and when she took my arm for the first time, a French phrase rose to the surface of my imagination, one of the first things a young man learns or figures out in French 101: Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? But surely, I thought, vous is the formal form. Wouldn’t you ask such a question with a tu?

  At lunch I posed some of the questions I had formulated the evening before. She answered absently, paying more attention to her slippery bucatini, which sent tomato sauce splattering off in all directions, than to me. Her name was Yvonne. She was from Dijon. She was on holiday. She worked for an architectural firm … But I couldn’t figure out what I really wanted to know: Why had she come to Florence alone? How had she landed in Piazza San Pier Maggiore with her enormous suitcase?

  In the afternoon I wanted her to notice how the streets in the city center run at right angles to each other—the old Roman castrum—but she led me back to the pensione. Her room was dark. I opened the shutters. I needed air and light. She sat on the edge of the bed and I thumbed through my dictionary, searching for the words I needed to explain that it was perfectly all right just the way it was: to talk … that it wasn’t necessary … that in all the years I’d been married I’d never … that I really didn’t think … I kept on turning pages while she removed her clothes. I was still turning when she took the dictionary out of my hands and put it in the drawer of the bedside commodino, where it remained for the rest of her stay.

  When I looked into her eyes, I saw my wife, Maggie, and I could see in Yvonne’s eyes that she too was seeing someone else. And I could see not only that this was so, but that she knew it was so and knew that I knew, and knew that I knew that she knew …

  An infinite regress? Yes and no. Maybe this mutual knowledge united us more firmly and closely than our embraces. I couldn’t be sure.

  In the mornings we went to the museums; in the afternoons we walked around the city or took the bus up to Fiesole or Settignano. We walked down the narrow mulatteria where the carriage scenes in A Room with a View had been shot. We paused at the field full of flowers where the young lovers meet, though the field was bare and I would never have recognized it if I hadn’t in fact watched the scene being filmed. Maggie and I had been walking from Fiesole to Settignano … But I no longer tried to explain.

  The city itself seemed brighter and sharper, like a fresco that’s been recently restored. The steady hum of traffic provided a basso continuo to the ringing of bells, and the smells of roasting chestnuts and boiled tripe drew us from one street corner to another. We ate our way through the menu at Trattoria Maremmana and walked home, holding hands, to Albergo Medici, where Volmaro turned a blind eye to our comings and goings. In the darkness we came together in silence.

  On Christmas morning we had the city to ourselves. Empty panettone boxes and champagne bottles were tucked into doorways. She had a ticket for the night train to Paris.

  In the afternoon I stood at the window while she packed her suitcase. The clothes that she hadn’t worn made me think that she’d had something else in mind. Something fancier, more high-toned.

  At the station she waited at the taxi stand while I looked for a luggage cart for the suitcase. I helped her onto a second-class carriage, and then a young man helped me lift the suitcase up onto the luggage rack. I got off the train and she stayed on. I waited outside her window till the train pulled out of the station, and then I went home and cleaned up my room. We hadn’t exchanged addresses.

  The next day I bought the soft leather jacket I’d seen in the window at Raspini. I couldn’t afford it, but I couldn’t help myself. It was too beautiful. It was the sort of jacket that the archangel Gabriel would wear in a modern-dress version of the Annunciation. Walking out onto Via Cavour, I felt as conspicuous as Gabriel himself must have felt, wings spread, halo glowing. How all eyes must have turned to him.

  I walked around the city center till it began to grow dark, and then I took a number thirteen bus up to Piazzale Michelangelo and walked back down. And yet no crowds gathered. No one followed me. No one even looked at me. The jacket, far from making me conspicuous, had made me invisible.

  That night—and every night for a long time—I could feel her presence in the bed, beside me, on top of me, under me. For many years, whenever I looked back on that difficult time, I could summon up her presence, and she would be there.

  I’d never discovered why she’d come to Italy, never understood how she’d happened to turn up in Piazza San Pier Maggiore with her huge suitcase. But my curiosity about these things no longer ran very deep. What ran deep was the memory of what she had given me. The gift of her body. No small thing, even in this age of casual affairs. But there was another gift too, more durable than the memory of her caresses—the gift of silence. Leaving behind my stories and anecdotes, I had followed her across the border into another country. Without words, at first I was afraid I wouldn’t know who I was, but in the silence, I no longer needed to know.

  HOW TO WRITE A MEMOIR

  The goal in your memoir is to discover, for yourself and for your reader, the meaning of something important in your past. Don’t worry about making a point. Just start with something—some event or issue—that you want to explore:

  I went to Italy with my aunt Lydia last summer. She said that Italy would get the taste of shame and humiliation out of my mouth, like a piece of rhubarb pie.

  Make a map of the scene: Imagine the place where the event or episode took place. Use your map to create a sense of place.

  I’ve got two maps taped up over my desk in Mary Markley Residence Hall, where I live with twelve hundred other first-year students. One I ripped out of the back of the Carthage, Michigan, phone book. The other is a map of Florence, Italy, that I ripped out of my Florence guidebook. On the first I’ve circled our house on North Street, my aunt’s apartment on Seminary, the high school, the Franklin Funeral Home (on the corner of Oak and M60), and the gasket company (Midwest Gaskets) out on Southport Road, where my aunt works. On the map of Florence I’ve marked the location of the station, the Hotel Mona Lisa on Borgo Pinti; the Osteria dei Pazzi, where my aunt and I ate with Severino on our first and last nights in Florence; the Bargello (where I got all worked up about Donatello’s David ); Piazzale Michelangelo; and the bus stop by the post office in Piazza Salvemini.

  Describe the people. Who are your main characters? How old are they? What do they look like? What do they say? What do they want? How do they respond to the events of the story?

  My Aunt:

  Technically my aunt Lydia, who’s about forty, is an old maid. My mother always sighs when my aunt’s marital status comes up in conversation. But Aunt Lydia is not like the other old maids in the Methodist church, who are sometimes called “maiden ladies.” When she was my age she went to the General Motors Institute in Flint and now she’s an executive vice president at the gasket company on the edge of town, before you get to the railroad hump yard. They used to manufacture all the gaskets for Maytag refrigerators, and when Maytag pulled out and moved to Mexico, everyone thought Carthage Gaskets was finished. But it wasn’t. The parent gasket company in Italy was expanding, not retrenching, and would be sending a team of engineers to oversee a retooling process
. Which is why my aunt had to go to Italy. The engineers would be coming in September.

  My aunt is someone I can talk to about certain things that I can’t talk to my mother about. For example, my aunt is the one I called when Howard Franklin, who’s a Christian Scientist, broke our date for the senior prom so he could go with another Christian Scientist, one he met at a retreat at the Christian Science Temple in Michigan City. It was lunch hour and we were standing outside my locker. He was sorry, he said, but I didn’t want to listen to his apologies. “Will she let you dry hump her,” I asked him, “or do you only dry hump Methodists?” I went straight to the office and called my aunt and she told me to take a taxi out to the plant, which is what I did. She asked if I wanted to go to Italy with her, and I said I did. And later on she gave me a book about Christian Science by Mark Twain, who called Mary Baker Eddy the “queen of frauds and hypocrites.”

  She said she really wanted me to go with her because I’d taken four years of Spanish in high school and that would make it easy for me to understand Italian, so I could help her get around.

  Stella (me):

  Me, I’m a strong student. Not the valedictorian, but strong—more artsy than academic. I did all the artwork for the yearbook. I’m the youngest of four children and have two brothers and a sister. I’m the last to leave home. My parents wanted me to go to St. Joe Community College, like my brothers, because it’s cheaper, but Aunt Lydia offered to pay for my tuition at U of M.

  I was reasonably popular in high school. I always had a boyfriend. I’m pretty good-looking. Not much in the way of boobs, but I’ve been told that my legs and my butt are “shapely” and I’ve got a “winning” smile. I started getting serious about sex during my junior year in high school, when I was dating Howard Franklin. I wanted to go all the way, but Howard was reluctant to cross that bridge. I guess he was satisfied with dry humping. Those are the ugliest words I’ve ever heard. “Dry humping.” I can barely write them down.