The light changes, and I start up Viale Macchiavelli. The boulevard snakes its way through the hills to the south-east of the city and cars cruise by in both directions. Occasionally I pass someone walking a dog. I’ve ridden up here on the bus, but I’ve never come on foot. Hedges and walls hide the gardens of big, old-fashioned villas and I get glimpses of bright blue swimming pools, green swathes of lawn. If I go on long enough, this will turn into Viale Galileo and then I’ll come to San Miniato, which, I realize, is not something I want to do. The way things are going just at the moment it would be my luck to run smack into Rinaldo and his little band of heavenly followers.
I turn down a lane on my left that leads sharply downhill, back towards the Boboli Gardens. Within minutes it turns to cobble, transforming itself into one of the pockets of Florence that look and feel as if they’re a Tuscan village. This is what I love about this city, the sense that it’s made of magic boxes, that not only does time slide back and forth—suggesting you might turn a corner and run into Beatrice, or Byron, or the ancient Botticelli, raving, with spittle in his beard and God in his eyes—but that the place plays tricks too. One second you’re standing in front of a wild baroque altar, the next you’re on a medieval battlement, or wandering in an olive grove. Add Fiesole, and you’ll get a Roman bath or an Etruscan shrine.
I stop by a break in a high wall to my right where a potholed drive winds into the olive groves that stretch between the Belvedere and San Miniato. The gate is closed, the old-fashioned latch heavy and rusted, and the sign, which reads ‘La Casa degli Uccelli,’ the House of the Birds, is half hidden by ivy. Tall spires of cypress rise on either side of the drive. The façade of the villa glows ochre pink in the afternoon sun. On the slope above it is a similar building, called Villa Magnolia, and across the street is the Casa della Maschera, the House of the Mask, a baroque folly with strange leering faces looking down from its gates.
The buzz of traffic rises behind me, but standing here it seems as if this is the real world, and cars and buses and scooters belong to some other, and infinitely inferior, dream.
Down the hill, the lane opens out into a small village-like square. To the north, the huge star-shaped fort of the Belvedere rises out of the olives, and behind the little square is what I realize must be the back wall of the Boboli. The buildings radiate from a central piazza, each of their façades imprinted with a bumblebee, suggesting they’re a remnant of one or another of the assorted Napoleons who set up shop in Italy. It’s a settlement of doll’s houses with glossy front doors painted in red or navy blue. Neat front walks cut perfect straight lines through tiny front gardens. The place feels oddly deserted, like one of those villages in science-fiction books and fairy tales where everyone vanishes or falls asleep. My running shoes squeak on the warm sidewalk as I wander down past the window boxes already filled with tight-budded petunias and the bright, upturned faces of pansies. Then I reach the bottom of the street, and the charm turns sour.
A huge old villa sits in the shadow of the Boboli wall. Its side faces a little piazza, and I suspect the bumblebee houses sit in what was once its garden. Tear tracks of soot run down either side of its boarded-up windows. The pale plaster is dirty and the wide front doors, their paint flaking, are riddled with woodworm. A rusted chain with a shiny new padlock twists through the iron handles, and two squat towers crouch on the roof. What once might have been a portico running between them is now nothing but an empty balcony with a jagged, broken rail.
The sidewalk dead-ends here, falls away abruptly and turns wild with weeds that converge on a tall fence that runs from the wall of the Boboli, dividing the bumblebee houses and the villa from the broad avenue beyond like the demarcation line of another world. There is a gate, which was once probably magnificent, but it too is now looped through with a chain. Not, I realize, that this stops the inhabitants from coming and going. As I sit down on the villa’s steps, a well-dressed woman, sleek with prosperous middle age, passes me, picks her way down the worn path in the weeds and ducks through a gap in the fence where a couple of railings have been removed.
The sight is vaguely surreal, and made more so when she stops on the far side, reaches into her large leather shoulder bag, and deposits a tiny dog in a plaid coat on the grass at her feet. The dog scampers off to lift his leg against a bush, then trots after her as she walks along the edge of the Boboli wall and stops to chat with the man who sits just inside a cottage at the garden’s exit. I watch her for a moment before I realize with something of a shock that this must be where they brought me out.
If I am right, and I’m sure I am, the Mostaccini fountain is directly behind this wall. The ambulances probably pulled up not twenty yards from where I am sitting now. They would have screamed up the avenue beside the Art Institute, wheeled around the dozens of parked cars, and jerked to a halt on the scrub grass where the woman is standing chatting. Did people gather, I wonder. Was there a crowd of onlookers as they carried me out? And where was Indrizzio? Was he among them, reaching into his pocket and fingering the thin, dark fabric of his hood as he watched? Or was he sitting right here, on these very steps?
The thought makes me get up faster than I mean to, and I almost collide with a tiny old man and his dog. The dog is an ancient grey poodle, and she peers up at me with clouded eyes and wags her stumpy tail. The old man touches his hat and jerks on the dog’s leash, then he says, ‘Out of the way, Perla! Out of the way for the Madonna of the Steps!’ And bursts into a cackle of laughter.
An hour later, when I get back and walk into the kitchen of our apartment, a huge bouquet of overblown pink roses, which Pierangelo knows are my favourite, are sitting in a vase in the centre of the table. Propped against them is a florist’s card which simply reads, ‘I’ll miss you this week.’ Billy has stuck a yellow Post-it note on the vase’s rim that says: ‘Handsome man brought these by for you! Meet us at Flavio later?’
I push my face down into the blossoms and inhale the sweet, heavy scent. When we first met, Pierangelo used to buy me these all the time. He swears they are the very same roses Catherine de Medici had distilled and sent to Paris when she was miserable, a balm for homesickness that started the craze for what the world now calls perfume. They’re better than any walk, and I call Piero and thank him. Then decide I will go to Flavio. I haven’t been very pleasant lately, at least to Billy, and I should make up for it.
Flavio, however, isn’t cheap, and I decide I’ll earn all this living high off the hog by spending what’s left of the day cleaning the apartment. The kitchen is still a mess and so is the living room, although the postcards have vanished. In the bathroom, I notice my toothbrush has vanished too. This causes me a momentary pang of severe irritation, and a quick trip to the pharmacy down the street for a new one, but the flowers make up for pretty much everything. I remind myself of that when I get to my room and find Billy’s ‘borrowed’ my make-up again. This time, though, it at least looks as if she tried to disguise it. But she can’t fool me. The lipsticks have been put back in the wrong order.
Chapter Nine
BY THE TIME I reach Flavio, the rough face of Santa Maria del Carmine is bathed in faint golden light and the last pigeons circle the sky. The trattoria is in the corner of the piazza, which tends to serve as a giant parking lot, and as I weave through the rows of tiny Fiats and motorcycles that are as big as cars themselves, I can see that tables have been set up outside. A few of them are occupied, but not by anyone I recognize, so I go inside and right away spot Kirk’s red hair and hear Billy’s laugh.
‘Mary,’ Henry says as I edge through the tables towards them, ‘glad you could join us.’
‘Hey,’ Kirk says, ‘have a pew.’ He pats the seat of the chair between him and Henry.
Billy peeks out at me from behind her menu as I sit down, and winks. ‘New necklace,’ she says. ‘Very bella! And flowers, gentlemen. Both from Lover Boy, and all in one day!’
Henry whistles, and I feel myself blush.
‘Mar
y has a boyfriend,’ Kirk sings.
The teasing is cut off by the arrival of a large plate of anti-pasto, which immediately leads to a discussion of black olives versus green ones, and the menu. When I finally ask about the field trip, which was to one of the Medici villas, Billy shrugs. ‘You didn’t miss much,’ she says. ‘If you want to go sometime, it’ll probably still be there.’
‘Well, it has been for five hundred years,’ Kirk points out. ‘Along with most of that lunch we had.’ He runs his hands through his hair and shakes his head to dispel the horror. ‘You should have seen the place she dug up this time. A veritable stable, my dear, replete with wheelbarrows, harnesses and straw-covered Chianti bottles.’
Kirk is convinced that Signora Bardino arranges most of her field trips for days when restaurants in Florence are closed, forcing her further afield for lunch. Some of her choices have been distinctly more ‘miss’ than ‘hit.’ We’ve begun to learn we’re in trouble when she announces that whatever out-of-the-way locanda we’re destined for is owned by ‘a very talented young chef’ who just happens to be one more of her husband’s nephews.
For the next half-hour, I listen while they relate the general awfulness of the experience. Then Henry reports that the Japanese girls are in love with Verona, and Kirk adds that they’ve come back sporting matching accessories, in this case strange-looking bright green hats. Billy wonders out loud if Tony and Ellen from Honolulu are actually brother and sister instead of husband and wife. Or maybe both.
‘They are exactly the same height, and they look alike,’ she says, when we express our scepticism. ‘Exactly alike. Their earlobes are the same shape. I promise you. It’s a dead giveaway. And they sound just like each other too.’
Kirk snorts as he stabs at one of his ravioli. ‘That’s just what happens when you’re married. It’s creepy, but normal, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or those people who start looking like their dogs. Right, Henry?’
‘Oh right,’ Henry agrees. ‘Of course. Shortly after we got married my wife grew a beard.’
‘I am serious.’ Billy waves her fork at us. ‘I am deadly serious. I bet you they’re, like, one of those pairs of twins that marry each other and then go off somewhere so nobody knows them. Just like that book, The Secret of the Villa—whatever it’s called.’
‘Oh yeah, I really liked that one,’ Kirk says. The Secret of the Villa Whatever It’s Called. By Who’s His Name. Didn’t it win the Pulitzer?’
‘Villa Golitsyn,’ I say. ‘By Piers Paul Reid.’
‘How do you know?’
I shrug. In fact it was another product of Sandy Skivling’s from the Book Mobile, but she didn’t get as much for it because word got out it wasn’t as racy as she promised.
‘Mary,’ Billy announces, ‘is a fount of information.’
‘Absolutely,’ says Kirk. ‘Mary is a walking version of the Dewey decimal system. In fact, she’s a robot with a computerized brain. The Three Little Maids from school are actually clones. Tony and Ellen are in fact their own parents. And you’re insane.’
‘Well.’ Billy humphs. ‘If you don’t like that idea, try this one. Ginevra Montelleone was about to get kicked out of the university.’
‘Who’s she?’ Kirk asks.
‘The girl they found by the river,’ Henry says. She was named by the papers a couple of days ago, but it still seems odd to hear her brought up like this. Henry abandons his bollito misto and looks at us. ‘Right?’ he asks.
‘Right.’ Billy shrugs.
She is eating a veal escalope and impales a piece of meat on her fork, lowers it to her plate and fussily cuts it in half. ‘At least I guess so,’ she says. ‘I mean, yeah, she’s the girl. And it looks like she committed suicide because she was being kicked out. I mean, that’s what I heard.’
‘Where?’
I put my knife and fork down. I haven’t actually read the papers in the last few days, and I guess Piero’s editors and everyone else have decided to keep toeing the police line. Billy is cutting her meat into tinier and tinier perfect squares. She’s so absorbed, she doesn’t answer me. ‘Did it say that in the paper?’ I ask finally. ‘That she killed herself?’
‘I don’t know. I heard it in the caféteria.’ She pops a piece of the veal into her mouth. ‘I stopped in for a cup of tea, on my way to the library, and everybody was talking about it. I guess she’d been kicked out of the university a few weeks ago or something. Oh yeah,’ she adds, ‘and there’s a candlelight vigil thing. We should go. Pay our respects.’
‘No, thank you.’ Kirk shakes his head. ‘You can keep the Sylvia Plath Brigade to yourself.’
‘Why?’ Henry asks. ‘I mean, why was she being kicked out?’
‘Abortion.’
Billy begins to chew, her jaw working in small, methodical motions that remind me of a guinea pig. I push my plate away. I can’t get the pictures of Ginevra out of my head, and as a result I don’t feel hungry any more.
‘She led a pro-choice rally a few months ago, I guess,’ Billy says. ‘Threw eggs and things at some right-wing politician and got arrested. In fact, it sounds like she was quite the activist, Miss Ginevra Theodosia Montelleone. How’s that for a handle? You should be glad,’ she adds, nodding at me, ‘that you’re just plain old Mary.’
After that, the conversation devolves into stories about names, and by the time we come out of the trattoria a thin veil of fog has dropped over the piazza, and it’s dark. The squat façade of the church looms above the sea of cars, the people winding amongst them faint ghostly shapes picked out by nothing more than the shrill ring of their voices and the occasional smatter of laughter. Billy loops her arm through mine. ‘I’m taking Mary home,’ she says. ‘She needs a good night’s sleep so she’ll be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning.’
‘Right in time for the Pazzi Chapel.’ Henry leans forward and kisses my cheek. There’s an early lecture tomorrow on ‘Proportion and Design in the Italian Renaissance’ that he apparently has high hopes for.
‘We’ll be there at nine. Sharp.’ Billy is already dragging on my arm and as we move off, I glance back to see Henry and Kirk going in the opposite direction. Kirk reaches out and raps his knuckles on the roof of one car, then another. The sound is hollow, like gunfire far away.
‘What the hell was that all about?’ I mutter. The rapping sounds get fainter and fainter. ‘Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?’
‘Well, I’m sorry,’ Billy says. ‘But you look exhausted. Lover Boy is wearing you out.’
‘Don’t call him that.’ I don’t really like being dragged and I take my arm away.
‘Well, what should I call him?’
‘Pierangelo, that’s his name.’ My resolutions about goodwill seem to be dissolving.
‘How picturesque,’ Billy says. ‘Did he come along before, after, or with your husband?’ She stands back and looks at me. ‘I mean, is that what happened?’ she asks. ‘Archangel, or whatever his name is, appeared, and “poof”, your husband vanished?’ Her hair is pinned up and the foggy glow of the street light catches it, forming a nimbus of light around the shadows on her face.
The spectre of Ty, with his smile and his golden eyes and his kindness, materializes, as though her words have conjured him. If I look down maybe I’ll see a gold ring, a chip of a diamond on my left hand. Billy has pulled a chiffon scarf out of her pocket and is tying it under her chin, but I don’t really see her. Instead I see a cowl. Damned, I hear Rinaldo’s voice whisper. Damned. Billy blinks. Her mouth opens. Then I hear my own voice.
‘It’s none of your damned business.’ Tears blur, soft and mushy, at the rims of my eyes. ‘What happened to me,’ I say again, ‘is none of your damned business.’ Then I turn and walk off.
We have reached the tangle of narrow alleys on the far side of the piazza. Laundry lines stretch from window sill to window sill on the upper floors of the buildings and the clothes that hang from them are strange dangling shapes above our heads. I start down it, leavi
ng Billy behind, wiping away the tears that run down my cheeks, and angry at suddenly feeling this way. There are no street lights. About halfway up the block a single window is lit, high up, but other than that it’s so dark I can’t see the gutters, or dog shit, or even the bumpy ridges of the cobbles beneath my feet.
In a few seconds, I hear Billy’s footsteps behind me and, as pissed off as I am with her, I slow down so she can catch up. Thinking of Gianni and his friend, I remember that she doesn’t know this part of town that well, and it’s easy to get lost. The rhythmic sound of her steps echoes behind me, bouncing off the walls of the buildings that seem so close I swear if I spread my arms I could touch both sides.
It occurs to me that I should ask Signora Bardino if I can move. Or I could just move in with Pierangelo. He all but suggested it again last night. But at virtually the same time I think this, I realize I don’t really want to do either of these things. Moving out would create insufferable tension, so I’d probably have to quit the course too. Which would leave me with nothing to do. Besides I don’t want to. Billy’s been bugging me, but she’s also right, I am tired. And we’ve been drinking a lot. Probably too much. And Ginevra Montelleone and Caterina Fusarno have upset me more than I care to admit, and she hit the nail on the head about Pierangelo, which is not exactly her fault.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say it without looking back. My voice floats up into the night, but Billy doesn’t reply.
We continue like this for perhaps a block, her footsteps beating out a counterpoint to mine. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say again, louder, but she still doesn’t say anything.
The Faces of Angels Page 13