‘Billy!’ I call again. By now I can hear my own personal nightmare, the Santa voice singing in my head.
‘Billy!’ I jump over a solidified chain curled like a snake, bang into a sign explaining who made it and why, and hear a burst of laughter. The tops of the trees in the Boboli shimmer and sway in front of me, and all I can think is that she must have climbed over the wall, or fallen and somehow survived.
‘Billy?’ I call again, and this time she answers.
The laughter’s close, and when I spin round I see a shaft of steps sinking into the overgrown lawn, leading down to nowhere. Billy is standing at the bottom laughing up at me. ‘Avon calling,’ she says.
About ten minutes later, the guard throws us out. We weren’t supposed to go down there. It turns out Billy moved a sign that said so, and he’s mad. She curtsies to him when he calls us ‘stupid Americans’ and takes my arm going back down the tunnel under the ramparts.
‘The Medici built it,’ she explains. ‘There’s a door at the bottom so they could escape through the Boboli up into the fort if the going ever got ugly. I guess there’s a tunnel too, somewhere. I found it in a thing on the Pitti. Anyways, you’re the architect, I thought you’d like it.’
‘I thought you’d fallen over the wall, I really did.’ It’s not like me to get so worked up, and I’m annoyed with her because of it.
Billy squeezes my arm. ‘Don’t be grumpy,’ she says. ‘I’m too smart for that sort of thing. And besides, I can fly.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah. I have to. It’s part of the job description.’
‘What job is that?’
‘Oh didn’t you know?’ Billy asks as we come out of the tunnel and into the sunlight. ‘I’m your guardian angel.’
Chapter Thirteen
THE NEXT DAY is the beginning of the city’s Easter festivities, and it starts out badly when the guardian angel wakes up in a very cranky mood. She doesn’t tell me why, exactly, but she had dinner last night with Kirk and that, I suspect, has something to do with it. She comes with me to the shop when I go to buy our morning pastries, and when she drops her purse and spills her change all over the floor, she swears so violently that the signora stops talking and crosses herself and Marcello turns as red as his apron. I try to help her pick up the coins, but she bats my hand away. When I ask what’s wrong, she only mutters that ‘men always want too much.’
Back in the apartment, I notice that Marcello has given me six croissants con marmalata again, instead of the four I paid for, but even this doesn’t cheer Billy up. She just ‘humphs’ and stomps off into her room. I figure she’ll tell me what the real problem is when she feels like it, so I make coffee, empty the pastries onto a plate, and shove the dirty dishes and ashtray aside so I can spread the newspaper over the whole kitchen table.
‘Who’s that?’ About a half-hour later, Billy comes in and peers over my shoulder at a picture of D’Erreti opening some kind of clinic out near the airport. ‘Oh,’ she says as she studies the photo, ‘the hip-church cardinal. Is it true he dresses up in jeans and hangs out so he can parlay with the youth?’
‘I don’t know. Is it?’
‘I guess,’ she says. ‘That’s what I heard anyways. Celibate, my ass,’ she adds. ‘Just look at him, he’s got it written all over his face. Who’s the kewpie doll with him?’
I look at the picture closely for the first time, and sure enough the familiar face is hovering like one of those weird little disembodied angels behind D’Erreti’s left shoulder.
‘That,’ I say, ‘is the one and only Father Rinaldo.’
‘That’s him?’ Billy leans in for a closer look.
‘In the flesh.’ I’m not surprised he’s there, since Rinaldo’s a big follower of D’Erreti’s, but Billy’s right, he does look kind of like a kewpie doll, I’d just never noticed it before. He’s grinning as the cardinal cuts a ribbon stretched across the door.
Billy raises her eyebrows. ‘That’s the one who tried to get you to join God’s Children and give up the Rose Petal?’
‘The very same. I’m surprised you don’t recognize him,’ I add. ‘He’s the priest who came here looking for me.’
Billy peers at the picture and shrugs. ‘I didn’t have my glasses on,’ she says. ‘Anyway, all priests look the same to me. Like pigeons. Or chorus girls. Get ’em in their costumes, it’s hard to tell the difference. Listen,’ she adds, ‘I’m sorry I was such a bitch earlier. I think maybe I just need some time to myself.’ Billy looks at me and laughs. ‘Not you, honey,’ she says, ruffling my hair. ‘Kirk. He’s driving me crazy. He’s so intense sometimes he makes me feel like running a hundred miles. Or doing my old act: the Disappearing Woman.’
‘One of my favourites. You want to hide out here, I won’t tell.’
‘I just might do that,’ she says. ‘Or, since it’s Easter, maybe I’ll go away for three days and come back again.’
Billy grins at her little joke and pours herself the rest of the coffee. She grabs a croissant and a shower of crumbs falls across the newspaper.
‘Have you seen Elvis?’ she asks, a second later. I shake my head and she puts her cup down and begins to rummage through the kitchen drawers. ‘I can’t find him anywhere.’
She pulls out a corkscrew, a wine stopper and a paring knife, and dumps them on the counter. A minute later she bangs the drawer shut. ‘Are you sure you haven’t seen him?’ she asks again, and I nod, but I’m not thinking about Elvis, I’m reading about the preparations for Easter. There are piazza parties—like the one we’re going to in Santo Spirito—across the city tonight, and D’Erreti’s booked like a rock star all week, holding court in the run-up to his big Easter performance when he sparks off a lot of fireworks outside the Duomo.
‘If Kirk’s kidnapped Elvis, I’ll kill him,’ Billy announces, and lights her cigarette from the stove, holding her hair up so she doesn’t set it on fire.
Around noon, Pierangelo texts me to ask where I will be tonight, and I text back that we are going to the party in Piazza Santo Spirito. It’s billed as a cross between a rave-up and a concert, and I have a sudden fit of inclusiveness. Why doesn’t he join us? I ask. The fact that he’s never met the others is getting sort of silly. He doesn’t reply, which annoys me.
I love Piero, but he can be high-handed, and I know he basically considers Americans to be inferior beings, except for me, of course. My irritation with his silence builds through the afternoon, and finally I try him again, this time by voice, and leave a message. I tell him we’ll be at the bar from seven o’clock onwards and he’ll know me because I’ll be the most beautiful woman there.
By this time, Billy is in the shower, and as I hang up I can hear the sound of running water, punctuated by the lyrics from The Wizard of Oz. A few seconds later, the door opens and she shouts, ‘Bathroom’s all yours!’ As if I am at least halfway across the city.
Her mood appears to have rebounded, and she’s spent the better part of the last few hours painting her nails and ironing her dress. Then she packed her hair in hot olive oil that she infused with rosemary on top of the stove. Half of it is still sitting in a sludge in the bottom of one of Signora Bardino’s fancy little copper pans, and I stir it desultorily as she sticks her head round the door.
‘The rosemary’s great,’ she says. ‘You should use it. I don’t know what it would do to your stripes, though. Might turn ’em green. By the way,’ she asks, ‘all that eye of newt and crap’—she is referring to the various potions and soaps from the Farmacia Santa Novella that Pierangelo orders for me—‘does it actually work?’
‘I guess,’ I say. Pierangelo insists I use them, and although I like the smell of acacia too, I revolted once over the stuff for my scars, said it was pointless, which made him all ratty, so I gave in. I think he took it as a personal insult. He swears the recipes are ancient Florentine elixirs, and maybe they are. Although, as far as I can tell, most of it’s made from distilled weeds. Enormously rare ones, if the pric
e is any indication. ‘I mean,’ I add, ‘the stuff costs enough so you feel as if it works.’
‘Ah,’ Billy says, ‘illusion and marketing.’ I’ve noticed that she’s become increasingly prone to these Zen pronouncements, and I remember Kirk’s love of sushi and wonder if it’s his influence. ‘It’s a gorgeous night,’ she adds rather more concretely. ‘So the piazza’s going to be packed. We don’t want to be late.’
This is a not very veiled warning to me. One of the many odd things about Billy is that she’s fanatically punctual. I, on the other hand, am what Mamaw used to call ‘born five minutes behind’.
By the time we leave the apartment, we can hear music. The city lights are trapped under a thick scrim of cloud, and threads of sound, the ripple of a saxophone and the higher whine of a violin, corkscrew into the hazy yellowed darkness. In the street, a crowd is moving towards Santo Spirito. Billy locks the gate and drops her keys down the front of her red dress. She wriggles until they nest somewhere in her cleavage. The dress itself is a recent find, the result of one of her excursions to the markets up behind Santa Croce, and in its boned corset, nipped waist and flared full skirt, Billy looks like a crimson ballerina. She even has red satin shoes to match.
The hum of the crowd grows louder, swelling and gathering like surf. Beams of coloured light shoot into the sky, and suddenly there’s a blast of sound and the band starts. All around us people murmur. Some clap, some even cheer. By the time we step into the piazza, it feels as though we’re at a carnival.
A stage has been set up on the terrace in front of the church. The plain creamy façade is washed with red, and then blue and green and red again. In front of the giant doors, the band looks tiny. There are a lot of them, two sax players, a drummer, a violinist and several others. They look like brightly dressed puppets in a shadow play. Against Santo Spirito, even their huge amplifiers are dwarfed.
More fairy lights than usual lace through the trees, and people are everywhere. Most are dressed up. Skirts and dresses and embroidered blue jeans revolve around us. Some of the younger men are wearing jester’s hats or striped crocheted caps, and a few people are in costumes or wearing masks. A witch runs by in a tall peaked hat, while at the bar that has been set up beside the fountain Galileo raises a glass of beer.
We push our way towards our bar and get almost next to them before we see Henry and Kirk and the Japanese girls waving to us. They have staked out a large round table in the corner of the enclosure, right beside a low plastic hedge that borders a wooden dance floor. A selection of carafes and bottles and plates of snacks surround a burning candle lantern.
‘Isn’t this great? Ayako came early and bagged a table!’ Kirk announces as we sit down. Ayako beams in delight when he smiles at her.
If Billy ever really suspected Kirk of kidnapping Elvis, she seems to have forgotten about it. He pours her a glass of white wine, and she kisses him as if he’s delivered up nectar of the gods instead of tepid Pinot Grigio. Whether this is for Ayako’s benefit or his, I’m not sure. Henry leans over and drops a plaited rope of ribbons around my neck.
‘Some guy was selling these for the homeless,’ he says, and I notice that everybody is wearing one, even Kirk. ‘It suits you.’ Henry smiles at me and winks.
In the next hour the darkness, which had not been much more than twilight when we arrived, deepens. The lights in the trees glitter like electric snow. The band takes a break, and a new one comes on. They start to play Chubby Checker, and Henry grabs my hand.
‘Come on, Mary,’ he says. ‘You may not believe this, but I won first place at my High School prom for the twist.’
Actually, I do believe it. There’s something unexpectedly graceful about Henry. In the Boboli Gardens I saw him jump into the air to pick a leaf he wanted to admire, and the effect was surprising, like watching a Newfoundland or a St Bernard transformed as they suddenly find their element and bound through snow.
I, on the other hand, am a lousy dancer. And I am about to say so, to fink out and turn him down, when I hear the Japanese girls giggling. They don’t think Henry is anywhere near as cool as Kirk, and now their cheeks are flushed with too much wine and with the idea that someone as big and ungainly as Henry should even think of dancing. My hand tightens around his, and I get to my feet. If I could give them the finger and climb out over the plastic hedge at the same time without falling down, I would.
‘Let’s Twist Again’ bleats across the piazza, as Henry and I join a herd of gyrating, wiggling twisters. The best are middle-aged couples. So far, they’ve been standing reasonably sedately around the outside bar, or sitting at the restaurant tables picking at antipasto and smiling at the wildness of youth on display, but now they take to the floor with a vengeance. Beside us a woman in Ferragamo shoes and what looks a lot like a Chanel skirt, and her husband, who must be sixty-five if he’s a day, put Henry and me to shame.
In my case, that’s not saying much—I look like a scarecrow caught in high wind—but Henry’s hot. His hips swivel. His knees dip. A blissful smile comes over his face, and his glasses slip cock-eyed on his nose. He catches me watching him and laughs.
When the song finally finishes and I glance back at the table, I see that Kirk’s gone and Billy and Ayako are leaning across his empty chair, talking head to head. Blonde and dark, they seem suddenly as Naomi and Ruth. Bonded for life. Ayako’s hands move as she speaks, and the other girls nod in agreement with whatever it is she’s saying.
Henry says something that I only half catch and steps away into the line by the fountain bar to buy us a glass of wine, which is fine by me, because I don’t really want to go back to the table. I don’t know what Billy’s up to but, just looking at her, I’m pretty sure it’s something. I look around for a space to sit down on the edge of the fountain, and I’ve just found one, on the far side of two old ladies who are eating gelato, when the lights on the front of the church shift, and I see Pierangelo.
Dressed in jeans and sweater, he’s threading his way through the crowd towards me. His eyes meet mine, then someone speaks to him and he stops and rests his hand on their shoulder. He smiles and nods, laughs, then mouths ‘ciao,’ and something inside my stomach twists. I feel as if I’m sixteen again and the boy I have a crush on is coming to ask me to dance.
The music is slow this time, and familiar. It’s the Stones’ ‘Till the Next Goodbye.’ Pierangelo stops in front of me and holds out his arms. ‘Most beautiful woman on the piazza,’ he says. ‘The paper’s gone to bed. And I’m all yours.’
This is the first time I’ve actually seen him since Graziella told me about his mother, and now that I’ve had time to get used to the idea I lean back in his arms, look into his face and imagine I see, not the elegant man I know, but someone else: a little boy abandoned, a child growing up, struggling to be an adult and find his place in the world, loved by an aunt and uncle, but knowing that his own mother couldn’t be bothered to raise him. How much hurt does that still cause, I wonder. How much sadness?
I reach up and run my fingers down the smooth line of his cheek and across the full-flush curve of his lips. ‘I love you,’ I whisper, and Pierangelo smiles at me with his lazy-cat eyes, pulls me close and kisses the top of my head. He smells of citrus and something else, the Colonna de Russe he buys at the farmacia. The cashmere of his sweater is a deep liquid blue, and soft.
‘I love you too, piccola. More than anything.’
He says the words with his mouth close to my ear and I feel his body moving, his breath on my skin, and right now I don’t think I’ll ever care about anything else again.
The music shifts and quickens and Piero and I dance the next dance too. At some point, we spin around and I glimpse Henry through the crowd. Standing by the fountain, holding a glass, he looks like a big shaggy dog somebody has yelled at, and I feel bad. I should go to him, I think, say something. Really, I should explain. But then Henry’s lost in a whirl of lights. Colours swing past us, and I get a dizzying glimpse of the table and se
e the white moon faces of Kirk and Billy and the Japanese girls staring, which makes me laugh. I’m half tempted to wave, as if I’m flying by on a ferris wheel or a merry-go-round, and they’re stuck, grounded in their clutter of bottles and empty glasses.
Eventually the music stops and Pierangelo and I find a place to sit on the steps of the church. There are people above us and below us. I’m at eye level with heads and legs, knees and rear ends. Voices rise in a wave. There’s some French, some English and something that sounds like Dutch, all of it a counterpoint to the rippling chatter of Italian.
‘So,’ he says, ‘did you miss me?’
‘No!’ I laugh. ‘What do you think?’
Pierangelo grins and shrugs. ‘With you women, you never know.’
The lights play across his face, bathing it in red and then blue so his high cheekbones and the sharp angle of his nose stand out. Before, I might have taken this more as the joke it’s intended to be, but now, knowing what Graziella told me, I don’t.
‘You do too,’ I say. ‘With me. That’s why I came back.’
Piero ruffles my hair. ‘Cara. I was teasing you. And,’ he adds, ‘now the article is put to bed and I’m all yours.’
‘Until next week.’
He shrugs. ‘It’s Easter, we’re not so busy.’
‘Are you happy with it?’
It’s not meant to be a complicated question, but Pierangelo’s face sobers. He shakes his head. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Sure. No. I don’t know. I told you, I admire D’Erreti more than I’d like. I guess.’
Pierangelo thinks for a minute, his eyes fixed on the throng of people below us, but not seeing them. I’ve seen him do this before, vanish while he is right in front of me, travel deep into his personal landscape where I can’t follow. Finally he says, as much to himself as to me, ‘The problem is, maybe I don’t know how to talk about the church any more.’
The Faces of Angels Page 20