Bella Figura

by Kamin Mohammadi

  I had asked Bernardo this outright and he had assured me that he had no interest in her, had fallen out of love a long time ago. And when he called me on those weekends, very late at night or very early in the morning, his voice was intimate; he was clearly alone in his bed, and I had no reason to doubt him. “No, but I get the impression that it’s not as clean-cut as all that. I mean, he’s told me that she—the mother—is very attached to the idea of having her family back together, but also that for him it’s over.”

  As Tosca’s tragic fate unfolded, Antonella humming while the Adonises wept prettily, I told Anto of the Winds of Doubt that had recently started to blow through my time alone. They made me doubt my judgment, asked me if, after the experience with Dino, I could really trust Bernardo. They brought with them the chill of uncertainty, the whiff of confusion, the shiver of suspicion. They blew strongest on the weekends when he had his daughters, and I felt like the mistress, shut out of Colognole and hidden away in Florence, relegated in favor of the family.

  Bernardo was open with his son about our relationship—at fifteen he considered him old enough, and anyway there wasn’t much choice; he was a full-time single parent and daily parenting was very much his concern. From the start, I had understood that our involvement meant adopting—to some extent—also his son, and I had accepted this, and we got along well.

  But then there was le bimbe, his two daughters, who lived with their mother in Chianti. They were young—just five and six—and their mom was a great mother, according to Bernardo. On the weekends that he had his daughters with him, he became unavailable apart from when they were asleep. He had told me just once that he didn’t believe he should introduce them to new girlfriends unless he thought the relationship likely to last. “I have made enough trouble for them, capito?” he had told me. “I have hurt them enough…”

  He had trailed off. Normally so open about his life, when it came to the end of his second marriage, Bernardo had told me only bare facts, and his face had closed in on itself. It was three years since he had left, but I felt instinctively that this was still a deep and private pain, and although inquisitive by nature, I didn’t dig. It wasn’t my business. It was his solitary and personal grief. I felt it, tucked away inside him, and I left it alone.

  “I don’t want to lie to them,” he had explained. “I think they can tell, even if they don’t understand…they are so young and at that age they imagine things, they make stories in their heads. I don’t want to confuse them any more…”

  I had got the message and, while it caused me some discomfort, I respected him for protecting his daughters, even if it was from himself. Especially if it was from himself.

  And yet every other weekend, I struggled with my insecurity, with the fear that he would be seduced back into the family. And that’s when the Winds of Doubt picked up and made me question everything.

  * * *

  —

  On a drizzly Saturday morning, I discovered the Piazza Santissima Annunziata. The Ospedale degli Innocenti dominated one side of the piazza, Brunelleschi’s loggia sheltering its front door. Above the columns, punctuating the arches, were della Robbia roundels of glazed terra-cotta, each one depicting a baby wrapped in swaddling, their arms spread by their sides as if lying down, glazed white on the vivid blue background, each baby in a different position, bearing a different expression. To the far left of the loggia there was a window with bars on it, surrounded by a fresco. Underneath it there was an inscription. “For four centuries this was the wheel of the Innocents, secret refuge from misery and shame for those to whom charity never closed its door,” it said. This was where people left unwanted babies, those whose mothers had died in childbirth or were the results of the droit du seigneur. There was a slot that regulated the size of the child that could be left—this was how the baby entered the institution, left by a parent or midwife in a way that guaranteed the privacy of the act.

  Built in the fifteenth century, the Ospedale had been a children’s orphanage, started by a donation in 1419 from a “merchant from Prato” and then managed by the Silk Guild of Florence, who paid Brunelleschi to design one of the most beautifully proportioned examples of Renaissance architecture. The Innocenti was the first lay institution in the world to be dedicated entirely to infancy and childhood, centralizing a service that had previously been scattered among hospices throughout Florence and the surrounding countryside. Children were taken in, documented, sent to wet nurses, educated, and eventually integrated into the community through apprenticeships or domestic service. Indeed, there were still many Florentines bearing the surname Innocenti, testament to their forebears’ starting life in this institution that even now provided children’s social services to the city.

  Children were very much on my mind. Bernardo was a father, a fact that I could not ignore. Christmas was in a few weeks and the complications of his arrangements as a twice-divorced father were making my head spin. Until now, his two families had proved quite useful to me; their existence dictated the time we spent together, provided the gaps and spaces I needed not to lose sight of my routine. I wrote for hours, visited the market, went for my walks, kept up with my friends, roamed around to find squares like this one. And so far this had worked well. I had managed to finish three chapters, which I had polished into a bundle with a proposal and consigned to my agent. Just yesterday she had written to me excitedly, telling me of interest from a couple of publishers.

  “Come the new year,” she had written, “I am sure this will turn into a deal. Isn’t that a wonderful prospect for a new year?”

  I had run to Luigo’s with the news; he had popped open a prosecco and we had danced all night. Bernardo was already ensconced with le bimbe by then, so I had not yet told him. And now I was glad. I needed time to think. At the prospect of a book deal and staying on in Florence, my doubts grew.

  I entered the cloisters first—one for men and one for women. They were inner courtyards framed by loggias, set with terra-cotta pots of lemon trees. They were arranged in the Islamic way, I noted, with the larger men’s cloister set as soon as one entered the Ospedale, while the women’s cloister—long and narrow and tucked deep inside the belly of the building—was farther in, protecting the women and children from the world as our old buildings in Iran did; the men’s cloister was placed to receive the outside world. The Renaissance architecture created by Filippo Brunelleschi reflected the one I was familiar with in Iran, adopting all the same themes with the vaulted arches, the loggias with their columns, and inner and outer courtyards distinguished by gender.

  I paused for a while in the shelter of the women’s cloister. The soft rain fell silently into the long, empty courtyard. I could imagine nurses crossing this cloister, bearing babies left in that doorway. In the museum of the Ospedale, I drank in the early Botticelli paintings glowing with gold, studied the Adoration of the Magi, Domenico Ghirlandaio’s masterpiece, and a glorious blue and white Madonna and Child by Luca della Robbia. But what drew me was a glass case displaying a selection of mementos that had been left with the babies. These all dated from the first years of the Ospedale’s opening, a fascinating array of the detritus of Renaissance life: little leather bookmarks, a cushioned fabric heart sewn with fat stitches, a broken coin—bits and pieces that the family could spare, objects of luck and also means of identity, something that would help the mother find her baby when she eventually came back to claim her child.

  Those objects fascinated me, so telling of hope and heartbreak, shame and poverty, of the greatest sacrifice. Insignificant in themselves, these personal scraps were so precious to the mothers who, so many centuries ago, had laid these tarnished treasures next to the babies they had left for a better life, hoping that one day, through some miraculous change in circumstance, they could come back and claim their children, recognize it by the heart stitched together from rags and strung on a grubby ribbon around the neck. Transported back five centuries, I wept for these women, for the losses they had suffered,
for the love contained in those scraps.

  I wandered back out to the women’s cloister and sat in the deep silence of that female space, letting my emotions settle. Questions that I normally avoided drifted up, questions about my own desires for a family, the ticking of the biological clock, whether I wanted to have a baby of my own. I could hear my mother’s voice in my head: “When are you going to settle down and have a family? You are already thirty-seven, soon it’s going to be too late.”

  My biological clock. I’d never heard mine. Or been aware of it ticking. Apparently we all have one, but where was mine? I had partied through my twenties, laughing out loud any time anyone asked me if I had kids. “Me?” I would say with astonishment. I was taken aback that anyone should mistake me for an adult. Had my clock been ticking, I would never have heard it over the thumping bass anyway, from my place next to the loudest speaker.

  In my thirties, I had started to hear the clock. Not mine, but my friends’. Close girlfriends got pregnant, started families. The babies started arriving. They were magical, interesting, and they smelled good. I loved all our babies, and I collected quite a few godchildren. But I still didn’t particularly yearn for one of my own.

  One of my closest friends described her own wish for a baby as a tsunami of longing that had washed over her one day with such intensity that it had left her breathless. Another friend (the first of our group to have children) made me promise her that should I be approaching forty and still alone, she could help me choose a sperm donor and operate the turkey baster…she seemed to think this was a perfectly normal offer, but I was so appalled that I quietly cut her out of my life.

  The only clock I heard was the one ticking out the remaining hours of one deadline after another. As my thirties had worn on, it seemed odd that there was no sign of this ticking, no tsunami, not even the faintest desire. No tick and definitely no tock. I had nothing against babies, and was a pretty good godmother to all my little ones. But, like any sane person, when they left after visiting my apartment, I thanked God that I could give them back. I could find no emotion but relief in not having to live that chaotic life—one in which all one seemed to ever say was “no”—and found the quiet of my home a comfort rather than an empty void, as the turkey-baster friend had called my child-free life.

  And besides, there was no man—a crucial detail, given that I had never contemplated having a baby without a partner. That, I knew with no doubt at all, was not for me.

  And then, there was the longing to write. This was my tsunami of desire. Here I was, age thirty-seven, and in the years that I should have been thinking urgently about finding a man and having a baby, I was preoccupying myself with giving birth to a book. Not just any book, but a book about my past and my family, my country Iran and the heartbreak, an opportunity to tell my family story and heal the wounds of the revolution and leaving Iran, life in exile.

  So I sat in the women’s cloister and tried to answer this question. Did I want a baby? Now that I had met a man I liked, was there anywhere in me a desire to make a family of my own?

  And what about Bernardo? He had made it very clear from the beginning—no more marriages, no more kids. I respected his decision. Also, I didn’t really think it was my problem. I had assumed that I would go back at the end of my year to something resembling my old life, albeit with better style.

  But Bernardo was proving to be more charming than expected, kind, soft. I was unwilling to lose him just yet. And now that there was a potential deal for my book, I could perhaps justify this seductively slow and contented life in Florence.

  All I wanted now was to go on with my writing, to go on excavating the historic pain of the revolution and exile, to bring it up to the golden Renaissance light and have it dissolve in this glorious beauty, where I had unwittingly exiled myself. Apart from the sadness of not being able to give my mother the grandchildren she so longed for, I found absolutely no desire of my own.

  I thought of Bernardo’s scruffy country clothes and scratched hands. He was the antithesis of Dino’s manicured elegance, and yet he was the authentic version of what Dino had pretended to be—a real Florentine aristocrat, living in a big stone country house with lots of dogs, vineyards outside the windows, and wild boar in the woods. His mother even lived in a castle and produced her own olive oil and wine. Colognole was filled with life, with love, with fecundity—all those kids, all those dogs, constantly pregnant and giving birth, full of puppies. And what of me? If I stayed, I would be the only female there who would remain childless.

  The rain had stopped. I walked through the square, my head throbbing with these thoughts. I sat on a bench and followed the gaze of the statue of Ferdinand I seated on his horse to the legendary window that Giuseppe had told me about. Situated on the second floor of the palazzo opposite the statue, there was a window that had remained open ever since a lovelorn Renaissance bride had sat at it to watch for the return of her husband from war. He never came back, and she wasted away there. After her death, the window resisted all attempts to be closed. Giuseppe had also told me that if one followed the gaze of the mounted Medici statue, it fell on the very same window, perhaps a hint from the sculptor that the young lady had in fact been the secret lover of Ferdinand I.

  Florentine love stories, affairs, and intrigues. I shook my head impatiently at the thoughts and marched home to immerse myself in my book instead.

  In San Niccolò, I saw Giuseppe and, in answer to my casual inquiry of “How are you?” he scratched his chin thoughtfully, pausing. “I realized this morning,” said Giuseppe slowly, “that I don’t think I have ever occupied myself so fully…”

  Occupy myself fully, I thought later as I sat on the corner sofa with my laptop. In London I had barely acknowledged myself, let alone known myself. The rush of appointments, overcommitted calendar, and intensity of stress had made me a stranger to myself, one who even refused to look at herself in the mirror. Now I got up and went to the bathroom, approaching the round mirror behind the basin with deliberate intent. I looked at myself. Curly black hair, glossy. Olive skin, smooth, plump. Light brown eyes, shiny. A curvaceous body that was trim and womanly. Most striking—the way I smiled at myself with the warmth reserved for a friend.

  Here in Florence I had detoxed. I who had been so fond of spending money on faddish detoxes in London—none of which had shifted a pound, erased a spot, or brought a second’s peace of mind—had come to carb-and-gelato-heavy Italy and undergone a true detoxification. One that had cleaned me out of the hyperstimulation and stress that had depleted and drained my adrenal glands to the point that I had burned out. By my learning to budget and live within my means, my severance money, and my small income from travel journalism, had supported this gentle, unambitious life in Florence, which had, quietly and stealthily, calmed my body, and once my body was well again, my mind and my soul could heal. Instead of taking a pillbox full of vitamins and supplements, I now took only my daily dose of olive oil, and I had never felt better. And here I was, sitting on my sofa, doing nothing at all but occupying myself fully.

  * * *

  —

  I was in the apartment, waiting for Bernardo. The table was laid with the prettiest crockery, spread on a lovely clean tablecloth. A few sprigs of loquat blossom from Old Roberto’s garden sat in a vase, filling the kitchen with their sweet scent. Ribollita was bubbling on the stove, a chicken was roasting in the oven. It was supposed to be our weekend together, but he had rung me the night before to say that he was taking le bimbe Christmas shopping today, and we had arranged for him to come to me afterward for dinner.

  The minutes ticked by, slowly turning into an hour. I called him. No answer. I started to fidget and turned off the oven. Another hour dragged by and I called him again. No answer. I spooned some ribollita into a bowl and forced down a few spoonfuls. A few more calls and messages and I put the whole roasted chicken into the fridge, furious. The months fell away and I was back in the turbulent, stifling days of the summer, a flashb
ack to Dino and his perfidy, the way he would disappear for an evening, then ring late in the night with an excuse, and then the way that he had suddenly vanished from my life. Bernardo was different, I had thought, but now, the Winds of Doubt whispered to me, he was no more reliable than Dino, probably in bed with his ex, as he had been for the past months, enjoying stringing me along while rebuilding his relationship with her, putting his family back together.

  I threw on my coat and marched to Luigo’s. I found him getting out Christmas decorations for the bar and offered to help. As we were stringing the lights, he asked me whether I was spending Christmas with Bernardo.

  “It’s looking very cozy with him, bella,” he said, winking at me. “And now that you have a family of your own, will you spend the holidays together?” He loved to tease me about acquiring “a secondhand child.”

  “No, Luigo,” I said, bursting into hot tears. “That’s all over. I’ve decided.”

  Luigo led me to a table and sat me down with a glass of water. “What happened, bella?” He was puzzled. “It was going so well.”

  I told him, and as he started to say, “He’s scared—” I cut him off.

  “No, no, this isn’t happening again. This time, I am going to decide. Bernardo and his menagerie can take a running jump. I’m done…”

  And I was so determined that, when Bernardo rang me first thing on Sunday morning, I switched off the phone and rolled over in bed. This time I would be the one who was unreachable.

  I ignored his calls and messages all day until, coming home in the early evening from a walk, I found him waiting for me at my door. “Thank God you are okay,” he said with visible relief. “I was worried. I wanted to apologize for last night…”

  I led him silently up the stairs to my apartment. As we sat down in the kitchen, I wanted to throw the cold chicken at him, but I said nothing and waited for him to explain, watching him closely as he told me that he had fallen asleep on the sofa.