The first time I met him I was in one of those leather chairs, engrossed in a rare Jane Austen first edition, when a shadow fell over the pages. I looked up, blinking.
“Are you planning a purchase, or would you like to spend the night?” Nathaniel asked in his British accent. I felt the heat in my face as I leaped up out of the chair.
“How much?” He told me, and I sat down again, horrified.
“Why don’t you come back tomorrow and finish it,” he said. “Officially we open at ten, but you can knock at nine if you can’t wait.” That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. I spent many hours in his store and, eventually, once we knew each other better, even more hours eating sumptuous meals cooked up by Nathaniel’s husband, Charles, a forensic pathologist with a deft hand in the kitchen and a wry sense of humor about the origins of his knife skills.
Nathaniel was the first person I told about Benjamin. I showed up at the front door of his shop at closing time on the day I got the lawyer’s call. Nathaniel had just bolted the front door when he saw me, but something about my face must have made it clear that he shouldn’t start our conversation on the sidewalk. He waved me in.
“My brother died and left me his house in Siena.” I said it all at once, before the words could retreat.
“Beatrice,” he said, and guided me gently to an armchair.
“I’m going to Italy. Will you take care of my apartment while I’m gone?”
“It would be my pleasure and privilege,” he said, his words formal but his eyes as warm as the hug I was not encouraging, though I clearly needed it.
“Thanks, Nathaniel, you’re my savior. Now I need some guidebooks.”
“Would you rather plan a trip than talk?” I nodded. He looked at me carefully, as if checking whether I was safe to leave alone, and then disappeared behind a tall bookcase. He came back with a pile of reading material on Tuscany.
“Try these,” he said. I leafed through them silently for a few minutes.
“There’s a lot to see in Siena.” I looked up from a color plate of Simone Martini’s Maestà.
“Indeed there is, Beatrice.” I was grateful he’d left the rest unsaid.
I kissed him on the cheek and left before I lost my composure entirely. I stayed up until 2:00 a.m. reading. Unfortunately, I had to wake up three hours later to operate on a tricky basilar aneurysm, but neurosurgeons are used to that.
* * *
An email from Ben’s lawyers arrived a few days later. I translated from Italian to English in my head.
Gentilissima Dottoressa Trovato:
We are deeply grieved at the news of your brother’s death and extend our most sincere regrets. We have known your brother for some time and mourn the loss of a well-loved scholar of our beautiful city and its history. As we discussed on the phone, you are his only known surviving relative and the beneficiary of his estate, which includes real property as well as material goods. We look forward to your visit to our Siena offices in the near future to aid in its disposition. We will send you the key to his residence in Siena to spare you the inconvenience of finding commercial lodging.
When Dottore Trovato first began working with our firm, he left instructions, in the event that any misfortune should occur to keep him from his research, that we send you the contents of his permanent carrel at the library of the Università degli Studi di Siena. You should expect to receive his notes and manuscript within the next few days. This is somewhat outside our usual procedure regarding timing of distribution of property before probate, but Dottore Trovato made it quite clear that you are his only surviving relative and that there is no one who would contest the intent of his will.
Although you are a Doctor of Medicine rather than Philosophy like your brother, we are certain you appreciate how regrettable it would be for the work of one of our city’s great modern historians to fall into oblivion. We are the primary firm representing Tuscan academics and have taken the liberty of contacting several scholars who have graciously offered to study your brother’s notes to determine what might be appropriate for publication. We will be happy to discuss the details further at your convenience.
With our sincerest hope for your solace in this terrible time of loss, Avv. Cavaliere, Alberti e Alberti
Even though I didn’t know exactly what Ben had been working on, the thought of other scholars getting their hands on it gave me a queasy feeling. I wrote a quick but polite reply asking the lawyers not to share anything with anyone. I wished I’d had a chance to hear Ben tell me about it himself. Now I never would hear him say anything again.
Three days later I came home late and overheated from my commute in a subway car with malfunctioning air-conditioning to find the package from Ben’s lawyers waiting with the doorman. Inside the wrapping was a battered red accordion folder tied with a flat satin ribbon. Ben held this folder, he tied the ribbon with his own hands. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. The folder smelled like a library, of course—old leather bindings and dust—not like Ben. I went to my desk and sat down to read. The papers were a jumble of typed paragraphs, interspersed with photocopies from original texts with notes scribbled in the margins. I could imagine Ben with his forehead creased in concentration, ink smearing along the heel of his hand as he wrote.
Agnolo di Tura, a 14th-century chronicler, recounted the impact of the Black Death on Siena:
“The mortality in Siena began in May 1348 . . . in many places in Siena great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead. And they died by the hundreds, both day and night, and were thrown in those ditches and covered with earth . . . Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another . . . for this Plague seemed to strike through the breath and sight. I . . . buried my five children with my own hands . . . And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world.”
Ben had scribbled a note in the right-hand margin around di Tura’s words, and underlined for emphasis:
How many people died in Siena? Agnolo says 52K—Gottfried insists that can’t be, since population was no more than 60K. BW claims that the population dropped 80 percent! Tuchman: more than half. Was the mortality from the Plague worse in Siena than in the other Tuscan cities? Seems like it. Why?
I went back to Ben’s typed notes.
Siena at her heyday had a master plan to make the Duomo the largest in the world—the nave to become the transept of a vast cathedral. This cathedral would be the physical symbol of Siena’s greatness among the Tuscan cities, what would become Europe, and the world. That plan died with the Black Death. The Plague heralded the collapse of a shining, self-governing city-state. After the Plague, Siena never recovered, unlike her longtime archrival Florence. Why?
For decades historians have tried to explain the particularly devastating effects of the Plague on Siena, her failure to recover, and the eventual fall of the great commune to her rival Florence. The pages that follow will introduce new evidence to explain Siena’s suffering and eventual decline from power and political independence.
I’d been so engrossed by the medieval mystery Ben was writing about that for a few seconds I’d forgotten the present. Now, as I looked up from his notes, the reason I had them at all hit me again like a punch in the stomach. All those years I’d postponed going to Siena, and now I was going to deal with my brother’s property and manuscript, rather than to see him. The consequence of my never having made time for a visit was nearly unbearable. I put Ben’s papers back in their folder, carefully tying the cloth ribbon and trying to breathe. But —I could still see Ben’s house, even without Ben in it. I could still visit the city that had drawn him in, even though he wouldn’t be there to greet me. I needed to sort out the estate, and I needed to get away; I hadn’t taken a vacation day in four years. The thought gathered momentum, and before the night was over I’d made up my mind. I fell asleep seeing Ben’s hand curved around his favorite fountain pen as he wrote about the Siena Duomo that should have been.
* * *
“Not just some hill town—Siena.” I glared back.
The specifics didn’t mollify Linney at all. “What’s in Siena?”
“My brother left me a house there; I have to go settle his estate.”
“Your brother died? You decided to tell me your brother died parenthetically while announcing that you’re taking a trip to Tuscany? Beatrice, hello, are you in there?”
I looked down at the blue shoe covers on our four feet. Linney crouched down so she could meet my eyes from below.
“Come back,” she said ominously. “The other neurosurgeons aren’t as good as you are.”
“Why wouldn’t I come back? It’s just a three-month sabbatical.”
Linney didn’t answer.
When the plane took off with me in it, I felt strangely light—as if the strings mooring me to the life I’d made had stretched too far, and had finally broken.
* * *
I stood at the door of Ben’s house with the key in my hand—heavy and brass, nothing like my New York apartment key. I was about to put the key in the lock when I got the sensation that I had done this before—put this key in this lock, in this door, in this city. It must be déjà vu, I thought, because I had never been to Ben’s house; I had never even been to Italy before. And yet I had a feeling of familiarity so strong, it had to be real. Déjà vu should be a dreamy sensation, not this sharp-edged clarity. I knew I had been here, and somehow that knowledge coexisted with the absolute certainty that I had not.
The heavy door stuck, but I managed to open it with a push from one hip. In the dark entryway, the smell enveloped me—the mustiness of a house left behind. I slid my hand along the wall, looking for a light switch, but found none. From the faint light filtering in through the open front door I could make out the entry hall with wood stairs rising to darkness above. I bumped into a hall table and almost knocked over a teetering lamp, caught it, then turned it on. I closed and locked the front door, and began to examine my new home.
Siena, June 4
Dear Nathaniel,
I’m writing a letter because Ben didn’t seem to believe in home-based Internet service. Very medieval of him. No light switches either—I nearly killed myself the first night I arrived in the dark. The house has a typical medieval plan: a sala (living room) in the front, and the camere (bedrooms) in the back. Those back rooms open onto a central courtyard shared by all the houses around it, planted with a trio of blossoming orange trees—I wake up to the fragrance filling my bedroom through the windows. I wonder who owned this house before us, what merchant or artisan, wine dealer, painter . . . do you know how to find out? You always know everything. Were there surgeons in the fourteenth century? I’m not feeling very much like a neurosurgeon at the moment, and I’m enjoying playing hooky.
My first visit to the law offices of Cavaliere, Alberti and Alberti was like something out of a Fellini film. Cavaliere was rail thin, practically invisible from the side; the Albertis short and round with a total of six chins between them, and they all had sympathetic, meeting-a-bereaved-client looks on their faces. I realize you are probably worrying about me, but just remember that doctors make jokes when things get bad. It makes us feel better.
But these lawyers . . . the windows in their office are so dusty that barely any light comes through, and the antiquated lamps have at most ten-watt bulbs in them. I could hardly see where I was supposed to sign. But then I did, and now I own a house in Siena and everything in it.
The Albertis are pressuring me to relinquish the project to someone “more experienced.” But I am not cooperating. There’s this Tuscan scholar, Franco Signoretti, who claims descent from one of the oldest and most prominent medieval families of Siena. He gave an interview for the local television station that I watched on Ben’s tiny black-and-white TV. (I know it’s hard to imagine medieval history being newsworthy, but things are different here.) Based on the sharp comments this guy dropped during the interview he was clearly trying to discredit Ben’s work. He described Ben as an “American-born young scholar in the making” who “had made a respectable effort, in his regrettably short career in Siena, to leave his mark on our long and illustrious history.” It was unpleasant to hear about Ben in the third person this way, though I’m happy to say Italian has come back to me surprisingly quickly. I’m glad now that Ben pushed me so hard to learn it when I was a kid, though at the time I fought him pretty hard. Listening to the guy rant on about how close he is to a discovery that the “young American” had been working on made me dig in my heels: not the reaction Alberti the Elder was hoping for. The more eager the lawyers get to pass Ben’s research on to another scholar, the more stubborn I feel about hanging on to it. I might even be able to publish for him, with a little help from local experts. After all, Ben trained me. I wish he were here to help me now.
How are you? Get any new books in recently? Thanks for taking care of my apartment. You can toss the plants if they’re too difficult to keep alive.
Love, Beatrice
The morning after my visit with the lawyers, I woke up with the sun in my face in the second-floor guest bedroom—obviously for guests because it was so tidy, and had so little in it. I went downstairs to Ben’s bedroom and stood for a few minutes at the door, looking in. The bed was made, but sloppily—he’d never been a hospital corners sort of guy. His spindly-legged bed table was stacked high with books, and more books stood in piles on the floor. The walls were covered with framed maps and pages of illuminated manuscripts, the dense black letters crowding together on the page. He loved his work, I thought—I loved mine too, but I wouldn’t have wallpapered my bedroom back home with pages from neurosurgical textbooks. The sun wasn’t as strong on the ground floor as it was in my room upstairs, and it came through the orange tree low and faintly green, speckling the walls of the room with leaf-shaped shadows.
I took a deep breath and stepped through the doorway, feeling like I might be invading his privacy—but what privacy do people have once they’re gone? I felt the wave of loss rising then like a tide, here in this cluttered room that sang out Ben’s memory like an elegy. I sat down on the wooden floor and watched the dust motes drift aimlessly in the light until my back ached and my body called out for coffee and breakfast. I closed the door on my way out.
* * *
I decided to visit the University of Siena, which was right near the Piazza del Campo—Sienese call it Il Campo for short—to see whether I could find more of what Ben had been working on. Nathaniel had recommended that I speak with a local archivist, Emilio Fabbri. It was too early when I got there, the doors locked and windows dark, but I could pass time in the Campo, along with half the population of the city.
The day was heating up by the time I reached the big piazza, so I stopped at a small shop to buy a bottle of fizzy lemonade. I drank it while sitting on a bench, watching the lines between the paving stones converge and bend in the heat. I counted the piazza’s nine sections—for the Council of Nine, i Noveschi—who ruled Siena during its medieval heyday. As I sat, my mind went still. The sounds around me intensified; high individual voices rang out against a background of lower rumbles. I felt the ground vibrating as children ran past me chasing pigeons, and I inhaled the pungent smell of garlic wafting from a trattoria that faced the piazza. And into that moment of pure receptive blankness came a sudden wave of profound, absolute panic. It passed quickly and left my heart pounding. Seconds later, the terror hit me again. I stood up, and the lemonade bottle slipped through my hand and shattered on the pavement. That’s when I saw the young girl a few feet away from me, alone in the crowd and white with fear. She looked up into my face, her dark eyes huge and brimming with tears.
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br /> “Dov’ è Mamma,” she wailed, throwing her head back. “Mamma, Mamma . . .”
In that moment I knew that it was not my own fear I felt, but hers. I grabbed the girl’s hand and looked desperately around the expanse of the Campo. At the other side of the piazza, under the awning of a souvenir shop where I’d bought postcards on my first day in Siena, stood a woman I’d never seen before. She had dark hair pulled back from a pale face, and her red dress was bright against the stone of the buildings behind her. The moment I saw this woman who should have been a stranger, all I wanted to do was run as hard as I could into her arms. And so we ran together hand in hand, the girl and I, both fueled by the same desire and knowledge, stumbling up the slope of the shell-shaped piazza, until we were looking into Mamma’s stricken face—me from above and her daughter from below. Mamma thanked me in a wild outpouring of Italian and tears and enveloped her daughter in a tight embrace. I stood frozen, watching them. She was back with her family, but no one could help me find mine. I didn’t have the energy left for the visit I’d planned to the university. I left the girl and her mother by the postcard rack and walked slowly home.
Back at the house, I sat at the kitchen table. I tried to re-create that blank feeling I’d had right before I’d found the lost girl, before her fear had taken root in my head. I’d had it before—in surgery. As soon as I’m scrubbed and gloved, my mind goes quiet and something else takes over. Looking back on all those surgical hours, I realized that when I operate, I am listening, and reacting to what I hear. And what I hear is the patient’s body telling me how things are going, because it knows I’m paying attention. I can feel the blood moving, hear the air entering and leaving the lungs, see the winding thick gray gyri of the brain being pushed aside by an invading tumor. I know where it is safe to cut, and I know when things go wrong.
The Scribe of Siena Page 2