The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  A couple days after I left for Italy that August, a friend told me that my mother had shown up at my apartment on Erie Street. One of the tenants answered the door but he didn’t know where I was. My mother spent the night at Agostino’s parents’; the following day she disappeared into Chicago’s streets. I watched the Perseid meteor shower from a friend’s house in Florence that night, La notte delle stelle scadente, the Night of the Shooting Stars. For each falling star I cast a wish for her, like I used to in the museum wishing well in Cleveland: Please keep her safe from harm.

  My plan had been to find a place in Italy for the fall, then travel to Poland to meet Robert, the medical student I had been seeing before I left. I wanted to live in Poland for the rest of the year while Robert finished school, then we could figure out where to go from there. Robert had told me that work in Poland was scarce, even for Poles. His sister, a doctor, was moonlighting by pumping gas. He had been saying the same thing ever since we got involved, that there was no future for us. We should just enjoy our time together until he went back home.

  The night before I left he said, “What will you do in Poland without your sister or your friends?” Robert stayed up late, helping me to pack. In the morning, he looked pale and exhausted. He gave me a farewell gift—a miniature painting he had made of a medieval castle, two lovers floating on a cloud above the spires. We kissed goodbye at the top of the stairs. On his way down, he stopped and turned around for a moment. He looked up at me and smiled the saddest smile I had ever seen. Less than a month later he called me in Italy and broke up with me on the phone.

  After that, I had to decide—should I stay or should I go back to Chicago? I had sold or given away nearly everything I owned; I had resigned from the Field Museum and my other jobs. And I suspected that my mother might have even moved to Chicago, maybe to my old neighborhood. I felt I had no choice—Chicago was the past and my future was not in Poland.

  I answered an ad in the paper for a roommate in a house on a farm called Cerreto, a forty-minute drive from Florence down Via Aretina, the fast curving road that follows the Arno east of the city. I had no car, so it took almost twice as long by bus and train. My roommates in the downstairs apartment were two women in their thirties, Elisabetta, an art restorer from Milan, and a blond Swedish language teacher named Elsa, who, when I asked where she was from, slapped her chest and said, “I may be from Sweden, but sono una vera Napolitana—I am a true Neapolitan!” Elsa laid down the rules the first day: I was not allowed to touch her newspaper, play music in the living room, or record my name on our answering machine. Elisabetta was much kinder but rarely home. I felt most comfortable upstairs, where Gabriella, Massimo, Angelo, and Claudia lived, a group of boisterous forty-somethings. If they noticed I was alone, they’d come downstairs and try to coax me up for dinner.

  Beneath the house’s eighteenth century walls was a medieval foundation; below that, the remains of an Etruscan tower. The house, and three others on the farm, sat on top of a steep hill embraced by chestnut and fig trees, a lemon grove, and an enormous garden. There were sheep and goats on the land, a pony, chickens, a dog, and twenty-three feral cats. On the hill below were a vineyard and a grove of silver-green olive trees.

  On Erie Street, I had two locks, a deadbolt, and a chain on my fourth-floor walk-up apartment. At Cerreto, I didn’t even own a key. Beside my bedroom was a little studio with a door that opened onto a flower-lined path, leading to a chicken house. On warm fall days, chickens meandered in from outside, and Stella the farm dog burst in the room wagging her tail, running up to lick my face. She’d sit on the terra-cotta floor beside me, bury her nose in my sleeve, sniff my wrist, and sigh. That was when I missed my mother the most, those brief moments of animal closeness—the warmth of a dog’s breath on my skin, the touch of her velvet ear.

  Across the path from my studio was a medieval stone house where Sabina and Alfredo—the resident farmers who worked for the owner—lived, along with Alfredo’s ninety-year-old mother. Sometimes Alfredo’s mother would stop by to offer a slice of torta di mela on an old chipped plate, or a few biscotti from her brown leathery hands. Once the family invited me over for a glass of wine. Their house was straight out of Boccaccio—the large open hearth with a big black kettle hanging from an iron hook, a blackened ceiling, an old church calendar with a beatific Madonna and child.

  “Where is your family?” Sabina asked. I said my father was dead but my sister was in New York and my mother and grandmother were in Ohio. “Tutto bene,” I lied, when they asked after my mother’s health. “She’s fine.”

  “We could adopt you,” Sabina suggested. She told me how the Lord had decided not to bless them with children, no matter how many times they prayed.

  “I’m thirty-one.” I said with a laugh. “Too old for that.”

  “We can still adopt you in Italy. We’ll find you a nice husband. Don’t worry.”

  Why would a girl come here without a family if not to make one of her own?

  I get anxious when I think about the war, being so far from my sister and my friends. And where is my mother? Is she safe? Something inside feels a bit lost and broken. But no matter how sad I feel at times, when I walk down the hill to take the bus to Florence, and the haze lifts off the trees, and I catch a glimpse of a lepre, one of the gray-brown hares that scatter across the land, and see a startled pheasant, flushed out from the brush by my footsteps, I don’t want to leave. Despite my loneliness and my growing stress about money, I want to stay on this hilltop of grapevines and olives. Without my sister and family around to remind me that she is the writer and I am the artist, I start writing stories and poems. I don’t want to be the person who gasps in fear whenever she hears the sound of a doorbell or a phone. I just want to lose myself in these hills, in the river winding west to the city of bridges.

  I always meet Emilio, the antique dealer, at his workshop, never his store. I’ve recently begun working for him, restoring ceramics. He is fifty or so, tall and wiry, and when I come to drop off the pieces I have restored, he is bent over his large oak table, a limp hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his thin lips, examining an old print he has just bought for a song. One day I happen to have my portfolio with me when I stop in to pick up a small porcelain figurine that needs repair.

  “Mi fai vedere,” he says. “Let’s see what you have.”

  I show him a few paintings, small metaphysical landscapes inhabited with glowing plants and flowers, arches with beasts, tendrils, and leaves. In some I had painted part of a woman, tilting her ear to something she hears in the distance. Emilio leans over my paintings spread out on the table. He holds his cigarette over my work, his ashes dangerously close. “Who is the woman?” He points with his long yellow-stained finger.

  The woman’s ear is mine; her face resembles my mother. “No one,” I say.

  “Not bad, these pictures.”

  Emilio takes a long drag and exhales a cloud of smoke. “Can you do watercolor?”

  “Watercolor, egg tempera, gouache. Or oil. Anything.”

  “Good. I have a job for you.”

  He hands me some old watercolor paper, a little brown and ragged around the edges, and asks me to copy an Art Nouveau painting of a dancer. He will pay me $200. That is half a month’s rent at Cerreto. If I do a good job, there could be more.

  “Use the old paper. Americans like anything that looks old. It doesn’t have to be exact.” He adds, “It doesn’t even have to be that good.”

  Up until now, I have been making six dollars an hour at a part-time job modeling nude for a figure drawing class, taught by a tyrannical professor in an unheated room. Maybe with Emilio, I can make a living wage. When I return to Cerreto, I begin a letter to my sister to tell her of my good fortune. But how should I begin? Rachel has changed her name to Natalia. She says that if she hadn’t done it, our mother would find her. My sister wants to start over. She has a tenure-track job teaching English, lives in a new town, has a brand-new life. I write, Dear Natal
ia, at the top of the page, but it feels strange. Dear Rachel feels wrong too. Before I left for Italy, my sister had urged me to change my name but I couldn’t. The art world is a young person’s game. Everything I had done up until then had been in my birth name, Myra Herr. What would happen to my career if I became someone else? But my sister would say, “What could happen to both of us if you don’t?”

  Two years later, my mother will write this in her diary: I’ve been thinking of changing my name for over fifty years. I could change the “N” in my first name to an “H”—from Norma to Horma(h). There is a Horma(h) , a city in the Bible, that was marked for destruction. Or perhaps I shall re-name myself Isthmus. Archaic definition: a narrow passage connect two bodies of land. Literal definition: affording little room for place or boundaries.

  Every Wednesday, after I’m done modeling, I cross Santa Trinita to the Oltrarno, the other side of the river, where the artisans work. The streets are incredibly narrow and full of the deafening chatter of motorini. It’s even louder here than my old neighborhood in Chicago. The city air smells of car exhaust, rotting garbage, grilled meat, and espresso. I stop at a little place called Café Calibria in Piazza Santo Spirito to write, and sip a glass of rose-colored vin santo. Afterward, I go to the church and light a candle for my mother. Not that I believe it will do any good; it’s just to remind myself that she is still lost in the world.

  One day in late October, after the café, I drop off a watercolor at Emilio’s. He has been giving me more work lately, more things to copy onto the same antique paper. I ask him why he doesn’t want me to use a better paper, something museum-grade without the wood pulp in it that makes it brittle and brown. “These won’t last,” I say. “I have good paper at home.”

  Emilio turns his back to me, rolls a cigarette, and lights up without turning back around. “If you don’t like the work,” he says, “I can easily find someone else.”

  On my way back toward the river, something catches my eye in the window of an antiquarian shop. It’s a small reliquary for a saint’s bone. The things people collect, I think. What was in there? One of the eight foreskins of Christ supposedly floating around Europe? I hear a muffled rapping against the window. There’s a man with thick salt-and-pepper hair beckoning me to come in. His face is kind; the air is damp and cold, so I go in.

  The man had been polishing a silver bowl. “Come in,” he says in Italian. He shows me what is inside the bowl—a tiny scorpion curled into a half-moon. He plucks it out and places it on the table. I take two steps back.

  “Don’t worry, he’s dead. My name is Paolo, by the way.”

  “Mi chiamo, Myra,” I say, pronouncing my name MEE-rah, the way my Italian friends do.

  I follow Paolo around as he shows me his rare books and prints, antique pottery, jewelry, and flatware. Paolo looks about forty-five, and is very fit, although his tweed jacket is a bit tight around his waist. He picks up the bowl that had held the scorpion and turns it over.

  “English silver, ottocento,” he says. He motions me to come close. His skin smells like sandalwood. “Can you see that?”

  Paolo points to a small stamp at the bottom of the bowl, a tiny crown. He explains how each silver object has a stamp on the bottom—a lion, a crown, a tree, or some other sign. He has to know what each symbol means so he can tell when and where each piece was made. My grandmother used to show me the symbols on the bottoms of her little cups from China, explain which ones were worth more than others and why.

  Paolo places the scorpion back in the bowl. “Sogni d’oro. Dreams of gold.”

  I feel embarrassed. Paolo clears his throat. He rubs a spot on the bowl. “I better get going now,” I say. “See you around.”

  “Wait,” says Paolo. “Tell me what you like best in my shop.”

  I take a careful look around again, by myself. Everything is carefully arranged like a cabinet of curiosities. Each book in alphabetical order, the nicer ones with illustrated plates propped open on small wooden stands. The furniture is classic late eighteenth century Tuscany—heavy carved tables and chairs, a rosewood pedestal inlaid with mother-of-pearl, an opulent credenza embellished with gold. I sit down on a red velvet chair and think of my grandma, how she used to take me to Higbee’s on Saturdays to see the furniture displays. She’d look at the dining room sets she couldn’t afford while I sat on leather couches, among a forest of Japanese screens, both of us dreaming we were living someone else’s life.

  I walk around his shop again and settle on three things. I lead Paolo to an old mahogany music stand, the reliquary in the window, and then to the scorpion in the bowl. Paolo laughs when I point to the scorpion.

  “Wait,” I say. “There’s one more.” I show Paolo an old print I found at the back of his shop. The words at the bottom of the page read, Penula Antica. “He looks like Folly,” I say. “Or maybe Hermes. His feet have little wings.”

  “Take it. It’s yours.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Of course you can. We can make a trade. You take the print and next time you take me out for a coffee. How’s that?”

  “That would be nice,” I say. When I get home, I see he has slipped another print inside my pack, an engraving of ancient musical instruments. A presto, the note says, see you soon.

  A few days later, I have an altercation with the professor who teaches the figure drawing class. He blows up at me for scratching my nose, for taking a break to pee, for shivering when there’s no heat. At the end of the session he refuses to pay and I leave crying. I head in the direction of Paolo’s shop. I’m on my Vespa this time, a noisy red one I bought off of a middle-aged Japanese man who had purchased it from a teenage girl. My hair is short now and I’m wearing a black leather jacket and high black boots. But my Vespa betrays my new tough look—it is plastered with Snoopy and I-♥ -THE-NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK stickers no amount of scrubbing will remove.

  Paolo asks me out to dinner and I say yes, almost bursting into tears again, grateful for the free meal. Soon I will be out of money if I don’t find more work. I remind him of our previous deal, though: the print for coffee later. During our squid ink fettuccine, I find out that he is forty-six, married, and has two kids. His son is eighteen and his daughter is twenty-six, five years younger than me. I block out Robert’s face on the stairway, my mother calling after me as I drive away from her in winter. Instead, I notice the laugh lines around Paolo’s warm brown eyes; how nice it is to eat a good hot meal.

  “I’d like to see you,” he says, after our orange and fennel salad.

  “Just as friends,” I say.

  “Of course,” he says. “Just as friends.”

  The next day, at home in Cerreto, I open a letter from Gloria, the woman who takes care of my grandma. She has written to tell me that my mother left the Stuart House apartment and is now homeless. She had contacted Gloria through my grandmother’s lawyer to set up a meeting in a restaurant because she isn’t allowed to know where my grandma lives. Gloria said in the letter that my mother arrived with two bags, one filled with papers, the other with crumbled-up clothing and a butcher knife. Gloria saw the knife poking out of the bag and made my mother hand it over to her. She had purchased two discount plane tickets for the following week, one for California, the other for Chicago. “You and your minions stole my house from me,” she told Gloria. “And I aim to get it and my mother back.” The last thing she said to Gloria was that her youngest daughter had changed her hair and face and the other daughter had changed her name.

  It’s midday in Italy and at Cerreto, the vendemmia is in full force: workers gather the turning grapes and olives in the late afternoon sun. In Cleveland or Chicago it’s early morning and the city is just waking up. I try to imagine what my mother’s life is like now, while I sip my tea and watch the men and women on the hill. A bell is ringing at a homeless shelter, somewhere in a bad part of town. My mother will wake up before everyone else and check beneath her pillow to see if someone’s stolen her teeth in the
middle of the night. There will be fifty women, or a hundred or more, packed like sardines in a gym. She will gulp down coffee and a donut and go out the door. She’ll be dressed in four layers, one for safety, one for warmth, one for gamma rays, and one for just pure luck. She’ll find a chair at a library, or a bench in the park, and doze off, dreaming her thoughts are being projected into someone else’s dream. When she wakes she’ll say to herself, No matter where I go, where I sleep, I must identify the Enemy or they’ll replace my heart with the heart of a Nazi or a pig. I have to know my safety exits in case of fire; know how to crawl on the floor when there’s smoke in the room; how to get information from the phone book and the professional manipulators with cannibal teeth. I must walk like I know where I am going, have eyes at the back of my head. If I don’t, they’ll inject me with poison and dump me far from the city, and there will be water everywhere rushing fast, and I’ll be clinging to an old rubber tire, heading down a long river of darkness straight into the leopard’s mouth.

  Or maybe she isn’t in a shelter. Maybe she’s sleeping on the street. Or maybe she’s in a halfway house and has a small but clean and tidy bed. Maybe she is dead. I am here, watching men pluck grapes off lush, heavy vines while my mother plucks a tuna sandwich out of a Dumpster four thousand miles away. Would she do that? Would she stoop that low?

  The next time I get together with Paolo it’s November 2, the Day of the Dead, il giorno dei morti, the day Italians place photographs on the headstones of their loved ones. Some people celebrate by making a dish with sweet fava beans they call ossi dei morti, “the bones of the dead.” If my mother died somewhere, how would I find her bones? It’s pouring rain and hard to see; on the way over to Paolo’s shop I nearly get run over by a panini di trippa truck. I lock my motorino outside of Paolo’s shop. I’ve convinced him to go to a gospel concert, a Chicago group is singing at a nearby church. Years ago, I used to go some Sundays to hear South Side choirs in Chicago early in the morning, and then head to the Soul Queen for eggs and grits.