The Chapel

by Michael Downing

  I said, “You have me confused with Gina Lollobrigida.”

  He checked his watch. “So, if you will tell Sara not to expect me today, I’ll meet you this afternoon at the Arena Chapel at three-fifteen or so.”

  I drew back my hand. “If I do stay, I’ll have seen the chapel by then.” This day was shaping up like a Roman arch, and I had the feeling I was on the downside already.

  “Perfect. You will know how to get there. There are benches just outside the visitor entrance.” He picked up a little biscuit but thought the better of it. “I have two tickets for a lecture at four.”

  I consulted my itinerary. “I’ll be at the basilica.”

  He pointed at my phone. “Where’s the camera on that thing?”

  I turned it on and handed it to him. “Press here.” I resisted the urge to fix my hair.

  He stuck out his tongue and snapped two pictures of his open mouth. “Now, you can tell everyone you went to the basilica and saw St. Anthony’s eight-hundred-year-old tongue.” He drank the second espresso and stood up. “Three-fifteen. Look for a man dressed up like a Catholic priest.” He left via the arcade, heading away from the hotel.

  I picked up my phone. No new messages. It was two in the morning on the East Coast. Rachel and Sam were asleep. For the first time in months, I was ahead of them. For a moment, I felt like their mother again, comforted by the idea that I would have advance knowledge of any global catastrophe and could warn them, urge them to take cover.

  Before I left the café, I had a conversation with a helpful young man at Air France. For twenty dollars, he sold me a twenty-four-hour hold on a reservation for a Tuesday afternoon flight from Venice to Boston. If I left at three on Tuesday afternoon, I would be in Paris by five, and in Boston by eight-thirty on Tuesday night, which seemed a little breathtaking, as was the pricing—$10,000 for first class, $4,500 for business class, and $2,500 for coach. Added together, all three options equaled the cost of the deluxe holiday I was tossing away. I opted for coach, despite his warning about the hefty charge for a second suitcase and other bulky items. I assured him I’d only be checking one bag.

  Back in my hotel room, I emptied the second suitcase, the banged-up match to mine, Mitchell’s better-traveled bag. He’d made it to Rome on Harvard’s tab several times, and once to Milan, but he’d never been to Florence, having waited to see it with me. He’d never get there now, a permanent exile, like Dante, who never entered the walls of his beloved hometown after he got himself tossed out when he was thirty-six.

  This biographical fact and everything else that remained of the Dante book was in the suitcase whose contents I had spilled onto the bed, all of Mitchell’s copious notes and the few furiously marked-up pages of his own fragile prose he had preserved. I’d even brought along a sampling of his photocopied pages of The Divine Comedy translated by the great British mystery writer Dorothy Sayers in her spare time, annotated and crammed with Mitchell’s marginalia. He’d left me thousands of similar pages, and I’d been stuffing the duplicates and triplicates into the newspaper recycling bin week by week.

  Many of the pages I had saved were crazy quilts, photocopied bits of esoteric literary exegesis Mitchell had taped to blank pages and then drowned in scribbled counterarguments and probably very witty or sardonic exclamatory bits of Italian that were lost on me. I’d sorted them into folders, one per artist—Botticelli, Blake, Rodin, and Dalí—as well as writers ranging from Chaucer and Milton to T.S. Eliot, Freud, and Jung. Some of the pages I’d saved were puzzling curiosities, including his notes for Chapter One, the chapter devoted to Giotto. There were a few photocopied pages of notes and anecdotes about Giotto from early Italian sources, but most of what constituted this chapter was basically a single page, a fragmentary chronology of Giotto’s career. Over the years, Mitchell had evidently made dozens and dozens of copies, each one covered with a new batch of annoyed annotations and exhortations to himself, as well as asterisks and underscores and arrows, skid marks on a stretch of road he never mastered, a curve that apparently threw him off course every time he approached the task of writing his book.

  I HAD TRIED TO PERSUADE WIDENER LIBRARY TO TAKE THE whole business off my hands, and in deference to Mitchell’s lifetime of service to the university, a graduate student was dispatched to my house and spent the better part of two hours in Mitchell’s study. He was a smoker, and he took several long breaks in the backyard before pronouncing the whole lot “a testament to the best tradition of citizen scholarship,” but not archival quality. He did give me the names of two rare-book dealers who might be interested in a couple of the oddball editions he’d noticed on Mitchell’s Dante bookcase.

  For a few weeks afterward, I managed to believe I would have the wit and the wherewithal to hire a raft or a little skiff in Florence, pack it with all this paper, light it on fire, and send it down the Arno under the Ponte Vecchio like a funeral bier, the sort of honorific sendoff Dante didn’t get. Now, I couldn’t even imagine getting myself on a train to Florence. Unless I could enlist T. to invent a more fitting conclusion to this sad story, it was obvious I was going to leave the suitcase under the bed.

  Before I repacked the whole mess, I put on my reading glasses, found the Sayers folder, and pulled out Mitchell’s preferred version of the lines Sara had read aloud, Dante’s assessment of Giotto’s fame.

  Oh, empty glory of our human deeds!

  How brief it’s green upon the topmost bough,

  unless perhaps some grosser age succeeds.

  In painting, Cimabue thought as how

  he held the field; but Giotto rules today

  so that obscure the other’s fame is now.

  The margins were crammed with Mitchell’s exclamatory huzzahs to the genius of Sayers and Dante: topmost (golden) bough! the painter’s and the painted FIELD! rules (like a monarch? or a pope!). In a fit of inspiration, I got my nail scissors and clipped out the six lines to preserve them as a tribute to Mitchell, Dante, and this brief moment when we were all together in Padua. I laid them onto the second page of my journal, wishing I had some glue or a roll of tape. I finally settled for a slick of lip balm, which held the patch of poetry in the middle of the blank page. I stepped back to admire my work.

  I closed the cover, opened it, turned the page—and it had stuck. But Dante’s praise of Giotto had not. From my distance, Giotto rules today sounded a bit equivocal. I sat down and read the lines again.

  It was the Renaissance that succeeded Giotto, not “some grosser age,” which sort of confirmed the opening lament: “Oh, empty glory of our human deeds!” This was not exactly an endorsement of Giotto’s enduring greatness. True, Dante conceded, Giotto held the field for a while, but so had Cimabue—human deeds, empty glory. Dante, on the other hand, had strolled into Paradise at the end of his poem—a supernatural, unearthly accomplishment.

  Had Dante dissed Giotto?

  The whole passage was weirdly reminiscent of the patronizing tributes Mitchell had so often received from the more eminent deans and senior-faculty grandees, pats on the back that kept him in his place. Mitchell had read the Giotto passage from The Inferno a hundred times, a hundred ways. Surely, he hadn’t misread Dante’s meaning. I read it again to the end. “Obscure the other’s fame is now.”

  Mitchell had been half-right. Dante had bestowed upon Giotto a form of immortality. He’d damned him with faint praise.

  SARA WAS STANDING ALONE IN THE LOBBY WITH A CLIPBOARD, her long hair gathered with a yellow rubber band high at the back of her head so it cascaded down several inches away from her neck, like a real pony’s tail. She was wearing skintight blue jeans and a tiny jean jacket with a pair of lime-green high heels that probably cost more than Mitchell’s BMW. I was relieved to be the first in line, above reproach. Sara was texting so I kept my distance, leaning on the front desk.

  From a swinging door behind the desk, a new character in a tuxedo emerged with two silver ice buckets. He was just about my height, with buzz-cut silver hair and a
square, German jaw. He said, “Prego.”

  I looked around. “Prego?”

  He said, “Prego.”

  I got the sense he wanted me to want something, so I said, “Glue?”

  “Blue?”

  “Glue.” I licked my finger and pretended to get it stuck on the desk.

  “Ah, francobollo.”

  This seemed unlikely. “No, glue.” I rubbed my finger on the desk and flattened my hand against the spot, and then leaned back, pulling on the wrist.

  “Si, si, si. Adesiva, adesiva.”

  I said, “Adesiva!” We were both delighted.

  “Adesiva, ha! No, no, no. Diciamo colla.”

  Cola? I blamed the ice buckets. “No—no cola, grazie.”

  “Prego, prego.” He bowed, ducked under the desk, and headed for the elevator.

  I waved at Sara, and as I approached, she politely lowered her phone. I took the opportunity to report on T.’s decision to skip the day’s activities.

  She said, “Il medico?” She sounded exasperated.

  I nodded.

  “Everyone tells me nothing,” she said. “Arrivederci!” She crossed his name off her list.

  I had intended to tell her about my altered afternoon plans, but I chickened out when Sara pointed at the four impatient couples staring at us from the sidewalk. She barked, “Andiamo!”

  As we stepped outside, one of the men said, “Which way?”

  Sara pointed to a crosswalk at the end of the block and the post office just beyond.

  I said, “Aren’t we waiting for Shelby?”

  Over her shoulder, one of the wives yelled, “She went ahead with that elderly gal. We were all waiting on you again.”

  I brought up the rear next to Sara, who towered over me, texting furiously. Corso Garibaldi was a major thoroughfare, with several lanes of two-way traffic, trams running on embedded tracks, and a broad sidewalk bordered by an unbroken run of waist-high iron-pipe railing that prevented pedestrian crossings for anyone who wasn’t ready to limbo. Within half a block, Sara pointed out the Church of the Eremitani on the far side of the street, a biggish, dark building oddly angled inside a curved brick wall. The church appeared as part of the Arena Chapel complex on the map she’d given us. “We will go there,” she said.

  I couldn’t see how.

  The shops we were passing were just opening up, and I asked Sara if the odd lot of cameras and ponchos and religious statuary was the edge of a shopping district.

  “For tourists who must buy something, sure,” she said. “The station for trains, it is one kilometer up there. You will see Wednesday when you leave for Firenze.”

  I wouldn’t, but I nodded agreeably, as we were about to catch up with the couples. They were waiting at a traffic light where the railing opened up for a tram stop and crosswalk. The men were edging out into the street, their wives clotted on the curb behind them, smiling indulgently at their impatient boys.

  Sara never even paused to look at the light. She yelled, “Pronto!” and took off across the street like a model down a runway, her green shoes flicking, her tiny hips still, and her ponytail swishing around her swaying shoulders. She was showing off, and she wasn’t getting any criticism from the husbands behind her. She never turned around. She raised her long arm and pointed to the right, leading us halfway back to the hotel along a six-foot-high brick wall until she veered off through an open iron gate into a courtyard of paved pathways lined with waist-high brambles bursting with pink roses and the occasional park bench. She opened the door to the visitor center and leaned back to keep it ajar, handing a brochure and a ticket to each of us as we entered and saying, again and again, “Fifteen minutes to enjoy the wait.”

  The room was a big, spare white rectangle, with a long white counter for unticketed visitors to the left, and an open-shelf and tabletop display of scarves and ceramic coasters and postcards to the right. I followed the couples past the gift shop to the coat check, where a sign warned us not to try to carry bags, cameras, food, drink, or pets into the chapel and to switch off our cell phones. I grabbed my glasses and left everything else in the red bag. I was headed back outside to the roses when I spotted Shelby and Anna, seated on a bench on the far side of the room.

  Anna waved. She was wearing another handsome knit suit.

  Shelby stood up. She was wearing a crinkly white button-up jumpsuit with a pair of camouflage binoculars, big as bazookas, slung around her neck. You had to admire her nerve. When I was still about ten feet away, she hollered, “That shirtdress is killer! You go, girl!”

  I said, “You always look ready for anything.” I had left Mitchell’s compact black-rubber binoculars at the hotel.

  Shelby hugged me and held on long enough to say, “Our friend is a little blue. We took Francesca to the train station this morning.”

  “Okay,” I said. When she let go, I bent to kiss Anna, as if she were my aunt, and then sat down between them.

  Sara was standing right in the middle of the room, leaning into her big leather purse, her jacket and white shirt pulled up, exposing a few inches of her tiny waist.

  Anna said, “God forgive me, I’m grateful my husband isn’t here to see that.”

  The four live husbands had staked out spaces at the front of the line by the door to the chapel. Their wives were wending their way past the other ticketed visitors, holding their opera glasses overhead as if they were swimming upstream.

  Shelby stood up and said, “Shall we dance?”

  I stood up.

  Anna said, “Where are we going now?”

  “We’re halfway there,” Shelby said. “We have to be dehumidified. Apparently, we go from here to a special air-conditioned room and watch a video about Giotto for fifteen minutes, and then we have our fifteen minutes in the chapel.”

  Anna said, “Only fifteen minutes?”

  I said, “Andy Warhol meets Giotto.”

  Anna said, “When I came here as a girl, none of this museum business existed.”

  Shelby said, “Did you come to Mass here?”

  “Oh, no. I don’t think it was ever used like that. It was just a place my mother loved. La mia piccola cappella.” She stood up, but her mood was sinking. “She wouldn’t recognize it now.”

  As we joined the line, Shelby said, “We’re so lucky to be alive and here today. It’s only a few years ago that they finally finished the restoration. Imagine—the frescoes could have just peeled and flaked and faded away.”

  Anna said, “In Florida, there’s black mold on everything.”

  The line snaked out through the door, along a paved path, which dipped as it neared the unadorned side of the little dusty brick chapel on our left. A vast woodland park spread out to the right with walking trails twisting around massive black boulders and disappearing into the glimmering greenery. The line stalled outside a dark glass vestibule, a kind of modern greenhouse attached to the chapel. From some angles, you could see the people inside, seated on folding chairs, watching a TV monitor while they were dried out.

  Someone well ahead of us said, “Three minutes.”

  Anna said, “Now what are we waiting for?”

  Shelby said, “There’s another group of twenty-five ahead of us.”

  Anna didn’t seem to approve of the glass vestibule or the wait.

  I asked if she wanted to sit on one of the nearby benches.

  She said, “I just hope it still feels like her little chapel.”

  We heard a woman yell, and the whole crowd turned to see Sara streaming down the path like one of the Furies trying to catch up with her crazy sisters, holding some sort of baton in her right hand. She came to a teetering halt next to Shelby. Instinctively, the whole crowd closed in. Sara bent over to catch her breath, and when she straightened up, she yelled, “Attenzione! Attenzione!”

  “That goes without saying,” I whispered to Shelby, a little too loudly. I got several approving nods from the women on the periphery.

  Sara slid a rubber band from he
r baton and peeled off a single sheet and handed it to Anna. “My EurWay guests only and not the others did not yet receive these helpful maps I am now passing to them,” Sara said breathlessly. She was already starting to move away from us. “These are perfect preparation for the chapel.”

  Shelby grabbed several sheets as Sara passed and handed two to me.

  Anna looked at the diagram and said, “This can’t be right. Did they make it bigger inside?”

  Shelby said, “It’s not a floor plan. It’s flattened out. It’s a guide to the frescoes on all four walls and the ceiling.”

  The door to the vestibule opened, and the three of us slid into one of the open rows near the back. I watched the tour group ahead of us filing into the chapel through a glass breezeway at the other end of the room. Another group was filing out of the chapel down a ramp behind them. They were there, we were here, and there was already another group congregating outside, and twenty-five more tourists picking up their tickets behind them. All the coming and going made my time in the chapel seem both precious and pointless. Several people in our group were unhappy with their seats and kept popping up and scanning the room, as if they belonged in first class. Shelby was busily tearing and folding her diagram. Anna looked lost.

  As the lights dimmed, Shelby passed Anna the fragile paper box she’d made by crudely tearing Sara’s handout along the perimeter of the diagram and folding up the four numbered panels. She had turned the map into a diorama.

  Anna looked inside the box. “That’s it. That’s her chapel.”

  The video crackled and popped on the TV screen at the front of the room, and a vaguely medieval melody drifted back toward us.

  Apologetically, Shelby whispered, “But the ceiling is on the floor.”

  Anna whispered. “We’ll stand on our heads.”

  BLUE.

  Had Mitchell been standing beside me, where he belonged, he would have whispered, “First impression?”