The Chapel

by Michael Downing

  We all ate a second slice, and then the bartender urged the newcomers up to the bar and took their orders. T. put the glass stopper back into the cruet and explained that the magic was in the monoflora source of local honeys. This clear nectar had been produced exclusively by bees feasting on the flowers of the acacia tree. While he talked, we sipped our bitter coffee and took turns slicking our fingers across the plate and sucking up what was left of the syrup. When the bartender turned to us from his espresso machine, T. wagged a twenty-euro note.

  The bartender said, “No, no. Troppo.”

  T. said, “No, no, perfetto,” and slid the cash under the edge of the white plate.

  The bartender smiled and said, “Grazie.”

  T. said, “Prego, prego.”

  I said to T., “How do you say heaven?”

  T. said, “You’re the Dante scholar.”

  I pointed to the plate and said, “Paradiso.”

  The bartender said something I didn’t understand. As I followed T. out to the street, I asked him to translate.

  “He said life is bittersweet.” T. hooked his arm around mine and led us across the street. “Like an orange,” he said. “And then he said you cannot change the nature of things.”

  “He said all that?”

  “And more,” T. said, leading us off the sidewalk and onto a path hemmed in by rhododendron backed by a stand of gnarly pines. “The Italians have a way of saying a lot of words per word. He also said, ‘You are here now, and this is the time for honeying the bitter fruit.’”

  Neither of us said anything for a while.

  As the path opened up a bit, the land at either side fell away into a series of soft little hills that tipped down toward a river on one side and a dry gulley on the other, and we passed a few remnants of an ancient stone wall, crumbly granite blocks coated with lichen-like layers of powdery white lime.

  T. said, “This is what remains of the old Roman Arena.”

  ACCORDING TO T., PADUA WAS PUT ON THE MAP BY PRINCE Antenor, who settled the place with a bunch of refugees from the Trojan War in 1183 BC. “This much of what those priests told me last night I believe,” T. said, “because it comes from The Aeneid, and even Dante trusted Virgil.”

  “Not all the way,” I said. It had always bugged me that Dante had turned Virgil into a functionary, his personal tour guide through the Inferno—and then ditched Virgil somewhere in Purgatory, based on the old Roman poet’s being a pagan and, thus, unfit for Paradise. “An old blind man leads you safely through hell and back, and that’s the thanks he gets?”

  T. said, “It is unthinkable to abandon a friend in the middle of a journey.”

  “Enough,” I said. “I’m leaving tomorrow. That decision is now ancient history.” It did occur to me that I hadn’t yet reserved my ride home.

  T. said the Arena had survived the Roman Empire, and Attila and his Huns, who rumbled into town around 450, and even the Goths, who followed a hundred years later. It was the Lombards who destroyed most of what the Romans had bothered to build, and in the centuries that followed, Padua sort of fell off the map and eventually got absorbed into the new Holy Roman Empire. It remained a backwater until it got a constitution of its own in the 12th century, and then the commune founded the second university in Italy in 1222 and launched a century of prosperity.

  All the while, T. said, the locals scavenged rock from the arena to fortify their foundations and shore up their bridges. I thought of Sam, who would have happily borrowed bricks from the chimney in my house to build himself a barbecue pit. But even in its decimated state, long before Enrico Scrovegni built his palace and chapel on the site, the Arena remained a kind of spiritual center and hosted pageants and public forums and, most importantly, an annual celebration of the Feast of the Annunciation, which involved two little boys being carried from the cathedral on chairs to commemorate the angel Gabriel flying down from heaven to tell the Virgin Mary that she was about to become a handmaiden to history.

  I said, “Why boys?” I was thinking of Rachel’s two little boys—how happy they’d be if they were hoisted up and paraded through town, how quickly I’d dial 911 if some priest dressed them up in heavenly robes and lipstick.

  “Everyone at the table last night seemed to agree they would have been boys. Oddly, that was just about the only uncontested fact,” T. said. “Was the idea of building a chapel here original to Scrovegni, or did he replace an old church built on the Arena and dedicated to Mary? The record is unclear. For his personal digs, did he rehab an extant palace or start from scratch? No one seems to know.”

  I said, “What year was Dante in Padua?” I was scratching an old itch, but since I’d been in the chapel, I was feeling personally offended by Dante—especially his famous crack about Giotto’s fleeting fame.

  T. said, “I don’t know that Dante ever was here.”

  “Dante would’ve heard about the chapel, surely. He would have wanted to see it, wouldn’t he? After he got tossed out of Florence, Dante was always begging at some patron’s table and then complaining about the quality of the accommodations, so you have to admit it seems likely he would have figured out how run into the richest man in Padua while he was here. And he must have been here. How else do you explain his attack on Scrovegni in The Inferno?”

  T. said, “I think you might have me confused with the attorney representing Mr. Dante.”

  I said, “I’m not saying Scrovegni was a saint.”

  “From what I heard last night, I think the case against Scrovegni—Enrico, the son, anyway—is just that he was a rich boob,” T. said. “For instance, there’s apparently plenty of evidence that Enrico was a knight—almost all of it left by him. But there’s absolutely no record of him ever raising his lance on behalf of the commune, and somebody wrote a sonnet about his habit of crying in public. Ed’s theory is that Enrico was one of those guys who joined a civic organization devoted to fighting heresy or indecency and took his honorary title too seriously.”

  “Like the Knights of Columbus,” I said. As a young girl, I was amazed when the fathers of my friends turned up at parish bake sales and car washes with three-foot swords swinging beneath their elaborate topcoats, big black feathers flouncing around on their fancy hats, as if they might be called up at any moment to retake Istanbul. “Did Enrico have a wife?”

  “Two of them,” T. said, “both from famous families, but you’ll have to ask Ed about them. That was the after-dinner topic, and I had to be somewhere else.”

  Whenever either of our kids would bolt from the dinner table with that excuse, Mitchell would say, “But you can’t be somewhere else.”

  Of course, he had since proved himself wrong.

  As it started to rain, we were rounding the wrought-iron fence that kept the world away from the chapel, and T. said we had three minutes to join the next group. He took our official letters to the ticket desk while I checked our umbrellas and my bag, and soon we were being hustled into the dehumidifying chamber to watch the video. I took a seat in the last row, trying to catch my breath, and T. stood behind me. As the closing credits rolled on the TV screen, I felt his hands on my shoulders, and his face next to mine. I thought I felt the warmth of his face, but he whispered, “You’re flushed.”

  “Reflected glory,” I said, thinking of Giotto, though I immediately realized he might think I was flirting with him.

  “Don’t wait for me,” T. said. “I have to explain our credentials to the guards who clear everyone out.”

  I FOLLOWED THE HERD OF TOURISTS INTO THE CHAPEL. I felt lost, all turned around. I stopped to locate myself on Sara’s map. From where I was, I could see the original double-doored entrance at the far end, below the Last Judgment, and Enrico hoisting his chapel up to the Virgin. I headed that way and then looked up and to the left until I located the mound of murdered babies beneath their weeping mothers’ outstretched arms, Sara’s Number 20, the Slaughter of the Innocents, my only anchor in the sea of blue that seemed to swirl beneath the p
ainted frames and figures as I tried to get a purchase on another image.

  Instead of the sense of awe I was waiting to experience again, I was agitated by the presence of other people, impatient with my own inability to settle in one place without having my imagination fill in the blank space in every fresco with a white jet in a blue sky, or the image of my black TV against the white wall of my living room, and it didn’t help that a wheezy ancient woman with a walker was trailing me, wheeling her way down the aisle and inching ever nearer, like an omen, her rosary beads clicking against her chrome handlebars.

  I walked all the way back to the other end of the chapel, to start at the beginning. According to Sara’s map, the first six panels, above the arched tops of the windows, were scenes from the life of Joachim and St. Anne. This was annoying. I had never heard of either of them.

  I’d read the Bible. I’d suffered through more than my share of sermons on the scriptures. At the very least, I should have been able to follow the story.

  T. was nowhere to be seen. I sidled my way through the crowded center aisle again and reclaimed my familiar perch in the corner and fixed my attention on the topmost panel, Number 6 on Sara’s map, Meeting at the Golden Gate. This panel calmed me down or made me sad—the distinction was lost on me lately.

  In the background, beneath a deep blue sky, stood a tall, white crenellated wall, the edge of a fortress or a city. At its center was a generous open arch, trimmed in gold, and on that narrow threshold was a cluster of five women—three in pastel robes smiling expectantly; one in a white peasant dress, with a blanket draped over her folded arms, her fragile face alert and delighted; and one in black, her cape pulled over her head like a shroud. These women were staring at an older couple—Joachim and Anne, I assumed—as they embraced. At the far left of the fresco, a man with a basket—a shopper? a peddler?—looked surprised to find his passage into the city blocked by the elderly couple’s embrace.

  Joachim’s robe was pale rose, and Anne’s robe was rusty orange, and as they leaned into each other, their gold-leaf halos overlapped and the generous folds of their robes came together, and they became a single figure, an intimate arch, another golden gate. Joachim gripped Anne’s shoulders, drawing her nearer to him. Anne rested one hand on her husband’s fulsome graying beard, and her other hand was pressed against the back of his head, pulling his face into a deep kiss.

  They were old, and heavyset, and admirably oblivious to the onlookers, so it was easy to turn them into Mitchell and me. We weren’t famous or fashionable, but we were together till the end.

  A uniformed guard shouted, “Pronto!”

  Had I left the chapel then, I would have left Padua grateful to Giotto for giving me a happy ending to my story, taken this image home with me to Cambridge, and pulled the stone back into place in my comfy crypt, furnished largely by Mitchell’s largesse. But as the crowd filtered out, I drifted over to the opposite corner to get a look at the Seven Vices on the lowest register. Just then, the guard waved and nodded his approval for my lingering presence, and I saw T., watching me from ten feet away.

  He stiffly walked my way, staring at one of the paintings on the wall. He stopped a few inches behind me and said, “You know everything.”

  “I don’t even know why Joachim and Anne get top billing,” I said, turning to face the other side of the chapel.

  “Let’s not be coy about this. It’s not a secret, E., but it is a mystery, an intolerably resolute mystery.”

  He didn’t sound pleased, and because I couldn’t see his face, I felt unnerved by the acerbic edge in his voice. I was almost certain we were talking at cross-purposes, but I didn’t know where the confusion originated. I whispered, “Are you talking about one of the frescoes?” But when I turned to him, he held up his hand to silence me. We had the place to ourselves, and T. closed his eyes, as if he wished he were alone.

  The chapel was empty for almost a full minute, but the air was thick with secrecy—what T. suspected I knew about him, what I suspected T. overestimated about me, not to mention the blood on his back that neither of us seemed able to discuss. It was suffocating.

  Finally, a new group was ushered in.

  As matter-of-factly as I could manage, I said, “I really don’t understand this, T.”

  He turned briefly to the front of the church, as if he’d spotted a few spies among the new batch of tourists. “Surely, you don’t expect me to venture an explanation right here,” he said.

  He seemed more confused than annoyed—or maybe that’s how I was feeling. Every time I shifted my gaze, I saw someone I recognized—Lazarus, still looking a little stunned after being raised from the dead, and plainly embarrassed to be standing in front of his sisters, Mary and Martha, in nothing but his bandages. And that serene woman on the top row with Mary and the baby Jesus had to be Elizabeth, cousin of Mary, so, yes, the baby paddling around beside her was little John the Baptist, and oh!, the Wedding at Cana, and Mary Magdalene, and was that Judas in the yellow robe? It was as if I’d stumbled into an ancient and endless family reunion.

  I said, “I don’t understand the six panels along the top of the wall.” I don’t know if I thought I was talking to Giotto, or to T., or to myself, but I was apparently frustrated with one of us because I had spoken so loudly that I temporarily had the attention of everyone in the chapel. The silence was total until a woman near me hissed the word américaine with a pointedly French accent, and then everyone nodded knowingly and turned their attention elsewhere.

  T. said, “I had been wondering about the acoustics in this place, too.”

  “Quite satisfactory,” I said.

  T. said, “Robust.”

  I pointed to the Meeting at the Golden Gate. “Just tell me where this kiss takes place.”

  T. said, “That’s the gate to Jerusalem.”

  “Start at the beginning,” I said. I tried to take his hand in mine to lead him back to the first fresco, but I caught the cuff of his blazer and almost toppled him over when I turned and tugged.

  When he recovered, he stood still and flexed his shoulders back, and this made him wince. “As you would say, Uncle.” But, at last, he was smiling. He hooked his arm into mine. “It begins with Joachim being turned away from the temple.”

  I said, “Who is he? What makes him unworthy? And why have I never heard of him?”

  T. said, “You must have been a good Catholic.”

  “I actually was a good Catholic. I was a very good Catholic.” A few nearby tourists turned to me, smiling their disapproval for my past-tense boast.

  According to T., Joachim and Anne were not bit players. They were the parents of the Virgin Mary, but they had been of no interest to the young men who wrote the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament, and so their stories never made it into the Catholic Bible. T. thought Giotto would have read about them in The Golden Legend, a compendium of the miraculous lives of many saints that was codified and circulated in 1250 or so. “The Who’s Who of Early Christendom,” he said.

  Joachim appeared in the first panel carrying a sacrificial lamb in his arms, but because he and Anne had been married for twenty years and still had no children, his sacrifice was rejected and he was cast out. Meanwhile, a rabbi half-hidden behind a wall was lavishing his attention on a much younger, presumably virile man. The baby business complicated my desire to cast Mitchell in the role of Joachim—I was clinging to my happy ending—until I realized that Joachim’s failure to father a child might be Mitchell’s failure to finish his book, which was the reason he was cast out of the inner sanctum of scholars into the barren field of academic administration.

  In the next panel, Joachim had wandered out to a rocky wilderness to tend to his flock with a couple of young shepherds, who shifted their glances away from him and his shame while the sheep scattered—Mitchell slinking past undergrads in Harvard Yard. Only a skinny little sheepdog, its articulated ribs especially evident compared to the full-bellied sheep in the foreground, looked happy to see h
im, and the dog and Joachim locked eyes—comrades in indignity.

  The third panel broke the narrative line. It was a picture of Anne on her knees inside a room with verdant green walls—a kind of lushness entirely absent from the stony white landscapes in the previous scenes. To the right of Anne, a red-winged angel hovered in a window high above her, its torso evident inside the room, but the rest of its heavenly body was not visible in the exterior view of that wall. The annunciating angel was apparent only to Anne.

  “The angel tells Anne to go to Jerusalem,” T. said. “You recognize this moment.”

  “Not quite,” I said. I was trying to see myself in the pious posture of Anne. “But I am crazy about the color of her bedroom.”

  T. said, “This is the Immaculate Conception.”

  I said, “No, that’s when Mary conceives Jesus.” I was pleased to have at least one ace up my sleeve from catechism classes.

  T. said, “No, Mary is a virgin when she gives birth, but that’s not what makes her immaculate. At her conception, when Anne and Joachim conceived their only child, an angel swept by so Mary would not be stained with original sin—thus, immaculate.”

  I said, “Trust me, Catholic girls know what immaculate means.” I was certain T. was wrong, but I was also losing the thread of my version of the story. “Who is that other woman?” To the left of Anne, on a porch separated by a wall with a lancet window, a handmaiden in an unflattering peasant dress was turning wool onto a wooden spindle, face forward, her dark eyes shifting toward the green room.

  T. said, “That’s obviously our friend Shelby.”

  He was right. Only Shelby would risk that outfit. “Maybe you’re here somewhere, too,” I said, spinning around to try to spot a likeness of T. in one of the paintings.

  T said, “We should look for each other before we leave. Everything echoes something, and everyone prefigures someone else.”

  “It’s sort of reassuring,” I said, “like a never-ending story.”