The Chapel

by Michael Downing

I said, “I’m guessing an emperor or a pope.”

  Ed said, “It’s your friend—Dante.”

  “No friend of mine,” I said, “He abandons his three kids and a wife to wander around writing poetry and that makes him a national hero?”

  Ed said, “He didn’t want to leave. He was exiled from Florence.”

  I said, “He was invited back several times after that disastrous trip to Rome.”

  Ed said, “You know it wasn’t that simple.”

  “I know, I know,” I said. I felt Ed was scolding me for simplifying history. It wasn’t the first time I’d been reprimanded for reducing Dante’s heroics to a domestic drama. “He was aligned with the Guelphs, and the Ghibellines controlled Florence. I know, I know.” But even as I said this, I was sure I didn’t know which side was which in that endless civil war. “Or was it the other way around? Who wanted to pledge allegiance to the pope? Wait a minute—which side became the Whites and which ones became the Blacks?” The history was all mixed up in my mind. I felt as if I’d crawled under my bed and got my head stuck in that suitcase stuffed with Mitchell’s memorabilia. “Dante was an antipapist White, right? Anyway, all he had to do to get back into Florence was apologize.”

  Ed said, “Maybe he didn’t think he’d done anything wrong.”

  I said, “Ever met a man who did?”

  Ed said, “Do you mind if I ask a question about your husband?”

  For a brief moment, I wanted to confess the affair with Rosalie on Mitchell’s behalf. Instead, I said, “Of course not.”

  Ed said, “I’m sure he loved you.”

  I said, “That requires a very long answer, but it isn’t really a question.” I wasn’t sure if Ed was speaking in his pastoral role as comforter or preparing to propose himself as a fill-in for my absent, loving husband.

  He said, “I’m sure he wanted you to be happy,” compounding my confusion.

  “You can say anything to me, Ed,” I said.

  To his shiny shoes, Ed said, “That’s my point. That’s the conundrum. I feel I can say anything to you.” And then he didn’t say anything else. He stood stock still, hands hanging at his sides, like a young boy who found himself on the threshold of a declaration of something and could not figure out how to go forward or retreat. He sat down on the bench and then stood right up, as if we were going to start again from my entrance, take it from the top. “T. said your husband was writing a book about Dante,” Ed said.

  I was game. “My husband had a lot of little projects on the side,” I said, trying to keep the door open for Ed to slip in whatever was really on his mind. But he walked a few paces away from me, leading us slowly forward, and I figured he wanted to leave behind whatever he hadn’t said. “Mitchell wanted to call his book Who Stole Dante? He thought Giotto and Scrovegni were two of the thieves.”

  “Which explains why Dante immortalized the Scrovegnis in the Seventh Circle of Hell? To avenge the theft?”

  “Maybe,” I said. Ed seemed to be a chapter or two ahead of me. “The truth is, I haven’t read every little note on every page.” Suddenly, everything I said sounded like a confession, a bid for absolution.

  “He might have been on to something—something original,” Ed said. “The pope who orchestrated Dante’s exile—Boniface VIII—he and his successor, Benedict IX, were deeply connected to Enrico Scrovegni through a Dominican priest, Altegrado de’ Cattanei. Altegrado was given several papal assignments—in Padua and in Rome.” He paused, as if to say, Get it? One of Ed’s most endearing qualities was his baseless conviction that I was his intellectual equal.

  I nodded instead of admitting that I just wanted to prove Mitchell wrong.

  “Altegrado probably designed the entire scheme for the chapel—which scenes were to be painted by Giotto.” Ed looked at me expectantly, but without any encouragement he sallied forth. “Most scholars identify him as the priest who appears with Enrico in the bottom of the Last Judgment fresco, hoisting the chapel up to the Virgin Mary, securing their salvation and—”

  “But who was Dante mad at?” I think I broke his train of thought.

  I also may have yelled. I know I had taken hold of Ed’s crinkly black sleeves and tugged too hard because he sounded sort of unnerved when he said, “I don’t know, I don’t know,” and backed away a few steps.

  I was as surprised as he was by my agitation, but instead of letting go, I tugged again and said, “Just give me your best guess.”

  “I don’t know, but running through them all—I mean the lifeblood of the popes, Altegrado, and Giotto—the lifeblood is Scrovegni’s money.” He paused, but he seemed to recognize I was not satisfied. “I think Dante’s damnation of Scrovegni must be a response to that image of Altegrado and Scrovegni—the picture of them giving the chapel to the Virgin Mary.”

  “So Dante was here, in Padua!” I was triumphant, though I couldn’t have explained why. “Did Dante see the chapel?”

  “I don’t know,” Ed said, and for a few seconds he closed his eyes, and I could see he was retreating into his ponderous, priestly mode, as if I had asked him a challenging moral question. “I also don’t know why I never thought to ask myself that question. Is that something your husband figured out—that Dante was here while Giotto painted the chapel?”

  “Like most men, my husband was a genius,” I said, instead of throttling him. “Let’s just stipulate that every thought I have is appended by a footnote to him.”

  Ed looked appropriately chastened. “Sorry about that,” he said.

  As if I’d known Ed for two decades, not two days, I said, “I’m just in a bad mood about my marriage this morning.”

  “I’m married to the Catholic Church,” he said. “We’re even.”

  “So was Dante here?”

  “Dubious,” Ed said. “We have a better record about Dante than almost any of his contemporaries, and there is no mention of his seeing the chapel. But I wish you would stay for a month and talk to me every day about this stuff. I might actually end up with a book. Why does it matter to you that Dante was here?”

  I said, “I’m just trying to understand why Dante condemned Giotto’s patron. Dante and Giotto were friends.”

  “Acquaintances, anyway, early on,” Ed said. “But he was constantly reinventing himself. Dante was never really who he appeared to be.” Ed held out the coin in his palm and placed a finger over Dante’s chin.

  “When you do that,” I said, “he looks a lot like T.”

  Ed said, “Spitting image.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  Ed said, “He’s all yours,” and handed me the coin. Quick as that, we were dealing in a different currency.

  I said, “As long as T. isn’t here, is there something we should be talking about behind his back?”

  “I really wish you weren’t leaving Italy,” Ed said.

  “I’m here now,” I said.

  Ed said, “That’s a very T.-ish thing to say.” He handed me my bag and stuck the umbrella under his arm. “We were supposed to meet him ten minutes ago at a little restaurant just past your hotel.” He held out his free arm, and I hooked mine into his as we set off.

  “Speaking of things T. says, I want to clear up something about the Immaculate Conception.”

  “T. has it right,” Ed said wearily.

  “You don’t even know what he said.”

  Ed said, “I’m guessing T. said the Immaculate Conception occurred a generation before the birth of Jesus, an instance of divine intercession at the moment St. Anne conceived the child who would become the Virgin Mary. It wasn’t codified into doctrine until 1854, but the idea that Mary was free from original sin by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God at the moment of her conception—that was in circulation by the 11th century. I gave T. this same lecture yesterday.”

  I said, “Am I the only Catholic who didn’t know this?”

  Ed said, “Are you still a Catholic?”

  That stung. Plus, T. being right made me p
etulant, which is why I sounded whiny when I said, “At least I was baptized. T. was never a Catholic, was he?”

  “What do you really want to know?” Ed stopped walking. We were fifty feet shy of the next intersection.

  I said, “Now, I’m sorry, Ed.” He had correctly guessed that my interest in the Virgin was not as profound as my curiosity about T. “I honestly forget I’ve only known T. for three days. You’ve known him for almost twenty-five years. Forgive me.”

  “Knowing T.” He smiled wryly. “That’s the immaculate misconception.” He didn’t explain that doctrine. He led us across several streets and right past my hotel. “Do you know what Dante said about Giotto’s kids?”

  Apparently, conception was our theme for the day. I said, “I’m not sure I knew Giotto had kids.”

  “Eight or nine,” Ed said.

  “You know everything,” I said.

  “I’m trying desperately to impress you,” he said.

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything, which made it clear that he was, too. I stopped for a moment, hoping to come up with a reasonable response.

  Graciously, Ed just carried on. “Dante asked Giotto why his paintings were so beautiful but his kids were so ugly.”

  This is only deepened my resentment of Dante.

  “Come on. There’s more to the story,” Ed said, urging me along. “Giotto told Dante there was an explanation for the discrepancy. He said he made his paintings during the day, but he made his children in the dark of night.”

  I said, “Man enough not to defend what didn’t need defending.”

  Ed stopped suddenly and swung open a red steel door. “I don’t want to come between you and T.” He was holding open the door, releasing a stream of garlicky air from the café. “But that is why T. invited me along today, as his interlocutor. I’m sure he won’t be pleased that we wasted all of our time talking about Dante. And now we’re late, so he’ll assume I’ve told you everything.” Ed let the red door swing shut and backed away a few steps. He looked down the street as if he wanted to sprint away. “He’s convinced I told you about his daughter yesterday at the café.”

  “I didn’t even know T. had a daughter.”

  “She’s dead,” Ed said. “She hanged herself. She was twenty-four years old. Forgive me for telling you like this.” Two business-suited men and an older woman had line up behind us, so Ed opened the door and impatiently swept them past us and into the restaurant. He let the door close again.

  All I could see was the tilted head and open arms of the faceless woman Giotto had named Despair. You know everything. I had been standing right in front of her, where Giotto had painted her, right where she had hanged herself, when T. had said, “You know everything.”

  But I knew nothing. I said, “When?”

  “At the end of last year,” Ed said. “Christmas Eve—not to put too fine a point on it. She had gone home for the holidays. She was staying with T. in his loft in Houston, and he was called in for an emergency of some kind, and when he got home, he found her. The thing is, she was wearing a pair of his scrubs.” He pulled open that red door.

  I said, “And now we’re going to have lunch?”

  “He doesn’t talk about her,” Ed said. “This trip—it’s the first time he’s been out of his house in six months.”

  “What made him come here?”

  “Lily—that was her name,” Ed said. “My niece, Lily. She had been studying in Florence. She was supposed to be there for two years. I think that’s why he’s going to Florence. He thinks he owes it to her? Oh, E., I really don’t know why any of us is here.”

  T. HAD ORDERED LUNCH, AND BY THE TIME ED AND I WERE seated a waiter came by with a platter of translucent white fish floating on a stew of bitter greens and sweet fennel, which he ceremoniously dowsed with olive oil. We each decanted masses of this stuff into hand-painted yellow bowls and ripped our way through two loaves of bread for dunking. Twice, T. told me the name of the fish, but all I remembered was that the word had a bravura quality when he pronounced it, like Bonanza! or Papa Gino!

  Ed and T. could not decide if the stew was spiked with something—maybe grappa, maybe limoncello—or if the fish was undercooked or perfect, or if it was going to rain again this afternoon. They were not really talking to each other, they were sparring, and I told myself again and again, We’re just eating lunch. We’re just eating lunch. And because I didn’t trust myself not to burst into tears on the sidelines, for the remainder of our meal we talked almost exclusively about sheep, thanks to no small effort on my part.

  I launched into a long-winded version of the story I’d invented about Shelby and the wool in the Anne and Joachim paintings, and Ed said that Giotto had been a shepherd as a boy in Vicchio, a small village twenty miles outside of Florence. Ed tried to turn this into another reason for me to rejoin the tour, but T. assured me that the museum billed as Giotto’s house probably never was Giotto’s house. Then T. said most of Giotto’s frescoes probably weren’t even painted by Giotto but by apprentices in his workshop. Ed suggested that T. might be leaning too heavily on guidebook descriptions of Renaissance workshops and that the guilds and studios of artisans were not nearly so well organized in 1300. T. conceded that he hadn’t squandered the last two decades of his life cross-referencing footnotes about the Jubilee Year, but he believed it was widely understood that Giotto hadn’t painted every inch of the chapel. Ed said the stuff by other hands was obvious to anyone with a discerning eye, like the big portrait of God the Father above the altar. I confessed that I hadn’t really investigated the altar area thoroughly, but could we all agree the sheep were by Giotto? Ed said Giotto’s whole career was launched because the great master painter Cimabue ran into him on his way to Florence and saw a bunch of sheep Giotto had drawn on bits of slate with a hunk of granite and recognized Giotto’s genius.

  T. said, “When was this?”

  Ed said, “Giotto was eight, so 1275 or so. He was born a year or two after Dante.”

  T. said, “But Dante was born in Florence,” as if someone had said he wasn’t. For the first time, I noticed he was wearing a fresh blue-and-white pinstripe shirt.

  “Which is where Cimabue had his studio,” Ed said.

  “His workshop,” T. said.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Ed said. “And Giotto lived there, and started his family there, and then we’re back to your wool, E., because Giotto eventually acquired looms and spinning wheels and leased them out to supplement his income as a painter. It’s weird, but no one talks about the sheep or wool in relation to the chapel frescoes.”

  “They’re so prominent,” I said.

  T. was preparing to say something contradictory—his smile gave him away—and Ed was peering at T.—pleadingly? pityingly?—but by then we’d mopped the fish platter dry, and the waiter had tried and failed to gin up interest in the contents of the pastry case, and half an hour earlier, midway through my first glass of pinot grigio, I’d realized I’d had enough to feel vaguely drunk, so when T. wagged his hand to indicate we wanted our bill and tipped the remains of our second bottle of wine into my glass, I drunkenly suggested that the three of us should go back to my hotel room and lie on the bed to continue the conversation.

  T. said, “I get to be Scrovegni. Ed is Giotto. E. is Dante.”

  I said, “There are never any good parts for women.” I was sick of being saddled with Mitchell’s business.

  T. said, “Maybe Ed should be Altegrado.”

  “That’s better,” I said. “That way you two have the weight of the chapel on your shoulders.” I wanted to be Giotto.

  But Ed said, “E. can be the Virgin Mary.”

  T. said, “That really changes the game.”

  “Anyway,” Ed said, “I have to get back to the Eremitani archives.”

  T. snagged the check and gave the waiter a credit card. “Let’s not argue about the bill,” he said.

  Ed said, “Still playing Scrovegni.”<
br />
  T. said, “Buying the necessary indulgences.”

  T. OFFERED TO WALK ME BACK TO THE HOTEL ON HIS WAY to an appointment of an unspecified nature with a nameless person, but Ed said he was going my way, and I said I was actually going his way because I wanted to take a few more turns around the chapel. I also wanted to get far enough away from T. so I could let out my breath and think of some way to be of some comfort to him. T. raised his hand to his head, thumb and pinky finger extended as if he were talking on a telephone, and I nodded enthusiastically, even though I didn’t know if that meant he was going to call me or I should call him.

  Ed waited until we were well away from T. to tell me that the chapel was closed to the public for the afternoon to clear the way for a delegation from the World Heritage Center.

  “I’ll never see the rest of it,” I said. Ed’s news had registered like a punishment. “I looked at all the wrong things. I didn’t even see the big version of the Gardner Giotto.”

  Ed said, “You’re still planning to leave tomorrow?” He sounded genuinely astonished.

  It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that Ed might think he had passed T. from his care into mine by telling me about Lily, that Ed might have been eager to find a substitute caretaker for T. “I’ve given away my place on the tour,” I said.

  “Fine,” Ed said. “You can always come back some other time.”

  But I knew I never would, as surely as I would never take up knitting, or plant a vegetable garden, or get a cat, or remarry. I knew I would end up buying a book of photographs of the frescoes and paging through it on the plane so I could pass any test administered by Rachel. I figured Ed was waiting for me to say something about his revelation at the doorway, but I was already gone, already feeling frantic about whether I should buy the little paperback guidebook to the chapel that would be easy to carry on the plane or one of the handsome, oversized hardback tomes I’d noticed in the gift shop, which I’d have to shove into the suitcase with Mitchell’s Dante debacle, and then what? When I got home I could set that suitcase full of Padua paraphernalia on the mantel as a memorial to our mutual failures or, even better, stick it in the front yard under the maple tree like a gravestone, a monument to everything unfinished. In a fit of inspiration, I said, “I have something I would like to give you.”