The Chapel

by Michael Downing

  Two short young women, both wearing dark pantsuits, their wavy hair parted in the middle, were standing beside the video monitor at the front of the room. They looked like flight attendants for a bargain airline. One of them had tied on a white neckerchief, which didn’t really jazz up her outfit but did make it possible to tell them apart. The priests stood in the aisle until I chose a seat in the middle of the many empty rows and then parked themselves directly behind me.

  One of them said, “We ought to spread out and make them feel better.”

  “My name is Lisa Sorretino-Balfour, assistant professor of rhetoric, composition, and modern communications at the College of St. Benedict, where I also serve as codirector of the Art History Is Our History program for returning scholars with my copresenter today, Margaret LaChappelle, associate professor of world religions and spiritual traditions and codirector of the Art History Is Our History program for returning scholars, as well as acting chairperson of the Humanities Department at St. Benedict.” Lisa was reading all of this from a thick packet of typed notes. She turned the page. “Today’s lecture is entitled Moneybags—” Here, she paused and looked up, as if she’d anticipated a roar of approving laughter from a big crowd when she’d prepared her talk. She glanced at Margaret, who was running a finger around the inside of her neckerchief. Lisa ducked back toward her notes. “The full title is actually a little longer. Here it is. I’ll just start that sentence again. Okay. Today’s lecture is entitled Moneybags: Symbols of Ill-Gotten Gain in Giotto’s Arena Chapel Fresco Cycle.”

  Lisa read for fifteen minutes. Except when she was interrupted by a wisecrack from one of the priests, which she never failed to mistake for a question from an interested audience member—pausing each time to look up hopefully, and then okay-okay-okaying until she had relocated herself in her text and resumed reading—she delivered a fairly steady stream of facts that occasionally threatened to cohere into an idea, if you had Sara’s map in your lap. Judas figured prominently in the early pages of her notes, as he figured prominently on three of the four chapel walls, most peculiarly on the front wall above the altar, where Giotto painted him receiving the silver coins for his promise to betray Jesus (Number 27). Judas also turned up in the famous scene in which he embraced Jesus and identified him for the waiting soldiers with a kiss (Number 30), and in the Last Judgment (Number 39), after he’d hanged himself, “his guts pouring forth from his abdomen, like a broken purse,” Lisa said, raising some groans from the clerical chorus. Judas, she said, was notably absent from the fourth wall.

  One of the priests held up a book of photographic reproductions of the frescoes. “Envy,” he said, his finger under Giotto’s gray portrait of a man in flames, a snake emerging from his mouth to eat his face. “Isn’t that a fat moneybag in his left hand? Or did he pack a bag lunch for his trip to hell?”

  Envy was Number 41f, facing Charity, Number 40f, on the opposite wall, and I mentioned the moneybags at Charity’s feet, hoping to bolster Lisa’s argument that the moneybags weren’t strictly associated with Judas.

  Lisa ignored my contribution. “Envy does broadly represent Judas’s sin of Avarice,” Lisa said, “but it’s not a portrait of a single man.”

  The priest said, “It is a picture of just one man.”

  Lisa said, “These are very good questions we can all discuss later.”

  Margaret spoke for the first time. “The moneybag is not singularly associated with Judas. It is also a symbol of fertility. You know, both a virtue and a vice.” She nodded my way. “Avarice holds on to the money. Charity is prepared to give it away.”

  I nodded enthusiastically.

  “At the front of the chapel, paired with Judas and his silver coins, is the Visitation,” Margaret said, “when the pregnant Elizabeth visits the pregnant Virgin. You see, vice and virtue.”

  The priest lowered his book. “Judas and the Virgin Mary are two sides of the same coin?”

  Margaret said, “It’s not quite that literal.”

  The priest said, “What does money have to do with the Visitation? Was Mary charging her cousin admission to see her belly?”

  Margaret said, “Many scholars see an intentional juxtaposition in the swelling stomach of the expectant mothers and the moneybag swollen with ill-gotten gains.” She had almost managed to turn the corner and lead us back to the topic.

  But Lisa said, “Fornication, too.”

  The priest said, “Fornication is associated with the Virgin?”

  “Oh, no. She’s a virgin.” Perhaps when she was promoted to associate professor of rhetoric Lisa would recognize a rhetorical question. But she pressed on. “I’m saying that the moneybag is a symbol of fornicators, too. And sodomy.” This was the first time she’d gone off script, and she should have grabbed a hold of Margaret’s neckerchief because she was in free fall. “Of course, sodomy wasn’t so simple back then. Sodomy wasn’t just sodomy in the Middle Ages.”

  “Yeah,” said one of the holy fathers, “you had to buy him dinner first.”

  There was a long silence. Finally, Margaret said, “We will enter the chapel in just about two minutes. Perhaps we should wrap up this segment by acknowledging that the medieval mind was profoundly affected by the reflective and refractive relationships among opposing ideas and qualities. The virtues and vices were not singular or solitary sins and ideals. Each one covered a lot of territory. Giotto’s mirroring here in the chapel is part of a tradition that informed Church doctrine and the great artists of the age, notably Dante’s depiction of hell. As you all surely recall, in the Seventh Circle, forced to exist on the infertile, burning plains of the Abominable Sands, we find blasphemers, sodomites, and usurers.”

  “But not the Virgin,” said one of the priests.

  “She was not infertile,” Margaret said slowly, patronizingly. “The Virgin is in heaven, the opposite of hell. Get it?”

  “But Scrovegni is there, in hell, I mean, in Dante,” I said.

  The doors to the chapel whooshed open, and the three wise men immediately headed in. Lisa scooted right after them. As I stood, Margaret said, “Is Mitchell Berman your husband?” She raised her hand and waved to someone I didn’t see, and the glass doors behind her sighed and closed.

  I sat down and didn’t speak.

  “You’re wearing his name tag,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  She said, “He wrote to me about his book, his theory about Dante.”

  “And then he died,” I said. “Mitchell is dead, though he doesn’t seem to be very good at it.”

  “Oh.” Margaret welled up suddenly. “I’m so sorry.”

  This seemed more an apology for her tears than a condolence, and I didn’t know how to respond. Finally, I said, “He was quite ill,” which somehow made it sound like Mitchell had been determined to die, so I added, “But thank you. Now, about his book.”

  “You mentioned Scrovegni.” She adjusted her neckerchief. For the first time, I wondered if she was hiding something—a scar, or a birthmark, or some other little demon from her past.

  I said, “Did you read Mitchell’s book?”

  She said, “Did he finish it?”

  “No, but I would like to find a way to be done with it,” I said. “Why did Dante identify Scrovegni among all of the nameless moneylenders in hell? Had he seen the chapel? Had he come to Padua?”

  She smiled. “You mean, did your husband have it backward? Did Dante steal Giotto?”

  I nodded. “That’s the book I’m not writing.”

  “Originality is a peculiarly modern obsession,” she said. “It’s a quantifiable aspect of art that can be asserted and disproved and debated by scholars and appraisers and collectors who treat art as a commodity or a currency. It would not have been a concern for Giotto. It is unrelated to beauty or truth, although it has become a substitute for those qualities. Thus, modern art. I mean, Giotto or Jackson Pollock? Seriously?” She bent her arm and dabbed her forehead several times with the sleeve of her
blazer. “I’m getting myself all hot and bothered,” she said. Her sleeve had raised a knotty bump of hair on one side of her part. “Dante had his own reasons to hate Reginaldo Scrovegni because of his deep and endlessly profitable ties to the pope, who’d got Dante exiled from Florence. And the next pope was only too happy to sell Enrico Scrovegni indulgences for his own sins, his father’s, and those of half a dozen relatives, whose money would otherwise have been tainted, compromising Enrico’s social status and his economic prospects. This was not uncommon. It was the Vatican’s means of assuring itself a share in inherited wealth. It was a kind of papal death tax, really.”

  “Or an early version of money laundering,” I said. “No connection to Giotto or the chapel?”

  “It’s not unlikely that by the time Dante was writing The Inferno he had heard about the chapel and Scrovegni’s fleeting triumph. And probably it pleased Dante to know his poem was in wide circulation in the Veneto when Scrovegni ran out of town and headed north to Venice instead of sticking around to defend Padua or his own honor,” Margaret said. “Instead of being famous by association with the chapel, Scrovegni spent his final years associated with the Seventh Circle of Hell. But that was just good luck for Dante, a coincidence.”

  I said, “An ironic juxtaposition.”

  “Typical of the Middle Ages.” Margaret smiled. Big drops of sweat were beaded up on her forehead again, occasionally running down her temple to the neckerchief. “For the record, Giotto did not steal Dante. The dates alone make it impossible, but I think maybe your husband was not aware of the recent scholarship. It was long unclear if Giotto painted here in 1300, 1310, or even 1320. We now know he had completed the fresco cycle before Dante began writing The Comedy in 1306. And the notion of a layered hell was not his invention or Dante’s. It was present in paintings as early as the 11th century. Not to mention the Passion Cycle and the long-standing fascination with time’s circularity and spirals, which was an established element of sacred ritual and art long before Dante and Giotto were born. I’d guess Giotto was more specifically inspired by the statuary he saw in Rome, and panel after panel of monumental friezes encircling the facades of temples and churches, the columns of carved figures stacked on top of each other.”

  “I get it,” I said. “Giotto didn’t—but did anyone steal Dante?”

  “It’s a catchy title,” Margaret said.

  “Actually, it’s a suitcase full of bibliographic references, annotated manuscript pages, and handwritten notes I have been dragging around the world. Would any of it ever be of any use to you?”

  “I won’t be teaching next year,” she said, and before I could ask, she added, “a sort of sabbatical. I’m supposed to be writing, but I really would like to do something more . . . more—”

  I said, “Collaborative? Rewarding? Lucrative?” I stopped when I realized I was cataloging everything writing hadn’t been for Mitchell.

  “Fun,” Margaret said. “I’d like to have some more fun. Not very original of me.”

  “Originality is overrated,” I said.

  She said, “I’m sorry to say I just didn’t understand your husband’s thesis—why, say, Rodin should be accused of stealing when he clearly intended to pay homage to Dante.”

  “Like Blake,” I said.

  She nodded.

  I said, “We’re on the same page.”

  She said, “You brought the manuscript to Italy?”

  “More cryptic scribbling than manuscript,” I said, “but I do have a suitcase full of something that I seem unable to give away.”

  Margaret said, “You could scan it all and copy it to one of those little memory sticks. It would be easier to get through customs. Or you could float it out on the Web.”

  It was a logical solution to my problem, which simply proved that my problem wasn’t logical. I said, “Memory sticks.” Digitizing Mitchell’s overwrought pages and consigning the book to the ethers felt like burning down the chapel.

  “Maybe I can do something with it,” she said.

  I said, “What would you do with it?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  I didn’t say anything.

  She said, “Is it easily portable?”

  I said, “The suitcase has wheels.”

  She pulled a sheet from the pile of Lisa’s notes and wrote her name quickly on the back. “I’m staying at the Hotel Arena, Room 104,” she said, handing me the slip of paper. “Leave it at the desk for me before Sunday.” She pointed to the guard outside, and a waiting crowd lined up behind him. The doors slid open.

  Just before we left, I saw the pile of Lisa’s lecture notes, minus one page, stacked up on the table next to the video monitor. Margaret never looked back. This didn’t bode well for the Dante book. As we slid past the crowd lining the path to the visitor center, she said, “Do you need any help getting to your next session?”

  From behind, I could see another odd bump where a lot of hair had gotten stuck above the black elastic band of a wig. I said, “I’ll find my way. Are you okay?” We had reached a patch of empty benches.

  “I’m headed to the Church of the Eremitani for a panel about—oh.” She smiled sadly. She raised a hand to her head and patted around. She eventually identified both problem areas.

  I said, “There is one of those hand-blowers in the ladies’ room. I think you can get your wig back into shape if you just give it a good shake under there.”

  She said, “Vanity, your name is woman.”

  I said, “Actually, my name is Elizabeth.”

  Margaret smiled.

  I teared up.

  So did Margaret.

  I didn’t say cancer, and neither did she, as if the word would stick to her like a label, turn her into an anonymous victim, a lifeless portrait of that deadly sin.

  She said, “Don’t you cry. That won’t help.”

  I said, “What will?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  I said, “What you don’t need is a suitcase full of my woes.”

  Margaret pulled her wig down above both ears, making matters worse, but she was smiling. “Oh, just give it to me. Please. Everybody’s been doing everything for me for the last year. Give me a chance to do something for somebody else for a change. It’ll be fun.” She checked her watch.

  I checked Mitchell’s watch.

  She said, “I guess we both have somewhere else to be.”

  I nodded as she backed away, and I waved when she turned and headed quickly down the path, momentarily haloed by sunlight.

  I had time enough before my final session to retrieve my phone from the coat check and find some coffee. The visitor center was empty, and I did find a huge urn of hot coffee, but I opted for a little can of espresso floating in an ice-water bath and then two more, one for each pocket. I found an empty room and ignored the one email I had received—after I confirmed that it was not from T.—and clicked into my folder of saved mail. I found the email I had written to Sam and Rachel about the money they were to inherit. I didn’t read it. I did down a second espresso, wondering what it would be like to be young and rich, but that was a different soap opera, so I hit send. I didn’t want to hold on to that money any longer. I didn’t want to hold on to Mitchell’s affair, or his book, or the other disappointments that had become so disproportionately large in my imagination of my marriage that they made it impossible for me to move forward.

  I was feeling virtuous, in general, and particularly charitable, but I did drink the third espresso, just in case it was the caffeine making me feel so good about myself. I turned in my phone, headed outside, and I saw Ed. He was passing the visitor center, walking quickly out toward the street. I called his name. He was with two other Roman collars and a squat woman with a deeply hennaed pageboy do. He didn’t stop, so this time I yelled, “Ed! Ed!”

  The woman stopped. She was wearing a blue-and-white-striped jersey and white capri pants. Ed turned and looked right at me. He said something to the woman.

 
; I said, “Ed. It’s me. E.”

  He looked befuddled. Both he and the woman inspected the faces of the people nearer them and behind me and waved tentatively, as if they didn’t want to hurt the feelings of whoever had called out his name, as if there were not a woman in a block-print dress standing in the middle of the path fifty feet away holding her hand above her head like a signal flag, and then they rushed away to catch up with the other two priests.

  I had some experience with being invisible—at cocktail parties where I had to be introduced to associates of Mitchell’s for the fourth or fifth time; at public schools when I worked as a substitute, where teachers would come into the library for the second or third research lesson with their classes and ask if I was waiting for someone; at Sam’s college graduation, where his roommate, who’d stayed at our home many times, passed me in the hallway of their dorm and asked if I knew somebody in the graduating class. It happened. And it got worse with age—a sort of dementia-by-proxy that inflicted people who got near me. But never with true friends. Which made me think maybe Ed didn’t want to know me, didn’t want me to approach him for some reason. Or else I was actually not there.

  MY LAST SESSION WAS SCHEDULED TO BEGIN IN THE DEHUMIDIFIER, so I didn’t have to go far. I claimed an empty bench. My back was erupting in itches, and though I didn’t blame Ed directly, I did think of him every time I bore down and scratched, which I did often enough to keep the gathering crowd at bay, even after four and sometimes five people had shoved their way onto the other green benches. No one came anywhere near me, and when we moved inside and I attempted to claim a seat in the middle of the last row, everyone shifted toward the middle, away from me, clearing the aisle seat for me, as if I were contagious.

  At the front of the room, a young black man in a blue blazer, white shirt, and jeans was paging through his notes. I’d already learned from bits of gossip and speculation being traded around me that his name was Andre Williams, he was on his way to a tenured position at Stanford next year, and his topic for today—Sacred Animation: How Giotto Made Space for Humanity in the Arena Chapel—was based on a book that was coming out in the fall.