As we got ready to leave, Sean teased me with my old phrase, “So, what now?”
“I have no idea,” I said, jumping up from the table. “Let’s go find out.”
In each piazza, stout marble churches posed proudly for pictures, and I stopped to photograph each one. In Italy, this kind of behavior is beyond obsessive, like taking a photo of every Starbucks in Seattle.
At the Chiesa di San Michele, the white and green wedding cake tiers and Gothic columns drew noisy praise from the gathered tourists—except Sean, who stood transfixed by death. No, not by the bronze-winged Archangel Michael spearing the small harmless-looking dragon atop the church, but by another sight below that.
“My God, those spider webs are huge,” Sean muttered. “I think that’s a bird wrapped up in there . . . and over there, too.”
“You’re kidding! Where?” I asked.
“In those recesses behind the columns.”
I squinted for a moment, until I saw a silk-wrapped bulge in the shadows. “Ewww! That’s disgusting. Actually, I think they’re rats.”
“Either way we’re talking some big spiders.”
The church stood in solid splendor, not crumbling ruins. Yet after Sean’s morbid observation, the building called to mind Miss Havisham’s wedding cake in Great Expectations, rotting and cobwebbed and overrun with spiders.
A real wedding party gathered on the steps, waiting for a bride and groom to emerge from the aged cake. The couple’s family and friends threw their arms around each other and exchanged kisses, “Ciao . . . Ciao . . . Ciao bella!” Then the bride and groom appeared, young faces glowing with a belief Sean and I have never known, their open smiles free of cynicism or doubt. Wedding guests threw rice at the pair as they floated down the steps, and the pigeons prevalent in every piazza scuttled forward to peck at the tiny white good wishes.
After the couple rode off in their flower-decked car, we walked into the empty church. The pews were adorned with red roses. At the last wedding Sean and I had attended in Alaska, I’d caught the bouquet. Sean had teased me about not getting “any ideas.” I’d felt degraded and we’d fought. Today neither of us hinted about our connubial surroundings. We simply agreed that the ordinary interior of the church was anticlimactic after the luscious layers of frosting on the outside.
At the Cattedrale di San Martino, scaffolding covered the façade, which is undergoing a facelift. But we weren’t as interested in the church’s outside as we were in what was inside: the Volto Santo, or Holy Face. The Volto Santo is a thirteen-foot crucifix of dark cedar which Catholics believe was carved by Nicodemus. According to biblical tradition, Nicodemus was a member of the Sanhedrin who knew Jesus during his lifetime, came to his defense, witnessed his crucifixion, and bought precious oils for his burial. The carving is simple, but believers consider the plain, passive, bearded face of this particular crucifix to be the “true likeness” of Jesus.
Its very simplicity appealed to me more than the vestments we later saw on display: clothes used to dress up the Volto Santo for an annual procession. The garments included a jeweled gold belt, gold crown, gold shoes, and other glittering accessories.
“I understand that Jesus sits on a throne at the right hand of God and the royal clothes are symbolic,” I whispered. “But I can’t help thinking it’s like playing Volto Santo Barbie.”
“Me, I just look at it as a jeweler,” Sean said. “This is amazing work.”
I preferred to see Jesus dressed down, like a “man of the people,” like someone I could talk to—which I did. Standing in the church before the unadorned Volto Santo, I closed my eyes and asked Jesus to show me the purpose of my life and help me fulfill it.
Surely there wasn’t any connection between my prayer and our next stop in the small room next door? The Tomb of Ilaria del Carreto. Ilaria, the wife of a thirteenth century nobleman, died in her early twenties. She would have had no visitors some seven hundred years after her death, if not for her glorious casket. While Ilaria’s bones moldered below, her fair and youthful likeness lay on the lid of her casket in lovely white marble sleep, immortalized by Lucca’s famous sculptor Jacopo della Quercia. It took one to three years to finish the piece. Her widower, Paul Guinigi, remarried before the sculpture was finished. So much for the eternal beauty of a dead woman.
Looking at the marble woman lying atop the casket in her high-necked gown, I saw my stepmother lying in the ICU in her hospital gown. Dad recently emailed to announce he’s getting married again, to the woman he met before I left. I’m not surprised. I’m happy for him. It’s not death that’s disconcerting so much as the relentlessness of the world revolving past it.
In this village, time has only stopped for the buildings. For people, the time between youth and death has sped up to a blur. Here, dozens of generations have left the path of time, leaving behind nothing but stone to mark their passing. Ilaria’s immortal beauty is an illusion. No artist, however great, can hold back the rot that will soon sweep us all off the path.
Feeling churched-out, we left the dark sanctuaries of the past for the light of the present. We strolled atop the city wall, a wide pedestrian avenue lined with trees. Day and night, locals and tourists walk or jog around the wall’s four-kilometer circumference and picnic in its grassy parks. We found an empty park and spread out a deli lunch on my sarong—panini, marinated mushrooms, and strawberries—which we cheerfully defended from a surprise assault by party-crashing ants. Then we took part in another traditional pastime on the wall: making out.
Sean’s hand had just snuck under my skirt and started plundering the territory beneath, when a guy on a bike pulled over at a nearby tree to do some sort of repair. Sean, an avid cyclist, puzzled over the guy’s aimless movements—which didn’t appear to be fixing anything—until he theorized there might be a local Petting Patrol, undercover bicycle cops who make sure no one has sex atop Lucca’s wall. Either way, our picnic was over. We resumed our walk until the sky threatened us with grey clouds and rain.
“You wanna go back to the room and finish our picnic?” I asked.
“Yes I do.”
We reached our upstairs room, with its dark wood floors and dark antique furniture, just as a violent thunderstorm burst outside. Trapped in the storm’s dark center, we reflected its fervor with our own answer to each burning white flash and deafening explosion. Never before had we been so uninhibited with each other.
After the rain stopped and nighttime fell, we left our room to walk atop the nearly empty wall in the dark, listening to each other breathe into the quiet night as time continued to hold its breath. When we came down from the wall, we followed a narrow canal, where we came upon a group of boys playing soccer in the street. A young man on a motorcycle drove through the middle of the game, and the ball hit his front tire and bounced away. Sean and I exchanged a look. We’d shared the same illusion: that the motorbike had playfully kicked the ball.
In this place, with this man, I’m beginning to feel a tranquility that has eluded me most of my life, minus the restlessness and ennui that I feared would accompany it. My soul is pulsing in rhythm with Italia, in synchronicity with Sean. Yet we cannot stay behind these timeless walls forever. Even here, the church bells toll the hours, though we ignore them.
corniglia, cinque terre, italy
A beautiful beginning, full of anticipation; a painful ending, marked by the probing of deep wounds: that’s the Via dell’Amore, the Way of Love. Today Sean and I walked the path of the same name.
The Via dell’Amore follows the cliffs of the rugged Ligurian coast. It starts as a paved path, but turns into a rugged trail of steep ups and downs, linking the five villages known collectively as Le Cinque Terre, “The Five Lands”: Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza, Monterosso. In the five villages, merrily painted boxes cling to each other atop steep cliffs and along rocky shores: homes and pensiones laced with intimate mazes of wal
kways, stairs, and passages. Up the steep hills above the towns climb groves of twisted olive trees and vineyards dotted with clusters of tiny, green early grapes. Far below the towns, the aquamarine of the Ligurian Sea explodes against the rough coastline in an ecstatic frenzy of white froth.
Suspended between those highs and lows, the Via dell’Amore comes alive each day with an antlike procession of hikers, mostly foreigners, mostly Americans. According to Sean’s guidebook, the entire walk usually takes four to six hours, but . . . something about best-laid plans, good intentions, mice, and the road to hell . . . or whatever.
At ten this morning, at the paved trailhead in Riomaggiore, a wiry old man leaned one arm against the railing and spoke to a handful of Italian tourists. His bent frame lifted and his shriveled voice swelled with pride, as one thickly veined hand pointed at the meeting place of land and sea. Though we couldn’t understand what he said, his voice and arms and bushy eyebrows rose and fell in a passionate upwelling of love for his home.
Along the rocky shoreline of the first four villages, locals and tourists have created four makeshift beaches, each one little more than a tongue of concrete boat launch and a lick of ocean. In Manarola, the natural rocks have arranged themselves into two pools. We paused our hike to join the two-dozen people sunning and swimming in the miniature cove.
It was a challenge timing the bobbing swells so that I could launch myself into the water without getting thrown back into the rocks. When Sean shoved off the rocks, a mean bully of a swell shoved him back, threw him into a boulder, then ground him back and forth across the stones. He hauled himself out of the water in frustration, his knees dripping blood. I rushed ashore and grabbed my first-aid kit. As I bandaged his knees, I told him I was excited at this rare opportunity to use my kit. He ruefully responded that he was happy to make me feel useful.
In the middle village, Corniglia, we climbed a trail into the vineyards to eat our lunch of focaccia while overlooking the cliff-top houses and the surf far below. We were quite alone on our high perch.
After lunch, I looked at Sean’s watch—it was just past noon—and said, “We have time to neck for five minutes, then go.”
“Five minutes?” He made a show of disappointment.
“Okay, make it ten.”
By the time we started the rugged hour-and-a-half hike to Vernazza, most of the other hikers were either well ahead of us or done, so we almost had the trail to ourselves. The air was hot and syrupy. Sean was deep red. “Let me know if you need to slow down,” I warned playfully. “Remember, you’re in your heart attack years.” After that, whenever he fell behind, he mimicked me, “Remember, I’m in my heart attack years.”
At about 3:30, we arrived at Vernazza’s castle tower, where men once kept a lookout for enemies and pirates. I wasn’t content until we climbed to the top of the tower and then explored every nook of the village: up and down stairs, under archways, past green wine jugs glistening in the sun. Most locals were indoors hiding from the heat, while on the stoop in front of the farmacia a group of panting young hikers leaned back on their elbows and licked lackadaisical cones of melting gelato. In a girlish, wheedling voice, I suggested we stop to buy one.
Much to Sean’s amusement, I’ve yet to miss a day of gelato consumption: tiramisu, niccola, fragoli, pine nut, chocolate mixed with candy . . . licking a scoop, swinging my feet, and humming a made-up tune, as blissful as a child answering the calliope call of the ice cream man.
It took another hour and a half to reach Monterosso, via a trail so precipitous and narrow it felt more like “Lover’s Leap” than “The Way of Love.” Then, gravity dragged us down a steep stairway to the last of the five lands. We arrived at about 6:30, faces burning, skin dripping, feet dragging. The piazza was nearly empty, the day-trippers gone. The beach—the only one in Cinque Terre with a resort-like stretch of sand and a line of colorful umbrellas—was also empty.
Eager to cool off, I challenged Sean to a swimming race, to the breakwater and back. He turned his bloodshot eyes and mottled purple-and-white face toward the breakwater, about fifty meters away, and said, “I don’t think so. I’ve already been beaten up by the sea once today. Besides, don’t forget, I’m in my heart attack years.” But I teased him until he relented.
I arrived at the breakwater just one stroke ahead of Sean, and reached out a hand to grab hold of a rock. As I drew my feet up to rest them on the rocks below, I looked down to check for sea urchins. A needle had stabbed my foot in Greece and I wasn’t interested in repeating the experience. I spotted several of the black, spiny maces lurking among the rocks and turned to warn Sean, “Be careful where you put your f—” Before I could finish my sentence, he yelped and grabbed his foot.
We swam back to the beach to inspect his injuries, which were worse than I expected. Both heels were shot through with deeply imbedded spines. Out came the first-aid kit again. For fifteen minutes, I tried to prod out the spines and splinters with tweezers. But I made no headway.
“We should probably head back so we can take care of this properly,” I said, allowing childish disappointment to creep into my voice.
“No,” Sean said, kissing my forehead. “I know you want to see the town, and we’re never going to get all these spines out. Let’s just walk.”
A girlfriend once told me there’s always one jerk in every relationship. If that’s true, then this time it must be me. Why else would I have taken Sean up on his offer when he was in obvious pain? Why else would I have taken Sean up on so many of the offers he’s made since I’ve known him, when it was obvious I was causing him pain?
I walked and Sean limped—wincing with each step—as the promenade filled with lovers out for the evening passeggiata, shadows moving through the chiaroscuro of a summer sunset. Although Monterosso is the most commercial-looking town of the five, the waning sun turned it into a mellow dreamscape, from the house overrun by purple bougainvillea to the male giant carved into the rock of a beachside cliff. The stone giant’s face strained as his back bent under the weight of a building. The sculpture was an anomaly; there were no others like him in sight.
At a small restaurant overlooking the beach, we ate dinner, a spicy seafood linguini dish for two. Sean plucked out the choicest morsels and placed them on my plate. Although the Cinque Terre vineyards are famous for their wines, I didn’t order any. After our first couple of nights in Rome, I decided to abstain for the rest of Sean’s visit. It seems rude to drink wine in front of a man who I once walked out on because of his drinking.
So it wasn’t wine that made me bold. Maybe it was the chivalry Sean had shown throughout the day that gave me the courage to tell him my fantasy: “Wouldn’t this be a perfect spot to get married? I wonder, if we wanted to elope tomorrow, how hard it would be?”
Sean chuckled, but said nothing.
Now I felt foolish. “I don’t mean to be . . . I won’t talk about it anymore.”
His eyes filled with concern. “No, don’t stop talking about it. I just laugh because I get embarrassed. But I like it when you talk about it.”
If anything, this response only made me more nervous. I smiled, but dropped the subject.
We took the train back to Corniglia, where we’re staying. From the train station we had to walk—or in Sean’s case, hobble—up three hundred seventy steps to reach the cliff-top town. In the piazza, local men had gathered, as they do every evening, to harangue each other about terribly important issues or outrageously funny nonsense, or both. We exchanged a polite “Bona sera” with them, then returned to our pensione so I could perform surgery.
For the next hour, in our tiny room overlooking the sea, Sean lay splayed out on the bed while I crouched at his feet digging out urchin spines, first with tweezers, then a needle. He repeatedly twitched his leg like a wounded dog and gasped in pain. I asked if he wanted me to stop, but he insisted I continue. Frustrated by the deepest splinters, I started f
laying away bits of skin, creating small bleeding holes all over his heel. I started to cry.
He asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine. I just hate hurting you.”
I pried out about ten pieces. A couple of spines had worked their way in too deep for me to dig out without the risk of seriously hurting him. After I bandaged his heel, which looked as if it had been shredded with a cheese grater, he kissed me tenderly. “Thank you. That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
“It is? Then you need to hang out with a better class of people.”
“Cara, I’d rather be with you, suffering and in pain, than anywhere else.”
It was such a corny thing to say that I gave him a doubtful look. But his eyes told me he spoke the truth. That’s when I knew: I love him more deeply than I’ve ever realized, this man who would walk on swords for me. The realization is as comforting as coming home and as unnerving as waking up in a strange land. Until tonight, I always felt guilty because I believed Sean loved me more than I loved him. If that’s not true, I need no longer worry about Sean. But what about me?
We cuddled up to sleep, my body in a fetal position, his wrapped around mine in placental protectiveness. I knew he was still in pain. But instead of falling asleep, he grew increasingly amorous, until I said, “Well, if I’d known flaying the skin off of you would turn you on so much, I would have tried it a long time ago.”
Maybe I had.
florence, italy
For our final two days together, Sean and I have come to Florence to finish painting the renaissance of our relationship in the summer-drenched colors I most want to remember. I don’t know if this revisionist work of art will survive our next separation. But in my memory it will remain imperishable, ever fixed in the frame of Firenze, the flower of Italy.
They Only Eat Their Husbands Page 33