We were equal parts entranced and appalled as we gaped at the Duomo, a pixilated neo-gothic bombardment of Florentine pink, white, and green marble. The overdressed façade of La Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore is enough to make a religious person say, “There really is a God,” or inspire an atheist to say, “Oh my God!” Or, as Sean put it, “Holy shit! I feel motion sick just looking at it.”
Tonight, a festival atmosphere took over the pedestrian-only streets of Florence’s historic city center: tourists and locals alike circling endlessly on a hot summer night, coalescing around street performers from all over the world, revolving through the gelato shops where soft, cold delectation was piled in great humps of glistening colors more distracting than the Duomo.
After dark, we stopped to admire the work of the street artists, some of whom were still hunched over their tasks, drawing amazing chalk artwork on the walkways. Next to each drawing sat tip jars filled with money. Some drawings were clever copies of Renaissance paintings, like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Others were original works of imagination, like the nude gazing at her reflection in a pool. All of it was temporary. “Now there’s an exercise in non-attachment,” Sean said. “By tomorrow these drawings will be all stepped on and smeared and faded.”
Now, lying in our hot, stuffy attic room, we’re exercising our own non-attachment. It’s too hot to make love, so we’ve been trying to sleep, arching and stretching our sticky bodies away from each other in the narrow twin bed. Arriving in Florence late on a Saturday afternoon at the height of the tourist season, the only room we could find was this tiny attic cubbyhole. I call it our “Room Without a View.” It has no air conditioning, no fan, no windows, and no oxygen. It must be more than 30º in here (around 90º F). After I shifted so far away from Sean that I fell off the bed, I gave up on sleep and pulled out my journal. Sean is still tossing and turning.
I suppose I should at least try closing my eyes. Tomorrow is our last day together, and already I feel stepped on and smeared and faded.
***
My last day with Sean was as perfect as Michelangelo’s David. That’s what made it so awful.
At the Galleria dell’Accademia I circled the David for at least half an hour, staring at the fiercely concentrating eyes and the overlarge hands holding the tools of his destiny. Although the David is perfect, perhaps because the David is perfect, I felt more affinity for Michelangelo’s four unfinished Prisoners. Here was something familiar: the soul trapped inside the body. They’re muscular men, but unable to break free of the marble blocks in which they’re trapped, imprisoned by the very stuff of which they’re made. Art historians disagree whether the artist truly didn’t finish the sculptures or intentionally left them that way. Either way, the message was complete. The Prisoners asked me just one question: how can any of us break free of our own natures?
After the Galleria, we returned to the Duomo to see the inside. There was a long line to get in, which gave us time to watch the unending slapstick routine of the Piazza del Duomo. Every day, dozens of illegal street vendors from Africa and Asia set up shop on blankets and cardboard stands in front of the cathedral. Every half hour or so the police cruise through, prompting the vendors to fold up their blankets and stands, with their wares stashed inside, and meander away, pretending they’re up to nothing. Meanwhile, the police pretend to patrol the area, somehow failing to notice the obvious vendors. The moment the cops leave, the souvenir stands reappear.
“It’s like a game,” Sean said.
“Who’s winning?”
“I don’t know. The rules aren’t very clear.”
In between rounds, we spotted two Gypsy children passing through the line to the Duomo and dipping their hands into the pockets of an oblivious American couple. Before we could shout a warning, before the tiny fingers reached anything, a young African vendor abandoned his stand to chase the children off, shouting in Italian and waving his fist. The couple looked up in alarm as the tall, dark man bolted past, and they grumbled at his suspicious behavior, never noticing the criminal cherubs who had darted away.
After we toured the Duomo, we wanted to climb to Brunelleschi’s Dome for a commanding view of Firenze, but the Dome was closed. We climbed the bell tower instead.
Following the cavernous expanse of the Duomo, the skinny tower was a shock to the senses. Its spiral staircase was nearly as narrow as a coffin: the tower’s wall hemming us in on one side, the axis of the stairway swirling like a chambered nautilus up the other, people one step ahead and one step behind. Sean and I giggled and made nervous jokes about claustrophobia, but the young man walking just ahead of us with his girlfriend came completely unglued.
The man kept babbling: “This is crazy! The walls are too close. Stay off our heels, will you? Back off!” When the entire line was forced to stop and allow people coming down the stairs to squeeze past, his panic increased. “Jesus, I feel like I can’t breathe!” When we continued upward he stopped so suddenly I almost fell into him. He crossed his wrists and made a violent slicing motion of denial, barking, “I’ve gotta get out of here! Move out of the way!” He shook his head at Sean, his white-circled corneas jittering madly as he forced his way past us. His receding voice floated up to us, “I’m outta here!” along with the grunts of people he stepped on and pushed in his frantic scramble down the stairs.
It reminded me of the time my birth mother took me to Disneyland when I was eleven. She was fine on the first few rides. Then we boarded Pirates of the Caribbean, a water ride that, at one point, took us floating through a pitch-black tunnel. In the tunnel, my mother started a litany similar to that of the man on the stairs, her voice rising in pitch, “Cara, I can’t do this! You don’t understand. I really can’t deal with this! I have to get out!” I felt her body shaking next to mine and I feared she would either jump out of the boat or faint. I thought I should do something but had no idea what. Her helplessness frightened me. More than that, it made me angry. I was the child; she was the adult. I didn’t want to take care of her; she was supposed to take care of me.
Luckily, our boat floated into an open cavern before she grew any worse. I turned and saw the beads of sweat on my mother’s forehead, and the whites of her eyes.
When I used to visit her in Arizona, on the last day of every visit I always stood before her sobbing and begging, “Mommy, why can’t I live with you?” But that day in the dark, as Animatronic pirates fired fake cannons over our heads, I felt grateful that this terrifyingly terrified woman had the wisdom not to try raising me on her own.
I never knew what dark tunnel in her life had left her that way. I only knew that her father had been so traumatized by World War Two he used to leap into the air screaming whenever his four daughters accidentally ran into him in the halls of their home, that he stuck knives in the walls to threaten them when he was angry, that once he shoved the head of his youngest daughter through a wall. “Monica used to be such a sweet, smart little thing,” my mother said. “She was never the same after that.” My dad once told me that my mother was often hungry as a girl, but never dared fetch food from the refrigerator without asking, because her father had threatened to cut off her hands if she did. My mother never told me that story.
Did she panic in that small, dark tunnel because her father once locked her in some small, dark place? Or did the stifling darkness simply remind her of what she saw whenever she closed her eyes and tried to look within herself?
I’ve never had claustrophobia in the true sense. Still, I felt relieved when Sean and I reached the top of the bell tower. We broke free into a dazzling view of Firenze: sun-blasted whitewash and terra cotta, heat-shimmering marble and cobblestone, the coruscating River Arno and its bridges, all laid out like a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. It was the sort of puzzle that families might put together at a kitchen table as they try to dream their way out of the dark.
In the early evening, we walked to the Ponte Vecchi
o. The fourteenth century stone bridge was the only bridge in Florence to survive the German bombs of World War Two. There—amid the tiny twentieth century shops of gold jewelers and silversmiths, the crowd of lovers out for an evening passeggiata, the street musicians playing guitars and singing with humble talent but great gusto—we watched the sunset turn the River Arno to liquid gold.
I opened my guidebook, looked up the Ponte Vecchio, and played tour guide for Sean: “It says here the bridge used to be lined with butcher shops, and the butchers used to throw animal parts and rotting meat into the river. It also says some Florentines used to piss into the river, knowing it would flow downriver to the towns of their enemies.”
“I wonder how many of them fell in,” he said.
I sat atop one of the walls, while Sean stood next to me on the bridge, gingerly holding my waist. I gave him a knowing grin. “Are you trying to protect me from falling in?”
“Something like that.”
“Is that why you’re not sitting up here?”
“Yes,” he confessed with a laugh. “You know I’m afraid of heights.”
Leaning back on the wall to tease him, I felt grateful to have no phobias. Or do I? How deep does a fear have to go before we name it a phobia? I keep moving forward through life, facing new people, new places, and new situations with an attitude some call courage. But maybe that’s an illusion. Maybe what scares me is to stand still, in one place, holding onto one person. “Let’s live in Florence,” I said. “I’ll become a photographer and you can be a jeweler on the Ponte Vecchio.”
“When I can’t even stand on the bridge without feeling sick to my stomach?”
“Okay. Let’s live in Cinque Terre.”
“Same problem.”
“Lucca?”
“Okay.”
I closed my eyes in contentment, to watch the warm red coals of day’s end play against my eyelids and memorize the feeling of Sean’s fingertips lightly trailing over my hip.
After dark, we walked back through the pedestrian center of old Florence and slowed to survey the wreckage of last night’s fleeting art. As Sean had predicted, the intricate chalk drawings of the night before were already smeared with the passage of indifferent feet.
***
Last night, we made careful, sweaty, uncomfortable love in our Room Without a View. This morning, as the first hint of dawn troubled the dark, we walked to the train station. It had rained in the night, and the streets shimmered wet and yearning in the glow of the streetlights. Sean was catching the six a.m. train to Rome.
As we walked down the platform, he said, “I’ve spent the past two days trying to think of what to say to you at the train station. I know I might not see you again for a long time, so I wanted to say something special. But it was too much pressure. I never thought of anything.”
“Sincerity is more important than originality,” I said.
“I had fun. I’ll miss you. I love you, Cara.”
“I love you, too. It’ll be lonely traveling without you.”
“But you’ll still have fun.”
“Well, ye-ah!” I said. “Of course I’ll still have fun.”
“Of course. I don’t know what I was thinking.” He laughed, but tears were in his eyes.
“I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean . . . I mean, I will miss you . . . I just don’t want you to think I’m all needy and . . . you know what I mean.”
“I know.”
We lingered, kissing and embracing as awkwardly as we had when I’d arrived in Rome—as if, instead of our time together coming to a close, it was unraveling. When we couldn’t put it off any longer, he turned to board the train. As he looked for a seat, we saw each other through the window and I waved, flapping my hand energetically like a child, trying to overcome sentimentality with silliness. He grinned and waved back. I wonder when we’ll see each other again.
It’s probably best we didn’t elope in Italy. I could hardly have married him only to send him home alone while I continued traveling for another two months or so. No, I would have had to leave with him, and I’m not yet ready to end this journey. And although we’ve rekindled our romance, so far it has all been in the context of Italy, country of romance. I’m not ready to trust him in the emotional minefield of life’s ordinary routines. Come to that, I’m not ready to trust myself, either. Making a commitment to this relationship was easier for me when there seemed little likelihood it might be reciprocated.
He’s only been gone a few hours and already his time with me feels like the distant past. In a few minutes I’ll catch a train south. To stay in Florence would only depress me now.
Alone, I took one more walk through the Piazza del Duomo, and stopped to watch the African street vendors and the cops play their “game” one last time. This time I found out who was winning, or rather, who was losing. After the vendors concluded one of their disappearing acts, one lone cop returned to their midst unnoticed. He walked up to a surprised African man who was overseeing a blanket lined with handmade wooden trains, planes, and cars. The policeman shouted at the man and kicked his display, scattering the toys.
The frightened African protested plaintively, “Far Niente! Far Niente!” (Doing Nothing! Doing Nothing!) as his shaking hands pulled some paperwork from his pocket. Another cop walked up, and when the two officers bent their heads together to talk, the African made a run for it. The cops ran after him. A third cop cut him off at the edge of the piazza. “Far Niente! Far Niente!” the man cried as they dragged him away, his feet bouncing along like a rag doll, heels skittering across one of the chalk drawings that were, by now, almost entirely faded.
“Doing nothing! Doing nothing!” he continued to cry in Italian as he was dragged one way and I walked the other. I turned to look over my shoulder at him, my eyes filled with tears of pity: pity for the African, likely to be deported back to a hungry land and cruel life that he’d probably fled for good reason; tears for myself, alone again and still running for no clear reason.
Far niente no longer sounded so dolce.
aeoli islands, sicily
Stromboli is me: a restless volcanic island, out-of-place in a sea of “doing nothing.” The most active volcano in Europe, Stromboli raises hell in the vacation paradise of Sicily’s Aeoli Islands. The mountain rises from the sea to vent its fury in constant explosions of viscous lava, volcanic bombs, steam clouds, and ash. It erupts several times an hour, creating flashes in the sky like a beacon in the night, earning Stromboli the nickname “Lighthouse of the Mediterranean.”
The volcano has been erupting like that for at least 2000 years. In 1919, during one of its more violent tantrums, the giant threw multi-ton blocks at the villages of Stromboli and Ginostra, killing four people and destroying a dozen homes.
By contrast, the island of Lipari is sweet, hot, breezy lassitude. That’s where I’m staying, behind the walls of a rambling, grey stone castle. I’ve been delayed here four days, waiting for stormy, threatening weather to clear so I can hike up Stromboli. The volcano’s eruptions tend to be small, and seeing them is unlikely without climbing the mountain itself for a closer look. That is my purpose in coming to these islands.
I’ve spent most of my long wait sitting at this café overlooking the tiny harbor, reading a paperback copy of Moby Dick and drinking granita di caffè. The frozen blend of coffee and sugar sets my leg and mind tapping, so I have to reread sentences. Who cares how to properly coil a rope on the deck of an eighteenth century whaler? Moby Dick in the summer heat; I must be mad.
By this morning, I grew stir-crazy and went to an Internet café to check my email. There were three from Sean. In the first, he’d written: “It’s been one week since I’ve been back and all my dreams are of looking for you in small towns, on winding stone-lined streets. I feel like a mouse looking for the prize at the end of the maze. I miss you.”
In the second e-
mail, he’d inserted a freehand drawing of a heart with the words “I love you” in the center.
In the third, he’d written only three words, “Marry me, soon.”
When I read that one, my hands flew to my suddenly warm cheeks, even though there was no one else in the café except the young woman who ran the place. But my reaction soon changed from excitement, to puzzlement, to disappointment. Was it a proposal, or a mere test of the waters? I’ve never given much thought to how I’d want a man to propose, but I’m sure “via email” would never have occurred to me.
I’ve sent no reply . . . yet. I want him to ask me face-to-face. I want to be sure it wasn’t the ease of pushing the “send” button that prompted him to write those words. I want to be sure our two-week reunion was long enough to tell me all I need to know. Will I ever learn all I need to know?
So it is that everything inside me is threatening to erupt, as I prepare to hike up Stromboli tonight.
***
A small pleasure boat took us to Stromboli Island. The little island is only the 900-meter-high tip of the volcano, which rises more than 2000 meters from the floor of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Our tour group was three Italian couples of various ages, and me. I sat alone and silent in the bow, sprayed mercilessly with water and the colorful confetti of Italian conversation. I assumed none of them spoke English, until a blond woman who looked as if she’d stepped out of a sailing brochure turned amused blue eyes my way and said, “You are really wet!” The boat had churned up enough spray to turn me into a sparkling pillar of saltwater. I laughed politely, an awkward seal-like cough. I could think of nothing to say. I felt so conspicuously single.
As we approached the island, we were escorted by a cheerful contingent of leaping dolphins, but my attention was on the swirling white clouds circling the bald upper reaches of the green-flanked volcano. There was something odd about those clouds; the rest of the illimitable sky was a spotless azure. It took me a moment to realize the clouds were not the aftermath of yesterday’s storm, but the result of heat rising from the craters hidden in their midst.
They Only Eat Their Husbands Page 34