“It is not difficult,” he replied.
“Right,” she said, falling into step behind him. They went into the office, where a nervous young man equipped with a computer he knew nothing about tried for several minutes to generate some vital information about the paid contract Lucy presented. He studied the screen hopefully. “Niente,” he said.
Antonio was patient but clearly bored. “These machines make nothing better,” he confided to Lucy. Again the boy’s fingers raced across the keyboard; then he stood blinking nervously at the shiny screen. “No, niente,” he said again. He discussed the problem with Antonio, who conveyed their conclusion to Lucy. It had been decided that the clerk would take an imprint of Lucy’s credit card and the charge would be added later, when someone who knew something about the system could figure out what it was.
“But there shouldn’t be any charge,” Lucy complained. “It was all paid in advance. It says so on the contract.”
Antonio looked perplexed. “Then what are we wanting here?”
“A receipt,” she said. “Just ask him to give me a copy of the contract.”
Antonio made this request. Another long conversation ensued. The contract was produced, examined; Lucy pointed to the line that showed it was paid. It was a single sheet, and there was no copy machine in the place. “How was it paid?” she asked Antonio, though she hardly expected him to know. She had found no receipt for it, and DV was careful about such things.
“They do not take credit cards for such a large amount,” Antonio explained. “Your friend paid in cash. I know this because I took him to the bank to get the money and then I brought him here to take the car.”
“So you know it was paid!” Lucy exclaimed. “So why would I give this guy a blank credit card now? It makes no sense. Can’t you tell him I want only a piece of paper that says it was paid?”
Antonio was losing patience as well, but he endeavored to remain in control. “The credit card is only for the event of small additional charges,” he explained calmly, “or in case the car has been damaged.”
“Damaged!” Lucy felt her blood pressure shooting up. “We can walk outside and look at it and see that it isn’t damaged. Anyway, it’s insured. That’s on the contract, too.”
“Please, Lucia,” Antonio pleaded. He was deeply uncomfortable with the developing scene, Lucy realized. The dull clerk, the boorish American tourist—it was the stuff of his nightmares. He was so miserable, his eyes rolled back under the lids and for a moment Lucy thought he might faint, or simply bolt from the room. But he mastered his emotions and forged on. “This is a stupid boy, but he is not dishonest. It is the way it is done here. I believe if you will consent to give him this credit card, I will persuade him to write out a receipt for you, and that will be the end of the matter. If some charge should appear on your bill, you will please send it to me and I will take care of it, but I assure you, such a thing will not happen.”
“So that’s what people do here?” Lucy said. She opened her purse and dug out the requisite card. “They just hand over huge sums of money and leave blank credit-card vouchers lying around and no one keeps track of anything?”
“I am sure everything is much better in America,” Antonio murmured. He subjected the clerk, who took the card with alacrity, to a long harangue, complete, Lucy noted, with several references to his own family name. The poor young man was so rattled that, when he handed Lucy the card and the half sheet of paper on which he had written the amount DV had paid, a number so rich in zeros that it ran halfway across the page, he forgot to ask Lucy to sign the credit-card form. The receipt, Lucy noticed, was undated, but the insignia Eurauto was printed in the bottom margin. Antonio noticed nothing; he was so eager to be out of the place, he had gone to stand at the door like a dog waiting to be let out. “Grazie,” Lucy said to the clerk, who puffed himself up as he replied, “Prego, signora.” He had completed the business to his own satisfaction. Lucy stuffed the papers into her purse and followed Antonio out into the parking lot. How long, she wondered, before the poor fellow discovered his mistake?
Antonio started the car and they continued on the dirt road without speaking. There was plenty of noise and excitement, however; the engine creaked and complained, the tires thudded in the holes, and the brakes squeaked. He needs a brake job immediately, Lucy thought, but she knew this was not the time to offer mechanical advice. The road joined up with the smooth two-lane highway to Sansepolcro, and the car settled down to its habitual low whine. “Thank you,” Lucy said, “for helping me with that. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
He smiled without looking at her; the road ahead engaged him. He’s annoyed with me, she thought, because I was annoyed by the clerk, though he thought the clerk was an idiot, too. She resolved to say no more about the business. She certainly wasn’t going to tell him she had not signed the credit-card form. They had entered the ugly strip of warehouse stores, and Lucy looked out the window in gloomy silence. And she would remain silent all through lunch, she promised herself, before she would offer a new topic of conversation.
“You must tell me, Lucia,” Antonio said, “how did you find Roma?”
“Noisy,” she replied.
“You did not enjoy your visit?”
She relented. She wanted to say a good deal about her visit. “Actually, I enjoyed it very much. I went to the museum in the Villa Borghese and saw Apollo and Daphne. That was worth the whole trip.”
“Ah. You are an admirer of Bernini.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Aren’t you?”
“Of course,” he agreed. “Everyone is. He gives one no choice.”
“I had an odd experience there,” she said. “Shall I tell you about it?”
He nodded again.
“Well, I’ve wanted to see that statue for years. I’d only seen it in pictures, and there it was. And of course, you know, pictures can’t really do it justice.…”
Antonio made a circular motion with one hand, signifying his entire agreement with this opinion. His eyes left the road for a millisecond, taking her in with guarded interest.
“So it was infinitely more wonderful than I’d imagined. At first, I just wanted to look and look at it, and I had the sensation—I think most people feel this in some way—that this statue was speaking somehow to me. To me personally.”
Antonio raised his eyebrows, his eyes still on the road.
“But then I realized what a crass reaction that is. How dull and vain it is to think that I have anything to do with Bernini, or he with me.”
Antonio looked at her again, frankly curious, as if she had really said something unexpected. “After all,” she continued, “here I am, an American, for God’s sake, I can’t even speak the same language he spoke, and I live in this world”—she gestured out the window at a garden-furniture outlet—“where people build things like that, and nothing lasts.…” She paused. Was this what she had felt? It was difficult to remember, and she wanted to get it right. Antonio was silent, but she could feel the force of his listening. “So I began to think about Bernini, and how hard he worked, and how he did it for himself, not for anyone else, certainly not for me, and how he couldn’t see into the future but that, because of him, I can see a little, just a little, into the past, and I felt grateful to him, just for having lived, and that gratitude was so big, it was so strong, it made me sad. It brought tears to my eyes.”
“You were weeping in the Galleria Borghese?” Antonio asked.
“Well, only a little. No one noticed, I’m sure.”
Antonio drove on without speaking, and Lucy was left to go over her explanation. She had not mentioned, of course, how vulnerable she had been to any and all intrusions of feeling because of her general anxiety about Massimo. But that was a precondition, she thought, of no interest to anyone but her. She looked out the window as Antonio executed a turn onto a wide tree-shaded street lined with double- and triple-parked cars. There were small shops along the pavement and several bars with
tables set out in the sun.
“Why is it, Lucia, that people so often believe what you have described, that a work of art has some personal message for them?” Antonio asked.
Lucy looked at him closely; there was no archness, no mocking in the tone of this, the first outright question he had ever asked her. She wanted to give a thoughtful answer. “It’s a wish, I think,” she said. “Because when we see something that stops us”—she paused, not liking the conclusion that beckoned at the end of her conjecture—“something that really holds us still, it reminds us of how empty and short our own lives are, and that is truly unbearable.”
The walls of Sansepolcro loomed up ahead of them. Antonio was dodging traffic now and could not respond. To her surprise, he ignored the generous public parking lots on either side and drove straight through the narrow opening in the wall. The world on the inside was entirely different from the one outside. The streets were cobbled and narrow, the shops pressed together on either side in a continuous line of stone, their windows clean and bright in the sun. Antonio veered into a side street, an alley, actually, designed with nothing wider than a horse in mind. He pulled the car half up on the sidewalk and turned off the engine. “Are you very hungry?” he asked.
She shrugged. So her remarks had meant nothing to him. “A little,” she said. “I’m always hungry, actually.”
“Would you mind if I took you to see something before we eat?”
“Of course I wouldn’t mind.”
“It is a fresco,” he said. “Do you know the work of Piero della Francesca?”
She nodded.
“He was born in this town.” Antonio reached over the seat for his jacket and opened the door of the car. “It is here,” he said, pointing to the building opposite.
Lucy got out and followed him along the high bare wall, for he had parked behind the building, to the wide steps and heavy double doors at the front. There was a sign on one door that read MUSEO CIVICO and gave the opening hours. It would be closing, she noticed, in the next thirty minutes.
While Antonio purchased tickets at the counter, Lucy wandered out into the first room. The ceiling was high; the walls were white. Two massive doorways framed in wide oak boards opened into the other rooms. There were a few large pictures on the walls, religious scenes; nothing, Lucy thought, unusual or interesting. Antonio joined her and ushered her through the nearer doorway. “We have not much time,” he said. “But it will be enough for you to see the Resurrection.”
As Lucy followed him through several rooms, past various paintings, a display of reliquaries, a section of a fresco so ravaged by time that she could barely make out the subject, she ran through a mental catalog of famous Resurrection paintings. It was not so thick as the file on the Annunciation, nor was she able to visualize even one that stood out from all the others.
“Here we are,” Antonio said, pausing in the doorway to the next room. Lucy joined him, conscious of an effort to present an eager expression, though she had a faint trepidation that the picture would be of scant interest to her. They entered a small, spare room, a kind of chapel, in which the vaulted ceiling curved down all around, like a white parachute settling over the cool terra-cotta of the floor. They had come in alongside the fresco. Lucy followed Antonio to a wooden bench that faced the niche in which the scene of the Resurrection glowed with an eerie, subaqueous light, like a window open upon another world. Antonio took a seat on the bench while Lucy approached the fresco.
The figure of Christ seemed to come forward to meet her. He was both perfectly still and in motion, one foot raised on the edge of his marble tomb, one hand grasping the staff of his simple flag. In the next moment, he would complete the action of climbing out of his grave, step down among the four stolid soldiers asleep at his feet, and astound the world. He was clothed only in a sheet of a pellucid, diaphanous pink, which was wrapped about his waist loosely, one end draping his shoulder, toga-style. His flesh was startlingly pale; he was thin, but his chest was strong and muscular, the bicep of his raised arm thick enough to throw a shadow in the declivity at his shoulder. His face was not extraordinary: He was plain-featured, his beard was short, but his expression was such a wonder, it spoke of so many emotions, of shock, anger, extreme fatigue, and determination, that Lucy felt she could read in it the whole process of his waking in the terrifying blackness of the grave, pushing back the stone, gathering up the winding-sheet, remembering all the while who he was, why he was here, who had betrayed him, what he must do now. As he pulled himself to his feet, he would have seen the slumbering guards gathered around his tomb. It was some hour of early dawn, and though two of the men had rested their heads against the tomb, they were sleeping soundly; they had heard nothing. He would have to wake them to get them out of his path. So he had paused, resting his pierced hand on his raised knee, to look again at the world he loved so well. Behind him the low hills, the gray trees just coming to life after a long winter, the thin racks of clouds drifting in a sky the color of a robin’s egg; all nature was still and calm. He alone was awake; he alone knew he had kept his promise and come back.
Lucy stood transfixed before the painting for some minutes. The double perspective was both impossible and magical, for the soldiers were foreshortened, as though seen from below, while the figure of Christ was presented dead-on to the viewer. The colors, too, were the stuff of legends: a deep blue-green, like weathered bronze, repeated in the stockings and helmets of the guards, a shield and hat of burnt sienna. There weren’t very many colors, and they had been laid in next to one another with loving precision. The composition moved the eye around and around inside the painted marble columns that framed the whole, so that the process of looking at the fresco was entirely absorbing. It made one feel busy just to stand and look.
At last, she turned away and joined Antonio on the bench. “Thank you for bringing me here,” she said.
He nodded, his eyes fixed dreamily on the fresco.
“He looks startled, as if he just woke up,” Lucy said.
“He’s been in hell,” Antonio said.
Lucy looked back at the picture. “What?”
“He went down to hell after he died. To release the souls of those who had not had the opportunity to know him.”
“Of course,” Lucy said. “I’d forgotten. The Harrowing of Hell.”
Antonio looked puzzled.
“That’s what it’s called,” Lucy explained. “In poetry. The Harrowing of Hell. It’s good, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he agreed.
Then they sat for a few minutes in silence, side by side, looking at the painting.
“When I was a young man,” Antonio said, “I had before this painting a sensation such as the one you have described. I believed the artist was speaking to me alone.”
Lucy regarded him with interest. He was about to tell her something personal, and it didn’t come easily to him. She said nothing, allowing him the time to gather his thoughts.
“There was not for me this barrier of the language,” he continued. “Perhaps I would have been better off if there had been. It seemed to me there was nothing between myself and this artist. We were from the same town, I was baptized here, probably in the same church he was, and I was young enough to think that the centuries made little difference. First I began to study his life, which takes not too long, because very little is known about him, and I made excursions to see all the paintings I could find. There are not so many, and what has survived is often badly damaged. Many of his frescoes have been lost. We have only accounts by people who saw them.”
“What a pity,” Lucy said.
“Yes, it is. Very sad. He was a most influential painter, but his life was like so many; he went from town to town following commissions. At the end, he stopped painting. His eyesight failed gradually. By the time of his death, he was blind.”
Lucy looked back at the startled, dark eyes of the Christ figure. Was he blinded by the light of day? Was that what made him look so vulnera
ble?
“Then I began to paint myself,” Antonio said. “I set up a studio in my house. My family approved my ambition, and I had various teachers come to me. I studied mathematics, as well, because he studied mathematics.…” Antonio lifted his chin to the painting as if the artist himself were standing before it. “He wrote a long treatise on this subject, very dull reading, which I studied.”
He paused. His story was not over, but he was considering how best to tell it. Now comes the bad part, Lucy thought. She could see it in the set of his jaw and the rueful inwardness of his eyes.
“Often I came here to look at this painting. It never failed to inspire me, but I began to lose my sense that it spoke to me. No, that is not right. It continued to speak to me, but it did not speak in a friendly way.” He smiled at this observation. Lucy understood that it represented a vast understatement. “This went on for several years. My struggles were great, my intentions were … noble. My teachers encouraged me. At last they told me they had nothing more to teach me. I had completed many paintings, but none of them pleased me at all. They were competent. Ignorant people praised them. But they had no life. Everything that came from me was already dead.” He examined his hands moodily, as if he held them responsible for his failure. Then he looked up at the painting. “As surely dead,” he said, “as that dead man is surely still alive.”
He fell silent while Lucy considered the question of which dead man he referred to—the figure of the risen Christ or the artist who had created him. Antonio was slumped forward at her side, dangling his hands between his knees. “So you gave up painting?” she asked.
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