The large man nearest the walkway looked to be asleep. He was aboriginal, his face larger than life, rearranged by a fist, perhaps, his legs too long for the bench. This much I glimpsed amid the sad miasma of the others. Curled in the fetal position, an enormous damaged crow in his filthy clothes. Folding my arms around the baby—the cautious shuffle of Gore-Tex—sleek and quick in powder blue, the same ocean paleness as the shadows cast by shrubbery, I whisked past. A lace-less workboot swung out and almost clipped me.
The morning stood out, because Tom and I had disagreed over who should get up and change the baby, fatigue pasting me to the sheets. He had early prep to do before catching his train, the firm where he was working located obtusely across town. His refrain, “You and Anna get to do whatever you want.” One morning among many, it was nothing special—but I’d raced, slow as cold porridge, to get us out early, before the men from the Good Shepherd spilled from its doors.
There’s something about having a purpose, an oasis: it girds you. It never occurred to me to be fearful, not after braving their gauntlet—a sort of test. Despite that foot swinging out, the men hardly moved, and in the days since Anna’s birth I’d come to see them as a periphery safeguarding the greenhouses’ seclusion. Only the gainfully lonely bothered breaching it, and once wrapped in steamy solitude I never worried. I suppose you could say I felt free. The best time to come was before the crowds—other mothers, many dragging toddlers, and members of certain rare-plant societies—though most people were too busy working to appear on weekdays. Their loss, for there’s something about a greenhouse’s full-blown abundance, the comfort of an Eden whose mildewed walls the streaming light erases.
Anna stirred. She blinked. The startled depth of a baby’s eyes. The solid comfort of tiny limbs pushed against me, the still-new sensation of her on the outside of my skin. Her baby grimace worked the scarf down to her chin. The perfect o of her mouth—don’t cry, don’t cry, please don’t cry—settling back into a tiny rosebud. The instant we entered, the leaching warmth bathed us, against her skin piquing some recollection? I suspect it’s why people flock south in winter and the crueller months of March and April, why they flee to the tropics—to remember vaguely how it was before birth, being enveloped, enclosed? Enfolded inside another’s warmth.
“Land of the silver birch, home of the beaver,” I hummed under my breath, the closest thing to a lullaby I knew. Going back to sleep, she gave me the unexpected bonus of more peace. In the perfect contentment of her body against mine, I followed miniature pathways one by one, winding past banana trees, orchids, monstrous monsteras. Stepping stones were arranged—planted amidst flaming primrose and curling pothos—as in the good witch’s garden in a picture book like those whose spines had yet to be cracked, lining the white shelf that Tom, my poor harried husband, had just painted. The lushness conjured the slither of snakes. Look up, way up—all that was missing were parakeets, cockatiels. The ripe blooms of goldfish and lipstick plants dangled, obscene against the double-glazing of ice on the roof, and through sparkling fern-patterned frost and grime, the northern sky glared blue. Babyhood memories held me: look way up—these days my own mother’s voice seemed goofily at one with mine. But for Anna’s straining now against my leaky breast—an infant not so different from these exotic plants craning towards sun—I was in that second deeply, raptly alone.
We are phototropic, I remember thinking: of course we are. Which explained Tom’s choice to do law and mine to do journalism—I work as a researcher on a low-budget show investigating scams like herbal cures for cancer, erectile dysfunction, insomnia: degrees of darkness begging for some illumination.
Opening her eyes, Anna whimpered at the brightness, its filtered intensity. In their blue-brown depths was that look: Hello, milk fountain, oh one I want plugging into now, supplier for all my needs. But this was the first time I felt a recognition: reciprocity? She was thirteen days old. When can I take her outside? I’d asked the nurses, as if enquiring about a new, rare species, an orchid that might die being carried from shop to car. Give her a few days. Make sure she’s well bundled up, and you’re good to go.
“Common sense, isn’t it?” said Tom. “You don’t want to be stuck inside all the time.” His brusqueness melded with my labour’s aftershocks, those of a kind of war that happened to go well—very well, I was told. The body’s urge to push replaced, replenished by gratitude—gratitude and a wild indebtedness, an impulse stronger than ever to strain and grasp at some slippery light.
So with Anna gazing up at me I savoured this moment of blissful, steamy goodness, a moment you could even call grace—till something interrupted it. A smell, a pungent odour, and the sight, beneath the spiky shade of a palm, of clothing. Dark, ragged—a pile of clothes ripe with the grief of cardboard over sidewalk vents, the eardrum-piercing shriek of subway cars below. Frostbitten fingers, toes.
The first signs of snow, I used to tell Tom when we moved in together, you feel in your fingertips: the stoniness that slows the trees’ sap and kills the last geranium in its window box. Leaving our tiny flat in this grey, wintry city, he’d warm my hand in his inside his coat pocket.
Clothing, it registered, this and my first fear—arms tightening around Anna, tight tight so that her whimpers rose to that newborn’s wail that makes you freeze, a-wah, a-wah, a-wah, and the milk gush. Oh our animal connection, the chafing wetness under waterproof fabric screamed, and the fear, equally animal, too. With clothes sloughed like skin from a snake, wouldn’t there soon be a body going without them? Boots, one missing its sole—these registered, and a guttural, spluttering sound: aspiration. Anna was howling. The clothing shifted. A head moved.
“What the fuck!” The sour sweetness of vomit wafted, replacing that of humus and the blue ammonia scent of condensation. A battered face looked up, broken-nosed. A face bruised by darkness and want, the healing of injuries untended.
“Fuck off outta here. Ain’t there nowhere a poor bastard can get some sleep?”
Something yellow leaked from the man’s pants. But it was his feet that nailed my attention: soles a peaty black, filth worn into the calluses as if he’d been born with it.
“What’re you gawking at, bitch? Get the fuck out, get out before a fella has to call someone.”
I turned and ran. I might’ve unzipped my pocket, dug inside for a toonie, left it on a flagstone—but I don’t remember. Anna’s face was a tiny red prune: a-wah, a-wah, a-wah. She bounced in the carrier. I did remember to brace her neck with my hand. I even got her tuque back on and scarf pulled up to her nose and double-checked to find both baby mouse-sized mittens on their string and in place, all of her tucked in tight, held so close I could have worn her inside my jacket.
But she cried, and cried even harder, if that was possible, at the frigid air slamming into us. Pockmarks in the snow showed where a sprinkling of salt tried to make the walkway safer. My baby crying her head off.
The man had gotten up from his bench—the big aboriginal man in his greasy parka and floppy boots. He was shuffling towards us smoking a cigarette, hands cupping its warmth. The sun traced the tree branches’ silvery melt and on the snow a sparrow hopped and pecked at a piece of donut. My eyes were on the paving stones, still icy despite the sun’s climbing, the city around us fully awake now, alive. My eyes on the pathway, Anna screaming, the feel of milk soaking my shirt and the waist of my jeans. Hurry, hurry, please—if you’ve never had a baby, you might not know it’s an APB alert when the child needs to nurse and in the face of it the world stops.
“There there little baby. There there,” the man was saying.
In her frantic squirming the tuque fell off, and he stooped to pick it up. He stooped so unsteadily I was afraid, really afraid he would fall, but he didn’t, and I wanted to run, run hard and catch the streetcar; and I pictured myself telling Tom later on, if I got it together enough to cook supper—because how on earth do you ever learn to function withou
t both hands free? Without putting a child down long enough to eat and pee?
“There there, little baby.” The tuque looked Disney-esque in his huge hand, the nails rimmed black, fingers stained with nicotine, that baby-poop yellow. His hand shook. It shook reaching down for Anna’s head; her downy scalp, the pulsing triangle in the top of her skull where the fontanelle had barely begun to knit—a word that will always remind me of mushrooms, wild mushrooms gathered in some silent forest. As he pressed the hat down she cried, and he put his finger by her mouth. His breath was sweet like dead meat and there, there, I had it, the toonie, and I pushed it into his hand, which closed around it though he shook his head. His expression half a jeer, but pitying, gentle.
I pushed my streetcar fare at him too.
His eyes were so dark they were black. “Can I hold her?” he said.
“Are you nuts? Are you out of your fucking mind?” Tom would not sit, standing to eat the chicken I somehow managed to put in the oven. Gnawing on it while holding Anna in that awkward, slightly despairing way men have—some men, I guess I should say.
But I felt calm, calmer than I had since delivering and possibly even since learning I was pregnant. Not that any one of us knows how things will play out, falling in love with a light of our own making then refusing to imagine its hardening-off.
Who knows what the guy might do? I’d asked myself. Or what he might’ve done: pulled a knife, or just stumbled away? I still wonder, What if I’d refused?
He held her like a flower, a delicate flower, the kind that barely lasts a day. Her mouth the opening of a man-eating one, the cry from her lungs a little sheep’s ba-a-a.
“Better get her some grub,” he said, handing her back, arms bending to mine, and the greenhouses behind us sparkling, all those tropical leaves pressed to glass.
And as oddly, as awkwardly as he had entered our morning—as jarringly as any child enters the world—the man turned and, picking his way as if walking on water, disappeared into the glass house Anna and I had just left.
“It was a shelter that could have been built of ice,” is what I told Tom.
Burning Times
The moment they step off the train they feel foreign, too heavily Canadian in their warm dark clothes—tourists under the hazy sun, dressed not for the Tuscan spring but a Maritime one. Discombobulating, is how Keith will remember it, maneuvering their suitcases over the platform. His wife, if she cares to, will shrug off any discomfort—Cia, who gazes around hopelessly “translating” signs, realizing the best-laid plans can go awry in Italy. It’s their first visit, a fifth-anniversary gift to themselves. Poor Cia—her outfit, chic at home, looks stodgily defiant. Its mummy-ish wrappings remind him of the bound chests and black T-shirts of transgender clients who come into the clinic for legal help. A complicated forgery, her dress.
The street through the grimy windows appears modern, suburban—neither downtown nor quattrocento. Cia looks at him, disgusted. This can’t possibly be the right station. His fault.
“I didn’t realize there was a difference.”
“How could you not?”
He sighs with the defeat of not speaking the language. His excuses: Trenitalia’s website is all in Italian, which makes bookings hit-and-miss. She shakes her head. A person waves—the only one to approach them since the Roma youth who hoisted their luggage into the overhead bin, then held out his palm, seconds before the train left Termini. The woman splays the fingers of one hand. “Another come, cinque minuti.”
Miraculously, it does. No one checks tickets. Soon they’re stepping off into Florence’s central stazione—into the most beautiful city in the world, a Facebook friend calls it. The mistake, his mistake, rectified, all is forgiven, even the sticky, diesel-laced heat as they trundle their bags along a grimy sidewalk. A whiff of sewage—momentarily transporting him home—underwrites the perfume trailing a passerby. “So much for scent-free,” Cia says, letting go of her suitcase to adjust her layers.
“The tickets to the Uffizi and the Academia are in my name,” she reminds him, looping her purse strap over her head.
“Watch out for luggage thieves,” yells a driver grabbing a smoke beside his idling bus. He kindly offers directions, holding their map upside down, drawing his thumbnail over it. Up, down, north, south—when they leave Firenze Keith will be no less confused about where streets lead and which way the Arno flows.
Chosen for its views—captured in pictures of the cathedral Duomo set against a pink sky (facing east, west?), of twinkling lights and bell towers framed by ancient hemlocks—the hotel isn’t as it appears online. Behind the desk, the clerk has what Keith considers to be Etruscan looks—hawkish nose, narrow jaw, startling eyes—which distinguish certain Italians from others: Pinocchios from Geppettos, say. The woman’s hair needs washing, her fingernails too, long and unpainted, unlike Cia’s neatly filed ones and the squared-off fakes sported by others who see him for legal advice. Maybe family law wasn’t his best career choice?
No matter what, the trip’s a vacation from work. Cia’s eyes fix on the keys behind the desk, hanging from thick leather fobs—like a Latino bike gang’s regalia, she’ll say, when they can laugh about it. Rows of keys and not a single one missing: full vacancy?
The ticket-sized lobby has an aged computer tucked beside a bar strung with Christmas lights. The guest book is a manila scrapbook, entries in different-coloured crayon. Guests with Russian names from Soviet-sounding places. A girls’ soccer team from the U.S.—kids on a European tour. The latest entry is from a week ago, he notices, while Cia debates something with the clerk. The woman’s English, though heavily accented, is quite fluent. Cia gives him the eye. Their carefully orchestrated gallery reservations have vanished in cyberspace. Whatever. He’s here for the food, the wine, the history. It’s Cia who’s turned the trip into a pilgrimage.
“But we’ve come all this way—”
“No, no email. I am sorreee. I call—okay? I call.” Rapid-fire Italian is exchanged over the phone. At least it’s cooler and quieter in off the street, at the top of this 1950s or ’60s office building in which the Hotel Panorama is accessed by a lift that seems—seemed—slightly unsafe. A smile. “For you. Special admission. Is free. Tonight, six P.M. Si?”
Beaming, the clerk lugs their bags up and down odd flights of stairs and along cramped corridors—like in a funhouse, a brutalist’s, he thinks, the bare, greenish walls neither amusing nor carnivalesque. The “suite,” no more inviting, is shown to them with a flourish. Once, it might’ve served as a doctor’s office—seriously—all dull speckled tiles, bathroom fixtures a tired, clinical white, the tub without curtain or shower. An examination room for the leprous? Above the bed’s cheap headboard, from a framed poster, Raphael’s Sistine Chapel putti keep watch with glib bemusement.
Dust along the baseboards seals the atmosphere, and he feels the creep of his watered-down genes—Canadian-Scots—as if such abject austerity is penance for his being hipster-slim, red-bearded, and slightly balding where others are abundant, exuberant, especially here in this place that spawned the Renaissance. Resolutely, Cia peels off, peels away, her clothes like bandages. Testing the bathing facilities, she leaves the metal door ajar.
They’ve brought wine, slivers of pecorino cheese and prosciutto from Rome, tiny sweet tomatoes, and a bottle of pricey balsamic vinegar, which has—oh shit—leaked inside Cia’s suitcase and ruined a cotton camisole. Unpacking their guidebooks, he lays out the treats on the pasteboard desk by the window. Its view of the distant Duomo is interrupted by buildings across a dingy courtyard. Turbaned in a towel, sitting on the bed, Cia accepts a plastic tumbler of Chianti. The mattress is as hard as the piazza cobbles they’ll soon traverse.
They’d been warned that on the eve of a holiday rooms were scarce.
“I really couldn’t tell by the photos. I mean, we could see if there’s anything else.”
“It’s
all right.” Her voice is determinedly brittle, bright. “Different if we were staying more than a night.”
It is a whirlwind visit and, to be truthful, the price is right; it suits their budget, Cia permanently relegated to sessional appointments, and Keith to servicing student loans. With two real incomes, he’s careful not to say, Hotel Panorama wouldn’t have figured in their plans. But Cia loves her work teaching Dante—the prime reason for her insisting on Florence when he’d have happily spent the week seeing ruins: Rome’s Forum, the Colosseum, Octavia’s Gate, the Palatine Hill where Nero supposedly fiddled while the place burned.
The room is simply somewhere to sleep, he agrees, as anxious as Cia not to spend a minute more in it than they have to.
Since Michelangelo’s David is just around the corner—and today’s reservation has been mysteriously zapped—strolling along holding hands, they decide to save it for the morning. Already it’s late afternoon. They stop in a restaurant for fancy insalatas, a little pitcher of wine—the only diners, their voices compete with an Italian soap on TV. The taste of Gorgonzola dispels the lingering scent of powdered cleanser in their nostrils.
Negotiating block after block teeming with pedestrians, the closer they get to the Cathedral—past the outdoor market hawking “Florentine” leather knock-offs, past the fortress-like banks and palazzos of the Medici—the more tightly Cia clings to his arm. Roving teenagers in shorts and flip-flops grow rowdy. Like youth anywhere flaunting their ripeness, there’s a loutish ease to their catcalls and shrieking laughter. It could be Pizza Corner in dowdy little Halifax. Flogging their wares, hawkers walk toy ferrets, spin flying saucers, waggle David statuettes. Driving the ruckus are drumbeats, distant ones—signalling a parade?
A bird on every tree Page 4