by Sue Woolfe
‘I am a man of this city,’ he said. ‘You are with the right man.’
I could scarcely look at him then. When I managed a glance, to my surprise he wasn’t looking into a mysterious distance, he was only examining the bar with its array of fine bottles.
I wondered if I should suggest a drink, but no, he was our leader.
He said:
‘Shall we go?’
‘First,’ my voice said, playing for time, trying for decorum, though decorum so far hadn’t stood me in good stead but at least there was dignity in decorum, perhaps even nobility – this voice of mine didn’t belong to me anymore, it was high, silly, almost a squeak – for my secret had been revealed. He knew what I was searching for as nobody anywhere in the world had known, it was clear to him; why, even the waiter slopping my expensive water on the table knew of my emptiness. They were, after all, from Florence.
‘First,’ this thing, my voice, squeaked, ‘we must have three meetings.’
I hoped that in three – again a propitious number – I’d be able to explain to him that despite my acceptance – perhaps – of mere sex, I was actually seeking out what Florence knows. The sacred knowledge that yearners share, and receive.
He bowed his head. It seemed like assent.
I went back to my friend’s apartment, and pondered what to do. One moment my pondering told me to go home before anything happened and that seemed the right solution, and then, after I’d gone for a coffee in the sunlight on the piazza, my pondering told me to take this chance, and that seemed the right solution as well.
On the first two of our outings, we scarcely spoke. It was not the fault of my stumbling Italian, learned largely from recipes, nor of his perfect English, with even an Oxford accent, because he’d been sent away by his mother many times to stay with a family in London. ‘The family was as chilly as the country,’ he said in an unusual burst of loquacity, ‘but they spoke well. Families do that here, send their sons to get the right accent.’
That hung in the air, against the screams of an espresso machine. Clearly my Australian accent wasn’t right.
Sitting across from each other in little cafés, he was as preoccupied as a philosopher working on a conundrum. I was awed by his silences. Dozens of times in my head I composed a speech to further explain myself, but the speech became smaller and smaller until it was a crouching, curled-up speck he could flick onto a dusty floor.
During both meetings, I’d announce, over the dregs of our coffees, that I must go home. It was the only moment I became an authoritative person who knows what’s what, someone who’s on top of things. He’d suddenly come to life, ringing a taxi for me on his mobile, speaking in Italian too rapid for me, joking with the man on the other end of the line. He always forgot my address, or perhaps he assumed I had no fixed address.
‘To—?’ he’d ask again.
I’d say it again: ‘Via del Paradiso.’
He’d repeat it to the taxi company, but in English, laughing.
‘She is bound for the Street of Paradise.’
I felt absurd even about the name of my street.
At the third meeting, we went to a movie in a cinema, but he pulled at my hand just after the opening credits.
‘It’s time,’ he said.
I stood up. I didn’t complain that I still hadn’t explained myself. This affair, I now knew, was not about words. I whispered to the ghost of my dog that he seemed too refined to be a murderer, and besides, isn’t this what I’d longed for? Hadn’t I sought the bliss his clumsy pantomime had suggested – by now I could admit that it had been clumsy – and was my life at home ever going to give me what I needed?
He strode impatiently through streets I didn’t know. Again, I followed, though I comforted myself by promising that I’d turn back here at the statue, I’d turn back there at the fountain. I broke my promises.
‘My home,’ he announced at last, slowing down so I could catch up. We were in a piazza. On two sides were expensive shops that in the day would’ve glowed in gold and crimson like the frescoes in the cathedrals, but now they were ominous shadows, as if the sacrament was over forever. On a third side was a church spire that poked around hopefully at a starless sky. And on the fourth was a grand house with a porch, crowded with a beggar and his dogs.
‘Give him nothing,’ my lover said when he saw me looking. ‘Let’s not encourage them.’
There were five dogs, the largest, a collie, at one end, and a little dachshund crouched under the beggar’s feet. Two dogs lay on either side of him and my favourite, a mongrel, balanced on his chest, its front paws nestled at the man’s chin, its little body rising and falling with his breath. It was the hour of the passeggiata, and the dogs smiled at the elegantly dressed crowds in a stately way as if they weren’t beggars at all. I didn’t say it to my lover, but the dogs made it more possible for me to follow the cream and black jacket inside. Behind his back, I flung them a secret smile. I was only visiting a friend’s house, my smile said. But then I wondered, would they hear me if I screamed? Yet, like a woman deranged, I followed him.
I felt no lust. I certainly felt no love. All I felt, like the suck of a tide I couldn’t begin to fight against, was a dull thud of determination. I must see what might be given.
The street door opened directly onto a vast white room that in earlier days might’ve hosted grand ceremonies, but now there was only the man and I, and a deep stillness under the forbiddingly beamed ceiling. It was as if the room’s past was with us, observing me, half-knowing I’d disappoint it. Over in a shadowy corner was a heavy, ornate wardrobe that was already mocking me, and a bed that perhaps he’d made up for my arrival, with a dark blue velvet cover and blue cushions stamped with an important gold crest. Perhaps someone else had made up the bed. He wasn’t the bed-making sort.
‘Our family,’ he said, seeing me look at the crest. ‘From the thirteenth century.’
There were three doors in the room, I noted, suddenly aware I might have to escape – one, the street door through which we’d come; another, a small modern door:
‘The bathroom,’ he said. ‘My mother permitted an ensuite.’
But the third. The third door was ornate, surrounded by a wide oak frame on which half a dozen snarling lions competed for my terror.
‘A portal,’ I murmured, for I’d heard the term and remembered that they’re often the entrance to exalted places.
‘It goes to the rest of the house,’ he said.
I struggled with disbelief.
‘Who lives there?’ I asked.
‘Just me and my sister.’
I should’ve noticed the way his voice thickened. My voice never thickens when I mention my brother.
I should’ve asked further. But all I said was:
‘And your mother?’
He shrugged.
‘Away.’
On the wall above the bed was a patch of faded fresco. He followed my gaze.
‘When my mother is gone, I’ll have it painted out,’ he said. ‘I’m bored with age.’
‘But you’re a man steeped in this city,’ I said. It came to me that he might be one of a race of interlopers who had nothing to do with the grand passion of Florence.
But he certainly wasn’t a new arrival.
‘This is my great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s house.’
To be honest, he listed so many greats, I lost count.
‘When my mother dies, the house will be mine.’
‘Will it belong to your sister as well?’ I asked.
He didn’t answer.
Undressing seemed called for. I went to a dark corner so I wouldn’t bore him with my age as I pulled off gloves, scarf, thick coat, trousers, tights, woolly jumper, skivvy, thermal singlet, bra. But I didn’t need to hide from his gaze. He was too busy shedding skins of his own, throwing them off so they skidded across the russet tiled floor, making splashes of unwanted colour like stains.
Then he was lying on the bed. Ag
ainst the blue velvet, his orange eyes startled me all over again. To escape them, I lay down beside him.
‘Just one moment,’ he said. He swung his muscled legs off the bed, strode across the floor and threw open the portal.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘The heating is overpowering,’ he said.
‘But your sister might come in. Is she in the house?’ I asked.
He ignored me.
I asked him to touch me the way I liked but he didn’t seem to understand. Perhaps the family who’d perfected his English didn’t talk about such matters. He worked on me for a minute or two his own way, but it was to prepare me for himself. Afterwards, I was only my disappointing self. Perhaps patience was required. But as I lay there I realised that the imposing room was silent in the way memories make rooms silent, so that there’s almost a whirring in the air of memories, on the other side of silence. Just beyond and above his face, itself a sculpture, was the patch of fresco that he’d have painted out. It depicted an angel, not an entire angel, just one angelic shoulder with one white wing jutting out. The shoulder was like his, the same sharp almost right angle, no gentle curvature down to the arms.
‘Was your great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather the model for the shoulder?’ I asked when he woke.
He corrected the number of greats, but that was all. When I shut my eyes again, I had an after-image of angel’s wings.
We made love for ten nights afterwards, always on the blue velvet under the snarling lions. We’d meet first, eat dinner in a little restaurant nearby, always the same restaurant, then we’d go to his house, always entering his room from the street door. We never went through the house from the other side, though every night the heating irritated him, he said, and he’d fling open the portal that was turning out to be no portal at all.
Once, during our lovemaking, it seemed to me that we were wrapped around with the angel’s wing. I tried to tell him this because it might be a sign, though I knew not of what, but he wasn’t interested in signs.
Each time, more and more, I saw the angel’s wing the way he seemed to, as something that added nothing to the city’s passion, just a dreary, drooping thing stuck on a shoulder in a desultory, almost sulky way, bereft of visible feathers, somewhat similar to the machine-like wings in da Vinci’s The Annunciation. But da Vinci, I remembered, had believed in the possibilities of angelic flight. When da Vinci was painting it, if his brush had wandered a little further, the wing might’ve become a helicopter. Whereas the artist employed by the great-great-great-great-great grandfather – I still couldn’t get right the number of greats – judging by the wing, believed in neither the flight of the soul nor angels. He’d been pleased, I could imagine, to have his model turn side on so he didn’t have to bother with a second wing. Perhaps his patron had required as much, not wishing his left shoulder to be immortalised. Perhaps that left shoulder had been wizened by an illness forgotten by us now, something that reminded the great aristocrat of his ordinariness. Perhaps it had been ruined in battle. However, the good shoulder could’ve supported a dozen magnificent wings. The painter seemed not to believe in wings, only in shoulders.
I asked, after one of our nights of love – still disappointing but I was still too polite to show it – if I could see the rest of the house.
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘To understand you more,’ I said.
There was a long pause.
‘My house,’ he paused again, ‘is irrelevant to us.’
I was comforted that he said Us. It kept me returning a little longer.
Perhaps I’ll achieve it next time, I said to myself, though by now I had no idea what ‘it’ was. I just seemed to be waiting like the room, without will or mind, waiting on the desires and needs of another. Nothing in my life had told me how to be other than someone who waits.
On the sixth night, over dinner, I asked the orange-eyed man what he did during the day.
‘I look after the library,’ he said.
‘Which library?’ I asked.
When he said nothing, I added that it might be one that the guide books had recommended.
‘My family’s library,’ he said. ‘My mother pays me to do this.’
I told him that I have a shelf full of books, old recipe books given to me by my customers – Keys to the Pantry, When Mother Lets Us Cook, A Cook Book of American Negro Recipes, Fine Old Dixie Recipes, Favourite Recipes of Famous Musicians, and a well-thumbed old Commonsense Cookery of my brother’s with a quaint emphasis on milky recipes for invalids and an underlying belief in the healing power of onions.
He said after another silence:
‘Our library is exclusively manuscripts. Illuminated manuscripts from the fourteenth century.’
On the seventh night I asked where his sister was. We were having dinner in the usual restaurant. I was comforted at how we’d developed a routine. At the mention of her, he became unexpectedly vivacious. He told me that she works, like me, in a restaurant – till well past midnight, he added quickly. She sleeps till lunch and then visits friends until she’s due at the restaurant.
Talking about her eased something in him. His skin glowed as if it had been basted. I wanted his vivacity to continue, so I tried to encourage more talk.
‘What does she do in the restaurant?’ I asked.
A wrong move. He paused. His willingness to talk ceased.
‘Women’s work,’ he said. ‘She feeds.’
I was curious to see and hear her, to observe what they’d both inherited from their grand ancestors.
‘Let’s go to her restaurant,’ I urged. ‘Tomorrow night?’
‘Perhaps I can’t find it,’ he said.
On the tenth night, from deep in the ancient house, I heard … what did I hear? Was it an ancestor, breathing so close? Was it the grandfather of the magnificently squared right shoulder? I held my breath, to hear again. But my lover contrarily didn’t hold his. He breathed heavily into my ear. He shouted in his orgasm, and subsided. Afterwards, there was only silence, the sound of a house settling into night.
‘Was it good for you?’ he asked.
He was always a man for the ceremonies.
He fell asleep before I could answer.
On the eleventh night, while I sat on the bed waiting for the taxi, I asked him:
‘Do you have a pet?
His orange eyes, as he lay on his blue velvet, swivelled to me.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Nothing at all?’ I asked.
‘Why these questions?’ he said irritably. But because the taxi took its time, he eventually answered:
‘My sister has a fish.’
He became animated.
‘It comes from the Red Sea, it’s called a lion fish, although it’s small and white. It has many flowing fins behind it, like trailing wings. In the Red Sea it would grow huge, but here in her small fish tank, it will never grow.’
‘Should you set it free?’ I asked.
He didn’t answer.
After a while, he added: ‘I bought it for her. Neither of us care about it. But that’s fine. She was offered a dog but I wouldn’t let her take it. It would possess her. Take her love away from me.’
I felt I was moving to the heart of the matter.
‘You’re very close, your sister and you?’
‘At times,’ he said.
Then tonight, on my twelfth night, after I’d lain down beside him, he turned to me and took off my watch. It had been my father’s watch, overly large on my wrist and with cranky angles that are always catching in things, and it needs winding every night, but I’d worn it since the day of his death. It times my life: when I get up, when I open up the restaurant, when we close it, when I sleep. I thought he would ask me about the watch, and then I could’ve told him at last something about my life, but he just pushed it under a cushion. I felt bereft.
He got up and strode to the portal. We were back to the usual ceremonies. Just then, the angel’s w
ing fluttered – no, that’s not possible, it was the fluttering of something else in the room, a movement that seemed like sound. My mind stood on its toes and pointed out at last what I should’ve seen all along – that the artist had painted such a poor, perfunctory wing because the great-great-whatever grandfather had had a fine shoulder but no soul, not even one perforated with emptiness like mine, and only a soul can support a wing.
At that moment, I stood too, and snatched at my clothes. They were tangled, turned upside down and inside out, and I buttoned them up wrongly but I didn’t care. I reached out to grab my father’s watch as I rang the taxi’s number on my own mobile.
‘Why?’ he asked, startled.
I pulled on my coat, grotesque with its bunched gloves bulging the pockets, and headed for the street door.
‘Why?’ he asked again.
‘The sound I heard was weeping.’
He said nothing.
‘It’s your sister!’ I said. I was only guessing, hoping I was wrong, but he blinked and as the orange lights momentarily dimmed, his spell over me broke.
‘Your sister is in the house. She’s been here every time.’
He had the grace to look down, twisting the royal blue coverlet between his fingers, holding on to it.
‘That’s why you picked me up.’
I wanted him to deny it, but his breathing seemed to quicken.
‘To torment her.’
He wasn’t someone to be accused.
‘Every summer,’ he said, louder than usual, ‘you tourists come here like pilgrims. Then you go home with nothing.’
‘You’ve done this before, many times, haven’t you?’ I said. ‘Picked up a woman, to torment your sister.’
I let myself out the street door.
‘You know why? Because there is nothing,’ he called after me. He repeated ‘nothing’ because it was important to have the last word.
By that hour the piazza was deserted except for the wind whisking ice-cream wrappers into the chilly air. The taxi lights illuminated the sleeping group of the beggar and his dogs wreathed in black plastic bags. I tucked money into one of them, and the mongrel, my favourite, opened an eye like a pleased old man, and wriggled its tail up and down, encouraged.