Perhaps she might imitate the custom of the ancient Egyptians who sheathed their sacred cat mummies in linen. From her closet she retrieved a grocery store box stuffed with remnants of ragged cotton T-shirts and torn sheets. With scissors she cut into strips a sheet decorated with faded pink and green tulips, and wrapped the strips around the carcass. She placed the corpse back in the sweater box bottom and set the top over the bottom. What to do next? Animal Control charged $50 to pick up a corpse. There was no open ground in which to bury it. Between the apartment building and the city sidewalk was a narrow dirt bed planted with hydrangeas. That would hardly do. She secured the make-do coffin with masking tape, wrapped it in a plastic bag, and lowered it into the dumpster in the alley behind her building. The cavernous bin was half-filled with plastic bags reeking of rot and buzzing with flies.
She slammed down the lid of the dumpster. “Rest in peace, pretty kitty. In a dumpster I found you, and in this dumpster I lay you to rest.”
On Monday morning, she woke to the sounds of the refuse truck clanging through the alley. The red numerals of her bedside clock read 8:00. But how could that be? She never slept past 5:30. Where was Puff? He always woke her by jumping on her feet and nibbling on her toes. She moaned, remembering that he would never play with her ever again.
She showered and dressed. There was no problem deciding what to wear. Her wardrobe was straightforward and efficient: two black wool skirts, four cream polyester blouses and three black polyester sweaters, all plucked from the mishmash of the racks at Ross. Her two identical pairs of black leather low-heeled shoes had been so often resoled by Avedick the Armenian cobbler that he could probably send his beloved grandchild to private school for at least a week on the ten-dollar bills she had handed over the counter in his shop reeking of leather and machinery oil.
She walked several blocks to wait for the bus. Shiny late model automobiles whizzed by on Pico Boulevard. She stood apart from her fellows. Two tiny gray-haired Chinese ladies stood arm-in-arm, whispering to each other. A middle-aged Filipina in a nurse’s uniform read the Los Angeles Asian Journal. A teenage girl held on to the hand of a four-year-old boy. His black eyes sparkled with mischief as he wriggled in her grasp. She scolded him in Spanish. Growing up, Nancy had seen only people like herself, who spoke a midwestern American English in the flat affect of the heartland. Over these many years, she had grown accustomed to the bewildering ethnic mix. But this morning, the babble of many tongues and the roar and fumes of the cars exasperated her.
She arrived at the office at eleven. She rode the wood-paneled elevator to the thirtieth floor, and sneaked through the back door to her cubicle. Her e-mail inbox held ten new assignments with deadlines marked urgent. At noon, the office emptied. She pulled out a small plastic bag packed with her lunch. She sat alone, nibbling on a tuna salad sandwich, yogurt and a brownie baked from Jiffy mix. The raucous laughter of coworkers returning from their restaurant meals unsettled her. During elementary school recesses, she had sat by herself on the edge of the schoolyard while the others disappeared, giggling and whispering secrets as they skipped off to dribble away their nickels on candy and gum at Sam’s, the corner grocery.
The week whizzed by, a blur in many identical weeks.
On the following Saturday afternoon, she lay on her sofa, reading a book checked out from the library, titled Asset Allocation. “Chapter 9, Portfolio Optimization.” Her lips puckered, and she began to weep. Softly, quietly at first. Then hysteria roiled over her. How was she going to make it through this empty weekend? The hours stretched before her, with no Puff to amuse her. The break with Susie was complete. She hardly knew her neighbors. The office was a snake pit of gossip and backbiting. She was utterly alone. Of course she could always move back to Shawneeville, to that tribe of stolid peasants whose thoughts never soared, who could not imagine anything beyond the daily monotony of life in their bland cookie-cutter bungalows. By now her seven nieces and nephews had produced a gaggle of fifteen snot-nosed children splashing barefoot in Chickasaw Creek. In all these years she had visited only twice. She knew her family through occasional photos, her three siblings already proud grandparents, her shriveled father wheelchair-bound, her white-haired mother hobbling about with a cane.
How was she going to make it through the rest of her life? The pent-up loneliness of all these years of exile swelled into her body. She was weary, beaten down by the cramped habit of thrift. But there was no alternative. Those protective money dragons, the fierce guardians of her frugality, had turned on her. She was trapped inside a cave of fear with those monsters barring the entrance.
She said aloud, “It’s not fair. Why doesn’t anyone ever help me? Why am I so alone?”
A jet airplane droned overhead. A dog howled nearby, and another smaller dog began to yip, but no voice answered her.
Galileo’s Finger
ON A GRAY NOVEMBER MORNING in 1979, Louise Stark, a plump American woman in her late thirties, stood shivering in a gallery in a museum in Florence, Italy. In her hands she clutched a decades-old Baedeker guide bought in a used bookstore in Chicago and a leather notebook with a Bic ballpoint pen clasped to the cover. Her frizzy auburn hair glistened with water droplets. A large wool paisley scarf was draped around her shoulders.
She had found the rusticated stone Romanesque building only by meandering around for almost an hour near the Palazzo Uffizi, up one narrow vicolo and down another. Morning mist had turned to a light rain. In a cloakroom near the entrance, an old woman dressed in black hunched down behind a marble counter. The poor dear, Louise thought, as she handed over a five thousand lira bill, and waved away the proffer of change. The woman smiled, revealing toothless gums, took Louise’s damp umbrella and raincoat and placed them somewhere below the counter. She mumbled “grazie, grazie” and waved Louise inside, toward the gloom of the vestibule.
Louise trudged up a staircase of endless stone steps, to the primo piano, all the while puzzling over the word “primo.” After all, it was really the second floor, and from the street it appeared at least four stories high. She walked into a room to the right of the landing. She propped her leather saddlebag against the wall, removed from it the Baedeker guide and the notebook and pen, and began to circle the room, studying the objects on display. A curious glass egg attracted her attention. The egg was mounted on an alabaster base. Around its middle was a ring of gold filigree that covered a hinge so that the top and bottom must pull apart like a clamshell. The base was inscribed with rhymed verses in praise of Galileo Galilei. At first she thought that a centuries-old fetus rested inside the glass egg.
Was the great man also an anatomist?
She studied a faded label, and translated the Italian as best she could. The object was Galileo’s right middle finger bone. His bones had been exhumed and reburied inside an elaborate monument at the Church of Santa Croce in 1737, almost one hundred years after his death. A certain Signor Gori, overcome with admiration for his hero, had detached the finger bone and placed it in this ciborium to be revered generation to generation. And then, fifty years ago, the Italian authorities had moved the ciborium to its present resting place in this room.
Galileo’s Finger rested in the glass egg and dreamed of the years of glory. It had released cannonballs from the top of the campanile in the Square of Miracles in Pisa while the crowds buzzed with excitement seven stories below. It had manipulated the lens into the telescope that first magnified the moons of Jupiter. It had gestured to the Inquisition judges as the scholar defended his theories.
The Finger had long imagined release from Its glass casket, and ecstatic reunion with the spirit of Its master. But It had no opportunity to escape. Most guidebooks did not even see fit to mention the museum. An occasional solitary tourist drifted through the musty rooms, respectful but bewildered by the jumble of astrolabes and lodestones. Only a half dozen visitors in the last ten years had caught sight of the Finger. Invariably the traveler would gasp, and whistle in fascination or disgust. The
Finger determined with all the strength of Its mind-force that the next pilgrim who lingered near the glass must, and would, be the vehicle of Its rescue.
And now, sixteen months later, Louise had appeared.
She screwed up her face, concentrating on the object, trying to understand.
“Unbelievable,” she said.
She had grown accustomed to the bones of saints set in jeweled reliquaries in the treasuries of the churches. The closer to Rome the bigger the bones. But the preservation of Galileo’s Finger seemed a singular paradox, since his heresies had so disturbed the Church. Was the father of modern science now regarded as a saint with his finger on display for the faithful to venerate?
She stared at the Finger. In these last three weeks, a kind of traveler’s fatigue had set in. She could no longer focus on the history of the city-states, on the names of the churches or the painters of the frescoes. The historical epochs were a muddle. Why had the Guelphs battled the Guibellines, and by how many centuries had the Etruscans antedated the Romans? She could not remember.
In her exhausted trance, it seemed to her that the Finger began to communicate. It did not speak out loud. All was silent save for the metronomic ticking of a humidity control device. But she distinctly heard Its urgent message.
“Luisa, bellissima Inglese, you are a lovely American girl. You have a romanzo with the language and culture of Italia, with the soil of our fathers and the rose garlands of our mothers.”
The baritone voice spoke in English with the aristocratic intonation of Professore Cosimo Ficino. Last January, she had braved the sub zero temperature to hear him lecture on ‘The Harmony of the Spheres in Botticelli’s Goddesses’ at the Art Institute of Chicago.
“Do not be alarmed. Per favore, pick up this glass prison and rescue me. I wish to be buried in the soil near Arcetri where my blind master lived out his melancholic final days. I desire to decompose naturally and return to the earth. I do not want to be forever on exhibit in this orb, reverenced by my countrymen and mocked by foreigners.”
Louise was by now tapping one short pink manicured fingernail on the notebook and fidgeting with the pen. She studied her own middle finger and wondered if some zealous Italian priest or government functionary might sever it. No, because she was an obscure American paralegal with neither saintly nor scientific predilections or accomplishments.
The voice of the Finger unnerved her. The rules of host country protocol had been breached broadside. A frugal traveler in possession of a blank journal and delusions of poetic talent relished the thousand discomforts that became the stuff of novels: maddening slow rides in bare third class railway cars; flea-infested beds in pensiones with Cararra marble floors; swarms of gypsy children in the Rome train terminal; the gelatinous eyes of a grilled fish on a dinner plate in Venice. But even the most intrepid tourist never expected to be accosted by a finger of a historical figure dead almost four centuries.
She stared at the Finger for several more seconds, and then she panicked. She did not dare address It directly, but turned her head and spoke as if to a companion.
“I seem to be losing my mind. I must go back. It’s stifling in here.”
She grabbed the leather saddlebag and bolted toward the door, banging her hip against a shelf and knocking over a set of brass compasses. They clattered with an eerie tempo, faster, faster, dancing a tarantella until they fell silent, abruptly, as an Apulian peasant might collapse, bone-weary after the strenuous revels of a village wedding feast. The room was again quiet.
The Finger now cajoled and commanded.
“Bellissima, my gorgeous madonna, my pet, you must, you will pick up the glass. It will separate easily from the alabaster stand. Do not be disheartened. The task is elementary. Place the glass in your pouch, and walk past the entrance portal to the street. I will instruct you further. I will reward you with the wealthy lover of your fantasies.”
Louise shuddered. She glanced around, and peeked into the room beyond. Not a soul in sight, nor any sound of footsteps or voices. She snatched at the glass egg. It toppled off its alabaster base into her hands as if it had never been attached, and she almost dropped it. The glass was not heavy, and felt like the tiny bowl she owned as a girl, in which so many goldfish had perished from overfeeding. She wrapped it in her scarf and placed it inside the saddlebag. She ran out into the corridor, bounded down the stairs and sprinted pell-mell into the street.
The light rain had intensified into a steady drizzle. After a few moments her leather shoes were soaked with water. Only now did she recall that her raincoat and umbrella were inside the museum. She made an abrupt about face, almost falling as she slipped on the cobblestones. Her heart pounded as she re-entered the massive bronze front door and scuttled into the cloakroom. She set the saddlebag on the floor.
It seemed an eternity while she negotiated with the old woman. Her scant Italian failed her. She gesticulated with hand motions of pointing to sky and opening and closing. The woman scowled as she reached under the marble counter and produced the raincoat and umbrella. Louise fumbled with the sleeves of the raincoat as she jerked it over her body. She picked up the saddlebag and punched at the latch of the umbrella. As the aluminum ribs lurched and the mauve nylon canopy expanded she was already out the door, sloshing through deep puddles.
The street widened into a piazza. A tavola calda was directly opposite. She stamped her shoes and shook out the umbrella as she entered. The place was empty, save for a young girl with black eyes who stood behind the bar. Louise pointed to a glinting copper Cimbali espresso machine that covered half the wall. The girl approached the maws of the machine that whirred and shot thick black espresso into a white ceramic cup. She placed the cup on the counter. Louise stirred six lumps of sugar into the coffee. As she gulped down the hot sweet nectar she coughed, deep in her chest.
I must be catching a cold. But I simply can’t allow myself to be sick. I’m so far from home, and I have to figure out what to do with this dreadful thing.
She pointed yet again to the machine. Cradling a second cup of espresso in her hand she walked over to a small table in a far corner of the cafe. She placed the saddlebag on the table, and sat down, feeling for the glass egg nestled in the scarf. Her heart fluttered.
What a nightmare. I simply must get out of this strange land and back home before I go out of my mind. I’ll go to the Alitalia office at once. It will cost me an arm and a leg to change my flight. Geez, I’m up to my eyeballs in body parts. What should I do? Maybe I should return it. I feel so guilty. I’ve never even stolen a stick of chewing gum. But I can’t go back to that ghastly room or I might get arrested for shoplifting or stealing national treasures or God knows what else, and what if they throw me into the dungeons at Castel Sant’Angelo, like Cavaradossi, and they executed him by firing squad after he kissed Tosca goodbye, and he sang about her sweet hands, still alive, but then soon enough she leaped over the walls, only, oh dear, that’s not a good example because it’s only an opera and not real life.
Louise slammed both fists on the table and moaned. Yet again, came the coaxing voice of Galileo’s Finger as from a cavern deep inside the earth, although It was only just inside the saddlebag.
“Bellissima Luisa, do not despair, you are my sweet angel and you have almost completed your dangerous mission.”
Louise nibbled on her lower lip. She shouted at the bag. “Leave me alone, you monster. You’re hideous.” She glanced toward the espresso machine to see if the barista girl was watching. But the girl had disappeared somewhere.
“Do not be frightened, cara Luisa. You have undertaken this quest for the love of the unsurpassed culture of my beloved country. I know it is difficult for you and I have reconsidered. It is impossible for you to locate Arcetri because you dare not attempt a single syllable of conversational Italian although you have studied our excellent Dante so diligently while across the ocean.”
Louise frowned. “Now you’re insulting me. But you can’t talk to any living It
alians, either. I’m sure they would make fun of you.”
“Ah, I treasure you, principessa, and I do honor to your singular American work ethics.”
“I can’t believe I’m even talking to you. You’re only a stupid severed dead Finger.”
“Ah, my lovely one, listen to reason. It is an incontrovertible fact that you have no access to a motorcar, and even had you such access, our haphazard traffic petrifies you. I would rest contented if you would board the autobus to Fiesole and bury me in the hallowed ground of the Teatro Romano. My master often ambled there on spring afternoons, where he meditated and dreamed and changed the course of history.”
“No, no. I won’t go to Fiesole.”
“Cara Luisa, Fiesole is a gorgeous tourist attraction with a five star view much admired in your Guide Baedeker.”
“Forget it, you hideous creature, I won’t go back to Fiesole. Never, never. That’s final.”
“Melancholy remembrance of a prior visitation?” said the Finger.
“How did you guess? I walked there one Easter morning many years ago when I dreamed of becoming an art history professor before I married Andrew and he made me so miserable and nobody ever helped me and thank God he died or so help me I would’ve murdered him.”
Louise’s eyes were now filling with tears. She looked up. The girl again stood behind the counter, staring at her. Louise smiled, and pointed at her cup, as a sign to pour another. The girl shrugged and prepared another espresso in a clean cup. She placed the cup on the counter. Louise arose and retrieved it. She sat back down at the table with her back to the girl. Again the patrician voice, seductive, demanding.
“Listen to me, my precious girl. A wealthy man will desire you. You will live in a granite townhouse on North Dearborn, just as you always have fantasized.”
Curious Affairs Page 5