This isn’t you.
Where are you?
Look at you.
As their actions become more extreme, they’re accused of being sick. But they don’t try to appear normal and do not trust those people who attempt to change their habits. Priests cannot preach it, Angela says. They do not understand what they preach. They babble. And, in truth, their behavior must have been celebrated—what is recorded is not evidence of illness but proof of saintliness.
Stop watching me, I’d said to my sister. But I was asking for witnesses all the time. Was it just about the audience? How do you cut so close to the bone? They were a part of it at the beginning, before it became something else. Something with teeth in it.
When I stopped eating, I didn’t have any of the illuminations, understandings, or visions that the mystics describe; I didn’t feel a connection to God. But I had something not altogether different, something that I didn’t want anyone to see because it was mine alone, and that I didn’t want to talk about because I didn’t have the words to describe it. I know more, I see more; you don’t know, you don’t see. You just had to know it, and they couldn’t possibly know it. This vision is not tangible or imaginable, St. Angela writes, but something ineffable.
While not every saint was celebrated in her lifetime, each woman who entered that celebrated state—Catherine or Clare or Margaret—inevitably gained followers, cults and convents springing up in her wake as women, young and old, flooded the cloistered communities or practiced in the clandestine privacy of their own homes, in Genoa or Mantua or Perugia, the miraculous behaviors and rituals for which the mystic had become known. Few might ultimately wear the mantle of saint, but there were hundreds trying to inhabit that sacred space, and so the rituals, behaviors, and practices—from Angela in the thirteenth century to Maria Maddalena in the sixteenth century—gained traction and spread, fast as an epidemic.
All week the saints circle my thoughts, informing my memories and insinuating themselves into my dreams. In the evenings, I row, but I don’t see anyone I know, and without the reality of conversation, there are only their voices. Even when Luca calls one night, I have trouble connecting—his voice sounds far away and my own, unfamiliar, and I remember that feeling of disappearing, when all other voices became distant until there was only one voice, urging me forward, prodding me on.
And then there are the reminders. They are everywhere in Florence. In the streets named for these women, in the bells that ring continually on the hour and half hour, in anything that catches my eye and drags my gaze up. In the mornings, I take a longer route to pass the church where Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi practiced. The tall gates of the adjoining convent are closed as always, and I stop to look up at its walls. It was here, in this place, that she starved herself to death. And she was not alone. Fragmented references to food appear throughout the accounts, tossed off casually as a part of the denial of earthly things, riches and sustenance given equal weight. We must fast every day except Sundays, St. Clare says when establishing her order. My delights have heretofore been bodily and vile, because I am a body—St. Angela. And always the gap between the denial of food and the experience of ecstasy. Some confessors suggest that meals simply slipped their minds. She forgot to eat and drink, as if her spirit did not exist in her corporeal body. That phrase again: I forgot to eat. But there is more to it. Their fasting is not weak or forgetful—it is an all-out war. Let the tongue of the flesh be silent when I seek to express my love for you, St. Clare cries in a moment of ecstasy. Strip yourself of self, St. Catherine demands. Do not ask me to give in to this body of mine, St. Margaret pleads when urged to eat. Between me and my body there must be a struggle until death.
Of all the mystics living in Italy in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, most denied themselves food, and many spent portions of their lives bedridden and died of the complications of malnourishment. Only Catherine of Genoa avoided extreme fasting, and she became famous for her insatiable appetite.
My rituals. What I ate, when I ate, counting and categorizing, teasing apart a plate to pull out the acceptable bits, returning to one of the many bathrooms when they became unacceptable. I built my day around these rituals, cut loose any plans that interfered. By June, I no longer accepted invitations to meals, but soon anything in the evening was out because I grew exhausted immediately, could not hold my wine, could not hold my attention, could not keep defending myself—I forgot to eat—against questions and suggestions.
I was seeing, still, this doctor. Handing over my journal with its too-spare lists, knowing she would say, You can’t forget. So I edited, padded the entries with items that I surely would have eaten if I hadn’t forgotten to eat. In this way, I believed that the account was honest.
Still she said, “It isn’t enough.” Over her shoulder, the parade of healed girls smiled at me as she prescribed one can a day of liquid supplement, a sweet, viscous substance that tasted of metal when I took it as a single shot, pouring it into my throat without thinking, wanting to gag it back up but keeping it down. She congratulated me on this, on keeping it down, as though it were a triumph. It wasn’t a triumph. It was a defeat. It forced a crack in the balance; it threatened to topple the whole.
“It’s good,” she said.
I didn’t trust her. I didn’t trust her or her vats of liquid or her waiting room filled with younger women who had nothing to do with me. She was trying to bury me with her labels, to trap me with her words. But she was speaking the wrong language. In the end, all she did was disrupt my rituals—counting and categorizing, dividing the day into consumption and expulsion, dividing my body into parts I could look at. These were the things she didn’t understand. This was where I put my faith.
By July, I’d stopped seeing this doctor. I collected my severance. I made my own plan. I left her behind with everyone else.
“Scusami, Hannah.” Friday morning. I’m on the phone with Luca, who is canceling our plans. Because I’ve been so distant? But he says, “I must go to Arezzo, to visit my father. He is not well.”
“Will he be all right?”
“Sì, sì,” he says, but he doesn’t sound certain and he continues speaking quickly. “Allora, I return tomorrow. I meet you at the canottieri? Scusami ancora, Hannah.”
I nod into the phone before I say, “Of course. It’s no problem,” because it isn’t his fault that I have no one else, and I realize how dependent I was on seeing him now that I can’t. I call Peter but there’s no answer, so I leave a message inviting him to join me at Piazzale Michelangelo this evening. “And Pam as well,” I add.
The day passes slowly. The sun is out and only two people, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, visit the library. I’ve finished the work Lorenza left for me, so I’m reading St. Angela’s letters, which are filled with love, the eroticism of her language so common to these women. The Word entered into me and touched me throughout and embraced me, saying, “Come, my love, my bride.” In one of the oddest visions, she is in a sepulcher with Christ. She kisses him, places her cheek on his. He, in turn, placed his hand on her other cheek, pressing her closely to him. I close my eyes, try to understand the comfort that such a morbid image could provide. It makes me feel my solitude more acutely. No word from Peter. Luca gone. I slip the book into my bag and decide to make an evening of it on my own.
I’m planning on going to the canottieri but it begins to drizzle. It isn’t the right weather, either, for Piazzale Michelangelo, set up on a hill. But maybe the rain will let up in time for sunset. I stop at a bar in the meantime, where I drink a glass of wine and continue to read about Angela’s experience with love, which is inseparable from suffering. Love took the form of a sickle. But her suffering is not bodily. It is the pain of stretching away from the earth and from herself to arrive at that moment of ecstasy, which, once experienced, produces its own pain—the anguish of leaving that heightened state, of returning to the earth, to the body. Then the pain of having known that pleasure and living perp
etually in its echo. I am continually in this state. But that isn’t right. To be always in that state is the wish—the reality is something other, something that leaves her wanting. She was filled with love and inestimable satiety, which, although it satiated, generated at the same time inestimable hunger.
I watch as the rain grows lighter and lighter, until it is only a mist and people return to the street. It is Friday evening and I am alone, but now I don’t let the melancholy take hold. I finish my wine and then walk along the river for a ways, the storefronts becoming residential and the street growing quieter, until I reach the steeply ramped steps that curl up to the overlook that is Piazzale Michelangelo. As I climb, I pause at each level and watch the city grow smaller, farther away, comprehensible.
When I make it to the top, it is almost sunset and the piazza is full. The romance has not been lost on the visitors or the locals, who line the perimeter to look out over the city. There is an openair café that I know will be overpriced, but I sit down at one of the small tables. The waitress arrives immediately to wipe away the remaining raindrops. I order a wine—and why not?—and then watch as the sun sinks and couples frantically pose and re-pose for the kind stranger to whom they have handed their camera, hoping to capture, really capture, the light of this moment, the reality of their love. I look down at the city, where the forms of the buildings fade until it is too dark to make out the disparate colors but too bright for the lights to break through. One of the people by the wall looks like Luca in profile and my heart catches. It isn’t him, but once I think it, I imagine him everywhere in this city with another woman—maybe the one who had broken his heart before, now returned—the convenient excuse of a sick father keeping me oblivious. I remember then his description of his ex’s irrational jealousy. Is that the type of woman he attracts? Is that the type of woman I am? There is nothing in the world that I hold as suspect as love, St. Angela said, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing, and as another passing figure becomes Luca, I begin to suspect love as well, or at least my decision to open myself up to anything like it.
I order another drink, but when it arrives, it looks daunting. What was I thinking? I’ll just finish this drink slowly, very slowly, and then go. I pull the candle closer, returning to St. Angela’s experience with love, which is really a continuous cycle of elation and pain that leaves her entirely full or entirely empty, and when she is empty, her only desire is to suffer enough to return to that place of satiation. I will leave you in such great love of Me, she is told by God, that your soul will always burn with it. It echoes and echoes and echoes. He withdrew so very gently and so very gradually. I lost then that Love that I bore in myself.
“Hannah, you’re freezing,” Julian said our last night together. The radiator clanked and clanked as though there were a small drummer boy at the heart of it. We were on the cusp of May, but it felt like winter, as it always did to me then. I kept trying to wind the covers around us, to lower the goose bumps that covered my body, to warm my legs, my arms, my lips, my heart, which felt full but also numb, too tender then, like my nerves, too raw.
Even as Julian pulled me into him and I could feel the heat coming off him, I felt cold, unable to absorb, even, his physical warmth. We touched and kissed, and I tried to stay with him, but my mind kept drifting.
“Where are you?” Julian asked, because he could tell.
Still I kept returning to my ever-growing list—everything I’d eaten, which was more today in an attempt to keep myself from unraveling—to Julian’s bathroom, which was just off his bedroom, too close, and so I would remain heavy tonight. I tried to stay with him. I could see him seeing me, could see him touching me, and when I looked down at my new valleys, I felt surprised, happily so. I took it in as someone might a painting, before I was drawn back to the heaviness in me, and then to that other being always with me now.
“Where are you, Hannah?” he asked again, and I grew more aggressive to compensate, kissed with force, moved with force on top of him, as if to say, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here, willing it to hurt just to feel—I never orgasmed anymore, my body refused, and I felt empty even as I moved violently so that he might feel my pain until he cried out into the darkness.
I could not imagine a death vile enough to match my desire, St. Angela writes. But it wasn’t Julian that filled me and emptied me. It was that other thing that I clutched close. I loved it and it hurt me. Both were true. But had I loved it because it hurt me? I don’t know. But I understand the profound joy and loss in Angela’s plea: Who would not be set afire with such love? What heart could keep from breaking?
It is almost dark when I hear my name. I look up through the fog of alcohol to find Peter crossing the piazza, his light coat bright and bleeding into the air around him.
“I just got your message,” he says, taking a seat. “This is nice. Romantic.”
Again the waitress appears immediately.
“Whisky con ghiaccio,” Peter says quickly. He looks different, hardened, as though there are more edges to him—in his face, in his voice—and his eyes shift side to side.
“I’m glad you came,” I say, once we’re alone.
It takes Peter a moment to process this and I wonder if he’s heard me at all. “Oh, yeah.”
I ask him about his classes and he shrugs. So I tell him about the reading that I’ve been doing, describing in some detail the history of the mystics, their language, things that would normally interest him, and it feels good to be sharing them with someone, especially him, but he doesn’t pick up any of the threads, just swirls his drink and lets me speak, his eyes still shifting, shuffling down the figures on the wall, and I wonder if he’s looking for someone, too. Below us, Florence is blazing now, a sea of lights swimming around towers and domes, the Palazzo Vecchio a great ship sailing toward the Arno. Peter looks down to the lit city, up to the lit sky, before interrupting me.
“Have you spoken with Francesca at all?” he asks, having waited what must have seemed the appropriate amount of time. He’s on a mission. It is the reason he has come to meet me.
“At the festival last weekend—you were there, remember?”
“Oh, right, so you met him then, too.”
“Marco? Yes.”
Peter almost visibly flinches at the name. “He’s arrogant, don’t you think? He completely ignores her. How could anyone ignore her?” He pauses, perhaps waiting for validation.
“I don’t know, Peter,” I sigh. I think I see Luca again, this time in the figure of a man in the distance who becomes a woman when she passes our table.
“It’s messed up. Why would she marry someone like that? God, it drives me crazy.”
“Neither of them seems happy.” I pause. “But we don’t know the whole story. We don’t know anything.”
“Well, I know he’s a prick.” His voice is too loud, the word doesn’t belong to him, and his face twists up like a small child’s, rage rooted in disappointment. “And if you heard what Francesca had to say about him, Hannah, you wouldn’t be defending him. Trust me.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
But he keeps going, laying out the charges against Marco, one after another. Then he moves on to Francesca’s in-laws, their friends, the men at the club, everyone who has wronged her, ignored her, misunderstood her—and who am I to say they haven’t? He could be right. Of course he could be. I’ve heard the men at the club; I understand the problems of being a woman here—up on a pedestal one moment, up on a stake the next. Peter could be right about all of it. And still it wouldn’t change the fact that he’s coming apart in front of me. I keep nodding, waiting for a break in the stream of spite. I remember my meal with Claudia so many months ago. You have a problem. I put my hand on Peter’s—he tenses but lets it rest there.
“I’m not defending him,” I say, trying to bring us back to center, to this table, to this night, which is suddenly and speedily unraveling. The alcohol is wearing off, my head is clearing, and, for a moment, I t
hink that I can do it, can pull him out of the clotted sludge, can balance us both. “All I meant is that we don’t know the whole story.”
Peter pulls his hand away. “She’s right,” he says pointedly. “You can’t trust Italian men. You should be careful.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Aren’t you dating one of the guys?”
“Who told you that?” I’m angry, even as I can feel myself taking his warning to heart.
“Francesca said—”
“Francesca doesn’t know anything about me,” I say sharply, and Peter seems to see me for the first time since he sat down. He remains silent.
I drop my voice. “I’m sorry, but she doesn’t. She’s an unhappy woman in an unhappy marriage. I’m not surprised that she doesn’t trust anyone but that doesn’t have anything to do with me. I’m sorry I snapped at you—I don’t like being talked about.”
“You really think her marriage is unhappy?” He’s heard nothing else.
“Yes, I think she’s unhappy. And I feel badly for her. But I’m not sure anyone is in a position to fix it,” I say. “The night of the festival, when you saw her?”
He nods, leaning in so as not to miss a word, looking in his eagerness so young again.
“She disappeared for a long time and then she left dramatically. It was strange. And, yes, I think Marco could be more attentive, but there’s more to it, Peter. She was making a statement. She practically announced that she was going to see someone else. You, I assume.”
Peter looks confused, so I add, “She said she was going home to her daughter, though. I’m sure she was only making a point.”
“She won’t talk to me,” he says then. “But that’s typical, right? I mean of someone in an abusive relationship. She can’t help it.” He drains his drink in a gulp and sets down the glass hard enough that the couple at the next table looks over.
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