“Wherever the first train leaving the station takes me when I get there.”
“I always knew there was a fire somewhere under that cool surface,” Joe said. “Ciao, Ward. Take care.”
Warden packed a few clothes and told Irena he’d return at the end of the week to pick up the rest of his belongings. He considered making a plane reservation for home right then, but thought better of it. He scarcely had enough cash till next payday.
“I will look after your things for you,” Irena assured him.
On the way to the station Warden dropped in to see Andreo. The photographer was in the middle of a shoot, but he stopped when Warden entered.
“Take a break everybody,” he said.
The models broke their poses while Andreo led Warden to his desk. He picked up a large file-folder and opened it, papers falling onto the floor. Warden bent to pick them up.
“Leave them—we will always get more.” He gave Warden’s face an affectionate squeeze between his big hands. “How are you, my lovely boy?”
“Bene. Va bene, maestro.”
Warden looked down at the photographs. He saw himself in various outfits: a suit followed by a sweater and cotton trousers, then another suit, smiling and then pensive. His stance was confident, self-assured. The look drew the viewer in.
“Go ahead and say it,” Andreo told him. “They’re exquisite. Did I not tell you it was a face to fall in love with?”
Warden stared at his image. There was a naturalness and ease to the poses, as though he were contemplating the world from a pinnacle of potency on the other side of the page. Where others aggressed the camera, he acquiesced, drawing it in after him.
Andreo clasped the back of his neck. “And this, my beauty, is going to earn for you more praise than all the others combined.”
He turned over the final photograph. It was the beige suit. Warden stood in three-quarter profile, head turned toward the camera and the trumpet flying from his grasp.
“I tell you a secret,” Andreo said, eyeing the other models lounging around the studio. “You are my best model.”
“You’re my best photographer,” Warden said, grinning.
Andreo laughed. “I must get back to work now or they will become impatient with me,” he said, sniffing as though it were distasteful that a photographer should find his actions dictated by the whims of his models. “Next week I will have some work for you. Come and see me after this weekend.”
“I will. I’m going out of town for a few days. I’ll drop in when I return.”
In the station, he stood looking over the schedules in the same spot where he’d bid farewell to Valentino a few hours earlier. There was a train leaving for Florence in five minutes. He remembered Jimmy saying Florence was the most beautiful city in the world. He looked at a map. Not far south of Florence was Isola d’Elba, a small Mediterranean island Valentino claimed was his favourite vacation spot.
He bought his ticket and hurried back upstairs where the nose of an engine pushed against the loading dock. Thick greasy smoke rolled out among the wheels and giant gears. All along its length people were rushing to get on board, as though to do anything in Italy before the last minute might be a mistake or a sin. Faces peered out of every available window to watch the others clambering aboard or say farewell to those left behind.
A whistle blew. Warden slung his bag over his shoulder and hurried up the steps. Inside the car, the air was stifling. He walked along, peering into each compartment for an empty seat. Every spot was filled.
The passageways were clogged by people eating sandwiches and drinking beer. Most of the passengers were young, sitting knee-to-knee on the floor with an air of cheerful vagabondage. Warden lowered his knapsack and sat. A breeze from the open doorway between the cars provided the coolest relief he’d felt so far. Florence was just over three hours away.
13
Under the canopy of night, Florence glowed like a music box built with tiny bejewelled fingers. The sky stretched like a net covered in thousands of tiny fish, their scales winking and twitching to be free. With no schedule and no appointments to keep, Warden had a choice of any direction. He left the station and stumbled into the tourist quarter, losing himself amongst the noise and confusion of the merry-makers thronging the streets. His anger spent, he felt a little foolish for having run off. Still, he reasoned, he needed a break from Milan and Maura’s Models.
He looked around for an inexpensive hotel. Along steamy side streets, lamps flickered like pale blossoms on insubstantial walls. A bevy of teenaged girls sat perched on the steps of the first place he passed. One of them gave a low salivating whistle that attempted to pass for unbridled lust. He smiled and climbed the stairs past the refractory group, their heads turning to watch him. In the lobby an elderly signora looked him over as he came in, shaking her head.
“Finito,” she said, briskly sweeping both hands back and forth before he could speak.
“Grazie, signora,” Warden said with a nod.
The girls on the steps watched him come back out. “Finito!” cried several of them, mimicking the hand motions of the signora.
“You can share my room,” said a bold voice. This elicited several gasps and the shrill treble of pubescent giggling.
“Thanks. I’ll keep it in mind, but I’ll try down the street first,” Warden replied.
“They’re all finito,” one of the voices informed him. “All the school tours are in Florence this week. Next week it’s Rome.”
He watched their curious faces wearing too much make-up and smelling of heavy perfume, as if gentle breezes had stirred an odd nocturnal floral arrangement on the stairs.
“You wouldn’t like them anyway,” one of the girls said. “They all have midnight curfews.”
The group groaned with teenage rebellion. Warden thought of the Albergo Sirtori and its cardboard night latch.
“Well, we can’t have that,” he said. “Where do you suppose I can find a reasonable place without a curfew?”
“You can’t—the whole town’s full.”
“We told you that already,” someone chided.
“I forget things quickly,” Warden said, leaning against the railing. “Where are you young ladies from?”
“Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio,” several voices chimed at once.
“Where are you from?” asked the bold voice that had offered to share her room with him.
“Toronto.”
“That’s in Canada.”
“Say, you’ve been studying your geography.”
More giggles. Warden hoisted his pack onto his shoulder again.
“So you don’t think I can get a room anywhere?”
“No, but you can try.”
“I guess I’ll have to do that.”
“Good luck,” someone called as he headed back down the stairs.
They’d told the truth, at least about the hotels in that neighbourhood. They were all full. As he wandered in search of a vacancy it was fast approaching curfew and he knew with a house full of school children the suspicious signore would be reluctant to open their doors to him.
The “No Vacancy” signs began to thin out as he approached a well-lit pedestrian concourse. Crowds had gathered on corners around street performers. Mimes clowned and light-soled dancers moved as though walking on air. At one walkway, a fire-eater’s flames stopped foot traffic for the duration of his act. The air snapped with spontaneous applause. Coins flashed into inverted hats and open guitar cases like wishing wells set on the ground in front of the performers.
Warden walked till he came to an empty piazza. He sat on the stone steps and looked at his watch. It was past midnight. A man approached from the far end of the square, flickering in and out of the shadows, his movements a slow-motion film of barely completed actions. He stopped to light a cigarette then crept up to where Warden sat.
“Hello, Yankee-boy,” he said softly, glancing around as though afraid of being overheard.
“I’m not a Yanke
e,” Warden said out of habit. “I’m Canadian.”
“You are looking lost,” the man said.
“I’d believe it.”
He seemed to take this for encouragement.
“Why are you out here so late?” he asked. “I thought all good Yankee-boys had to be home in bed at this hour.”
“I just got into town,” Warden said. “I’m looking for a place to sleep.”
“Yes, I am thinking so,” the man said, peering at him from the shadows. He came closer, smiling. His teeth were rotting and stained, his face old and wrinkled. He held out a hand. “You can to sleep with me,” he said softly. “I will pay. How much are you?”
Startled, Warden looked up. “I’m not for sale,” he said.
“That is too bad,” the man said, laughing and sloughing off his refusal with a gesture reminiscent of the hotel keeper’s “finito.” “You would be beautiful to sleep with.”
“Do you know of any parks near here?”
“Parks?” the man said, a quizzical tone in his voice.
“Parchi.”
“Ah, si! Yes, I know—there is the Piazzale Michelangelo. Why do you want to know where is the park?”
“I need somewhere to sleep,” Warden said, wishing the man would leave.
“You would be better to sleeping with me,” he said. “In a nice, soft bed where I can touch your smooth skin.”
Warden shook his head. The man shrugged.
“Is no problem—the park is that way, across the Ponte Vecchio,” he said, slipping back into the shadows of the piazza.
Warden found the famous bridge stitched like a honeycomb of lights across the canal. A few vendors’ booths remained open with their exhibitions of silk and jewellery for curious tourists who marvelled at having found a real structure in the shimmering apparition.
On the far side, he found the park entrance guarded by a single-tiered tower and followed the path upward in darkness. An occasional car passed, slowing as the glare of the headlights picked out his figure. A stream splashed noisily over the face of unseen stonework as the road wound upward. Finally, the sky opened to admit him to a flat summit where he found himself overlooking the city, a chimera of lights engulfed by darkness.
A series of trident lamps marked the edge of a piazza laid out with marble benches. He chose one, putting his pack under his head and lying back on the smooth surface. Sounds came to him over the wind like fragmented radio waves, uniting finally into the strains of Guantanamera. Somewhere in the distance some homesick Cubanos were singing of their lost land across the sea.
The curious stars faded above and he fell asleep, waking occasionally to rub away an annoying mosquito. Some time before dawn he woke thoroughly chilled. The temperature had dropped considerably. His watch read a few minutes past five. Even the mosquitoes had left him alone. He shivered as he brought out a sweater from his pack and pulled it on over his head.
A chocolate bar tucked into one of the sleeves fell to the ground. He picked it up and tore it open hungrily, thinking of food for the first time since he got off the train. The only sound was his breathing. He looked up at the statue hovering above, which he’d earlier failed to recognize as a replica of Michelangelo’s David, the body green and weathered with time. No wonder Italians were so unabashed, he mused, looking up at its giant musculature and remembering Valentino’s boldness.
A shadow came slinking toward him, a dog or perhaps a wolf. He didn’t know whether there were wolves in Italy. It slid along, nose to the ground, guided more by smell than sight. The creature sniffed its way toward him then froze as it sensed his presence, trying to pierce the darkness to discover what other life form was sharing its hilltop kingdom uninvited that morning. Warden bit off a piece of chocolate and threw it to the creature.
“Here you go,” he said softly.
It sniffed suspiciously at the offering before accepting it, then slithered back into the shadows.
When he woke again his watch read 7:30. The air was warm once more. He sat up and looked east where a red glow had caught hold, snaking along the river whose banks he’d followed to the park the night before. Now he saw Florence for the first time by daylight, a jazzy mosaic of red tile roofs and white sand walls surrounded by blue skies. Small gold domes glittered in the hazy distance and palm trees fleshed out the streets as though he’d gone too far south and hit Morocco. It was a city of sublime if earthly beauty, shaped with the reverence of a sacred engraving from some medieval text and ringed round by illusory-looking mountains. These seemed connected more to the clouds than the earth, a giant grazing herd of cattle that at any moment might pick up and move on. In the centre of it all, rising above sleeping houses in cathedralic resplendence, sat the great cap of the Duomo, chaste and sunlit, gleaming in the morning light like the unimaginable eye of God.
Warden made his way back to the city, already thronging with tourists. There he found a café and went in for breakfast. When he was finished he asked directions to the Accademia di Belle Arti, home to the real Michelangelo’s David. He cut across the tourist section, whose deep shadows and narrow streets strangely reminded him of home, and found the gallery.
While Copernicus was discovering the universe and Columbus the new world, Michelangelo Buonarotti was discovering the perfection of human form in an older world, achieving the consummate blending of classical antiquity and nature, the one becoming the measure of the other. Inside the academy, Warden stood before the statue of cool Florentine beauty, his hair dishevelled and pack slung over one shoulder in unconscious imitation of its massive musculature. Two teenaged girls, noticing the statue’s fleshly counterpart, nudged one another and giggled. Others were silent, moved by the marble contours as though finding themselves in the presence of something beyond ordinary comprehension. The statue’s gaze doubled them back, liars with sunglasses and cameras, as they stood mutely before it.
When he’d seen enough, Warden made his way back to the train station feeling very much alone. Something was missing: he wanted to be sharing all of this with Valentino. He’d already decided not to spend another night in the unreal beauty of the city, leaving the park to the dog and the homesick Cubans.
In a public washroom, he was startled by his reflection in the mirror. His locks had turned into dense vines curling around his temples while his face was streaked and coated with the dust of a long day and night under the stars. His clothes were creased and wrinkled from the knapsack he carried them in. He thought with amusement of the fastidious look of horror that would overcome Sr. Calvino if he could see his young protégé now.
14
The hills of Florence slid past with the pale resonance of an apparition. Resisting the temptation to think how tenuous his life was at the moment, Warden drifted off to sleep, lulled by the dull chugging of the train wheels. He woke to a porter shaking his shoulder to let him know his destination was approaching. In the seat across from him, two women who had not been there earlier sat grinning behind their hands to conceal their amusement. One of them said something in Italian.
“Cosa?” he asked.
She made a noise to indicate he’d been snoring.
“Capisco,” he said, smiling.
The train slowed as it approached a handful of buildings clustered around a dock. A dozen passengers got off carrying bags and luggage. They all made their way to a ferry, the only boat in sight. As soon as they boarded the vessel embarked. Two hours later they were moored at the base of the sloping black hills of Isola d’Elba.
Warden caught a bus that carried him into the mountains across terrain as beautiful as it was unfriendly, up to a height where he could see falling all around him the dark edges of the tiny continent-world spreading out to the sea. As they descended again, the driver pointed out a villa where the deposed Napoleon had once lived under house arrest. Red tile roofs were surrounded by lush gardens. It couldn’t have been such a terrible existence, Warden thought, even if he’d exchanged an empire for this quiet anonymous villa.
The bus stopped at a place where six or seven meandering routes converged. Warden got off, knapsack in hand, and walked along a beach where dozens of masts were tethered in green water. A nearby campground swelled with the colourful movements of canvas tents. At the far end of a horseshoe-shaped bay lay the town of Marina di Campo, outlined by a sliver of sand caught between the sea and the mountains.
Warden followed the boardwalk to a café. Once again hours had passed since his last meal. He sat at a table overlooking the beach, feeling dirty and dishevelled. In the distance, the white jet currents of boats spread out like ghostly ribbons. Lights were beginning to come on around the bay as the sun sent a cascade of rays over the hills.
In the evening, he strolled among tourists in airy white linen like picture postcards approaching and dissolving in the sweet distance of evening. In cafés and along the shore people sat drinking a translucent turquoise liquor. He bought a wedge of watermelon from a stand near the beach and wandered across the sand.
In the centre of the darkened beach a building sat like a burning vessel, light and sound spilling through open windows and echoing from its porches. Smiles greeted him like flung confetti as he entered. The music blaring from the loudspeakers was a familiar collection of pop tunes. He felt as though he’d come home. Three identical-looking blonde boys leaned on a wooden railing, the picture of Aryan youth. The middle one saluted him, raising his beer. He shouted across the bar asking if he were “Deutsch.” Warden shook his head as the young man approached.
“What are you then?” the boy asked in English.
“Canadian,” Warden said. “But one of my grandfathers was German.”
“Yes, you are one of us,” said the boy, identifying him with their particular aesthetic.
A Cage of Bones Page 11