The Sixteen Pleasures

by Robert Hellenga

  “And you find it difficult?”

  “Molto difficile. The bishop is opposed to everything we’re trying to accomplish. It’s a very difficult situation. Fortunately I have some influential friends.”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant by ‘trying to accomplish.’ “What do you try to accomplish in a convent that a bishop would disapprove of?” I asked.

  “Oh, heavens!” She laughed. “Bishops have always disapproved of convents. They’re always meddling. They can’t leave us alone and never have been able to. Certain reforms in the order, to begin with, that would allow us greater self-governance. With regard to the habit, for example, which is unsuited to our present needs. Why should a group of men prescribe our dress for us? And that’s only a minor thing. We’re hemmed in in every way. We can’t celebrate the mass without a man. And what an old stick they send us.

  “But the main thing is our work. There’s a whole tradition of female spirituality and scholarship, too, that has been neglected for centuries. All the books have been written and edited by men. Or not written and not edited! Everything has been distorted, and doubly distorted, in the actions and in the record of the actions. Why were so many women driven to such extremes to defend their virginity? Why did they cling to it so desperately? Because the flesh is evil? No, it was so they could retain control over their bodies and their lives instead of handing them over to men. It was the only way. What were the alternatives? Marriage, years of childbirth, no right to own property. That’s why their virginity was so precious. But who has told their story truly? No one. And it’s all right here. Countless stories that no one found worth the telling. Lucia de’ Medici had the foresight and the means to collect everything she could find, and her relatives thought she was crazy. She wrote a book herself and no one would print it; she painted pictures and was treated like a freak. If she hadn’t been a Medici she would have been put in prison. She joined Santa Caterina so she could be free. And she frescoed the walls in the cloister. Where I first met you. You should spend more time there if you want to understand. And now that we’re starting to tell those stories, the bishop is up in arms. He’s threatened. It was only through the intervention of an old friend that Sister Chiara was able to receive the nihil obstat for her history of women in the early church. And now he wants to turn the whole library over to the monks at San Marco. O Dio . . .” She made the sign of the cross. “We have to be cunning as serpents, as well as innocent as doves.

  “But take a look at this without opening it, and tell me what you see,” she said. She handed me the book on her desk. (It had been interleaved with blotting paper to absorb moisture, but the embroidered binding, which had been damaged beyond repair, was damp and unpleasant to the touch.)

  I handled the book carefully. The title wasn’t legible but I could see that it was a prayer book—at least it looked like a prayer book—probably seventeenth century, in pretty bad shape. I said as much.

  “What else can you tell me about it?”

  “Embroidered book covers were popular items for the upper class from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. Usually they were for private devotional books or service books. They were more popular in France, Germany and England than in Italy, though some examples survive. The earliest examples come from the thirteenth century, generally embroidered by cloistered nuns.”

  “Now open the book.”

  I did so, tentatively, as if it were a box holding a snake or some sort of nasty insect, but the title was a standard one—I preghiere cristiane preparate da Santa Giuliana di Arezzo—and the contents familiar: a selection from the Roman Missal—the Office of the Dead, the Penitential Psalms and Litany, the Hours of the Cross and the Holy Ghost, and so on—followed by the personal prayers of the saint. I was relieved. Something that I had thought was going to be complicated had turned out to be simple. It was a shame, though, that the binding had been destroyed. The binding had probably been more valuable than the book itself.

  She took the book from me and let it fall open in her hands. “Look,” she said; “you see, two books have been bound together.”

  She moved her chair so I could see better; I slid mine around so that we were sitting side by side. She opened the book flat on the desk. I could see the second title page: I sonetti lussuriosi di Pietro Aretino. I translated lussuriosi as “sensuous,” to myself.

  “The practice of binding two books together,” I said, still speaking with the voice of authority, “was not altogether uncommon in the early Middle Ages but it would have been very unusual in the seventeenth century.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But such strange compagni we have here.”

  She began to turn the pages.

  “What sort of a thing is a man?” she asked at last, looking up at me.

  “I haven’t any idea,” I said. I was feeling quite agitated.

  “You should have by now.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “A man,” she went on, “is a nest of Chinese boxes. He’s a rational philosopher—Plato’s thinking reed. He’s an aggressive warrior—an Achilles or an Odysseus. He’s a paterfamilias and a domestic tyrant, a bundle of neuroses because in reality he’s irrational and cowardly. And at the inner core he’s a collection of images, a little picture gallery, as private as the pope’s bathroom in the Vatican. Let me show you.”

  She continued to turn the pages one by one till she came to an illustration. “I believe this is what Sister Gemma was trying to describe,” she said. “You can see the resemblance to a monster.”

  What I saw did indeed resemble some sort of monster, but I was blushing furiously and couldn’t bring myself look directly at it. I shook my head and sneezed as if I’d just looked into the sun on a bright day. I couldn’t focus my eyes.

  “You can see the arms and legs,” the abbess went on, “like the tangled tentacles of a giant squid.”

  I did see it now, a man preparing to mount a woman from behind. They were drawn from behind so that both their heads were concealed by their bodies. The man’s anus stared at the viewer like a great dark eye, his member, cleverly foreshortened, hung down past his noselike scrotum like an elephant’s trunk, or like a great hooked beak.

  She turned to the next illustration: a woman on her back, legs in the air, a man lowering himself on top of her. I’ve looked at all sorts of pictures, of course—who hasn’t in this day and age?—but I really couldn’t look at these drawings in the presence of the abbess. I was too self-conscious.

  “Well,” said the abbess. “What do you think?”

  “It’s quite extraordinary.”

  “You’ve never seen anything like it?”

  “Not exactly, though my sister took me to an adult bookstore once.”

  “An ‘adult’ bookstore?”

  “A bookstore that sells pornography.”

  “How interesting, and you call this kind of store an ‘adult’ bookstore. This was in Chicago?”

  Like most Italians she gave “Chicago” a tch sound at the beginning, like “Tchaikovsky.”

  “Yes. Men have to pay fifty cents to get in but women get in free. There are magazines on racks on the wall, and books on revolving stands like the ones in the front of the Paperback Exchange. It was pretty disgusting. I wanted to get out of there but Molly said I had to stay.”

  “Molly is your sister?”

  “Yes. She’d do anything. ‘You’ve got to know about this stuff,’ she kept saying. It was as if she was shouting in the reading room of a library: ‘Look at this, look at this.’

  “The shop was arranged in sections, like a grocery store or a boutique. There was something for everyone. I don’t really remember what I saw on the covers of the magazines and books. What I remember was the way the men all stood around trying to make themselves invisible. No one looked at anyone else. They kept their eyes down when they moved around. They were furtive, that
’s what they were, furtivi. There were businessmen in respectable suits, a soldier with his service cap pulled down over his forehead, a couple of kids who looked like college students. And nobody said anything. I think they were afraid of us.”

  “The brotherhood of man, of men,” she said. “You see what I mean?” she said. “They’d rather look at pictures than at a real woman.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “The pictures don’t frighten them. They can’t talk back.”

  I was relieved when she closed the book. It was like someone shutting off a bright and annoying light.

  “But you’ve never heard of Aretino?”

  “The name rings a bell.”

  “He was a remarkable man. He wrote a biography of Saint Catherine, actually, but he was better known for his satires. He was called the ‘scourge of princes,’ and everyone was afraid of him—even the popes—because he had such a vicious tongue. He could ridicule anyone. Truth, of course, didn’t matter a bit.”

  “Did he do those drawings?”

  “No, he wrote the sonnets, and somebody else did the drawings. Giulio Romano, I think. The point is, the book caused quite a scandal. There are lots of allusions to it—‘Aretino’s postures,’ the ‘sixteen pleasures,’ that sort of thing—but the pope was scandalized and ordered all copies of Aretino’s book destroyed. If a copy still existed, it could turn out to be valuable.”

  “How valuable?”

  “I really haven’t any idea. I thought you might know.”

  “It depends on so many things—the condition of the book, which is not very good. I mean the binding is ruined. The scarcity. You’d have to see what kind of a track record such things have at auction houses. Things like that.”

  “Perhaps you could look into it for me?”

  “Certainly, but it will be difficult with the Biblioteca Nazionale closed. I’ll have to find . . . I’m not quite sure. Auction records, I suppose. There must be something that tells.”

  “But you will try?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I want you to start with Signor Giustiniani in the Piazza Goldoni.” She wrote down the name and address on a small square of paper. “But you must be very careful.”

  “Capito.”

  “And there’s another thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The book can’t stay here.”

  “Of course not.”

  “You’ll have to take it with you. I think that Signor Giustiniani will—how shall I say?—realize its true worth, and I think you must show it to him and trust him. At least a little bit. But if you feel unsure, you should perhaps place it in a locker at the stazione. I’ll leave it up to you. It would be awkward, you understand, for me to dispose of it myself.”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “So I’m going to leave it in your hands.”

  “But I really don’t know . . . I’ll be leaving before Christmas.”

  “But you’ll do what you can?”

  “Of course, Madre Badessa.”

  “Do you remember the first time we met?”

  “In the cloister?”

  “And you said you didn’t know what you were doing here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you still feel the same way?”

  “No, Madre Badessa.”

  “Good.”

  I rose to leave.

  “Remember. Be very careful.”

  “Do you think its really valuable?”

  “Yes, in fact, I do. Very.”

  “Could you give me an idea of what you have in mind?”

  “I don’t want to mention a particular figure,” she said “because I may be wrong—but I think it’s the only copy. I think all the copies were destroyed except this one. I may be wrong, but I think men will be willing to pay any amount of money for it, perhaps even enough to save our little library from the bishop.”

  7

  Pray Without Ceasing

  On the morning of November 4, the morning of the flood, Dottor Postiglione, alerted by one of the gallery’s watchmen, left the door of his apartment wide open for his less fortunate neighbors who lived on the lower floors, and waded through oily water, already knee deep in Piazza Santa Croce, on his way to the Uffizi. The water was rising rapidly, and he could hear guard dogs, trapped in the basements of the warehouses along Borgo de’ Greci, barking wildly. At the Uffizi he was soon joined by the director of the museum and her assistant, and by an official from the Soprintendenza del opificio delle pietre dure. The four of them, along with the watchman who had telephoned Dottor Postiglione, rushed to the Vasari Corridor, the enclosed passageway that connects the Uffizi with the Palazzo Pitti on the other side of the river, and that crosses the river on the tops of the goldsmiths’ shops on the Ponte Vecchio. The corridor contains the finest collection of self-portraits ever assembled: Filippo Lippi, Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt (two: one as a young man, one as an old), David, Corot, Ingres, Delacroix, and others. Dottor Postiglione’s first thought had been of these self-portraits, for if the old bridge gave way, the corridor itself would be dragged down into the raging Arno.

  They carried about twenty paintings to safety, but the floor was trembling so violently beneath them that Dottor Postiglione, fearing for their safety, ordered them to stop.

  They made their way to the restoration rooms in the basement. One of these was already inaccessible, but in the other, the Vecchia Posta, a rescue effort had been mounted by members of the museum staff, who were sliding a huge framed canvas across the slippery tile floor when they arrived: Botticelli’s Incoronazione. All in all some three hundred paintings were waiting to be cleaned and restored, including the famous Raphael tondo from the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, which Dottor Postiglione carried, by himself, up the stairs to the safety of the mezzanine.

  At nine o’clock the soprintendente himself appeared, Signor Giorgio Focacci. He was shaken, white faced, unshaven, soaking wet, but when he learned that the portraits in the Corridoio Vasariano were still in danger, he marched off to save them. Dottor Postiglione and the others raced after him and tried to stop him, but the crisis had rejuvenated the old man, had given him the strength of youth, with which he fought off those who tried to prevent him from risking his life. “I’m an old man,” he shouted. “I’ve lived my life. I have no family, no children. Let me go, I tell you!”

  With this there was no arguing, but neither the direttrice nor her assistant nor Dottor Postiglione was willing to let the old man go by himself, so the four of them mounted the trembling stairs, trembling themselves, to finish the rescue effort that had been abandoned earlier. Soon they were over the Ponte Vecchio, which was being battered by automobiles and oil drums and whole trees that had been uprooted upstream. The debris below them was clogging the arches of the bridge, forcing the water to pass through the narrow openings over the central arch. They could hear the small shops below them exploding like bombs under the assault of the water.

  Most of the portraits could be managed easily by two people. The direttrice and her assistant worked together, Dottor Postiglione with the soprintendente, the dottore marveling at the old man’s strength and stamina as they hefted the two Rembrandt portraits at the same time.

  It took them two hours to empty the corridor. On his last trip Dottor Postiglione, who was bringing up the rear, paused for a look out one of the curtained windows. What he saw beneath him, or thought he saw, was neither an inexplicable act of God nor a simple natural disaster, but the breakdown of civilization itself, the failure of civilization, that is, to act upon what it knows and has known for centuries. The danger of the weirs and the need for reservoirs had been recognized in the Middle Ages. During the Renaissance the divine Leonardo had drawn up plans for sluices to drain off floodwater. But instead of acting on this knowledge in order to allev
iate the problem of flooding, men had chosen instead to aggravate the problem by covering the floodplains with concrete and by hacking down the forests that once acted as natural sponges to absorb excess rainfall. And then, to top it off, they continued to store their most precious documents in basements along the river and to refuse to move the conservation laboratories to safer ground at the Fortezza da Basso (one of the dottore’s pet projects). Dottor Postiglione noticed a bloated cow floating toward him, on its side, heaving and kicking as if it were still alive. The cow, deflected by a log, spun around and slammed into one of the piers of the bridge. Dottor Postiglione thought he could distinguish the impact from a thousand other impacts by its peculiar dullness and stupidity.

  When it stops raining, he said to himself, there will be a great noise in the newspapers, new governmental agencies will be formed, old ones reorganized, the experts will arrive and everything will be explained, the relief agencies will set up their tents and everyone will be relieved. English ladies will arrive in tweed skirts and sensible shoes and American women in jeans and high boots. But nothing will be done. There will be no warning system, no computers to coordinate the readings of the hydrometers along the river. His neighbors in Sante Croce, the popolo minuto, the little people, would continue to suffer, their houses defiled and broken, their workshops destroyed, their lives in shambles.

  This is what it will be like at the end of the world. And all because of human stupidity. Human beings are as stupid as that dead cow. And not just the Florentines, not just the Italians, all human beings. They cut down the rain forests in South America, poison the earth with pesticides, the rivers with chemical effluents, the atmosphere with hydrocarbons . . .

  And yet, Dottor Postiglione has an instinct, an instinct that enabled him to survive the prisoner-of-war camp in North Africa and to endure a difficult marriage without losing the sweetness of his disposition. It is an instinct—almost an inner voice, like Socrates’ daimon—for happiness. Guided by this inner voice he makes for happiness in any situation, however desperate, just as surely as an experienced air traveler makes for the aisle seat by the overwing exit.