The Sixteen Pleasures

by Robert Hellenga

  How I longed for his caresses, his kisses, his bottomless sack of bedroom tricks, his thoughtfulness, his gentilezza and cortesia. But what I regretted most was not what had been lost but what had never been, not the past but the future.

  In my dream I was about to speak to him, but I don’t know what I was going to say, and I never found out, because the bells were ringing compline and the abbot had his hand on my shoulder and was shaking me.

  “It’s time to go,” he said, his breath sour on my cheek.

  The abbot, oddly, was the only person I’d met who wasn’t convinced of the absolute necessity of preserving everything in Florence that could possibly be preserved. “Of the making of books,” he liked to say “there is no end, and much study is a weariness to the flesh.”

  I’d never taken him seriously—I was a book conservator, after all—but that night I was inclined to agree with him. The great spiritual classics of Western civilization lay strewn all around us in various stages of undress, reduced to things, physical objects, water logged, molding, stinking, mud en­crusted, humbled by circumstance—and I didn’t care.

  “It’s time to go,” he said again, still leaning over me. “You need to rest.”

  It was true; I was overtired. But I felt like opening up to him the way someone might open up to a bartender after a few drinks. I wanted to tell him about Sandro. I wanted to tell him that there was one book that I would preserve with my life, one book that I would weigh against all the spiritual treasures that I, as a professional conservator, was bound to preserve.

  At the great iron gate that opens onto the Via Fortini I turned to him and said: “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit.”

  “Is that so?” He looked at me as if he’d heard something truly astonishing.

  “That’s what my mother used to say.”

  “Then your mother must have read Milton’s Areopagitica,” he said. “If you don’t hurry you’ll miss the last bus.”

  What was it, I asked myself as the bus sped along the Via Fortini, that had kept me from speaking to Sandro, there in the darkness in the Badia, as he tapped away at the intonaco on the backs of the Lodovici frescoes? What had held me back? What would I have said to him in my dream, if the abbot hadn’t awakened me? What had kept me from knocking on the convent door the night I’d emerged from Sandro’s apartment? What had kept me from telephoning Papa? It was the book, of course, the Aretino. I’d known that ever since I decided not to go home for Christmas. But what I had never fully grasped, up to that time, was this: The little book of pictures wasn’t just a valuable piece of property; it wasn’t just a unique copy of the most powerful work of erotic art produced by the Renaissance. It wasn’t just an occasion to strut my stuff as a conservator. It was the adventure that fate had placed in my path. I couldn’t walk away from it any more than Jack could have refrained from exchanging his mother’s cow for the magic beans, or Psyche from opening the magic box that Venus had given her to take to the underworld, or Bassanio from accepting the adventure of the three caskets. It was my handful of magic beans, it was my magic ring, my talisman. That’s why I couldn’t simply sell it to a dealer or turn it over to Sandro; that’s why I couldn’t give it back to Madre Badessa or turn to Papa for help. It was my story—my story. Without it I wouldn’t know who I was or where I was going.

  A week later I took the train to Basel. My visitor’s permit needed to be renewed, which meant I had to leave the country, and I wanted to have my passport stamped at the border to prove I’d been out of the country anyway. I didn’t have to go all the way to Basel, but a plan was finally taking shape in my mind. I couldn’t take the Aretino to Sotheby’s, which is what I wanted to do, without explaining where I’d gotten it. I couldn’t explain where I’d gotten it because the legal owner was not the convent of Santa Caterina but the bishop of Florence, or the church itself. But if I could create a false provenance by laying down a trail that would lead a suspicious inquirer not to Santa Caterina but across the border into Switzerland . . . If I could show that I’d acquired the Preghiere cristiane in Basel—say, on my way to Italy in November, or even now, in the present moment—there would be no need for an export license, no need to explain. The Newberry did business with several antiquarian book dealers in Basel; it wasn’t out of the question that I could turn up another copy. Seventeenth-century prayer books, after all, were not that uncommon. Surely the details would sort themselves out once I was in Basel.

  I hadn’t been able to reserve a couchette and wasn’t looking forward to sitting up in a compartment with four other people—two small children (and their parents)—but I’d brought along my copy of Emma to shut out the external world, and as the train pulled out of the station, I fished it out of my purse. It was a solidly built old edition, late nineteenth century, sewn on real bands, with marbled endpapers and hand-sewn headbands. The leather was still in good shape, but the pulp paper—a product of modern technology—was so brittle it was impossible to turn a page without breaking off a corner.

  The purse also held the Aretino, which I’d been reluctant to leave behind, so I kept it safely wedged between my leg and the inner wall of the compartment, a fact that seemed to provoke the curiosity of the little girl, who must have been five or six. She maneuvered herself around my knees and tugged at the strap, which I had wrapped double around my arm.

  “Nein, nein, nein.” The mother, sitting next to the window on the opposite side of the compartment, didn’t make a move; she was saying nein for my benefit. The little girl paid no attention to her.

  Putting Emma to one side I hoisted the child up on my lap and we had a conversation. She asked questions in German and I made up answers in English, much to the amusement of her father, who was the only one who knew both languages.

  “When you come into die Schweiz,” he said in English, leaning forward and smiling, “you won’t have to hold the purse so tightly.”

  “You can’t be too careful,” I said.

  “Never,” he said. “Especially . . .” He nodded his head in the direction of the window, to indicate, I gathered, Italy.

  “Zigeuner everywhere,” he went on. “They say it’s worse in Napoli.” He closed his eyes and gave an involuntary shudder.

  “Zigeuner?”

  He looked it up in a canary yellow Italian-German diction­ary: “Zingaro, zingari.”

  “Gypsies.”

  “In the underground tunnels there are zingari. My little Schätzli was frightened, wasn’t she,” he said, taking the little girl from my lap. “They say they’re rich, they live like kings.”

  “No Gypsies in la Svizzera?”

  “No, nothing like that. Do you know what Goethe said about die Schweiz?”

  I didn’t know.

  “He said he was happy to know that there was a country like die Schweiz existing where he can always take refuge.”

  “Good for him,” I said, “but do you know what he said about Italy?”

  The Swiss man didn’t know.

  I didn’t know either, but I repeated something that Mama used to say: “He said that a person who was tired of Italy was tired of life.”

  The Swiss man was not amused, and the family, following his lead, closed ranks, turned in on itself. Mother held the little girl up to the window. Father and son began conversing in German. I opened my book.

  I forced myself to read for two hours, during which time Emma discovered that Harriet Smith was not in love with Frank Churchill but with Mr. Knightley, from whom she was antic­ipating a proposal, and that she, Emma, was in fact in love with Mr. Knightley herself. Once again she had completely misread the true state of affairs: her matchmaking efforts had brought the parties involved to the brink of disaster, and now she was facing a second humiliation.

  Poor Emma! But Emma had Mr. Knightley waiting for her at the end of her story, a man who saw things as they really were
, a man who was virtuous, upright, trustworthy, honorable . . . all the things that Sandro was not. I summoned up what wisdom I could—for both of us, for Emma and for me. I mocked my own conventional hopes and fears, but admitting them to myself only made them more real, gave them a new kind of power over me, as if I’d admitted to myself a preference for Norman Rockwell over, say, Giotto or Leonardo. You won’t know true happiness, Madre Badessa had told me, till you give up your heart’s desire. But I couldn’t help imagining that the empty seat in the compartment was Sandro’s, and that he’d just gone down to the dining car to order something special—something not on the menu—for our supper.

  Later on, in the middle of the night, as we crossed into Switzerland and were wakened by the border police who’d come to check our passports, the Swiss man—wishing to restore cordial relations—asked me where my home was, and I didn’t know what to tell him.

  “Home,” I said, “is the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

  He didn’t understand. “My mother used to say that,” I explained. “It’s sort of a joke. It’s from a poem.”

  “A joke. Ein Witz. Please say it one more time.”

  “Home is the place where when you have to go there they have to take you in.”

  “Ah,” he said, smiling to show that he understood. “And where is that?”

  “Texas,” I said.

  “And do you like Texas very much?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been there.”

  Basel was cold outside and warm inside, just the opposite of Florence, where the law requires you to turn off the heat on the first of April regardless of the weather. I suppose that when it gets cold enough outside, as it does in Switzerland, you have to protect yourself, to pay more attention to keeping warm. Life is lived inside, not in the streets. My room at the Schweizerhof, on the piazza, across from the station, was very gemütlich, a place of refuge, like Switzerland itself, according to Goethe. Under the window a tile stove, itself a work of art, radiated warmth. The armchair squatting next to it was big enough to curl up in. The bed, unlike the bed Sandro and I had shared in Rome, was big and heavy, a bed that wouldn’t threaten to collapse when you made love in it; a bed for serious sleeping under feather comfor­ters, your head bolstered, your feet toasty. I was seriously tempted to lie down.

  To be perfectly honest, I didn’t feel like going out into a city where I couldn’t speak the language. It had been enough of a struggle to get across the Platz—ugly word—to the hotel. I was like a baby: I wouldn’t be able to ask directions; I wouldn’t be able to explain what I wanted; I wouldn’t even be able to find a bathroom. Moreover, the details of my plan had not coalesced into a coherent whole that gave me a clear sense of direction. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for. Now it seemed to me that the chances of finding another Preghiere cristiane were miniscule, and even if I did find one, I wouldn’t be able to afford it.

  I did, nevertheless, venture out into the Platz. I bought an English-language guide to the city in the station and followed the map to the Klosterberg, which, according to my guide­book, was the center of the antiquarian book trade.

  The bookstores that I visited did not cater to casual buyers but to serious collectors, people who knew what they wanted. In jeans and a pullover I didn’t look the type, though when I said I was from the Newberry Library I was treated with grave courtesy.

  By noon I’d examined half a dozen prayer books in half a dozen shops and, at my last stop, a remarkable seventeenth-century French book of hours covered with dark green velvet, worked with couchings of gold twist, which had a devoto—a little strip of cloth that had been dipped in the blood of a saint—sewn on the last page, just above the colophon. But by this time I’d realized that all I really needed was some dog with warped boards, loose hinges, and rounded corners. Actually I didn’t even need a book at all. All I needed was a receipt. A little slip of paper with the name of the store on it:

  buchhandlung karl schulze

  32 Grabenstrasse

  Basel 10093

  (67-92-03)

  I was tempted to swipe the receipt book lying on the clothcovered counter, next to the book of hours, but Herr Schulze was keeping a sharp eye on me—the book of hours was worth several thousand dollars. Herr Schulze had located a couple of prayer books, too, but I poked around on my own until I found something of no particular value—a nineteenth-century trans­lation of Pilgrim’s Progress in a plain cloth binding for forty-five Swiss francs.

  Herr Schulze, standing behind the counter, inspected my choice. “So what do you want with this doggy? Did I miss something?” He flipped through the book. “Your Newberry Library I don’t think is not going to be much happy, Fraülein, when you could have a beautiful book of hours or a beautiful embroidered prayer book.”

  “It’s for me,” I said. “My mother used to read it to me.”

  “Not auf Deutsch?”

  “No, in English, but it had the same pictures.”

  I opened my purse and pulled out some unfamiliar Swiss banknotes, green, blue, yellow, with pictures of woodcutters and of women harvesting different kinds of fruit.

  “Could I have a receipt, please?”

  “For this doggy?”

  “For the customs.”

  “Forty-five Swiss francs, Fräulein. Ten American dollars. You do not have to declare a doggy like this.”

  “Just to be on the safe side. Besides, it’s more businesslike.”

  “This is Switzerland, not Deutschland,” he said, shaking his head and writing out the receipt. I watched him press down hard with the stub of a pencil: “45 SF.”

  “Could you put down the name of the book too?”

  “Just to be on the safe side?”

  “Yes.”

  “Die Pilgerreise. Is that gut, or do you think the customs officers will want to know the whole title?”

  “I’d like the whole title,” I said.

  “What a serious work to sell such a book!”

  “I appreciate it, believe me.”

  He tore off the receipt and handed me a copy. I put it into my purse.

  On my way back to the hotel I stopped at a stationery store and bought a packet of carbon paper, a sharpener, and a number two Venus pencil. Back in my room I sharpened the point of the pencil and practiced Herr Schulze’s stumpy writing until I had it mastered. Then—my hand trembling slightly, as it had trem­bled when I was finishing the Aretino—I put a sheet of carbon paper between the “original” I had just created and the copy and, underneath Die Pilgerreise zur seligen Ewigkeit I wrote out, one stumpy letter at a time, Preghiere cristiane preparate da Santa Giuliana di Arezzo. I thought for a moment before deciding on a price. The prayer books I’d examined earlier in the day had ranged from five hundred to several thousand dollars—out of my range. But they had had unusual bindings in excellent condition. I finally settled on 150 SF. Thirty-four dollars and fifty cents. Just about right for some ‘doggy’.

  According to my guidebook the Swiss drink hot tea, not wine, with fondue, but this wasn’t the case. The fondue that I ate in the hotel restaurant that evening was served with the same local wine that had been used in preparing the fondue itself, which was delicious. And the wine was the best I’ve ever drunk—so delicious that my mouth began to fill with saliva each time I picked up my glass.

  After supper I went back up to my room, where I had arranged my little library on the bureau: Die Pilgerreise, Emma, and the Sonetti lusstiriosi. Strange bedfellows.

  I paged through Die Pilgerreise looking at the pictures that had captivated me as a child: the Slough of Despond, the Man in the Iron Cage, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Vanity Fair—which in German is das Jahrmarkt der Eitelkeit—the Giant Despair, and, finally, the Celestial City. How different from my own pilgrimage, I thought, as I crawled into bed with Emma
.

  Emma’s education was almost complete. Her eyes had been opened so that she could, in Signor Focacci’s phrase, see things as they really were. I slid down from a sitting position and lay on my left side, holding the book in my right hand. Mr. Knightley was about to propose.

  I turned over so that I was lying on my right side, holding the book in my left hand.

  Mr. Knightley proposed.

  I sat up again.

  Emma accepted Mr. Knightley’s proposal. But my heart refused to rejoice for her. The truth was, I’d grown tired of Mr. Knightley. It seemed to me that Mr. Knightley was becoming insufferable—a prig, a bore—and that Jane Austen was punishing Emma, not rewarding her. And hadn’t she been punished enough? Hadn’t she been taught to be ashamed of every single one of her imaginative impulses except, finally, her affection for Mr. Knightley? Why was I getting so carried away? I put Emma back on the bureau and picked up the Aretino, which I hadn’t opened since Sandro left for Rome. The drawings, I soon discovered, had not lost their power to startle and, yes, arouse. I amused myself by imagining the chaste coupling of Emma and Mr. Knightley. Was Mr. Knightley as virginal as Emma, or had he, as a young man, sown his wild oats? It was hard to imagine Mr. Knightley as a young man. Hard to imagine him sowing wild oats. Hard to imagine him removing Emma’s under things. Hard to imagine Emma saying, “I want it in my culo, please forgive me.” Hard to imagine Knightley’s reply: “Has the other place, then, gone out of fashion? I mean the potta.” And Emma: “Not entirely, but behind the cazzo finds far greater pleasure.”

  Francesca tells Dante that there is no greater pain than the recollection of past happiness in present grief, but that wasn’t my experience that evening. Whatever grief I’d experienced had been mysteriously transformed, and as I looked over, once again, the familiar drawings, I was taken back to that happy afternoon when Sandro and I looked at the Aretino for the first time, and I stood naked before Sandro’s cheval glass, and to dozens of other happy afternoons and nights, and mornings. These memories, intertwining with each other, like the lovers themselves, began to reverberate in my imagination, a deep hornlike humming, like the intonings of Tibetan monks—somewhere below the range of the deepest bass voice, or like the low string of a double bass when it’s tuned down to an A, or even a G.