The Sixteen Pleasures

by Robert Hellenga

  “I’m sorry, I missed that.”

  “I clipped it out and sent it to Madre Badessa. I’m sure she’d be happy to show it to you. I told her to keep her eyes open in case anything like it turns up.”

  “I’d be very interested.”

  “I thought of you at once when I saw it, but this vol­ume turned up in Switzerland. It may have come from the National Library in Dresden. Fancy that! Perhaps there’s a second copy, though of course a second copy wouldn’t bring nearly as much.”

  “No, it wouldn’t be unique.”

  “May I get you a glass of vinsanto?”

  “No thank you, Eminenza, I must be going.”

  “Very well, Signorina. May God speed you on your way. We are in your debt.”

  The celebration was a noisy one, as convent celebrations go, and I slipped away unnoticed, but I didn’t go home. I took the number 7 bus up to Fiesole, as I had done so many times, and set out for Settignano. I didn’t have a map, but I didn’t need one anymore. I knew the way too well. It was raining lightly so I didn’t dawdle, I just walked along briskly, and by five o’clock I was at the little cemetery. Ten minutes later I was entering the Casa del Popolo, glad to be out of the rain. I bought a Mars Bar and put it in my purse, and a glass of rough red wine, which I took out to the balcony, where I stood close to the wall, protected from the rain by a large cornice. It wasn’t really raining hard, but it was misty and I couldn’t make out the familiar landmarks in the valley below me.

  Tonight was Sister Gemma’s—I mean Sister Amadeus’s—wedding night. What was she thinking about now? What was she experiencing? Would the divine embrace be as comforting as the human one? An important chapter in her life had ended, a new one was beginning. And a new chapter was beginning in my life, too. The last one had been very eventful; I couldn’t imagine that the next would be as exciting. I tried to see into the future, tried to picture myself looking back at this very mo­ment, standing on this very balcony, this very glass of wine in my hand, still almost full. Where would I look back from? Chicago? Texas? Florence? Would I be looking back from the dinner table in my dining room, surrounded by children, a husband, dogs? Or would I be by myself in a bed-sitter? I strained my eyes, but I couldn’t see any farther into the future than I could into the valley at my feet.

  I spent the rest of the day drinking tea and answering letters, sitting sideways in my comfortable chair with my back against one large arm and my legs over the other. The ink flowed in a smooth, even line from my Mont Blanc pen. My Florentine stationery, which had been properly sized, accepted the ink without feathering.

  From time to time, as I gathered my thoughts, I looked out at the piazza, which was back to normal. The fuel oil from the furnaces had been cleaned off the facades, all the shops had reopened; the tourists had returned and were buying up purses and belts and wallets and leather jackets and even leather pants. The old man I’d seen Sandro talking to was sitting where he often sat—on the base of the statue of Dante—and every once in a while, as someone new approached him, I’d see him make the same mysterious gesture, his hand pecking down at his throat like a bird, and then scooping up at his rib cage, like someone scooping out ice cream that’s frozen solid. Finally my curiosity got the better of me. I had to know what this gesture meant. I had the feeling that it meant something significant, that it had something to do with me. I put on my shoes, locked the apartment behind me, and walked purposefully across the piazza. When I asked him, demonstrating as I did so, what this particular gesture meant, he seemed totally surprised.

  “You had the same operation, Signorina?” he exclaimed in a hoarse whisper. “But you’re too young to have throat cancer.”

  So much for signs. How many times would I have to be fooled before I learned my lesson? Maybe I’d never learn. Maybe I didn’t want to.

  I looked around me, at the leather shops, the restaurants, the bars, at the marble facade of Santa Croce, at the monte di pietà where I’d pawned Sandro’s gifts, at the statue of Dante towering above me, at a young boy standing with his arms outstretched, completely covered with pigeons, waiting for his father to take his picture. Piazzas are charged with meaning, like oceans and crossroads and rivers. What I like about a piazza, though, is that it gets away from the life-is-a-journey metaphor. A piazza is a microcosm, not a way of getting from one place to another. There’s no goal implied in a piazza, no destination. It’s a place to be, and not just anyplace either. Of all the places I might have been at 7:34 p.m. on 20 giugno 1967, it was where I wanted to be.

  Afterword to the new edition

  Thirty-nine Rejections

  My first novel never got published, but my agent, Henry Dunow, said that we wouldn’t have any trouble selling the second one, The Sixteen Pleasures. All the signs were good: A story that became the first chapter of The Sixteen Pleasures had been awarded an NEA Artist’s Fellowship and had been published in TriQuarterly. A story that became the second chapter had been published in The Chicago Tribune and received a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award.

  But in fact we had a lot of trouble—thirty-nine rejections before Where I Want to Be, my working title at the time, found a home with Soho Press. Many of the thirty-nine editors who turned it down had really liked it, but—they said—it was “too quiet” and would never sell. Soho proved them wrong.

  The First Two Chapters

  The first chapter, “Where I Want To Be,” was prompted by our oldest daughter’s departure for Italy. We’d spent a year in Florence in 1982–83, a watershed experience for our family, and the next year an Italian girl, one of Rachel’s classmates, came to live with us. The following year Rachel went to live with her family in Florence.

  The thought of a daughter so far away was energizing, and I started to write about a young woman who goes off to Italy by herself. I put my character, Margot, who was twenty-nine years old—a good deal older than our daughter—on a flight to Luxembourg and then on a train to Florence. Why was she going to Florence in the first place? I had no idea, but during our thirteen months in Florence I’d learned a lot about the great flood of 1966, and I put this together with a mini-course in book conservation that I’d taken at the Newberry Library when I was directing a program there. Book conservators were needed after the flood. The head of the conservation department at the Newberry had been one of the many conservators who went to Florence to offer their services. And another important conservator laid out in some detail his post-flood experiences in Florence in a little pamphlet published by the National Geographic Society. So I turned Margot into a book conservator. I got some additional help from the woman who’d taught the course in book conservation at the Newberry. She was an authority on 17th-century prayer books and let me Xerox some of her worksheets, so I turned Margot into an expert on 17th-century prayer books.

  The second chapter, “Pockets of Silence,” was prompted by a habit of sitting down and writing for an hour without stopping. I started with the idea of a woman on her death bed making a tape for her children and just kept going till it was time to listen to the tapes. I couldn’t figure what the mother could say on the tapes that would go beyond the conventional wisdom, how much she loved her family, and so on. I couldn’t think of anything, so I just left the tapes blank. I’ve probably received more letters (and emails) about this moment than about anything else I’ve written.

  The Convent

  Margot does not receive a warm welcome from the conservators in Florence, but I found a job for her in a convent library, directing the restoration work. I thought it would be a good idea to identify some of the books she works on and it occurred to me that it would be fun to include a copy of Pietro Aretino’s I modi, a 17th-century work consisting of sixteen erotic drawings by Giulio Romano, engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi, and accompanied by sixteen really obscene sonnets by Pietro Aretino.

  About a week later I realized that the book could bring my story into focus.
I was ready to shift from “stuff happening” to a story with a clear direction, a story about a power struggle for control of this very valuable book—a unique copy of a work of Renaissance pornography—in which Margot manages to hold her own against three powerful men: the bishop of Florence, who is the legal owner of the book and who threatens her; her Italian lover, Sandro Postiglione, who seduces her and tries to cheat her; and her father, who needs the money from the sale at Sotheby’s for his new venture into avocado growing.

  That’s the way I see the story, but it’s not the way Hollywood has seen it. The novel has been under option from the very beginning, but every script that I’ve seen has turned the story into a romantic comedy. Huh? Still no film, but the novel is under option now and I’m hoping for a script in which Margot’s commitment to her vocation as a book conservator will neither be overshadowed by her romance with Sandro Postiglione nor undermined by her impulse to join the convent.

  Laura Hruska

  The novel that I sent to Laura Hruska at Soho was not radically different from the novel that finally appeared in print, but it was different in a lot of little ways, since Laura paid attention to the smallest details—the Chemical Bank didn’t have an art department till two years after the auction at Sotheby’s, so I had to switch to Chase Manhattan. And in fact we did make some significant changes.

  One. In the original version, Rudy, Margot’s father, had his own chapters, which were told in third-person past tense. We decided to eliminate these chapters and incorporate Rudy’s story into Margot’s first-person narrative. Three of Rudy’s stories have been published separately in versions that don’t always square with the text of The Sixteen Pleasures, or even with the text of Rudy’s own novel, Philosophy Made Simple.

  Two. In the original version it’s Margot’s new Italian boyfriend, who works for Sotheby’s in Florence, who takes the Aretino, which Margot has restored and rebound, to the auction at Sotheby’s

  in London. I did it this way because I didn’t know anything about rare book auctions and had not been able to find any accounts of rare book auctions at Sotheby’s or anywhere else.

  Laura wasn’t having it. Margot had restored the book; it was her adventure; it was her job to consign the book to Sotheby’s and go to the auction. I didn’t go to London myself, but I did telephone Sotheby’s and talk to someone who was very helpful. He didn’t quite grasp what I was about and talked as if he were reminding me of something I already knew: You remember the back staircase that leads up to the horseshoe, he’d say, and I’d write down, back staircase, horseshoe. And so on. He gave me his number and I called him again to clear up some of the finer points. I think it’s one of the best scenes in the book, and I’ve received several compliments from people-who-know on how I got it just right.

  *

  The Title

  The only significant disagreement I had with Laura was about the title. I didn’t care for her title—My Florentine Romance—and she didn’t care for mine—Where I Want to Be, which is the title of the first chapter and which was my working title from the very beginning. “Too minimalist,” she said. We were at a standoff.

  One night that summer (1993) my wife and I invited for dinner three young women who were on an artists’ residency in Galesburg. After dinner I presented each one of them with the following list of possible titles.

  Erotic Drawings

  A Book of Erotic Drawings

  An Album of Erotic Drawings

  Erotic Engravings

  A Book of Erotic Engravings

  An Album of Erotic Engravings

  Dirty Pictures

  My First Italian Lover

  My First (and Last) Italian Lover

  The Postures of Pietro Aretino

  The Sixteen Postures of Pietro Aretino

  The Sixteen Pleasures

  How I Went to Italy and Got Laid by a Man Who Later Abandoned Me, But I’m All Right

  How I Went to Italy and Got Laid by a Man Who Later Abandoned Me, But it Was a Good Experience

  How I Went to Italy and Got Laid by a Man Who Later Abandoned Me, But It Was a Good Experience Because I Found This Very Valuable Book of Erotic Engravings

  My Florentine Seduction

  Florentine Seduction

  Seduced in Florence

  Restorations

  Everyone voted independently, and everyone chose The Sixteen Pleasures, and I thought the issue was resolved, but Laura said she’d never publish a book called The Sixteen Pleasures because is sounded too much like a twelve-step program. Booksellers wouldn’t know where to put it on their shelves. So we were still at a standoff.

  The only viable alternative at the time seemed to be The Italian Lover, but I resisted that title because it pointed in the wrong direction by suggesting that Margot’s love affair with Sandro Postiglione was more important than her vocation as a book conservator.

  A couple of weeks later Laura called and said, “we fold.” “What happened?” I asked. She said that the buyer from Barnes and Noble had come in and thought The Sixteen Pleasures was a great title.

  The Sixteen Pleasures was already the subtitle of a book about Aretino called I modi. I never met the author of I modi, but she attacked (verbally) Laura at the ABA meetings in New York. Fortunately, you can’t copyright titles.

  Letters

  I received a lot of letters about The Sixteen Pleasures, many

  from readers who had never written to an author before, many from readers who wondered how I’d managed to write so convincingly from a woman’s point of view; one from the chairman of the Chicago Board of Trade correcting a misstatement that Margot makes about compound interest; and one from a friend of Frederick Hartt, the art historian and honorary citizen of Florence, recalling that Toscanini’s daughter had given (or sold) Hartt a copy of the Aretino, which he later gave to the Museum library in Mantua. I’m quite sure, however, that this was not an original but one of several pirated versions. A copy of an original did in fact turn up in a French pornography collection and was auctioned off at Sotheby’s in Paris in 2006 for £227,000. Margot’s copy sells for £89,000 in 1967, so adjusting for inflation, I’d made a pretty good guess.

  But the letter I liked best came from a man who’s wife had spent nineteen years in a convent:

  The part which the convent play’s is especially meaningful to me. My wife, who died of cancer three years ago, was a nun for nineteen years. Your account, so sympathetic of the life of a nun, rings deeply true. In the mysterious way of art, the “healing power of art,” your depection has made a contribution to my own healing from her loss.

  This letter was especially gratifying because in made me feel that I’d guessed right again.

  Maybe.

  When my wife and I were back in Florence in 2004 I popped into the Badia as I used to do, intending to go up the stairs that lead to the arcade on the second floor of the cloister, from which you can look down on a foosball game. I wanted to see that foosball game again. The door to the stairway was locked, however, and a young nun who had been praying in the front of the church came over and asked me what I was doing.

  I told her that I was doing what I’d done many times when we’d lived in Florence—that I wanted to see the cloister. She informed me that the Badia had become a working convent and was no longer open to the public.

  She was an American, and we got to talking and it turned out that her mother had given her a copy of The Sixteen Pleasures, hoping to dissuade her from becoming a nun. It hadn’t worked. I didn’t ask her directly if I’d gotten the convent right in the novel, but I didn’t have to. She invited me to eat with the nuns and I’m sorry now that I didn’t accept her invitation. Despite this invitation, however, her last words to me were: “You don’t know the first thing about the spiritual life.”

  Maybe. And maybe not.

  Rober
t Hellenga

  13–19 Giugno 2014