L'America (2 page)

He was a boy, a fourteen-year-old boy, when the fresco was removed, one year younger than Valeria when she was captured for eternity. But at fourteen he was unaware of her, only half aware of his mother, who ran around the house and the city nervously making the arrangements for the fresco. Nervous because she had a nervous energy that fueled her and that seemed to reveal that she knew there was not enough time. Long ago she had given up her passion for Russian literature and her fantasies of taking trips to Moscow and St. Petersburg, of riding in a horse-drawn sleigh in the bitter cold, wrapped to the nose in furs, of being surrounded by people capable of speaking half-a-dozen languages fluently, especially the children she would someday have. She spoke five languages herself: Italian, French, Spanish, German, and English. For a while she had studied Russian, but then she married Giovanni Paolo, a man who spoke no language other than Italian and who had never traveled (and never would) beyond the perimeter of northern and central Italy. He was a good ten years older than she, and though she had known him since she was young (her father was a lawyer for the Cellini bank), in the beginning he had felt like a stranger, if kind, and their marriage had felt like an arrangement that was intended to please her parents more, perhaps, than herself. In this new life, her ambitions had become decidedly less complex and her faith decidedly more profound.

Of her boy, of course, she was aware, more of his physical side (his skill at sports—soccer, skiing, tennis) than of his interior world (America, history, literature). She was acutely aware of his physical beauty. He was much more attractive than either she or her husband or their funny little Laura, though Elena could see herself in him: he had her height and Roman nose, long and distinguished. She was aware of Francesca, daughter of one of Cittàs richest and most prominent citizens, who had a thriving business manufacturing socks and whose accounts were at the Cellini bank; she was aware that Cesare and Francesca had a tight love. They went skiing together at Francesca's house in Cortina. They went sailing together from Francesca's house on the Costa Smeralda in Sardegna. The two would grow up together, falling in love at fourteen and staying together until they were twenty-two—eight years during which Francesca transformed from girl to woman, with her almond hair and her perfectly round face and her soft green eyes, and learned to expect nothing and everything.

Francesca's mother, Signora Marconi, younger than Elena by a good fifteen years, draped herself effortlessly in all her money, lots of gold and fine clothes, Como silk and Tornabuoni leather. She would invite Elena to their various villas, and Elena, in turn, would invite her to her own villas and involve her (she was named Caterina but was known as Cat, pronounced with a very hard C) with the elaborate process of restoring the fresco. Elena invited Cat to see the fresco in situ, before removal. She invited her to the restorer's studio in Milan. She invited her to the Città villa to elicit Cat's opinion about where the fresco should hang once restored. Elena lacked Cat's easy confidence and that is why Elena loved to be with her—as if Cat's confidence could somehow rub off. "Here," Cat said emphatically. "The fresco should hang right here." She was in the living room of the Cellini's Città villa. Cat was deeply tanned from an Easter trip to Sardegna. Smaller paintings hung on the wall Cat referred to, but it was a vast wall that would not swallow the fresco. And Cat was there when the fresco (restored) was hung in its new spot. Reaching her long and slender and tanned finger (bejeweled with one enormous diamond sunk in a thick band of yellow gold) toward Valeria's face, she drew a circle, targeting Valeria's expression. What she loved best about the painting, Cat said, was that pain. "It must be felt. Must. At least once, for some reason."

Elena watched the beautiful hand encompassing the pain that Elena had always felt in the figure of the girl but had never articulated—a ripping ecstasy tearing across the face, familiar to Elena from paintings of religious trials, from Anna Karenina's travails. Seeing Cat describe the pain, contouring it with the confidence of experience, Elena had the urge to ask private questions, to talk like free young girls, when all was whimsy and potential. She did not, of course, because it would have been impolite. Such subjects were not discussed, and she was a good Catholic woman. But the pain, the heartbreak, it flourished in the privacy of her mind, Cat as the heroine with some lover, someone other than her small balding husband, emperor of socks—a ferocious kiss followed by tender bites on the back of a pale reclining neck, tender bites sending shivers of desire throughout her. Briefly this image cut across Elena's mind before she dismissed it and all such foolishness with an embarrassed prayer to Saint Jude.

"Just once," Cat repeated, and Elena burned again, an ember receiving a blast of air, "that love that rips through like a knife." And Elena nodded with a warm smile, hoping that Cat would not understand the depths of her ignorance.

"Is that a claw?" Cat asked, and the subject changed to a debate about iconography: was it God's hand or Zeus's hand or simply the hand of fate. "Oh, think," Cat said, "if those artists, all of them, Raphael and da Vinci and Michelangelo, Cellini even, if they could only have felt the freedom to paint secular subjects. Just imagine what their imaginations would have created. That ache, that pain, it is subject enough."

"It's fate all the same," Elena said suddenly, surprising herself. She was usually not so bold with her opinions. "If it is God's hand or Zeus's claw or the will of the boy to leave or be left—it is fate." And for an instant she imagined the world without the great religious works of all those artists and in that moment of emptiness she was certain that Cat did not attend mass every Sunday.

What Elena also knew was that her son would inflict that pain upon Cat's daughter. Francesca was the kind of daughter-in-law the Cellinis would expect and want, but Elena knew that Cesare and Francesca had found each other too young and their relationship would not last. She knew the outcome. She knew good-looking boys always had the advantage. In some small way, though Elena was not malicious, this knowledge made her feel triumphant.

 

The exquisite pain: the early hours of the morning, a calm Sardinian sea, a hundred little boats rowing off to the horizon, eager for the daily catch, all the faint noises of such movement, the bells of buoys, the swish and clunk of sailboats rocking in the sway of the water, the creak of ropes. It is a green Smeralda morning: seagulls ride on the back of a light breeze, calling sharply; the
forno
smell of brioche floods the dawn with the promise of something warm and a little sweet. Francesca is looking for Cesare. She has been up all night. Barefoot, she wears only her nightgown. Her round face and enormous eyes are marred by worry and exhaustion. It has occurred to her slowly through the night, the thought rising like the break of day, that this is the end. Eight years—a long run. She is innocent but no fool. He will be cold and mean because who knows how to end love well? It is the Dutch girl, Francesca knows, from last night's party. The one with the short black pixie and the strappy black dress and all the height, the one who spoke English to Cesare as they drank a little too much wine. The one who cocked her head with flirtatious drunken sloppiness. The one who laughed pre-posterously. The beauty of him, of Cesare, his smile widening for another girl—Francesca had studied it, noting his black hair receding at the temples, his dimples deepening with the curl of his lips as he bowed toward the Dutch girl.

Francesca's feet ache, the right one
is
scratched above the instep, enough to cause a little bit of blood to pearl. This romance will be insignificant for Cesare, for the Dutch girl, too, but not for Francesca. For Francesca it will mark the threshold of her adulthood. She sits down on the steps leading to the marina. Her hair is a mess. She has not brushed her teeth. She remembers being fourteen, imagining extraterrestrials finding
Pioneer
10, the ship shipwrecked on some gorgeous star, the plaque inside with the picture of Man and Woman designed by Carl Sagan. The naked man waving his hand, inviting aliens to realize he is friendly. They had laughed, she and Cesare, at this simple notion and all the potential of such an expedition. Their futures rose just as bright and grand, full of the places they could someday be. All admiration and curiosity was she for Cesare's passion for America.

She has found him. She knows where he is. Down there in the marina, among the hundreds of yachts, in the sailboat belonging to her family, the cabin light is on. And he is inside with the Dutch girl, both naked like the figures on the
Pioneer
plaque, but intertwined, ruining everything and nothing. She sits on the cold cement steps, bougainvillea flowering hopefully all about, and the world smelling of brioche and honey, and she knows any ecstasy they enjoy is because of her, because of her sitting here watching them, their knowledge of her eyes on them, the pain of it ripping in her, how intense that makes their lust. She'll wait. She'll sit here until they have the courage to emerge from the boat into the bright Sardegna morning, the long limbs of the Dutch girl draping Cesare—her sly smile mocking innocence. And then Francesca will stand up so that Cesare can see her, rise above them and ride the back of a gentle breeze.

 

Of the year 1519, Cesare did not know much. It was the year that Leonardo da Vinci died (in France) and the year that Catherine de Medicis was born to the richest non-royal family in Europe. She was the granddaughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent and would become Queen of France and mother-in-law of Mary, queen of Scots. Among her many contributions to the world would be ballet, she its first patron. Ferdinand Magellan began his voyage around the world, sailing from Seville. The facts of a year knit time to make history. A young goldsmith from Florence fled to Città, was taken in by his uncle who brought him to Fiori, a small village in the hills above Lago Maggiore, and there he fell in love with his cousin Valeria. Her name means Strength. She was fifteen years old with a vitality that Benvenuto wanted to sculpt and make his own. In less than a year she would be married to someone else. The someone else stands among the guests, his eyes trained on Valeria, the only figure not oblivious to her ache. But you must look hard to catch this, the artist playing games, reading the future. Is he telling Valeria she will be all right? Or is he telling himself she will be all right? Trying to excise the pain, remove it as you would a thorn? No good way to end love, is there? That summer of 1519, when the pope and his bishops were carrying on trying to defend Catholicism and Catherine was born to so much privilege and da Vinci died, Benvenuto made a record of the pain, painted his fresco showing Valeria trying to both pull back and set free the ascending man too beautiful for mortal life. The pain would travel across time, being studied and watched and ignored by generations of a family, until in 1972 a gentle woman named Elena removed it from the Fiori villa, restored it, and placed it on the wall of the Città villa, where it still hangs today with a dull lamp suspended above it, illuminating it as gently as possible with the goal of immemorial preservation.

 

Now, sitting in a red velvet armchair, the velvet curtains drawn, Cesare studies the fresco. He studies it as he has many times before, pondering the debatable claw, the notion of fate—but tonight he looks at the painting as if for the first time because Beth is dead. He has just learned of Beth's death today in an e-mail sent by her husband. He had watched her death unwittingly and repeatedly on the television, over and over and over and yet again and would be able to do so for years to come. The little light perched above the fresco casts its glow on the anguish of the girl, the exuberance of the rising star, the fleeing artist, driven not by romantic passion or heritage or money, but by a desire to live untethered from the ground. He watches the fleeing artist enviously, watches the girl grab for his leg. Yes, as if to pull him back or be pulled up and taken away by him. "He wanted to be pulled back," Beth would say, standing there. "He wanted her to take a stand. Look at his left hand," she would say. "Just look at it. Look at the left hand." And Cesare did now, the longing curl of it, of the elegant slender fingers, perhaps, indeed, reaching back for hers. Willful American Beth, his beautiful rebellion.

Cesare is a forty-three-year-old banker in the town of Città. A rich prominent citizen, he lends money—as his father did and as his father's father did and as his father's father's father did, and so on and so forth—to big manufacturers of socks and shoes, who are trying to become bigger by inventing smarter, tighter, slicker, smoother socks and stockings and soles and heels. His father's big success, in collaboration with Signor Marconi, Francesca's grandfather, and later with her father, was with panty hose. Cesare's big success in collaboration with Signor Agnelli, husband of Francesca, as it turns out, has been with nonskid socks for toddlers. The Cellinis have mastered the art of money making more money, though the world is now in an economic slump and terrorism spreads like a cancer, metastasizing around the globe. And Beth, gone from him for fifteen years, is gone once again and permanently. Unwittingly he has watched her go many times. Behind her she has left a husband, a daughter, and a father. In their bedrooms, Cesare's wife and son are asleep. From time to time he peers in on them just to observe the gentle rhythm of their breathing, the rise and fall of their chests beneath the blankets. His wife's head, haloed by curly black hair, rests on her pillow, knowing only comfort. She peels her grapes, has the leisure to think of such stuff, the small silver knife and fork working intricately with the skin, slipping it off like a dress. She is the heir to an empire of fruit, ordinary fruits, exotic fruits, exported fruits, imported fruits—kumquats and kiwis and mangosteens, durians, and rambutans (favorites of the orangutan, as it happens). She breathes. In the morning, they will drive together to Fiori to oversee the construction of a swimming pool.
Pioneer
10 has long made it past the edge of our solar system. He wonders what Beth imagined as she died? Did she know she was about to die? For how long, how many minutes, did she anticipate it? Who is her daughter screaming for now? The e-mail had been matter-of-fact: "
I wanted you to know...
" Did her husband know Cesare loved Beth still?