The Sonnet Lover (28 page)

“What’s going on?” Mara asks at the sight of drawn shutters and
Chiuso
signs.

“They’re closing for the
riposo,
” I say. “For the afternoon rest. You know, the siesta.”

She turns to me, an empty look in her eyes, her shoulders slumping under the weight of half a dozen shopping bags. She looks like a woman waking up the morning after a drinking binge and discovering there’re no Bloody Marys waiting for her in the fridge. I’m afraid I probably have the same hungry look in my eyes.

“It’s okay,” I say soothingly, “I know a lovely trattoria near here—if it’s still here. We’ll have lunch.”

Mara nods meekly and, managing a small smile, follows me down a narrow side street. Lunch is a close second to shopping. The restaurant I’m thinking of is a small, family-owned trattoria on a quiet side street with a secluded fifteenth-century courtyard garden in the back. Bruno introduced me to it, of course; it wasn’t the kind of place you’d find in a guide book. He said that during the war it had been a meeting place for Delasem, the Italian Jewish refugee assistance organization that had hidden Jewish refugees in convents, churches, and homes throughout Italy. The restaurant had been owned by the same family since the middle of the last century, he’d told me. Surely having survived that long—and withstood fascist raids—it will still be here. It should be the perfect place in which to prod Mara in her limp post-shopping daze to talk about the night of the film show.

If only I can figure out where it is. I’ve turned us into the maze of side streets that run parallel to the river. I know it’s not far from the Arno and that it’s somewhere between the Ponte Vecchio and the Ponte Santa Trinità, but whenever I came here with Bruno I’d followed him, listening to the stories he told about every statue and fountain and cornerstone we passed.

“Are you sure you know where you’re going?” Mara asks. “My feet are killing me. Maybe you should ask directions.”

I nod, but the trouble is, I don’t remember the name of the restaurant. I remember an old wooden sign painted with a knight on horseback hanging above an arched doorway and a wrought-iron gate dripping with brightly colored bougainvillea, beyond which was a lowceilinged cavelike room with paintings on the whitewashed walls. But I can’t remember the name on the sign.

“The name started with a
G,
” I say. “Il Grotto, maybe?”

“Haven’t we passed this building already?” Mara says, pulling on my arm. “We’re going around in circles.”

I look up and see we’re standing in front of a five-storied palazzo faced in rough gray stone. “This is the Palazzo Davanzati,” I say, as happy as if we’d just run into an old friend. “It has some beautiful wall paintings—”

“Does it have a restaurant? Can we get something to eat there?” Mara whines.

Unfortunately it looks like the Palazzo Davanzati is closed for restoration, which is too bad because I’ve remembered that the paintings in one of the bedrooms are similar to the ones in my room at the villa (minus that last horrific scene beneath the tapestry). The good news, though, is that I remember now that the restaurant I’m looking for is just around the corner. I turn down a narrow street—an alley, really—and there it is. The arched doorway, iron gate, the bougainvillea, all just as I remembered it, and three steps down is the cool white cavern with the strange writhing figures painted on the walls. I remember now that the name had something to do with Dante’s
Inferno,
but there’s no name on the sign. A maître d’ in a gleaming white shirt greets us at the bottom of the stairs.

“Potremo mangiare al fresco, per favore?”
I ask, the words Bruno always used when we dined here coming back to me as if they were the magic incantation that ensured entry.

“Ma certo, signora,”
the maître d’ replies, bowing deeply and sweeping his arm toward the back of the restaurant. We follow him down a long, low corridor, past the wraiths of Dante’s dead undulating on the walls beneath incongruously cheerful banners.

“This is kind of creepy,” Mara says, clutching her shopping bags closer to her. “Who are these people supposed to be?”

“The sad spirits who lived without praise or blame,” I tell her. “In Dante’s
Inferno
they occupy a kind of vestibule before hell. And those”—I point to the ceiling, where dark-winged angels wheel above us—“are the coward angels who neither opposed God nor stood by him. The paintings were done during the war,” I say, lowering my voice, “and were probably meant to condemn those who let the fascists take control without opposing them or trying to save the Jewish refugees.”

“A little grim for a restaurant,” Mara says. “Are we going to hell now?”

“Well, yes, but only the pleasanter part. The bar through there is limbo,” I say indicating a room paneled in dark wood and lined with deep red banquets, “and out here in the garden is the second circle for the lesser sins of lust and gluttony.”

The maître d’ opens an old wooden door at the end of the corridor and waves us into a tiny courtyard, enclosed on each side by espaliered pear trees and climbing roses. In the center is a fountain of two lovers entwined together in an eternal kiss.

“Paolo and Francesca,” I tell Mara as the maître d’ seats us at a small table underneath a grape arbor. Each one of the tables is in its own small bower to ensure privacy.

“Well, this is pretty,” Mara admits, sinking into her chair and letting her shopping bags settle to the ground around her, the layers of tissue paper inside rustling like roosting pigeons.

I order us a bottle of sparkling mineral water and a carafe of the house red. “There’s no menu,” I tell Mara, “but I remember they made a wonderful pasta with cream and grated orange peel. Oh, but I forgot—you don’t eat dairy.” Or drink, I remember as the waiter returns and pours us each a glass.

“Oh, well, when in Rome,” Mara says, taking a sip of the wine. “Order whatever’s best. I’m exhausted. Shopping always makes me tired.”

I can see why. The energy that had propelled Mara through her purchases had a frantic quality to it—a compulsive quality—and now that it’s abandoned her, she seems somehow deflated.

“But what good bargains we got,” she says. “I know those scarves cost over three hundred dollars at home, and here they were only two-eighty.”

The waiter has appeared so I don’t answer right away. I order us both salads and the
pasta del giorno.
When he goes I take a sip of mineral water and say, “Well, actually, Mara, that was in euros. With the current exchange rate, that makes it well over three hundred dollars.”

“Oh,” she says, waving her hand again. “Oh, well. I suppose I’ll have to listen to Gene rant and rave when he gets the Amex bill, but at least he can’t make me return anything without sending me back to Florence.” She smiles conspiratorially and clinks her glass of red wine against mine as if I were her comrade in deceiving her husband. I’m alarmed to see that she’s finished the glass and I wonder whether it’s a sign of guilt over concealing the truth about Robin’s death. “And he really shouldn’t complain. My parents bought us the house we live in, so it’s not like we’ve got a big mortgage, and it’s not my fault academics make so little. When we met he told me he was going to make movies. I thought it sounded so glamorous, but I should have listened to my mother and married a doctor or at least an orthodontist. Do you have any idea what Ned’s braces cost us?”

Thankfully, our salads arrive and Mara takes a break to exclaim over the nearly translucent shavings of parmesan, the crisp white fennel, and the sweet figs. “What did you say this restaurant was called again? I want to tell my friends about it.”

“I honestly can’t remember. The name had something to do with Paolo and Francesca, though.”

“Who?”

“Two lovers Dante met in the underworld. Francesca tells Dante how they fell in love while reading the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere, how when they got to the moment where Lancelot kisses Guinevere, Paolo kissed her.
‘La bocca mi basciò tutto tremante.’
All trembling, he kissed my mouth. It’s very sensual in the Italian…”

I pause because the waiter has brought our pasta—cream-drenched tagliatelle flecked with tiny orange specks and garnished with purple nasturtiums. A dish, I suddenly remember, called Pasta alla Francesca.

“I’m not sure I should eat all this dairy…” Mara says, but she’s already twirling the gleaming noodles and bringing a forkful to her mouth. She closes her eyes at the first bite and moans. “Oh, my God, that is the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten. So, tell me, why are Paula and Francesca in hell?”

“Well, Francesca was married to Paolo’s brother, Gianciotto.”

“Ah, so they were adulterers,” Mara says, wiping a dab of cream from her chin.

“Yes, but in their defense, there’s a story that Gianciotto sent Paolo to Ravenna to bring Francesca back to Rimini to marry him, and Francesca fell in love with Paolo thinking
he
was her husband-to-be.”

“Still,”
Mara says, “once she knew…”

“Yes, well, they are in hell,” I say, annoyed with the way Mara always turns everything into
her
story—the story of the aggrieved wife of a philanderer—but then I realize that I can perhaps use the story to serve my own purposes. “But the husband, Gianciotto, is in a lower circle for killing Paolo and Francesca. Dante organizes the circles of hell so that the worst sinners receive the worst punishment. The figures we saw coming in, for instance, were of people who saw evil but did nothing to stop it. Like the citizens who did nothing to stop the fascists from killing the Jews here in Italy.”

“Oh, it’s just too awful to think about,” Mara says, wiping the cream from her lips. “You know, I read Anne Frank’s diary four times in the year I was preparing for my bat mitzvah. It had such a big impact on me that I brought it up in my dvar Torah speech. I’d gotten the worst Haftorah portion—that part of Leviticus with all the gross sacrifices? But then my Hebrew tutor pointed out that it was all about responsibility and I was able to relate it to Anne Frank and the rabbi said it was one of the best dvar Torahs he had ever heard. There wasn’t a dry eye in Temple Beth-El.”

“Yes, I can imagine that was a very powerful subject,” I say, delighted that Mara has grasped the concept of bystander guilt so quickly. I think, from my own dim memories of Hebrew school, that the passage of Leviticus she’s talking about (the one with all the “gross sacrifices”) actually says something about a witness’s obligation to report what he has seen. Now I just have to connect that lesson to her responsibility to report what she knows happened on the balcony in New York before she starts in with her bat mitzvah theme and color scheme.

“Accountability is something I’ve thought a lot about since Robin’s death,” I say. “You see, I was inside, so I didn’t see what happened. But you were out on the balcony. Maybe you saw something then that didn’t really register—”

“I didn’t see anything,” Mara says abruptly. “Gene pulled me away.”

“But Gene saw what happened…Is he sure Robin jumped?”

Mara has been twirling the same forkful of pasta for the last thirty seconds, staring at the strands as if they had turned to snakes. “What difference does it make?” she asks, putting down her fork. “I mean, the boy’s dead. What difference does it make if he killed himself or someone pushed him?”

“Well, for one thing, Saul Weiss, Robin’s father, wouldn’t have to go through the rest of his life thinking that his son killed himself. Imagine if it were Ned—”

“Ned would never hurt himself. I’ve made sure he’s had all the best therapists, and when they wanted him to go on Prozac last year I said no because of the cases of teenagers on antidepressants killing themselves. We put him on Wellbutrin instead. It has a much lower incidence of suicidal thoughts and it helps you lose weight at the same time.”

I realize I’ve touched a nerve more sensitive than I’d counted on and I feel a twinge of guilt using Mara’s maternal protectiveness to make her come forward with what Gene told her. I also realize how much pain I’ll be causing Bruno if Mara does accuse Orlando of pushing Robin off the balcony. For a moment I wonder whether it’s worth it—trading one parent’s grief for another’s, but then I think that Bruno might well have sent Orlando to New York to get those poems. Why should I spare him? And as for Mara, she hasn’t just concealed the truth surrounding Robin’s death; she stands to profit from it. She’s just gone shopping on it.

“So, think how you would feel,” I say, “if after everything you did, you thought Ned had taken his own life. If it weren’t true—if it had been Ned who was pushed off that balcony—wouldn’t you want to know the truth?”

Mara nods her head meekly. She looks suddenly very young. I can picture her at thirteen delivering her dvar Torah to the congregation of Temple Beth-El. “I really didn’t see anything,” she says, sounding for all the world like a schoolgirl caught cheating, “but Gene…” She stops, reluctant, I imagine, to give too much away to me. A full confession is more than I need, though, as long as she convinces Gene to come forward with what he saw on the balcony. I put my hand on hers. “If Gene saw something that’s different from what Mark told the police, he should say so.”

Mara nods. “Well, I’ll talk to him about it,” she says weakly. “I suppose we ought to be getting back. Garçon!” She summons the waiter and wiggles her hand in the air to indicate that she wants the check. We lapse into silence waiting for it. Mara, I hope, is busy thinking of how she will tell Gene that they need to tell the police about Orlando, and I’m reluctant to push her any further.

“Oh, sweetie, could you put this on your card?” she says when the bill arrives. “I don’t want Gene having a hemorrhage over our balance. You’re so lucky that you don’t have anyone looking over your bills.”

Or paying them,
I think, laying my MasterCard on the silver tray. Since I may have just sabotaged the Silvermans’ lucrative film deal with Leo Balthasar, I figure the least I can do is pay for lunch. In order to stoop to such a deal, the Silvermans must be fairly desperate for the cash. Which isn’t hard to fathom if Mara regularly shops like this on an academic’s salary.