The Truth About Death (27 page)

I was about to order another glass of wine when I noticed a young woman crossing the piazza dragging the largest suitcase I’d ever seen. The suitcase had wheels on it so that you could pull it down long airport corridors, but the wheels were too small for the rough paving bricks of the piazza, and the suitcase kept tipping over like a large dog that keeps flopping itself down. She wasn’t able to go twenty feet without the suitcase falling, and it was so big and heavy she had trouble setting it upright again. I stepped out from under the
volta
to get a better look, and when she saw me in the light of the piazza, she cried out,
“Acqua, acqua.”

I shrugged my shoulders. After all, there were two bars in the piazza, in addition to the
bettola.
We were in the center of a modern city, not in the middle of the desert.

“Acqua, acqua.”

I could hear the tears in her voice.

“Acqua Arno,”
she said, and it dawned on me that she was looking for the river.

“Right down Via Verdi,” I said in Italian, pointing in the direction of Via Verdi and indicating that she should turn to the right.

The suitcase tipped over again and this time she left it.
“Acqua Arno,”
she repeated.

“Parla Italiano?”
I asked, helping her right the suitcase.

“Acqua Arno.”

“English?”

“Je suis française.”

“Ahi,”
I said.
“Non parla italiano? O inglese?”

“Française,”
she repeated.
“Je suis française.”

I’d had two years of French in college and said the first thing that popped into my head.
“Je peux parler un peu de français.”

“Dieu merci.”
A look of relief rose to her face.
“Je cherche l’Arno, s’il vous plaît …”
She kept going, but too fast for me to follow. Quite naturally she expected more, but unfortunately there was no more. To her rapid questions I could make only a single response: “
Je peux parler un peu de français
”—I can speak a little French—which I kept repeating, hoping that something would click. But nothing clicked. I was imprisoned in a single phrase. What had looked like an open door was a trompe l’oeil.

“Acqua Arno?”
This time it was a tentative question. She had given up. She was a damsel in distress, and I was her knight-errant; but without the sword of language I couldn’t come to her rescue, so I pointed her once again in the direction of Via Verdi, extending my arm toward the river—
acqua Arno
—and watched as she crossed the piazza. As she approached Via Verdi the enormous suitcase teetered, tottered, and fell over again. She struggled to set it on its wheels, and then she disappeared around the corner and was gone.

Je peux parler un peu de français.
It was ridiculous. It was maddening.
Je peux parler un peu de français.
It didn’t occur to me at the time that if I’d gone on in French, in school, instead of switching to Italian I’d probably be in Paris instead of Florence, or that if she had spoken Italian, she wouldn’t be in the middle of the piazza asking for
acqua Arno
. No, all I could think of was that my whole life had been leading up to this point,
and I’d studied the wrong language
.

I caught up with her in front of the Banca del Lavoro on Via Verdi. I hadn’t made a decision; I’d just paid for another glass of wine, and then, without drinking it, I’d started to run after her. She hadn’t gotten far because of the suitcase. Between the two of us, we managed to keep it upright—two police officers escorting a troublesome drunk—until we reached the river.

“Pension,”
she said, looking up and down the
lungarno
.

“Pensione,”
I said, not knowing if she had a particular
pensione
in mind or if she were looking for a
pensione
, any
pensione
. “
Indirizzo,
” I said. Address. No response. “Uhndrezz.” I gave the English word a French twist, but she didn’t understand.

The third week in December was not cold as we understand cold in Chicago, but it was chilly and I thought the French woman needed more clothes, warmer clothes.

The small
albergo
where I’d reserved a room for my daughter was not far away, just past the Biblioteca Nazionale.
Since I hadn’t collected my deposit earlier in the evening—I’d paid in advance for two nights—I considered the room reserved.

Volmaro, with whom I had quarreled bitterly only an hour earlier, gave me a puzzled look, as if there’d been some mistake. “Professore,” he said. “Your daughter has arrived after all?”

I explained the situation and Volmaro smiled. Nothing enigmatic, just a smile.

“You can put my deposit toward her bill.”

“Of course, but let me remind you that the policy of the hotel …”

“Please.” I interrupted him. “Let me help you with the suitcase and I’ll be on my way.”

Together we maneuvered the suitcase up a small flight of stairs to the elevator landing while the French woman watched, her image reflected ad infinitum in a pair of gilt mirrors on opposite sides of the landing. She was a woman in her mid-thirties, dressed from top to toe in the very latest fashions: a short jacket, cinched at the waist, leggings that were soft and clingy. She had forest green boots on her feet; her hair had been dyed a metallic copper color; and on her wrist she wore a bulky Russian watch. She was more fashionable than beautiful. But she was beautiful too.

Volmaro pushed a button and the elevator door clanked open and he rolled the suitcase into the elevator and my left knee began to quiver and quite suddenly I remembered another phrase in French. It came to me as a gift, rising to the surface like a cork that’s been held underwater:
“Dans le fonds des forêts votre image me suis.”
In the depths of the forest your image follows me. It was a line from Racine, something that had stuck in my mind, because as a young man I’d once
written it on one of those little cards that florists give you when you send flowers.

She colored slightly and smiled.

“Alle undici,”
I said. Eleven o’clock. I held up two forefingers, side by side.

“Onze?”
she said.

“Onze,”
I repeated.
“Qui.”
I pointed at the floor, the ceiling, the four walls.

“Ici,”
she said, nodding her head as she stepped backward into the elevator.

In the morning I bought a shirt and a pair of corduroy pants at Raspini, across from the Baptistery. There was a jacket in the window, too, a really splendid jacket. I’d never seen such a jacket before, rich dark-chocolaty suede, soft as butter. It fit perfectly, but it wasn’t really any warmer than my Windbreaker. It was totally impractical, in fact;
DO NOT WASH
read a tag, in English, that I pulled out of the inside pocket;
DO NOT DRY-CLEAN
. And the salesman admitted that it would be ruined by rain. Besides, it was outrageously expensive—I could have spent two weeks in Rome for what it cost—and when I asked, just to double-check, I found that the price in the window was incorrect. The jacket really cost a great deal more, so I settled for a green silk scarf, which I knotted around my neck like a tie.

Leaving my jeans and turtleneck at Raspini to be picked up later, I crossed Via Cavour and admired my new clothes in the window of the Mazocco bookstore, where I picked out a French–
I
talian dictionary that was small enough to fit into my jacket pocket and included a brief outline of French grammar. I also bought a Michelin Guide to the city, in French. Then I made my way to the
albergo,
where I found
the French woman waiting in the lobby, dressed in black stockings, a short apricot-colored skirt, and a flowery silk blouse. Her makeup, minimal but skillfully applied, matched the skirt.

“Bonjour, madame,” I said.

“Bonjour, monsieur.”

I gave her a complete tour of Santa Croce, because it was close, and because I didn’t know what else to do, and because I had the
Guide Michelin
and could read to her in French, which took her so completely by surprise that she laughed and covered her mouth with her hand, on which I noticed a ring. The more I read, the more she laughed; but when, embarrassed, I handed
her
the book, she handed it back.
“Lisez,”
she said.
“Lisez.
”

It was one o’clock by the time we left the church. I ordered sandwiches—
schiacciatta
with
prosciutto arosto
and
pecorino
and
salsa di funghi—
in a bar in Piazza San Pier Maggiore, and while she ate I read aloud from the guidebook: “ ‘The tower that dominates the piazza was built by the Donati family at the beginning of the thirteenth century. In 1308 Corso Donati, captain of the Black Guelphs and brother of Piccarda, Dante’s inconstant nun, was besieged in the tower by his enemies. In an attempt to escape he was dragged to his death by his own horses on the present-day Via Pietrapiana.’ ”

I could understand the guidebook French because the subject matter was familiar; but I couldn’t talk, couldn’t put together a sentence, couldn’t tell her that I myself had lived in that very tower with my family, that I used to stand in the window with a glass of Gallo Nero, waiting for my wife to come back from I Tatti, how she’d get off the bus in front of the post office looking beautiful in the red dress I’d bought for her on the Via Tornabuoni, how happy we’d been then, that
my image of happiness was bound up with that tower apartment, with that piazza, with the
pizzicheria
, the
forno
, the
latteria
, and the
polleria
, even the dry cleaner with its peculiar odor; and how our neighbors and the teachers at the language school and the parents of the children’s classmates and even people I met on the bus had been happy to sit at our table, to talk: food, love, philosophy, religion. But I tried, with a handful of words from my French–
I
talian dictionary:
famille
,
femme
,
enfants
,
appartement
,
convives
,
table
,
manger
,
parler.
She leaned forward so as not to drop crumbs in her lap.
“Heureux,”
I said. She looked at me thoughtfully, the way an adult would look at a child who was trying to explain a complicated dream that he didn’t fully understand.

She nodded. She was a nodder, and she nodded that evening in the Trattoria Maremmana, where my wife and I, on our last night in Florence, asked if we could have the last of our
bistecca alla fiorentina
for our dog, and the waiter, after he’d taken our plates, brought us a large sack full of old bones:
femme, dernier nuit, bistecca, bourse pour les os, garçon, os pour le chien
.

That night I made a frontal assault on the French language: I studied the grammar in my dictionary, conjugated
parler
,
finir
, and
répondre
in the present indicative (which is all you really need), memorized a list of irregular verbs, reviewed prepositions from
à
to
vers
, tried to formulate some hypothetical phrases, and fell asleep with the dictionary in my hand.

In the morning we went to the Uffizi. Aesthetic response is my special subject, my academic raison d’être
.
What is aesthetic experience like? Why do we value it? How can we translate it into words? After four months it was nice to experience the real thing again—the tug of beauty like the tug of a
kite on a long string. If only I could speak—if only I could tell her—but all I could do was read from the
Guide Michelin
—clichés as universal as international traffic signs:
cette Venus couchée … symphonie harmonieuse de coleurs … intense et vibrant … chiaroscuro doucement modelé … le realisme du petit chien endormi sur le lit …

Her
response was more physical, and when she took my arm for the first time, a French phrase rose to the surface of my imagination, one of the first things a young man learns or figures out in French 101:
Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? But surely,
I thought, vous
is the formal form. Wouldn’t you ask such a question with a
tu
?

At lunch I posed some of the questions I had formulated the evening before. She answered absently, paying more attention to her slippery bucatini, which sent tomato sauce splattering off in all directions, than to me. Her name was Yvonne. She was from Dijon. She was on holiday. She worked for an architectural firm … But I couldn’t figure out what I really wanted to know: Why had she come to Florence alone? How had she landed in Piazza San Pier Maggiore with her enormous suitcase?

In the afternoon I wanted her to notice how the streets in the city center run at right angles to each other—the old Roman castrum—but she led me back to the
pensione.
Her room was dark. I opened the shutters. I needed air and light. She sat on the edge of the bed and I thumbed through my dictionary, searching for the words I needed to explain that it was perfectly all right just the way it was: to talk … that it wasn’t necessary … that in all the years I’d been married I’d never … that I really didn’t think … I kept on turning pages while she removed her clothes. I was still turning when she took the dictionary out of my hands and put it in the drawer
of the bedside
commodino
, where it remained for the rest of her stay.

When I looked into her eyes, I saw my wife, Maggie, and I could see in Yvonne’s eyes that she too was seeing someone else. And I could see not only that this was so, but that she knew it was so and knew that I knew, and knew that I knew that she knew …