Without Reservations (37 page)

When we traveled together, Hal and I seemed to have an un-spoken
agreement that we could go our own separate ways once we’d got to our destination. Sometimes we’d arrive in a town and while Hal went off to tour some church or sit in a café, I strolled through the streets or sought out a pottery shop. But we always met for lunch. And we were always eager to tell each other, over pasta and wine, what we did that morning.

Seeing a place through Hal’s eyes added a new dimension to the trip. He was a person who seemed pleasantly surprised by everything. The appearance of a dog on the street. The sight of a little girl combing her doll’s hair. Once when a sudden rainstorm swept through Siena, catching us off guard at an outdoor café, Hal seemed surprised but delighted.

“Unusual, this rain. But there’s nothing more refreshing than Italian rain, is there?” he asked, after we’d taken shelter under one of the café’s awnings.

Hal and I also enjoyed taking part in the
passeggiata
, the traditional before-dinner stroll observed in many Tuscan towns. It’s a neighborly time, when young and old take to the narrow streets, window-shopping and stopping to gossip. Young lovers, too, came out to enjoy the
passeggiata.
But they walked in their own world, each in thrall to the other. The older townspeople smiled at the sight of the young lovers as they passed by. Hal and I, walking arm in arm, smiled too.

“Romeo and Juliet, eh?” Hal said, nodding in the direction of one young couple. “Caught up in the
folie à deux
known as young love.”

“Ah yes, I remember it well,” I said. “Too well, I fear.”

“I suspect we all do. Romantic love is likely responsible for most of us marrying the wrong person.” Hal laughed. “It was in my case, anyway.”

I was caught off guard by his remark. Despite his love of writers like Yeats and Joyce, I never thought of Hal as having a romantic nature. It was hard for me to imagine him driven by overwhelming passion into a marriage, or even a relationship. Certainly ours was a platonic relationship. But I’d suspected from the beginning that Hal and I would never be a romantic couple, that we were destined instead for friendship.

The truth is, my relationship with Hal turned out to be one of the least romanticized I’d ever had with a man. I didn’t imagine him or invent him, as I often did with men who attracted me. I liked him for the person he actually was. And when I noticed something about him I didn’t like, it was no big deal. As far as his feelings about me, well, I liked not having any of the bloated self-awareness that comes with romantic chemistry or the need to see myself reflected favorably in a man’s eyes. What I saw in Hal’s eyes was: Hal.

Sometimes I thought Harold Ladley was just the kind of man with whom I could share a life. But other times I suspected that I would miss the leap of the blood, as a friend of mine calls the physical chemistry between a man and a woman. It is the tension, as every woman knows, that gives a relationship its extra spring.

I felt it, the leap of the blood, one morning in Siena when a letter arrived from Paris. It was from Naohiro, suggesting we meet in Venice. Immediately I wrote back, agreeing. On my return from posting it, I stopped to look at some pottery in a shop window. In the glass I saw my reflection. Looking at my flushed face, I decided that the leap of the blood, among other things, was very good for one’s complexion.

On the day before I was to leave Siena for the Veneto, Hal suggested we visit the nearby town of San Gimignano. “It’s among the most remarkable of all the Tuscan towns,” he said. “Very well-preserved and quite haunting, I think.”

I agreed and we left within the hour, driving the short distance from Siena to San Gimignano through rolling farmland and air fresh with the scent of cypress trees.

As we drove, Hal explained that San Gimignano, once known as San Gimignano of the Fine Towers, had a savage past, one that included fighting and plunder by barbarians, and terrible plagues. At the end of the eleventh century, seventy-six towers were built, from which San Gimignano’s great families could wage war. As usual when Hal went into the history of a place, he made it quite entertaining.

Listening to him, I often was reminded of my father’s stories about the exotic places he’d visited. I’d been thinking about my father a lot lately. Sometimes when I came across a place that seemed unusually exciting and foreign to me—the kind of place I imagined he would like—it was as though I was seeing it through my father’s eyes as well as my own. More than once I found myself wondering if I was trying to, as an analyst might put it, “incorporate” my father. I knew it was a necessary emotional task I’d never been able to complete. It even occurred to me, on the way to San Gimignano with Hal, that of all the roles assigned to me in my lifetime, the one I’d never played to a mature conclusion was that of daughter. Daughter to a father, anyway.

I was about to ask Hal how close we were to San Gimignano when a skyline of tall buildings appeared on a distant hillside. The shapes, silhouetted against the sky, struck me as mysterious, almost ominous. If I squinted, they resembled giant warriors standing guard over the town.

“Those are the thirteen remaining towers of San Gimignano,” Hal said. “The most that are left, I think, in any of the hill towns.”

As we approached the walls surrounding the town, my excitement grew. I was attracted to the dark history that lay inside these ramparts, just as I had been drawn to the medieval pageantry of the parade in Siena. Why this was so, I wasn’t sure. But the minute I entered the walled city, where no cars are permitted, a little thrill of pleasure passed through me.

Hal had decided to search for a church fresco he wanted to see, so I walked alone up the steep Via San Giovanni. Halfway to the top I stopped and leaned against a doorway. I stood there imagining how, long ago, whole families living on this street were wiped out by the cruel and terrible Black Death. Now there were shops and cafés filled with tourists drinking Vernaccia, the delicious local white wine. Looking past the town ramparts I could imagine fierce battles being waged, filling the air with smoke and the pitiful cries of the doomed. Now I smelled the fragrance of almond biscuits baking and heard the high, sweet sounds of music.

Since Hal and I had agreed to meet at the square—the Piazza del Duomo—I headed in that direction. The fresco Hal was looking for was inside the large cathedral on the west side of the piazza.

I was about to climb the steps leading to the cathedral’s entrance when I saw Hal. He was standing at the opposite side of the piazza, leafing through a book. The sight of him in his familiar brown tweed jacket, his red hair shooting off sparks in the sun, made me smile. I waved. He didn’t seem to see me.

As I started to walk back down the steps to cross the square I heard the music. It was the same sound of recorders I’d heard earlier. Hauntingly beautiful, the music reminded me of Andean folk music, sad and delicate, filled with longing. I spotted four men standing at the entrance to a street; they were playing different-sized wooden pipes. The limpid sounds floated through the piazza, each note hanging in the air like a memory of home.

As I listened, a strange, mixed-up feeling came over me. Part of it had to do with standing in a small Tuscan hill town waving—waving good-bye, really—to a man I liked and admired. But another part was about the past, about wanting to wave good-bye to my father. Not the kind of good-bye that was forever, but the kind I waved to Mother when I left on the bus for Girl Scout camp or to Ducky Harris when we parted after walking home from school.

I thought of all the years I’d spent trying to piece together a picture of my father’s face. Now, for the first time, I wished he could see me, see what I looked like, see who I was.

I wanted to say:
This is me, Dad. This is your little girl grown into a woman. And I’m standing here far from home, alive and excited and thinking of you.

Instead, I said to the red-haired man running up the steps of the Duomo toward me, “I was wondering if you saw me. I’ve been waiting for you.”

I
t was to Asolo, a Renaissance town perched high in the green foothills of the Italian Dolomites, that Freya Stark came to live out the end of her life. And it was to Asolo that I had come to pay my respects to Dame Freya and to end my trip.

It seemed the right thing to do, to spend the last days of my journey with a woman who had become my travel companion. Over the months I often had relied on her spirit to guide me when I hesitated, uncertain of the way. Usually it was her idealism and desire to understand that inspired me. But Freya also made me laugh. Sometimes out loud. Who else could offer up, after writing with elegance and insight about the culture and people of Baghdad, an observation such as this:

“I suppose that, after the passion of love, water rights have caused more trouble than anything else to the human species.”

The irony was that had I come to Asolo just seven months earlier I might have run into her. Indeed I might have seen Freya at the very villa where I was staying; she was said to occasionally take dinner there. But just as I was beginning my trip in Paris, Freya was ending her lifelong journey. She died in her beloved Asolo at the age of 100 and was buried in the local graveyard. In Arabian robes, so the story goes.

No wonder she loved this village, I thought, as I sat drinking espresso in Piazza Garibaldi, the central square of Asolo. With its honey-colored buildings and winding, colonnaded streets too narrow
to allow two-way traffic, Asolo’s quiet beauty for centuries attracted composers, painters, and poets, Robert Browning among them. “The most beautiful spot I ever was privileged to see,” he wrote of Asolo. After his death the street he lived on was renamed Via Browning.