The Truth About Death (19 page)

Maybe I
was
self-conscious, but I didn’t say so.

“Let’s go to bed right away,” she said, once we got into the house. “Then we can enjoy our dinner later. Besides, it’s chilly in here. That will give it a chance to warm up.” She adjusted the thermostat. “We can talk later. You can tell me all about Galileo. His tomb’s in Santa Croce, you know.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m going to see if we can borrow it for the
MSI
exhibit.”

“The tomb?” She laughed. In the bedroom she unpinned her hair in front of a mirror and then combed it out. Hurry up and wait. But I didn’t mind. I studied an etching on the wall signed
Rembrandt f. 1646
—a young couple making love.

“Is this real?” I asked. “I mean really a Rembrandt?”

“Yes, but it’s not mine. It comes with the house.”

“The woman has three hands.”

“He forgot to erase one when he changed the position. But look at the smile on her face.”

It was a lovely smile, a wonderful smile, like the smile on the face of a young woman I’d been watching over and over on the YouTube video—a slide-guitar version of “Corrina, Corrina.”

I watched Rosella’s shadow moving on the wall as she took her clothes off. When she turned toward me and smiled a smile that spread through her whole body, I could see tiny creases under her eyes. She was irresistible. But over her shoulder, in the mirror, I could see something moving outside the bedroom window, something at the edge of the darkness. The drapes had not been pulled. I turned to look. It was an enormous white pig coming closer, walking stiff-legged. The
pig came right up to the glass wall and pressed its nose up against it. For a moment I thought I was coming unstrung, but Rosella put her hand on my back, as if to steady me.

“It’s Elena,” she said. “She’s supposed to be penned in up at the villa, but sometimes she gets loose. She’s attracted to the light. They have quite a few animals.”

“They?”

“The family.”

“She’s huge.”

“Over two hundred and fifty kilos. Do you want me to chase her away?”

“No, no,” I said. “It’s all right.”

“She’ll wander off when I turn out the light.”

After we made love, Rosella cooked spaghetti with garlic and oil, the simplest meal in the world and one of the most satisfying. No salad—the shops had been closed on Easter Monday evening. There was nothing else to eat in the house except some crackers and a bowl of apples, big green apples past their prime. We each ate an apple using knives and forks.

After supper we went outside and looked at the night sky through the crude cardboard telescope I’d given Rosella. No sign of Elena. The moon was full, but because of the small field of vision inherent in the design, you could see only half of it at a time.

“Before Galileo,” I said, “astronomers thought that the sky had been completely explored. Everything—all the planets, all the fixed stars—had been cataloged. There was nothing more to discover. Who would have thought that by sticking two eyeglass lenses into the ends of a tube …”

“They had eyeglasses?”

“Eyeglasses were invented in the late Middle Ages,” I said. “That’s what you’ve got in this tube, more or less.
Sixteen dollars for a pair of lenses, thirty-five dollars for the whole kit.”

We looked at the North Star and at Vega, which was rising in the northeast, and at Jupiter, though the telescope wasn’t powerful enough to pick out its moons, and then we went back inside and watched—on a computer—a slideshow of Rosella’s restoration work between the Gothic ribs at the top of the apse of Santa Croce—the Cappella Maggiore. We looked at hands and feet and robes and faces that had been cleaned and the tips of an angel’s wings, the feathers newly restored to their original luster.

“I love this job,” she said. “You’ve got to be an artisan, working with your hands without leaving a mark. And you’ve got to be an artist, using your imagination, and you’ve got to be a scientist too, a chemist. And you’ve got to be an historian, hanging on to things that are passing away, to preserve the old visual culture. Now we’re in a new visual culture. It’s impoverished in some ways, but rich in others. The problem is that people don’t know how to understand the symbols, how to read them critically. You’ll have to come up on the scaffolding with me. Then you’ll understand.”

Scaffolding? The top of a Gothic cathedral? I was picturing Juliette Binoche in
The English Patient
, hoisted up to the top of a church so she can examine the frescoes. No, thanks. But I didn’t want Rosella to know that I was afraid of heights. I wasn’t cripplingly acrophobic, but I never stood close to the floor-to-ceiling windows in a high-rise, and I never took the glass elevators in Water Tower Place.

“You’ll have to wear a hard hat,” she said, too interested in the slideshow to notice my lack of enthusiasm, interested in the frescoes not so much as works of art but as things, physical objects, subject to decay in a way that a poem or a piece of
music is not. “When they’re covered on the outside,” she said, “with an accumulation of dirt and grime and candle smoke, you can clean them. When they’re threatened from the inside by corrosive salts erupting from within the very stones of the cathedral, you can dissolve the salts. But when they’re gone, like half the Giotto frescos in the Peruzzi Chapel, they’re gone forever.”

When the slideshow was over, I sat down at the computer and went to the YouTube video, the one with the smiling woman. The men you see at the opening are Italian, and the man wearing headphones says something in Italian—too fast for me—and counts down in Italian. The voice of the singer sounds like an old black man from the Delta, but the video doesn’t match the audio. The young man playing a guitar in the video is strumming away wildly with a flat pick, but what you hear on the audio track is someone fingerpicking a slow blues:
Corrina, Corrina, where you been so long?
And then, during the second and third verses, you see the young man and this lovely woman sitting together. Talking. She turns to him and smiles.

“Look at her smile,” I said. “It’s like the smile in the etching.”

Rosella looked at me, astonished. “That’s Joan Baez,” she said. “And Bob Dylan.”

“Really? It doesn’t say that on the website.”

“
Porcamadonna
! How could you not recognize Joan Baez and Bob Dylan? You’re kidding me.”

“No, I had no idea.”

“Well,” she said, “they’re very young.”

“That’s not Bob Dylan singing, is it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“He can do gravelly,” I said. “And he’s the one who made that song popular.”

We went back to bed. Rosella left the light on. She couldn’t stop smiling. “I can’t believe you didn’t recognize Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.” And she—Rosella—seemed to have three hands like the woman in the etching, all pinching, tickling, massaging, scratching, poking.

Afterward she fell asleep, but I was wide-awake. I propped myself up on one elbow and watched her for a while, and then I got up and went outside. I slipped on my leather jacket, which I’d bought at a discount store in Chicago, and put an apple in one of the side pockets. I turned the porch light on. A bicycle was leaning against the side of the house, and I was tempted to go for a spin. The road, or lane, led back down to Fiesole or up to the villa. But it was too dark to see, and the house was too isolated. Low streaky clouds covered the moon, and there was almost no light except the light from the house itself—the porch light and a lamp on the table next to the bed that I’d left on. I could see into the bedroom. Rosella had covered herself with a sheet.

I walked out to the edge of the darkness, out of sight of the house. I could sense trees, but I couldn’t tell what kind they were. Maybe olive trees. I felt a branch but couldn’t find any olives. It was too early anyway. It wasn’t cold, but it was chilly, and after a few minutes I was ready to go back inside. But I’d forgotten about Elena. Two hundred fifty kilos. A third of a ton. Pure white like the moon. She was standing under the light, between me and the door. I walked around the house. There was another door that opened into the kitchen, but it was locked. I knew enough about pigs not to challenge her. I’d helped my girlfriend’s father rustle hogs a couple of times when I was in high school, and what I knew was that if a farmer had a heart attack in his field, the pigs would eat him.

I took the apple out of my jacket pocket and held it out to her. “Elena,” I said. “How about a nice mushy apple?” She really was enormous.

“Elena, Elena,
vieni mi qua
, come and get this nice apple.” I took a bite out of the apple. She moved her head, and I could see she was tempted. It took about five minutes to lure her away from the front door. She moved toward me in her stiff-legged gait. Closer and closer. She seemed interested, rather than hostile, as if she were interrogating me. I thought about throwing the apple down on the ground, but decided against it. I held it in the palm of my hand as she came closer. She knocked it off my hand with her snout, waited for my reaction, then picked it up with her mouth. I walked around her, slowly, on my way to the door, trailing my fingertips over her back, which looked furry but felt as scratchy as sandpaper.

She raised her head, looking for another apple. I went inside, brought out the bowl of apples, and fed them to her one at a time till they were all gone. And then I got back into bed with Rosella.

On Tuesday morning I met with the director of the Museo di Storia della Scienza, who was pleased that I spoke Italian. He didn’t make any promises about the second telescope, but he sent me to the Fondazione Scienza e Tecnica on Via Guiseppe Giusti, near the Protestant Cemetery, where I spent a pleasant afternoon, though our own collection at the
MSI
already contained most of the sixteenth-century astronomical and mathematical instruments that we needed for the exhibit.

On my way to Piazza Santa Croce to meet Rosella I stopped and browsed the windows of several real estate agencies. I liked the looks of a two-bedroom apartment on Borgo
Pinti for six hundred thousand euros. It would be perfect. Rosella could walk to work. The words of the notice embedded themselves in my brain:
appartamento luminoso.
It was on the
piano nobile
of an old palazzo that had been recently restored. Large living room. Modern kitchen. Two bedrooms. Two baths. Rooftop terrace. I was feeling optimistic that evening as the waiter at the Osteria dei Pazzi, who knew Rosella by name, seated us at a table by the window. But Rosella was preoccupied, because out of the blue the Italian government had decided that it needed to exercise more control over restorers. The first step was a decree that all restorers would have to have a university degree.

“All of a sudden twenty thousand restorers aren’t restorers,” she kept saying. “This country is impossible. You can’t live here.” She tore off a chunk of
pane toscano
and put it in her mouth. “And this bread is ridiculous. Everywhere else in the whole world they know enough to put salt in their bread. The Florentines are the only people in the whole world who don’t know this. What is the matter with these people? It’s insane.”

“That’s because their food is so salty already.”

“Instead of putting so much salt in the food they should put some of it in the bread. Twenty thousand restorers won’t be restorers if the Italian government has its way.” She shook her head.

She ordered the
antipastone
for both of us. I understood that
antipastone
meant “big antipasto,” but I didn’t understand that it meant that the waiters would keep bringing us food till we couldn’t possibly eat any more, not even one more olive: salami, prosciutto, cheeses, octopus salad, anchovies, roast vegetables, roast beef,
lardo Colonnata
—thin white slices of lard that has been specially cured in marble basins at Colonnata, near Carrara. But lard nonetheless, a Tuscan delicacy.

It was while we were eating straight lard that I proposed to Rosella. I didn’t know what I’d do if she laughed in my face. My clothes, my suitcase, were at her house, so I couldn’t have just walked out of the restaurant. I was trying to stay focused in the present moment, to detach myself from the result, to identify with the watcher watching myself rather than with my ego.

She didn’t laugh nor did she throw herself into my arms. She listened as if she were listening to a business proposition. The fact that we were in love was very important, but it was only one part of a larger picture.

She called to the headwaiter, a man who burst into song every so often, and asked for another
quarto
of wine. It wasn’t a fancy place. Comfortable. Not too expensive.

I told her about my father’s death, though I didn’t mention that he’d died on Easter Sunday, only four days ago, and she became tender and understanding. But, she said, she had her own situation to consider, the situation that was too complicated for an American to understand, the situation that involved a rich older man who had a life of his own—a wife, several children, old money, old aristocracy, a big estate with several houses, animals … She was right. I didn’t understand.

“How would we live?” she wanted to know. “Fresco restorers don’t make a lot of money. How would you find a job in Italy?”

I had in fact given this question some thought, but I didn’t want to play my trump card, didn’t want to tell her that now that my father was dead, I was a rich man too. I wanted her to meet me halfway.

“Museum jobs,” she said, “any state jobs, are impossible to get. You’d have to enter a
concorso
, a competitive examination,
along with hundreds of other people. And even if you won, which you wouldn’t because the exams are rigged—there’s a lot of horse trading—you might be sent to Calabria.”

“One of the American programs? There are forty-three of them in Florence.”

“You wouldn’t make enough money.”

Our waiter had cleared the table and brought a bottle of vin santo and some biscotti di Prato. Rosella dipped a biscotto into her glass of wine.