The Truth About Death (20 page)

“Rosella,” I said. “I want this to matter. I want
us
to matter, you and me. I want us to be important. This isn’t a little adventure.”

“You never know what’s important and what’s not important till it’s over, do you?”

On Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, around five o’clock, we met at the statue of Dante in Piazza Santa Croce and then took the number seven bus up to Fiesole, where she’d left her Alfa Romeo Brera parked near the Roman amphitheater. Sometimes she took the tunnel-like lane, sometimes a regular road that took us past the villa where her sugar daddy lived.

We made love first thing every evening, early, so we could enjoy our dinner later. Elena did not reappear, but on Thursday we went up to visit her in her pen behind the villa. The signora was in Rome; the signore and his older son were still in the Dolomites, where the slopes were covered with snow year-round.

“She’s got a very low center of gravity,” Rosella said as we admired the gigantic sow. “But she’s very fast. If you want her to move forward, you have to enter her flight zone from behind the point of balance, which is right between her shoulders, and you have to remember her field of vision is almost
three hundred sixty degrees, so the only time she can’t see you is if you’re right behind her. If you want her to back up, you have to enter the flight zone from in front of the point of balance.”

“You know a lot about pigs,” I said.

“I know a lot about Elena,” she said.

She’d borrowed a guitar from a fellow restorer so I could play for her. I tuned it down to an open G and played “Corrina, Corrina” while she cooked. I used a table knife as a slide.

“You know,” she said. “I don’t like the second verse of that song. He doesn’t have his girlfriend and now his life ‘don’t mean a thing’? I don’t think you can look to another person for your salvation, to give meaning to your life.”

“Then I won’t sing it again,” I said.

On Friday morning—we were going to have lunch later at the Osteria dei Pazzi—we met at Dante’s cenotaph in the right aisle of the basilica. She wanted to take me up to the vault at the top of the apse, where she was working on the feet of Saint Francis himself. The vault at the top of the apse was about the last place I wanted to be. The scaffolding was massive, not at all like the sort of thing painters put up at the side of a house. It filled the entire apse of the Capella Maggiore. Even so, looking up into that airy dome—I counted nine levels or floors—made me a little bit seasick.

I had secured the second Galileo telescope as well as an unusual astrolabe, so I wouldn’t be going home empty-handed. There were still contracts to negotiate regarding the insurance, method of transportation, dates, and so on. I wouldn’t be carrying the telescope, which looked like a piece of broom handle, in my suitcase, of course, but I would finish up my part on Monday. The
MSI
lawyers would worry about
the fine print. But I was not in a mood to congratulate myself because I didn’t know if I’d see Rosella again after today, didn’t know if she’d be back from organizing a demonstration in Rome, didn’t know what she’d decided or what would be settled up in the apse, didn’t know if whatever it was we were doing was important or if it would turn out to be just a
piccola avventura
; I wasn’t going to tell her about the
luminoso
apartment. Not yet, anyway.

The elevator made me nervous—though it was huge—so we put on hard hats and took the stairs. Up nine stories, each floor supported by metal braces inserted into holes in the wall that had been made when the church was built in the thirteenth century.

Rosella stopped to chat with someone on each level and to introduce me and to explain what was going on. You could see the joins where one day’s work, or
giornata,
had overlapped another. In places you could see traces of the preparatory drawing in
verdaccio
, a sort of second underdrawing that repeated and corrected the
sinopia
or first underdrawing. You could see places where the pigment layer was flaking and areas where the pigment itself had been weakened by the binding medium or by surface abrasion. She explained the properties of the different fixatives (organic and inorganic), emulsions, and solvents (volatile and polar) that were used to remedy these problems.

We stopped on the eighth level for a cup of coffee in a large office, the sort of office you might find in downtown Chicago—full of desks, wastebaskets, lamps, a copy machine, a fax machine, telephones, and an espresso maker.

The apse had been frescoed by Agnolo Gaddi, who had learned from his more famous teachers—his father, Taddio, and Giotto—but who had done something different, moving
toward the International Gothic style. But the scaffolding made it impossible to take in the big picture,
Scenes from the Legend of the True Cross
.

Rosella was working on the frescoes between the ribs of a vaulted arch at the very top of the apse. We were face-to-face with Saint Francis, the four Evangelists, and the risen Christ, and we had to take off our hard hats so we wouldn’t scrape the ceiling.

“Vaults need special treatment,” she said, “because the undersurface is lath rather than stone.”

“What about these big cracks?” I asked. “Are you going to seal them up?”

“No,” she said. “If you fill them, that just redirects the stress. You smooth them out and seal the raw stone at the edges so it doesn’t disintegrate any further.”

I was so overwhelmed just by the idea of being up there that I forgot to be afraid. Overwhelmed and feeling very special, very much the insider. I even let Rosella walk me to the edge of the scaffolding so I could look down into the big barnlike nave. She put her hand on my back to steady me, as she had done when Elena first appeared at the glass wall of her bedroom.

Far below us groups of tourists followed guides holding bright umbrellas, stopping in front of the famous tombs: Dante’s (empty), Machiavelli’s, Michelangelo’s, Galileo’s, Rossini’s. A service was being conducted in one of the smaller chapels directly below us. We couldn’t see the priest, but we could see the people in an area that had been roped off. Everywhere you looked people were taking photos. Isolated worshippers were scattered here and there. In the right aisle a mother and father consulted a guidebook while two children ran up and down the aisle. They had to make way for a
mother and teenage daughter pushing an infant in a stroller. Workmen rolled a cart of stuff to the elevator. Some women in blue aprons were polishing the altar railings. (The main altar had been relocated to make room for the scaffolding.) A priest hurried toward the sacristy—we couldn’t see the entrance from the scaffolding. Two other priests, crossing paths in front of the pulpit, stopped to chat. A line snaked out in front of a confessional. Two young lovers held hands. Two middle-aged women held hands. A beggar sat on the pavement by the ticket booth. You couldn’t just wander in anymore. You had to pay. A bridal party had gathered around the ticket booth and the bride was arguing with the woman who sold the tickets. Probably a wedding party on their way to the wedding hall in Palazzo Vecchio.

What had happened to the original Franciscan vows of poverty? Legend has it that one of the friars responsible for the construction of the elaborate basilica was now in Purgatory being struck on the head by two hammers continuously.

Rosella pointed out the line of the floodwater from the big flood of 1966. The basilica—the whole Santa Croce district—was in the flood plain. The water had burst the huge doors.

I thought this view of the nave was what Rosella had wanted to show me. But I was wrong. What she wanted to show me was in a corner, in a small space at the base of one of the ribs, where the
intonaco
had been completely worn away. She pointed to a small oval portrait. A man in a floppy medieval hat, bright red—a jester? A peasant? A noble? A holy fool? I didn’t recognize him at first. I was reading it as a late-medieval portrait, and I was only semiliterate. It didn’t make sense. I had to adjust my eyes. And then I recognized myself. It was me. This was her gift to me. At first I didn’t understand, and then she put her hand on my back, and I did. I
understood that she was saying good-bye, that it was too late now to play my trump card, my ace in the hole. Too late to say I was rich, too late to tell her about the
appartamento luminoso
on Borgo Pinti with the terrace on the roof.

“It’s true
affresco
,” she said. “The lath, then the arriccio, the sinopia, the intonaco, the paint applied to the wet plaster. Then a few details al secco. Certain pigments you can’t use in true fresco. It will be there for centuries. You can see Saint Francis and the Evangelists.”

“And they can see me,” I said. “Can you do this?” I added. “I mean, can you get away with it?”

“I’ve already gotten away with it.”

My sister and I spent the week before Christmas in the old family home surrounded by old familiar things—the bright blue table in the breakfast nook, the deep red davenport in the living room that was always threatening to collapse, my mother’s walnut Steinway piano, the silverware and the plates we’d eaten off as children, the glasses we’d drunk out of, Dad’s typewriter on the desk in the little office off the front hall, a copy of the letter still curled up in the rollers. Two of the keys—the
s
and the
t
—were completely broken, but he’d kept typing anyway:
ALHOUGH
I
AM
NEIHER
RICH
NOR
POWERFUL
,
NONEHELE
,
IF
YOU
HINK
…

I had never gotten around to playing my trump card in Florence, and it was just as well, because my father left his estate, valued at about eight million dollars, to the Methodist Church. Except for the house, which went to my sister, and the Airstream trailer, which went to me. The church already had a new roof and a new electronic organ. The brick walls had been tuck-pointed, and the pastor was living in a new parsonage. It wasn’t Santa Croce, but it was something.

On Sunday, two days before Christmas, my sister and I went to the ceremony in which the new organ was dedicated to my mother. Afterward we went out to the cemetery, just the two of us, and buried the urn that held Dad’s ashes. The ground was frozen, but the hole, which had been dug months earlier, had been filled with straw. All we had to do was stick the urn in the ground. Someone from the cemetery would cover it with dirt and sod. But later.

We could have contested the will, but we didn’t, and we didn’t experience the rancor we might have felt. Eight million dollars. I could have bought the
appartamento luminoso
in Borgo Pinti. Gracie could have quit her job at the library and moved to the Florida Keys with her new boyfriend. Liberation, not rancor, was what we experienced. We were finally out from under. The money would have weighed us down. We were better off as we were. The Galileo exhibit was on schedule. Gracie had become the head librarian in Green Arbor. The library was planning to expand. We were almost festive at the cemetery.

On Christmas Eve we panfried a couple of small steaks and cooked some mushrooms and made a salad and drank most of a bottle of Bordeaux, and then we sat on the davenport in front of the fire in the living room and enjoyed the Christmas tree we’d decorated earlier. In the morning Gracie’s boyfriend and his two kids were coming. We were going to cook a turkey and everything that goes with a turkey. Gracie had already baked the pies.

I’d sold the Airstream, and Gracie had put the house up for sale. We opened another bottle of wine and fought off the ghosts of Christmases past, though many of them were happy ones, and I told her about Rosella, told her the story I’ve told you: Easter dinner at the Marchettis’; the Rembrandt etching of the woman with three hands; the huge sow pressing her
nose against the glass wall and then knocking the big green apple out of my hand with her snout; the YouTube video of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan; looking through the window at Rosella asleep; the
lardo Colonnata
in the Osteria dei Pazzi; the
luminoso
apartment; drinking coffee in an office on the eighth floor of the scaffolding; removing my hard hat so it wouldn’t scrape the ceiling of Santa Croce; Jesus and the Evangelists; looking down at the nave, without fear, overwhelmed by beauty. And my picture. Painted in the true fresco manner. A gift from the heart.

“Did it matter?” I asked my sister. “Was it important? Did it matter? Does anything matter? You know what she said to me? Rosella?”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘You never know if something matters till it’s over.’ And now it’s over, and I still don’t know. What’s the measure of change? Shouldn’t something be different now? If she’d said yes, then it would have ‘mattered’ because it would have been a turning point in my life. Everything would be different. I’d be in Italy right now. You could be in Italy too. Or Florida. Down in the Keys.”

“But she didn’t say yes. And you couldn’t have bought the
luminoso
apartment anyway because you didn’t inherit any money.” Gracie leaned forward and poured the last of the wine into my glass. I thought the davenport was going to collapse under the weight of my questions:
Was it important? Is anything important? What does it all mean? What does anything mean? Does anything mean anything? Was it a
piccola avventura
that turned out to be a
grande passion
or a
grande passion
that turned out to be a
piccola avventura
?
“A story like mine,” I said, “should end with a comes-to-realize moment. But I haven’t realized anything.”

“Or a fails-to-realize moment,” she said.

“But if it’s ‘fails-to-realize,’ that means there must have been something to realize, something I missed. Doesn’t it?”

“Stay calm and carry on,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll be all right.”

“How about this, little brother: maybe it’s like money in the bank, a savings account, or an
IRA
or a money-market fund at a brokerage house. When you need some emotional capital, you’ll be able to draw on it.” She stood up. “But I’m going to bed.”