Italian Fever (21 page)

She pulled the sweater on and went back into the bathroom to brush her hair. Had she been transformed? She studied her reflection. How glittery her eyes were, how unusually clear and delicate her skin looked, almost translucent. This was doubtless the result of her illness. And how full of appetites she was, how hungry for everything, for food, wine, art, but especially for Massimo. He had noticed her eagerness that morning and had attributed it to their brief separation. Though he was perfectly willing to join her in the rush to the bed, both of them throwing their clothes off in every direction, afterward he had teased her. “So you are no longer so shy with me?”

She lay on her stomach, her face turned away from him, which was good, she realized, for he couldn’t see the flush that burned her cheeks. “Did I make a lot of noise?”

She could hear him fumbling on the nightstand for his cigarettes. “You were quite noisy, yes, I would say.”

“God, I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I got carried away.”

“Don’t apologize,” he said. “It is a compliment to me.” She heard the snap of his lighter, then the slow intake of his breath. “Perhaps you will become insatiable.”

“I don’t think that’s in my character.” She felt his hand drop across her shoulder, then move up, lazily riffling through her hair. “Perhaps you do not know what is in your character, Lucy,” he said.

As she recalled this remark, Lucy gave her reflection a flirtatious smile and tossed her brush into her travel bag. Then she rushed into the bedroom, for she heard his soft knock at the door.

Chapter 18

T
HE PALAZZO THAT HOUSES
the Galleria Borghese may have an impressive facade, or it may not. Doubtless there are living Romans who have seen it, but their children must rely on parental reminiscence if they want some idea of the exterior. Lucy came at it from the park, picking her way around the warren of scaffolding, catwalks, plastic sheeting, and corrugated tin that have, for so many years, hidden the venerable stone from view. It had turned chilly, the sky was overcast, and a damp, gusty wind made her hunch her shoulders and pull her shawl tight. She entered a rickety walkway that funneled her into a court piled high with lumber, steel, and rolls of plastic sheeting. Here she found the inauspicious door and the hand-lettered strip of cardboard that has for more than a decade now designated it as the
Entrata
. Beyond this, in a narrow chamber, a haughty public servant lounging behind a makeshift counter reluctantly exchanged five thousand lire for a generic museum
ticket. Passing through another doorway, Lucy stepped into the high, wide expanse of the first salon.

She was absorbed in her thoughts, which were not particularly satisfying, and with the grumpy business of being physically miserable—she was chilled and her ankle throbbed from the long walk—but the scene before her canceled all preoccupations. Now this is something, she thought, this is grandeur. She was to see marvels in a marvelous setting. She leaned upon Antonio’s stick, taking in the high vaulted ceiling, the gleam of marble and gilt, the spare furnishings supporting various busts of imperial Romans. The doorway to the next room was a wide one, and through it she could see two carefully positioned large works, the nearest of which she recognized with a gasp of delight. It was Bernini’s
David
. Oh, she thought, this is here, too.

There were a few other people in the rooms, scattered in groups of two or three. Some studied the laminated informational cards they had discovered on a side table. The cards detailed, in various languages, the contents of the rooms. Though there was the buzz of conversation, it was subdued. The enormous proportions of the palazzo seemed to weigh upon the speakers, constraining them to hushed, even reverent, tones.

Lucy went through to the smaller salon, found a place before the intent coil of the figure of David, and gave herself over to the pleasure of encountering a famous work she had previously admired only in books.

He had been captured in stone at the exact moment when all fear gave way to the necessity for calculation. The polished rock, his weapon, was closed in the tight grip of his left hand. He held it down, flexing the strap of his slingshot back over his thigh with his right, his right knee slightly bent. He was taking
the measure of his opponent. Lucy experienced a shiver of excitement as she felt the size of the giant at her back, for David’s burning gaze was fixed upon his enemy’s temple, where the stone must find its mark. She looked behind her at the coffered ceiling—he was that big.

How did he do it? she thought. Her question did not refer to the legendary subject, but to the sculptor, whose task, to take up his chisel and hack from obdurate marble this startling vision, had certainly been the equivalent of bringing down Goliath with a slingshot. She glanced at the date on her card, 1623—this marble youth who appeared to be holding his breath had been holding it for quite some time. Bernini himself had been a youth when he made the
David
, and with youthful exuberance he had used his own face for a model, scowling into a mirror held for him, the story went, by his great patron, Cardinal Borghese. For several minutes, Lucy took in the stone a bit at a time, from the head down. “Wonderful,” she said before turning away.

She went out into the next room. Two children, a boy and a girl, came running past her, shouting at one another in Italian, shouted at in turn by their father, who had just turned away from the luscious seminude figure of Pauline Borghese, Napoleon’s sister, reclining on her marble couch. The man was handsome. His black eyes flashed as he hurried out after his children. Lucy approached Pauline, who smiled wryly at some point across the room. She was smiling at the sculptor, Lucy speculated, the great Canova. She remembered the exchange—she’d read it in school—between Pauline and a friend who had voiced dismay about the statue. “How could you model like that, before that man, without your clothes?” the friend had complained, to which Pauline had replied, “Why? His rooms are heated.”

She did look comfortable. The couch was richly cushioned; her smooth limbs left soft impressions upon it, at the elbow of the arm raised to her head, and beneath her lovely pampered right foot. She was the opposite of the athletic David, though, in her way, just as prepared for a contest. Her beauty was her weapon; her face was the challenge. Who would have the temerity to find her lacking?

Not Canova, Lucy concluded as her eyes wandered over the indolent marble woman. Her thoughts drifted, as well. The shouting father had reminded her of Massimo. Did he come here, now and then, with his children? Did he stand here before this voluptuous woman, admiring the full curves of her breasts echoed in the smaller but equally perfect globe of the apple she was holding? The apple was the prize Paris had given her, for she was not just Pauline but Venus, too, and she had never been in doubt that she would win it.

Wasn’t this just the sort of woman Massimo would adore?

Lucy closed her eyes, leaning hard on Antonio’s walking stick, as a precise recollection of a moment in her last meeting with her lover flared up in her memory, a burst of heat and brightness that threw everything apart from it into a deeper gloom. It was a string of tender kisses, she recalled, from the pulse at her ear to the inside of her elbow, accompanied by the pressure of his hands over her hips, sweeping her in close to him. The recollection was so complete and profound that she felt dizzy and panic swept over her. She opened her eyes, momentarily disoriented and confused, but Pauline as Venus, amused by everything, everything, but most especially by the flights and paroxysms of lovers, brought her back to her senses. She turned away from the smug, self-satisfied smile and wandered through the doorway that led back to the salon of imperial busts.

How could he know her so well in bed and so little outside of it? This was the substance of her ruminations. Why did he seem so eager to assume that she would make impossible demands, that she would try to keep him from his work or his family? He had created some obnoxious role for her, and now he was determined to have her fill it. A frank conversation might help. She could explain, I am simply not like that; I am like this, but he had a way of closing down all such protests with the assertion, obvious to him, that he knew more about her than she knew about herself.

Did he? Was that possible? Surely she had known from the start that it was a bad idea to enter an affair with a married man. She had never done so before and had always gazed with horror and amazement at the folly of those friends who did, but here she was, full of the inevitable bitterness that must come of such a liaison. She had entered it freely, and Massimo had known, from very early on—she had no doubt of that—that she would. And so he treated her like a woman who would—because she had. After all, wasn’t he correct in all his assumptions?

No, her interior advocate cried out in her defense. There were extenuating circumstances. She had been so ill, so weak, it was a foreign country, he was so handsome and had cared for her so lovingly, it had all happened so easily and naturally, there had been no point when she had been faced with a decision that had not, almost magically, already been made.

She looked about herself bemusedly. A baroque villa filled with lavish statuary was no place for a moral crisis. The blank marble eyes of the emperors looked on indifferently; the marble flesh, which appeared so warm and supple but was, in fact, perfectly lifeless, cold, and dead, seemed to mock her inferior material. You won’t last, the stone heads announced. You’ll
grow old, stiff, wrinkled; you’ll pass away, but we will still be here.

A living man, tall and fair, shabbily dressed, his shoulders hunched slightly beneath the weight of the backpack that declared his nationality, came into the room from a doorway Lucy had not tried. He was joined directly by a young woman, who looked back over her shoulder, obviously reluctant to leave. In the flat tones of the great American Midwest, she declared, “That was fantastic. Wasn’t that just fantastic?” Lucy’s eye traveled past her to the room of the fantastic experience. She could just make out the raised arm, the leafy out-stretched fingers of Daphne. There it was, what she had come for. She approached the two Americans, who took no notice of her. “I’m tired of looking at statues,” the young man complained as she passed by.

“But these are so good,” the girl replied. “Don’t you think these are really good?”

Lucy smiled as she entered the salon where the marvelous apparition of
Apollo and Daphne
burst upon the somber space of the eighteenth-century room with the fury of two wild horses. Again the contrapunto coil, again the climactic moment of a struggle, but this time nothing heroic or noble was about to happen. Daphne was exchanging one terror for another, and her face, mouth ajar, eyes rolled upward as consciousness both astounded and eluded her, made it clear that her father’s idea of rescue was infinitely more horrible than anything Apollo had in mind for her. Her fingers and toes had begun the transformation to leaves and roots; tree bark encrusted her legs. Apollo, too, was frozen in a moment of revelation. He couldn’t see what was happening, for he was behind her, in hot pursuit, and he had at last caught up with her. Everything he knew came to him through the hand he had
slipped about her waist, which was still flesh, but altered. His expression was a mixture of triumph—he had captured her—shock—she was not what he thought—and something else—was it sympathy or just resignation? He was a god himself; this was a game for him, one he now knew he had lost. Her flesh beneath his fingers looked soft and impressionable still. Could he feel the blood thickening to sap, the convulsions racking her heart, the collapse of her lungs upon the last gasp of oxygen that would be of any use to her?

Lucy stepped closer to examine the thin roots forming from Daphne’s delicate toes. Again the power of the story was matched, was eclipsed, by the supernatural artistry of the sculptor. How could stone express so clearly the distinction between flesh and bark? Lucy stepped back, taking in the whole figure of the terrified young woman rising before her suitor as if pulled up by some force from above. Apollo looked vapid and lazy; his body was no match for the lean, muscular, concentrated energy of the
David
. His legs were even a little thin and his stomach, above the decorous drape that covered his genitals, looked soft. His waist was thick. But he had a handsome face. His hair was plentiful and wavy; he had lovely, long, tapered feet that reminded Lucy of Massimo’s feet. He took good care of them. She had never known a man to be fastidious about such things. And he was ticklish there; she could make him shout by running her thumbnail down the sole.

She let out a sigh of exasperation. She had not come here to moon over her lover, but to stand in awe of Bernini, about whose feet she knew nothing. The two children came careening and shouting through the room, in one door and out the other, oblivious of Daphne’s horrific struggles, and after them, striding purposefully, his patience worn to a thread, their father. Lucy smiled at him as he went by. He shook his head,
making some comment about
i bambini
, the impossibility of watching them—it was
un casino
—then disappeared.

She looked back at the statue, at Daphne’s silent scream. The agony of her transformation never ended. There was something brutal in that. Bernini had created her in this way, brought her to this moment of extreme terror, and no further.

Though for him there had been a point when it was all over. He had labored over every strand of her hair, the perfect curve of her lower lip, the slight protrusion of her ribs visible below her small breasts. Over every inch of her body he had lavished his miraculous attention. No detail was too small; nothing escaped him. And then, one day, he was finished with her. He had stepped back, walked around her, felt—what, satisfaction, relief, eagerness for his fee or for his lunch, the pleasurable sadness of accomplishment, of a job done something more than well? He was still a young man, he had a lifetime of work ahead of him, and he was never to stop. He was working in the Vatican at eighty. Did he look back upon this young woman with the nostalgia of a lover, or was she simply of no further interest to him?