Italian Fever (26 page)

Lucy looked at him closely; there was no archness, no mocking in the tone of this, the first outright question he had ever asked her. She wanted to give a thoughtful answer. “It’s a
wish, I think,” she said. “Because when we see something that stops us”—she paused, not liking the conclusion that beckoned at the end of her conjecture—“something that really holds us still, it reminds us of how empty and short our own lives are, and that is truly unbearable.”

The walls of Sansepolcro loomed up ahead of them. Antonio was dodging traffic now and could not respond. To her surprise, he ignored the generous public parking lots on either side and drove straight through the narrow opening in the wall. The world on the inside was entirely different from the one outside. The streets were cobbled and narrow, the shops pressed together on either side in a continuous line of stone, their windows clean and bright in the sun. Antonio veered into a side street, an alley, actually, designed with nothing wider than a horse in mind. He pulled the car half up on the sidewalk and turned off the engine. “Are you very hungry?” he asked.

She shrugged. So her remarks had meant nothing to him. “A little,” she said. “I’m always hungry, actually.”

“Would you mind if I took you to see something before we eat?”

“Of course I wouldn’t mind.”

“It is a fresco,” he said. “Do you know the work of Piero della Francesca?”

She nodded.

“He was born in this town.” Antonio reached over the seat for his jacket and opened the door of the car. “It is here,” he said, pointing to the building opposite.

Lucy got out and followed him along the high bare wall, for he had parked behind the building, to the wide steps and heavy double doors at the front. There was a sign on one door that
read
MUSEO CIVICO
and gave the opening hours. It would be closing, she noticed, in the next thirty minutes.

While Antonio purchased tickets at the counter, Lucy wandered out into the first room. The ceiling was high; the walls were white. Two massive doorways framed in wide oak boards opened into the other rooms. There were a few large pictures on the walls, religious scenes; nothing, Lucy thought, unusual or interesting. Antonio joined her and ushered her through the nearer doorway. “We have not much time,” he said. “But it will be enough for you to see the
Resurrection
.”

As Lucy followed him through several rooms, past various paintings, a display of reliquaries, a section of a fresco so ravaged by time that she could barely make out the subject, she ran through a mental catalog of famous Resurrection paintings. It was not so thick as the file on the Annunciation, nor was she able to visualize even one that stood out from all the others.

“Here we are,” Antonio said, pausing in the doorway to the next room. Lucy joined him, conscious of an effort to present an eager expression, though she had a faint trepidation that the picture would be of scant interest to her. They entered a small, spare room, a kind of chapel, in which the vaulted ceiling curved down all around, like a white parachute settling over the cool terra-cotta of the floor. They had come in alongside the fresco. Lucy followed Antonio to a wooden bench that faced the niche in which the scene of the Resurrection glowed with an eerie, subaqueous light, like a window open upon another world. Antonio took a seat on the bench while Lucy approached the fresco.

The figure of Christ seemed to come forward to meet her. He was both perfectly still and in motion, one foot raised on
the edge of his marble tomb, one hand grasping the staff of his simple flag. In the next moment, he would complete the action of climbing out of his grave, step down among the four stolid soldiers asleep at his feet, and astound the world. He was clothed only in a sheet of a pellucid, diaphanous pink, which was wrapped about his waist loosely, one end draping his shoulder, toga-style. His flesh was startlingly pale; he was thin, but his chest was strong and muscular, the bicep of his raised arm thick enough to throw a shadow in the declivity at his shoulder. His face was not extraordinary: He was plain-featured, his beard was short, but his expression was such a wonder, it spoke of so many emotions, of shock, anger, extreme fatigue, and determination, that Lucy felt she could read in it the whole process of his waking in the terrifying blackness of the grave, pushing back the stone, gathering up the winding-sheet, remembering all the while who he was, why he was here, who had betrayed him, what he must do now. As he pulled himself to his feet, he would have seen the slumbering guards gathered around his tomb. It was some hour of early dawn, and though two of the men had rested their heads against the tomb, they were sleeping soundly; they had heard nothing. He would have to wake them to get them out of his path. So he had paused, resting his pierced hand on his raised knee, to look again at the world he loved so well. Behind him the low hills, the gray trees just coming to life after a long winter, the thin racks of clouds drifting in a sky the color of a robin’s egg; all nature was still and calm. He alone was awake; he alone knew he had kept his promise and come back.

Lucy stood transfixed before the painting for some minutes. The double perspective was both impossible and magical, for the soldiers were foreshortened, as though seen from below, while the figure of Christ was presented dead-on to the
viewer. The colors, too, were the stuff of legends: a deep blue-green, like weathered bronze, repeated in the stockings and helmets of the guards, a shield and hat of burnt sienna. There weren’t very many colors, and they had been laid in next to one another with loving precision. The composition moved the eye around and around inside the painted marble columns that framed the whole, so that the process of looking at the fresco was entirely absorbing. It made one feel busy just to stand and look.

At last, she turned away and joined Antonio on the bench. “Thank you for bringing me here,” she said.

He nodded, his eyes fixed dreamily on the fresco.

“He looks startled, as if he just woke up,” Lucy said.

“He’s been in hell,” Antonio said.

Lucy looked back at the picture. “What?”

“He went down to hell after he died. To release the souls of those who had not had the opportunity to know him.”

“Of course,” Lucy said. “I’d forgotten. The Harrowing of Hell.”

Antonio looked puzzled.

“That’s what it’s called,” Lucy explained. “In poetry. The Harrowing of Hell. It’s good, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he agreed.

Then they sat for a few minutes in silence, side by side, looking at the painting.

“When I was a young man,” Antonio said, “I had before this painting a sensation such as the one you have described. I believed the artist was speaking to me alone.”

Lucy regarded him with interest. He was about to tell her something personal, and it didn’t come easily to him. She said nothing, allowing him the time to gather his thoughts.

“There was not for me this barrier of the language,” he
continued. “Perhaps I would have been better off if there had been. It seemed to me there was nothing between myself and this artist. We were from the same town, I was baptized here, probably in the same church he was, and I was young enough to think that the centuries made little difference. First I began to study his life, which takes not too long, because very little is known about him, and I made excursions to see all the paintings I could find. There are not so many, and what has survived is often badly damaged. Many of his frescoes have been lost. We have only accounts by people who saw them.”

“What a pity,” Lucy said.

“Yes, it is. Very sad. He was a most influential painter, but his life was like so many; he went from town to town following commissions. At the end, he stopped painting. His eyesight failed gradually. By the time of his death, he was blind.”

Lucy looked back at the startled, dark eyes of the Christ figure. Was he blinded by the light of day? Was that what made him look so vulnerable?

“Then I began to paint myself,” Antonio said. “I set up a studio in my house. My family approved my ambition, and I had various teachers come to me. I studied mathematics, as well, because
he
studied mathematics.…” Antonio lifted his chin to the painting as if the artist himself were standing before it. “He wrote a long treatise on this subject, very dull reading, which I studied.”

He paused. His story was not over, but he was considering how best to tell it. Now comes the bad part, Lucy thought. She could see it in the set of his jaw and the rueful inwardness of his eyes.

“Often I came here to look at this painting. It never failed to inspire me, but I began to lose my sense that it spoke to me. No, that is not right. It continued to speak to me, but it did not
speak in a friendly way.” He smiled at this observation. Lucy understood that it represented a vast understatement. “This went on for several years. My struggles were great, my intentions were … noble. My teachers encouraged me. At last they told me they had nothing more to teach me. I had completed many paintings, but none of them pleased me at all. They were competent. Ignorant people praised them. But they had no life. Everything that came from me was already dead.” He examined his hands moodily, as if he held them responsible for his failure. Then he looked up at the painting. “As surely dead,” he said, “as that dead man is surely still alive.”

He fell silent while Lucy considered the question of which dead man he referred to—the figure of the risen Christ or the artist who had created him. Antonio was slumped forward at her side, dangling his hands between his knees. “So you gave up painting?” she asked.

“Yes. I gave it up. All the inferior pictures are locked away. I do not come here very often anymore. This picture has become a reproach to me. But because of what you told me, Lucia, I saw that you are wiser than I am, and I knew you could appreciate this great painting without your life being destroyed.”

Lucy laughed. “I do appreciate it,” she said. “But it isn’t wisdom that keeps me safe. I can’t draw a box.”

He accepted this, nodding his head with his habitual air of bored resignation. “Now we will go and have something to eat,” he said. “The restaurant is nearby.”

Outside the museum the day was warm and sunny, and the streets were thronged with shoppers, their arms laden with packages, for the closing hour was near. Lucy walked beside Antonio, enjoying the scene as well as her ability to stroll through it without external support. Her ankle had survived the treacherous streets of Rome and seemed, in fact, strengthened
by the ordeal. Antonio walked so slowly, she was in no danger of stumbling or falling behind. His confession had surprised and pleased her, and she viewed him now in an entirely different light.

His attraction to Catherine had surely been something more complex and esoteric than the crude lust she had imagined. Perhaps, she speculated, he really was Catherine’s patron and nothing more. She chided herself for having been so small-minded as to think the only reason a wealthy man would invest in a beautiful woman was to gratify some base desire for possession. No, Antonio had recognized in Catherine the full blaze of the spark he had tended so diligently and hopefully in himself. He had observed how things stood with DV, how incapable he was of giving Catherine the one thing she required, which was liberty. So he had stepped in where he saw the opportunity. He was not an artist, but he had served on that altar, he had participated in the sacred rites, and he had seen in Catherine a fellow initiate, one who could, if she were only given the chance, ascend into the blessed company of the saints.

Lucy was restored to earth from this rhetorical flight by their arrival at the trattoria Antonio had chosen. It was a simple room with exposed beams, stone floors, and good linen cloths on the scattering of tables. Antonio was evidently well known and much respected here, for no sooner were they seated than two waiters, followed by the chef himself, descended upon them to discuss the refinements of the meal. It was noted that Antonio’s guest was an American who was leaving for her own country on the morrow, and it was determined that she should not be allowed to go without tasting the true Tuscan cuisine. Lucy owned herself willing to eat whatever was set in front of her, and, almost immediately, the
procession of dishes began. Antonio examined, tasted, and approved each one, but Lucy noticed the only thing he actually ate was a quail. He lives on little birds, she thought, stabbing a piece of sausage on the platter of roasted meats. The wine was a hearty local red, and Antonio pressed it upon her, filling her glass twice as often as he filled his own. It doesn’t matter, she thought. She could have a nap when she got back to the farmhouse. Wine did not flow this freely in Brooklyn.

Their conversation rambled, interrupted by the enthusiastic waiters and Lucy’s exclamations of pleasure at each new dish. Antonio was more at ease in this atmosphere, Lucy noticed, than he was in his own home. He was even capable of a certain dry humor, though no one would ever call him gay. They talked of the food, the town, her plans for her return to the States, the perfect weather. At last, the plates were cleared away and the waiter brought two cups of black espresso, and, at Lucy’s request, a pitcher of hot milk, followed by two narrow flutes of a rosy strawberry dessert wine made, he confided, by his family and not available for sale.

The subject had drifted back to Rome; Lucy wasn’t sure which of them had brought it up. She was careful not to mention Massimo, and the studied omission of his name felt like a shadow cast over the conversation. Antonio expressed regret that she had not seen more art there, and she was not able to explain that this was partly because she had spent so much time in bed with Massimo. “I tried,” she said. “But everything always seemed to be closing just when I arrived.”

“And of course you had your business affairs to carry out.”

“Right,” she agreed, studying her cup so that he wouldn’t see her guilty confusion. He had noted it, had, in fact, brought up the transparent excuse they both knew was a lie, just for the pleasure of seeing it. She decided it was then perfectly fair for
her to introduce a subject she knew would make him equally uncomfortable. “I did see Catherine Bultman,” she said.