Storm Glass (15 page)

W
henever she is sick, home from school, Clara the child is allowed to examine her mother’s Italian postcards, a large pile of them, which are normally bound with a thick leather band and kept in a bureau drawer. Years later when she touches postcards she will be amazed that her hands are so large. Perhaps she feels that the hands of a child are proportionally correct to rest like book ends on either side of landscapes. Or maybe it’s not that complicated; maybe she just feels that, as an adult, she can’t really see these colours, those vistas, and so, in the odd moments when she does, she must necessarily be a child again.

The room she lies in on weekdays, when she has managed to stay home from school, is all hers. She’ll probably carry it around with her for the rest of her life. Soft grey wallpaper with sprays of pink apple blossom. Pink dressing table (under the skirts of which her dolls hide, resting on their little toy beds), cretonne curtains swathed over a window at the foot of the bed she occupies, two or three pink pillows propping her up.
Outside the window a small back garden and some winter city or another. It doesn’t really matter which.

And then the postcards; turquoise, fuchsia, lime green—improbable colours placed all over the white spread and her little hands picking up one, then another, as she tries to imagine her mother walking through such passionate surroundings.

In time, her mother appears at the side of the bed. Earlier in the morning she brought the collection of postcards. Now she holds a concoction of mustard and water wrapped in white flannel and starts to undo the little buttons on the little pyjama top.

While the mustard plaster burns into her breastbone Clara continues to look at the postcards. Such flowers, such skies, such suns burning down on such perfect seas. Her mother speaks the names of foreign towns;
Sorrento
, she says,
Capri, Fiesole, Garda, Como
, and then after a thoughtful pause,
You should see Como. But most of all you should see Pompeii
.

Clara always saves Pompeii, however, until the end, until after her mother has removed the agonizing poultice and has left the room—until after she has gone down the stairs and has resumed her orderly activities in the kitchen. Then the child allows the volcano to erupt, to spill molten lava all over the suburban villas, the naughty frescos, the religious mosaics. And all over the inhabitants of the unsuspecting ancient town.

In the postcards Pompeii is represented, horrifyingly, fascinatingly, by the inhabitants themselves, frozen in such attitudes of absolute terror or complete despair that they teach the child
everything she needs to know about heartbreak and disaster: how some will put their arms up in front of their faces to try to ward it off, how others will resign themselves, sadly, to its strength. What she doesn’t understand is how such heat can freeze, make permanent, the moment of intensest pain. A scream in stone that once was liquid. What would happen, she wonders, to these figures if the volcano were to erupt again? How permanent are they?

And she wonders about the archaeologists who have removed the stone bodies from the earth and, without disturbing a single gesture, have placed them in glass display cases inside the museum where they seem to float in the air of their own misfortune … clear now, the atmosphere empty of volcanic ash, the glass polished.

These are the only postcards of Pompeii that Clara’s mother has. No bright frescos, no recently excavated villas, no mosaics; only these clear cases full of grey statues made from what was once burning flesh.

Twenty-five years later when Clara stands with her husband at the entrance to Hotel Oasie in Assisi she has seen Sorrento, Como, Capri and has avoided Pompeii altogether.

“Why not?” her husband asks.

“Nobody lives there,” she replies.

But people live here, in this Umbrian hill town; the sun has burned life into their faces. And the colours in the postcards were real after all—they spill out from red walls into the vegetable displays on the street, they flash by on the backs of overdressed children. Near the desk of the hotel they shout out
from travel posters. But in this space there is no sun; halls of cool remote marble, sparse furnishings, and, it would seem, no guests but themselves.

“Dinner,” the man behind the desk informs them, “between seven and nine in the big salon.”

Then he leads them, through arched halls, to their room.

Clara watches the thick short back of the Italian as she walks behind him, realizing as she does that it is impossible to imagine muscle tone when it is covered by smooth black cloth. She looks at the back of his squarish head. Cumbersome words such as
basilica, portcullis, Etruscan
and
Vesuvius
rumble disturbingly, and for no apparent reason, through her mind.

Once the door has clicked behind them and the echoing footsteps of the desk clerk have disappeared from the outside hall, her husband examines the two narrow beds with displeasure and shrugs.

“Perhaps we’ll find a way,” he says, “marble floors are cold.” Then looking down, “Don’t think these small rugs will help much.”

Then, before she can reply, they are both distracted by the view outside the windows. Endless olive groves and vineyards and a small cemetery perched halfway up the hill. Later in the evening, after they have eaten pasta and drunk rough, red wine in the enormous empty dining room, they will see little twinkling lights shine up from this spot, like a handful of stars on the hillside. Until that moment it will never have occurred to either of them that anyone would want to light a tomb at night.

Clara is thinking Blake … in Italy of all places, wandering through the empty halls of Hotel Oasie, secretly inspecting rooms. All the same so far; narrow cots, tiny rugs, views of vineyards and the graveyard, olive trees. Plain green walls. These rooms, she thinks, as Blake evaporates from her mind, these rooms could use the services of Mr. Domado’s Wallpaper Company, a company with one employee—the very unhappy Mr. Domado himself. He papered her room once when she was a sick child and he was sick with longing for his native land. When Italian postcards coincidentally littered her bedspread like fallen leaves.
Ah, yes
, said Mr. Domado, sadly picking up one village and then another.
Ah, yes
.

And he could sing … Italian songs. Arias that sounded as mournful as some of the lonelier villages looked. Long, long sobbing notes trembling in the winter sunshine, while she lay propped on pink pillows and her mother crept around in the kitchen below silently preparing mustard plasters. Mr. Domado, with tears in his voice, eliminating spray after spray of pink apple blossoms, replacing them with rigid geometric designs, while Clara studied the open mouths of the stone Pompeii figures and wondered whether, at the moment of their death, they were praying out loud. Or whether they were simply screaming.

Screaming, she thinks now, as she opens door after door of Hotel Oasie, would be practically a catastrophe in these echoing marble halls. One scream might go on for hours, as her footsteps seem to every time she moves twenty feet or so down to the next door, as the click of the latch seems to every time she has closed whatever door she has been opening. The doors are definitely an addition to the old, old building and appear to be pulled by some new longitudinal force back into the closed
position after her fingers release their cold, steel knobs. Until she opens the door labelled
Sala Beatico Angelico
after which no hotel room will ever be the same.

Neither Clara nor her husband speak Italian, so to ask for a complete explanation would be impossible.

“A Baroque church!” she tells him later. “Not a chapel but a complete church. All the doors are the same,
this
door is the same except for the words on it, and you open it and there, instead of a hotel room, is a complete church.”

“It appears,” he says after several moments of reflection, “that we have somehow checked into a monastery.”

Sure enough, when she takes herself out to the rose garden later in the afternoon to sit in the sun and to read
The Little Flowers
of
Santa Chiara
in preparation for the next day’s trip to the basilica, the hotel clerk greets her, dressed now in a clerical collar. Clara shows no surprise, as if she had known all along that hers was not to be a secular vacation; as if the idea of a retreat had been in her mind when she planned the trip. She shifts the book a little so that the monastic gardener will notice that she is reading about St. Francis’s holy female friend. He, however, is busy with roses; his own little flowers, and though he faces her while he works his glance never once meets hers. She is able, therefore, to observe him quite closely … the dark tan of his face over the white of his collar, his hands, which move carefully but easily through the roses, avoiding thorns. Clara tries, but utterly fails, to imagine the thoughts of a priest working in a rose garden. Are they concerned, as they should be, with
God
…
the thorns, perhaps, signifying a crown, the dark red stain of the flower turning in his mind to the blood of Christ? Or does he think only of roses and their health … methods of removing the insect from the leaf … the worm from the centre of the scarlet bud? His face gives her no clue; neither that nor the curve of his back as he stoops to remove yet another vagrant weed from the soft brown earth surrounding the bushes.

Clara turns again to her book, examining the table of contents; “The Circle of Ashes,” “The Face in the Well,” “The Hostage of Heaven,” “The Bread of Angels,” “The Meal in the Woods,” and finally, at the bottom of the list, “The Retinue of Virgins.” St. Francis, she discovers, had never wanted to see Chiara. The little stories made this perfectly clear. Sentence after sentence described his aversion. After he had clothed her in sackcloth and cut off all her hair in the dark of the Italian night, after he had set her on the path of poverty and had left her with her sisters at St. Damien’s, after she had turned into a
hostage of heaven
and had given up eating all together, Francis withdrew.
Beware of the poison of familiarity with women
, he had told his fellow friars. In a chapter entitled “The Roses,” the book stated that Francis had wanted to place an entire season between himself and Chiara.
We will meet again when the roses bloom
, he had said, standing with his bare feet in the snow. Then God had decided to make the roses bloom spontaneously, right there, right then, in the middle of winter.

Clara cannot decide, now, what possible difference that would make. As a matter of fact, it looks to her as if God were merely playing a trick on Chiara and Francis. If Francis said they would meet again when the roses bloom, why not have the
roses bloom right now? Perhaps then there would be no subsequent meeting since the roses had already bloomed. This would have certainly been a puzzle for Chiara to work on during the dreary winter days that stretched ahead of her in the unheated convent. She could have worked it over and over in her mind like a rosary. It might have kept her, in some ways, very busy.

Francis, on the other hand, was always very busy. As the book said:
Francis came and went freely from St. Mary of the Angels hut Chiara found herself like a prisoner at St. Damien’s
. Francis might have dropped by to see Chiara while he was out rushing around, but he didn’t.
On the other hand, Francis stayed well away from St. Damien’s
, the book continued,
for he did not wish the common people should take scandal from seeing him going in and out
. So basically, it would appear that poor Chiara, poison that she was, rarely spoke to her mentor; the man whose principles she built her life around. At least not until “The Meal in the Woods.”

After she had asked him repeatedly to share a meal with her, Francis finally relented. Speaking, once again to his fellow friars (he seemed never to have spoken to Chiara), he argued,
She has been a long time at St. Damien’s. She will be happy to come out for a little while and to see in the daytime that place to which she first came at night, where her hair was cut from her, and where she was received among us. In the name of Jesus Christ we will picnic in the woods
. Somehow, during the course of this unusual picnic, the woods began to glow as if they were on fire. It is not clear to Clara whether God or Francis was responsible for this miracle. It may have been a collaboration. It is perfectly clear, however, that Chiara had nothing to do with it. Her role was that of appreciator—one that she, no doubt, played very well. And, as usual, she wasn’t eating. The chapter ends with this statement:
Finally Chiara and Francis rose from the
ground, overjoyed and filled with spiritual nourishment, not having touched as much as a crumb of the food
.

Clara is beginning to feel hungry. Delicious smells are coming from what she now knows is the refectory. The gardener is placing his tools, one by one, in the wheelbarrow. Then, without looking in her direction, he pushes the little vehicle away from her, towards the potting shed.

“Our hotel clerk,” she informs her husband at dinner, “is a gardener as well as a priest. I was reading up on my namesake out on the terrace and I saw him in the garden, working away.”

“I discovered the other part of the building,” her husband replies. “There is a glass door with
Keep Out
written on it in four languages, and then an entire wing where the priests must stay when they open the place to tourists.”

“You didn’t peek?” asks Clara, fully aware that, had she discovered it, she might have opened the door.

“No … written rules you know,” and then, “Have you decided to like your namesake? Do you think you take after her?”

Clara reflects for a while. “I think she was a very unhappy woman. She kept on wanting to see Francis and he kept not wanting to see her.”

“Probably just propriety, don’t you think? You can’t have Saint Francis spending a lot of time hanging around the convent you know, wouldn’t look good.”