The Chapel (11 page)

I said, “Impetuous.”

“Thank you. Unlike Shelby, I disapprove of your bequest to Anna.”

It was like junior high. Everybody knew everything. I said, “Actually, Francesca is the beneficiary.”

“Whence my objection,” said T. “I'm certain she speaks more English than she lets on.”

“That will make it easier on Anna,” I said. He might be able to talk me out of a Tuesday flight, but the sisters were my business.

T. said, “Folly.”

I said, “Call me impetuous.”

“But you're here now.” T. grabbed hold of my hand. “Are you really that unhappy?”

Everybody touched each other here, even Americans. “Sometimes,” I said. Every day brought a new measure, so it was hard to get a fix on it. She's so unhappy that she didn't shower today. She's so unhappy that she forgot to return three phone calls from her brother in Atlanta. She's so unhappy that she got down on her knees and scrubbed the walls of her self-cleaning oven. Most unnerving of all, sometimes she was happier than she let on.

T. was looking disapprovingly at my Swiss Army watch. “A memento mori,” he said. He looked right into my eyes. “You are here.”

I nodded.

“It's Italy,” he said urgently. “There are all kinds of wonderful drugs to improve our moods, and we can get them right over the counter.”

“Are we missing Ed's lecture?”

T. stood up. “Park bench to church pew,” he said.

“Pilgrim's progress,” I said. I stood up and fell into step beside him. For some reason, he led us away from the chapel and out the gate. If the
signs we passed were any indication, Ed was lecturing in the Church of the Eremitani. I was thinking ahead to Thursday and Friday, thinking it should probably be unthinkable, but thinking I would miss T. for a couple of days as much as I missed Mitchell, and maybe more.

T
HE
F
IRST
J
UBILEE WAS DECLARED IN
1300
BY
P
OPE
Boniface VIII—aka, His Holiness P.T. Barnum—to drum up business for the dilapidated shrines and cemeteries and churches in Rome. It was a financial bonanza. On any given day, there were about a quarter of a million heat-stroked pilgrims trampling ancient ruins as they fought their way into old St. Peter's to buy pizza and plenary indulgences, hoping like hell to end up with “full and copious pardon of all their sins.” There were also all-night block parties in Sienna, and no end of Paduan pageantry parading through streets crowded with pilgrims who couldn't make the trip to Rome, not to mention knights errant galloping around, lances up, looking for a fight or a free drink or a reasonably priced damsel in Venice and Florence and many of the other independent communes throughout Italy—which was just a notion and not a nation for another five hundred years, and only then if you were willing to define a nation as a conglomeration of cities that changes prime ministers more often than the citizens change their underwear.

That's how Ed spoke. I didn't object to the breakneck pace, but his offhand, derisive tone was bewildering. He might have been saving his more academic material for the Italians. I couldn't see how his lecture was going over with the American priests, but from the way wimples were whipping around, I could tell he wasn't scoring a lot of points with the nuns.

I nudged T. to get his verdict.

He shrugged and whispered, “This is my first visit to a Christian comedy club.”

The setting wasn't doing Ed any favors. Even by the dour standards of the Dark Ages, the place was a downer, a hulking bulwark of a building. The ceiling of the church was built like the hull of a ship, all shellacked dark-wood beams and rafters, and the walls were dull marble, alternating rows of green and maroon horizontal stripes, which were no more flattering to the Romanesque architecture than they were to a middle-aged woman's midriff. The only relief was the light behind Ed, where the altar was set inside a bright domed space, its ceiling and walls decorated in the suburban Catholic paint-by-numbers style—a pale blue sky with cartoonish, cottony clouds and a pastel Jesus surrounded by some sacred stuff I couldn't really see. T. and I had been late so were stuck in the farthest-back benches.

Before he crossed the language barrier, Ed hammered home the significance of the Jubilee Year, reminding all of the English speakers that Dante had been in Rome in 1300, sent as an emissary by his friends in Florence to beg Pope Boniface to butt out of their secular business. Years later, in
The Divine Comedy
—“that conniving fever-dream of worldwide condemnation and self-promotion in verse form”—Dante dated the launch of his famous trip through the Gates of Hell as Good Friday, 1300. And it was 1300 when Enrico Scrovegni sold off a town he owned in the Veneto and plopped down a pile of gold to purchase the decrepit site and tumble-down ruins of the old Roman Arena in Padua, with plans to build himself a new home and a little chapel.

T. whispered, “It
was
a banner year.”

One of the American priests raised his hand and shouted, “You're saying Scrovegni owned Venice?”

“No, you're saying
Venice,
and I'm saying
Veneto
,” Ed said, alienating one of the few people in the pews still paying close attention. “The Veneto is the region that extends north of here, and Enrico owned a lot of it. The town he cashed in to buy the Arena is called Malo.”

T. elbowed me, but I would not look his way. I did not need to be
reminded that Malo was Francesca's hometown. And I didn't like the feeling that, like Enrico, I was meddling in Malo in an attempt to buy myself absolution.

Ed said, “Okay, exercise time.” Nobody moved. He seemed almost heroically unfazed by the crowd's animosity. “You're going to have to stand up eventually. So if I can coax you out of those rock-hard wooden pews, I'll ask you all to follow me to the chapel on my left. If you didn't bone up on your Italian, just look at the pictures and wait for the English portion of our program to resume.”

As he stood, T. said, “I will say not one word about Malo, but you must know my tongue is bleeding.”

“They have a spare at the basilica, courtesy of St. Anthony,” I said. “Do you think Ed explained what
Eremitani
means in the English part we missed at the beginning?”

“Hermit,” T. said, and he handed me a photocopy he'd plucked from a rack in the vestibule on our way in. “But these hermits couldn't shut up about Scrovegni.” He was leading me to the back of the church, and when I glanced guiltily toward Ed, I saw a couple of priests following us. “They even wrote to the pope in 1305, complaining about how fancy the Arena Chapel was looking, so the powers-that-be forced Scrovegni to scrap his plans for a big bell tower.”

“1305?” I was thinking of Mitchell's many chronologies. He had always assumed that Giotto did not finish frescoing the chapel until after Dante had begun to write
The Inferno.
“Did those hermits happen to mention the state of the interior? Had Giotto finished painting in 1305?”

T. shrugged off my question. “I think the proposed bell tower was their big gripe. The Eremitani had been here since 1260-something and didn't like competition.”

“You should be giving this lecture.”

T. stopped at the back of the church and turned around. “I'll tell
Ed there was a medical emergency.” The two priests zipped right past us, their heads bowed. Ed had moved to the edge of one of the two chapels that bulged out of the nave on either side, forming a modest transept, anticipating the familiar crucifix shape of later churches. T. said, “These monks hired Mantegna to fresco that little chapel at some point in the 15th century.”

“Mantegna who painted the Foreshortened Christ?” That famous view of the shrouded, ashen body of Jesus seen from the end of the marble slab on which he is laid out is unforgettable.

T. nodded.

I didn't add that I only knew the painting because it hangs in a museum in Milan, and I had a postcard of it in a bin at home, courtesy of Mitchell.

“Mantegna is also credited with the first painting that applied the mathematically worked-out theory of perspective,” T. said. “That masterpiece is in a church in Florence, by the way—in case you ever have the chance to get there.”

“Perhaps Francesca will send me a postcard,” I said, which sounded more like a rebuke than I'd intended. T. looked as surprised by my tone as I was, but I didn't offer an apology, and I couldn't explain it. I just knew everything in my past was in tumult. The ground of my life had been shaken, and I didn't want to outrun the spreading fault lines and fissures. Whatever was happening, I wanted to let it catch up with me, overtake me. I had spent thirty-five years persuading myself to keep going, stoking my faith in the power of the next day, the next phase, the next promotion, the next graduation, the next book club, or concert series, or grandchild to vindicate my perseverance, to make something whole and smooth and strong of my married life. I no longer believed in the annealing power of the future. I couldn't see why I should go to Florence and Assisi and Rome and Venice just to get to Cambridge. “I want to see this Mantegna,” I said. “As you would say, we're here now.”

“Mantegna, unfortunately, is not,” T. said, turning to the door. “Apparently there are some fragments of the fresco that they pieced together into a re-creation, but this whole structure is ersatz. The original was blown to bits during World War II air strikes.”

“By whom?”

“I'm guessing someone with a plane. We'll ask Ed.” He held open the door but stuck out his foot to stop me before I went outside. “Considering his performance, probably best not to ask Ed about bombing.”

T
HE DAYLIGHT WAS STARTLING, AND THE PALE BLUE OF
afternoon was overrun with puffy clouds—as implausible and silly as the painted sky above the altar inside. T. and I agreed that we needed a drink before we had a drink with Ed. Around the block, across the street from the low profile of the Eremitani cloister, we spotted two white metal chairs and a tippy white table about the size of a dinner plate. T. went inside and soon returned with two tumblers filled with something precisely the color of orange Kool-Aid.

He said, “He claims it's just called a spritz. I've seen them all over town.”

I said, “Is it fizzy?”

T. raised one of the glasses to his nose. “Fizzyissimo,” he said and sat down. “It's something called Aperol, which looks suspiciously like Campari with a dye job, and some prosecco, and sparkling water.”

After a few sips, I said, “This makes me very happy.”

T. said, “At this guy's prices, we can afford to get ecstatic.”

Our little street wasn't much of a thoroughfare. A few cars cruised by, and three dark-haired girls in white short-sleeved blouses and pleated blue-plaid skirts came close and then disappeared into a doorway. That was enough for us for a long time, and then my phone rang. I saw that it was Lewis, and I turned it off.

“Not urgent,” I said.

T. gulped down his drink. “I have to make a call, too. Ten minutes or so?”

I watched him wander away toward the church. The sun had slipped right into his path, so I had to use my hands as visors. His blue back got darker and smaller with each step, not disappearing but becoming something compact and dense, something I could hold in my hand, the essence of T.

A young waiter came out of the café and smiled sympathetically. He had a mop of curls, and he was wearing a butcher's apron over a T-shirt and blue jeans. I shook my head to let him know I'd had enough. He left me alone.

I pulled out my phone, but I didn't dial immediately. I didn't know what I wanted Lewis to say, and I'd had just enough to drink to believe my desire would influence his response. While I dithered, the waiter returned. He nodded in the direction T. had taken, and from behind his back he produced a white saucer with an almond biscotti glazed with a thin strip of chocolate on the bottom. Then he handed me a small wax-paper bag.

“To take away,” he said.

I realized he was feeling sorry for me. “I'm okay,” I said. “He's coming back. Really.”

The waiter smiled knowingly. “My gift, okay?” He turned back toward the café.

“Orange and chocolate,” I said. “
Perfecto
.”

He hesitated, then slowly said, “
Per-fet-to
.”

I said, “
Per-fet-to?
”

“
Si, perfetto. Preciso
.”

What the heck? I said, “
Perfetto. Perfetto
.”

He laughed. “
Essato!
” He left it there and went back to work.

I made the call. Lewis was delighted to speak to me, delighted that
I had enjoyed my abbreviated stay in Italy, and delighted to be able to accommodate my request. Anna, too, was delighted, just delighted.

Something I said must have struck a less delirious note because Lewis flattened out his voice and asked if I could bear to go over a few practical details. As Anna and Francesca would not be traveling back from Rome to Venice via Ravenna, he was preparing a refund for me for that leg of the trip. I assured him that was not necessary. He insisted it was already being processed. “I don't suppose you have any of your paperwork right there in front of you?”