Touchy Subjects (26 page)

Every inch of Florence meant something; there were no blank bits. It was slightly exhausting.

At the Uffizi he saw a Greek statue which had once been known as
The Knife Grinder,
but scholars had now established that it was a Scythian preparing his blade in order to flay Marsyas. There was another statue of a man hanging upside down and laughing, only he wasn't laughing, he was howling, and that was Marsyas again.
Gladiator
was nothing to this, George thought queasily. But he definitely preferred art in which something was happening: a fight or a miracle or a death or something. He was already bored with all those pictures of the Madonna tickling the Bambino under his chin.

When he's got his crown of thorns on it's called Ecce Homo, then the Deposition is when his friends lift him down off the cross (NB you never see them taking the nails out with pliers, maybe it would look too undignified). A Lamentation can also be called Dead Christ or Pieta (he's not always on Mary's lap, sometimes just propped up by angels, looking sick or hungover rather than actually dead, hard to tell).

Back at the Annunziata, his bed had not been made; maybe that was the difference between a pensione and a hotel? Anyway, he liked the privacy; he wouldn't fancy the Signora shuffling round pawing through his stuff. She seemed to keep the radio on all the time; it was a bit sad. George stared at the picture over his bed, the one that looked like two wrestlers going in for a clinch. After he'd taken it down and cleaned the glass on the bedspread, it turned out to be a Visitation of Mary and Elizabeth; they were touching each other's pregnant stomachs. He was starting to recognize all the scenes, now; it was like a code, and he was cracking it.

Wednesday, Day 3. Never never go on holiday with only one pair of shoes if they're suede. Pissing down all day and I'm soaked to the ankles, my feet feel like dead fish.

George sat in a cafeteria eating a calzone out of a napkin. He was tempted to go back to the counter and complain that it was cold in the middle, but he'd left his phrase book in his room. He flicked through his notes, trying to figure out whether the Virgin Mary had died or not. In several churches he'd seen paintings called
The Death of the Virgin,
where she was lying there like a normal dying person with grieving relatives (including Jesus holding a baby—maybe his childhood self?). There were other pictures called the "Transition" or "Assumption," which showed Mary floating up to Heaven, looking pretty alive. As far as George could tell, Jesus "ascended" (actively) whereas Mary "was assumed," but what was the difference, apart from grammar? Could you say God assumed her? No, that sounded like he took her for granted. Maybe JC flew up by his own will, whereas Mary was sort of sucked up as if by aliens?

George hadn't time to obsess over these arcane details; he was two-thirds of a day behind on his itinerary. Reckless, he crossed off all the Baroque churches—the Renaissance was more than enough to be going on with—and squelched off to Santa Spirito, which bore a huge, crass sign proclaiming that its restoration was being funded by Gucci. The Church of the Ognissanti meant the "Church of All the Saints"; that was a good way to hedge your bets, George thought a little cynically. He saw a postcard of a painting that used to be there but was now in Berlin: a Giotto from 1310 called
The Dormition of the Virgin.

Now what the hell's a dormition? Abstract word for sleep?Mary looks comatose in the picture (and about eight feet long), people are standing beside her bed, one guy is hugging her, but you can't tell if her eyes are open.

All the saints died, and so did Jesus (even if he rose again), so if Mary hadn't actually died, that would make her the only human being ever who had avoided it. Not that any of this stuff was actually true, George had to remind himself.

Some gravestones say "fell asleep" meaning died, but it's a stupid phrase, I bet they're totally different feelings. Unless you happen to die in your sleep, which a lot of people claim they'd like, but I think it's cowardly, I'd rather be hit by a lorry and look it in the face. The thing is, whatever's happening, to be totally AWARE and AWAKE.

He was starting to shake with cold; he'd have to go back for dry socks. Passing a bookshop, he had a brain wave. In the English section he found a dictionary of religious terms and looked up
dormition.
He turned away so the girl at the counter wouldn't see him taking notes and scribbled in his leather journal.

Turns out Mary died in the ordinary way, then three days later Archangel Michael brought her soul back down to reunite it with her body, Jesus and everybody was clapping, then she got assumed into heaven again!

It was very satisfying to sort out the full story.

At the Annunziata, George was suddenly knackered and let himself get under the sheets. He wished the Signora would turn her radio off the odd time; all that Western stuff wrecked the atmosphere. Well, of course, Italy was the West, but they could still do better than Eminem.

When he woke up after an hour, he wanted to borrow an iron, so he looked it up in his phrase book and knocked on the Signora's door, but she didn't answer; maybe she'd gone out in the rain. George decided to wear his crumpled jacket for dinner; who'd be looking at him, anyway?

Thursday, Day 4. My last day, arghhhhh!

George almost ran from church to church that morning, ticking them off on his list. He had to fend off dozens of leather-jacket salesmen to get into San Lorenzo. Donatello's late-period pulpit was the grimmest George had seen, even the
Ascension
panel, with a wrecked-looking Jesus trying to float off into the sky, but sinking back down.

So many of these guys seemed to start out all idealistic but got burnt out. Suppose life in Cinquecento would do that—plagues, revolutions, etc. Whereas now everything's easy and comfortable, no mysteries left, life comes prepackaged by Disney or the Gap, we just drift along and nothing ever really happens compared with back then.

In a café, flicking through his highlights of the Uffizi book, he came across a little panel by Fra Filippo Lippi called
Predella of the Barbadori: Announcement of the Death of the Virgin.
He didn't know how he could have missed it when he'd done the Uffizi; maybe because it was so small.

It looks like an Annunciation at first, because she's standing up (not old or anything), and the angel's handing her something like a magic wand, or a tall gold candle. Wow. Imagine if we all got told when we were about to snuff it—like an e-mail, on the day, telling you to pack your bags.

Speaking of which, time to go. George headed reluctantly back to the Hotel Annunziata via a cash machine.

When he'd zipped up his case, he went to the door of the Signora's apartment and knocked a few times, quite loudly. Her radio was playing "Nights in White Satín"; she had to be a bit deaf, he thought, though she hadn't seemed it on Monday. "
Bon giomo?
" he called a few times, then, almost shouting, "Signora?" She knew he'd be checking out this afternoon, didn't she?

George was beginning to panic about missing his train. He tried the door handle and walked down the narrow hall. "Signora?" There was an armchair with an ancient-looking radio playing beside it, and an empty espresso cup. He felt it, in case she'd just popped out, but it was cold. He wanted to turn the music down—something old of Sheryl Crow's—but he didn't dare. He got out his wad of cash and counted it, €196; that way he could wave it at her if she appeared, so she'd see why he'd barged in on her.

No one in the tiny kitchen. George's armpits were damp. If you were running a pensione or whatever, you just couldn't behave that way, even if it was off-season. It would serve the old bag right if he walked off without paying. Then it occurred to him to leave the money beside the radio with a note, but he'd packed his pen away with his journal. He put his head into the bedroom to see was there any sign of a ballpoint. It was very dim in there, with the curtains shut, but when George's eyes got used to it, he saw her on the bed.

He dropped some of the money on the floor, and when he bent down to pick it up he thought he might keel over. The Signora could have been asleep; she could have taken a pill or something. But it didn't look like sleep, the way she was lying quite straight on top of the bedspread with her shoes turned up. And he couldn't be sure in the bad light but he thought her eyes were open; he saw some kind of glimmer that had to be an eye. He ran back out to the room with the frescoes and sat on his case to catch his breath. He put the money back in his pocket; one of the notes had stuck to his hand and he had to peel it off.

George knew he should probably go back to check. He hadn't smelled anything, but it was pretty cold in her room. It could have been days she'd been lying there.

In the end, he crept back into the apartment, just as far as the phone. He had to turn the radio off. He rang 999, but of course that was the British number; what a moron! There wasn't a phone book that he could see, so he had to go back out to his room to find the guidebook. The Italian emergency number turned out to be 113, not very memorable at all, he thought. George didn't make much sense on the phone; all he could say was "
Signora vecchio morte!",
which was partly French, but the woman on the other end spoke some English and in the end she managed to get the address from him.

After he'd opened all the doors upstairs and downstairs in the lobby, too—he dreaded that he mightn't hear the bell—George waited in the hall with the stucco, and he tried to pass the time by figuring out what all the little
putti
in the frescos were doing. He felt sick. If he never saw another picture again as long as he lived it would be soon enough for him.

When the ambulance guys walked in, George jumped up and started crying, more out of embarrassment than anything else. They didn't seem bothered by this; after all, he told himself, Continental men cried more anyway. There were policemen, too, but not swaggering and fierce, as George had been imagining. He realized that he'd been afraid they'd suspect him of killing the Signora for her heirlooms (the frescoes? the stucco? it was absurd). But it hardly counted as an interrogation; they only took down his name and address from his passport and asked him in English when he had last seen the Signora. "About twenty minutes ago," he said stupidly, and then realized they meant
alive.
"Monday," he told them, "and since then there's only been the radio." Then he thought they might ask him,
Did you not wonder, boy, did you not
think it was strange that an old lady would play her radio all day and all night for three days?

As soon as the draped stretcher had been carried out, George was told that he could go.

At the train station he queued up at the ticket office to explain, but the girl behind the counter seemed bored; she said, "Next train to Paris, 16:22," and he gathered that his old ticket would still work. They were very casual about these things here. Of course he didn't have a couchette on the next train, so he had to sit up all night.

It got cold. About three in the morning, George realized that what was digging into his leg was his rent money. He took it out and felt like a criminal. It occurred to him to post it back from London, marked
For the heirs and assigns of the Signora of Hotel Annunziata, Florence.
But what would be the point of that? They were about to inherit a prime bit of Florentine property even though they clearly never gave enough of a shit about their grandmother (or whatever she was) to come round and see her, once in a while. She could have been eaten by dogs, if she'd had dogs!

George wondered why he was getting so angry. For all he knew, the Signora didn't have any heirs and assigns. He'd been the last person to see her, and for three days, all he'd done was wish she'd turn the bloody music off.

He put the money back in his pocket. He took out his notebook.

Left Florence, night train.

He couldn't think what else to put. He thought he should probably get some sleep, and he put his head back against the cracked leather of his seat and shut his eyes, but he didn't feel sleepy, not at all.

Pitre and Bunch knew each other from the old time. They were Louisiana crawfishermen, at least as long as the crawfish were biting. These days, what with global warming and so forth, the cages were mostly empty, and it was hardly worth the trouble of heading out to Mudd Swamp every morning.

The two men were having a smoke at the Bourdreaux Landing one May evening, and discussing whether there was any such thing as a coloured Cajun, which is what Bunch claimed to be. Pitre mentioned, not for the first time, that what flowed in his own veins was one hundred percent French wine. "Every ancestor I ever have was a full-blood Acadian. Cast out of Nova Scotia back in 1755 at the point of a British gun."

"Maybe so," said Bunch, grinning, "but you were born in the state of Texas."

"About one inch over the border," growled Pitre. He was twenty years older than Bunch, and his reddened scalp was grizzled like a mouldy loaf.

"Well, whatever, you know, I'm a live-and-let-live sort of Cajun, my friend," said Bunch, sucking the last from his Marlboro. "I was born and reared in these swamps, but I'm willing to call you brother."

"Brother!" snorted Pitre. "You're a black Creole with a few Sonniers for cousins; that's not the same thing at all."

Just then a candy-apple red Jeep came down the dirt road. Four old ladies spilled out and started taking photographs of the boats. Pitre asked them in French if they wanted to buy some crawfish, then mumbled it again in English; he hauled a cage out of his boat and held it up, with a few red creatures waving inside. The ladies just lengthened their zoom lenses for close-ups.