Gianni is on the far end negotiating a deal. He gives good prices, but then, he cuts his weed. There is a dead blue-painted cart across the way. Two students are conversing in excited, educated tones nearby. Inside, amidst the pillars and columns and sweet breath of serenity, a group of children are passing loudly up to the altar on a field-trip. Their voices echo and return and meld into one note, the note of the cathedral.
I first met Katherine here, on the steps. Starved for conversation after the continental trek she began to ramble on, speaking of Botticelli's truth and her love for the scent of Florence, that mingled ambrosia of ancient sewers and cheap benzin and burning leaves. Her exuberance was infectious. We walked the gardens together and lay in the olive orchards beneath San Miniato, delighting in eachother and the rustling silence. She has a love of solidity and security, which is why she travelled, and if you don't understand that then you will never understand why I loved her.
"Why did you come?" I asked Katherine, my mouth full of a cheese and pickle and tomato and asparagus sandwich. Not Kate, or Kathy, but Katherine with a K and an Oxford degree and tannin-brown eyes.
She tilted those wise brown eyes up at the rooftops and then out at the vendors dotting the piazza square.
"I like it here." The crispness to her words was German or perhaps Greek, I didn't know then but savored the speculation. "I came once and rubbed the nose of the boar at the Mercato, and sure enough, I returned." Now she looked at me, and her dimples deepened.
"I decided to spend an entire afternoon in one spot, and soak up the air, the, the atmosphere..."
"Ambiance."
"Ambiance. I've seen the museums. I've seen the Ponte Vecchio and churches. I didn't want to be a tourist. "
"Wait until fall. The town empties. Most of these people--" I waved my free hand about--" are tourists."
She looked around the square, her eyes grave. Tourists never want to be tourists. They will come, each for their own reasons and beliefs, and see the Florence carefully created for the tourist's eye. They will buy the Florence carefully created for their coffee table and leave content, never once noticing the old woman hunched by the church door in rags, her bowl filling with all the slow inevitability of the tide.
"Why did you come?" Katherine asked, the sweet planes of her face mildly curious.
"It is the one city I can live in. These people, the Florentines--this city has been for a thousand years. Petrarch, Machiavelli, Lorenzo the Magnificent all walked these narrow streets and lived behind these tall doors. But the Florentines don't care. England treats its history with dignity, and France with smug superiority, but here..." I shrugged, I think. "There's dogshit on the stones where Dante walked. They don't care. They take it for granted. It, I don't know, it all makes it more real, somehow."
"And you like that."
Katherine smiled.
"You are beautiful," she says suddenly with conviction. She loves with an intense and passionate immediacy, she cannot think of a future or a past when she is loving, of what was or what will be. Her blind enthusiasm hit me where I wasn't expecting it and my stomach contracts with pain and anger at my nakedness before her. There are no defenses against an open heart.
Katherine is late. I stand by the Doors of Paradise across from the Duomo, enjoying the annoyance I feel. Savoring it. It's a defense, however slight; but she runs towards me, and smiles, and any annoyance falters under a rushing whirl of apology . She doesn't like sad movies, but is going to see La Strada with me anyway. She's pensive and silent afterwards. A stop for some cold straciatella and then a rambling walk along the glitz of downtown, surrounded by the rush and blare of evening celebration.
We pass a display window filled with dangling sculptures of paper and tin-foil, and conclude that it is an unspoken rule of fashion that the more exclusive a store, the less they need to display. She takes me to a discotheque she discovered, and though I loathe them, I agree; to see her dance, to see her float like one possessed on the throb of modern Madonna, alone in her world--it is worth a thousand prayers.
After two days she ends up at my place, by implicit agreement, and I look at the soft slope of her shoulder gilded by morning sunlight and realize that the painters were right, the priests were right, there are angels and they do have the form of human flesh, two wings tangled invisible in bedsheets. She gives herself as totally and violently to lovemaking as she does to laughter and conversation, and I wish, oh how I wish that she was less than perfect, for I'm drowning in her and have no way to save myself.
"Damn," I whisper, and pull at my cigarette. She turns lazily, and smiles at me. A soft smile, as if swallowing a secret.
Its loss would be so tragic and numbing that one must laugh. For what would be left? Only stars, and however many there are and however brightly they shine they would never be enough to replace our one, solitary sattelite clothed in eons of legend. Nights would be blacker. Perhaps people would see the stars more clearly, and learn all their names, and hold on to them as to a lifeline, a thin suggestion of what was vanished. A time would come when the moon is a tale told by parents, and then by grandparents, and then in tales: "Once upon a time, when the moon shone..." it would become magical and perfect and impossible.
There's a trick to managing pain; find the very center of it and position yourself there and then spread yourself carefully out, always staying balanced, until you ride it like a California wave and it doesn't hurt so much, no, not quite so much. I wish now more than ever that I could give in to tears and tribulation and despair, but that has never been my way; I know myself too well. I am too merciless and too unkind.
So: I let out my breath with a whoosh and breathe in through flared nostrils, the smell of Firenze, the smell of shit and old spaghetti, and look out across the purple square and the dealers and students and the mopeds and the dreaming stacatto of pigeons over it all. There's an old man sitting in a small curlique chair outside the Bar Tabbachi, a really old man, a melting derilict of a man going on ninety with a question mark of a back and stubble and a ratty suit singing the immortal hymn of sweat and tobacco, and he's looking down at his dog--a small dog, a rat dog, the ubiquitous Italian Dog found in Fellini movies--who is looking back at his master with a blank, profound, brown-eyed love. He stares and stares, his eyes shining with devotion and utter complacency, and the old man rises with the creak of dying bone and muscle and goes into the Bar Tabacchi and returns with an extra-large gelato, and he bends and feeds it all every bit to the blunt-nosed dog, no words given or taken, and the dog eats it all with the singleminded drive of his kind, and the man sits back and stares bright-eyed at the bare and simple face of Santo Spirito, and isn't that what love is all about?