Cathedrals, galleries, towers, city arches, crumbling walls, castles on Steve’s left. Cassie and sibling rivalry, old animosity and lies from their childhood on his right. They trudge miles by day, through stone medieval streets, view marble masterpieces and gold-painted Byzantine canvases. They traipse past topiary shrubs as implacable and in-yer-face as Cassie’s stories of Mom’s electro-shock therapy, Dad’s emotional abuse, Granny’s incestuous behavior, bad marriages, worse divorces, suspicious shotgun accidents—all of it delivered in his sister’s forceful and rapid-fire narration and examined against a backdrop of priceless art. In spite of arguing about nearly everything their parents did to/for them, he and Cassie manage to put away a bottle of Chianti Classico each night and down a half-dozen espresso demi-tasses in the gray morning light of this coldest-on-record Florentine winter.
Granny’s incestuous behavior--?! Steve thinks.
Over shots of grappa this afternoon, Cassie is complaining about how all of Michelangelo's women look like men with breasts grafted onto their chests, how none of the female statuary have pubic hair. "I'm talking sculptors of so talented a precision," she says, "they can do fur on the underbelly of the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus." She takes a grappa sip.
She and Steve are sitting in a misty drizzle on a couple patio chairs outside the Cin-Cin Bar, and at this hour, 3pm, the piazza is mostly empty, all the twiggy wrought iron tables and chairs scattered haphazardly across the pavers. She's wearing a black felt beret, the mist fuzzing its edges. Steve hasn't seen this beret before today. She's getting rapidly Tuscanized, he thinks, the native noir taking hold.
Cassie leans toward him. "It's vagina dentata all over again. The female genitalia are so hidden, so internal, so frightening they think only baring them, defoliating them, can level the playing field, as it were." She pulls a battered paperback from under her cape and slaps it against the table. Beaded mist scatters. Instead of bringing Fodor's or a Berlitz guide to Florence, she's got a copy of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, which she reads with a religious voracity, sometimes bursting out of nowhere with a belly laugh. Steve never asks what's funny. Cassie shoves the paperback toward him. "A fear of women inspired artists to some of the greatest works in the world."
He doesn’t reach for the book. "They should hire you to guide tours around here. You could anchor the post-modern perspective."
Steve's having one of those ulterior moments, not unusual in Florence since his sister's arrival. His feeling is that neither of them has gotten laid in a while, and it shows. He doesn't say this, of course, coming from as long and illustrious an incestuous line as Cassie insists they do. The University of Illinois entrusted him to do research in the archives of the Uffizi Gallery, not remake a Bernardo Bertolucci movie. Instead, he flexes his cold toes inside his wet loafers and says, "Maybe it's something to do with the materials. Marble," he says. "Bronze."
Her eyes widen, and the pupils even dilate with astonishment. "Take a look at the Neptune in the Piazza Vecchio. Take a look at the David. Fanciful little curlicues. Delightful wads of pubic hair."
He addresses his grappa, shakes his head.
"Oh, scusi, Herr Profesor Doktor, I forgot. You don't do the tourist traps."
Ever since her arrival, she's been wanting to see the David. At first he thought, You bet. Even saved it as a pleasure they could have together. But he waited for her one day, as planned, and she never showed up. The next time she had cramps…. A week later they agreed to meet there, but she left a scrawled note for him—“I'm Not In A Very Good Place”--whatever the hell that meant. Then some other screw up happened—missed connection? crossed wires?—that left him sitting on the steps of the Galleria dell’ Accademia, in 40-degree weather—for an hour. No Cassie. He got the weird feeling she was stringing him along.
Go to see the David? What did his sister really mean?
The upshot of it all is they haven't gone. Now that she's got only three more days in Florence, she's become insistent. But for Steve a defiance has kicked in. The more she asks, the more he avoids.
Ah, family.
Cassie pulls a map from inside her woolen cape and unfolds it. "Look. We could head toward the duomo. The David's only"--she counts--"six blocks away. Can we do that? Head toward the duomo?"
"People think of Florence and picture Michelangelo's David. It's a cliche. A rip off. Bait for the Ugly Americans."
"I'm 27, and I've never seen it. I might be 50 before I get back here. If ever."
"Then go, for Christ's sake."
"I want to share the experience. Maybe it means nothing to you today, but it might 20 years from now."
Steve lets his gaze sweep the piazza, all the metal furniture shadowed in this gray mist. Grappa surges through him, facing off in places--the chest, the temples--against an espresso charge he's had since morning. "There are people living in poverty in this city while Americans spend millions of Euro in the tourist traps."
"I'm talking about a statue. What the hell?" She draws her elbows in close to her chest and leans them on the metal table between them, a guarded posture, her body fortress-like. "It's the prominent genitals--isn't it?—why you won't go with me to the David."
He gazes out at the piazza where a guy kneels in the mist before a red Vespa, trying to put the chain back on the sprocket. "Every morning I see prominent genitals. I don't need to spend my grant money on prominent genitals." Steve knocks back a swig, clicks the glass against the metal table, regret burning along his gullet with the licorice drink.
Though he and Cassie share a common tongue, a common blood, and can sit together in the heart of this city that first acculturated barbaric Europe, it's not the place that is strange and distant so much as the two of them. Grew up in the same house, her bedroom next to his, their sleep at night partaking of the same ether--but for him dreams. Her? Nightmares. Whether railing about stone pubic hair or, more simply, their family, Cassie wants something he can't give. Wants him to buy her vision of their childhood.
This morning, as Steve made his way toward the Uffizi, a man yelled something in a Tuscan dialect to a woman across the Piazza Vecchio. Some of the words stood out, some were carried on the breeze; important connections and transitions were the things he missed. That's how it is between him and his sister. A bad translation of their childhood, an "almost just."
Inside the Cin-Cin, the barkeep draws close to the window now and then, keeping an eye on them. He frowns from time to time and, Steve imagines, feels a certain narcissistic pleasure: American idiots in the rain.
Cassie scowls into her empty glass. "At un banco, the exchange rate was awful. This official, an il duce replica if ever I saw one, pounded my papers with his big knob of a rubber stamp. He raised his hand above his head and thumped the stamp down on my papers. Up, down, up, down. All the while staring at me from under his hairy brow. Thump, thump, thump." She waves to the spying barkeep, who hustles out to them a couple more grappas. “It’s rape, I tell you.”
Steve swigs from his new glass, happy to get off the David. He tells her about the prostitute who approached him back in November when he was walking home from the Russian church. Her lips were painted black, like death, and she looked bruisy around the eyes.
She said, In dreams of love we exchange our two souls, no?
“And I said”—Steve tips back in his patio chair, throws a look Cassie’s way, trying to gauge audience reaction—“I said, ‘No. You love only my money.’ And I kept walking.”
This neither amuses nor distracts his sister. Her voice is a whisper: "The misogyny's wearing me down."
Steve observes that circa 1479 Florence was the most homosexual place on the globe. "It was a city that deified Mary and treated women like shit. Madonna-Whore dichotomy to the nth degree."
"Where is there room for me in that?"
On the piazza, the guy with the Vespa gets the chain put back on, and he revs the motor. A flock of pigeons lifts from the pavers, circles over toward the Santa Maria Novella church. Steve follows their trajectory. "I've spent all week reading registries on infanticide. Girl babies died in epic numbers during the Middle Ages. Right here. In this town." He rubs at his eyes, shakes his head. "Jesus, I need a couple grappas just to purge that."
The research Steve does, social history, is Number 1 with a bullet in academia, and critical acclaim is all but assured: endowed chairs, visiting professorships, someday a post as Dean. What's left is to present a strong perspective on baptismal bonds, circa the catasto of 1427, a type of census in Florence, and to research baptismal taboos and transgressions. The climate-controlled upper storeys of the Uffizi Gallery hold the public art, salon after salon of priceless masterpieces, most of them church-commissioned, full of seraphim, saints and martyrs, while the unheated stone berths and research chambers down below contain the private ricordanze, the records, page after page in diaries and ledgers describing daily life. Upstairs, the angels; downstairs, how the fallen angels made do.
Cassie draws her cape more tightly around her shoulders. "Your glee chills my blood."
"Glee? Where do you get that? It’s freaking me out."
"I wondered how long it would be before you'd find some historical fact to lord over me." Cassie opens her travel journal, flips to a blank page, then begins writing.
Steve leans back in his chair. The grappa has by now blurred the edges of everything nicely, even her words. They take on a silvery drizzle all their own, and he finds them melting away in the mist.
Shopping with Mara…. He thinks of his fiancé in the States, how he wishes he could push a grocery cart down the aisles of Kroger with her again. Something so simple, pushing a grocery cart, balky wheels and all, the over-lit well-stocked aisles, Hamburger Helper, Campbell’s Soup. A nostalgic wave washes through him. His eyes well up. God, he hates shopping with Mara…. But in Florence, where cold comfort is on the itinerary every day, he feels such a sweet longing for it….
Cassie flips her travel journal around on the table for Steve to read. Scrawled on one of the pages: "Phlorence is phabulously phallic."
He smiles.
But she doesn't. Her jaw is tightly grim, and she stares out at the piazza. "Not phallic enough, in a specific way, for me, though. When I traveled in Mexico, I was like a northern goddess. Here, the men don't notice me. Like that bartender." She nods toward the Cin-Cin. "He looks at you."
"Maybe men think we're a couple. You and I, that is."
She pats his hand. "Thanks for trying to make me feel better."
He senses in her a mean drunk building, something a bottle of Chianti Classico in a little while will elevate to a fever pitch before everything turns soggy and sodden and she rounds out the night huddled over by the radiator in their pensione, crying. Many of their evenings end with him at the bidet, washing out tomorrow's socks, and her at the radiator, feet propped up, back to him, pretending--he imagines--she's in Europe all alone.
Cassie lifts her glass and stares at him over it. "You can go to Florence, but you can't get away. Nobody's free--not in a place where only the past matters. Are you hiding down there in the Uffizi Archives? Or just doing penance?"
He flips his hand at some of the mist beading up on the metal table. Here it comes. "Look. We've got three more days together. Let's just get through it."
"Three more days? Let's have it out. Steve"--her voice betrays her, and it's a moment before she can continue--"I'm scared."
"Of what?"
"Mother went away, and Dad was never there to begin with. And then all the lies. Our whole childhood was full of madness, shadows and lies. Doesn't it get to you, Steve? How do you go on?"
He picks up her pen and writes on the open page of her travel journal, “This is a city of medieval history, not ancient.” He spins the journal around for her to read.
“Oh, ho,” she says. “What a wit.”
“Ancient history, Sis. I can’t undo something that happened 25 years ago.”
“Like you even try?”
"It's over. Done. Fini."
"Yeah, right. The historian. Yup." She draws herself up, haughty, and is all chin-jut now. "I see in you someone fated to spend his whole life buried in dark grottos."
"Look. Mom had shock therapy. But she got well. We went on to have a good childhood. Trips to the museum, the circus. Ballet for you, hockey for me. A car to drive when the time was right, prom parties, a full-ride to college, and come on, Mom and Dad still help. Didn't they give you the down payment on your house?"
Cassie has begun to cry. The barkeep chooses this occasion to amble once again toward their table. "Un porti, por signora?" Steve shoos him away. Stinginess bucks through him like waves in hard sets, but he opens his wallet, slips a 10 Euro note under their empty glasses. "Come on."
Grappa-fortified, they totter from the misty piazza and cross the Arno on the Ponte Vecchio. A rowing team skims along the placid water below. At the Santa Maria Novella church they go in, light some candles at the altar, examine a couple frescoes before blundering into a side chapel where a wake is taking place. Gathered around the coffin, the black-garbed mourners stare at them. The deceased clasps a rose bouquet in his dead hands. His closed eyelids pucker where they’ve been sewn together. Steve and Cassie back out of the chapel simultaneously, like bit actors who have blown their cue in a tricky stage drama. They hustle out into the drizzle again, squint up at the headache-gray sky before wandering down the degli Vincenzo to the Pitti Palace. It's free day, and they decide to tour on through. Unlike the Uffizi, the Pitti doesn't heat its galleries. Steve walks the marble floors, gazing at the art, his ability to appreciate it severely limited by cold-numbed feet.
But Cassie has her own peculiar heat.
If there is an oddball subject portrayed--moldered corpses of saints performing miracles--she gravitates toward it. Steve finds himself bracing for something. The world knows and loves a domesticated Florence: Fra Angelico frescoes in the San Marco convent, churchy and tame. But less known, never mind loved, is a morbid walk-on-the-wild-side Florence, circa 1538: plague-time rot, decay, gobbets of infested flesh. The longer you stay here, Steve notices, the more you run up against it: Florence being Florence. In the Pitti's west wing, before he can stop her, Cassie wanders into a salon where all the paintings showcase various saints in the midst of their martyrdom.
"Look at this," Cassie yanks him by the sleeve. "What do you make of this?"
Beheadings, thumbscrews, the rack, a Catherine wheel. There hangs a room-sized 8 by 8 foot canvas, painted in the early Renaissance style associated with Andrea del Sarto, of Bertrilda of Prato during the moment of her martyrdom at the hands of Roman soldiers. Her torso is bared, and one particularly adept soldier has with his scythe-like weapon lopped off a breast. Another, rapier in hand, focuses on the remaining breast.
"Explain it to me, Steve. What am I missing here?" Cassie's tone curves upward, the soldier's scythe in it. On the spot it skewers something mean-spirited in him. Though he knows what she wants--condemnation, outrage, maybe an "Is it Art?" discussion--he resists.
"A painting isn't about its subject matter," he says, hearing the pinched and pompous tone in his voice. The academic. "Look at the curtain behind Bertrilda. Look at the fabric of her gown. The texture, the folds. Do you see how so much of the work is taken up with that kind of detail? And"--he steps closer to have a look--"the three-dimensionality. You see, painters had just abandoned the flat two-dimensional works associated with Byzantium." He turns to her. "It's about perspective, Cassie. Perspective was discovered in Florence." Though he doesn't have to draw close and tap her on the wrist at this point, he does. "Right in this town. This very place. They discovered perspective in Florence." Dissertation finished, Steve all but clicks his heels.
Cassie inclines her head and looks at him with the scowling disgust she has shown the painting. "Get a clue, bro."
He frowns. "Say what?"
"Perspective and you? Do the math." With one of her knuckles, she thumps him squarely on the sternum. "What have I been talking about all along? Perspective." She spits the word at him. And at that Cassie swirls her woolen cape around her shoulders, sweeps off toward other martyred saints.
For an hour she scrutinizes the paintings while Steve wanders the rest of the Pitti. One late Renaissance effort catches his eye: a painting of Dante's Paraiso showing an intense, beefcake-type guy with an oar in hand ready to swat all the lost souls away from the Pearly Gates. Heaven's bouncer. Cherubim and seraphim blossom around him. Fleshy Botticelli women, their faces contorted into expressions of El Greco-magnitude desperation, cluster about.
In the bowels of the Uffizi Archives, when Steve studies the ricordanze, the story goes invariably like this: the youngest son of a merchant was suckered into an unsuitable marriage with the daughter of a taxpayer. The taxpayer's family tries to renege on the dowry--so much flour, so many chickens, so many bolts of cloth. What Steve discerns about life in the Quattrocento is reduced to an economy of goods promised, goods exchanged, gifts given on the occasion of births, marriages, deaths. The human story accessible only insofar as commodities figure in.
Whatever scandalous truths broadsided these families--the things Cassie rails against: abandonment, abuse, incest--are nowhere present. Things were different then--? Thinking of those austere entries, remembering the neat hand, the careful itemizing, Steve doubts it. The scandals are there, the human pain hidden, beneath the impulse to keep track, record, tally the score.
You can go to Florence, he thinks, but you can't get away. Not that I’m trying…
When Cassie finds him, she creeps up from behind and stands there, silent, looking at Dante's Paraiso over his shoulder. Something snaky emanates from her, an itchiness, the air bristling around her. He turns. She nods at the canvas before them: heaven's bouncer, fluttering angels, the women in agony. "There's Mom,” she says. “There's Dad. Oh!"--she points--"There's me way over there. Where are you, Steve? Eh? Dove sono Steve?"
Three more days of this—? Three? He steps forward, pulls her to him. In his arms she does not resist. She feels as small and insubstantial as one of the saints who, it is said, subsisted on the Host alone. Her body caves. "I give up," he says. He consults his watch. "Let's go.”
“Go?” Her voice is muffled in his coat.
“Come on.” He’s walking her across the marble floor, a pas de deux for siblings.
“What for--?”
“Let’s go see the David."
"Like this?" Cassie pulls back, shakes her head. They're both a little soggy, a little tipsy still after their grappas in the rain. "We can't go drunk."
"I'm not drunk."
"Why else would you want to?"
"We planned it. We talked about it. Hey, come on—don’t cry."
Cassie dabs at her eyes with a black lace hankie. "I've gone this long without seeing the David. I can wait." She gives her head a pert shake. “We can wait. Don’t you think? Won’t it be better? If we can just wait…”
Steve narrows his eyes. Stuck, he thinks. Between il paraiso et il inferno.
When a year or so from now his research receives critical acclaim and he's on the rubber chicken circuit giving talks at major institutions, he knows he'll look back on his stay in Florence not as its own torturous circle of hell but with a sweet fondness, call it nostalgia, that will most certainly include his love for Cassie.
But he won't tell her that now.
Now is too damaged. Too fragile.
Now it'll be enough to drag themselves back to the Pensione Rosi, where they'll sit in bleak silence for hours, all of it pretty damn sobering.
Besides, she has already explained to him that Freud equated nostalgia, the feeling, with a desire to return to the birth canal. That was the first day of her visit. They were examining leather goods at the Santa Croce church. “It’s mother’s vagina,” she said, turning a red suede wallet. “Mother’s vagina, all the way.” He didn’t take the bait then, and he won’t now.
Dark cypress spires tower against a stone gray dusk as Steve and Cassie leave the Pitti. Bridges along the Arno have withstood 500 years of on-again-off-again wars. Steve knows he and his sister can get through this, too—Florence, together. He slips his arm around her shoulder, draws her in against the chilly night. Ah, family.., he thinks.
A matter of perspective, no?