Hill Towns (38 page)

“
Buon giorno
,” she said, slipping into the opposite chair and taking a deep gulp of the coffee. “Ready for Mother Whitney’s Magical Mystery Tour? You look like Madeleine this morning.”

I looked down at the navy shirtdress I had traveled in. It was light, cool, impervious to dirt and wrinkles, and, with its white-piped sailor collar, it did indeed look like the uniform of a French convent school. Especially beside Yolanda’s gypsy cotton. I grimaced.

“I could slit the skirt to my waist and leave the top three buttons unbuttoned. Then I’d look like Madeleine on a bender.”

“Don’t bother. It’s a good combination, the sacred and the profane. You can get us into churches and abbeys, and I can get guys for us. It works out perfectly.”

I laughed aloud, joy rising like a geyser in my throat. The day opened out before me, as rich and dense with possibility and magic as if I were a child on her first away-from-home adventure. In a way that was true. I had never, I realized, done precisely this before: gone off on my own with a friend for a spur-of-the-moment

HILL TOWNS / 317

totally unplanned lark. Lark. The word sounded in my ears as if it would taste wonderful on the tongue, round and rich like a bonbon.

“Lark,” I said aloud, rolling it in my mouth. “We are going to have a lark.”

She grinned at me.

“Bet your fanny. Where’s your luggage?”

“Don’t have any. I put a fresh set of underwear and a toothbrush in my bag. We aren’t going anywhere fancy, are we?”

“Nope,” she said, laughing and getting up from her chair.

“In fact, you’re probably overdressed for where we’re going.

I do like a gal who can just throw in a pair of panties and go.”

“Then let’s,” I said.

I threw a wad of lire down on the table and we went out through the lobby to the Opel, arm in arm, like school friends in the brightening day.

We did not, after all, go out into the countryside to look at gardens. When Yolie dropped me off at American Express on the Via Guicciardini, just shy of the Ponte Vecchio on the Oltarno side, the line was out the door. Although it was early, the sun was climbing and the sky whitening with heat, and the throng inside the narrow office was already restless and uncomfortable. People were fanning and rolling up sleeves, unbuttoning shirts, and craning around to see what was holding up their line. There were four work stations open, and each one seemed to me to be hopelessly stalled, clogged with God knew what effluvia of away-from-home strife. Most of the whining, imploring, and then angry voices were American. Most of the curt, indifferent ones were Italian.

Goddammit it, Joe, this is not at all funny. I wish I’d let you mop up your own mess in Siena, I thought, as 318 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

ten o’clock turned into eleven, and then crawled toward noon. By twelve there were still four people ahead of me.

Each of them held enough
documenti
to precipitate individual international monetary crises. None of the other lines looked any better. Sweat ran down my back and soaked my bra, and the hair at my nape and temples was sopping. You’d think American Express would have caught on by now that six out of twelve months in Florence were hot.

Yolie wandered in every now and then, looked over the situation, and drifted back out, to browse along the Ponte Vecchio or to run and move the car from the space she’d found nearby to the big public lot in the Piazza del Carmine.

She stayed with me after that.

“It’s right near the place I’m taking you for dinner,” she said, “and it’s just a minute or two from the hotel. After you’re done here maybe we can walk around Oltarno, see the Boboli and the Pitti if you’d like, and get some lunch.

Or the way this is going, we’ll do lunch first and then the tour. I think the country villas are out.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I should have let Joe go on and do this in Siena. It’s a rotten substitute for breezes and scenery.”

Yolie stretched her arms high up over her head and arched her back and let her head tip back until the braid brushed her waist. Her brown breasts made as if to escape the white cotton blouse. She let her arms fall and settled back beside me, weight resting heavily on one leg, hand on hip. She looked around the room, scanning the crowd slowly and fully.

“Scenery’s not so bad in here,” she said.

I saw her eye had fallen on a young man standing at the end of the line beside us. He looked to be college age HILL TOWNS / 319

or a bit older, a tanned, dark-pelted, hulking young man with peeling sunburn on his nose and the thick arms and big hands of a linebacker. He did not seem to be with anyone in the crowd, as the other young men and women generally were; was not thumbing impatiently through papers or fid-geting or craning his neck to see if his line was moving. You could tell he was hot; his white T-shirt was wet, and the dark mat of his chest hair showed through it, but he did not fan himself or pull the shirt away from his body. He simply stood there, like a statue or a tree or perhaps a placid, sun-stunned bull. Waiting his turn. Looking back at Yolanda.

Yolanda smiled and the boy smiled back. He did not drop his gaze or avert his head, as most strangers will when they inadvertently smile at another stranger in a public place. He simply looked at her, all of her, from her feet to her face, and smiled. It was a smile to match the rest of him, thick and slow and somehow battering. Her smile did not falter either, and she did not look away. Volumes of things that I thought were best left unsaid passed between them in the humid air. I thought I could almost smell her.

“Yolie, really,” I said under my breath, and the line in front of me moved up, and I saw that I was next after the man ahead.

She broke the look and turned back to me, letting the smile trail behind her like a thrown net.

“You’re right,” she said lazily. “By the time he gets his business done I’ll be out of the mood. Pity. That was U.S.

Grade A Prime.”

She did not lower her voice. Someone behind us laughed.

My face burned. My turn came at last, and I got the duplicate checks I had come for, and we made our way through the crowd to the door. As we went out

320 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

into the sweet, blinding air, she looked back and blew the hulking young man a kiss.

“You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t batter the door down tonight,” I said.

“I’ll be lucky if he does.”

“You are really incorrigible, you know it?”

“Not really. Just still horny. I didn’t get the motor turned off before Cosimo the Beautiful cut for home.”

“Well, take a deep breath or a cold shower or something, and let’s get some lunch. My treat. Pick somewhere wonderful. It’s the least I can do after botching up your whole morning.”

“It was yours too,” she said equably. “I don’t mind. I’ll see gardens and villas for the next five days, in Tuscany. I won’t be back here for at least a year, though. I’d much rather spend this last day in my neck of the woods. It’s the best part of Florence, even though there’s nary a villa or a swimming pool in the lot of it.”

“Thank God,” I said. “Come on. Let’s walk.”

We walked in the deep, still heat to the Borgo San Jacopo, turned left, and made our way through streets so narrow and closely overhung with houses and shops that it was like walking through a tunnel. The light here was a permanent half-light, pierced by shafts of pale sun. Dust motes danced in them. The yellow-walled old houses glowed, sulfurlike.

Yolie was right; I had not seen this Florence before. It was a distinct neighborhood, a village; the sense of lives being led, work being done all around you, was intense. People walked the narrow cobbled streets, went in and out of shops with baskets and string bags, called to one another, dodged the marauding autos and
vesparini
that roared by so closely their clothing billowed in the wind. Shopkeepers set their wares out; tourists and housewives examined HILL TOWNS / 321

them critically; children shrieked and scuffled; impassive teenagers with boom boxes and earphones leaned on their Vespas or the doorways of the old shops, or on each other, their eyes hooded with contempt and coolness, many hundreds of thousands of lire worth of supple dark leather on their bodies. Old men sat in the sun in small street
caffès
and argued or played board games.

One street over, the village disappeared abruptly and gave way to extravagant palazzi and dim, rich antique shops whose artful windows frankly intimidated me. I saw few people in them, and those few were so relentlessly austere and dark-clad I could not tell if they were customers or dealers.

“If I had a billion dollars I’d still be afraid to go in one of those shops and buy anything,” I said to Yolie. “I’m sure they’d show me out for not having the right thing to wear.”

“Probably,” she said. “Salespeople in Florence are the rudest in the world. They’d like you to think they’re aristocracy just helping out a friend for the day. I don’t see how they ever sell anything. But Americans buy that stuff by the ton. I think Texans buy the most. Dallas women don’t seem to know when they’re being snubbed.”

“How do you know all this stuff?”

“It’s my business to know stuff.” She grinned at me. “In my line of work, the more you know, the safer you are. Stuff is power.”

“It must be awfully tiring,” I said, meaning it. “To be always keeping your antennae up.”

“You don’t know. That’s why I love coming to Italy; Florence especially. This part of it, anyway. Down here nobody cares what you know or don’t know. This neighborhood is about seeing and tasting and feeling. It’s not 322 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

as eerie as Venice or as overpowering as Rome, and it’s not as relentlessly rustic as Tuscany. It’s still a city, but you can let yourself slump here. And it’s good grazing, if you know what I mean. You can meet interesting men without having to fight them off until you find one you don’t want to fight off. You couldn’t do that much of anywhere else in Italy.

Forget the Mezzogiorno; you’d be black and blue or raped or worse in two hours if you went trolling like you can in Oltarno.”

I looked at her as we ambled across the Borgo Tegolalo toward the Piazza Santo Spirito. She was as round and sleek and sinuous as a relaxed cat in the warm, close gloom.

“Aren’t you ever afraid something will happen to you?” I said.

“Nope. I’m street smart and I’ve got great instincts. I wrote the book on safe sex. I’m more afraid something won’t.”

It crossed my mind that she might really be pathological in some way: a nymphomaniac, if anyone still used that sad, innuendo-sodden old word. But then I thought not. She was too successful; had carved out too lofty and seamless a career for herself to be driven by pathology. What she had achieved undoubtedly had taken enormous drive and singlemindedness and determination, as well as talent. I put it out of my mind, partly because it was enough, on this burnished day, to take her as the funny and endearing companion that she was and partly because coming into the piazza from the dusky tangle of streets was like coming into a burst of pure light after a long dull time in the dark.

At one end of the tree-lined oblong Brunelleschi’s great Romanesque church sat, austere and classical, a remote and beautiful white-carved sentinel presiding HILL TOWNS / 323

over benches full of old people taking the sun, tangles of children playing ball, and umbrella carts full of used clothing and stray flowers left from the morning’s market. In the center of the piazza lay an oblong defined by more old trees, and in its center a fountain’s lazy play caught the sun in a dazzle of refracted rainbows. More children splashed and screamed here, and mothers and nannies chatted, half watching them. All around the piazza more shuttered, anonymous
palazzi
stood, alternating with shops, a
latteria
, and a
gelateria
. Some were half shuttered by the ubiquitous corrugated metal shades that meant the long lunchtime siesta was getting under way, but others were open, and business in them was brisk.

Yolie steered me toward a trattoria at the opposite end from the church. A few umbrella tables had been set out, and most of these were empty.

“Manno has the best
tribollita
in Oltarno,” she said, sinking into one of the chairs. I followed, gratefully.

“Is that the entrails of something, or do I want to know?”

“It’s bean soup. Did you think I was going to make you eat intestines? Though that’s pretty much what they did around here, or at least in San Frediano, where I’m staying.

It was where the tripe makers worked. They boiled it up in huge vats and then delivered it early in the mornings all over the city, in wheelbarrows. You can still get the best
trippa
alla fiorentina
around here. Maybe we’ll try some tonight.”

“Just don’t tell me beforehand,” I said. “Bean soup sounds fine. God, I’ll bet it smelled something fierce around here back then.”

“Probably not a lot worse than it does now, at least first thing in the morning,” she said. “It’s a bad place for 324 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

drugs, and before the street cleaners get here the smell of vomit and God knows what else is potent. You have to step over syringes, sometimes, and worse.”

“Lord, is it dangerous? It must be. This beautiful place seems a million miles from that kind of thing,” I said, looking around at the peaceful piazza in the sun that was just now beginning to slant westward.

“For some reason it never has seemed dangerous to me,”

Yolie said. “Sad, maybe, and wasteful—all those poor thin furtive kids, most of them foreigners, a good many of them American, squatting on the church steps and smoking and snorting and shooting up and sneaking around behind the trees to fuck. I come here late at night sometimes because the way they light the church is just so fantastic, like a set for
Tosca
or something. There are always police and, for some reason, soldiers. Nobody has ever bothered me.

Florence just isn’t the place for that.”

Manno came then, exclaiming over Yolie, kissing her cheeks, bending over my hand to kiss it. He sent a carafe of chilled white wine like a wind off a mountain, and we drank it and another one before we ordered. When the bean soup came we fell upon it like starving foundlings, mopping the remains with Manno’s thick crusted bread, and then had two or three glasses of
vin santo
. I had never thought I liked sweet wine, but this was wonderful, with just enough of an after-burn not to be cloying on the tongue.