One Thing Stolen (16 page)

My mama, he says, has something to tell you.

Vieni con me
.

He helps me up. Leads me through the squeeze of the stairs. At the top of the staircase the hallway bends like the dip in a bow tie and the light rains in from three naked ceiling bulbs and I stand for a long time until I am almost sure that it is not another dream. Painted stalks on the walls. Painted trees. A map of branches and the heads of flowers that aren’t flowers but brushstrokes of copper and yellow and pink.

There are forests above us, pointy-nosed bees, birds with too many wings. The floorboards creak when we walk. At the end of the hall the duffel bag hangs from a doorknob. I trace one painted
branch into the canopy of the ceiling. I trace another back down to the floor. I circle the flower petals with one finger. None of the birds fly, and the bee can’t sting. It’s a short, crooked hall. It’s an untrue garden. It’s a psychedelic sky.

When we reach the end of the hall he leans in to kiss me. His lips on my eyelids and then on my lips, and now I feel his fingers low on my neck searching for the skin beneath my collar. I reach for his hair with my hand, the dark chip in his ear, and I will have this moment for all of time, I will not forget this, will not forget you, Benedetto.

I whisper, but he doesn’t hear. He kisses my ear, looks down at my hands, the map of my hands, and kisses me. Now he turns the knob and opens the door and it’s a room big as a bed and a window and a chair, a thin quilt of a thousand colors.

From the dark ceiling flowers are hung—the dried husks of sunflowers, lilies, ferns, Miniato red, the fresh violet blues—all of the flowers upside down, and if you could see. If I could bring you here. If you could hold it safe, for me. This: On the heavy crossbeams are painted roots and sprouts, the cracked shells of seeds, the one small skull of a bird, a chain of big-earred orchids. On the bed are books and magazines, a bowl and a spoon, a green sweater, a long orange scarf, a woman, her face like Benedetto’s.

Nadia, Benedetto says.

Julietta, she says. And her hair is just like his.

She has four pillows at her back—four old velvet squares. She has big eyes on high-up bones, a riverbed neck, long arms in a gauze shirt, the quilt drawn to her waist like an every-color skirt.

When the wind wanders through the room’s one window, the dry bells of the flower heads rustle, soft little songs. The violet smells violet. The pages in the old books blow back and forth, like the order can’t matter in her stories anymore. Here is the end. Here is the beginning. Here is the middle again.

Sit with me, she says, her English like Benedetto’s English, round on the edges. She touches a place on the side of her bed where nothing else is.

I told her you were something, Benedetto tells me. She wants to see for herself how you are.

I feel my face go hot.

So you like my garden? Julietta says.

Pazzesco
, I say softly.
Crazy
. Or someone who sounds like me says. Softly.
Bello
.

Esattemente
. Julietta glances across the room toward her son.

And my city? she asks. Do you like my city?

Florence is . . . confused, I say. Confusing.

Esattemente
, she says again. When she smiles I see that her teeth are like Benedetto’s, too little and so white. I see how tired she is too, how much work it is to sit here against the velvet squares, her whole world this one room and the forest garden Benedetto
has drawn for her on walls she cannot see. His mother, a survivor. Something to tell me.

What have you done? she says now, lifting my hand into her hands. The tips of my fingers are still scarred and rough, like I have dug, barehanded, into a bucket full of pins.

Pazzesco
.

I want to tell her about the finch and the egret and the turtledoves, the green woodpeckers and the nests. I want to tell her about the angel on strings. I want to tell her how it feels to weave in and out, to build, to make, to want, to try so hard, so very hard, to keep everything safe and whole, sheltered from the storm. I want to tell her that I’m losing things, that I can’t stay here, that I will vanish, that I have come to say goodbye, that I love her son, or would have loved her son, and what, I want to know, is a survivor? How do survivors survive?

Tired, I whisper.

Amore sempre
.

Scared.

Anche io
.

I lean in and kiss her on the cheek. I lean back, close my eyes and I don’t know how much time goes by.

It’s time to say goodbye. The real things, the good things, the strange things, the gardens, the song of the birds in their nests. Time to tell the truth. Benedetto is real, but I am disappearing.

Pleasedonotforgetme.

I find her at the top of the hill, in the back of the house, in the walled-in patio. The big pots on the stone ledges, the grill in a corner, the black apron hung from a hook, the stack of magazines. Katherine with the phone in her hand.

She stands. Her blankets slip to the ground. She takes me into her arms, hugs me hard, says, I was just about to call.

She wraps me in a blanket. We sit, east to west, each of us quilted into our own chairs.

There are bits of sun. Freckles of light on her face. She lifts the hat on her head and her hair falls to its hem. You’re shivering, she says.

I pull the blanket to my chin and close my eyes. I draw the air into my lungs. I put everything I have into the question I will ask, this thing that suddenly I must know and Katherine can tell me.

Is it true, I find the words, finally, about the flood? Fourteen thousand works of art? Sixteen miles of records? Four million
books? Eighteen million cubic feet of debris? Everything destroyed? Everything rescued?

Florence, November 4, 1966, Katherine says. The city survives.

I open my eyes, see the cloth clouds above scuttling in, see the thoughts moving behind Katherine’s eyes, a breeze ruffling the pages of her magazines. She collects her hair into a knot and then it falls.

What are we going to—

Do? I ask.

Somewhere down there the city blinks on and off. Somewhere down there Benedetto is sitting with his mother, beneath all the flowers he has stolen for her, in the room he has made for her, in the hope of surviving. He is sitting there. Real. High on the hill, I am with the Mud Angel. The American who came to Florence and fell in love and stayed, who knows something about the business of rescue.

Has your father ever told you the story of Cimabue’s Christ? I hear Katherine say.

I nod. My hands in my pockets, my blanket to my chin.

You’ve seen it? she asks. In the refectory of the Basilica of Santa Croce?

I nod. I’ve seen it. Cimabue’s Christ is a work of art, fourteen whole feet tall. It is painted on two timbers planed from trees axed down in the Casentine Forests seven hundred years ago. I know this. I’ve seen it. I listened to that story.

The basilica took a lot of water, Katherine is saying, on the day of the flood. Eight feet. Nine. No one knows. Sheets of music were stuck to the ceilings. Bibles were crashed against the stones like bricks. Cimabue’s Christ was so flooded out that the only way to reach it was by way of pontoons. The paint had burst from Cimabue’s canvas—rained down like specks of fireworks. White lead. Cinnabar. Lapis. Gold.

Impossible to fix, I say.

Nothing’s impossible.

This is. I am.

Some said the same thing about Cimabue’s Christ, she says. Some people said to let it go, that the flood was too big, that it could not be fought. But the monks didn’t listen; they had hope. They leaned over the edges of their little boats in the basement of the cathedral and scooped the flakes of Cimabue’s face into tea strainers.

Cimabue had painted his Christ on a canvas, Katherine says. He’d hammered the canvas into the cross. He had used eight layers of gesso and the yolks of eggs and so much gold, and by the time the floodwaters receded the cross was three inches longer than it had been—the old wood saturated and swollen, splintering apart.

It took fifteen men to break the cross from its wall. It took fifteen to lay it facedown on the benches of the church, where it stayed until they carried the cross that had lost its Christ to a flatbed truck. It was driven over the river and to the top of the hill, to
the Pizzi Palace. It was carried into Limonaia of the Boboli Gardens, where the Medicis had once grown their citrus trees.

It has grown cold up here on the hill. Katherine pulls the second blanket up to my chin and goes inside and finds a coat and comes back out with two glasses of tea.

Have some, she says.

Listen, she says. To the end of my story.

She says that word went out that Cimabue’s Christ was gone. She says that after eighteen months they tied it to a flatbed truck and drove it to the old fort near the train station where, at last, the swollen timbers dried. They dressed the cross with Casentine timbers. They rearranged the canvas. They chose their paints. His face was in tea strainers. His limbs were swollen. And still, among some, there was hope. Women working in pearls. Men painting with squirrel-tail brushes. The work going on for years, one quarter inch at a time.

She says it took ten years, but Cimabue was saved. Nothing is impossible, Nadia. Nothing.

The day has turned to dusk. The pages of Katherine’s abandoned magazines rustle like wings.

One thing at a time, she says.

One thing by one thing by one thing.

Trust yourself to trust me.

Into the bed, she says.

Sleep, she says.

Don’t leave me.

Don’t forget me.

A white room.

A painted garden.

Christ’s face in a tea strainer.

I’m not leaving, she says.

Sleep.

This is the dream. The last thing I can tell you with the words that rush and break.

I have a key in my hand. A door clicks open. A hallway smells like motorbikes and boots. There is a woman standing by the mail slots. She is young. And pale.

She wears a dark wrap with three bright, round buttons. She puts a flame to a cigarette, pinches the lit match between blue nails. She nods but doesn’t move. She exhales the first cloud of smoke, which hangs dense between her and me and the mail slots and the motorbikes and the heavy smell of gasoline in the entrance lobby.

Sleep, someone says.

Ciao
.

Ciao
.

Sleep. Only a dream. The woman with the blue nails, smoking.

Third floor, she says, tilting her chin up toward the rooms where she lives.

Second floor, I say. The Vitales’.

She knows. She pulls on her cigarette and releases its heat. She exhales and I see a tiny dog, white and fluffy, tucked into the crook of her arm. I see the tall shoes with the spiked heels in the shadows. I see the bookbinder’s ribbons, like streamers, in her hair.

You’re the one with the piano, I say.

Si
.

I hear you, I say. In my sleep.

Si
.

What is your name?

Agnese.

I didn’t mean it, I say. I didn’t mean to steal the pink. I didn’t mean—