The Gilder (3 page)

“Look. You’ve stepped on the face of a Medici.”

Marina withdrew her hand and looked down at the stark white face that pressed up from within the marble floor. Taking a step back she saw that it was attached to a life-sized bas-relief of a nobleman dressed in a long robe.

“Oh, sorry. I didn’t see it. I was looking at the altar.”

He shrugged. “It’s nothing to me, but these old priests don’t take kindly to young women throwing themselves onto their revered countrymen.” He held out his hand again. “I’m Thomas.”

Marina gave it a quick shake. “Marina. Thanks for your help.” She turned away, moving toward the center nave.

Thomas moved with her. “Is this your first time in Santa Croce?”

Getting picked up was the last thing she wanted right now. Every day she had been hassled by men in the streets who did not seem to understand either the shaken head or the word no. She’d even resorted to giving one of them the finger, only to receive his fisted version in return. But Thomas did not seem to fit into that category. He spoke softly, as if he, too, respected the silence. She took in his wide-set gray eyes, long narrow nose, and the soft, rosebud mouth that saved his face from its harsh angles. Salt-and-pepper hair curled across his forehead and around his shirt collar. He looked harmless enough. She told him, yes, she had been in Florence a week, that she was here now to see the altar.

Thomas nodded. “You should have seen it after the flood. It was a mess.” He touched her elbow lightly to stop her progress, then raised his arm and pointed at a line high up on the wall at the back of the church. “See the water mark? That’s how high the floodwaters rose in here. This side of town was the hardest hit.” He paused as if picturing it. “Isn’t it wild to stand here and imagine all this under water? It’ll give you a different perspective when you look at the restoration that’s been done on the altar.”

Marina looked around, trying to imagine water creeping up the walls, submerging everything. It wasn’t hard. Hadn’t she lived and breathed that catastrophe in the self-imposed exile of her teenage bedroom as she pored over tattered articles and magazines, crying about paintings and sculptures by artists she had never heard of? But still, she hadn’t felt the enormity of it in the way she could now, standing in the actual spot. Her mother had told her that someone mistakenly opened the floodgates upriver too soon, causing the worst flood in the history of art, but Marina wasn’t sure if that was true. She’d never come across that fact in any of her reading.

She was about to ask Thomas if there was any truth to the story when he said, “After you’re done here, go through that doorway and you’ll see photographs of the damage.” Then he turned and walked away.

From behind the velvet rope, a few feet from the altar, Marina lost herself in the gilding as her eyes transmitted to her fingers the smooth surfaces and graceful curves they were not allowed to touch. She imagined the tools—carving knives, awls, and brushes—in the hands of an artisan, an old man or his young apprentice. In the glinting twists and burnished edges, she saw herself bent over a workbench, a magnificent frame or candlestick in some stage of repair, her hands moving with confidence.

When she surfaced from her reverie, Thomas was gone. She followed his advice, finding the photographs of the flood in a corridor that connected the basilica to the Pazzi Chapel. There were aerial shots of the area under water, nearly two stories deep in the Piazza Santa Croce, and heartbreaking pictures of cars, pieces of furniture, and art buried under mud and debris. It was hard to imagine that one person’s error in judgment could have such far-reaching consequences.

Marina found her way out onto an airy portico that led to the cloisters. From there, she headed back toward the piazza.

“Hey, Marina!” Thomas waved from a table in front of a café across the street.

She waved back but kept going.

“Hey, wait.” Thomas jogged across the street toward her. “Come join me for a coffee.”

“Thanks, but I have to see about an apartment.”

“That’s great. Where is it?”

“I’m going to the American Consulate. I don’t know yet where, or if, there’s an apartment.”

Thomas grinned. “Oh, I see. Well then, good luck. Maybe we’ll meet again.”

She wasn’t sure what he thought he saw. Maybe he thought it was all a line, that she was giving him the brush-off, but she really didn’t care. She had an apartment to find and a future to get on with.

As it turned out, the consulate had no leads on apartments. The man behind the highly polished desk under the Stars and Stripes suggested Marina ask at the American school on the other side of the river. They might know of something. If all else failed, she could try one of the local rental agencies, but he warned that the prices would be exorbitant. The elation that had carried her from Santa Croce to the consulate ebbed. She’d already scrutinized the rental ads posted in agency windows, and while she fantasized about alfresco meals on rooftop terraces and leisurely soaks in marble baths, they were all beyond her price range. He also suggested she might check at the university, but she was not anxious to jump back into student life, with its late nights and sloppy habits. Besides, she wanted to live alone, simply. One room with a hot plate would do, as long as she had space for a workbench. She wanted a real life, an artisan’s life, not some rehashed student life. Nor did she want to fall in with a community of transplanted Americans. That was not why she had come to Florence.

The next morning, as soon as it was light, Marina put on the same black turtleneck sweater and beige corduroys she’d worn to the consulate, hoping she looked presentable enough, in spite of the wrinkles, for her appearance at the American school. But first there was something she had to do.

The streets were quiet as she made her way across town, only the occasional buzz of a taxi or three-wheeled truck disturbing the stillness. She passed block after block of the blank metal shutters and decorative grills that rolled down at night, sealing the storefronts. About halfway across town, she came upon a coffee bar that had its shutter raised enough to see chair and table legs, an occasional pair of shoes going about the morning preparations, and to let escape the scent of fresh coffee and pastries just out of the oven. But breakfast would have to wait. She’d woken at dawn with the gilded altar on her mind, and she needed to see it again before the day was set in motion.

Piazza Santa Croce was empty except for the ubiquitous flock of pigeons. Marina stopped on the far side of the square and considered the church’s geometric, pink and green marble façade, not unlike that of the Duomo, more austere, but pretty. On impulse, she lifted her arms, flapping them as she ran down the center of the square, scattering the birds. At the top of the church steps, three massive wooden doors rose two stories high across the front of the church. She stopped there, panting, and composed herself before entering through a smaller door cut into one of the larger.

She stopped just inside the little door, giving her eyes a moment to adjust to the dusky light. The silence pressed on her. Quietly, she removed her boots and began her walk to the front of the church, the floor icy even through thick socks. When she reached the velvet rope, she put down her boots and fixed her eyes on the altar. Looking around and seeing no one, she stepped over the barrier.

Even at this proximity, the intricacies of shape and texture under her fingers informed her far better than her eyes. Closing them, she let her fingers take her back, and for the first time, she knew without a doubt that she’d been right all along. Right to petition her high school’s board to allow her swap out of Domestic Sciences and into a boys-only woodworking course. Right to stick it out, ignoring the stares and sniggers, cherishing the feeling of completeness when she used a carving knife. She’d been right about it all: leaving home, coming to Florence, learning Italian, the gilding course. Now all she needed was a place to live.

Following the directions she’d obtained from the consulate, Marina caught a bus up to Bellosguardo, where the American school sat on a hill overlooking the city. The gray-haired secretary, in a twin-set and pearls, somehow managed to look down at Marina from her seat behind the desk, informing her that she couldn’t “just appear” during school hours without an appointment, and that the school was not “in the habit” of providing real estate leads to transients. Marina tried to explain that she was not a transient, that she had moved to Florence and would be studying and then working here, but the woman only pursed her lips tighter and invited Marina to “vacate the premises.”

After standing at the bus stop for fifteen minutes, Marina decided to walk back to the center of town. Scuffing the heels of her boots along the pavement, she thought of all the things she should have said to the bitch in pearls, but it didn’t help. Her early-morning conviction began to wane. Perhaps she’d made a big fat mistake in coming to Florence. Her words, “moved to Florence” and “working here,” dogged her footsteps. Did she really have any idea what she was doing? Was she a fool for not going to graduate school or getting a teaching job at some prep school? But she didn’t want to teach. She wanted to work with her hands. Sure, she’d stumbled onto the idea of gilding, but she knew it was right from the first time Professor Campione mentioned it. It fit with everything she loved—art, history, the feel of a tool in her hand, the way wood yielded, curling into the blade of her carving knife—and the idea of restoration, of taking something that was damaged and restoring its beauty, thrilled her. Was there any better place for her to be right now? Her steps lengthened to a stride as she reached the bottom of the hill and started back along the river toward the town center. She
would
find an apartment, if not today, then tomorrow. Today, she vowed, she would eat a proper meal, on her own, in a restaurant, something she had thus far avoided by eating piecemeal from coffee bars and cafeterias.

She crossed the river at the Ponte Vecchio, taking her time, perusing the windows of the jewelry stores that lined both sides of the bridge. The shops, cantilevered out over the river, were barely large enough to hold two or three people. One shop had a large selection of cameos in the window. As a child, she had coveted her grandmother’s cameo that lay buried in her mother’s jewelry box under the cool, clean lines of modern pieces. She remembered with Braille-like accuracy the lines of the patrician profile, the delicate filigree frame. It reminded her that she should call her parents on the off chance they were wondering how she was doing. That wasn’t fair. Of course they’d be wondering how she was doing. Although, her mother’s initial reaction to her proposed trip had been matter-of-fact and she’d never acknowledged that she’d broken her promise to Marina, her encouragement had been unwavering, and as the plans unfolded, her excitement had been genuine. Marina’s father, too, had come out of his study long enough on a number of occasions to listen and murmur appreciatively.

Long ago, when her parents weren’t looking, and they weren’t, she had created a life for herself within the shadow of their lives and had grown accustomed to her own company. In retrospect, she considered herself lucky to have been naturally suited to a solitary life; had she been a needy child, she might not have survived so well. She understood that her parents’ attention spans for anything outside their worlds of contemporary art or mathematical equations was limited, and had mastered the art of condensing her needs into as few words as possible for fear of losing their focus before she was finished. Yes, she must call them.

At the center of the bridge, Marina stopped to watch a street artist draw caricatures for a group of giggling French girls. Then she proceeded through the loggia of the Uffizi Gallery, turning once again toward Santa Croce, where she remembered seeing a number of small restaurants in the warren of streets around the piazza. She’d look there for something small and cozy.

Walking down a narrow alley away from the tourist shops, Marina followed the scent of wine, garlic, and olive oil to the door of a small restaurant with a sign over the door: Trattoria Anita. The menu was posted in a small glass case on the wall to the right of the door. She scrutinized the list, knitting her eyebrows as she read the obvious words: spaghetti, ravioli, tortellini, and vino. The rest was a mystery. Good. No English, no tourists.

“Stepped on any Medici today?”

The voice, close to her ear, startled her. She turned. “Oh, hi. Thomas, right? I was just checking out the menu.”

“About ready to devour it, don’t you think?” Thomas addressed the woman at his side.

“Hmmm, yes, just about to take a bite, I’d say,” replied the woman, who, like Thomas, had an American accent. She smiled at Marina. “Shall we save her from a nasty paper cut and take her in with us?”

The woman had deep green eyes set in a pale oval face, and the most remarkable head of hair. Long, the color of rust flecked with gold, strands of it curling out beyond her shoulders as if exploring the atmosphere.

“Yes, that’s just what I was thinking,” said Thomas. He took Marina’s arm and ushered her through the doorway.

Inside, a woman who couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, if that, came out from behind a counter to hug Thomas and his companion. He said something to her, possibly about the clumsy American girl he’d rescued from the floor of Santa Croce. Whatever it was made her chuckle, then smile and nod at Marina. As she led them to a table, Marina looked around, trying to get a sense of where she had landed. The smell was so familiar she might have been down in the Village at Mario’s, with its red-checked tablecloths and wax-covered Chianti bottles. Here, though, the decor was simple, if not ascetic: white walls and ceiling, simple overhead lighting, and a tiled floor made of gray and white terrazzo. High up on the walls, a narrow shelf overflowed with bottles of wine, while square tables with white cloths and butcher paper filled the room.

Once seated, Thomas’s companion extended her hand toward Marina with a smile. “I’m Sarah.” She had long graceful fingers and a firm clasp. “And I gather you’re the woman who stepped on the face of a Medici.”