The Sonnet Lover (37 page)

“I’ve done little but,” I say, grabbing his hand and pressing it hard. I want to hold on to the naked look I’d seen in his eyes a moment ago; I know I may never have an opportunity to say these things to him again. “I thought the worst part would be at the beginning, that as time passed I would get over you, and for a while I thought I had. I threw myself into graduate school and writing my dissertation and then teaching and more writing. I dated, of course, but you know how graduate school is—there’s not a lot of time for that sort of thing and everyone knows they’ll be heading in different directions afterward and I knew I’d do better if I was entirely focused on my work—”

“I’ve read your articles on the sonnet, by the way. They’re excellent.”

I smile, pleased at the compliment, but I go on, determined to tell him everything today—before it’s too late. “I felt at times when I was working—reading, researching, writing—that I had no body, as if I was floating outside of my body and had become only mind. And then six or seven years ago, when I began teaching at Hudson, I started having dreams about you. Not just once in a while, but every night, and they felt…well, not like dreams, but like you were actually
visiting
me. When I woke up it felt as if you’d really just been there—” I stop, unable to convey the immediacy of those dreams.

“I know what you mean,” he says. “I’ve dreamt of you as well.”

“And then for days after I’d dreamt of you I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about you. I realized then that all those years I had thought I was getting over you, all I had done was
delay
grieving for what I had lost. My subconscious was catching up with the reality of what had happened years before, and the dreams were my way of working you out of my system.”

“Like a splinter?” he suggests, a faint smile curving his lips.

“Well, not entirely unlike a splinter. I thought…well, that I was simply a slow learner.”

“Anything but,” he says. “And after dreaming those dreams these last seven years, did it finally work? Did you
work me out of your system,
as you say?”

“I thought so,” I say, resolved to be honest. “The dreams became less frequent. I…I started seeing someone a few years ago…” I hesitate. Despite my resolve to be honest, I don’t know whether I should tell him about Mark. It turns out I don’t have to.

“President Abrams?” he asks, lifting one eyebrow.

I nod. “How did you know?”

“I didn’t think he could despise me so much for the lawsuit alone.”

“You’re wrong there. I think he cares more about the lawsuit than—” I’d been about to say “than me,” but I stop myself. Again, Bruno knows what I’d been about to say.

“Well, then he’s an even bigger idiot than I was twenty years ago.” He takes my hand in both of his and leans closer to me. “I’d like to think I’ve gotten a little smarter in the interim.”

His lips have just touched mine when a noise from the door alerts us to the fact that we’re not alone. The young receptionist who greeted me earlier is standing in the doorway, looking flustered.

“
Scusi,
Professore, but there are some men—police—here to see you downstairs. I asked them to wait—”

I see Bruno turn very pale. “They might have good news about Orlando,” I say. “Perhaps they’ve found him.”

Bruno nods and tries to smile, but when he gets up I notice that his hand is trembling. “I’ll go with you,” I say, starting to get up.

“No.” He puts out a hand to keep me in my seat and then, turning to the receptionist, says, “Could you go down and tell the policemen that I will be right down, please?” When she’s left, he sits back down and takes both my hands in his. “If they’ve found Orlando and taken him in for questioning I may be stuck all day at the police headquarters. You should stay here to see if you can find any clue to where Ginevra would have hidden the poems and then go back to the villa. I’ll meet you back there tonight…if you would come to my apartment…?” He leaves the question open and I answer by pressing my mouth onto his. As I watch him leave I can only hope that by tonight he still wants me.

After another two hours of scouring the record books of Ser Cosimo Guasconi, I can find no conclusive ending to the de Laura/Barbagianni lawsuit. In the first court appearance, Barbagianni’s lawyer went about systematically destroying Ginevra’s reputation. Witnesses were called forth who claimed that she was a woman of low character and that she had bedded several of her father’s clients for money. Barbagianni claimed that she had been the one to suggest going to the second-floor bedroom and had lured him into bed. Obviously, her intent was to trick Barbagianni into an ignoble marriage. As for the evidence of the blood, the servant recanted her testimony, and the nun who had found Ginevra bleeding at the door of Santa Catalina took an oath of silence and, when the convent was relocated to an obscure town in the Valdarno, became a hermit. And then Ginevra and her father disappeared. Ser Guasconi noted on June 1 of 1581 that the de Lauras failed to appear at a hearing and that attempts to locate them at their residence proved unsuccessful. At the same time, Barbagianni informed the
podestà
that he was engaged to be married—to a young woman of the noble Cecchi family—and argued that the case ought to be dropped. But the
podestà
decreed that the case should merely be suspended until such time as Ginevra and her father reappeared before the court “in the event that Pietro de Laura had been compelled to leave the city to follow his craft abroad.”

I wondered where the
podestà
got the idea that Pietro and Ginevra had gone abroad and whether there was any basis to his supposition. I find myself wondering whether they could have gone to England. Perhaps Pietro received a commission to create a floor there and he thought it was a good idea to get out of town for a while. He might have thought it was a good opportunity to get his daughter out of town while Barbagianni was spreading rumors about her.

I’m interrupted in these conjectures by the receptionist, Sylvia, coming to tell me that the library is closing in half an hour, early for the
festa,
and that if I want to copy anything she’ll be pleased to help me. I ask whether the library has a scanner I could use to transfer material directly into my laptop, and she tells me she has one in her office that I’m welcome to use. As we go down to her office I try to think of a way to ask whether she overheard what the police said to Bruno without implying that she was an eavesdropper, but then she solves my problem for me. “Imagine, I was so silly before. I thought perhaps the
professore
was in trouble with the police!” She laughs at herself as she opens the door to her office. “But it was nothing like that—just a little…how do you say?
Una scappata
of his son’s.”

The word can mean escape, or flight, but I realize from her demeanor this isn’t what she intends. “An escapade?”

“
Sì,
a little joke.”

“What kind of escapade?” I ask.

“He was using his father’s credit card to buy train tickets,” she says, shaking her head. “I did the same thing when I was younger because I wanted to go with my boyfriend to ski in the Alps. Stupid, yes, but harmless. I hope his father won’t be too angry with him when they find him.”

I nod in agreement, but I’m thinking that Orlando wasn’t trying to go skiing. He was probably trying to leave the country.

By the time I’ve finished scanning the records I want into my laptop, it’s four o’clock. The bus to the Piazza della Libertà is just pulling out as I come out of the archives and I know, from watching the comings and goings of the bus from the window, that there won’t be another for half an hour. I can probably walk to the stop at the English Cemetery and catch up to the bus there.

After consulting my map, I walk west and then north, a route that takes me past the synagogue. Its nineteenth-century Moorish design was generally overlooked in the art and architecture classes I took here, but I had visited it often—if only so I could write home and tell my mother I was still going to temple. Florence’s Jewish neighborhood is small compared to Rome’s, but I’m happy to see that there’s still a kosher restaurant on the Via Farini. I’m less happy to see the elaborate security booth and armed guards installed in front of the synagogue.

I continue walking north alongside a neighborhood park full of speckle-trunked sycamores and children waiting their turns for a ride on the carousel. This area feels more like a regular middle-class neighborhood that you might find in Brooklyn or Queens than an art capital of Europe. One block north of the park I run into a wide avenue and find myself directly across from the English Cemetery. I check the times on the bus stop and see that I’ve got fifteen minutes until the bus arrives, just enough time for a quick visit to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Zoe’s not the only one whose love affair is in need of a little kindly intervention.

Even on a summer afternoon, the English Cemetery feels gloomy, an effect, I think, of the many cypresses standing like gaunt, black-coated mourners above the graves of displaced foreigners. The graves of these Swiss exiles (despite being known as the
English
Cemetery, it was founded and is still owned today by the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church), Russian princes, and Anglo-Florentines exude a melancholy mixed of mortality and homesickness, the sadness of being buried in foreign soil.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sarcophagus, held aloft by six columns, seems to float above these sorrows, perhaps because the fifteen years she lived here with Robert Browning were a reprieve from the half-life she endured until she fled her father’s house. Her presence here in a foreign grave seems more victory than defeat. “I love Florence,” she said in her last days. “I cannot leave Florence.” And she hadn’t.

I notice that someone has left a small bouquet of wildflowers tied with a pink ribbon and wonder whether it’s Zoe’s gift to the poet. I wish I had something to leave as an offering, but when I close my eyes I realize that all I’ve got is the memory of Bruno’s lips on mine and a simple wish.
Let it not be too late.
And then, as an afterthought, I silently tell EBB that, after all, I’m the same age now as she was when she met Robert Browning. If she could get off her invalid’s couch and defy her draconian father at that late stage, why can’t I start over again with
my
poet?

Ginevra, too, I think as I wander farther up the cypress-lined path, must have fled the court-induced marriage her father was trying to coerce out of Lorenzo Barbagianni. Why else would she have disappeared in the middle of her own trial? Perhaps her flight was the reverse of EBB’s. Perhaps she
did
go to England and meet the English poet to whom she later addressed the poems I’ve read. And really, why couldn’t it have been Shakespeare? The timing was perfect. Ginevra disappeared from Florence in 1581, a year that the young William Shakespeare was absent from Stratford and unaccounted for. Some scholars—most recently Stephen Greenblatt—believed he was a private tutor in the north of England during that time. If Ginevra’s father had received a commission to lay a
pietre dure
floor somewhere nearby…

I am so deeply engrossed in this line of conjecture that I trip over a slab of marble embedded in the ground. When I look down at the offending tombstone, I am more than a little shocked to find the name of the poet whose biography I have been happily reinventing: William Shakespeare.

“Well, that can’t be,” I grumble out loud, “he’s buried in Stratford.”

I hear laughter come from behind one of the graves—an unnerving sound beneath the gloomy cypresses—but then a gray shape unfolds itself from the marble tombstones. It’s an old woman dressed in the same shades of white and gray as the weathered marble: a long homespun gray robe, a soft white cloth tied over her head, and, despite the warmth of the day, a gray and white alpaca poncho woven in Incan patterns. A specter in gray and white that could be the spirit of the cemetery, except that when this woman smiles there’s nothing remotely sepulchral about her round, dimpled face and clear blue eyes. They seem to defy both her old age and the gloomy atmosphere of the cemetery.

“My predecessors,” she says, wiping her grass-stained hands on her robe as she comes over to stand by me above the gravestone, “and descendants of the poet.”

I look down and read the entire gravestone: “Beatrice Shakespeare and Claude Shakespeare Clench, last
descendentes
of William Shakespeare.”

“Descendentes?”
I ask.

The nun chuckles. “Italian stonecutters,” she explains.

“Were they really the last descendants of William Shakespeare?”

“Well, only in a misogynist sense. There are more descendants; they just don’t carry the name. Are you another Shakespeare scholar come to prove Will visited Italy?”

“Another?”

“Yes, there was a lovely American boy who frequently came to this grave site this past fall. I made him come into the library for tea so he wouldn’t ride the bus back half frozen, and he told me his ideas about Shakespeare and an Italian poetess who lived in one of the old villas up in the hills. A bit fanciful, I thought, but he read me some lovely poems by the Italian poetess.”

“That must have been Robin Weiss,” I say, imagining Robin in the thin jackets he wore in winter crouched here at this grave site with the lonely cypresses as his only companions. “I’m sorry to tell you…well, he died this spring.”

“Oh, no, the poor lamb! Was it drugs? I’m afraid he often smelled of cannabis when he came to visit.”

“No, it wasn’t drugs. He fell from a balcony at the college where I teach.”

The nun’s face, which had looked so smooth a moment ago, creases into a maze of lines. I’ve aged her a good ten years by thoughtlessly blurting out the news of Robin’s death. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told you.”

“No,” she says almost sternly, “of course you should have. Now I can pray for his soul. I’m just a little shook…Was it…? Did the poor boy take his own life?”