Hill Towns (39 page)

It was quite late now. The heat was draining slowly out of the day, and a small, teasing dry wind made its way through the maze of streets into the square. It lifted the hair off the back of my neck and riffled the lace-edged ruffles of Yolie’s blouse. She stretched and looked at me.

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“Do you really want to go to the Pitti and the Boboli? It’ll be light for a long time….”

“What I really want to do is never move again,” I said.

“Let’s sit awhile and then go take a nap before dinner and tell everybody we went.”

“I think we’re sisters who got separated at birth,” Yolanda said. “Well, so tell me where you’re going from Siena. The usual lap around Chianti-shire? There are some wonderful gardens, though a lot of them aren’t the old Italian ones anymore. English, mainly.”

“I’m not really sure,” I said. “Maria and Colin planned Tuscany originally, but I think Ada has edited it. San Gimignano, I know, and Montepulciano and Pienza. Colin wanted to go over to Perugia and Assisi, but Ada is lobbying for the coast. I know we’ll go back to Rome by way of Orvieto.”

“Ada must have a new bikini.” Yolie grinned.

“Probably. They have some friends who have a place somewhere around Elba. I’m hoping Colin wins. I really don’t want to stay with anyone we don’t know. It’s hard enough—”

I had been going to say, for no reason that I could think of, “getting to know each other,” but thought how it would sound, and said instead, “moving the ill and the maimed around in hotels.”

She looked at me keenly but said nothing. She was, I knew, going back to Rome from Siena, to sign her new contract and collect her crafts research from the Hassler, and then to New York. I thought suddenly that I would miss her a great deal.

“Will you be glad to get home?” I said.

She smiled.

“New York isn’t home.”

“Where is?”

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“Nowhere, really. I have a tiny apartment in New York, and a share of a little place up the Hudson Valley. But I spend so much time traveling. The show is shot in LA, and I’m there for two or three months at a time. I always thought home might turn out to be here. Florence.”

I thought about that, thought how strange it would be to say “home” and mean this small wedge of Oltarno. How strange her life was, without a center, a core. How strange it would be not to have that. A small pulse of anxiety began to beat in my throat at the very thought of it. But maybe her center was in herself. That would be something else entirely; that would be real strength, real power, not to need home.

“Why here?” I said.

“Because there’s more of everything that appeals to me here than anywhere else in the world.” She smiled, and the smile left no doubt as to what she meant.

“Did you ever think about getting married again, settling down?” I said. It did not seem awkward, now, to ask her.

“Not in a very long time. Not since I learned how to be alone. Not when there’s so much good young stuff strutting around. And the nice thing is, when one gets his feelings hurt and flounces home to Mamma, like my dear late lamented, there’s always another one right behind him. I don’t kid myself that I’m always going to be young, but I’ll probably always be rich, and that will help immensely.”

I laughed helplessly. Her words were hopelessly cynical, of course, even corrupt, and I would have hated them from almost anyone else. But she sat there so easily, so bright-eyed and apple-cheeked, fitting so well and feeling so fine in her tight skin, grinning with such frank enjoyment, that you could only laugh. At the same time,

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I wondered what sort of wife she would have made to someone other than the bird-watching British anchorman, what sort of mother. I realized she probably considered my focus provincial in the extreme, but I had no other. The wonder was that we did not antagonize each other, the very worldly and the unworldly. But we did not. This had been a lovely day. I thought she thought so too.

“What about you, what will you do when you get home?”

she said.

“Oh, I’ll…”

I paused. In my mind’s eye I saw my beautiful stone house on the Steep; saw the bright air-flown rooms and the overflowing garden, dreaming in the sun of full summer, burning with the wildfire of autumn. I saw our skyhung bedroom, Joe’s and mine, and the kitchen, the house’s warm heart.

But I did not see anyone in it. I could not find myself there.

I could not see Joe.

“I’ll tackle the garden,” I said firmly. “It’s going to look like a jungle. It’ll take a week or so to get things cleaned and put away, and then Joe will have to think about classes this fall, and we’ll see everybody, maybe have a dinner party and make everybody look at our slides. And Lacey will be coming home between semesters for two or three weeks, and that will be heaven.”

“And after that?”

“After that we’ll just live, like we always do. Not everybody has your kind of gypsy life, Yolie, wonderful as it is. We’ve always lived very quietly. We will again.”

“Will you really? I wonder if you can,” she said seriously.

“Do you have any idea of the commotion that portrait is going to attract, when Sam finally puts the 328 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

new show together? You’ll have every newspaper and art magazine in the world calling you.”

“I doubt that,” I said, unsettled by the idea. I had not thought that far ahead. “Anyway, how do you know there’ll be a new show? And if there is, surely it will be a year or two away?”

“Oh, there’ll be a new show,” she said. “You could no more stop it now than you could stop Niagara. But you’re right not to worry about it. It shouldn’t change your life….”

Her voice trailed off, and I wondered suddenly if her life had been changed, substantially altered, by having been one of Sam’s subjects. Joe and I had thought at the beginning that she had been in love with him and perhaps still was, but I had long since discounted that. Their relationship was simply too casual, too uncharged, so much the camaraderie of old friends. Surely you could not bear to spend the time she had spent this trip in the presence of someone you loved but who did not love you. It would be too painful. Yolie’s whole focus was immovably fixed on pain’s polar opposite.

We left the Piazza Santo Spirito and walked slowly back to her small hotel off the Borgo San Frediano. We went by way of the Via dell’ Ardiglioni, down the narrow street where Filippo Lippi was born in 1406. The street did not seem to me wide enough to admit automobiles, and indeed, in the shadow of the tall, leaning old houses, the fifteenth century seemed all around us. The noises of modern Florence were so dim they did not intrude. When Yolie pointed out Lippi’s house, number thirty, she was whispering.

We crossed the Piazza del Carmine, lying partly in the shadow of the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, past the car park where the dusty Opel sulked in the late HILL TOWNS / 329

sun. I grinned at it, a familiar if sullen piece of this strange old landscape. We turned into the Borgo Frediano and down the little street, really an alley, that led to her hotel. It was tiny and narrow, five stories tall, painted the same stained yellow as the houses around it; the lobby was actually a dark hall that spoke of tomato sauce and a general contempt for deodorant and held a rusty little cage elevator. The Centrale, it was called.

“Well, it’s central to the neighborhood, I guess,” Yolie said, when I smiled at the name. We were wallowing our way up in the elevator.

She manned the creaking old controls expertly, shimmying it to a stop only inches before the top floor.

“This part of San Frediano is full of working-class people,”

she said. “They used to be the rag pickers and the tanners and the tripe boilers, and they like to think they’re great characters still, tough as alley cats, colorful as hell. They all act like they’re in a bad fifties movie: film noir. But they’re decent people, most of them, really pussycats. Once they know you, they’re family. They’ve smartened the neighborhood up a lot since I’ve been coming here. There are all kinds of shops and bistros and quaintsy little places opening, and we’re beginning to get the more adventurous tourists in here.

They’ve got places you can buy underwear that would make Frederick’s of Hollywood look like Laura Ashley. You in the market for some crotchless panties? I get all mine here.”

“I think I’ll pass,” I said. “Oh, this is charming.”

The elevator let us out in a bright tiled lounge filled with plants, comfortable if slightly spavined old chairs and sofas, and small tables and chairs. Many of these were occupied by people drinking coffee or wine, and most of them called out to Yolanda. Beyond the lounge

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was a roof garden teeming with flowers and plants, where a few more people sat at tables drinking and admiring the view of jumbled red-tiled roofs and the dome of San Frediano, and beyond it the slate-gray Arno and the tower of Ognissanti on the far bank. There was a forest of telephone wires and television aerials, and a spidery tangle of clotheslines almost as far as the eye could see, but somehow they seemed festive and endearing, a stage set. The unapolo-getic, slightly raffish charm of the Centrale gathered you in like strong, slightly sweaty arms. I felt peace flood me and sighed gratefully.

Yolie’s room was large and high-ceilinged and starkly fur-nished with a huge dark bed, freshly made up in white but strewn with clothes. There was an armoire big enough to sleep in, a table and chair by the French doors that led out onto the roof, and a spidery bureau. The noise from the street below was horrendous, but it did not bother me. It was, after all, the evening rush hour. Later, I thought, it would be quiet; it would be like sleeping in the prow of a ship, high over the Arno. Yolie put her head out of the door and yelled something in rapid Italian to someone called Butti, and I went into the tiny white bathroom and ran a bath in the huge claw-footed old tub and climbed in. Presently she brought me a glass of good red wine, so stoutly acidic it made my tongue pucker, and I lay swishing tepid water around me and sipping it and thinking nothing at all except that I was happy. When I came out of the bath, wrapped in a huge, thin old bath sheet, she was stretched out on the bed sipping wine from a fresh bottle. The empty one sat on the table beside her. A packed suitcase and a pair of overflowing Vuitton totes stood beside the door into the hall.

“You’re all ready,” I said.

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“I am ready for absolutely anything.”

We sat out on the roof terrace garden for a bit, finishing the second bottle of wine. Night was falling fast; the rose and gold light that had lain over Oltarno and the river was turning dusky blue. A thin shaving of a white moon rose just over the tower of Ognissanti, seemingly pinned there by the spire. Below us, the street roar had abated a little, but I could still hear spatterings of conversations over the grind of the autos and
motorini
. The noise did not intrude, though.

“Want some more wine?” Yolie said presently, regarding the empty bottle. We were both slumped far down in our chairs, resting our feet on the low parapet around the roof.

“No. I’ll be drunk as a goat. I thought you’d given it up, anyway.”

“The hard stuff, not wine. Wine never did bother me, for some reason.”

I looked sidewise at her. She must be right. There were spots of vivid pink on her cheeks, but her eyes were clear and her smile and voice steady. She looked pretty and relaxed in the dusk, and younger than ever.

“What I am,” I said, “is ravenous. I could eat a cow.”

“Maybe we will. Have you had
bistecca alla fiorentina
yet?

Steak from locally grown cattle brushed with olive oil and pepper and grilled? It’s wonderful.”

“I didn’t mean literally,” I said. “I didn’t come to Italy to eat steak. What are some other specialties besides steak and tripe?”

“Wild hare, boar meat, larks, thrush—”

“And I thought the Tuscans were supposed to be the most civilized of the Italians. Could we just go get some spaghetti or something?”

We went down in the woozy elevator and turned left, 332 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

walking deeper into the alley that led off the Borgo San Frediano. Half a block down we turned left again, into a pas-sageway so narrow and dark I did not at first recognize it as a street. Here the cobbles gleamed with a greasy moisture that you felt never entirely dried, for surely no sun or wind could penetrate. The rooftops leaned so closely together overhead that you could have stepped easily from one to another, and the closed doors were of thick, damp, dark wood. There seemed no street life here. There seemed no life of any sort.

“Are you sure this is right?” I said, realizing only after I had spoken that I was whispering.

“I’m sure. I come here all the time. It’s safe. It’s just dark.”

I stumbled behind her in the gloom, tripping on the slick, uneven cobbles. Presently she stopped. I did too, but I saw nothing.

“Here,” Yolie said, and disappeared down a narrow, winding flight of stone stairs so dark I had not seen them. I plunged down behind her, unwilling to be left alone in that black alley for even a moment. I stood behind her in utter darkness, hearing a deep metallic clang, and realized she was banging on a door with a brass knocker. I could see neither.

The door opened then, and light spilled out into the stairwell, and we went inside.

Afterward I could never remember the name of the restaurant, and I still cannot. Perhaps Yolie never told me, or perhaps it did not have a name. It seemed the kind of place that would not, except to be called after the owner. I met him almost immediately, or someone I took to be the owner: a squat, thick bear of a man who came to hug Yolie and grunt at me. She called him Taddo, or Tadeo, but she never did tell me who he was.

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I heard no other names that night, either. Yolie seemed to know many of the people who sat and stood in the shadows, drinking and dancing and kissing and perhaps other things, and even eating, a few of them. But she called none of them by name. I couldn’t have heard, anyway. The din was too loud.