The Girl in the Glass (22 page)

We walked to the southern end of the piazza to a restaurant with umbrellaed tables and waitstaff beckoning.

“They have porcini mushroom ravioli here,” Sofia told me as we settled into chairs. “It’s quite good. Despite the price.”

Devon was right.

Porcini mushrooms are as sweet and soft as marshmallows.

After our meal, which Sofia refused to let me pay for, we headed back out to the Via dei Calzaiuoli. Sofia told me at lunch we’d be walking past the Duomo and while I would want to stop and gape at it, we would need to keep walking to meet our ticket time to the Accademia. We turned on Via del Corso, which would take us to the backside of the magnificent cathedral so it wouldn’t be as difficult for me to pass by.

Even so, the moment we rounded the corner and the south side of the Duomo stretched before me—four city blocks long and piercing the sky in a kaleidoscope of pink, white, and green marble—I did stop and gape. Sofia let me. I took a few pictures, lame as they were, for no one can capture the depth and breadth of it—even its backside—with a lens. I hadn’t sensed my nonna’s presence yet, but I felt her when I stood at the edge of the cathedral she said was the most beautiful in the world. Or maybe it was just awe speaking to me, sounding like someone I loved.

“The long name is the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, the church of Saint Mary of the Flower,” Sofia said, pulling me along. “But everyone calls it the Duomo because of Brunelleschi’s dome. We will come back.”

Reluctantly, I followed her.

Less than ten minutes later, we were at the Accademia and waiting for our slot to step inside what looked more like an apartment building than an
academy. Sofia told me Cosimo I founded it, and that it was the first drawing school in all of Europe. The lines to get in were thick all around us, and I was infinitely glad Sofia had her connections to get us in.

Once inside we made our way into the hallway where Michelangelo’s unfinished statues lined the aisle like sentinels, leading to the room that would reveal the statue of
David
. I had seen pictures of what Michelangelo called the
Prisoners
, but I was astounded by their tortured poses. Chunky marble monoliths stood erect with torsos of men writhing out of them, half-formed, some with arms or pieces of arms, some with a neck but no head, all of them with their muscles flexed in agony or perhaps defeat, as if someone had poured concrete on them while they begged to be shown mercy.

“What a terrible way to die,” I whispered.

She cocked her head. “I’ve never thought of them that way. I’ve always thought that was a terrible way to live.”

I was so appalled by the
Prisoners
that I hadn’t looked ahead of us as we walked.

“Marguerite,” Sofia was saying gently.

I turned and the seventeen-foot statue was before me, white like snow under moonlight and shining with his sinewy legs, tensed arms, a full chest of air, and pulsing veins in his neck. His skin looked warm and soft. His Adam’s apple seemed to bob after a swallow. He was a giant of a man about to slay a giant, with the sling nearly swaying behind his back. I staggered back a step, and Sofia reached to steady me, as I am sure she has done with others a thousand times before.

“No one was meant to see him this close,” she murmured to me, the way a mother might say to a child, “It’s okay, it was just a dream.”

She patted my arm. “He was meant to be atop the roof of the cathedral. But the statue was too heavy. You weren’t meant to be this close to him. This is why you stagger. Why everyone does.”

Sofia took my arm, and slowly we made the circle around the pedestal. I was vaguely aware of other people in the room, some standing in awe, some reading their guidebooks, giving their eyes a momentary rest from the magnificence in front of them. I was also only slightly aware that the statue in front of me, clearly portraying a young man about to kill a giant, hadn’t a stitch of clothes on. I was transfixed by its perfection no matter where I looked. And I shivered as I saw that the statue’s expression seemed to change as my angle of vision changed. Courageous. Then hesitant. Then calculating. Then determined. And then courageous again.

“Michelangelo was only twenty-six when he took this commission,” Sofia said. “The marble had been sitting in a courtyard for twenty-five years after several ill-inspired attempts to hew something out of it. It’s amazing, isn’t it? It’s facing Rome! How’s that for attitude?”

I appreciated the comic relief and smiled. “What did you think when you first saw it?”

She shook her head. “I can’t remember the first time I saw it. Papa brought me here from the time I was little.” She looked up at the statue. “I have always known him.”

The next question out of my mouth fell away from me without forethought or reason. “Do you hear Nora’s voice in here?”

“Sometimes it seems like I can hear her saying my name in here. Just that. Just my name. Or maybe it’s the statue itself saying my name. This is the one place where I’m not sure if it’s Nora I hear or something or someone else.”

“Do … do you hear it right now?”

She tipped her head, unfazed by my question. “Not today.”

I knew we would be heading back out onto the street and my grand moment with the statue would be over. I stood as close as I could and looked
up at his face, high above me. I opened my mouth, not caring who heard me or what anyone would think.

“Hello, my name is Meg. I mean, Marguerite. Marguerite. That’s my name.”

A few people next to me whispered to one another, but I didn’t care.

I just wanted that statue, if indeed it were even remotely possible that it had a soul, to know my name.

My mother loved Carnival. In the gallery of my mind, in one of the images I have of her, she is dressed in Carnival regalia, as beautiful as a fairy princess—all glitter and diamonds and feathers. She is showing me her dress in this memory, and I am asking her if I can come with her to the theater where she has staged a play. She is bending down to place an errant, downy feather on my head. Then she kisses me and says, “When you are older, Nora.” And I ask her if I can have a dress just like that one, and she says, “You can have this one. I’ll save it for you.”

I never saw the dress again. I looked. I asked. But by the time I asked about it, several years had passed since I had last seen it. No one knew which dress it was. She had many beautiful dresses, and they’d been given away or sold. I only wanted that one because she twirled in that dress when I asked her to. She hummed a little tune, and it made me laugh.

She also loved music. There is a painting of her holding a piece of sheet music that looks very much like the portrait of her in her wedding dress. But there is no little dog in this one. It soothes me to know she loved music and that she staged concerts and plays at her villa and the palace, even though she did not play for me. Music is the language of the soul. Music captures our prayers and hopes and joys—and yes, our sorrows—and gives them voice, just as the paintings and the statues give them dimension.

Nurse told me my mother was fond of games too.

Her face was sad when she said this, as if she wished to warn me that some games are too dangerous to be played. I understand now that unlike music and art, games do not give voice and dimension to our dreams and desires. Games exist to make sport of them, for our entertainment. Games produce victors.

And wherever there is a winner, there is by necessity, the one who lost.

18

Sofia and I spent the rest of the afternoon at the Duomo. She encouraged me to climb the stairs to the top to see Florence from the sky above it.

“You don’t want to come with me?” I asked her as we made our way to the northern exterior of the basilica.

Sofia shook her head. “The underside of the Duomo is beautifully painted, but Vasari’s fresco of
The Last Judgment
is too much for me. I know people deserve what they get for the terrible things they do against God and one another, but I do not want to see it.” She leaned her head back and looked at the outside of the dome. “It gives me nightmares. I don’t go that close anymore.”

She stood in line with me while I waited, sharing with me Brunelleschi’s genius in completing a dome no one believed was possible to build.

The cathedral preceded the dome, of course. Arnolfo di Cambio designed the basilica, but the design for the cupola itself—the architectural term for the dome—was the subject of endless arguments. Arnolfo envisioned a cupola over the massive cathedral, but he could not come up with a way to execute the dome; there didn’t seem to be a way to build it with scaffolding. And there certainly was no way it could be built without it.

A competition was arranged in 1418 so that masters all over Italy could propose a solution. Filippo Brunelleschi proposed raising a dome that wouldn’t need a centring, the wooden structure that arches are built upon and is removed upon completion. No one believed he could pull it off. Brunelleschi proposed that whoever could make an egg stand upright on a
slab of marble should win the competition. No one could do it. Brunelleschi took the egg, brought it down on the marble hard enough to make the shell on the underside come up inside itself, distributing the weight between inside shell and outside shell. That was his proposal. A double cupola—an outside shell and an inside shell—indistinguishable unless you looked at the dome outside and then ran into the cathedral and compared what you saw. The exterior would appear bigger than its interior.

Sofia said when Vasari wrote of how beautiful the Duomo was, he began with a list of its mathematical measurements.

When the line I was in entered the building, Sofia waved good-bye to me and told me she would meet me outside by the Baptistery doors. There were people ahead of me and behind me, but I felt alone as I began to climb the 463 stairs that would take me to the top.

There was no one I could comment to about the seemingly endless steps or the breathless exertion it took to burst out onto the top.

As I stood looking over all of Florence, I felt invisible. I took some pictures, amazed by my view but unable to share that amazement with anyone. I saw a man and wife and their teenage daughters laughing and taking photos. They were British, or Australian, perhaps. And I was envious of what they were experiencing together. My father should have been standing there with me.

A young couple, obviously in love, walked past me, cuddling each other as if it were a frigid forty degrees up there instead of a balmy seventy-something. My gaze fell again on the girls. One of them noticed me staring.

It took me a moment to look away.

She smiled at me. “Would you like me to take your picture for you?”

Her kind offer surprised me and I hesitated.

“Do you speak English?”

“Yes. Yes, I do. Thanks. That’s very kind of you.”

I handed her my camera.

“Right, then,” she said, holding the camera up. Her family assembled around her to wait for her to take the shot.

“That’s a great view, right there,” the other sister said. “Take mine next, Gemma.”