The Protestant Cemetery was at the end of Borgo Pinti, one street over. According to the guidebook, the schedule was irregular, but you could usually get the custodian to let you in. Beryl didn’t really want to deal with a custodian, but she’d cross that bridge when she came to it.
The cemetery was on a little island, protected by a viale, or boulevard, the way a castle might be protected by a moat. It seemed to be built on an unstable mound of dirt, enclosed by a wrought-iron fence, and held together by a crumbling stone wall. She could see tombstones and cypress trees and a few mausoleums and a gatehouse. She could see that the front gate was open and was relieved that she wouldn’t have to deal with a custodian. One less thing to worry about. But she couldn’t figure out how to cross the busy viale. There were no zebra crosswalks in evidence, and by the time she was able to dash through an opening in the unrelenting traffic, the sky had clouded over again and it was starting to drizzle.
A sign on the gatepost at the front of the cemetery repeated some of the information in the guidebook about EBB, Clough, Landor, etc. Beryl went through the gate and followed the main path under an arch in the gatehouse that led to the cemetery itself. A bicycle leaned against one wall. Beryl looked in the windows but couldn’t see much. She picked up a booklet from a table outside the door and left a five-thousand-lire note as a donation. The cemetery had seemed small from the outside, but inside, it seemed huge. It was not well cared for. Trees and bushes needed trimming. There were no signs to guide you, like the signs in Père-Lachaise, where she and Michael had visited Proust’s grave—that was when she was reading “Combray” in French—or in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, where she’d sat at a bench near Keats’s grave: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
She had no trouble locating EBB’s neoclassical tomb, however, which was pictured in the booklet. The sarcophagus itself, supported by six Corinthian columns, bore her initials (E-B-B), the date of her death (1861), and a laurel-crowned woman in basrelief flanked by two Florentine lilies. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Beryl could remember struggling with her paper in her room in Baldwin House. She’d been in love herself at the time, not with Michael but with a boy from Amherst who drove a hearse with a mattress in the back and who rolled his own cigarettes.
When she heard a noise she stepped behind the sarcophagus. She peeked around the corner and saw the figure of an old woman standing in the archway. The custodian. Beryl stayed put and watched while the old woman walked her bicycle down to the front gate. And then she heard the sound of the gate closing. She ran to the gatehouse in time to see the old woman ride off on her bicycle, merging smoothly into the flow of traffic. She could see that the gate was now closed. And she soon discovered that it was locked as well.
She stood at the locked gate, holding onto the bars, like a prisoner. She was puzzled at first but not really alarmed. Just a little uneasy. It was getting dark, but traffic continued to zoom around the cemetery. She could see people walking on the sidewalks on the other side of the viale, but not on the sidewalk that circled the cemetery.
“Oh, bother,” she said, as if she were Winnie the Pooh. She was a little annoyed, but she maintained her sense of humor. This will make a good story, she thought, and she imagined telling it at a cocktail party. And then she got a little angry. No, not angry, indignant. What kind of a place was this anyway? No posted hours. The custodian just going off and locking you in?
It was getting darker. There were fewer people on the other side of the viale. She shouted but she couldn’t make herself heard over the traffic. She had a good command of the present, imperfect, and past perfect tenses, but she didn’t have a very good handle on the imperative, so she tried several different forms: Aiutame, aiutami, mi aiutare. She made the circuit of the cemetery, which took about twenty minutes. By the time she got back to the front gate the streetlights had come on. She shook the gate. She started to panic and then pulled herself together by breathing deeply and by doing one of the spiritual exercises recommended by Father Sam at St. Francis back in New York, only instead of imagining Christ on the Cross, she imagined the scene at Cana, all those firkins of wine. Christ didn’t even need to stick his finger in the water to turn it to wine. He just told them to fill the water jars with water. Did the water turn to wine gradually, as it was being poured into the water jar? Or all at once, the moment the jar was full to the brim? And then it was her own wedding she was imagining, her father presiding over the ceremony at St. Andrew’s in Troy, New York. She and Michael had been sleeping together for over a year. How handsome Michael had been. Still was, just a little gaunt. And when The Lady with the Pet Dog had been screened at the Venice Film Festival, how they walked up and down the Lido every night, eating octopus and other things in a little ciccheti bar on the other side of the island.
It’s just another one of your adventures, Michael will say, like the time you got off the Orient Express in Belgrade thinking you were in Athens, or the time you got stuck in the laundry chute in the house on Blackstone. She walked back up to the gatehouse and sat on the bench, out of the drizzle. It was too dark to read the booklet. She held the booklet in her hand and pictured the cemeteries in her life. There was only one, really. Only one that really mattered. Elmwood Hill Cemetery on Belle Avenue, where her parents were buried, and her brother, who’d been killed in Vietnam. And her aunts and uncles.
Like many of her high school classmates, Beryl had ridden her bike in the cemetery, had learned to drive a stick shift in the cemetery, had parked at the back of the cemetery, had lost her virginity there, with a boy named David Logan, with whom she still exchanged Christmas cards.
When the drizzle let up again she walked around, looking for a good spot for her and Michael, the way they used to drive around Beverly Hills, when they first moved to L.A., to pick out their ideal house. She didn’t see signs of any new graves, but it was too dark to see very well. Maybe a few of the urns were new. And then she found the ideal spot. In the center, where the sounds of the traffic were muted. It wasn’t too far from EBB. A little farther down the main path, where she’d seen the Shakespeare grave—two sisters, Shakespeare’s last relatives. Michael would like that.
It wasn’t till she heard the old woman at the gate that the tears welled up inside her and she realized she’d been holding them in. She didn’t want to startle the old woman, but she simply couldn’t hold back her tears. She wasn’t used to crying. What she really wanted to do was rush past the old woman and out the gate, but the woman was holding up her bicycle with one hand, already locking the gate behind her.
“Mi trovo in difficoltà,” Beryl said in a loud voice.
The old woman looked around, startled.
“Chi è? Che cosa fa?”
“Mi trovo in difficoltà,” Beryl said again. “I find myself in difficulty.”
The old woman walked her bicycle up to the gatehouse. When she saw Beryl’s tears, she said, in Italian, “You poor dear, you got locked in, didn’t you? I didn’t think anyone was inside the gates when I left. I usually go to the movies on Sunday nights. Dimmi, dimmi, speak to me. Are you all right?”
“I am locked in,” Beryl said in Italian. “I wanted to see the grave of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and then the gate was closed and locked.”
“Ahh, ahh, ahh. Elizabeta. Signora Browning. Ahh. Our most famous resident. Si si si. Si si si. È molto famosa. What a beautiful story. So romantic. Ahh.”
The old woman unlocked the door on the left side of the gatehouse and asked Beryl if she’d like a cup of tea. Beryl said yes and watched while the woman boiled water in the small kitchen. The nice little house seemed to hold her in an embrace. It was a combination of her father’s study and her mother’s sewing room. The walls were covered with pictures; the windows were shuttered; the rugs were thick. A spiral staircase led to the upstairs.
“You live here?”
“My husband was the caretaker, for twenty years.” She handed a tray of tea things to Beryl
. “Put them on the little table.” Beryl did, and they sat next to each other on a sofa.
“My husband,” Beryl said, “is here to make a film.”
“In Piazza San Pier Maggiore? Nel convento vecchio?”
“You know about that?”
“I get my vegetables at the little shop in Via degli Albizi. Usually I go at noon, just before they close. A film. Very exciting.”
“I shop there too, but it’s very difficult for me. I can shop all right, by pointing at things, but for a week I was buying bietola thinking it was lettuce, and wondering why the lettuce in Italy is so tough; I washed my husband’s things in fabric softener, thinking it was detergent—it had a picture of a woman putting clothes in a washing machine on the bottle—and the meat is impossible. I’ve always been good at math, but there are too many conversions to consider at the same time: kilograms to pounds, etti to ounces, lire to dollars.
“We could live in a hotel, but I couldn’t stand it. And anyway my husband is dying,” Beryl said. “That’s all right. I mean, it’s not all right, but . . . I thought it would bring us closer together.” She started to cry again. “I am doing everything to make him comfortable. But he’s going farther and farther away from me. Every day, farther and farther. I thought we were all through with films. And now . . . But we’re going to go to Venice during Easter week. We were in Venice after his first film. He won a prize. We stayed at a hotel out on the Lido.”
The old woman touched Beryl’s arm. “Men,” she said, as if she were offering an explanation. “And now?”
“He doesn’t want to be with me. I don’t know if it’s the sickness. Cancro. I don’t know what to do.”
“My husband has been dead for twenty years, signora.”
“Do you miss him?”
“Every day,” the old woman said, and she started to cry too, and Beryl put an arm around her to comfort her. These were companionable tears, shared by two women. Beryl was starting to enjoy herself. And then suddenly she realized that she’d been having this conversation in Italian, and she caught a glimpse of herself in Italian, as this kind old woman saw her. The way you might catch a glimpse of yourself in a shop window when you’re not expecting it, not prepared for it. She hardly recognized herself. Where was the sophisticated woman of the world who’d sent back a two-hundred-franc bottle of wine at Le Piramide, who wore shoes from Ferragamo and Prada and dresses from Chanel? Where was the hardheaded woman who’d made money in the stock market in the seventies and eighties, who’d kept her husband’s taxable income under fifty thousand dollars a year for the last fifteen years? Where was the practical woman who’d taken over as chair of the stewardship committee at St. Hildegard’s Episcopal in Los Angeles just when it looked like the church was going down the tubes? And who was this timid, shy woman who was afraid of shopkeepers? who was afraid to confront her butcher when he overcharged her? who couldn’t find the cornstarch in the Standa and didn’t know how to ask? who was afraid to answer the telephone because it might be someone calling in Italian?
She didn’t know who this other woman was, but she thought she’d like to find out, thought that maybe this was what God had in mind for her in Italy.
Rehearsal
Michael’s prognosis was not good. His chances of dying with dignity were almost nil. The cancer had metastasized to the bone. He’d lost his appetite; he couldn’t sleep; he couldn’t fuck. He had plenty of energy, but the energy was generated by the very tumor that was killing him. A massive heart attack would have been better, or even a long lingering illness, with Beryl taking care of him. He could imagine himself lying in bed, like a sick child—but not too sick to read. He could imagine eating soft-boiled eggs with strips of buttered-toast soldiers, and, in the evenings, watching his films with Beryl in their new screening room, which they hadn’t used yet because of a problem with the electronic focusing mechanism.
But Beryl was right. Death wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that his last film had been too ponderous, too heavy handed—not a critical disaster, not a financial disaster, just not much of anything. He’d clung to scenes that should have been cut; he’d tried too hard for profundity. It had been too walkie-talkie, as if he’d forgotten how to use images to create drama, to deepen the characters, to further the story. He wanted to go out on a lighter note, plenty of movement, lots of jump cuts, lots of crosscutting, lots of color, lots of romance, lots of sex, lots of life itself.
He was a very organized director. He liked to arrive on the set with everyone already knowing how the scene was blocked and how he wanted to shoot it. So during the two weeks before he started rehearsing, he tried to anticipate every question that anyone might ask him. He went over the script a hundred times; he knew what he was looking for in the characters so he could coach the actors; he created backstories for every actor, which no one had to follow, but which gave everyone an idea of what he was looking for. He thought that by being organized, he could be more flexible, so that when the unexpected happened, he could put it to use. He watched the production assistants, who were crowded around a large American coffeemaker at the end of the big refectory. Most of them had been through film school, but they couldn’t figure out how to work the coffeepot. It was a big electric pot, like a giant samovar, a church-basement pot. It was plugged into an adapter, but it just sat there. A little red light blinked off and on. There was coffee in the pot. And water. But it wouldn’t start perking. There had to be a secret switch somewhere, but no one knew where it was. He experienced the familiar feeling of inadequacy. Middling. It was always like this at the beginning of a film; everyone standing around like the kids at the coffeemaker. Not knowing how to get it started.
What about Craft Services? What did they call it in Italian? Michael didn’t know. Esther had hired a company called Piccolo Mondo, a catering company that supplied food to airlines, but Piccolo Mondo probably didn’t know how to make American coffee. There were no pastries either. Esther would know what to do when she showed up with Zanni. Michael, too nervous to intervene with the coffee urn, made himself invisible by studying a plan of the convent on the wall of the refectory. Almost all the interior scenes would be shot in the convent, and the set construction was on schedule, but Miranda Clark, the female lead, didn’t like the script and kept pushing for changes, and she suddenly didn’t want to do the cunnilingus scene. Her Italian lover, Giovanni Cipriani—Zanni—was a commedia dell’arte actor famous for not taking direction, famous for refusing to acknowledge any authority outside himself. He’d been denied a visa to reenter the United States after ridiculing President Bush and Vice President Quayle at Harvard in one of his pantomime routines; he’d been banned from Italian television for ridiculing the government of Giulio Andreotti; he’d been denounced by the Vatican for ridiculing the Pope. Michael wasn’t anxious to become another target of his satire.
He asked the PAs to rearrange the long school tables, to put them back the way they’d been originally, in a square, and set out ballpoint pens, notebooks, and fresh scripts at each place, as if this were a business meeting in an airport conference room.
People from the production office began to bustle in. The production designer, costume designer, second assistant director, the script girl, the editor, and the director of photography. The second assistant director was full of questions. “We still don’t have permission for the bar in Piazza Signoria. The guy wants too much money. Do you want the shelves in the library to run lengthwise or sideways?”
“Isn’t there another bar in the piazza?” Michael asked.
“There’s one bar, that’s it. The one on the northeast corner, by Via Calzaiuoli.”
“Find another piazza; build another bar; talk to Esther; build the shelves the way they were in the convent; you only need one wall; do what you have to do.”
By eight o’clock all the actors except Zanni had arrived and were schmoozing with the PAs to show that they were just regular people, which they were. Everyone wanted coffee, but no
one had figured out what to do except complain about Piccolo Mondo, till Zanni arrived with Esther. Zanni took one look at the coffee machine and sent Esther and a team of PAs out into the piazza to get real coffee and plenty of pastries.
Michael got everyone settled and ran through the story while they were waiting for their coffee.
“Act One. Here’s the setup. Margot Harrington, twenty-nine years old, dysfunctional family, father a broken-down blues musician, alcoholic; mother dead for years, a cold, unfeeling woman. Margot is a book conservator at the Newberry Library in New York. Some of the books in a convent in Florence—this convent, actually—have been damaged by water from a broken drainage pipe. The nuns run an ad in a book conservation journal for an American book conservator. A woman. They want an American woman because they’re afraid an Italian man will give in to the bishop, who wants to move the books to San Marco. Margot answers the ad. She comes to Florence. But she’s lost. She doesn’t speak Italian. She doesn’t drink wine because her father’s an alcoholic. She doesn’t drink the water because she’s afraid of getting sick. She doesn’t eat the food because she’s afraid of getting fat. She’s afraid of life.
“She’s sitting in the piazza outside the convent when a man, Sandro, comes up out of the sewer and offers to buy her a glass of wine.”
“Michael,” Miranda interrupted. “For one thing, the Newberry Library’s in Chicago, not New York, and for another I still can’t figure out what Sandro’s doing in the sewer.”
“Let’s worry about the library later,” Michael said. “And Sandro, Sandro’s been trying to sneak into the convent through the sewer to look at a famous fresco in the cloister.”
“Ah.”
Michael went on: “Sandro notices Margot and offers—in English—to buy her a glass of wine, but she tells him to get lost.