Authors: Kate Eberlen
Great chat-up line!
I can almost hear Nash screaming at me.
‘Did you know that in Italy, families visit their relatives’ graves on Christmas Day?’ Tess says. ‘The flower stalls outside cemeteries do a roaring trade.’
‘What a nice idea. I love the way of life here.’
‘Me too,’ says Tess.
The Gelateria dei Neri no longer exists. We walk several times up and down the stretch of Via dei Neri where it used to be. My disappointment is less about the ice cream than
that something we have in common has gone, our connection unravelling. But as we go on towards Santa Croce, we both spot the queue at the same moment. The Gelateria dei Neri has moved premises, and
it’s much bigger now.
Tess chooses a cone with three flavours: raspberry, melon and mango. After some indecision, I opt for blueberry, mandarin and passionfruit. The flavours capture the sharpness as well as the
sweetness of the fruit like no other sorbet I’ve ever tasted. We don’t know each other well enough to offer a lick and after a few moments of mmming appreciatively as we walk back
towards the main square, Tess suddenly stops. ‘We forgot the two-flavour rule!’
‘What’s the two-flavour rule?’
‘If you get three flavours, for some reason, you only end up tasting two of them, so Doll and I worked out it would be better to have two flavours, three times a day, not three flavours
twice.’
She’s right. My first taste of
mirtillo
was like eating the pure distillation of blueberry, but I cannot now tell the difference between the mandarin and passionfruit.
‘Let’s finish these,’ I suggest. ‘Have a glass of water to refresh our palates, then go back.’
‘You’re my kind of guy!’ she laughs.
Do you mean it? Are you feeling what I’m feeling?
I keep getting little rushes of excitement, tiny bursts of adrenaline zinging through my limbs, making me light-headed with
happiness and nerves all at the same time.
‘I never got to see the Uffizi,’ Tess says, as we walk past the entrance to the gallery. ‘There was such a queue, and my friend could only stand so much art in a
day.’
I look at my watch.
‘We have time to see one painting.’
‘Botticelli’s
Primavera
?’
I point. ‘There’s no queue.’
The ticket office is closing. I thrust a couple of twenty-euro notes at the bewildered attendant, and we run up the stairs to the room where I remember the Botticellis hang.
‘Oh my God! The ceilings!’ says Tess, as we dash along the corridor. ‘Nobody even tells you about the ceilings!’
We find the room containing two of the most famous paintings in the world and a disconsolate attendant who thought he was finished for the day.
‘There’s so much going on in this painting, you could look at it all day and still see things,’ says Tess, stepping as close as she can to the
Primavera
.
‘There are five hundred species of plant and over a hundred different flowers,’ I remember.
‘You counted them?’
I laugh. ‘No, I read it!’
‘It’s so huge!’ she says. ‘I had no idea it was this big. I’ve got the poster, but it’s only about a metre wide. The colours are not like other paintings, are
they? There’s so much green. It’s like a religious painting and a pagan painting all at the same time, don’t you think? If you think of Venus as Our Lady, these gods are like the
saints . . . Honestly, you could look at it for a month, couldn’t you? Hey, what’s this?’
She moves on to
The Birth of Venus
on the adjacent wall, fascinated by the small bas-relief in front of the picture. ‘This must be for blind people to see the painting with,’
she says. ‘Like a Braille painting. Isn’t that cool?’
We take turns to close our eyes and feel.
‘When blind people imagine the painting this way, do you think their brains make pictures, like our brains do when we’re asleep, even though we have our eyes closed?’ Tess
asks.
With her commentary, I feel as if I am seeing everything for the first time.
‘Do you think we’ll ever know what it’s like to be someone else?’ She asks questions that most people of our age have grown too jaded to think about.
The attendant clears his throat for the umpteenth time.
‘I think we know that he wants to go home,’ I whisper.
We leave the room and walk along the empty gallery to the windows at the far end that overlook the river.
‘I suppose that’s what writers try to do.’ Tess continues her theme. ‘Be inside someone else . . .’
‘And portrait painters,’ I say.
‘Did you know that there’s a passageway full of portraits of artists that runs along the side of the Ponte Vecchio?’ Tess gestures towards the bridge. ‘It’s called
the Vasari corridor. I read about it on one of the websites.’
She points to a row of square windows above the shops that I never noticed before.
‘It leads from here to the Palazzo Pitti, so the Florentine lords and ladies didn’t have to mix with the hoi polloi, I suppose.’
‘Is it open to the public?’
‘I think you have to book months in advance,’ she says.
‘I’d love to do that.’
‘Me too!’
Is she thinking, as I am, that there is something going on between us that’s bigger than here, now, today?
Under the colonnade outside, street artists are sketching tourists.
‘Have you ever been tempted?’ I ask Tess, as we stop for a moment to watch.
‘No way! When I see myself in the mirror I think I’m OK, but in photos I always look terrible, and the camera never lies, does it? This would be worse!’
‘I’d love to draw you.’
‘Can you draw?’ She gives me a sceptical look.
‘A bit.’
‘A man of many talents!’ she says. ‘Cooking, drawing! Gus, you could make a fortune here! What you should do is move to Italy, set up a restaurant and draw people, like Van
Gogh did. There was this exhibition of his letters at the Royal Academy. Did you see it? I mean, I don’t think Van Gogh cooked the food, but he painted all the people in the bar. It would
make a brilliant TV series, wouldn’t it? You could call it
The Art of Italian Cooking
, or has there already been one called that?’
A busker is playing jazz clarinet on the Ponte Vecchio and the cobbles are packed with tourists.
‘Let’s do a selfie,’ says Tess. ‘And send it to Doll and see if she guesses who you are!’
She puts one arm around me, her face close to mine, holds her phone as far away as she can.
‘Say cheese!’
‘Formaggio!’
In the photo, our eyes are closed because we’re laughing, so we have to do another one, and as we’re checking it, her arm stays around my back, and when we look up from the screen,
our eyes meet and I badly want to kiss her.
‘Do you think that’s enough time?’ she says.
‘Time?’
‘Before our next
gelato
?’
I love that she says ‘next’, as if we have a whole evening of eating ice cream ahead of us.
I freeze.
‘What?’ she asks.
‘I’m meant to be cooking supper!’
Tess looks at her watch. ‘I’ve only gone and missed the minibus!’
‘OK,’ I say, ‘so, we have a choice: a) we can take a cab up to Piazzale Michelangelo and drive like Italians to arrive back late for supper? or b) we can spend a relaxed
evening wandering around the city . . .’
With phones and cameras clicking all around us, this moment will appear in the background of a thousand Instagram feeds.
‘I think we should probably let them know where we are,’ Tess says.
My momentary disappointment that she hasn’t said b) turns to joy when I realize she has.
I struggle through a difficult conversation with Lucrezia by pretending to understand less of her broken English than I do, and when I hang up, Tess looks at me anxiously.
‘Chef is very crazy,’ I tell her. ‘The Culture group do not enjoy waiting one hour in a bus very hot. Everyone is interesting for our safety . . . however, we pay our money . .
.’
‘So we can do what we like!’ says Tess. ‘It’s supposed to be a holiday, isn’t it?’
Apparently, Doll would love to hear that we’re sitting in Piazza Signoria drinking Aperol Spritzes.
‘She thinks it tastes better if you’ve paid more,’ Tess says.
We send Doll another selfie, from the cafe table. And I’m trying to imagine this woman, who is so important to Tess, but I can’t remember at all, and hoping that she likes the look
of me as these pictures ping into her inbox.
‘You know,’ I say, taking a sip, ‘I think Doll’s right!’
It’s so easy to make Tess smile, and yet each time it’s like an unexpected gift.
I keep wanting to say something like, ‘Do you know how gorgeous you are?’ and I have to keep telling myself that I’m thirty-four years old, not a teenager.
‘Do you have a pencil?’ I ask her.
She burrows about in her bag and then produces a stub of one.
I take a paper napkin from the holder on the table and start sketching.
She runs her fingers through her fine curls, tries to hold a serious face.
I’m finding it impossible to capture her. I remember sketching Lucy, seeing her as a doll whose expression never changed, but the essence of Tess’s beauty is in her vitality.
It’s why she doesn’t take a good photo. But the camera does lie.
‘Stay still!’ I tell her.
Perhaps it’s my parental tone that makes her suddenly ask, ‘Are you married?’
‘No,’ I say, then, not wanting to deceive with a half-truth, ‘I’m divorced. My ex lives in Geneva with my two girls. It’s a long story.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ says Tess, picking up her neon-orange drink and taking a slurp through her straw.
‘What about you?’
‘Me? No. It’s quite a short story in that department.’ She leans over the table, trying to see how the sketch is going.
‘Is that really how I look?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Told you!’ she says. ‘Can I keep it?’
‘Of course!’
‘I’m going to put it in my notebook,’ she says. ‘Otherwise, knowing me, I’ll be fishing around in my bag for a tissue and I’ll blow my nose on it or
something!’
She puts the napkin carefully between the centre pages.
‘What are you writing?’ I ask.
‘Kind of a memoir,’ she says. ‘But I seem to have come to a bit of a standstill.’
‘Do you have a deadline?’
‘Not a real one,’ she says, then excuses herself to go to the toilet.
I watch her weaving towards the cafe, ducking her head under the yellow parasols.
I call the waiter over and ask him to recommend a good restaurant, trying to indicate, in a man-to-man kind of way, that I want to impress, but sounding like a dodgy character from
The
Godfather.
‘
Una persona molto importante, capisce?’
When I produce a twenty-euro note, he suddenly remembers the best restaurant in Florence, and makes a personal mobile phone call to reserve a table.
As Tess walks back towards us, he says,
‘Bellissima, la signorina!’
and winks at me.
‘To be honest, after all that ice cream, I’d be just as happy wandering round with a slice of pizza,’ says Tess. ‘It’s a shame to sit in a restaurant, isn’t
it, when you’re somewhere like this?’
My plan to impress her with a good bottle of Chianti and a rare Florentine steak so enormous they charge for it by the kilo vanishes so quickly I can’t think why I even considered trapping
her at a candlelit table with a disapproving waiter shaking a linen napkin over her long, bare legs.
We amble aimlessly together along cobbled streets on the other, less touristy, side of the Arno, where old women dressed in black sit on kitchen chairs outside their doors, chatting to their
neighbours. The air is full of the smell and sizzle of frying garlic and the clink and clank of unseen mothers preparing the family supper.
‘We never discovered this bit,’ Tess says, as we enter a square with a little park in the centre. She gazes up at the floodlit facade of the church, with the same look of wonder on
her face that I saw at the Stones concert at the weekend, and in San Miniato al Monte this afternoon, and half our lives ago.
‘I think it’s the student area,’ I tell her.
There is a tiny merry-go-round for toddlers under the plane trees and a slow procession of young couples with prams, and older women linking arms for the evening
passegiata
. The air is
balmy, the mood mellow.
We sit down at a table outside a little pizzeria. The waiter lights the candle on our table, brings us a cylindrical pot of grissini, and takes our order.
‘Last time I was here, I was going to be a student,’ Tess tells me, breaking a bread stick in half as she stares at the group of young people gathered on the church steps around a
guitarist. ‘I had my room booked in hall and my poster of Botticelli’s
Primavera
all ready to stick on the wall.’
‘What happened?’ I ask, as the waiter brings us a quarto of red wine and pizzas twice as large as the boards they are served on.
‘When I got home, everything changed.’
The food remains virtually untouched as she tells me about her mother dying and having to look after her little sister. She pauses after describing her mother’s funeral in a way
that’s funny and sad at the same time, and says, ‘You’ll know how it is, with your brother dying young. You never get over it, do you, whatever people say? You get used to it, but
the missing never stops.’
I stare at the flickering candle, wondering if I am as honest as she is. I know that I have to tell her the truth, because this attraction, this connection, whatever it is that draws me to her,
will not allow me to dissemble.
‘The thing is, I didn’t like my brother much. I didn’t want him to die, obviously, but I couldn’t seem to feel much, except guilt.’
Tess is quiet for so long I’m convinced that I have ruined everything.
‘I think it was probably worse for you, Gus,’ she finally says. ‘Not that it’s a competition or anything. I mean, I wish Mum hadn’t died, but I always knew that she
loved me, and she knew that I loved her. But now you’re left with thinking you hated him, and he hated you, because that’s how brothers are – I’ve got two myself – and
you never got the chance to become men together, and find out if you could be friends.’