The Doctor and the Diva (39 page)

The next pension was full, too, when the horse cab paused outside. Did every tourist who came into Florence from the Central Railway Station carry the same British guidebook? The hordes must have arrived in the city earlier in the day, and claimed every room on the list.

At least Quentin wasn’t enduring this with her. She would have felt dreadful, pulling him along by the hand, or wandering with the sleepy weight of him against her shoulder, unable to find a bed for him. If he were here now, he’d have grown too heavy to carry. If she let him slide from her arms, he’d have sunk to his knees, his breath sweet and sticky with candy.

When the coachman turned down a narrow, nameless street, Erika noticed a red carpet and potted palms through a glass doorway—a small hotel lobby.

“Only one room left,” the clerk said. “I can give it to you for—” The man named a sum that sounded like a great quantity of lire, and while she stood and mentally calculated how many dollars that would translate into (she had always been slow at figures), he threw down his pen and halved the price.

“I’ll take it,” she said, relieved. The bed sagged and a faucet dripped behind the wall and kept her awake, but she felt lucky to have found it.

The guidebook advised her to apply to a gentleman on the Via dei Pecori about furnished apartments for rent. He escorted Erika into a building whose corridors the sun never touched. A single gas jet burned all day and all night to illuminate the stairwell and the wearisome climb four flights up. The furnished apartments were situated under the roof, and the upholstery in each held the odor of burned stew or other stale smells of previous tenants.

Erika stood for a long while in one, attempting to envision a life here. She pulled open the shutters and found herself peering across a narrow alleyway and into the window of the opposite house, where a dog that sounded like a German shepherd gave terrible barks. She wondered if it would bark all night, a couple of yards from her pillow. “It won’t do, I’m afraid,” Erika told the agent, and she went away depressed.

The desk clerk at her hotel was a chubby, neatly dressed man. His dark hair grew thick around his ears and had broken off into thin bristles at the top of his head, where a round spot of scalp had worn through. He wrote in the ledger in such a precise manner that Erika asked if he owned the hotel.

“How I wish,” he said, and laughed. Erika imagined him to be the father of young children.

He was patient with her efforts to converse in Italian.
“Per favore—”
she said. “How one might find a furnished room in Florence?”

“To rent by the month?” he asked.

She nodded. “Something pleasant but reasonable? I’ve come here to study—” She was surprised how she turned, almost pleadingly, to a stranger in this way, but there was no one else.

He was appalled at the price the agent had quoted for the apartment she’d seen earlier that day. “Such a man is a thief,” the clerk declared. Little wrinkles worked into his forehead as they talked.

The next morning while she sat eating breakfast and studying her Italian language book, he approached her table in the courtyard.

“I know of a place,” he announced. “Views of the Arno. Right near the Ponte Vecchio. Very beautiful.”

“Is it expensive?”

“No,” he insisted, both of his forefingers pointing toward his heart in sincerity. “Only forty lire a month, plus five lire a month for servants. Sunny. Perfect.”

“What is the address? May I see it?”

He looked uneasy. The elderly proprietress was very particular in choosing her tenants, he had heard, and she might not care for foreigners, so perhaps he should go and vouch for Erika’s character himself. He found his hat and went directly out, leaving a waiter in charge of the front desk.

While he was gone, she waited on a courtyard chair and studied Italian verbs. In a short time he returned, looking dejected.

“No luck?”

A servant had answered his knock, and had carried the message to the elderly landlady that a gentleman wished to rent the room for a lady, but the owner had refused to see him.

“Did you say that I am an American?”

“Only that you are a dignified lady, and a schoolmistress.”

A schoolteacher. He must have fabricated that to furnish her with respectability, but perhaps the old proprietress had felt suspicious that a man had come to rent the place, rather than the lady in question.

“What is the address?”

Erika decided to wait until afternoon before paying a call herself at the house on Lungarno Acciaiuoli. She would have to pretend to be an entirely different lodger from the one proposed that morning.

When a horse cab drove her past the place, she could hardly believe how splendid it was. The façade was ochre-colored, the dimensions high and narrow. The upper-story rooms had wrought-iron balconies where one could stand and survey the river with its arched bridges reflected on the water. Less than a block away, jewelers’ shops clung, like squatters’ huts, to the sides of Florence’s ancient bridge, the Ponte Vecchio.

The driver dropped her off. She worried that just in the past hour, the place had slipped away and been rented to someone else. Thank goodness she had worn her most impressive suit, the dove gray with the blue velvet collar, and her blue toque with the ostrich feather. The day was warm, and as she strolled toward the building, she fretted that she had become hot and unkempt in the heat. Perhaps the elderly landlady suspected that the hotel clerk wished to lodge his mistress in her house. Perhaps that was why she had turned him away. Or it could be that the old lady simply disliked men, or felt afraid of them.

From a street vendor Erika bought an orange and ate it to sweeten her breath. Afterward she regretted it, because her hands felt sticky from the rind and juice.

The house had an elaborate knocker on the front door. Erika lifted the large metal ring through a lion’s brass nose and rapped against the wood. A fat servant who wore no corset answered. Erika explained that she was an American who had come to Florence to study opera, and that she was seeking a room. The maidservant looked at her and disappeared up a long, echoing stairwell. After a time she called from the landing that Erika was invited to come up.

She headed for the broad staircase. The foyer’s red-tiled floor, the banisters, the walls—everything gleamed from the efforts of someone with rough hands and vigorous elbows who loved to clean. The window on the second-story landing was open. The afternoon light above the Arno was so brilliant that Erika expected to see the watery reflections mirrored in the highly glossed floors.

Upward, upward. As they passed closed doors, Erika feared that the room to be let faced the rear alleyway, where laundry drooped from clotheslines. The room might provide no panorama at all. She believed the stout servant was leading her to inspect the quarters in question. But no—she was to be interviewed first.

The owner of the Lungarno Acciaiuoli house lived in an expansive apartment that consumed the top floor. Erika was surprised that an elderly person would wish to climb four flights, but the views must be best here. As the servant unlatched the door and motioned for her to follow, Erika felt a flush of light and airiness, the sensation that she had entered a place close to the sky and clouds. This was the apartment farthest removed from the din of the street.

The proprietress, an old lady, did not turn as they came in. She sat in profile, like Whistler’s mother, and faced the long balcony doors that opened to the river on this warm September afternoon. The elderly woman was fragile, her limbs as spindly as the arms and legs of the fine antique chairs that furnished the rooms. The apartment contained a beautiful grand piano, and carpets and dark oil paintings of such quality that Erika wondered if she had stumbled on a descendant of one of Florence’s ancient banking families.

At first Erika was struck by the landlady’s regal profile, by her nose with a small, stony bump in its bridge. Then, as the proprietress turned her head, it became obvious that she was blind.

Her old brown eyes appeared unfocused and coated with a peculiar film. The vanity Erika had felt over her fine suit, the fretting she had done about her perspiring forehead—it all seemed absurd now.

“You sing?” the landlady said in English. “Let me hear.”

“Ah,” Erika said. “You speak English. Where did you learn it?”

“I lived in London as a girl.”

Days had elapsed since Erika had practiced anything, but she went to the piano. Her fingers felt numb on the keys. She sang softly at first, her voice very light. (“If you want to snare someone’s attention,” her Conservatory professor used to say, “sing quietly.”) She knew she was executing it all very weakly, singing Rossini at half-voice. But her tone grew more secure by the end.

Afterward, the old Florentine landlady sat motionless in her chair, as though she could still hear the vibrations of Erika’s aria after it ended. The blind woman faced the Arno, not seeing the river but perhaps sensing its light, its flow.

She instructed the servant to take the American lady downstairs and show her the room situated directly below this vast parlor.

The room was light-filled and empty, large enough for a piano and much else besides. Its red tile floor shone, and Erika heard her heels strike and echo against the surfaces. The servant explained that her mistress preferred each tenant to bring her own belongings and personality to it. Erika did not worry about how she would furnish it.

The maid unlatched a pair of shuttered doors and threw them open. Erika stepped onto the balcony to view the Arno. The room had the same vista as the owner’s apartment, just one flight above. She imagined one day showing this to Ravell, his spirits uplifted by it all.

“Well,” the blind lady said when they returned upstairs. “What do you say? Will you take it?”

“Of course,” Erika said. “It would be splendid.” She could hardly believe that only forty lire per month were being asked for it.

“Good. I have one request.”

“What is it?”

“As you practice, if the day is warm enough, I would like you to leave your windows and shutters open. A voice such as yours is something I want to hear clearly.”

“That would be my pleasure.” Erika suspected that the blind woman could hear a smile when a person spoke; the shape of smiling lips changed the sound of words. “You haven’t told me your name.”

“My name?” The old lady paused. “You can call me ‘Donna Anna.’ ”

“Like the character in
Don Giovanni
.”

“Exactly.”

The apartment held masses of flowers, Erika noticed. Lush blossoms floated in bowls, and long-stemmed yellow roses and flame-colored gladioli thrust upward from vases. Dashes of color everywhere, all beautifully arranged.

As she and the servant descended the stairwell, the maid mentioned that her employer played the piano for long hours, music being a deep consolation in her old age.

“She loves flowers, too, I see,” Erika said. In Italian she could not express the little mystery, the irony she had felt, being in the apartment of a sightless woman who surrounded herself with so many colorful blooms.

“She can smell them,” the maid said.

“I
am a busy man,” he declared to Erika in a handwritten note. “Remember, I have only ten minutes to give you.”

The most sought-after voice teacher in Florence, according to a friend of Magdalena’s, was a man named Mario Brassi, who spoke excellent English. Students flocked to him.

A servant instructed Erika to remove her shoes upon entering the maestro’s house. She had been forewarned about Maestro Brassi’s passion for anything Oriental. He wanted all visitors to his Florentine home to imagine that they had stepped into a Mandarin palace. When Erika cast off her hard-heeled shoes, the servant pointed to an array of Chinese slippers of all sizes on the vestibule floor. Erika was supposed to choose a pair and wear them for as long as she remained in the maestro’s house.