The Liar's Wife (34 page)

“You're very kind,” Theresa said. “
Molto gentile.
Can we speak Italian, so I can practice? I really need to learn.”

“Certo,”
Chiara said. She patted Theresa's bed and turned down the cover. Theresa remembered Tom's advice about not saying “ciao.” But it was all right if someone was your age. Or considered you a friend.
“Ciao,”
she said to Chiara, as a sign that she was hoping they might become friends.

The room was a combination of ancient elegance and contemporary motel: there were exposed oak beams in the ceiling; the walls were thick plaster, and the floors red tile. But the table and chairs were very like the ones in the Days Inns she went to with Tom. She took a shower in the stall that was like a little phone booth. The water was hot and plentiful, but she wished the towels were thicker. She would unpack later. Now she would begin what she was here for. She would visit her first Civitali. She would start her work. Here in Lucca. In Italy. In Europe. In the world.

It was an easy walk up a street called simply Fillungo to the church of San Frediano. She would have to learn who San Frediano was eventually, but it wasn't important now. What was important was that she was going to see the Rose Annunciation, which she had studied so carefully in reproductions, knowing they could only give her a hint of the real thing.

The church was at the end of a square surrounded by quite ordinary establishments: a shop that repaired computers, one that sold sweaters and lingerie, a toy store, a café. And rising above it, the great warm pinkish brick basilica, at the architrave a golden mosaic glistening in the sun. But she would look at all that later; her heart beat fast and
hard, as if she were about to meet a lover she had known only through letters and the occasional blurred photograph.

The light in the church was dim. She had never experienced herself in space in quite this way, never been in a place so large and dark and empty. And yet the darkness and the emptiness didn't make her feel alone and insignificant. There she was, herself, Theresa, twenty-five years old, her body young and healthy, ardent, warm, and there was the cool darkness, and she took her place in it, content, and yet full of an excited apprehension. Any minute she would see it: the Rose Annunciation. Which she had traveled all these miles to see.

It was almost hidden in a side altar, halfway up the nave to the main altar, only partially visible in the light from the opaque, white glass window with its series of octagonal panes. She walked up to it with her eyes shut, afraid to look, afraid to be disappointed.

But it was more wonderful than she had been afraid to hope. The slender girl, her blond hair elegantly coiffed, surprising for a Madonna: you expected either a veil or long flowing hair. Because she was made of wood rather than stone, she seemed more approachable, and the deep rose of her dress provided a warmth that marble would have denied. She was so slender as to be almost boyish; her simple dress was high-waisted, the rose color deepened and then faded as it traveled to her shoes. Up close, the shoes were surprising. The elegance of the hair, the delicacy of the hands were contrasted by the sensible earthbound shoes, peasant shoes. She stood flat-footed on unadorned earth. It was meant to be an Annunciation, but there was no angel. Only the position of her arms and hands suggested an exchange. The arms were bent at the elbow and the hand gestures were self-contradictory, ambiguous. The palm of the left hand faced the imaginary angel, a clear message of refusal: I'm not ready, I will not, go away. The other hand beckoned. The palm was open, facing inwards, towards her body, the middle finger was bent, seductive; the thumb and middle finger touched, suggesting resignation, supplication, assent. The ambivalence of Mary's position was absolutely clear. I would and I would not. I am willing but I am afraid. And the firmly planted feet. I am where I am. Here.

She would have to explain the significance of the thumb and third finger. That would require a lot of research, perhaps culminating in an article. But what she couldn't write about, because there was nothing to be said about it because it was fleeting, an accident, a trick of light, was the shadow cast by the Madonna on the plain, stone wall. She kept looking at the shadow, feeling herself drawn to it, and wished there was some way to mark that, as Fra Angelico had marked the shadow behind the Virgin in his less famous Annunciation fresco. But that kind of marking was not her work. No one, though, could stop her from focusing on the shadow for as long as it was here.

She felt the slow, deep pleasure of knowing she was exactly where she wanted to be, doing exactly what she wanted to do. Her breath came easily; the damp coolness seemed to refresh the fragile skin around her eyes, abraded from fatigue and the dryness of plane travel. She felt lapped in a nourishing, consoling air. I am here, she kept saying to herself. I am here, and the word “here” seemed to her the most beautiful, the most desirable word imaginable.

She took the binoculars out of her bag and looked at the mosaics on the wall across from where she sat. She became aware of the sound of weeping. She lowered the glasses guiltily, tracking the sound. A young woman, probably about her age, was sitting in the darkness, her head in her hands. The church's emptiness freed her to sob without restraint, like a child, holding nothing back, with no sense of shame or exposure. Theresa felt that looking at her was a violation. She put her glasses back into her bag.

The door of the church banged, and she heard the parade of loud feet and the sound of German. It was over. She would leave.

Tom had written to the curator of the art museum, the Villa Guinigi, and the curator had written Theresa urging her to be in touch as soon as she arrived: she would be glad to be of help. But Theresa didn't want to meet her yet, to present herself, as if she were a diplomat presenting credentials to the court. She wanted more time alone with the work; she wanted to know what she thought before she had to say anything
to anyone, before anyone asked her anything. She wanted to be looking innocently, as she had looked innocently at the Rose Annunciation. She would go to the museum as an ordinary tourist.

But not just any tourist; she had a destination in mind. She would bypass the Romans, the trecento crucifixions, and make her way to the Civitalis. She knew that there were four of them in one room alone. Probably more than in any other room in the world.

She made her way into the room, past a guard who seemed nearly asleep, opening his eyes to look at her neutrally, then going back to his cell phone to text. She knew that she would be seeing the suffering Christs, so different from the Rose Annunciation she had seen the day before.

The largest of them was a standing figure, nearly six feet high. Life-sized, she thought, but it was not a representation of life. The place where the spear entered Jesus' torso was a thin line, the width of a pencil mark. The loincloth was simple, nearly colorless, making almost no contrast with the flesh.

Her first glimpse of the Rose Annunciation had filled her with delight, and she was able to move from that place to a position of close scrutiny, her training taking its place easily beside her visual pleasure. But what she felt looking at the figure of Jesus was not pleasure, but shock. Because this Jesus was, himself, shocked, unable fully to understand what had befallen him. His face expressed a stricken incomprehension. His arms, open at his sides, his palms facing upwards, said most clearly, “How can this be happening? To me? In this world? Here? Now?”

She thought of the uncomprehending look that sometimes took over her father's face. His bafflement at what his life had become.

And for the first time in all the years since her father's accident, certainly the first time since his death, Theresa wept. She looked around, hoping the guard hadn't seen her. He seemed to be absorbed in his texting. She knew she could not weep here. She wished that she were in the dark church where she had heard the girl freely weeping. You could weep freely in a dark church; this was one of its last public functions, one of its last civic services. But in a museum, you might be thought
mad if you wept, seen as a danger, perhaps asked to leave. She was glad that Chiara wasn't on duty. She would go back to her room without speaking to anyone. She would weep.

She woke after a three-hour nap. She hadn't realized how tired she was. Was it too late for lunch? The day stretched ahead of her, its openness luxurious and threatening. She had a month. Thirty days, and she had to determine the best way to use them. What Tom had written in the recommendation for the grant was that she would use the month in Lucca to solidify a dissertation topic. But what did that really mean, “solidifying a topic”? It could mean anything or nothing.

Not much had been written on Civitali. There were articles; one book, a hundred years old, was in French, and the most recent one was in German, which she couldn't read. Would she have to learn a new language to read one book? Not having an army of scholars ahead of her was both a gift and a burden. She didn't have to sift through mountains of dullness or misinformation. On the other hand, she felt she had no hand to hold.

Tom had told her she must find a special pizzeria that made a special pizza; instead of tomato sauce, the thin crust was covered with a paste made of chickpeas, oil, and garlic. It was near the Cathedral of San Michele. She wouldn't open her map on the street, so she wouldn't leave her room till she felt confident of her route. She had a glass of wine with her pizza, and then made her way across the square to the statue of Civitali.

It wasn't a good statue: bronze, imposing, seventeenth century, with nothing of the tenderness and delicacy that marked his work. It didn't make him look anything like what she'd imagined; she was sure this wasn't how he looked; for one thing he was a fifteenth-, not a seventeenth-century man. It pleased her that there was a statue in a large town square dedicated to an artist that most of the world hadn't heard of. But she also resented it. People passing him every day, leaning against him as they smoked or kissed—this made him less hers. They don't know him as I do, she thought, and she laughed out loud at herself. I sound like a possessive wife in the face of a parade of casual
lovers unworthy of the beloved husband. Who would always be, most importantly, hers.

She walked up the Via Roma. I am pleased, she heard herself saying. I am so pleased. The word sounded wrong, but she knew it was the right one. “I'm so pleased” sounded false, affected, a hostess's words or something from an English movie, and you knew the person saying the words—it was always a woman—wasn't really pleased at all. But she didn't care, she kept repeating in her mind, “I am pleased.” She felt that everything had been arranged, not to make her happy, “happy” seemed too risky a term, implying some expectation of continuance. This, this being pleased, was happening right now and it might never happen again. But the things that unfolded before her eyes, that pleased her, seemed like the work of good manners, the product, not of a particular affection, but of a sense of what was right.

The windows of the shops of the Fillungo were a sign of something, of a way of living she had never experienced, but had somehow intuited. How, she wondered, how did I always know? They had, she thought, been waiting for her. The candied violets, the marzipan fruits, the cakes as beautiful as fashionable ladies' hats, the artful pyramids of oranges and lemons in the markets, green-gold grapes resting on a bed of dark leaves, carefully arranged trays of cheeses, even the meat in the butchers' windows (chops decorated with white collars or parsley necklaces), the children's clothes, lace, crocheted, embroidered, all spoke of a care for the look of things that was somehow free of the element of punishing exclusion or self-aggrandizement that she associated with American commercial display.

I am in Europe, she kept saying to herself. I made it. I'm here. And all at once, the word “pleased” wasn't enough. She knew that what she was experiencing was delight.

She was very glad that she was by herself, because she could allow the words that she knew were clichés without banishing them for fear of someone accusing her of a cliché. Thank God Tom wasn't here. If the thought of ordering cappuccino after noon was an abomination to him, what would he have thought if she'd allowed the words that were now going through her mind to slip out? “Things are so old here, so much older than in America.” “I have never seen stones this color. I love
the way the light falls on the sides of the buildings, and I remember the names of colors I knew in my first Crayola box. Ochre. Burnt sienna. The stones are kinder here.”

There was a life lived in the open, on the streets, but, unlike on the streets of Milwaukee, where almost no one walked except as a sign of some kind of ruin, or the streets of Chicago, where everyone walked in response to weather that was nearly always insupportable, the street life here was elegant and leisurely. People spoke to each other, kissed each other—men and women—on both cheeks. They carried flowers or you could see the tops of vegetables—the complicated asparagus, the mathematically precise carrot leaves—peeping like well-behaved schoolchildren out of cloth market bags. She thought that everything she saw must be some sort of sign, some hint of a larger connection, and she believed she would, eventually, put the pieces together. But she knew she couldn't will it; it would have to happen on its own.

It was up to her to get in touch with Gregory Allard, the American collector whose name Tom had given her, and she had let a week go by without doing it. She told herself that it was all right, that this was her first time in Europe, her first time anywhere by herself; she could allow herself a little latitude. But she knew the truth: she dreaded making contact with Gregory Allard for reasons that had everything to do with who she was, and where she felt she had no right to be.

The problem with any sentence she could imagine saying to him overwhelmed and paralyzed her. “I would like to look at your Civitalis. I am a student of Tom Ferguson.” And what if he asked what would be normal questions: “Why do you want to look at my Civitalis? Why isn't Tom here now?”