The Memory Palace (27 page)

It’s the moment when I notice a woman opening a window in a small house on a bridge above the Arno that I think of my mother, somewhere across the wide Atlantic. The woman shakes a rug out, dust floats down like flecks of mica, the window slams shut, the light shifts, the river darkens. Where is she? Is she dead? In a letter my mother wrote me not long after our ill-fated visit that January 1990, she said that she had moved to our old Stuart House apartment building on Triskett Road and was waiting for my sister and me to come. I wrote back to say that I was moving overseas. My mother promptly sent a reply to my Chicago post office box:
I taped a map of the world to the wall in my room with a note: Ask no questions. They’ll tell you no lies.
She added:
Where are your belongings—your books, pictures, and bicycle? With all the sales here in Cleveland, I’ll spend some money on you when you return. For myself, I don’t need much, just a small radio, some books, and a lamp.

Right before I left for Florence that August, I sent one more letter to her. I said that I had a one-person show coming up in Europe that fall, which was true, but didn’t say that the exhibit was in Italy. I told her I had no intention of returning anytime soon from the “European country” I was moving to. My letter came back with “Addressee Unknown” stamped across it.
I tried sending another to her after I arrived in Florence. I described where I lived as a vague, imaginary place so as not to reveal my true location. “It’s so sunny here,” I wrote. “There are birds of many colors and the trees are russet and gold.” Once again, my letter came back. If she wasn’t there, where in the world was she?

The late September light shifts again outside the window at the Uffizi, and the green river sparkles below. I think of the woman in the window on the bridge, how she could be me living another person’s life—a Florentine housewife with a couple of kids, a small white dog, and paunchy husband who sells jewelry in one of the shops below on Ponte Vecchio. My name could be Carlotta or Maria or I could take the name Agostino’s grandparents gave his mother when she was born, Orienta, after a ship they saw pass by the port of Napoli. I could give myself the name of a ship, a vessel bound for the scalloped edge of someone else’s country.

I turn and walk down the corridor to find Botticelli’s Annunciation. The picture is like a scene from a movie: An angel enters a room, walks between two pillars to where Mary sits. She holds her hand out in a gesture of refusal. Gabriel offers her the job but she doesn’t want it, won’t take the lily from his hand. She is reluctant to be selfless and holy. But it’s the background I’ve come to see, not Mary—the distant hazy purple horizon, the exaggerated perspective to make something look real when it’s really not; the painting’s verisimilitude—truth, besotted with lies.

I leave Botticcelli to find the round blue room of Mannerists. My favorite is Bronzino’s portrait of Lucrezia, a stoic woman in a scarlet dress. I make a quick sketch of her pale, elongated neck, her chaste, enigmatic stare. Could I steel myself against the world like her? Her unwavering gaze follows me like Goya’s did years ago. Engraved on her gold necklace are the words
Amour dure sans fin.
Love lasts eternally. Was she a happy wife and mother? Or was she hiding something, holding back tears?

In another room I find Caravaggio’s painted shield. Medusa’s eyes glare at me; her serpentine curls hiss:
How could you leave me? I sleep on benches, on bridges, on cardboard and leaves.
Will I ever let down this burden of guilt?

I return to the window. The woman is gone, but the river is still bathed in light. I look out at Ponte Vecchio, the one bridge left standing after World War II. Iraq had invaded Kuwait the week before I left for Italy. Saddam Hussein had declared, “The mother of all battles has begun.” Are we about to enter World War III? Shouldn’t I be back in the States, trying to find my mother? But here, it’s hard to imagine war: from the window I can see bridge beyond bridge—Santa Trinita, Ponte alla Carraia, Vespucci, and Ponte della Vittoria in the distance. Is this what it means to wander? Gold, capricious light on water, arches unfurling, all the way to the sea? Is it a heart splitting open? Is it loss? Or is it the seductive verisimilitude of beauty, waving and singing a stranger’s land?

In my memory palace, there is a long corridor lined with marble statues. The ceilings are decorated with Italian
grotteschi:
sylvan landscapes of centaurs, nymphs, gargoyles, and swans. Guilded paintings adorn the walls. At the end of the corridor is a map of a make-believe world. In the distance are snow-covered mountains, forests of cypresses and parasol pines. There are ships waiting to leave at every harbor, there are places still waiting to be named.

A couple days after I left for Italy that August, a friend told me that my mother had shown up at my apartment on Erie Street. One of the tenants answered the door but he didn’t know where I was. My mother spent the night at Agostino’s parents’; the following day she disappeared into Chicago’s streets. I watched the Perseid meteor shower from a friend’s house in Florence that night,
La notte delle stelle scadente,
the Night of the Shooting Stars. For each falling star I cast a wish for her, like I used to in the museum wishing well in Cleveland: Please keep her safe from harm.

My plan had been to find a place in Italy for the fall, then travel to Poland to meet Robert, the medical student I had been seeing before I left. I wanted to live in Poland for the rest of the year while Robert finished school, then we could figure out where to go from there. Robert had told me that work in Poland was scarce, even for Poles. His sister, a doctor, was moonlighting by pumping gas. He had been saying the same thing ever since we got involved,
that there was no future for us. We should just enjoy our time together until he went back home.

The night before I left he said, “What will you do in Poland without your sister or your friends?” Robert stayed up late, helping me to pack. In the morning, he looked pale and exhausted. He gave me a farewell gift—a miniature painting he had made of a medieval castle, two lovers floating on a cloud above the spires. We kissed goodbye at the top of the stairs. On his way down, he stopped and turned around for a moment. He looked up at me and smiled the saddest smile I had ever seen. Less than a month later he called me in Italy and broke up with me on the phone.

After that, I had to decide—should I stay or should I go back to Chicago? I had sold or given away nearly everything I owned; I had resigned from the Field Museum and my other jobs. And I suspected that my mother might have even moved to Chicago, maybe to my old neighborhood. I felt I had no choice—Chicago was the past and my future was not in Poland.

I answered an ad in the paper for a roommate in a house on a farm called Cerreto, a forty-minute drive from Florence down Via Aretina, the fast curving road that follows the Arno east of the city. I had no car, so it took almost twice as long by bus and train. My roommates in the downstairs apartment were two women in their thirties, Elisabetta, an art restorer from Milan, and a blond Swedish language teacher named Elsa, who, when I asked where she was from, slapped her chest and said, “I may be from Sweden, but
sono una vera Napolitana
—I am a true Neapolitan!” Elsa laid down the rules the first day: I was not allowed to touch her newspaper, play music in the living room, or record my name on our answering machine. Elisabetta was much kinder but rarely home. I felt most comfortable upstairs, where Gabriella, Massimo, Angelo, and Claudia lived, a group of boisterous forty-somethings. If they noticed I was alone, they’d come downstairs and try to coax me up for dinner.

Beneath the house’s eighteenth century walls was a medieval foundation; below that, the remains of an Etruscan tower. The house, and three others
on the farm, sat on top of a steep hill embraced by chestnut and fig trees, a lemon grove, and an enormous garden. There were sheep and goats on the land, a pony, chickens, a dog, and twenty-three feral cats. On the hill below were a vineyard and a grove of silver-green olive trees.

On Erie Street, I had two locks, a deadbolt, and a chain on my fourth-floor walk-up apartment. At Cerreto, I didn’t even own a key. Beside my bedroom was a little studio with a door that opened onto a flower-lined path, leading to a chicken house. On warm fall days, chickens meandered in from outside, and Stella the farm dog burst in the room wagging her tail, running up to lick my face. She’d sit on the terra-cotta floor beside me, bury her nose in my sleeve, sniff my wrist, and sigh. That was when I missed my mother the most, those brief moments of animal closeness—the warmth of a dog’s breath on my skin, the touch of her velvet ear.

Across the path from my studio was a medieval stone house where Sabina and Alfredo—the resident farmers who worked for the owner—lived, along with Alfredo’s ninety-year-old mother. Sometimes Alfredo’s mother would stop by to offer a slice of
torta di mela
on an old chipped plate, or a few biscotti from her brown leathery hands. Once the family invited me over for a glass of wine. Their house was straight out of Boccaccio—the large open hearth with a big black kettle hanging from an iron hook, a blackened ceiling, an old church calendar with a beatific Madonna and child.

“Where is your family?” Sabina asked. I said my father was dead but my sister was in New York and my mother and grandmother were in Ohio. “Tutto bene,” I lied, when they asked after my mother’s health. “She’s fine.”

“We could adopt you,” Sabina suggested. She told me how the Lord had decided not to bless them with children, no matter how many times they prayed.

“I’m thirty-one.” I said with a laugh. “Too old for that.”

“We can still adopt you in Italy. We’ll find you a nice husband. Don’t worry.”

Why would a girl come here without a family if not to make one of her own?

I get anxious when I think about the war, being so far from my sister and my friends. And where is my mother? Is she safe? Something inside feels a bit lost and broken. But no matter how sad I feel at times, when I walk down the hill to take the bus to Florence, and the haze lifts off the trees, and I catch a glimpse of a lepre, one of the gray-brown hares that scatter across the land, and see a startled pheasant, flushed out from the brush by my footsteps, I don’t want to leave. Despite my loneliness and my growing stress about money, I want to stay on this hilltop of grapevines and olives. Without my sister and family around to remind me that she is the writer and I am the artist, I start writing stories and poems. I don’t want to be the person who gasps in fear whenever she hears the sound of a doorbell or a phone. I just want to lose myself in these hills, in the river winding west to the city of bridges.

I always meet Emilio, the antique dealer, at his workshop, never his store. I’ve recently begun working for him, restoring ceramics. He is fifty or so, tall and wiry, and when I come to drop off the pieces I have restored, he is bent over his large oak table, a limp hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his thin lips, examining an old print he has just bought for a song. One day I happen to have my portfolio with me when I stop in to pick up a small porcelain figurine that needs repair.