The Whirling Girl (10 page)

ROMA 5984W

AS CLARE WALKED BACK towards the piazza, she noticed pots of white daisies set out along the street. The woman in charge of the
profumeria
, who was tending the pot outside her shop, charmingly and fragrantly explained to Clare that the daisies were set out in honour of the seven-hundred-and-tenth anniversary of the return of the holy Santa Margherita to the city.

In the window of an antiquarian bookstore, the saint herself appeared, though not as Clare thought the real saint would have looked. The holy apparition had just raised a local boy from the dead; her face was uplifted in reverence, mouth half-open, eyes rolled back, as if that was all there was to being really holy. Surely the real saint, the woman who had so gloriously erred, would not have worn such a soppy, cow-like expression.

How would a person look, though, if they'd just raised another person from the dead? Lean, determined? Awestruck? Terrified at the responsibility of what it turned out they could accomplish if they set their mind to it? How would an artist show that essential quality? A physical sensation fused up from Clare's toes along the inside of her legs and through her gut. A sudden flare-up of desire:
That's what I want to show, even in a flower, something revealing as all that
.

LATER, IT SEEMED TO Clare that the rest of the day had the inevitability of one of those dreams in which things repeatedly slip sideways, yet some not-quite-understood quest leads you onwards.

She returned to her car with the mission of driving to the top of the town where the basilica stood, where the actual saint lay in her glass casket, the woman so flawed and determined that she had ripped away her beauty in sacrifice to transcendence.

The guidebook said getting there was easy, yet immediately she got lost in the labyrinth of streets. After many wrong turns she found herself on a narrow track outside the city's upper wall, with a teetering view over roofs and towers. An impatient driver right behind forced her through an archway into a tiny piazza with a playground, a bright red phone booth, houses with flowered balconies all around — and seemingly no exit but to drive down a shallow set of steps, then along the narrowest of twisting alleys, until she faced a wall with a barred gate.

The gate held a sign. This was where Santa Margherita had entered the city all those centuries before.

Did Clare get a chance to reflect on this? A Land Rover was right behind her, and behind that yet another car, the driver leaning on the horn.

The man in the Land Rover got out, came forward, bent in her window, controlling his expression with some difficulty as he told her that a footpath marking the Stations of the Cross led up to the basilica from here, certainly something that would be very interesting for her, he was sure. What she should do to clear the traffic, at the moment, however, was to carry on down the steep diagonal track to her right. Yes, it was a proper road, despite the cobbles. She should not worry about the policewoman in the piazza below, just drive slowly into the throng of pedestrians and reverse through them into the area with the statue of Garibaldi. There she would be able to find a parking spot. This was the way it was always done.

Today he was wearing faded jeans, a tan shirt with rolled sleeves. But she had recognized him, immediately, from the first glance in her rear-view mirror.

BY THE TIME SHE managed the tricky turnaround in the Piazza Garibaldi, he'd spun his Land Rover into a position ahead of her, blocking her exit and keeping all other traffic stopped. He sprinted over, still with that marvelling look on his face.

“Someone is pulling out. There, see! You can back into that spot.”

The policewoman raised her baton threateningly at him and laughed, while Clare did back into the spot.

THE MAN FROM THE autostrada, yes, though driving a different car.
Italy is dangerous
. Dangerous indeed. Now she knew who he was. She'd spotted an enamelled badge above his licence plate showing a rearing unicorn, exactly like the labels on the dangerous and delicious garnet wine. This was Federica Inghirami's brother, the one who'd rogered every woman from here to Timbuktu.

He didn't need to know who she was, though.

He put some money in her parking meter while she was still in her jeep, then leaned in her window again, saying, “Please, you will wait this time? Please?”

Those eyes. She got the same jolt as on the autostrada. His joyous ridiculous seared expression showed he felt it too.

She tried to collect herself while he reversed the Land Rover into a spot that clearly indicated the illegality of parking in front of a church across the little square. “This is so wonderful!” he said, when he'd sprinted back. “But not amazing, no.” He looked embarrassed, clicked his heels together, looked even more embarrassed. “Permit me. I am very forward. My name is Gianpaulo DiGiustini. I will hope to prove my correct intent.” With the same determined but self-conscious look, he began pulling out identification: his driver's licence, his identity card, his library card, his membership in the cooperative where he took his olives to be processed, the badge proving he regularly donated blood,

“Oh, stop. Stop it! Please. It is amazing. It's wonderful. I agree.”

“And so you will believe the reason I have driven up behind you on the autostrada, the other day? I don't need to prove I am not what you might call a highway masher?”

“I'll believe anything you say.”

“You will not try to make another getaway?”

Not a chance. The danger was in walking down the street together without setting the place on fire. All those sparks shooting back and forth, the whole street glowing, maybe even radioactive, her boots turning into ruby shoes. As they walked to a café table on the piazza, Gianni was greeted by one person after another, mainly women all happy to kiss him on both cheeks, and a young giant of a man with a Russian name who came bounding out of the
tabaccheria
, also to kiss this Gianni on both cheeks before he stooped to kiss Clare's hand.

“Whew, I'm dying for a cappuccino,” she said as they sat down.

He glanced at his watch. “If you wish. All the same I believe the hour for that has passed.”

“Is it so strictly controlled here?”

“Not for North Americans of course. But I would suggest a small Cinzano so close to noon.”

“I'll have a glass of prosecco, then. And an espresso on the side.”

THE SAME WAITER WHO had earlier brought her the
correzione
came to their table. Maybe she should thank its lingering effect for the buzz she was feeling. She studied this electric Gianni when he took his eyes off her for a moment. The upturned chin had both the noble determination of the coin-face in the book, and a hint of the same childish petulance.

She said, “I noticed you have a unicorn above your licence plate. Is that significant?”

He narrowed his eyes. “Do you believe in the unicorn?”

She said, “Yes and no.”

“Ah!” He sat back, smiling. “So you hedge your bets.”

When the prosecco came, he lifted his glass. A flush spread across his face.

“
Salute
…” he began, with the expression of someone about to make a speech no matter what. He started again. “
Salute
, ROMA 5984W.”

“Hello?”

“This is your licence number, is it not?”

“I have no idea.”

“But you must understand that this number has been embroidered on my cerebral cortex for the last three days.”

“That sounds sore.”

“Sore?” He frowned, assessing this so carefully that Clare could almost see the stitches going in. “No please,” he said, “Do not smile too soon. I confess, when I pulled up behind you on the highway, I was just a man doing a good deed for a woman in a very plain, disguising hat who might have been in trouble. Then we saw each other in your mirror. Just your eyes, I saw.” He held his hand, banditlike, to the bridge of his nose. “A dazzling bolt of blue. And then — poof! You drove off and left me only the vision of the golden spinning of your hair! It was at this moment, without even conscious thought on my part, that ROMA 5984W became embroidered on my brain.”

He looked ridiculously relieved to have completed the speech. To have achieved the moment at which they sat here with two glasses of sparkling wine in the lively piazza, with the crenellated tower outlined against the sky, was to him a kind of artistry, she told herself; he might have said the
dazzling bolt of blue
line even if she was ninety; it was like the creation of a fine sonata they could play together, and why should the other player in the duo feel demeaned because the performance would be a short one?

Now he was distracted, reaching for the briefcase he'd put under the table. He asked her if she knew the films of the great Marcello Mastroianni.

She frowned, nodded.

There was a scene in one film, he said, where the great Marcello, wearing a white suit, meets a beautiful woman at a spa. They are standing beside a mud bath. She is wearing a wide black hat. The wind blows off her hat. It sails into the midst of the bath of mud, which is the size of a swimming pool. The great Marcello, without a moment's hesitation, wades in and brings it back. What a scene! A man might live his entire life without a chance to live such a scene. Yet there was he, Gianpaulo DiGiustini, standing beside the autostrada when a beautiful woman's hat blew into a muddy field … He reached into his briefcase, brought out an oblong box, removed the lid.

Her hat.

AGAIN HE LOOKED ENORMOUSLY relieved to have brought that off, not just the retrieval of the hat, but the story, the presentation, his eyes sparkling with a kind of delighted apprehension, as if she still might smash this delicate cardboard castle of a moment he had somehow managed to construct.

She took the box warily in her hands; her good old vintage hat, her serious hat, worn in moments of her life when she needed a prop to disguise whatever else she was, if only from herself. She lifted it out. It released a powdery, dismal scent.

What to say?

“Does this mean I'll be emperor?” she asked, wishing, right away, she hadn't given an opening for more soppy lines.

“
Brava!
So you know this story of the Tarquins!” Then, catching her mixed feelings, he shook his head, looked distressed. “But I have put my own desire to impress you ahead of one iota of good sense. Why should you accept back this hat? You have thrown it out, and with good reason if I may say so. You were right to run away. Perhaps, after all, I am what in your idiom one might call an inadvertent highway masher.”

True enough, she didn't want it back. But she put it in her bag. She laughed and said it was an amazing thing he'd done.

He brightened, relieved. And, dangerously, she couldn't help picturing him as a boy, then a growing kid, dreaming up grand performances and repeatedly having them go a little wrong, never able to resist when the next great idea came along.

Now he was asking how it was that she had come to be driving down through the upper sections of the town, not a route many visitors attempted.

“ROMA 5984W, you are obviously an explorer.”

Now this Gianni DiGiustini (was he Federica Inghirami's halfbrother?) was saying that the basilica was indeed a most important thing to see. Perhaps she would allow him to guide her there? Perhaps they might find a suitable place where the splendid hat could be sacrificed, so it would never find its way back to disguise her again? (That look again of trying too hard to hit the right note.)

Of course she would allow him to guide her to the basilica. She hadn't yet given him her name. In a little while, when the lovely performance had played out a little more, she'd do the smart thing and slip anonymously away, heeding her own sound advice about avoiding disappointment.

AS THEY WALKED BACK along the central street, Gianni called “
Ciao
, Petronella!” to a dark and handsome woman watering a pot of daisies in front of the leather shop. “Allow me to introduce to you my explorer friend ROMA 5984W, who will lead me on a climb to your basilica.” They chatted briefly in Italian, drawing Clare in, but talking faster than she could follow. Then he bent in a mock bow, saying that he would see the woman “at the wedding.” They parted, with a kiss on both cheeks. He said, “
Allora, a piú tarde, Santa Mia!
”

“For every year she does become our veritable saint,” he told Clare, steering her over to the window of a camera shop, where a series of photos showed the same woman dressed in a long white medieval robe on the steps of the town hall which had been turned into a stage. “The piazza has been jammed,” he told her, “And when she speaks, you could not hear from the crowd the dropping of a needle.”

The dropping of a needle.
Clare smiled.

“Yes, she does not play the saint. She is the saint. She will tell you how when she spoke the words of the saint, she was filled with such a great joy that it changed her life.” A look of perplexity winged across his face. “These moments are so fine, so very small, are they not?” He held up his thumb and forefinger, measuring a hair's breadth; his fingers were long, the nails short, the knuckles scarred. “These moments when the universe inside us tilts a fraction, almost nothing, and yet everything is different after that.”

When they got to the Piazza Garibaldi, Gianni made an arrangement with the policewoman to ignore Clare's meter when it expired.

THEY CLIMBED THE STEEP cobble road to the gate where the saint had entered the city. Gianni said it had been locked for years. “Perhaps because we know already that we will never see her like again.”

Some little boys were kicking a football in the street. The air was hot and sweet, heavy with the fragrance from a flowering acacia in the garden of a villa across the wall.

He began to tell her about the saint. Clare did not let on that she knew the story. She breathed the Arabian Nights scent of the flowering tree across the wall, and Gianni's became a different story, told in a voice she hoped would never stop, just as the girl in the story knew better, knew that though she wandered into fields where the handsome nobleman would see her there would never be a proper relationship between a man of his rank and a simple peasant girl. And though the girl goes off with him to his estate and lives openly with him in great wealth and splendour, sometimes she is stricken with an unexplainable sadness.

The man at Clare's side broke off, seemed to forget that Clare was there. “
Triste
,” he said. “But why?” He looked different, as if the charming nonsense had been a cover-up for attributes he didn't like to show.

Don't
, she wanted to say,
Don't turn serious now. Please.

“Oh, but I have been guilty!” he exclaimed, as if he'd heard that. “You must forgive me for getting lost in my own small thoughts. Especially when I have been so rude as to make a jest, to introduce you to my friend as if you were a licence plate.”

“Not a problem. I kind of liked travelling incognito.”

“But it was not correct. It is one of the less sterling aspects of the DiGiustini; sometimes we are not very wise.”

“Are there a lot of you?”

“In the present tense, very few. But we have the habit of tracing the footprints of our folly back through many generations. An Italian failing. Do you know of the Battle of Fossalta?”

“Not yet.”

He clapped his forehead in mock surprise. “But this was so recent, only in 1272! After defeating the Ghibellines, the Bolognese beat the enemy swords into ploughshares, giving a start to our family's business, which has been manufacturing farm equipment ever since.”

Clare remembered Ralph Farnham's lament:
Never marry an Italian, dear girl! Not only will you never be good enough, but you will marry countless generations of ancestors too.

“When you meet my mother,” Gianni said, “she will quite possibly begin the conversation by explaining how she is a descendant of the tragic Giovanna Galuzzi, who at the age of eleven hanged herself from a window of the family tower when the boy she loved was murdered by her father, in 1274.”

“You say your mother was a descendant of that little girl who hanged herself?”

“I will admit this makes it very remarkable, yes, that my mother is here at all.”

He stopped. He shook his head. Then, “Come, are you ready for our hike?”