Читать книгу Florence in Ecstasy - Jessie Chaffee - Страница 10

Chapter Two

A gymnasium. Three girls lined up, standing at attention—why? The boy, smirking. I dreaded this boy who went down the line pointing his finger, labeling our breasts. Flat as a board. Mosquito bites. Melons. He was no taller, no stronger, and still we took in his smirk and watched him take in our blank faces, our failure to respond. His smile grew, became something I couldn’t find my way around. He walked away then, satisfied. We did not look at one another. We did not speak of it.

But that’s not right. That was a story people told me. This is where it begins, they said, pointing at screens and billboards and smirking boys with sharp fingers who would become men who lose the smirk and do not point and yet both are felt. But that is not where it began. Not for me. Still, years later when I saw school groups at the museum, I waited for this boy to emerge with that same small smirk. I watched as he circled girls like me, wanted to silence him before he could speak, wanted to follow him into the cluster and make them all scatter like birds. Would that have helped? Children do this, after all. Children do this and they don’t end up like me.

The next morning I find the city transformed. The Italians have returned, reclaiming Florence at this early hour, and the city moves, not yet weighed down by the slow stroll of tourist traffic, amoebic and unpredictable. Instead the old stones rumble with cars and rattle with bikes; buses pull up and just as quickly away as suited men and women hop on and off; the mopeds that have lined the curbs in double layers all night zip out one by one and join the buzz over bridges; and delivery trucks sit stubbornly outside grocery stores, bringing whole streets to a roaring standstill. I feel high on the new energy as I cut through the center. This is Florence in September.

I use a self-service photo booth near the train station, blinking hard each time it flashes. The four photos are identical. My eyes look surprised, my nose large, my smile too wide. Look at you. Is this me?

But no one hassles me as I make my way to the club. No one sees me, it seems. Not the men in crisp shirts and loafers. Not the women in heels and sleek skirts who dismount their scooters with ease. All weaving in and out of the din of cramped coffee bars—each one a humming polis this morning—before disappearing through doors that must lead to offices and schools, vanishing from the scene before it fills with the second wave, and I’m relieved to be able to join them in my own way as I duck into the club, determined to make true my words to Kate.

“Per la carta,” I explain to a woman in the office, handing her the photo after she charges my credit card.

She looks at the photo, doesn’t say, Look at you, only “Sì” with a smile. She slides it into a membership card and hands it to me. “Eccola.” I am official.

Tracing yesterday’s path, I tunnel down to the locker rooms. Voices echo loud from the men’s room, but the women’s room is empty, tiled in cool white and hushed. I change quickly.

“Ciao, Anna of Boston,” Manuele says when I enter the coffee bar, full today. Like the city above, the locals have returned, only here they are all men and I’m no longer invisible as eyes dart up. I hurry out into the sunlight. More eyes. Old men—Nico in his unisuit among them—are parked in chairs on the grass. They peer up over their newspapers and the murmuring begins. It fills me with rage, their whispering. And it makes me want to hide.

“Attenta, Hannah!”

I turn and almost collide with a large boat that rests heavy on the shoulders of Stefano and two other men.

“Buongiorno,” one of them says as they pass, their uneven steps pounding the length of the metal dock. They transfer the boat from their shoulders to their palms, the movements automatic, then rotate the wooden body, gripping its edges before lowering it into the water. Stefano stands up, wiping his hands on his thighs.

“Aspetta,” he says to his companions. He gestures to me to come down and takes my hands in his, kissing each of my cheeks, and this quiets the grumbling of the old men.

“Ti presento Sergio.” Stefano grasps the forearm of his teammate, a compact man with uncharacteristic red hair and large teeth who smiles at me broadly.

“E Giovanni.”

The third man—tall with a small beard and sparkling eyes—takes my hands: “Per gli amici, ‘Gianni.’”

I haven’t had this much physical contact in weeks. Not since Kate gripped me tight at the airport, my body stiff in her arms, rejecting the embrace. Take care of yourself, she kept saying. Then, I love you, but it felt like a chokehold.

These hands aren’t prying or controlling, though—only warm—and I feel elated. As if sensing this, Gianni releases me, spreads his arms wide, and throws his head back. “Che bello giornata, no? Sunshiiiiiine!” he shouts, a tall elegant bird greeting the day in neon stretch pants.

“Our first day of training since the vacation,” Stefano explains.

“Ragazzi, che giornata!” A fourth figure emerges from the darkness, four oars gathered on his shoulder.

“Ecco Luca,” Stefano says.

Luca smiles, surprised, and I recognize him then as the laughing man I’d met at the club’s entrance the day before.

“Hannah,” I say, my face hot again.

“Buongiorno, Hannah. Welcome back,” he says with that same laugh. He doesn’t say more, though, doesn’t give me away. He slaps Stefano on the shoulder and passes the oars to Gianni and Sergio, who slide them into the rings at the boat’s edge. Then he steps into the shell, one hand on the dock, and lowers himself onto the second seat.

“We train together for years,” Stefano says. “Since…” He puts his hand at waist level. “Questi ragazzi sono i miei—how do you say?—old friends.”

“Best friends,” Gianni shouts, taking his place in the boat, followed by Sergio.

“Sì. I miei grandi amici,” Stefano says expansively.

They all nod except for Luca, who looks up at me, unsmiling. “My great friends? Io, no,” he says, “I don’t like these guys,” provoking a chorus of moans.

“Allora, Hannah. You practice today?” Stefano asks.

“Inside on the machines.”

“Ci vediamo presto, okay?” Stefano gives my arm a squeeze before taking his place in the first seat.

“Alessandro, vieni qua!” Gianni shouts, and an adolescent boy dashes past me and climbs into the front of the boat, facing Stefano, his legs folded beneath him. He grasps a rope that connects him like reins to the rudder behind him. The coxswain. They push away from the dock and pause.

“Pronti!” Stefano’s voice cuts a straight line, and the boy adjusts the rope, pulls it taut, as each man lifts his oar in preparation. “Via!” Stefano calls, and they dip their oars in unison and begin to row with small strokes, using only their arms. They move slowly up the Arno toward the Ponte alle Grazie, where they carve a diagonal and then bring the boat around so that their backs are to the club. They come to a full stop, a single breath in and out, before I hear Stefano’s voice again—“Pronti… Via!”—and with a deep whoosh, they are off with unbelievable speed, using their legs now, too, as Stefano calls, “Tutti insieme! Uno! Due!” When they pass the club, I can see that they move as one, their bodies folding and stretching, folding and stretching, their muscles flexing and releasing in time.

“Uno! Due! Uno! Due!” Stefano’s voice echoes across the water as they approach the Ponte Vecchio. Within seconds, they are in the bridge’s shadow and then lost to the sunlight on the other side. Four months ago. I stood in front of an annunciation surrounded by people, all potential donors. It was a special tour I was chosen to lead because I’d studied these things and because one of the prospects spoke Italian, and I’d studied that, too, though as soon as he began speaking, my blank stare stopped him.

It was bright in the gallery, hard to make out the features on the faces around me, except for the well-heeled woman in the center, the one who’d asked, Aren’t you warm, honey? at the beginning of the tour, nodding at my cardigan. It was May, but I was always chilled then.

I was talking about perspective when the ground grew unstable and the faces blurred, as though someone were erasing them, one by one. And then I must have fallen, hard. Darkness. Nothing. Then a voice, light, a face that I knew. One of the guards helping me stand. He liked me. He wouldn’t tell, didn’t tell. But someone did. Someone had.

Because the next day, Claudia invited me to lunch. She was so unlike me, but we had history. She’d helped to hire me five years before, became my mentor and then my friend. I trusted her.

We went to a café by the museum. The sun was merciless, the traffic screaming around us, but Claudia was composed as always—seated cool and tall, her lips a decisive line as she looked over the menu. I hesitated. Ordered fruit and yogurt, a splurge.

“You haven’t been yourself, Hannah,” she pressed as soon as we were alone. Her eyes—sharp and blue, blue, blue—didn’t leave room for questions or doubts. “You’ve been making mistakes.”

I nodded. I’d always been good at my job. Not good like Claudia, who handled the major gifts. But I could smile and smile. I was competent and, most of the time, invisible. Unless I made a mistake. Which I had, more than once.

“These aren’t small errors.”

There were gaps in my days. The details consumed by the next meal, the exercise to negate it, whether I’d need to throw up and how and where. And then that voice, always that voice. If only you were. Each day I felt closer to it.

“They cost money.”

I’d grow dizzy scanning the screen, pull the wrong file, approve the wrong payment—

“That e-mail was a bomb.”

—forward the wrong message. And suddenly I wasn’t invisible at all.

“And there was a complaint about the event. One of the guests said you collapsed.”

I nodded dumbly. If we could just keep the conversation to work, to my many mistakes.

“I told them you were sick,” Claudia said. “Robert doesn’t know about it.” The director.

Our food arrived and I watched her eat. I didn’t defend myself. I thought it would end there. But she had arrived with knives.

“I think you have a problem,” she said, her eyes catching mine again. They looked right through me.

My yogurt sat cold in front of me. I couldn’t lift my spoon.

“Hannah?”

I took a breath, tried to assure her that I was all right. She didn’t realize, perhaps. But I couldn’t look her in the eye.

“I don’t think you understand,” Claudia said. “You have a real problem.”

Something stopped in me. The scene began to unravel. I was not a reliable source, I knew, and still.

“I’m fine,” I said quietly.

“You’re not fine, though. You’re starving. Look at you. Your eyelashes are falling out.”

This image would stay with me, maybe forever. It wasn’t true, but it stuck. This was the end of our friendship. I lost other friends, too, though not in quite the same way.

I meet Francesca at the end of my first week at the club.

I’ve been here every day, working out on an ergometer in the room below the Uffizi, and the movements of this new routine are slowly growing familiar: I position myself on the rowing machine’s small sliding seat and grasp the wooden handle. When I push with my legs, the seat slides back along the metal bar. I draw the handle all the way into my chest, the pressure of the cord it is attached to mimicking the resistance of water. Then I allow it to pull me back toward my feet, the seat sliding in, my body curling forward, my knees folding up to my chin. The spinning wheel exhales a breeze that cools me before I spring back again. I’ve lost so much muscle this past year, and the first few pulls are difficult—my arms and legs shaking and the seat shuddering beneath me—until I get into a rhythm. Curling forward, springing back. Slow and then faster. The movement is a relief; the expended energy counterbalances the ever-expanding list, my inventory. Still, I don’t look at myself in the wall of mirrors. I keep my eyes on the handle, on the wheel, on my feet.

Finding me battling the machine in these first days, Stefano has helped. I’ve spoken with only him and Manuele, not with any of the others, all men, no matter what time of day. In the morning, the old men’s banter echoes through the corridors with the clang, clang, clang of the weight machines. Midday the working men arrive to train while the city has its siesta. After school, it’s the boys—they flail about on the river as Stefano calls instructions from a speedboat, his reassuring smiles interspersed with grimaces as they teeter and totter and cut too close to the rubbish-filled banks of the Arno. The old men are still on the embankment at that hour, rounding out the day with criticisms as the silhouetted teens slide past in small wooden sculls.

All men and boys. And then I enter the locker room on Saturday and find Francesca bent over the sink naked, examining her eyes in the mirror. They are red-rimmed.

“How are you?” she tosses my way in flawless English. “I’m Francesca. You’re the American.”

“Hannah.” My voice sounds strange.

“Hannah. You a student?”

She must be flattering me. “No. Not studying. Just visiting.”

“How long are you here for?” She spreads cream under and then over her eyes, massaging it in.

“I’m not sure.”

“Huh. Well, watch out—time is different here.” She rubs her fingers together. “Slippery. It feels like it’s moving slower, but it’s a trick. You see my face?” She eyes me in the mirror as she pulls her skin taut. “You can always tell how I’m feeling. I can’t be too sad. You see it right away. It sticks, you know.”

“You mean—”

“Wrinkles. Age. Anyway, you’re too young to know. How old are you?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“Huh.” She returns to her reflection. “I thought you were younger.”

Her comment would irritate me, except that I’m more concerned with how I’m going to change. Normally I wouldn’t undress out in the open, would avoid the glances that might become questions. Even after I began eating again, the flesh kept falling away, and still my bones protrude. And then there are the bruises. They appear some mornings, without cause, blooming across my body like evidence. But there are no private spaces here, and so I change carefully, trading one piece of clothing for another. I look at Francesca. I’m not frail compared with her. I am an Amazon—much taller, with large hands, large feet. Some echo of the women of my past. Francesca is of different stock. Petite and lithe. She must be in her forties, but except for the lines around her eyes, she seems ageless.

Laughter from the men’s locker room bursts through the vent.

“They’re crazy.” Francesca rolls her eyes toward the sound and strolls back to her locker. “Those men, crazy. There was an Australian girl here—she got burned three times! Three times!” She pulls on her own small leggings and glances up at me soberly. “She was thirty-three. You think she would’ve known better. Acted like she was about thirteen. Bad news, these guys. That boy from Chicago seems nice, though. Have you met him?”

I nod. Peter. The student. He’s a serious rower. He walks around the club with his toned arms held slightly out from his body as though they’ve just been inflated. He’s young, even for me.

“American boys are nice. Simple. I spent some time in America. I should have stayed—ha! The guys here, you just can’t tell. Three times she got burned.”

“What do you mean… burned?”

Francesca purses her lips and makes a motion with her hand. “She was humiliated. Everyone knew. And two of the guys were married.”

“Didn’t anyone tell her?”

“Tell her what?”

“That they were married.”

“I thought she knew! You think she would have been smarter about it. Thirty-three years old! It got so she couldn’t show up here. What can you do?” Francesca returns to the mirror, twisting her hair up into a coil, silent now, and I hear another eruption of laughter from the adjoining room. Our area feels like a vault, a mausoleum. We are rarities, like the red tiles scattered across the stark white walls. Chance blocks of color.

“Not a lot of women at this club, huh?” I ask.

“A few.” Francesca shrugs. “It’s mostly men. Doesn’t bother me as long as my husband isn’t one of them. If he was a member here, I wouldn’t be. That’s for sure.”

I don’t say anything, but she locks eyes with me and continues. “I don’t see him all day. Just a half an hour at night. Then I go walking with the dogs so I don’t have to see him.” She pulls on her little ankle socks and the cloud passes over us, forgotten. She’s practiced at transitioning, but I’m curious now.

“Are you from Florence?”

“Me? God, no. I’m from a real city. Milano. I’ve been here twenty years.” She sighs at the burden. “Like I said—you lose time.”

“Did you meet your husband in Florence?”

Another sigh, a flick of the hand. “Yes. I was twenty-one. How old are you again?”

“Twenty-nine,” I repeat.

“Ah, sì. Twenty-nine. So you understand. I was only twenty-one. Too young to know better. He’s one of those real loud types, you know? Real neurotic. I see it in my daughter sometimes. She’s at that awkward stage—all pimply, short hair.” She pauses. “Peter’s single, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know. I mean, he’s a student.” What is she thinking?

“Yeah, he’s single. All men are at that age.” She closes her locker decisively. “You going to the game Monday?”

“I don’t think so.” Stefano has distributed invitations for the event—a soccer match, one of the first of the season. He bought tickets for the members at a discount, and though I accepted one and said that, yes, I’d see him there, I’m not sure I will. It’s one thing to come to the club, to exchange a few words with him over a smooth shot of espresso. It’s another thing entirely to see people out in the world.

“You should come,” Francesca says. “I could use another woman there, you know? And the game’s wild. Well, take care. Ask me about any of these guys.” She pauses to glance back at herself in the mirror. “I appreciate it, you know. The bad thing.”

I’m not sure anymore whom or what she’s talking about.

“It’s taught me. But it’s a shame to learn like that,” she says, then strolls to the door. “Ciao.”

“Ciao,” I say, but she doesn’t appear to hear me as she smiles and joins the voices on the other side.

Later in the afternoon, I’m again struggling with the ergometer, intent on getting it right. I look down at my arms, which seem thicker, and look away. My face in the mirror is red, growing with the heat. I can feel it growing. Look at you. I close my eyes, slide the seat forward, roll my body in, push back with my legs, and pull with my arms. I hear footsteps and Stefano enters followed by Luca, who has a bag slung across one shoulder. I watch their reflections.

“Eccola,” Stefano says. “Troppo veloce.”

“Too fast?” I ask.

“You must wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“Spingi e poi—”

“Stefano!” A voice from down the hall.

“Scusi,” he says, and disappears.

Luca watches me in the mirror and I stop moving. He smiles but says nothing. He’s a person at ease with himself and the world. It makes me nervous.

“You must wait,” he says finally, crossing the room. “Push with the legs e poi pull with the hands. Try.”

I lean forward, curl in, and then spring backward, pulling the handle with me.

“Too fast,” Luca says. “Di nuovo. Slow.”

I lean forward, curl in, and begin to pull, but a pressure on my back stops me. I glance at him in the mirror. He’s leaning down, his hand supporting me. I look for a loaded smile, wait for a line.

“Aspetta” is all he says. Then, “Push with the legs.”

He keeps his hand steady, releasing the pressure gradually as I slide back. When my legs are almost straight he says, “Adesso,” and I draw the handle all the way into my chest.

“Così,” he says. “You understand?”

I nod.

“Di nuovo.”

I repeat the motion, alone this time.

“Brava.” He stands up, smiling, and skin gathers around his eyes. Like Francesca, he must be older than he looks, but he does not carry the weight of age or the gravity of too much experience.

“Grazie.”

“Di niente.” He turns to leave.

“Are you here tomorrow?” My voice echoes loud and he turns around, surprised.

“Domani? No.” He looks confused. I’ve done something wrong, misread his casual kindness for something else. “Tomorrow is Sunday,” he explains. “The canottieri is closed.”

“Oh.” Of course. Sunday.

“Allora, until soon. Maybe Monday, yes? At the game?” He tilts his head, smiles, and is gone, leaving a lightness in his wake that I try to hold on to as I curl forward and push back, waiting to pull with my arms. I stop then and let the wheel spin slowly to a rest.