doned I felt, alone in a foreign city, agonizingly clumsy without my own language. Bergamo had been Dan’s choice, the Montessori training a step toward doing the work he loved, and I had come under protest, deciding after many arguments to accommodate myself to his plans. But if I felt angry and vulnerable so far from my moorings, a more profound sense of unease gathered like a cloud. It wasn’t just that the scene had changed, that every cultural marker had been replaced by something new and enigmatic. The worst thing was that Dan was hurt, that his body had been changed, and the laws of safe passage through the world had been broken. The laws of safe passage? Isn’t it by carefulness that one outwits danger, aren’t the people who avoid accidents the smart ones, the ones who know how the world works? I had learned from my childhood to be cautious. The other accident victims in the ward had put themselves in the path of danger, riding motorcycles, using powersaws, playing with firecrackers. Dan had simply been making dinner. For the moment, I couldn’t forgive him. he Frescoes of Giotto Between the first operation and the second, scheduled in two weeks, we took a trip. Our destination was nearby Padua, where I wanted to see one of Giotto’s most famous works, the Arena Chapel. Since college art history classes I had been interested in the fourteenth-century master, and during the years I catalogued works of art at the museum, I had grown to love seeing things up close. My job required traversing the surface of each object inch by inch, with my eyes, making maps of flaws and weak spots, scratches and flaked paint, writing long descriptions of the exact condition of the object when it came to the museum, a history of the effects of age and wear: the odd darkening of a still life (had it been used as a fire-screen?), the horizontal abrasion in the same spot on a pair of portraits (had dining room chairs backed into them every evening for centuries?), and the tiny losses whose causes were unknown—a chip of paint missing from the lace of someone’s sleeve. I was, in a way, a cataloguer of damages and repairs. Though the art history professor made much of Giotto’s pivotal position between Byzantine painting and the perceptual innovations of the Renaissance, I remember responding to something the professor never mentioned: Giotto’s figures show a strange and beautiful range of feeling on their faces and in their bodies. I had seen the images only in reproduction, and I felt eager to stand before the actual walls that held the frescoes by his hand. We arrived at noon to find the chapel’s massive doors locked, and realized we’d have to wait out the ....to live in Italy, in the kind of house that inhabited his dreams, was to step inside a kaleidoscope and find myself among huge chunks ofglass whose sudden shifting was both beautiful and violent. long mid-day break. The building itself was discouraging —an unadorned rectangle with thick, colorless stone walls and a severe roof. A small crowd had gathered by 3:00 when two men in silver-buttoned uniforms returned to open up. We got in line, and when we entered saw the others standing with heads thrown back. From floor to high ceiling, biblical scenes in Giotto’s famous cobalt blues, reds, and golds filled the space with another crowd of people, smaller, more vivid, less restless. Before the Bible was allowed into the hands of the people, paintings inside a church did not merely decorate: they were the main means of instruction for the illiterate faithful. As I stared up at the walls I felt I’d just crawled inside an illuminated manuscript. I stood at the bottom of the page in awe. I dropped a large coin into a metal box, turned the dial, and heard a woman explain in English the iconography of the scenes. The highest band of paintings showed the life of the Virgin, a story unknown to me. The most surprising painting depicted the “Meeting at the Golden Gate,” in which Mary's parents, Joachim and Anna, first encounter each other. In the previous scene Joachim, an old man with a curly white beard leans dejectedly against a rock and surveys the surrounding desert. He has waited his whole life to marry, and in the desert a dream tells him that he will find his wife at the Golden Gate. Joachim and Anna embrace, his hand on her shoulder, her hands cupping his face, forehead touching forehead. Giotto paints both pairs of lips as they meet. Most amazingly, the eyes, so close together, are open, as if they must take in everything about the other, as if every point of contact between their bodies is essential and cannot be done without. Somehow their need becomes a ; source of strength. Their bodies make a solid unit, backs and heads uniting to form an arch, which Giotto accomplishes by painting them the Same size. The arch, I remember, is strongest of the architectural forms and can bear almost any weight. It is impossible to imagine prying them apart. The'n I noticed a long crack running through the painting. Because the man and woman are so close, the crack enters each of their bodies at the same angle, first one, then the other. Having found each other, they stand under the same tree when lightening hits, they eat the same broken bread. What, I wondered, did they say to us? Our marriage hardly felt like a solid architectural structure. We too had met one another late after waiting in various deserts. For our marriage ceremony we’d asked the priest to avoid using images of marriage as repose. We’d put red and purple flowers on the altar. “Most like an arch,” writes John Ciardi of marriage, “an entrance which upholds/ the stone-crush up the air like lace.” Not us, not yet, I think. Better Robert Bly who says, “When men and women come together/ how much they have to abandon!” Reading later about Giotto, I found the scenes of Joachim and Anna described as filled with a “strange absorption, a slow but inflexible continuity of action, controlled by the quiet assurance of a destiny traced by God.” The lovers seem intensely aware of what is happening to them. Their solid, bulky bodies absorb the feelings of grief or love in each scene. They appear to meet their fate with dignity and weight, as if with an inner conviction they are capable of suffering their own drama to the last. Giotto united Anna and Joachim and enclosed their spirits in an image of strength. But some accident cracked them open. Only slightly, but forever. Repair Monday morning was cool and clear. I got up knowing someone had opened Dan’s hand and was somehow reconnecting the nerves and tendon. A piece of sky, intense, enamel blue, appeared above the courtyard when I unlatched the shutter. As I walked down Via Gombito, the cobblestones were slick with cold dew. A slant of sun cut acro.ss the empty street. A man on a three-wheeled motorbike with loaves of bread bristling from a huge basket sped toward me. I flattened myself against the wall of a shop to let him pass. The medieval street was only just wider than a car, the incline‘steep, and pedestrians had to. fend for themselves. I entered the funicular station, bought a ticket from the sleepy news seller, punche'd it in p machine, and entered the little car, glad to put myself in someone else’s hands. As I waited I studied the metal cable that lowered the trolley-like car down the hill. I had earlier discovered the connection between the cable and the movement of the car, and like the time I rode in an elevator with a hole in the top, I wished I hadn’t seen its inner workings. The trembling cables, thinner than my wrist. The conductor, red-cheeked and wearing a thick wool uniform, emerged from the cafe in the station and guided the car down the hill. After passing through a dark tunnel beneatfi the city walls, we emerged to a glittering view of the lower town, red roofs, bell towers, church spires spreading toward the plain of the Po. The car moved slowly and silently, not much faster than a wagon pulled by a child. The foothills of the Alps appeared further off, and the blue hills cradling wisps of white morning mist seemed ancient and dense. Dan’s bed was empty. An elderly man in green pajamas told me he’d been taken to surgery early in*the morning. It was already 10:30. I waited by the tall French doors in the corridor, jumping at every sound. Eventually I heard metal wheels on the marble floor and saw a cart being pushed by four male nurses. It clattered harshly as if the wheels were uneven or the floor had a grid. Why are they going so fast? Why aren’t they being more careful? They stopped in front of me, but the cart kept rattling. Dan’s skin was the color of cement, and he was shaking violently, his stiff body banging against the hard surface of the cart. The nurses were somber. They lifted him onto the bed, tucked sheets around him. Giorgio was there, and I asked how the operation had gone. “Bene, bene,” he said, but his grim tone frightened me. They told me not to give him anything to drink for three hours. Then they left. Dan was very cold and completely unconscious. I held his hand, massaged his forehead, waited. He began coughing. The coughs wrenched his body off the bed, then released it to fall back limp. He opened his eyes and asked for water. I said he couldn’t have any. He coughed some more. He realized who I was and tears blurred his eyes. He asked again for water. I explained what the nurses had said. He got angry and coughed and coughed. He talked nonsense, slept, woke, coughed. I gave him a wet washcloth to suck and he spit it out. The operation had been unusually long, four hours, and they’d given massive doses of anaesthesia to keep him under. After several hours two young nurses came to the room. I wanted some reassurance that Dan was all right. One of the girls said, “You must bring him pajamas.” The hospital provided nothing. The thought of going out for pajamas just then brought a knot of anger and helplessness to my throat. I swallowed hard and said, “ He has no pajamas. I will have to buy them.” My tone of despair didn’t get through. The nurses seemed satisfied and left. I still didn’t know how to find the main shopping area or what kind of store to look for. Any exchange of money was humiliating and exhausting. I would have to talk my way past the hospital guards a second time that day. Dan looked scared when I said I was leaving. I walked out the hospital gate feeling useless. Since the night of the accident I had tried to understand, to speak, to comfort. Today I’d only been able to watch while a violent experience passed through someone else’s body. On the street I asked a teenaged boy the way to il centro, and he politely walked with me to make sure I understood his directions. He asked if I liked Bergamo. After a few questions and answers, each repeated two or three times as we tried to unr “La luceshe said in her soft voice. “La luce,”I repeated, amazed. derstand each other, our conversation faded. I didn’t want to tell him I was going to buy pajamas. He didn’t tell me his destination. He could not have known what he meant to me then or that I would remember now his tall awkward presence, his concern that I find my way, the comfort I felt walking silently next to him. Is it true that two boats together quiet the waves, the way a long truck on the freeway makes a windless passage for a smaller car? After we parted, I found a store with display windows and hoped it was big enough that I could look at pajamas without having to explain myself to a salesperson. I knew that sizes would be meaningless, and that I’d have to hold up the tops and pants to look at them, something that was not encouraged in Italian shopping. There was a selection of pajamas, all expensive, and I bought a blue-and- red pair that looked like a soccer suit. The shirt, I realized, wouldn’t fit over Dan’s bandage. I would have to cut off the sleeve. It was new, it cost too much, and I would have to cut it up to make it right. ji^htrope Sun streamed through the French doors in the corridor, and the slanting rays burst and scattered in the commotion of glasses and plates, laughter and exclamations that meant lunch in Men’s Plastic Surgery. Dan was well enough to eat with the others, and I sat nearby enjoying the scene. The men who had frightened me earlier with their bandages and their silence had become a jovial group (everyone was in for a long stay) and as usual at lunch time they fetched bottles of wine from their nightstands and offered to fill each others’ glasses. The nurses ladled soup and pasta from big pots on carts, bantering with the men, then brought around platters of roast chicken and ossobucco. Sounds of high-spirited Bergamasco, the local dialect, filled the corridor. “Ch’6 successo, ch’d succes- so?” they asked Dan, wanting every detail of the accident. What happened, what happened? “Ah, il mignolo!” they cried. The little finger. They said the name for each of the fingers, introducing Dan to his hand in Italian. Most knew stories about injured fingers, crippled fingers, fingers that had been cured by miracles. They were hard men, used to physical work, aware of their hands as tools. They reminded me of the men I had watched repairing a 34 Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1988
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz