‘Shall we hit the old bridge?’ asks Ingrid. ‘An excellent idea,’ Simon says.
Ponte Vecchio
Unfortunately, dozens of tourists have had the same excellent idea at the same moment — to stand on the Ponte alla Carraia and take each other’s pictures with the Ponte Vecchio in the background, tinged blood-colour by the dying sun.
We no doubt look grotesque to the Florentines, thinks Rena. ‘What a cliché…’ Yet each of us integrates this cliché into a specific history. That young Asian man, for instance, clambering over the parapet of the Ponte alla Carraia to set his Nikon up on one of the pylons, then dangerously backing up to be in the frame and smiling as he takes his own picture with the famous bridge behind him — where’s he from? Who is he?
How sad, Subra nods, to have such a sophisticated camera and no one to smile at…
They walk back to the Lungo Corsini and begin to wend their way along the river. The temperature is delightfully mild, and an all-but-full moon is rising beyond the Ponte Vecchio. Impossible, however, to savour the instant: no boardwalk to stroll along, no bench to sit down on, no way to be together. Squashed between the flow of cars and the flow of pedestrians, they’re forced to advance in Indian file.
‘Hey!’ Simon suddenly exclaims. ‘Doesn’t that look like a satyr’s knees?’
Hubbub cars pedestrians jostling crowd commotion…
Rena stops, turns, looks at what he’s pointing to — the wrought-iron balustrade is studded with a decorative motif. ‘I suppose so,’ she nods vaguely. ‘Very stylised, though.’ She sets off again.
‘And if those are his knees,’ her father insists, ‘what’s this, in your opinion?’
Hubbub cars pedestrians jostling crowd commotion…
Stopping, turning, looking again, Rena sees a protuberance between the ‘knees’.
‘Dad!’ Ingrid protests.
What does he want them to say?
‘Wow.’
All right? That make you happy? You got one, too?
Rena turns away. Sets off again, jaws clenched. Stares up, beyond the sunset-gilded bridge, at the moon. Almost full, yes, almost pure.
They reach the Ponte Vecchio at last—’the only one of Florence’s bridges,’ the Guide bleu informs Rena, ‘to have escaped destruction by the Germans.’
Having no wish to get Ingrid started on the subject of the Second World War, Rena refrains from translating this passage for them.
‘Isn’t it magnificent, Dad?’ Ingrid exclaims.
‘The ancient neighbourhoods on either side of the river,’ the Guide bleu goes on, ‘were destroyed by landmines. Though reconstructed, they delude no one.’
Oh, yes, they do. They delude us just fine, thanks.
The elderly couple stands there, entranced.
Delusion is a many-splendoured thing…right, Dante?
Piazza della Signoria
Simon is impressed.
‘Incredible. To think Savonarola held sway on this very spot.’
‘Who?’ Ingrid asks.
‘You know, the fanatical monk we talked about this morning.’
‘Oh, yes, right…’
It’s nearly time for dinner. Why not have a real meal this time, in a real restaurant?
They find a place. White tablecloths, ancient wood panelling, grey-haired waiters.
‘Do you prefer red wine or white?’
‘I don’t drink anymore,’ Simon says.
‘Oh? You mean not at all?’
‘Not at all.’
Rather than leaving it at that, he launches into an explanation. Alcohol, Rena learns, is incompatible with the drugs he now takes to steady his heartbeat, soothe his soul, calm his nerves and keep despair at bay. With Ingrid’s assistance, he runs through the list of his current medications, counting them off on his fingers, explaining dosages and proportions, chemical interactions and adjustments, experimentations and side effects (drowsiness versus insomnia; stupor versus restlessness; blinding light versus darkness; vertigo, palpitations, panic attacks).
‘I see,’ Rena says. ‘Just water, then?’
‘Just water.’
She orders a bottle of Valpolicella for Ingrid and herself.
Can this really be the man who used to drop acid with me when I was seventeen or eighteen, ostensibly to cure me of my migraine headaches?
Tell me, Subra says.
‘You’ll see, it’s pretty amazing,’ he’d say, putting Bach’s Sonatas for Solo Violin on my record player, carefully extracting from his wallet the tiny squares of blotter paper he called Timothy Leary tickets and slipping them under our tongues, then calmly sitting down next to me on the couch to await the first effects. After about forty minutes, the patterns in my wallpaper would start to swirl gently in time to the music.
Now, three decades later, only a few scattered memories remain of our trips together. How excited we were, for instance, to discover — familiar, yet exponentially enhanced — the miraculous combination of tastes, colours and textures that went into the making of a ham sandwich. Ham…butter…bread…mustard…lettuce…Each ingredient a quintessence, an absolute. Explosion of saliva. ‘How is it possible,’ we’d say to each other, ‘that we usually gobble this down without noticing, after muttering, Hm, I’m feeling a bit hungry, why don’t I slap together a ham sandwich?’ Yes…’slap together’… Following which we’d spend another twenty minutes admiring — as if it were a precious gem — the various facets of the expression ‘to slap together’.
Once, I recall, as I stood at the window marvelling at the beauty of the sky, Simon came up to me and announced, ‘Blue does not exist.’ ‘What?’ ‘The colour blue. It doesn’t exist objectively in the universe. Only in the brains of certain mammals whose retina happens to capture a particular wavelength of light emitted by the sun.’ ‘Wow!’ I answered. ‘For something that doesn’t exist, the colour of that there sky sure is gorgeous.’
We laughed and laughed.
The expression I’m feeling blue was suddenly imbued with tragedy.
‘Maybe the same goes for God?’ I suggested a while later. ‘Huh?’ ‘Maybe God’s like blue — He exists only in the eye of the beholder.’ ‘Magnificent!’ Simon said, applauding in delight, and pleasure flooded through me.