Thanksgiving in Florence

In a few hours, Americans all over Europe--even the most resolutely expatriated of them--would be getting together over makeshift banquets to experience, many for the first time, the meaning of that first Thanksgiving: strangers celebrating their survival in a strange land. But we knew no one in Florence, and so we had arranged to have our little feast that evening in a quiet restaurant a block from Dante's house.

"Yes, this is still the best view," said my wife, puffing a little from the climb. "Now you can get an idea of what it was like when I was here before."

We were standing at the parapet up on the Piazzale Michelangelo, a little surprised by the distance we had come, for we could just make out what we took to be the roof of our pension beyond the far-off Duomo. Down there, across the milky-green Arno at low water, Florence lay spread out in a shallow bowl of hills--its pale-yellow piazzas, and walls of earthy pink, and tiled roofs in terraces of faded ocher as graphic as a high-definition photograph in the startling clarity of the Tuscan morning. "From up here, in this light, you'd never guess that it's become a madhouse," I had to admit.

The light was the pure, emphatic light you saw through the windows of quattrocento paintings, and of course the landscape was the same. The cloudless blue sky was as keen and scoured as tempered steel, the cedars were that black-green that seems the very essence of greenness, and the rooftops looked as if they had been kilned out of the red earth itself. It brought back a forgotten memory of California foothills in the smogless days of the early Thirties when the air was still as clear and cool and rational as a glass of mountain water.

"Yes, this is how I remember it," Shirley said with a trace of the returnee's pensive recognition of how much had been taken for granted before. "In 1950, it was poor and cold, and there was still bomb damage then, but I had my best times of all here."

From that wide, sunny height, Florence looked as splendid as one's bookish hopes for it: the queen city of the Renaissance--as marvelously anachronistic in a world of urban blight as an exiled empress punctiliously holding court in a slum. Out of the maze of narrow, zigzag streets, the Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio and Santa Croce rose above the rooftops like a lopsided triangle of plinths in a moiling sea; and from up there the busts in the Uffizi courtyard--commemorating the artists, philosophers and statesmen who had transformed this provincial town in Tuscany into a world city--took on flesh and walked its streets once more in the imagination. You could visualize them down there off the busy piazzas, pausing for coffee on that crisp morning amid the smells of ink and marble dust and wet plaster; and for a moment the genius of old cities, cities that had grown up naturally out of a communion of energies and ideals until they achieved their own unique character the same way a man achieves his, came home with an empathetic flash. The communitarian vision that had once represented man's deepest urge toward civilization, but which in our age had degenerated into a nightmare of cement jungles, stirred up the powerful nostalgia one sometimes feels for an experience one has never had firsthand. Community! A community of men!

But the feeling evaporated with the idiot beeping of a tourist bus pulling onto the Piazzale. For we had just walked through the streets down there. Or rather we had negotiated them as you negotiate the mad swirl of a Dodg'em rink, and knew too well that Florence had become a community of machines rather than of men, a museum surrounded by a traffic jam. At last Dante had something to scowl about from his pedestal in the Piazza Santa Croce, for he had become the sole attendant of a parking lot full of Fiats. The 18-foot reproduction of Michelangelo's David in the Piazza uella Signoria rose above the motor scooters and delivery vans, as vulnerable in his genitals as a sleeper dreaming that he is naked on Fifth Avenue. The traffic that roared in a ceaseless drag race around the Duomo made it one of the most treacherous places in the world for the culture-prone pedestrian, and contemporary Florence would have totaled Ruskin in the first five minutes of one of his famous morning walks.

It had taken us two days to register the reason for our peevishness. If the nerves were as taut as guitar strings, it must have been the result of anticipation, excitement or our ten quiet days in Venice. If the attention wouldn't concentrate on a building or a picture, it must have been because by then we'd seen too many buildings and too many pictures. But not at all. Our state of more or less permanent jangle resulted from the sheer impossibility of walking ten steps with our eyes lifted. There wasn't room in the streets for the Lambrettas, much less the Maseratis. The sidewalks were 24 inches wide. The forbidding, windowless walls of palazzi lowered over you like escarpments. You had to walk blocks to find a crossover, and once you ventured out into it the motor bikes pursued you like berserk lemmings; and if you got across with your legs unbroken you were little better off than a mountain climber on a ledge full of Sherpa. Even if you were an old New Yorker, you discovered nerves you hadn't known about; and after a while your gorge rose in the half-crazed, splenetic fury that sometimes overcomes the urban man at that one indignity too many. You snapped at your wife, and cursed the drivers with a pumping forearm, and ran like a hysterical turkey the week before Thanksgiving, and your initial discomfort rapidly deepened toward outright paranoia.

A year before, the passive Arno had risen all in a few hours to flood the city. Along the riverside, the high-water mark was seven feet above the streets, a height attested to (in this city that memorializes everything) by classy bronze plaques. In the Duomo (all white and pink and green marble--the largest chunk of gorgonzola in the world), the central floor had become a fenced-in excavation, in which you dismally expected to see that tangle of loamy ganglia for which Con Ed is always tirelessly probing in New York. The damaged lower parts of the huge paintings in Santa Croce were covered with those ugly plastic shrouds that obscure everything around building sites, and every cellar trattoria on the side streets exhibited a Polaroid shot of loaves of bread or heads of lettuce floating just under its rafters. Still, the more permanent inundation was bound to be the automobile. The city cried out for a traffic planner, but you couldn't escape the suspicion that he would qualify for a strait jacket within ten days. The 20th Century machine had ravaged the 15th Century city as remorselessly as a horde of army ants, turning what had been a citizenry into a fragmented crowd, and Florence had become less a place of human habitation than a kind of claustrophobic, automated Antonioniland in which the people, souls somehow muffled behind their eyes, seemed as ephemeral as their counterparts in London or New York.

Nevertheless, looking out over the city in the blue-and-gold November light, unmenaced for the moment by animated metal, I realized that it was a sense of flesh that was qualifying my disappointment in Florence. The massive, violent nudity of sculpture was everywhere. The Loggia across from the Palazzo Vecchio was a bacchantic tableau of thrusting breasts, and straining thighs, and phalluses blatant with power. In the Bargello, the huge nude figures around the inner court were stone so transmogrified into flesh that your own flesh roused toward them involuntarily. The harsh and virile genius of this city during the Renaissance seemed to have driven its artists so beyond the austerities of their culture (much less the pieties of Pope or Medici) that they had ended up, like so many closet pagans, monumentalizing the ecstatic mystery of the body's life in the very squares of commerce.

A day before, I had stared at the statue of David (the civic emblem, miniatures of it available in every gelateria, a reproduction standing behind us now) and found myself stirred by a kind of sensual awe, for the beauty of this muscular youth was rendered with an erotic intensity usually reserved for female beauty, and his noble, shameless nakedness--the expressive weight of the hands, the subtle downward curve of the belly, the very cock itself--made me glimpse for a moment the natural perfection of a man's body in all its arrogant power, and understand, as well, something of the secret languor of a woman's response to it, even as I choked on the exhaust fumes.

But despite its past, Florence was no longer a sexy city--the way modern London is, or Rome. You didn't sniff that faintly acrid trace of salt in the air that suggests seraglio excesses behind the closed shutters of Venetian afternoons. There was little sense of a voluptuous life going on nearby, and the contemporary Florentines seemed to be a mannered, snobbish, mercantile and urbane lot--without a hint of hedonism in their high, cerebral foreheads and coldly (continued on page 214) Thanksgiving in Florence (continued from page 132) beautiful eyes. You were always aware of the burden of past distinction that had somehow enervated the present, of tradition stifling innovation. The young artist, his imagination just coming into itself, must have felt suffocated by the profusion of Michelangelos, Donatellos and Cellinis that he encountered on even the most casual saunter after cigarettes, and probably he ran off to Rome to get away from it all. Some cities, in burning their unique vision into the consciousness of the world, seem to burn themselves out in the process--as Athens did, or Boston--and the traffic had done for the rest.

"I suppose we ought to try to do the Medici Chapel this afternoon," Shirley said, "if we're going to do it at all." She wanted to shop for a hat and we would have to lunch before one o'clock, when everything closed up.

"Might as well. After you've seen two thousand Annunciations, you've seen them all, but we've done only ten or fifteen chapels."

The Medici was her favorite place in Florence. Years before, as a girl, the Michelangelos there had shaken her awake the way works of art sometimes do, permanently enlarging the moral Imagination as they speak to the senses; but she hadn't talked much about it since we'd been in Florence. I knew she was saving it for the right moment, a moment that hadn't come. But now we were leaving for Rome the next day, and it couldn't be put off any longer. "Let's find us a trat on this side of the river and arm the nerves with a liter of wine," I said. "That is, if you can stand a little more broken-field running."

She could, and we started down a terraced walkway through an olive grove that was fenced with simple, oaken crosses as yet unmarked with names. The old, earth-dun wall of the city toiled over the next rise toward the Palazzo Pitti, and we passed under a portal where the ancient masonry gave back the warm glow of the sun, and went along a narrow, inner street that was cool and shadowed and blissfully autoless. Dark doorways, fragrant with romano and olive oil and fresh oranges, stirred up an appetite in me that so far Florence had failed to touch, an appetite for neighborhoods, for local life, for districts where people cooked and washed and slept together. Up to then the city had seemed as unctuously custodial as the guards in the museums. Shirley bought an orange for tomorrow's prebreakfast hunger in a tiny shop where dusty salami hung like reeking stalactites and a dog lay among baskets of artichokes, losing to his fleas. My spirits rose a little, and we wandered on into the "better" part of town on that side of the river, past the Brownings' house (Elizabeth Barrett got all the billing on the plaque; Robert wasn't even mentioned), but couldn't seem to find the sort of restaurant for which I hankered. Not wanting to lose my temper to the servile hustle of a waiter, I got picky, and Shirley began to weary.

The steel shutters of the shops would be banging down in 20 minutes, and the streets were suddenly crowded with noisy school children, wielding strapfuls of books like so many young Davids brandishing their slingshots at the Goliaths of the traffic. Piazza Santo Spirito was a chaos of parked cars, and a reef of tall, white cloud moved over the hills across the sun, bringing a sudden chill to the air, like a premonition of the cheerless, urban twilight that was still hours away.

"How about that place?" Shirley said. "Maybe we'd better settle for it."

It was a tiny trattoria on the corner of the piazza. Its dingy windows displayed no menu, no prèzzo fisso in three languages for the tourist, but only some dusty bottles of Stock and a lethargic tomcat. Inside, there was a small zinc bar, and the strong odor of a garlicky soup, and a kitchen doorway full of steam and the clatter of pots. The tables were crowded with workmen finishing their coffees, who took Shirley's measure as a matter of course--the eyes going down and then going up again with that candid and impertinent appreciativeness that is a street gallantry in Italy. We found a table in the narrow, dim little alcove that led to the toilets. The checkered cloth was a mosaic of wine stains, cigarette ash and yesterday's hardened cheese sauce. "Look," I said, "this won't do. Not for our last day. Let's go on a few blocks," wanting the lunch to be as special as Shirley's hopes for the afternoon.

But the signora had appeared, a large, pretty blonde woman with an amused eye, a supple waist that pasta and childbearing had thickened, and the slap-slap-slap of bedroom slippers. She eyed us with bold interest as she recited the lista, flicking the ashes off the table with her towel and settling the matter of the wine right off. She liked us (you felt she probably liked everyone at first), but nevertheless her kitchen was closing. Artichokes and eggs? The artichokes and eggs were "molto bene." And perhaps a bit of her own ravioli to start. A nice insalata rossa, and then gorgonzola and fruit--yes? Yes.

We drank the white wine that was so dry and tart that you gulped it down like water and ate her spicy ravioli that was molto bene, too, and went on to the artichokes and the lightly beaten eggs and found, once we had gotten to the pears and the cheese, that we had had a fine time after all. Nothing would suit my mood but that we have a Strega with our coffee, which the signora set down before us with the tactful smile of a concierge renting a room to lovers. The place was emptying; everyone was going home mulled with wine to drowse or to make love, and the signora behind his bar eyed the signora as he rinsed the glasses, and the signora felt the Signore's eyes upon her, and hurried.

It was suddenly good. I felt lifted. An absurd uprush of well-being came over me, and for a moment the hater of cities went back to his grumpy lair, and I said yes to Florence--traffic and all--for the first time. What did I care that the glut and pollution and nerves of the modern metropolis had reached here too? There was still wine, skylarking children, the afternoon siesta, and the wise smile of a woman who knew the important things. There were still a few years left to this city, at least on this side of the river, before it became uninhabitable to everyone, except those who had allowed some part of the machine into their psyches. Beyond the chiseled flesh of the statuary, which seemed to have withered the sensuality of the Florentines precisely because of its extravagant voluptuousness, might there not still be the faint pulse of the old Adam? Wasn't there some meager hope as long as everything came to a stop for an hour or two in the afternoons?

Outside, the empty streets made it seem a safe bet. The Volkswagens along the curb and the ranks of motor scooters parked on the pavement at crazy angles had the slightly foolish look of kids' playthings abandoned in a front yard and, once we turned toward the river, the silence of the afternoon hiatus restored an air of human intimacy, of architectural coherence to the narrow, Renaissance blocks down which we walked. Upriver, three frigate swans cruised under the silversmiths' shops on the Ponte Vecchio where, at mid-bridge, the bust of Cellini mused--the patron saint of all artisans and hustlers. We walked, in a warm envelope of wine, under the dramatic Tuscan sky--the sun coming out and going in as masses of broken cloud scudded over the city, the chic shopwindows along Via Tornabuoni alternately gilded or in shadow--and, on a certain corner where the sun suddenly flooded down an old stucco wall in a poignant rush of champagne light, I knew that I would remember forever every last crescent of tile on that overhang, every bit of window ornament, every single shutter slat, so absolutely open to it, so unimpeded by the gloomy reflections of the discursive intelligence, was I at that moment.

This feeling of utter lucidity, this idiotic joy I felt in the simple unfolding of reality itself, lasted through the Central Market, where some of the stalls and barrows had remained stubbornly open to catch the custom of lire-burdened tourists from colder climates to whom an afternoon nap was frivolous, if not downright decadent. It lasted through the piles of handbags, wallets and gloves, the ranks of dashboard Davids in plaster or lead, the gimcracks and gewgaws, and the whole souvenir detritus of mass-produced bad taste that may bury Europe one day as it has already buried America. It even lasted through the ritual ping-pong of offer and counteroffer, concerning a Russian-style fur hat, which Shirley conducted with an admiring barrowman; it lasted because if the value of an object can still be haggled over, one has remained its master instead of vice versa. But shortly I became aware that Shirley was stalling on the Medici Chapel, which was only a few streets away, as reluctant to risk disappointment (in it, or in herself, or in me) as a divorcée the second time around.

The afternoon had gloomed over while we shopped, and when the steel shutters rolled up again the lights were on in the gelaterie, where the espresso machines hissed like toy steam engines, and the pastry trays glistened with Alp on Alp of glazed icing. The trickle of cars was building toward a stream once more, and you felt the city taking a deep breath, getting its second wind. I wasn't sure I wanted the Medici Chapel. I didn't feel reverent, even about Michelangelo, and I was enjoying Florentine street life for the first time. Shirley wasn't sure she wanted it either, but we were each too poised in tactful awareness of the other to say anything, and found ourselves pocketing those lovely, tissuethin, pastel-colored tickets of admission that you purchase in museums all over Italy, and following the signs through a crypt, up a dark stone stairway, through the ornate chapel proper, and into a severe, domed sacristy.

Does this smallish marble chamber, higher than it is wide, and bathed that day in the half-light of late afternoon coming through modest windows far up in its walls, constitute the pinnacle of Michelangelo's art? I don't know. Though I had known his work for years through reproductions, he was the crashingly obvious revelation of my weeks in Italy--his David seeming the perfect symbol of Florence in its boom days: larger than life, self-indulgent, virile and yet somehow narcissistic in its sensuality; his wooden torso of the River God in the Casa on Via Buonarroti, limbless and decapitated though it was, stating with unexampled power that a titanic, Archimedean energy (sufficient to turn us all into gods, did we but accede to it) lay somewhere just below the navel; and later (in Rome) the Sistine ceiling striking me as nothing less than the audacious attempt of one supremely gifted man to be done with all the possibilities of painting in a single, gigantic creation almost as encompassing as the vision of creation that it celebrates, and yet.... Well, all that was art--great art that evoked pleasure, admiration, even awe--but only art, after all. The way Madame Bovary is art, or Haydn's Farewell Symphony. Whereas Anna Karenina is somehow more than art, as is Mozart's Jupiter. And those statues in the Medici Chapel.

There was a straight-backed chair or two in that austere chamber, to which the ponderous weight of the surrounding marble seemed to impart a special, tomblike chill, and Shirley took one and sat in a corner, while I moved around, studying the four recumbent nudes (representing Day, Night, Dawn and Dusk) on the two sarcophagi. Footfalls and lowered voices echoed hollowly in the outer chapel. The traffic outside was a distant, muffled roar, sounding as obsessive as the gabble of game-playing children in the street as overheard from a quiet room. A small East Indian gentleman came in, seemed embarrassed by our presence, did a quick turn of the room with the self-effacement of a dormouse, and scurried away. I could hear my own breath.

But more, I could feel my own body. Those four life-size blocks of marble, which had been forced more than four centuries before to become flesh at the behest of a human hand, seemed more mysteriously alive than most of the bodies I had allowed myself to experience in a bed, and waves of sensual understanding swept up through me. A tendon glimmering through the flesh of an upraised thigh, a straining shoulder that limned the banded pattern of the musculature within, the soft swell of a belly firming downward to the Venus mound, the lax droop of a penis falling to one side: to know the body as Michelangelo had--the way it occupies and defines space, the way it tenses and lapses as it discovers its own solidity--and to be able to compel lifeless stone to so awaken the living spectator that the enigma of human sentience that redeems the simple meat came out clear, was to have penetrated to the sacramental core of all sexuality, to have come beyond a fixation on the erotic into the realm of a deeper longing, the longing of the soul to be a celebrant in the temple of the body.

I felt an overpowering urge to touch. I wanted to use my hands instead of my eyes. My own body trembled with creaturely sympathy, and in a flash I remembered watching a ten-year-old girl in London's Tate Gallery years before, standing in front of a Degas sculpture, unconsciously assuming the position of the dancer out of that same sympathy of flesh for flesh. Suddenly the stubborn, unmoving presence of those four bodies weighed on my consciousness with all the baffling power of a primal memory. I no longer denied that I knew what I knew. We were not broken, we were whole. All the ephemeral people hurrying through the streets were complete and perfect, and their machines were only rueful evidence of their distrust of that completeness, that perfection. We humans had recoiled from our physical selves, as from a mystery our arrogance could not abide, and the fantastically complicated watchwork we had made of modern life was nothing less than an exteriorization of that pathetic self-hatred. Standing there, I found myself mourning all the bodies I had ever trafficked with--their shames, their modesties, their lecheries--all of it: the whole sad illiteracy of our sensual vocabulary, the dance that was helplessly imprisoned in every one of us, the intellectual pride that never went before the Fall, the barren dramas of the ego to which we had forced our guileless flesh to become the corrupted accomplice. I missed a dozen girls to whom I had never been the proper lover but only played the sexual acrobat going through his paces; and half a dozen men with whom a mutual affection had remained nervously gestureless. We were whole, after all. We had only to admit it. Witless as a boy approaching a woman for the first time, I reached up and touched the smooth curve of a female thigh, and was shocked to discover that it was cold. It was nothing but marble, a piece of statuary, the dead image of a living thing, another exteriorization. And yet a compensating warmth spread through me, and I turned to Shirley.

She sat in her chair, back in the shadows, unaware of me (the hardness of the chair, the softness of her buttocks--all of a sudden I knew the tactile nature of things that way), and she seemed utterly within herself at that moment, as if some gap had closed in her (a gap in my awareness, I realized with delight). Her face was as musingly lucid as the face of a deer turned toward a sunset across which wild geese etch the long, wavering arrows that will get them home (nothing to plumb, no need to translate the expression into the mood), and she sat quietly absorbed in the statues, so completely herself, and so absolutely separate from me, that it was like seeing her for the first time. All the disappointment in Florence had drained out of her face, and her eyes were faintly moist with relief to discover that 17 years of winnowing certitude had proved insufficient to blunt the truths of 21. She had that look of mingled pride, skepticism, pleasure and irony that the triumphs of the species always evoke in those who are sensible enough to expect defeat but nevertheless refuse to relinquish hope.

The redemptive power of art in broken times came over me like a revelation. If we could still be roused by the integrity of body and spirit in these sculptures, an integrity that ultimately had nothing whatever to do with aesthetics, it must be because we were still integral ourselves somewhere beneath the cracked veneer. If the powerful mystery of sentient flesh embodied in the marble could still awaken an answering mystery in me, what real power could the automobiles and the anxieties exert? For the first time, it occurred to me that even religion might be only art in another form, instead of vice versa, and I felt a sudden lightness, almost a giddiness, of soul.

The light in the room had waned with the waning afternoon, the shadows had densened, and I had a strong sense that we were the last people in that echoing building. Shirley got up.

"Ready?" I said.

"Whenever you are."

I took her arm, and we left, and didn't look back. Outside, the chilly streets had the sere, musky smell of old leaves that always suggests New England autumn twilights to me. We negotiated the traffic hand in hand, and almost overturned a baker's boy, who was carrying an armful of fresh loaves in front of himself like a stack of logs. He shot us an angry, dark-eyed look, which turned quizzical at our smiling apologies and then dissolved into a comic shrug of the shoulders as he went on, leaving the yeasty fragrance of the warm bread behind him.

"Ummmm," Shirley murmured. "You know, it's ridiculous but I'm starved. Let's go home and get ready for Thanksgiving."

The cars flowed around the Baptistery opposite the Duomo, scooters zipping in and out among them like pilot fish, and we breasted our way upstream against throngs of secretaries hurrying homeward too. The night before, we had tried to explain about Thanksgiving to the signora of the restaurant a block from Dante's house. Finally, she had understood that it was a curious American feast, in honor of a good harvest, and she had promised us a delectable bistecca alla fiorentina and a special chianti.

Strangers celebrating their survival in a strange land. It was true of these Florentines too. It was true of all of us in this brutalizing century, through which everyone was struggling in his own way to bring some vestige of passionate mortality intact.