The Sixteen Pleasures




Soho, 1994

Dell, 1995
Chapter I: Where I Want to Be

   I was twenty nine years old when the Arno flooded its banks on Friday 4 November 1966.  According to the Sunday Times the damage wasn't extensive, but by Monday it was clear that Florence was a disaster.  Twenty feet of water in the cloisters of Santa Croce; the Cimabue crucifix ruined beyond hope of restoration; panels ripped from the Baptistry doors; the basement of the Biblioteca Nazionale completely under water; hundreds of thousands of volumes waterlogged; the Archivio di Stato in total disarray.  On Tuesday I decided to go to Italy, to offer my services as a humble book conservator, to help in any way I could, to save whatever could be saved, including myself.
    The decision wasn't a popular one at home.  Papa was having money troubles of his own and didn't want to pay for a ticket.  And my boss at the Newberry Library didn't understand either.  He already had his ticket, paid for by the library, and needed me to mind the store.  There wasn't any point in both of us going, was there?
    "Then why don't I go and you can mind the store?"
    "Because because because . . ." 
    "Yes?"
    Because it just didn't make sense.  He couldn't see his way clear to granting me a leave of absence, not even a leave of absence without pay.  He even suggested that the Library might have to replace me, in which case . . .
    But I decided to go anyway.  I had enough money in my savings account for a ticket on Icelandic, and I figured I could live on the cheap once I got there.  I'd lost touch with my old classmates, but surely one of them would be willing to take me in.  Besides, I wanted to break the mold in which my life was hardening, and I thought this might be a way to do it.  Going to Florence was better than waiting around with nothing coming up.



EVERYTHING about the narrator and heroine of this novel is appealing right from the first paragraph, in which she sets out the basic facts: that she is twenty-nine and a book conservator, and has come to Florence after the famous flood, in 1966, to “save whatever could be saved, including myself.” She is taken up and subsequently exploited by a Harvard big shot on the flood scene, but she moves on, landing in a cloistered convent. There she is in the dodgy position of trying to save the convent’s invaluable library, not only physically but financially, through the potentially illegal sale of a volume of sixteenth-century pornographic pictures and sonnets. Although she is attracted to monasticism, her bibliographical dealings involve her instead with a sexy Italian art restorer–against whom the abbess, his cousin, warns her, saying that he has “no soul.” What is amazing here is how intensely you care about everything that happens to this woman, and not just in the obvious matters of love and money: the suspense is so sharp that you find yourself checking ahead to make sure she doesn’t miss a train. Like her, the book is modest, resourceful, and without malice–it is high-minded and fine. So after skipping ahead to slow your heart you go back to read each elegantly moving word.   —The New Yorker

I could look out my window in the morning and down on a little fruit market. I took dozens of pictures of it but never got it quite right.



   From Fiesole to Settignano.

We'd pour over our map as we went along, but then we'd get to talking and pretty soon
we'd be lost. but then we'd run into a road, or we'd come up to the edge of the valley
and find the city at our feet: the Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio, Santa Croce, Santa Maria
Novella, the Uffizi, the Pitti Palace, theBadia, the Bargello, the green dome of theSynagogue, right across the street from our first apartment. This was Mama's city, her spiritual home, the place where it all began: Giotto, Michelangelo, Leonaardo, the Medici...., the cradle of the Renaissance, the discovery of the world and of man.   
      But there was another city too, my city. My city was the Liceo Morgagni and the Paperback Book Exchange on Via Fiesolana, and the bar behind the Mercato Centrale where you could get real American ham- burgers, with everything on them.... My city was bus passes and the old cheese factory where we had our gym class once a week, and all the apartments where I could ring the bell and someone would be glad to see me.  



One of the things that used to turn up when Mama and I got lost on our walks was the beautiful little cemetery just before you get to Settignano.  We'd come out of the woods, or up over a little rise, or around a curve on whatever path we happened to be following, and there it would be, and we'd know where we were.  The little village would be just up ahead with another Communist bar, another Casa del Popolo, where we'd stop for something to drink before taking the bus down to the city.
      About four or five times a year Ann Landers prints a letter from someone advising readers to tell their loved ones that they love them--before it's too late. Whenever I read one of those letters I think of Mama and her tapes.  But the analogy is imperfect; the moral is not the same. Mama was trying to tell us.
      But then what is the moral?
      Check all your equipment?  Well, of course.  The problem, it turned out, was with the new remote punch in/out switch, which had been activating the tape recorder without engaging the recording heads. Papa hadn't used it in the three years since Mama's death, so he'd never discovered that it hadn't been working properly. He sent the tapes to the Ampex laboratory in Schenectady, New York, to have them analyzed on the off chance that a weak signal had gotten through, but there was nothing to be recovered.  The tapes were virginal. 
       So, by all means, check all your equipment. Yes. But that's a moral for the head, not the heart. What can I say about the heart?
       I suppose the real question is, why does it matter so intensely? What could Mama have said that would have altered the course of our lives?
       I think about this question a lot--not all the time, but often enough--without coming any closer to an answer.  All I know is that my life is filled with little pockets of silence. When I put a record on the turntable, for example, there's a little interval--between the time the needle touches down on the record and the time the music actually starts--during which my heart refuses to beat. All I know is that between the rings of the telephone, between the touch of a button and the sound of the radio coming on, between the dimming of the lights at the cinema and the start of the film, between the lightning and the thunder, between the shout and the echo, between the lifting of a baton and the opening bars of a symphony, between the dropping of a stone and the plunk that comes back from the bottom of a well, between the ringing of the doorbell and the barking of the dogs I sometimes catch myself, involuntarily, listening for the sound of my mother's voice, still waiting for the tape to begin.   

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