Whenever she is sick, home from school, Clara the child is allowed to examine her mother’s Italian postcards, a large pile of them, which are normally bound with a thick leather band and kept in a bureau drawer. Years later when she touches postcards she will be amazed that her hands are so large. Perhaps she feels that the hands of a child are proportionally correct to rest like book ends on either side of landscapes. Or maybe it’s not that complicated; maybe she just feels that, as an adult, she can’t really see these colours, those vistas, and so, in the odd moments when she does, she must necessarily be a child again.
The room she lies in on weekdays, when she has managed to stay home from school, is all hers. She’ll probably carry it around with her for the rest of her life. Soft grey wallpaper with sprays of pink apple blossom. Pink dressing table (under the skirts of which her dolls hide, resting on their little toy beds), cretonne curtains swathed over a window at the foot of the bed she occupies, two or three pink pillows propping her up. Outside the window a small back garden and some winter city or another. It doesn’t really matter which.
And then the postcards; turquoise, fuchsia, lime green—improbable colours placed all over the white spread and her little hands picking up one, then another, as she tries to imagine her mother walking through such passionate surroundings.
In time, her mother appears at the side of the bed. Earlier in the morning she brought the collection of postcards. Now she holds a concoction of mustard and water wrapped in white flannel and starts to undo the little buttons on the little pyjama top.
While the mustard plaster burns into her breastbone Clara continues to look at the postcards. Such flowers, such skies, such suns burning down on such perfect seas. Her mother speaks the names of foreign towns; Sorrento, she says, Capri, Fiesole, Garda, Como, and then after a thoughtful pause, You should see Como. But most of all you should see Pompeii.
Clara always saves Pompeii, however, until the end, until after her mother has removed the agonizing poultice and has left the room—until after she has gone down the stairs and has resumed her orderly activities in the kitchen. Then the child allows the volcano to erupt, to spill molten lava all over the suburban villas, the naughty frescos, the religious mosaics. And all over the inhabitants of the unsuspecting ancient town.
In the postcards Pompeii is represented, horrifyingly, fascinatingly, by the inhabitants themselves, frozen in such attitudes of absolute terror or complete despair that they teach the child everything she needs to know about heartbreak and disaster: how some will put their arms up in front of their faces to try to ward it off, how others will resign themselves, sadly, to its strength. What she doesn’t understand is how such heat can freeze, make permanent, the moment of intensest pain. A scream in stone that once was liquid. What would happen, she wonders, to these figures if the volcano were to erupt again? How permanent are they?
And she wonders about the archaeologists who have removed the stone bodies from the earth and, without disturbing a single gesture, have placed them in glass display cases inside the museum where they seem to float in the air of their own misfortune … clear now, the atmosphere empty of volcanic ash, the glass polished.
These are the only postcards of Pompeii that Clara’s mother has. No bright frescos, no recently excavated villas, no mosaics; only these clear cases full of grey statues made from what was once burning flesh.
Twenty-five years later when Clara stands with her husband at the entrance to Hotel Oasie in Assisi she has seen Sorrento, Como, Capri and has avoided Pompeii altogether.
“Why not?” her husband asks.
“Nobody lives there,” she replies.
But people live here, in this Umbrian hill town; the sun has burned life into their faces. And the colours in the postcards were real after all—they spill out from red walls into the vegetable displays on the street, they flash by on the backs of overdressed children. Near the desk of the hotel they shout out from travel posters. But in this space there is no sun; halls of cool remote marble, sparse furnishings, and, it would seem, no guests but themselves.
“Dinner,” the man behind the desk informs them, “between seven and nine in the big salon.”
Then he leads them, through arched halls, to their room.
Clara watches the thick short back of the Italian as she walks behind him, realizing as she does that it is impossible to imagine muscle tone when it is covered by smooth black cloth. She looks at the back of his squarish head. Cumbersome words such as basilica, portcullis, Etruscan and Vesuvius rumble disturbingly, and for no apparent reason, through her mind.
Once the door has clicked behind them and the echoing footsteps of the desk clerk have disappeared from the outside hall, her husband examines the two narrow beds with displeasure and shrugs.
“Perhaps we’ll find a way,” he says, “marble floors are cold.” Then looking down, “Don’t think these small rugs will help much.”
Then, before she can reply, they are both distracted by the view outside the windows. Endless olive groves and vineyards and a small cemetery perched halfway up the hill. Later in the evening, after they have eaten pasta and drunk rough, red wine in the enormous empty dining room, they will see little twinkling lights shine up from this spot, like a handful of stars on the hillside. Until that moment it will never have occurred to either of them that anyone would want to light a tomb at night.
Go and light a tomb at night
Get with child a mandrake root.
Clara is thinking Blake … in Italy of all places, wandering through the empty halls of Hotel Oasie, secretly inspecting rooms. All the same so far; narrow cots, tiny rugs, views of vineyards and the graveyard, olive trees. Plain green walls. These rooms, she thinks, as Blake evaporates from her mind, these rooms could use the services of Mr. Domado’s Wallpaper Company, a company with one employee—the very unhappy Mr. Domado himself. He papered her room once when she was a sick child and he was sick with longing for his native land. When Italian postcards coincidentally littered her bedspread like fallen leaves. Ah, yes, said Mr. Domado, sadly picking up one village and then another. Ah, yes.
And he could sing … Italian songs. Arias that sounded as mournful as some of the lonelier villages looked. Long, long sobbing notes trembling in the winter sunshine, while she lay propped on pink pillows and her mother crept around in the kitchen below silently preparing mustard plasters. Mr. Domado, with tears in his voice, eliminating spray after spray of pink apple blossoms, replacing them with rigid geometric designs, while Clara studied the open mouths of the stone Pompeii figures and wondered whether, at the moment of their death, they were praying out loud. Or whether they were simply screaming.
Screaming, she thinks now, as she opens door after door of Hotel Oasie, would be practically a catastrophe in these echoing marble halls. One scream might go on for hours, as her footsteps seem to every time she moves twenty feet or so down to the next door, as the click of the latch seems to every time she has closed whatever door she has been opening. The doors are definitely an addition to the old, old building and appear to be pulled by some new longitudinal force back into the closed position after her fingers release their cold, steel knobs. Until she opens the door labelled Sala Beatico Angelico after which no hotel room will ever be the same.
Neither Clara nor her husband speak Italian, so to ask for a complete explanation would be impossible.
“A Baroque church!” she tells him later. “Not a chapel but a complete church. All the doors are the same, this door is the same except for the words on it, and you open it and there, instead of a hotel room, is a complete church.”
“It appears,” he says after several moments of reflection, “that we have somehow checked into a monastery.”
Sure enough, when she takes herself out to the rose garden later in the afternoon to sit in the sun and to read The Little Flowers of Santa Chiara in preparation for the next day’s trip to the basilica, the hotel clerk greets her, dressed now in a clerical collar. Clara shows no surprise, as if she had known all along that hers was not to be a secular vacation; as if the idea of a retreat had been in her mind when she planned the trip. She shifts the book a little so that the monastic gardener will notice that she is reading about St. Francis’s holy female friend. He, however, is busy with roses; his own little flowers, and though he faces her while he works his glance never once meets hers. She is able, therefore, to observe him quite closely … the dark tan of his face over the white of his collar, his hands, which move carefully but easily through the roses, avoiding thorns. Clara tries, but utterly fails, to imagine the thoughts of a priest working in a rose garden. Are they concerned, as they should be, with God … the thorns, perhaps, signifying a crown, the dark red stain of the flower turning in his mind to the blood of Christ? Or does he think only of roses and their health … methods of removing the insect from the leaf … the worm from the centre of the scarlet bud? His face gives her no clue; neither that nor the curve of his back as he stoops to remove yet another vagrant weed from the soft brown earth surrounding the bushes.
Clara turns again to her book, examining the table of contents; “The Circle of Ashes,” “The Face in the Well,” “The Hostage of Heaven,” “The Bread of Angels,” “The Meal in the Woods,” and finally, at the bottom of the list, “The Retinue of Virgins.” St. Francis, she discovers, had never wanted to see Chiara. The little stories made this perfectly clear. Sentence after sentence described his aversion. After he had clothed her in sackcloth and cut off all her hair in the dark of the Italian night, after he had set her on the path of poverty and had left her with her sisters at St. Damien’s, after she had turned into a hostage of heaven and had given up eating all together, Francis withdrew. Beware of the poison of familiarity with women, he had told his fellow friars. In a chapter entitled “The Roses,” the book stated that Francis had wanted to place an entire season between himself and Chiara. We will meet again when the roses bloom, he had said, standing with his bare feet in the snow. Then God had decided to make the roses bloom spontaneously, right there, right then, in the middle of winter.
Clara cannot decide, now, what possible difference that would make. As a matter of fact, it looks to her as if God were merely playing a trick on Chiara and Francis. If Francis said they would meet again when the roses bloom, why not have the roses bloom right now? Perhaps then there would be no subsequent meeting since the roses had already bloomed. This would have certainly been a puzzle for Chiara to work on during the dreary winter days that stretched ahead of her in the unheated convent. She could have worked it over and over in her mind like a rosary. It might have kept her, in some ways, very busy.
Francis, on the other hand, was always very busy. As the book said: Francis came and went freely from St. Mary of the Angels hut Chiara found herself like a prisoner at St. Damien’s. Francis might have dropped by to see Chiara while he was out rushing around, but he didn’t. On the other hand, Francis stayed well away from St. Damien’s, the book continued, for he did not wish the common people should take scandal from seeing him going in and out. So basically, it would appear that poor Chiara, poison that she was, rarely spoke to her mentor; the man whose principles she built her life around. At least not until “The Meal in the Woods.”
After she had asked him repeatedly to share a meal with her, Francis finally relented. Speaking, once again to his fellow friars (he seemed never to have spoken to Chiara), he argued, She has been a long time at St. Damien’s. She will be happy to come out for a little while and to see in the daytime that place to which she first came at night, where her hair was cut from her, and where she was received among us. In the name of Jesus Christ we will picnic in the woods. Somehow, during the course of this unusual picnic, the woods began to glow as if they were on fire. It is not clear to Clara whether God or Francis was responsible for this miracle. It may have been a collaboration. It is perfectly clear, however, that Chiara had nothing to do with it. Her role was that of appreciator—one that she, no doubt, played very well. And, as usual, she wasn’t eating. The chapter ends with this statement: Finally Chiara and Francis rose from the ground, overjoyed and filled with spiritual nourishment, not having touched as much as a crumb of the food.
Clara is beginning to feel hungry. Delicious smells are coming from what she now knows is the refectory. The gardener is placing his tools, one by one, in the wheelbarrow. Then, without looking in her direction, he pushes the little vehicle away from her, towards the potting shed.
“Our hotel clerk,” she informs her husband at dinner, “is a gardener as well as a priest. I was reading up on my namesake out on the terrace and I saw him in the garden, working away.”
“I discovered the other part of the building,” her husband replies. “There is a glass door with Keep Out written on it in four languages, and then an entire wing where the priests must stay when they open the place to tourists.”
“You didn’t peek?” asks Clara, fully aware that, had she discovered it, she might have opened the door.
“No … written rules you know,” and then, “Have you decided to like your namesake? Do you think you take after her?”
Clara reflects for a while. “I think she was a very unhappy woman. She kept on wanting to see Francis and he kept not wanting to see her.”
“Probably just propriety, don’t you think? You can’t have Saint Francis spending a lot of time hanging around the convent you know, wouldn’t look good.”
“Possibly … but maybe it was just an excuse. Maybe he really didn’t want to see her. The poor girl … she was in love with him, I expect. He was probably God to her.”
“Maybe he was in love with her … did that ever occur to you? Maybe that’s why he stayed away.” Her husband glances down to the end of the room. “Look who’s Coming,” he says. “Our desk clerk is not only a gardener and a priest, he is also a waiter.”
The next afternoon Clara decides she will not visit the basilica after all. She would rather read in the rose garden than gaze at frescos.
“Later,” she tells her husband. “You check it out, tell me about it.”
Postcard views and skies are outside the walls of the hotel as usual, and now the closer, more exaggerated colours of the roses. It is hotter than the previous day so the priest has abandoned his collar. Clara notices that he has a perfect mole situated right in the centre of his throat. A sort of natural stigmata, she decides.
The chapter entitled “The Door of the Dead” fascinates her. She is reading it for the fourth time. It seems that the ancient houses in Assisi often had two doors; a large one through which the family normally came and went, and a smaller one, elevated above the ground, through which the dead were passed, feet first in their coffins. Chiara, on the night she went to meet Francis in the woods, decided to leave the house through the second door. She wanted to get away secretly, the book states, and she was absolutely sure she would meet no one on the threshold of that door. With the help of a minor miracle on God’s part she was able to slide bolts and move hinges that had been rusted in position for fifteen years. Then she jumped lightly to the ground and ran out of the village. Never again would she be able to return to her family, the chapter concludes, Chiara was dead. Chiara was lost. Chiara had passed over into another life.
Clara wonders if the priest, who is working directly in front of her, has also passed over into another life, and whether, if this is so, the roses look redder to him than they do to her. Whether he lives a sort of Through the Looking Glass existence.
She adjusts the angle of her chair. He is working close enough now that their shadows almost touch. A vague sadness stirs near Clara’s heart, stops, then moves again. Restless lava shifting somewhere in the centre of a mountain.
Her husband has decided that they will stay at Hotel Oasie for the remainder of their vacation. He likes it there. He likes Assisi. He is moved by all of it; as much, he says, by the electrified confessionals in the basilica as by the Giottos. He claims that the former are like the washrooms on a jumbo jet in that they have automatic occupied and vacant signs that are lighted from behind. He is amazed, he continues, at how easily the Italians have adapted their highly superstitious religion to modern technology … the lighted tombs, the electric candles in front of religious statues, the occupied signs. This amuses and pleases him. He will write a sociological paper on it when they return to North America.
She isn’t listening to him very carefully because she has fallen in love, just like that, bang, with the gardener, waiter, desk clerk, priest. She has, by now, spent four long afternoons with him in the rose garden and he has never once looked her way. Unless, she speculates, he looks her way when she is absorbed in The Little Flowers of Santa Chiara, which is possible. On the third afternoon she made up a little rule for herself that she would not lift her eyes from the book until a chapter was completely finished. In that way she has balanced her activities. Ten minutes of reading followed by ten minutes of studying the priest. This means, of course, that he is never in the same location after she finishes reading “The Door of the Dead” as he was after she finished reading, say, “A Kiss For the Servant.” She is then forced to look around for him which makes the activity more intriguing. One afternoon, after finishing the chapter called “Infirmity and Suffering,” she looked up and around and discovered that he had disappeared completely, simply slipped away while she was reading. Almost every other time, though, she is able to watch him collect his tools, place them in the wheelbarrow and walk towards the potting shed. And this makes her grieve a little, as one often does when a lengthy ritual has been appropriately completed.
“Did you know,” she asks her husband angrily at dinner, “Did you know that he wouldn’t even let her come to see him when he was dying? I mean, isn’t that taking it a bit too far? The man was dying and she asked if she could see him and he said no … not until I’m dead.”
The priestly waiter serves the pasta. Clara watches his brown left hand approach the table and withdraw. “Scusi,” he says as he places the dish in front of her. She cannot accuse him of never speaking to her. He has said Scusi in her presence now a total of seventeen times and once, when a meal was over, he looked directly into her eyes and had asked, “You feeneesh?”
Now she stabs her fork deliberately into the flesh of the ravioli. “Moreover,” she continues, “that little book I am reading has next to nothing to do with Chiara … mostly it’s about Francis … until he dies, of course … then it’s about her dying.” Forgetting to chew, Clara swallows the little piece of pasta whole.
“Well,” says her husband, “at least Giotto included her in some of the frescos.”
“Hmm,” she replies, unimpressed.
Clara gazes at the priest and her heart turns soft. He is staring absently into space. Imagining miracles, she decides, waiting out the dinner hour so that he can return to his quiet activities. Evening mass, midnight mass. Lighting candles, saying prayers. Does he make them up or follow rituals? Are there beads involved? Does he kneel before male or female saints? Any of this information would be important to her. Still, she would never dare enter the church she has discovered at the end of the hall. In fact, with the exception of the basilica with its electrified confessionals and famous frescos, she has not dared to open the door of any church in town. They are spaces that are closed to her and she knows it.
“Have you ever felt that a church was closed to you?” she asks her husband.
“Of course not,” he answers. “After all, they are not only religious institutions … they are great public monuments, great works of art. They are open to all of us.”
Clara sighs and turns her eyes, once again, to the priest. The way he is carrying the crockery back to the kitchen, as if it were a collection of religious artifacts he has recently blessed, almost breaks her heart.
It is her fifth afternoon in the rose garden. He is there too, of course, pinning roses onto stakes. “Crucifying them perhaps,” she thinks vaguely, lovingly.
By now she knows that this man will never ever respond to her, never ever speak to her; not in his language or hers—except at meal time when it is absolutely necessary. Because of this, the sadness of this, she loves him even harder. It is this continuous rejection that sets him apart. Rejection without object, without malice, a kind of healing rejection; one that causes a cleansing ache.
The ache washes over her now as she watches him stand back to survey his labours. She loves the way he just stands there looking, completely ignoring her. She is of absolutely no consequence in the story of his life, none whatsoever, and she loves him for this. She has no desire for change; no mediaeval fantasies about being the rose that he fumbles with, the saint that he prays to. She wants him just as he is, oblivious to her, causing her to ache, causing her to understand the true dimensions of hopelessness, how they are infinite.
She turns to the chapter in the book called “The Papal Bull.” This is an oddly political section and her least favourite. It concerns the legitimization of the various Franciscan orders including Santa Chiara’s Poor Sisters; the legitimization of lives of chosen self-denial. At this point Clara is finding it difficult to concentrate on what the Pope had to say, finds it difficult to care whether it was legitimate or not.
She is surprised, when she allows herself to look up, to find the priest’s gaze aimed in her direction. She prepares to be embarrassed until she realized that he is, at last, reading the title of her book.
“She wanted words from him,” Clara tells her husband later. “Words, you know, spiritual advice. You know what she got instead?”
“What?”
“She got a circle of ashes … a circle of goddamn ashes! The book tries to make this seem profound … the usual, he put a circle of ashes on the convent floor to demonstrate that all humans were merely dust or some such nonsense. You know what I think it meant? I think it meant that regardless of what Chiara wanted from him, regardless of how bad she might have wanted it, regardless of whether or not she ever swallowed a single morsel of food, or wore hair shirts, or humiliated herself in any number of ways, regardless of what she did, all she was ever going to get from him was a circle of ashes. I think it meant that she was entirely powerless and he was going to make damn certain that she stayed that way.”
“Quite a theory. I doubt the church would approve.”
“God, how she must have suffered!”
“Well,” he replies, “wasn’t that what she was supposed to do?”
In the middle of her seventh afternoon in the rose garden, after she has finished reading a chapter entitled “The Canticle of the Creatures” (which she practically knows now by heart), and while she is studying the gestures of the priest who has moved from roses to vegetables, Clara decides that her heart is permanently broken. How long, she wonders, has it been this way? And why did it take this priest, this silent man who thinks and prays in a foreign language, to point it out to her? This is not a new disease, she knows suddenly. It’s been there for a long, long time; a handicap she had managed to live with somehow, by completely ignoring it. How strange. Not to feel that pain that is always there, by never identifying it, never naming it. Now she examines the wound and it burns in the centre of her chest the way her mother’s mustard plasters used to, the way molten lava must have in the middle of Vesuvius. Her broken heart has burned inside her for so long she assumed it was normal. Now the pain of it moves into her whole body; past the pulse at her wrists, down the fronts of her thighs, up into her throat. Then it moves from there out into the landscape she can see from the garden, covering all of it, every detail; each grey, green olive leaf, each electric candle in front of each small pathetic tomb, every bird, all of the churches she can never enter, poppies shouting in a distant field, this terrible swath of blue sky overhead, the few pebbles that cover the small area of terrace at her feet. And all the air that moves up and down her throat until she is literally gasping in pain.
Pure eruption. Shards of her broken heart are everywhere, moving through her bloodstream, lacerating her internally on their voyage from the inside out into the landscape, until every sense is raw. She can actually see the sound waves that are moving in front of her. She wonders if she has begun to shout but then gradually, gradually isolated sound dissolves into meaning as her brain begins its voyage back into the inside of her skull.
“Meesus,” the priest is saying, pointing to her book. “She is still here, Santa Chiara. You go see her … you go to Chiesa Santa Chiara … you go there and you see her.”
Then he collects his gardening tools, places them in his wheelbarrow, and walks purposefully away.
She goes alone, of course, two days later when she feels better and when she knows for sure they will be leaving Assisi the following morning. She is no longer in love with the priest; he has become what he always was, a small brown Italian busy with kitchen, clerical and gardening tools. The heartbreak, however, which preceded and will follow him is still with her, recognized now and accepted as she stands across the road from the Church of Santa Chiara watching a small cat walk on top of its shadow in the noonday sun.
Inside the door total darkness for a while, followed by a gradual adjustment of the eyes to dark inscrutable paintings and draped altars and the slow movements of two nuns who are walking towards the front of the church. She follows them, unsure now how to make her request and then, suddenly, the request is unnecessary. There, boom, illuminated by the ever present electricity, is the saint, laid out for all to see in her glass coffin. “She is, you see,” one of the nuns explains, “incorruptible. She is here seven hundred years and she does not decay because she is holy.”
Clara moves closer to see the dead woman’s face, now glowing under the harsh twentieth-century light, and there, as she expects, is the pain. Frozen on Chiara’s face the terrifying, wonderful pain; permanent, incorruptible, unable to decay. The dead mouth is open, shouting pain silently up to the electricity, past the glass, into the empty cave of the church, out into the landscape, up the street to the basilica where images of the live Chiara appear, deceitfully serene, in the frescos. It is the heartbreak that is durable, Clara thinks to herself, experiencing the shock of total recognition. Everything else will fade away. No wonder the saint didn’t decay. A flutter of something sharp and cutting in Clara’s own bloodstream and then she turns away.
Before she steps out into the street again she buys a postcard from one of the nuns. Santa Chiara in her glass coffin, as permanent as a figure from Pompeii in her unending, incorruptible anguish.
Clara places the card in an inside pocket of her handbag. There it will stay through the long plane ride home while her husband makes jokes about the washrooms resembling Italian confessionals. It will stay there and she will clutch the leather close to her broken heart; clutch the image of the dead woman’s mouth. The permanent pain that moves past the postcard booth into the colours of the Italian landscape.