The Fixation
The Trattoria Giusti in the Via Giuseppi Giusti was the favoured eating place of many people who studied in Florence in the late 1970s or who, as perpetual travellers, found themselves stranded in the city. I was studying at the Kunsthistorisches Institut at the time and earning a living working as a tour guide. My friends there were two other students, an attendant at the Uffizi, a phar-macist’s daughter from Siena and a Canadian journalist couple.
The only pieces of furniture in the Trattoria were two long tables, and there was no menu. You simply sat down at one of the tables, often among complete strangers, or with a mixture of strangers and friends, chose between fish and chicken and left the rest to the chef.
The first person from home to venture forth and visit me in Florence was a woman who – don’t ask me why, I’ve no idea – went by the name of ‘Matubi Hühnchen’ – a large, blonde, shy woman who invariably responded to my witticisms by exclaiming: ‘Ooh, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you!’ Not that she ever did, mind.
Back home, she lived in a one-room attic flat above a confectioner’s. All the other apartments were unoccupied; in other words, there were lots of spare rooms with beds and fusty old furniture, and when we wanted to have sex we always decamped to one of these other rooms. When we’d finished, Matubi would sit naked on the windowsill with the curtains open and breathe in the baking smells that wafted up from below, day and night. Her snow-white body and the smell of the confectioner’s were so intertwined in my mind that, even in Florence, the aroma of warm baked buns and cakes always filled me with thoughts of summer love and homesickness. Yet this habit of sitting naked on the windowsill was the only truly liberated act of Matubi’s that I could recall.
Nor did that change when she came to see me in Florence. Everyone around us was some sort of Bohemian, yet all the two of us could think of was that we missed the aroma of confectionery. So on the second night of her visit, when I’d drunk too much Vin Santo, I confided in her:
‘I really just feel like talking wildly, no holds barred.’
To which she responded: ‘There’s plenty of time for that later.’
That second evening, I’d taken her to Trattoria Giusti, where we soon found ourselves surrounded by a group of American tourists. One of them, Peter, a painter, swam through European art like a biological cell through its surrounding medium. His main interest was in the Catalan informal artist Antoni Tàpies. He carried around a reproduction of one of his works in his wallet, and in the run-down Trattoria he was able to point out certain places where the fabric of the building had decayed in interesting ways that Tàpies would surely have found intriguing. Peter wanted to become a pupil of Tàpies, and to this end had already written him three painterly letters, liberally larded with artistic formulations and offbeat metaphors, which he hoped would persuade the master to invite him to Spain. All three letters remained unanswered.
In the meantime, though, Peter had also become interested in Greek philosophy and studied Plato’s theory of art and the edifice of ideas in Neoplatonism. It all made for a very animated evening in the Trattoria. Drink was quaffed liberally, and the discussion flowed freely between such topics as impressions from our travels, biographical snippets, cultural knowledge and jokes, with everyone chipping in where appropriate. The only surprise at the end of the night was that no one insisted on exchanging addresses. So it was and should remain, then, this one-off, unrepeatable evening, at the very last gasp of which Matubi told me that there was no future for us and that she was going to go back home early.
Some weeks later my six-square-metre room had grown too cramped for me, so I moved into a commune with two American girls, an Argentinian girl and a Turkish guy. The girl from Argentina, Anna-Maria, was, in her dark splendour, one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. Several times a week in the afternoon, she entertained her lover, a squat Neapolitan called Luigi. He’d put on Ravel’s Bolero and, as a master of his art, would arrange it so that that he and his girlfriend came to a climax in synch with the music, and as the orchestra reached a crescendo, so would they. The ensuing diminuendo would coincide with Anna-Maria’s loudest orgasmic moan, and all the while I’d be sitting in my room beneath a reproduction of Jacopo della Quercia’s ‘Tomb of Ilaria del Carretto’, shaking along in time to their exertions.
One day, there was a ring at the front door and a man’s voice enquired:
‘C’é Riccardo?’
And I responded, as arranged:
We were having trouble with the landlords, so we only let in people who gave the correct passwords. And duly, up the stairs came Peter, Peter the painter, who turned out to be a friend of one of the two American girls in the commune, or to be more precise, her discarded lover. The first thing we said when we saw one another was that we knew it, we just knew we’d run into one another again.
Since we’d last met, Peter had sold his return ticket to the US and was planning to stay in Europe to study aesthetics, visit Tàpies – who still hadn’t replied – and devote himself to his painting. For the time being, he was eking out a living renovating apartments.
Thereafter, we saw one another almost daily and shared the crises that hit the commune: Anna-Maria found out that Luigi had a wife and four kids back in Naples, the Turk got involved in pushing drugs near the Ponte Vecchio, and the clash with the landlords reached such a pitch that we took a joint decision to quit the place.
At that time Peter was living in a Benedictine-Olivetan monastery in Settignano, in the hills above Florence, a building that had once housed fifty or more monks, but where now only four were left. Accordingly just four of the remaining cells were rented to secular guests, who were only outwardly required to abide by the order’s rules: no music, no noise, and no women visitors in the cell wing, over whose exit hung a sign bearing the sombre legend: ‘Clausura’.
The abbot, Don Carlo, was so short and pot-bellied that his monk’s habit was clearly the only garb he could possibly have worn. He received me and gave me a soul-searching examination, which I passed without taxing my soul excessively. But when Peter wanted to take a photo of us both, because he liked the way the rubicund man of faith only just reached up to the height of my belt, the abbot demurred:
‘I’m not a vain man, but you really mustn’t take this photo.’
His proscription had all the force of an Old Testament ‘Thou Shalt Not’. Over the ensuing months, I came to learn all the foibles of the other monks: Don Tarcisio liked to read out loud the instruction leaflets from the tablets and other medication he took, Don Lorenzo remonstrated with politicians on the television from a distance of two metres, and Don Gabriello had two collections, a public one of perfume bottles and a private one consisting of pictures of transvestites, which he filed between the pages of a hymnal that he kept well hidden.
Don Gabriello had become a monk when he was twenty-one, but by twenty-three he’d realized that it couldn’t possibly be God’s will for a young man to be confined to a monastery from such an early age. Consequently, he had found himself committing transgressions on a regular basis. Indeed, we only addressed him as ‘Don’ out of sympathy, as he’d never actually taken holy orders, so in fact was the only ‘Fra’ among the brotherhood. Peter and I like him best out of all of them, and sometimes of an evening we’d sit either side of his high bed, in which he, cocooned in a sheath of eggshell-coloured jersey, sat looking like a large mealworm and regaled us with smutty stories.
In the mornings, we’d go and put the tables out for the two women who ran the bar on the nearby square, and eat our brioche there, before Peter headed off into the hills to paint, while I went into the institute to immerse myself in the art theory of the Early Renaissance. Sometimes we arrived at the bar in the early morning and found the mother and daughter kneeling in front of the television, where the Pope appeared briefly standing on a red carpet. After a couple of months, Peter was finally flat broke, accepted a larger renovation job in Rome, and so the plan was that I would travel with him as far as Orvieto, stopping off in Siena along the way, where we wanted to go and see the famous horse race known as the ‘Palio’ around the city’s main square.
On the eve of our departure, Peter took a couple of hefty swigs from a bulbous brown bottle of grappa, strapped all his paintings on his back and went from bar to bar, where he hoped to talk the bored owners into purchasing sketches in oil and watercolour showing corners of walls, haystacks and forlorn animals to decorate the walls of their taprooms, which were already covered with pictures. And the impossible actually happened! By the end of the evening Peter was blind drunk but had managed to offload most of his paintings, earning him enough to buy a ticket to Rome and pay off his debts. Don Carlo nodded in satisfaction: despite his handsome exterior, here was a good lad who wouldn’t end up doing a flit while still owing him rent. He’d known it all along.
From midday that day we stood on the mussel-shaped Piazza del Campo in Siena, where the racetrack had already been cordoned off and the square was soon barred to any more visitors, as the crush was already so great. A Red Cross ambulance did the rounds, picking up people who’d fainted. All round the square, small groups sat playing games, eating, sleeping or arguing.
By the time the riders in their medieval costumes – each individual representing his quarter of the city and bearing the coat of arms of his Contrada – nervously embarked on their first lap, the crowd were already yelling their support for the ‘Tower’, the ‘Ram’, the ‘Snail’, the ‘Wave’, the ‘Giraffe’, the ‘Panther’, the ‘Dragon’ and so forth.
The race itself went down in history as the Palio that had seven false starts. The jockey of the ‘Giraffe’ Contrada was injured in the melée and had to be carried off the track on a stretcher by the Red Cross. But just before he reached the open maw of the ambulance, he suddenly jumped off the trolley, got hold of his horse again and went on to win the race. The ensuing uproar culminated in a pitched street battle between the ‘Giraffe’ and ‘Tower’ districts. Although Peter and I managed to jump over the balustrade separating the rest of the square from the race track and the back alleyways and escape into one of the side streets, that was precisely where the two main fronts of the battle had converged. So, we pressed our backs against a house frontage and let the two cohorts lay into one another in front of us with raised sticks and bare fists, while residents in the upper storeys poured buckets of cold water down onto the hot-headed brawlers.
A young woman, who like us had got caught between the two warring fronts, fainted at our feet. We caught hold of her just in time, propped her up against the wall behind and waited until the fighting had moved on past us. The crush suddenly abated, the girl came to, and with us supporting her on either side, she let herself be steered into a café in one of the side streets.
Bernadette had, it transpired, come to Rome as an American au pair, in search of some cultural life. Instead, she’d found love there, and then lost it again. Her stories only gave off faint whiffs of this lost love, and as she scraped her fingers through her long brown locks and gazed into our eyes, she convinced herself that life was fated to take another romantic turn, some coup de foudre, a piece of sheer craziness, like finding herself cast into the company of two strangers in the wake of a street battle in the summer heat of Siena.
As night fell, Bernadette still hadn’t taken a step without us propping her up on either side. She’d given each of us a peck on the cheek, showing equal favour, and the instant either one of us nipped into a shop or went off to the loo for however brief a time, she gave the other such a passionate French kiss that he couldn’t help but feel he was the Chosen One. Indeed, her kisses were profligate and intemperate, she fairly launched herself into each one, flinging her bare elbow round your neck as she did so, so that you couldn’t avoid it and so she’d enjoy the experience all the more. Whenever she stopped kissing, she’d throw her head back and give a guttural laugh, which sounded a bit insane, a bit dirty, and a bit proud all at once, and sometimes she’d even wipe her lips with the back of her hand. She was determined to drive us wild, the both of us, and while she was kissing us, we were definitely also meant to feel her girl’s body nuzzling up against us as our tongues intertwined with hers at the back of our throats.
Shortly before midnight, things had progressed to such a stage that there was no question of us going our separate ways. Bernadette made no secret of the fact that she really didn’t want to be on her own. The idea was for us to find a meadow somewhere outside the city and spend the night together there. When we hesitated, she walked a few steps ahead, lifted her T-shirt almost up to her breasts, bent over and asked:
‘So, which one of you wants me?’
Men are both drawn to and terrified of women like this, while also despising them a little. But Bernadette was radiating the promise of a warm summer night, and there was enough desire in her for two. Peter was a dog, game for anything, and spreading his arms out munificently like Jesus, ceded the decision to me. I, however, was a coward, and with a curt ‘Just get on with it, you two!’ beat a retreat. As I did so, I could read two emotions in Bernadette’s eyes: regret at having to pass up on one of us, and contempt – ultimately melting into friendliness – for the bashful guy who was probably just afraid of the competition.
So, for her part, our leave-taking was so motherly as to be almost hurtful. Peter was quick to assume the role of the loyal friend who was still prepared to forego the pleasure; there were more important things when all was said and done. But in no time we’d agreed to meet up at twelve noon the next day outside the cathedral in Orvieto, and once that was settled, his lust was shameless and urgent. I headed off to the station. When I turned round to look at them one last time, Peter’s hand was grabbing her bum as if to say: look, that’s how you do it, and as they walked away she threw her head back and laughed at the night sky.
At the station, once I’d found out that the next train to Orvieto was only due to leave early next morning, I bunked down in the corner of the waiting room next to a couple of backpackers and slept for hours, though I woke in good time to catch my train.
It was just pulling into Siena station when a couple – with tousled hair and rumpled clothes – lurched onto the platform. Peter was clearly sober by this time, while Bernadette wore a blissful but deranged expression and was leaning against him, clutching his arm, with grass stains on her jeans. All Peter did by way of a farewell was give her a pretty peremptory kiss. And as the train pulled away, it was me who kept waving the longest at her as she stood there on the platform, beaming, enthusiastic, and finally sweeping her arms above her head in a wide arc – this slightly crazy young woman who was very much of her time.
On the train, the first thing Peter wanted to know was whether I was angry with him. When he found I wasn’t, he took off his brown suede jacket and presented it to me. Yet when I asked him about his night in the meadow, he shook his head and grew taciturn, like someone who had gorged himself and now had nothing to show for it but a guilty conscience. It had been too wild, too crazy, he said, he’d lost all self-control, and that wasn’t good.
It was still before midday when we pulled into Orvieto, that soaring town that seems to reach for the heavens. The cathedral stands at its highest point, scraping at the sky and alarming the populace with its outrageous visions. At one time, the local burghers must simply have jogged along, content in the knowledge that tomorrow was just another day. And then suddenly they found themselves confronted with Luca Signorelli’s fresco cycle in the San Brizio Chapel in the cathedral and must have come to believe that hell had the most beautiful naked figures and Heaven the angels with the fluffiest wings. For when, one day, the Day of Judgement arrived, they’d suddenly find themselves handed over to the grizzled ferryman Charon by the hosts of heavenly soldiers and rowed across the Styx into eternal damnation. And they’d discover that they’d failed to inform themselves about the need for repentance in good time.
Luca Signorelli, who envisaged the Last Trump and set it down in paint, was himself an enigmatic figure who came to Umbria from Tuscany. He had an obsessive interest in anatomy, and his painterly imagination was fired by Dante, whose work may be said to have influenced or even determined popular conceptions of hell for many centuries. Signorelli is even reputed to have fallen from the scaffolding once while executing his frescos, but then again nobody’s descent into hell is exactly featherbedded.
I told Peter all I knew about the fresco cycle: that it was begun at the end of the fifteenth century, that Signorelli was a contemporary, and perhaps also a rival, of Michelangelo, and that his work in Orvieto Cathedral was the largest, most ambitious depiction of the Last Judgement that had ever been attempted up to that time.
‘Here we can see,’ I lectured him, ‘that only the young and naked and pure in spirit are admitted to heaven, which recognizes no class distinctions. The base and vile, on the other hand, aren’t even let into heaven, but are simply massacred where they stand, while prostitutes are spirited away through the air by winged devils with athletic figures who torment them, and are spat at by demons. At the Apocalypse, the trees sweat blood, and blood also rains down from heaven, while the stars vanish from the firmament and the earth is consumed by fire. Skeletons emerge from the ground and put on new flesh. And they’re all fit and trim.’
Despite the fact that Peter had spent months living in a monastery and was acquainted with the motif of the Apocalypse, Signorelli’s work left him cold, particularly because of the anatomically exaggerated and decidedly un-sensual human figures, with their heads turned toward heaven. Repelled by the weak materiality of the corporeal and the painter’s evident lack of interest in material things, he launched into a paean of praise for the great Tàpies, who precisely in matters of materiality …
‘You really ought to write to him one more time!’
In the event, then, we didn’t spend long looking at the Last Judgement. Instead, Peter felt far more at home among the ancient ruins of the Etruscan period. In Orvieto, you come across these in walls and gates, burial objects and stelae. They sometimes look like they’ve developed directly from primitive art forms, so I, in my assumed role of travel guide, summoned up all the knowledge I had about the Etruscans:
‘The most important monument from the height of Etruscan culture is the Temple of Belvedere, which is thought to date from the beginning of the fifth century bc. The podium of this ceremonial complex, which was purposefully sited to afford it a panoramic view over the Paglia Valley, is built on a natural rocky outcrop. A flight of steps leads to two lines of columns, behind which are three stone chambers, one leading on from the other. From the position of the complex, scholars surmised that this was where haruspices – seers trained in the art of reading entrails and other auguries – brought their human sacrifices. In addition, many terracotta artefacts from the Etruscan period were excavated here, primarily small decorative architectural adornments, along with the bronze figurine of a female dancer and a number of larger figural reliefs, in which the influence of the Greek sculptor Phidias and echoes of the Parthenon frieze were identified.’
The Etruscan burial chambers cut into the tufa rock cliffs around Orvieto, notably those at Crocifisso del Tufo and Canicella, yielded a particularly rich haul of finds. Yet even more was to come: when, some years back, a landslide dislodged a large chunk of the tufa outcrop on which Orvieto is built and sent it crashing down into the valley, it happened to expose one of the ancient burial sites, and the city’s inhabitants tried to identify through binoculars what the chambers that were now laid bare contained. When Peter and I attempted to do the same, all we could make out was soil, ancient soil.
In the afternoon, we went for a dip in the river, and while I lay listening on the sandy bank, Peter, who was standing in the reed beds, recounted to me the twelve ways in which you could inadvertently drive the woman who loved you to give you the elbow. These included; always talking too loudly, having to have jokes repeated and explained to you, wiping your runny nose on your sleeve and giving a running commentary on it … Never again have I encountered a guy who exerted such a magnetic pull on women.
I went down to the station with him in the evening, and as the train pulled out, his hand stayed sticking motionless out of the compartment window in farewell, even when the train began to tilt into the curve and disappear from view. Then, all of a sudden, there were two policeman at my side. They seized me by the right and left elbow, led me away and interrogated me in a small office in the station building; who was the man I’d just seen off? What had we talked about down at the river? Where did we come from and why wasn’t I telling them the truth? From outside came the sound of birdsong, occasionally interspersed with the clanging of the level crossing bell as the barrier was lowered.
I submitted willingly to their questioning, answering them readily, precisely and exhaustively. To this day, I have no idea what these two policeman wanted from me. When they finally released me, I got the feeling that grilling me had simply been an amusing way for them to kill time, or maybe they’d just wanted to practice their interrogation technique on me, but in any event my train to Florence was long gone by that stage. I stayed one more night at our Locanda in Orvieto and set off on my return journey a day late.
Three weeks later, I met a German singer on the streets of Florence, and spent an evening with him and his coterie of expats and transients in the garden of the Villa Scifanoia in San Domenico, just outside Fiesole. This motley crew had taken up residence there and because the night was so exquisite, we just didn’t want it to end. I only made it back to my monastery in Settignano as dawn was breaking the next day and had managed to grab no more than two hours’ sleep when I was woken by someone shaking my shoulder. My friend Antonio, the Uffizi attendant, was kneeling at my bedside, repeating the same phrase over and over:
‘Tanti saluti di Bernadette!’
At first, I could make no connection between his face, my room in the ‘Clausura’ and the name Bernadette.
‘She was here,’ Antono whispered. ‘Una vera donna!’
It seems that she’d arrived late on the previous afternoon and sat waiting for me on the low wall outside the monastery as evening fell. When night fell, the monks took her inside, and Don Carlo allowed her to sit in the refectory, outside the ‘Clausura’ and wait for me. Antonio came and sat with her to keep her company, entertaining her with his fund of funny stories. Even so, after a couple of hours, when he asked her whether she’d rather he left her in peace, she’d replied ‘Yes’ and then spent a while working on a drawing – here, he showed me it – after which he’d sat by her again in the dim light in the empty, echoing refectory, by the window that looked out over the distant city. At 3 a.m. she’d finally decided to leave; Antonio walked her out to the taxi and was rewarded with a kiss on each cheek.
The drawing showed one of the standard-bearers from the Palio in full costume. The flag he was carrying was emblazoned with Bernadette’s message to me:
‘Hi, lover! I’ve spent half the night waiting for you. It’s two in the morning now. I’ve finally managed to shake off that pain in the neck Antonio, your Uffizi attendant friend, for a bit. I’ll give him this so that you’ll know I sat up half the night waiting for you. I’ve got to get back to Rome now. Then I’m flying back to Denver from Rome. Leave me not,’ she signed off, ‘Be here.’
And beneath she’d printed, all in capitals, her full address in the States, including the apartment block number and the floor she lived on.
Not long after, I left Settignano and returned to Germany. Bernadette and I wrote each other long, fond and convoluted letters – hers covered in a mass of little doodles and drawings, interrupted by clauses in parenthesis, and embellished with stars, annotations, footnotes and inserts, while mine were full of innuendo, double-entendres and excessive presumption. We kept up our airy-fairy and mutually titillating correspondence until the following summer. Then she sent me a photo, which showed her standing on the sidewalk next to a broad American boulevard, laughing. She was leaning toward the camera, and on the left side of her head, a ponytail dangled down as far as her waist. There was something unwholesome about the way she was laughing, despite the fact that a little dog was nuzzling round her feet and that she was bathed in strong, warm light.
Oh, Bernadette, I thought, that’s you all right, and recalled how she’d collapsed into our arms at the Palio and conjured up the image of her stumbling onto the station platform, propped up on Peter’s arm and with her jeans covered in grass stains, after several hours spent doing things that Peter had called ‘not good, not right’.
A week later I got back to my place in the small hours – life back home had finally begun to pick up pace again – only to be greeted by a high-pitched yelp of delight that filled the room when I checked my messages on the answerphone: ‘Guess who-hoo?’
So euphoric it was positively scary.
She’d done it! She’d finally done it, and she was free, free at last! She didn’t say from what, but she was clear about the upshot: ‘I’m coming!’
No later than twenty days precisely from then, she’d be expecting me at twelve o’clock sharp inside the cathedral in Orvieto, in front of Luca Signorelli’s Last Judgement naturally, ‘to reinvent history,’ as she put it. There followed some brief chitchat, which was hard to grasp as it was evidently being drowned out by the street noise of Denver wafting in through her apartment window. Then came another exuberant yell: ‘I’m leaving!’
Her voice, which had always been high-pitched and full of vibrato, already sounded like it was caught in the slipstream of a moving vehicle, and her sheer happiness burst into the deep German night of my room like a communication from another plane of existence.
There was no point calling her or writing her, she’d told me. She was already on the move.
‘Just be there,’ she shouted joyfully and hung up, though it sounded like she kept on talking all the same. I played the tape a second and third time. Fascinating. Whatever we did in Orvieto, whoever we were, it would have very little to do with the world we were leaving to hook up with one another again. My fantasy life was at something of a low ebb, and I was keen to exorcise the memory of the coward who’d wandered off to the station that time. It was summer. I dreamt of grass stains and bought myself a train ticket to Orvieto.
Climbing up the steps to the cathedral, which on this midday was shrouded in the same shimmering heat haze as the year before, I was overtaken by a brief spasm of unease at this reenactment. Wasn’t life slipping back all too readily into a wornout posture? The flight of steps, the façade, the sunlight, the smell of the warm stones were exactly as before. But my gaze took it all in much more sketchily than before; after all, this time I wasn’t there to sightsee a church, a fresco, a Last Judgement, but to meet a woman.
But that’s not how it panned out. No longer curious, but simply biding time and determined to get through viewing Signorelli’s fresco as quickly as possible, I sat myself down on the front row of pews and cast my eyes fleetingly over the paintings, whose bold and dreadful power couldn’t help but draw you in. In fact, the drastic and vulgar nature of these ruthless images, the way they so insistently strove after visual effect and impact, violated the sanctity of this space somehow. The local clergy had even given Signorelli religious instruction while he was working on the frescos. They been concerned to wring his conception of the work from him and trammel his creativity into pre-agreed lines. Yet he proved to be a recalcitrant pupil; hardly surprising when one considers how the principal work of Signorelli’s teacher Piero della Francesca, the Legend of the True Cross fresco in Arezzo, depicts, immediately to the right of the altar in the High Chapel, a workman with one testicle hanging out of his tunic.
In one of her letters, Bernadette had told me how devout she’d been as a child. At the age of seven, during communion classes, the pastor had granted her remission for all her sins. All those she’d committed up to that time were absolved, he said, and in her mind’s eye she’d envisaged the blank white sheet of paper that was her list of transgressions and thought long and hard about what new sin might be worthy of being the first one to be recorded there. She’d duly stolen the pastor’s eraser, and was quite pleased with this new sin of hers.
While he was working on his fresco cycle, Signorelli conducted anatomical experiments with cadavers. He’d also painted his dead son, to keep his memory alive, and had learned how to use poses and facial expressions in order to portray people in crowd scenes as individuals. He twisted the corpses into unlikely contortions, experimented with the way they stood and the human body’s centres of gravity, all the while tirelessly asking himself: what is a naked person? What does he signify?
In the Resurrection of the Dead scene, and above all in The Damned Cast Into Hell, his fantasy is dangerously unchained. Here he opens up the dungeon and the images burst out. In an daring mix of the heathen and Christian worlds, he expands the act of creation out into a cosmic anarchy. Deluges loom threateningly over the horizon, while the animal world cowers in terror, errant people wander across the plain, false prophets scan the firmament for signs of hope, while many human souls have already been possessed by demons. A blood-red moon shines dimly from the heavens, and the Antichrist is seated on his throne, heeding the advice of a demon. Soldiers in black uniforms are razing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the ground. Even the elements no longer obey natural laws and are now behaving erratically and randomly.
The sky is a murky soup, the stars have been wrenched from their usual path across the heavens and almost casually are setting the whole world aflame. The seas overwhelm human settlements, fire consumes the land, earthquakes shake the ground and people are seen pressing forward up slope and out of the picture, like they’re attempting to break the illusion of pictorial space and step into the real world of the viewer, who on this day happened to be me, sitting on my pew and waiting to commit a sin that had come a long way from the original ‘resurrection of the flesh’. And for sure, there on Signorelli’s fresco, skeletons were rising up out of the ground and taking on corporeal form or blossoming forth into the full glory of their anatomical beauty, as yet still pure, conceived in God’s image, but still flesh for all that.
When she was twelve, Bernadette had told me in one of her letters, she took part in a competition to find the prettiest doll. And hers ended up winning, even though it was the ugliest, and could only move its eyes. But its owner was everyone’s favourite back then, pretty as a picture and with exclusively cute friends, and if all that wasn’t enough, a perfect black dog called ‘Arrow’ too. Bernadette had her first kiss in the graveyard behind her house. No sooner had she been kissed than she resolved never to undergo such an intense experience again.
‘Why?’ asked the boy, who was four years older than her.
‘Because it’s a sin,’ she replied.
‘What’s so sinful about it exactly?’ the boy pressed her.
‘I dunno,’ she answered, ‘but it sure felt like a sin. That’s all I know.’
The next day, she spent ages trying to explain to the lustful boy what a sin was. As she was doing so, ‘Arrow’ was run over by a car. Whereupon she stopped talking to the boy entirely, and instead, with a guilty conscience, gave him the push instead.
Signorelli’s pictorial spaces are dramatic stages, and he sees the end of the world in very theatrical terms, with the descent to Earth of the Antichrist, a scene that is evoked in the Apocrypha, in the chronicler Jacopo da Voragine’s Golden Legend, or in the visions of St Brigitte of Sweden. It is a matter of ultimate questions and last things, with humanity required to awake to a new life. It is the end of the world; the Cumaean Sibyl points to her ‘book of prophesies’, where ships are shown teetering on the crests of waves, the ruins of ancient buildings stand as stark warnings, a bank of cloud the colour of spilt blood lowers in the sky, an impending firestorm threatens in the background, while in the foreground a throng of mercenaries and soldiers, devils and demons advances. But in all this, the aspect of the painting that appears so nightmarishly personal is the pedantic way in which Signorelli dissects a mass fate into a whole series of individual dramas.
An artistic soul, too artistic for her home environment of Denver, shone through the personal vignettes that Bernadette’s letters sketched out for me. She wrote about her early boyfriends – handsome bores who wanted to save themselves for marriage, a slacker, a guy called Elwyn who she loved in a platonic way and with whom she went on seven-mile walks every day. But the inside of his mouth turned her stomach.
Later, she’d had a dog called Bronco. It was run over one time when she was out walking with Elwyn. She promptly made up her mind never to go out with him again, and as she was telling him this, she kept her eyes fixed firmly on the chamber of horrors behind his open lips. That made it easier to ignore his tears.
After this resolution and Bronco’s death she also took a long hard look at herself and decided henceforth to live like an Amish girl, keeping her eyes lowered, wearing plain black and white clothing, singing folk songs and renouncing the world of technology. That did her a power of good. Friends in the city started to think she’d gone into a convent. But in actual fact, adopting a supposedly Amish lifestyle was just her surreptitious way of neglecting herself. She duly woke up one day in hospital. Days of her life had gone missing, and all she felt was a strong urge to eat some ice cream again. She conducted running battles with the nurses, the well-meaning, strong nurses with the calloused hands. She was determined to stay there, but all to no avail; in due course, she was sent back out into the wide world again.
‘Since the age of fourteen I’ve been living in a state of disillusion,’ she wrote, and after emerging from her spell in hospital she drifted into university, where she attempted a dual-track approach to her education, thinking in epicurean terms and avoiding the platonic. But Marlon, the only toy boy she could ever have imagined in her life, escaped the tidal wave of desire she felt herself being born aloft on in the nick of time and went to Europe.
In the Resurrection of the Flesh, Signorelli’s figures are not seen climbing out of graves. Rather, these bodies emerge straight out of a barren field and take on fleshly form. On the open expanses, people gather, transfixed by the state of emergency, and seeking safety in numbers in this situation of general confusion. The only figures that stand separate from these knots of humanity are those who are beheading, tormenting or liquidating others.
On their way to the place of judgement, the damned are led through hell, where a woman stands burning in the infernal abyss. The naked bodies writhe in an orgy of disinhibition, given over to the excess which at the Apocalypse goes hand-in-hand with a surfeit of lust. On a bare stage in Purgatory waits inescapable damnation, and the mass of people, shot through with a complex rhythmic pattern like in bebop jazz, swells back and forth, and up and down, leaving us with the impression that nothing exists under this dismal firmament other than a despairing humanity, united only in their attempt to escape.
And what is humanity’s lot here; more specifically, what is the fate of women in this world? Exposed to a sovereign form of sadism, they find themselves subjected to every kind of humiliation. Their nude state is not that of Paradise, but of pornography. They are thrown to the ground, kicked head-over-heels out of heaven with their legs splayed; they are shown being bound and beaten, run over and bitten, abducted and dragged by the hair. Their naked bodies, depicted in the willing poses of pin-ups, abandon themselves to the cruel fantasies of the Last Judgement. Yet their nakedness, as if in some biblical men’s magazine, is already an integral part of their degradation, their punishment.
On the other hand, it is only in the context of damnation that these nudes possess any sexual identity at all. As soon as they have been raised from the dead or received into heaven, they begin to wear their naked form like an accessory. Only in damnation does their countenance become an animated human face, and their backside turn into an arse. What a chance I was being offered, here and now, just before my so hotly and obsessively imagined rendezvous, to renounce sexuality! But in the light of what had motivated me to come on this journey, I was firmly on the side of the Damned, and stimulated by the meat market of these supine bodies.
Come the early afternoon, and I was still hanging around the cathedral, sitting down occasionally on the sun-drenched steps outside the main door to warm up, and scanning the piazza, the steps and the entrances to the alleyways to see if there was anyone keeping an eye out for me from some hidey-hole. Then I went back in again to stand in front of the Last Judgement once more, where the tide of the Damned still hadn’t receded, and a monumental miniature, showing a single couple, began to attract my gaze, ever more insistently.
It was the pair of figures whom Signorelli had placed immediately over the central axis of the throng of people. The woman is naked, with her blonde hair blowing free, and is being carried on the back of a flying devil. Her anxious gaze lights upon the eyes of the angel standing to the right of her, resplendent in his armour, while the Lucifer-like winged devil who is carrying her through the air flies on unimpeded, horned and cackling, down to the pit of hell. Yet, frozen in motion above the seething mass, with no clear provenance or destination, in this moment the pair still had the potential to be anything; even the monad of an ill-matched pair of lovers who have saved themselves from damnation and taken flight.
But there was no escape.
Bernadette did not appear that day at noon, nor did she show in the afternoon, nor in the evening, when the cathedral entrance was closed. In fact, she never came, and yet in her very absence she was actually present in the most appropriate way. I was disappointed and relieved in equal measure, caught the train back to Rome as darkness fell and from there continued my journey back home the next day. There was no news awaiting me there, and when a fat letter in a padded envelope finally arrived a fortnight later, I didn’t bother opening it for several days – out of spite, for sure, but also because, standing in front of the Last Judgement in Orvieto that day, I’d grown tired of this correspondence, and decided to draw a line under it for good.
But when, in a weak moment, I did open the letter after all, an avalanche of inserts fell out into my lap: the photo of a girl at a prom; an empty packet of ‘Lucky Strikes’; a piece of silver paper; a picture of a sleeping child under an alarm clock; a drawing of a knight beneath a tree and one of a hunted deer; two plasters; a sketch of a screaming woman holding a flower and standing in the middle of a field where all the trees were screaming too; a label reading ‘Kalamata Crown Figs shipped by Jenny’; a photo copy of the address printed on the side of an eraser; a postcard with the logo of the Universal Postal Union; a piece of animal hide; a drawing of a traffic intersection with a level crossing; pictures of packers and flamingos; a colour photo showing exhausted fishermen in a boat; a copy of a painting of Dante by Signorelli; a snapshot of a summer party at a swimming pool set above an ocean; a clipping of a newspaper headline ‘Ex-altar boy steals $15 from plates’; an illustrated copy of the book Little Black Sambo, covered in kids’ scribbling; a white envelope inscribed with the word ‘Bernadette’, and inside it a blank, transparent sheet of white paper; pages torn from an old book on dog training; a list of foreign words and their translations – epigone: descendant, plethora; too full, provenance: foresight; taciturn: silent, élan: vigor; exhume: dig up, zeitgeist: ghost of time, obfuscating: to make obscure, nemesis: goddess of vengeance. The package also contained: a flag with a skull on it; an old card with the legend Volkstracht von Schapbach; sheets from a Chinese calendar; turn-of-the-century photos of children playing on a sandy beach; a drawing of a naked woman embracing a clothed man, and on the reverse a small woman riding on the back of a huge man; the draft of a logo for ‘National Pornographic’ magazine; a photo of Saturn; a skeleton playing the bongos; a picture of a Boeing 737–200; a drawing of a man holding in his arms a naked woman in the posture of the Deposition of Christ; a man and woman in front of an enormous heart; a woman standing screaming between pieces of furniture; a sketch of a rowing shadow beneath smiling stars, on the back of which were two men in a boat, pushing clouds along with the oars; some drawings with crêpe paper stuck over them; biblical quotations; a notebook full of illegible jottings, which on one page had notes under the heading ‘soundless exercises’; a drawing of a cat tearing its fur out because it was being bitten by mice; more lists of foreign words; additional photos of flamingos; more sketches of planets.
The twelve-page, densely written letter that came with all this stuff had been franked in the USA. The handwriting was so regular in its messiness I found it as pleasing to look at as the hieroglyphs on an obelisk. Her imagination rummaged through the flotsam of her life, and I kept reading dutifully in the hope that this rambling narrative might ultimately offer some explanation of her failure to appear in Orvieto. But instead she kept talking about her feeling of disorientation whenever she woke from sleep, when her desire was at its height and yet her sense of shame was no less strong. To try and explain her confusion, she gave the name ‘Saturn passing’ to one aspect of this phase, though she also called Saturn ‘the planet of wisdom’.
She wrote about a boyfriend she’d had at high school, Chester, the next in line of the Unredeemed, the Platonic ones. After he passed his high school leaving exams with flying colours, she decided give herself to him, completely. But then Chester, who waited so patiently, had to go abroad all of a sudden, ‘and I really lost it,’ as Bernadette put it. The letter went on to say that he returned as a ‘spiritual guest’. This time the story ended with her finishing high school, determined to go to Europe and work as an au pair and get herself a real love life under the heathen skies of the Old World. It had proved impossible for her to synchronize living in the USA, going to university and a having a sex life.
So during the next strong phase of ‘Saturn passing’ she’d set off for Italy and drifted around.
‘But when I look back,’ she wrote, ‘all I had left from that whole time was your address. Peter gave me a false telephone number and vanished without trace. So I came up to Florence to look you up, then to Rome, but you weren’t there either, and then on to Orvieto, and Perugia – where on earth could you be? Finally I saw you standing in an oriel window on the road to Assisi. But because I was a hitchhiker travelling in someone else’s car, I couldn’t pull over and stop. So I flew back home with your words ringing in my ears. Had you spoken those words, or had Peter translated them for me, had they resounded in my head, or had I written them down from your thoughts?’
She didn’t say what those words were, as her handwriting went totally off the rails at this point.
‘I surrender. I submit. Daniel was the first man I gave myself to, but he always had more layers of clothes on under his clothes, and I could never really get to him properly. Peter was my sin. Those two had to come first in order to clear the world between you and me. It’s all good. Don’t be angry, because they led me to you, my first true love. I’m ready. Forgive me, it took me all this time to catch my breath. Now I surrender to you and to love and to life.’
She’d added her name at the bottom, a scribble that tailed off sharply to the right. No further explanation followed, but the presence of a third party was palpable in the lines she’d written. And that was the end of her letter.
A month later, I turned on my answerphone to hear the harsh voice of a clearly older American woman, who told me in a resolute tone that a ‘travel agent’ who’d been on the ball had fortunately refused to accept Bernadette’s recent flight booking to Rome, because she seemed so distraught and confused. I should take my cue from him. He’d alerted the family, and they had decided to ‘get this young lady into custody’ and ‘put her in professional hands’. At present, then, Bernadette was in an ‘institution’, and in urgent need of psychiatric care. The last thing she needed were my irresponsible letters, which, like last week’s and the one from the week before, were no help at all, but only made things worse. ‘For Bernadette’s own protection,’ she said, ‘if you choose not to desist from such outpourings, we’ll have no choice but to burn your letters. And we also reserve the right to take legal action against you if need be.’
At that point, I hadn’t written a letter to Bernadette for the past eight weeks.
Years later I received an air mail letter from the States. My address had been printed on the envelope in capital letters, with all the painstaking care of a child clutching a pencil in its fist. The only thing inside was a reproduction of Signorelli’s devil with the broad wings, carrying off a long-haired woman over the struggling crowd and into the fires of hell. A scribbled note below read: ‘Saturn passing’. The angel of salvation in armour off to the right wasn’t in the picture.