L’Ultimo Addio, Last Views Of The Ponte Vecchio

Ice crystals creep across the window hours before dawn on our last night in Florence. Rain has been forecast, but the night is clear and icy. The alarm has just waked us at 2 AM; we must be outside with all our luggage, the apartment vacated, by 3 AM, when the taxi will arrive at the gate to take us to the meeting place on the lungarno where the bus from Rome first dispatched us into our Italian lives.

Flung out of sleep into groggy awareness, we stumble about, getting our balance and trying to accept the fact that we have come to the end of our grand adventure. For the last two days we have been making our good-byes.

Professor Materassi and his wife held a tea to bid us farewell, inviting an illustrious Italian publisher (who promised to consider my work for publication in Italy), the son of an American writer who was visiting in Florence, and Riccardo and the young woman, Angela, to whom he is engaged to be married. Angela, a shy, pretty woman, managed to communicate to me that she wished her English were better. I confessed that my Italian was just as lacking, and we both laughed. We clasped hands, liking one another at once.

Millie Materassi served us slices of delicious panettone, cream-filled delicacies, fruit tarts on lacey paper circles. Professor Materassi, handsome and professorial in his beard, sipped his tea and told us last-minute tales of Florence and its wonders. The Materassi’s soulful-eyed cat, Figaro, perched on the piano bench, the curve of his back a question mark. How can you leave here, was the question.

Yesterday Cornelia and I had our parting luncheon at the Grande Mondo Ristorante Cinese. We hugged good-bye over a table of plum wine, Drago chips and Primavera rolls. We promised to write to one another.

Later in the afternoon, our landlady, Rina, stopped by to settle our phone bill and to offer us a bottle of their lovely wine from the farm. We had to decline, pleading lack of space and too much weight in our bags. She thanked me, amused, for all the packages of pasta and jars of tomato sauce I was leaving behind for her.

Finally, we shared our last supper with Riccardo and Angela, who gave us as a parting gift a book—of the same gargantuan size as the Giovanni Colacicchi artworks—containing magnificent aerial views of Tuscany. We toasted all the simple and fine things: our last pizza, our last bottle of Chianti Classico, our last noisy, smoky, passionate pizzeria.

Now, in this last dawn, our small bedroom is emptied of all objects but our suitcases, which lie open, packed to their brims, waiting for one last and desperate compression to get them closed.

We dress in haste, pack up our toothbrushes, toss away the last of the soap and shampoo, focus on removing the dust and debris of our occupancy as well as we can. Last, fast, things must be done: coffee made in the “due tazze” espresso maker, the last lighting of the stove with the accendigas, a bite or two of packaged sugared buns, and a brief regret for the foods to be left behind for Rina: the bags of potatoes and onions, the full jar of Nutella hazelnut chocolate creme, the frozen gelato, the sealed bottles of succo di pomodoro, the too-many packages of pasta I bought in the zeal and hope of making pasta here for eternities to come.

All these decisions are wrenching; this is not a sentimental parting, this is surgery! Joe and I are silent in our preparations to leave, each counting his own duties, his own losses. I feel, with the force of blows on my back, what I will no longer have.

Time is going faster than we imagined; we are nearly breathless with our little jobs; taking the garbage down, scrubbing the surfaces of the stove, sink and table, checking the closets, the drawers, stripping the basket-bed of its heavy linens, looking once more from each window, memorizing how the lights on the hills look to the east, west, and the south, but having no time to climb to the roof terrace to look north to Fiesole and Mount Morello.

This is it. In a final choreographed and practiced move, I sit hard on the suitcases—one after the other—and Joe pulls the zippers closed. Pure will and conjuring force the objects within to bend and shrink to the size we require of them (except for one bulky bathrobe of Joe’s and one heavy shirt of mine. These we leave behind with a note of apology to Rina).

We roll and pull our bags into the hallway, leaving them in front of the ascensore, then going back for a check of the apartment. Silence and emptiness, all the life of the last three months pressed into suitcases, the genie back in the jar, not a crumb of evidence left behind to prove that from one window we saw a woman put a Picasso in the dustbin, from another we watched a storm raise the level of the Arno high enough to create a rushing silver torrent, and from still another observed the weekly arrival of Riccardo as he parked his motor scooter, took off his helmet, looked up to see us at the window.

Whoever will inhabit this apartment next will never know what we knew here. If this is sentimental, well—I allow myself this much.

It’s nearly 3 AM. One of us must go down and stand in the cold lest the taxi driver arrive, find no one there, and leave. Or he may not come at all. If we lock ourselves out of the apartment, leaving the keys within, and then no taxi comes, what then?

I suddenly have no patience with what ifs and what thens. I’ve played that game long enough to last me through eternity. Here we are—having survived Italy, all manner of travel, mishaps, confusion, having overcome exhaustion, disappointment, an overload of art, the misery of public transportation, and we are nevertheless glowing with love for this country and heartbroken to have to leave it.

We ride down with our belongings. Piece by piece, we drag our luggage out of the elevator, through the hallway, past the mailboxes, out the inner door, the outer door and through the gate. Joe goes up to make one more quick check and to leave the keys on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table.

Ungrateful Florence, said Byron. Magnanimous Florence, said Twain. It would take a book, a thousand books, to describe what Florence is. Joe slams the door of the apartment—I can hear the finality of it from the foot of the staircase. Ciao, Florence! Addio. Arrivederci, Firenze!

The waiting bus casts a huge shadow on the river wall. Our students are clustered at the edge of the Arno, sobbing and clinging to one another. Nicoletta, concerned that they will wake everyone in the apartments overlooking the lungarno, makes a futile effort to bring order. But the kids are not to be quieted or consoled. They burst out in fresh waves of tears, embracing one another, moving through the crowd, flinging their arms about everyone and anyone. We are not spared. The girls weep on my shoulder, dampen the front of Joe’s coat. Mrs. Pedrini is busy passing out chocolates to sweeten the moment.

“How can I bear it?” says one of our girls in the darkness. Bundled up as she is in a hat and scarf, I can’t even tell who it is. “I’ll die if I don’t come back.”

“Look at the Duomo, just look at it!” cries another.

And I look. There, across the river, in the cold still night, is the looming dome of the great cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, Saint Mary of the Flower. Brunelleschi’s dome glows like an other-worldly shape, perhaps a crown, or the cap of God. Its lantern, its warm colors, its consoling supporting white struts, is a living countenance and seems to offer the reassuring gaze of a kind mother. The dome has been our compass, our point of reference, our guiding light during these last months.

“I’m going to come back and spend my life here,” vows Maria. “I can baby sit while I go to school.”

“And I’m going to work at home for a year to get enough money to come back and study here.” Pledges, vows, and promises are announced to the river, to the sky, and to the stars above the Arno.

Several Italian young men have gathered valiantly with us in the pre-dawn cold; Mai Jing’s friend Massimo is here to ride to Rome with her on the bus, as are the three young men who first took three of our girls out into the countryside in their van to give them bags of clothes. The six of them have become inseparable friends and the girls have become like daughters to the young men’s families.

Natalie’s suitor, the handsome Cesare, whom she met at the Full-Up Disco, is here, in his black leather jacket, a mournful look on his face. In fact, the two of them have just walked off alone a short distance toward the Ponte Vecchio.

“Oh my God,” says one of the girls. “Is he going to? Is he? Is he?”

Everyone turns to watch Natalie and Cesare.

“My God, I think he is.”

The tall young man has lifted Natalie up to sit on the parapet, and now he is kneeling before her.

“Oh, he must be asking her! He’s asking her right now!!”

Even Nicoletta has paused in directing the organization of the luggage in the compartments under the coach to watch the events transpiring on the river wall.

Beyond the couple, the familiar three arches of the Ponte Vecchio glow in the light of the street lamps, its shops closed, the corridor that runs above it from the Uffizi to the Pitti Palace a dim strip, its circular windows looking like closed eyes.

“I’m going to die of excitement,” say Maria. “To think we’re actually seeing it happen.”

“No, I think they’re just taking a picture,” says Marta, matter-of-factly. And yes, now in the dimness, it seems that Cesare is aiming upward from his kneeling position to take a picture of Natalie with the Florentine skyline behind her.

“I was certain he was proposing,” says Maria, in a new burst of tears.

“He already has, but don’t breathe a word of it,” Marta whispers. “I know they’ve made a plan to be together. She’s going to finish the school year at home and then come back to marry him.”

“Oh, how lucky she is,” sobs Maria. “If only it had happened to me.”

I suspect we all would like to be proposed to in the glow of the Duomo. Who wouldn’t want to fall in love in Florence?

I feel Joe’s hand press my shoulder briefly, for which I return a grateful glance.

The bus driver revs his motor. Nicoletta announces the headcount is complete, the luggage is loaded, everyone needs to get on the bus, it’s time to go. We have a three-hour trip to Rome, and then hours of checking through customs before we board the plane.

“Andiamo,” Nicoletta calls to the students, but she says it gently, almost like a prayer.

Our kids board the bus as if beginning a life sentence in prison. Their heads are down, they are moaning. Only Phil and Sara get on the bus briskly, holding hands, a couple from home who can stay coupled if they choose to. Cesare remains on the bank of the Arno, his face impassive, his bearing military, like the King of Italy on his horse. Natalie takes the window seat behind me; tears are flowing down her cheeks. I offer her a tissue over the seat, but her forehead is pressed to the window glass, her eyes soldered to her young man’s gaze. The bus driver closes the doors, he begins to move out slowly from the curb.

I think the sounds of sobbing must be audible in the tombs of Santa Croce as the bus lumbers along the narrow streets, makes a right turn, crosses Ponte Alle Grazie, and moves east along the opposite lungarno.

To my astonishment, I see that the bus is returning to our neighborhood, that the driver—on his way to the autostrada and Rome—has just turned into the street that passes our apartment house on Via Venosta. I look up to our windows half expecting to see myself and Joe moving about in our warmly lit kitchen. I want to call out to everyone, Oh look, that’s our house—that window is our bedroom, that one our living room.

But the rooms are dark. Like black mirrors, the windowpanes reflect the river lights back to the river. I breathe in this new reality. The bus turns south and the city disappears behind us. The sobbing in the bus modulates to sighing, then to silence. The driver turns off the interior lights so we may contemplate the dark landscape flying by.

I feel the speed of departure as surely as if Botticelli’s God of Wind is blowing us homeward. If I look closely, I can see him hovering over the fields, his wings shimmering, his blue cape billowing, his cheeks puffed with the force of his intention.

He is telling us that we no longer live in Florence. Now Florence lives in us.