ARMOR, WHAT ARMOR?

That first night in Siena I had a dream that I was directing a feature film in a city by the sea. I had gathered the crew by the main promenade at the edge of the unknown city to shoot an important scene. I could feel the presence of the big metropolis behind me. The sea was deep and voluminous, its surface rippled. There was nothing interrupting its horizon. I thought of taking a swim and the next moment I found myself undressing. No one seemed to mind. I climbed on to the short wall and dived. As soon as I was under water I regretted my action. I had not even checked if there were steps out. What if I cannot find a way to get back on dry land? When I rose to the surface and looked back, I saw that I had drifted far out to sea. The city was now the horizon. My rapid heartbeat was not only in my ears but seemed to run all the way down into the depths and fill them. I felt as if I were wasting away, leaking into the water.

Later that morning I took Diana to the bus station and stood watching her face behind the glass window until the coach pulled out. I missed her immediately. And here was my solitude, as quick and thick and heavy as always. It was temporally rich, as though when one is alone time becomes a room with double windows: one looking into the past, the other into the future. The historian’s temptation is to capture the uncertain past, to contain and divide it into chapters, ages and epochs, to organize and tell the story coherently, to locate and make an inventory of its motives and outcomes. And we are, of course, each one of us, the historian of our own lives. The future, on the other hand, provides endless opportunities for our predictions and fantasies. With it we can indulge our optimism by planning the years ahead, as though time were a carpet one could roll out into the unknown. The past and future stimulate our imagination; the present overwhelms it. What is there to do with this ongoingness that neither pauses nor tires, this ceaselessness that is like a blinding light flickering so rapidly that the naked eye cannot perceive its reverberations? The seconds are not divided, as a clock would have us believe; time does not tick, but is welded in a seamless progression. Talk of “being in the present” or “living in the moment” has become part of our contemporary language. But the present offers no options; it insists on our attention. It is relentless and knows that everything is contingent on it. The most casual turn, an innocent encounter—with a person, a book, a painting, a piece of unexpected news—or a mere thought passing through one’s head can leave one ever so slightly altered. And somehow we know, as the minutes pass, that we are being quietly made and that there is nothing we can do to stop it, because, when it comes to the present, we are susceptible and enthralled. By comparison the past is more easily locatable, or at least we have concocted the illusion that it is, and the future, no matter how uncertain, always seems distant. It is the guest who is forever not quite yet here.

I walked back into the folds of the city, one street following the next, losing my way without concern. What is it like to be born here, I wondered, and what is it like to die here? Those twin questions have followed me into every city. I have learned to make use of them. They have become part of the logic of my thinking, of how I engage with a place. I am never oblivious to where I am, and how often I have wished to be.

I returned to the Palazzo Pubblico. It was odd to be back in the same rooms but without Diana. If I stop and think of the people closest to me, of where they might be at this exact moment, what they might be up to, how they might be feeling, what might be preoccupying their thoughts, the weight of their concerns, I become incapable of doing anything else. It is a truly debilitating state. It fills me with immeasurable anxiety, sorrow and longing. I have never understood why the basic fact of the lives of those with whom I am intimate running concurrently and separately from mine must fill me with such darkness.

I stood in front of Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government again. This time the picture seemed to still and settle, to be fixed in place by a structural order that I did not notice the first time. It was as if my eyes had been re-educated by the painting or perhaps by Siena or even by the dream of the sea I had had the previous night. To the left of the figure representing the Common Good sits the Virtue Prudence. She is pointing to an object, perhaps a water clock, that reads “Past Present Future.” Beside her is Fortitude and then, reclining languidly in a sheer white dress, there is Peace. She resolves the picture, offers it a center, a place for the eye to land. She is why this room, the Sala dei Nove, is also known as the Sala della Pace, “Hall of Peace.” She is, it now appears, the organizing principle: both of the rest of the activity in the fresco and, by implication, the proposed system of governance. This is partly because of where Lorenzetti has placed her and partly because of her expression: waiting, monitoring, listening, her hand shelving her open ear, which is pointed toward us. Beneath her feet, as well as buried under the cushion on which she is resting her arm, are black bundles. It took me a moment to realize that they are pieces of armor, denoting how in the presence of peace there is no need for battle. But the detail is oxymoronic: armor, a thing used for protection and concealment, is itself being concealed. There is also something comically slapstick about how Peace seems to be pretending that nothing is there: Armor, what armor?

Covering the longer walls on either side of the painting are even larger frescoes, running the entire 14.5-meter length of the room. The Effects of Good Government and The Effects of Bad Government: one simulates how the world would appear if the advice of the central fresco were followed and the other how it would be if it were not. In The Effects of Good Government a just, prosperous, peaceful and harmonious city is shown to exist side by side with a thriving and verdant countryside. The metropolis, with its interwoven and variant architecture, is teeming with color, amiable sociability and unprejudiced trade. The landscape is depicted with a sweeping lucidity, rich with astutely observed details and an informal freedom that would not look out of place among modern paintings. There is a wide array of plant life, handsome people upon handsome horses, healthy donkeys bearing abundant loads with a weariness that expresses a gentle and loving gratitude, as though their burdens were actually their own offspring. There is a fat and wholesome pig; delicately keen and joyful dogs ever so affectionately rendered. The city resembles Siena; this is natural enough, but also accentuates the feeling that, when you are in it, Siena comes to seem like the only city, or the city that is every city, or not a city at all, in fact, but an allegory of a city. The farms too correspond to those of the surrounding rolling hills. The dividing wall, running vertically, splits the painting in two. The decision is so assertive, juxtaposing human creation and nature in a way that is striking. Looking at it you can almost detect the air changing between the two halves. Both regions are benefiting from the fruits of good governance.

The fresco facing it—The Effects of Bad Government—shows Tyranny reigning and Justice in chains. Tyranny, portrayed as an androgynous devil, reminded me of the graffiti that covered walls everywhere across Tripoli, caricaturing the fallen Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Here too Tyranny is meant to look vile and stupid, and here too he is darkly mesmeric: cross-eyed, with horns and braided hair, a permanent frown clinched on Dracula teeth. He is without doubt. He is relentlessly fixed on his intention. And this makes it hard to take one’s eyes off him. He dominates the entire room. He captivates. I could imagine the magistrates who had, over the centuries, met here in the Sala dei Nove in order to discuss the welfare of the citizenry, the distribution of taxes, the threat of invading forces and other matters of state, being occasionally drawn to his portrayal. Above Tyranny are what Siena’s magistrates deemed the “leading enemies of human life”: Avarice, Pride and Vainglory. On the left sit Cruelty, Deceit and Fraud; and, to the right, are Fury, Division and War.

Unlike the Allegory of Good Government and The Effects of Good Government, both of which are to be read predominantly from left to right, the normative direction for a reader of Latin, The Effects of Bad Government is to be read from right to left. Here the city is as hard and empty and naked as a flexed muscle. The only business that seems to be thriving is that of the armorer. Houses are abandoned, their windows left wide open, and others crumbling from war. Further in the distance, two armies are facing one another in perpetual combat. Justice, chained at Tyranny’s feet, has been dethroned and stripped of her gown. All she has got is her white chemise. It wraps itself around her like a second skin, as though the fabric too is embarrassed. Time, or a vandal, has erased the section running from just beneath her breasts all the way to her upper thighs. A grayish cloud now covers that area. It is as if age has breathed smoke over Justice’s reproductive system.

I left and was in the expanse and openness of the square. It was near noon and the whole place was in the light. I lay on the brick tiles of Il Campo, polished by centuries of pedestrians and horses and carts. I could feel the warmth of the ground seeping into my back. I listened to the random conversations around me. I wished I could speak the language. My father could. I saw his face, the only one I knew, the one before his captivity, when he was well and free. Then I remembered how on one occasion he spoke to me in Italian—only two or three sentences—his eyes smiling, enjoying my inability to understand him. I was baffled by his attitude, by the fact that I could not read him, by how stonily impenetrable his thoughts seemed. I wished I could remember what he had said—for, although I still could not speak Italian, I could partly understand it now. My father often traveled alone. He never, it seemed, had a problem about his own pleasure. But at that moment, lying on my back on Il Campo, the sky open above me, I felt I had exceeded him, that the pupil had excelled his teacher.