CHAPTER TEN
He saw less of Fabrizio and Maddalena than he had thought he would; they were in technical rehearsal and run-throughs, out at the theater half the night, and resting during the day to conserve their energies. Similarly engaged, it seemed, was the toothsome Giuditta, though he did see her mother, old Signora Abruzzi, from time to time, pinching back plants in the stone parterres of the central courtyard and skimming fallen leaves from the fountain. Alba encountered the Abruzzis' cat – a lean, evil-eyed tabby with tattered ears – and survived with only a superficial scratch on the nose to show for it.
Dean was grateful not to be on a train. The air was crisp and autumnal – pleasantly warm under the sun, pleasantly cool at night. He bought a cheap panama hat from a tourist stall near the Porta Borsari and spent his mornings exploring the streets of the oldest part of the city, marveling at the finely chiseled pavers under his feet, quarried and laid the year that Christ was born, and lunching on figs and cheese from the market stalls in the Piazza Erbe. Most afternoons, he parked himself at an outdoor table in the quiet Piazza dei Signori under the elegant Renaissance façade of the Loggia del Consiglio, and drank icy, sweating aperol cocktails while Alba, freed from the leash, raced in dizzy joyful puppy-circles around the grave marble statue of Dante Alighieri.
If he were more ambitious, he would slog through Inferno again, maybe not in translation this time. Instead, he chose to revisit Paradise Lost, which he loved beyond all reason and read with the same repetitive veneration that his more devout relatives saved for Pilgrim's Progress and the King James Bible. It was Paradise Lost, truth be told, who was to blame for the most scurrilous and enduring rumor that blackened his reputation in Blair Water; as a young man in his twenties, he had unwisely confessed to an admiration for Milton's bitter, flawed, all-too-human Lucifer. By the time this had been passed around and come back to him, he was branded a devotee of devil worship, down to the cloven foot and the pentacle secretly branded on his hump.
"Idiots," Aunt Nancy Priest had said, and laughed. "A lot they know; you're the only one of us who will ever go to Heaven, Jarback, even if it's only because no one's ever invited you to sin."
But that was no matter now.
The last time he had read the Milton through had been aloud to Emily, two winters ago. Emily, pale and wasted, her foot wrapped, her thin body propped on pillows; Emily, hollow-eyed with the new and unwelcome knowledge of physical infirmity and betrayal. Dean had sat every afternoon with her, under the distrustful eyes of her suspicious aunts, and read into her ears those beautiful, half-heretical words. Now, he steeled himself against unwelcome memory and read them again, reclaiming them for himself alone.
Solitude sometimes is best society.
O sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams, that bring to my remembrance from what state I fell, how glorious once above my sphere.
Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is, and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely: and pined his loss.
Dean closed the book and stood up. Alba, a hundred yards away on the far side of the statue, flung herself joyously through a kit of perturbed pigeons, scattering them aggrieved to the air, and arrowed toward him. She had an endearing way of racing up to him and inserting her sleek head into the cup of his palm. She did this now, and as always, it made him smile.
"No more dancing," he said to her, drawing a bill from his pocket and leaving it on the table for the waiter. "The Borsari is too crowded for you to walk without the leash. No, don't pull, piccola, you will strain your neck, and besides, it is not becoming of a lady."
They threaded their way through the market and back toward the old gate, stopping for a gelato from a street vendor. It was strawberry today – fragola in Italian, a word Dean loved because it made him think of fragrant, and truly it was, sweet and heady and almost overripe, the essence of summer in a paper cup. He dabbed a bit on Alba's nose and watched her lick it off. His head was full of words – he'd closed the book before his eyes could register them, but it didn't matter because he'd had them memorized for years:
How can I live without thee, how forgoe
Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly joyned,
To live again in these wilde Woods forlorn?
Should God create another Eve, and I
Another Rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart; no no, I feel
The Link of Nature draw me: Flesh of Flesh,
Bone of my Bone thou art, and from thy State
Mine shall never be parted, Bliss or Woe.
The night before Lucia di Lammermoor opened at the Filarmonico, Fabrizio arrived at Dean's door at ten p.m. with a bottle of wine and two panini wrapped in newspaper.
"It is a dark night in the theater," he explained. "The singers, they must not sing, they must not talk. Maddalena, she must rest more than anyone else; she has been in bed for an hour already. But me, Dino, I have the conductor's nerves, the flutter in the belly, and cannot sleep, not yet. You will come out and talk with me? The cucciolo, she can come too. She will like this place."
They walked the block and a half to the Piazza Brà and stood in its green tree-shaded quiet, staring up at the jagged hulk of the Roman arena against the night sky. "It is so big," Fabrizio said, "and so old. Have you been inside?"
"No, not yet."
"Come. I will show you."
They went in one of the side entrances, through an ancient stone arch, and climbed the rough hand-hewn stairs – slowly, in Dean's case, though each step was wide enough that he could pull himself up before attempting the next. When they came out into the moonlight, they were halfway up the side of the coliseum; there was a broad path running all the way around that separated the upper banks of granite bench seats from the lower. They sat down on the lowest bench of the upper section and leaned back. The stone had absorbed the heat of the sun during the day and was still warm.
"It will seat twenty thousand people," Fabrizio said, expertly pulling the cork on the bottle with an opener from his pocket. "A marvel, is it not, Dino?"
"A marvel," Dean agreed. He was staring down into the vast central field, imagining troops of soldiers playing at war there. "Is it true that the Romans diverted the Adige and flooded it on purpose?" he asked. "So they could simulate water battles?"
Fabrizio shrugged. "So they say," he said, swigging from the bottle and handing it over to Dean. "But war, ancient history, pah. What a theater it would make!"
"For opera?"
"Why not? The acoustics are good. And even if there was a stage – there –" he waved toward one of the narrower ends of the big oval – "there would still be enough seating for all of the city." He sighed happily. "You could stage Carmen with a real bullfight," he said. "Elephants for Aida. Imagine it! Verona would be the center of the universe for opera – there would be nothing else like it anywhere in the world."
"You would be at the mercy of the weather," Dean said. Fabrizio waved this away.
"Summer only, of course," he said. "The downbeat of the orchestra just at sunset. Music under the stars, Dino, with nothing to stop one from meeting the other. Surely the great composers would smile down on us from Heaven and approve."
Alba was nearly out of sight, a tiny intrepid figure trotting along the mezzanine walkway. Dean called to her, and she came galloping back. He rewarded her with a bit of bresaola from his sandwich.
"And you," he teased Fabrizio, "in your white tie and tails, waving the baton."
"That is too big a dream for me," Fabrizio said, shaking his head. "I cannot even imagine."
They traded the bottle back and forth and ate their panini. Out on the street, Dean knew, the city had come out to dine and socialize. But the massive stone walls blocked out the sound of distant conversation and laughter; inside the arena, it was as quiet as a cathedral, lit only with moonlight and the occasional spark of a stray firefly, down on the ground level.
"It feels," he said, slightly lightheaded from the wine, "as if time is not passing here."
"Ah?"
"These stones," said Dean, "are here, as they were here a thousand years ago, and they have not changed." He shook a finger at the vast empty expanse of the arena. "And while we are inside them, we do not change either. We will go down those stairs and out onto the street, and the world will have moved on without us; we will be strangers in a strange land."
"This is impossible," said Fabrizio, emptying the bottle.
"How do you know?"
"Because I have my Maddalena," he said, "and she knows that I come here sometimes to look at the stars and dream of open-air opera. And if she wakes in the morning and I am not beside her, she will come and find me."
Dean laughed. "True enough," he said. "How fortunate you are, my friend."
"Love," said Fabrizio, "is a thing that I wish for you. You will not be complete without it."
"I loved," said Dean, "and it did not make me feel complete. It made me feel loneliness and hunger and, even more terribly, hope. And then it betrayed me, or I betrayed it, I am not always certain, and broke my heart. I am done with it."
"Love does not make you feel those things," said Fabrizio with authority, "if it is true love. You want the fire that warms, not the one that burns you up."
"Fire is the same fire whether it is large or small," countered Dean. Fabrizio shook his head.
"No," he said, throwing out an expansive hand. "No, I am quite sure of this. To say that all love is the same is to say that a wolf and a dog are the same." He held out the last crumb of his sandwich to Alba, who took it delicately from his fingers. "The wolf knows only its own hunger, so it takes what is offered and your hand with it," he said. "The dog, who loves, takes what you can offer and stays by your side, hoping that some day you will offer more."
Dean shook his head. "We are both too drunk to have this conversation," he said. "Nor do I think that any woman, even your long-suffering Maddalena, would thank you for comparing her to a dog."
Fabrizio laughed.
"I do not have the right words," he conceded. "But I know what I know, Dino. When you find the right one, she will bring you joy and not sorrow. And then you will understand that what you thought was love before was not that at all."
They lingered until the stones beneath them began to cool, then found their way down the winding stone steps and out onto the street.
"I think perhaps I will now sleep," said Fabrizio. He was weaving slightly as he walked. "Thank you, mio fratello, for keeping me company. I will conduct tomorrow night with no fear of the claques or the critics, and I have you to thank for this." He paused by his door. "There is a ticket for you," he said, "in the box office. And after, there is a dinner for the cast. You will come?"
Dean hesitated, then nodded. "Of course," he said. "I would not miss it."
"Until tomorrow, then," Fabrizio said. "Domani."
"Domani."