The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga

The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga

Author:Robert Hellenga
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2015-04-26T02:15:44+00:00


11

The Sixteen Pleasures Restored

On Tuesday the twentieth of December at nine o’clock in the morning I left the convent of Santa Caterina Nuova. In tears. I’d been happy there, happier than I realized, and I felt close to many of the nuns, especially to Sister Gemma, who gave me the Saint Christopher medal she’d worn since she was a child, and to Madre Badessa, who gave me her blessing, held out her hand for me to shake, which I did, and then took me by the shoulders and looked as far down into my eyes as anyone had ever looked in my entire life. I had not yet returned the Aretino to the bishop, but Sandro was going to do so for me.

I let everyone think that I was going to take an express train that morning to Luxembourg, but in fact I wasn’t planning to leave Florence until the following morning, and as soon as we were out of sight of the convent I told the taxi driver to take me to Piazza Santa Croce. I wanted to spend an entire night with Sandro before I went home, and this was the only way I could think of to arrange it.

Sandro had some things to look after at the Uffizi, which was reopening in a couple of days, and I didn’t expect him until noon or so, so I removed the Aretino from the thymol chamber and checked it for the hundredth time for traces of mold. There were none. I put the signatures in order and placed them in the solander box I’d made to hold them. Then I took them out of the box and had another look. The engravings had not lost their power to astonish me. If anything I’d learned, by looking at them through Sandro’s eyes, to appreciate them more fully. It’s unusual for a great artist to concentrate his energies so intensely on the erotic, and though Marcantonio is not usually considered an artist of the very first rank, I was learning to see in the dynamic composition of the figures and in the heavily worked contours and dark cross-hatching that gave them a soft luminous quality, the influence of Raphael. I put the signatures back in the box, put on most of the clothes I’d brought with me, because it was cold, and sat down on my orange crate by the window to wait.

Piazza Santa Croce was in a state of disrepair. The buildings were discolored, stained by fuel oil from the thousands of furnaces that had been flushed out by the floodwater. A few had even been abandoned because they were threatening to give way and had been shored up with temporary supports. But I was drawn to it anyway.

It was cold, about as wintry as it gets in Florence. There was no snow in the city, but there was snow on the cars that had come down from the surrounding hills. Some of the leather shops had reopened, and the bars were doing a brisk business.



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