The Stories of David Leavitt by David Leavitt

Author:David Leavitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2003-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

I See London,

I See France

I

Here is Celia, not so many years later, sitting on a bench in a park in a village in Chianti, staring at her hands. Beyond the trio of little girls playing jacks, beyond the edge of the park and the crumbling cobbled houses, beyond the fattorie and the villas and the half-collapsed town wall, a glorious vista of hills rises, hills Celia can still not quite believe she is sitting in the midst of, hills which belong in the backgrounds of fifteenth-century paintings—dry yet supple, their greenness occasionally broken by rock, just beginning to burn under the late-spring sun. Christ might be kneeling for baptism in those hills, his waist wrapped in a sodden cloth; or the Virgin, in an open stone house, might be poised over her spinning wheel, awaiting the angel’s visitation.

Celia is looking at her hands. They are city hands, more used to typing or sealing envelopes than they are to pulling tiny clams from their shells, or picking sprigs of wild thyme from fields at the sides of roads, or raking the uneven landscape of Seth’s chest—Seth, the man who has brought her here, the man who, she is tempted to say (though she resists saying it), has saved her from all that. What intrigues her is that her hands look the same, the fingers a little puffy, the meat of the palms pale and blotched with red. Only when her hands change, she believes, will she have changed, only then will this new life become something she can believe is going to last. But so far the signs are minimal. Her nails are no longer chewed to the quick; the hairs on her wrists are bleaching from the sun. And her lifeline—so mysterious, Seth had said the first night they spent together, as he opened her palm and traced it—it’s broken in the middle. Two distinct halves, and in the center a void, a gap. “They’ll have grown together before I’m through with you,” he concluded, wrapping her hand back up into a fist, and she’d flinched at the notion that he’d ever be through with her, even though she knew it was just a figure of speech. Now she looks carefully and wonders if the two halves really have grown a fraction of an inch closer to one another, or if she’s just imagining it.

Across the street from the park sits the rented Fiat Panda that has brought them here; next to it, Seth waits for a farmer in a wobbling Ape to pass by on the road. Seth’s arms are full of sandwiches and pastries he’s bought at a little bar across the street, but before he crosses, he stops to chat with the driver of the Ape, a three-wheeled vehicle which is halfway between a truck and a motorcycle. Seth is a translator and interpreter, and since they’re on their way to an important literary conference—his first Italian interpreting job in two years—he’s talking to everyone he can, determined to oil the rusty wheels of what is, unbelievably, his fifth language.

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