Santo Spirito
Seventeen years ago, I decided I would mend a broken heart by creating a new life for myself in Italy. I sold my few pieces of furniture and silverware, and scraped together the air fare for London. There, an au pair agency found me a job in Florence.
I wanted a situation so different, so engaging, that I would have no time to dwell on the past. My wish was granted. I was to look after an American woman stricken with Alzheimer’s, overseeing all the little details of life which had become so difficult for her; washing, dressing, going for walks. Her name was Yvette. She and her Italian husband lived in a 14th century palazzo in Piazza Santo Spirito. The unassuming building was four storeys high with brown shutters on the tall windows. Its facade was a septic-looking shade of rose. Time had gently nibbled at all the edges. For a year, it was my home.
A true gentlewoman despite her disintegrating personality, Yvette was the first to greet me on my arrival. The disease had already made her as faded and transparent as an apparition. She immediately referred to me as ‘the guest’, asked me if my room was comfortable, whether I had enough towels, and would my mother be joining me soon? I imagine that the idea of a nurse or watchdog come to look after her was so distasteful that her mind cast me in a better role. The agency had warned me that Yvette was able to remember complex events and anecdotes from the distant past but nothing so simple as tying her shoelaces.
A few minutes later, the Sri Lankan maggiordomo brusquely interrupted Yvette’s warm, if confused, welcome. He led me through a hallway of vaulted pietra serena ceilings and terra cotta floors polished to the colour of bloodstone. There was a wide curving stone staircase, lit by an enormous opalescent white glass chandelier, and on the wall going up, a row of portraits. They were ancestors- although I was never to know whose- of the high ruffled collar and bilious featured variety.
I was taken into the main drawing room where my new employer, Yvette’s Florentine husband, was waiting. He was propped against the Steinway grand piano, dressed in an elegant grey suit and cravat. His eyes were bright blue and his white hair pomaded. Raimondo O. had the look of an aging actor advertising chocolates or whiskey. Someone had tried to lay a fire in the huge fireplace but the result was a roomful of smoke and a dense fug.
He gave me a predatorial leer and handshake and proceeded to show me his palazzo.
The drawing room was immense, comfortable sofas and armchairs in gold brocade grouped around the fireplace, which was flanked on both sides by tall bookshelves full of old and precious volumes.
On the piano were silver-framed photographs of friends and family, mostly defunct. Raimondo pointed to the tinted portrait of a beautiful blonde woman with 1920’s crimped hair and startling blue eyes.
"My sister," said Raimondo. "She was crazy. My parents gave her a house and she lived in a tent on the front lawn just to spite them. She was an opium addict, murdered in New York, you know." We continued on our tour.
Three sets of french doors looked out to the colonnades of a cloister and beyond those, a garden. It was a true Italian garden, without flowers, a symmetrical combination of pathways, box hedges, high walls covered with Virginia creeper, and a lone persimmon tree at its centre, the orange bulbs dangling from dark naked branches in midwinter. At the bottom of the garden was a pond and statue of a naked woman pouring water from a pitcher. Two century-old terrapins occasionally made an appearance from under the hedges. At night, I was to find out later, domestic and stray cats roamed and yowled noisily along the garden walls.
It was the kind of garden that was best enjoyed through a window. Actually walking in it, the overwhelming sensation was of hidden prying eyes peering down from the other houses surrounding the courtyard. In the winter, it was dank, mossy, hinting at something primeval and sinister. And later in the spring, there was a frenzy of lurid growth and blinding hot light splashing through a filter of green vines which suggested that the best place to be was in the shade.
Italian houses, especially older ones, are like cave dwellings, dug out of rock, a series of secret passages tunneling through darkness. They have few windows, usually at only one end of a room. With the Persian blinds and inner shutters closed, there was a feeling of safety, of being hidden away in a timeless world which made frequent reference to a glorious past.
Most of the palazzo’s internal walls had been painted white, but beneath the paint was a Bacchanal of 18th century frescoes. The house was full of antiques. Raimondo told me that during a recent illness, both he and Yvette had been robbed blind by the night nurses. They had taken some of his wife’s jewelry and his precious Fabergé egg.
The furniture was heavy and ancient; a green malachite table in the centre of the hall, and next to the front door, two throne-like chairs with bargello needlework seats. Sixteenth and seventeenth-century tapestries covered the walls. At the far end of the hallway, more french doors opened onto the garden.
In the 14th century, the palazzo had been part of the monastery which occupied the piazza. The dining room, with its massive stone fireplace, had been the original refectory for the monks. Off the dining room, with tall french doors of its own connecting to another tiny courtyard garden, was a small anteroom. One wall was frescoed. It was a disintegrating depiction of a Madonna and Child with a predominance of dusty royal blues. Raimondo told me that the fresco was by Masaccio, a fact which, had it come to public knowledge, would have ended in the confiscation of his palazzo by the Belle Arti Society, the Florentine version of a heritage society. I was to keep my mouth shut about it. Today, I have no doubt that the fresco really was a Masaccio.
In the cellar, Raimondo said, was a crypt full of dead monks’ bones. I was not to venture down there, he said, because he had a deal. He let the monks rest in peace and they left him alone. He pointed to a round 17th century portrait of a woman on the dining room wall and said, "My mother was a medium. She painted that while in a trance. She was a Texan with Indian blood, a granddaughter of Chief Quanah Parker. You’re not to bother the spirits."
In that dining room we ate meals of steak tartar, octopus and fazolari (a mollusk with a scarlet body- eaten raw), with heavy ornate silverware which did not make its appearance until I’d been working there for four months. It was a judgement of character and I eventually passed the test.
We drank red wine that came in demijohns from the neighbouring hills. The wine worked like a truth serum. During these meals, Raimondo recounted the piquant details of his life.
Raimondo O. was the son of a Florentine count and a Texan lady. His earliest memories were of servants waiting in a vast hall for their master’s entrance, holding candelabra, wax dripping all over and ruining their scarlet livery. Although he had always lived in luxurious surroundings, this palazzo was not one of the family villas. He’d bought the Santo Spirito palazzo with cartons of black market cigarettes during the depression.
As a teenager, Raimondo was sent to the States to study and attended Columbia University in knickerbockers. He nearly died in the devastating Spanish ‘flu epidemic of 1918 but was saved, he maintained, by hot and cold baths and large doses of raw garlic. He studied architecture then became a lightweight boxer and fought fixed matches around the Eastern United States for a manager named Spike Lipschitz. When Raimondo realized, somewhere in Indiana, that a lot of short dark Italian immigrants were putting money on him, the tall blue-eyed blond Italian, he decided to win the match he was supposed to lose. Spike and his boys put him in hospital for a month and ended his boxing career.
For most of his adult life, Raimondo’s business was to procure antiques. It was the easiest thing to do with an aristocratic upbringing. People had faith in his tastes and knowledge. But he often expressed regret that he had not done more with his wealth and education.
In the thirties, he worked for William Randolph Hearst. Having found him some renaissance Venetian pews, he decided to go along to Hearst’s New York apartment and see how they looked. Hearst had had a bar installed in the pews, and when he offered Raimondo a beer but couldn’t find the concealed opening, he began to hack at the pews with a fire axe, breaking Raimondo’s antiquarian heart.
All through his memories, women were a central theme. His first women, Raimondo told me, had been his father’s women. Then there had been four wives; two Italians, a Canadian, and the last, Yvette, an American. He ogled me and said, "I don’t imagine I shall marry again. Although you never know."
He recalled, "I was at a masked ball dressed as a Mandarin. I got terribly drunk and crawled under a table. And there was Josephine under there as well, you know, Napoleon’s wife. She was wearing a mask. So I said, ‘This party’s boring. Let’s get out of here.’ So we did and it was a night of love. Turned out to be Peggy Guggenheim. Well, the next morning I rang twice which meant breakfast for two. Up came Alba, my maid, who asked if the Signora spoke Italian. I said, no, and Alba said, ‘And you dare to call me ugly when you’ve dragged that thing in?" And poor Peggy, whose nose was red from the drink and face green from the hangover, shrank down beneath the covers because she did speak Italian, of course."
Alba, his maid, was still vaguely part of the household. She had remained faithful to him through thick and thin, refusing to leave during penniless periods, sleeping on the floor outside his door when he was ill, to be sure he was still breathing. During the war, when Raimondo was part of the Italian Secret Service, Mussolini called the house on military business. It was Alba who answered the phone.
"Who’s speaking?" she asked.
"Mussolini," said the voice.
"Ah già," replied Alba, "And I’m Joan of Arc."
In return for her loyalty, Raimondo gave Alba an apartment in the same block as the palazzo. Each morning I would hear her raucous voice echoing through the service entrance and into the kitchen where she would tell the cook, Monica, her business.
The household was kept running by Monica and her husband, Newton. They were Sri Lankans forced from their country by the Tamil uprising. Monica was loudly Catholic and had a strong sense of sin, while Newton was Buddhist and circumnavigated the truth. Monica savoured telling me what an evil philanderer her employer had been in his lifetime.
Monica told me how Raimondo had recently screamed for squab in the middle of the night. She and Newton had to get up and go out at three in the morning to track down a man who kept pigeons. They got him to kill some then brought them home, plucked them and cooked them. When the birds were set on a plate in front of Raimondo, he said he didn’t feel like squab anymore. Monica slapped him hard across the face and made him eat every last bite, though he’d begun to cry like a small boy.
She told me that during the terrible ‘flu which had brought on Yvette’s condition, Raimondo also fell ill and temporarily lost his mind. He ran screaming naked through the hallways of his palazzo, peeing in all the corners and shouting, "There’s no privacy around here. A man must have his privacy." He finished his rant by climbing into bed with Monica and Newton.
Yvette’s recollections were not much gentler. She recalled that during the great flood of 1966, the piazza became part of the swiftly moving Arno river. When Raimondo saw a man being swept past his house by the current, he stripped down to his BVDs and dove into the water to save the man but was caught up by the current too. It was Yvette who saved them both by opening the gargage doors and momentarily changing the direction of the current. Later, Raimondo learnt that the drowning man was the son of the local communist party leader. He told the father, "If I had known he was your son, I wouldn’t have bothered."
Yvette slept alone in the master bedroom. On the same floor were the small white monk’s cell of a bedroom in which Raimondo now slept, and the library. Yvette’s room was vast, parquet floors, black and gold Chinoiserie furniture and the most extravagant bathroom I have ever seen. The bedroom and bathroom formed an L-shape and all had french doors giving on to the wide marble balcony. The bathroom was made up of three smaller rooms, one for the toilet, one for the shower, and one for the tub. They were done in black and gold marble with brass fittings, and the bathtub was set into an artificial grotto, the ceilings and walls an uneven rock colour frescoed with nymphettes and flowers. It had been designed for a Russian princess just after the Bolshevik revolution.
The library was a comfortable retreat. It housed shelves of books in English, Italian and French. There were eighteen foot high ceilings with the original 14th century ceiling beams, huge man-eating sofas and armchairs in dark leather, and a well-stocked bar. Two tall windows with burgundy velvet drapes looked across to the plain facade of the church in the piazza.
Raimondo kept some of his treasures in the library. There was a small pile of postcards all addressed from Giacomo Puccini to Raimondo’s Uncle Alfredo, and most of them had photos of pretty women on one side, usually a soprano, Puccini’s conquests. There were caricatures drawn by Enrico Caruso, who had been a friend of Raimondo’s father. Apart from drawing them, Caruso used to play cards with his entourage and lose on purpose so he could give them money without hurting their pride.
Raimondo showed me all his photos from the war, his ‘handsome devil’ days. He recounted, "I was a prisoner of war in Regina Coeli. Those British put me in a cell which had a grate in the ceiling and they poured urine and excrement on me through the grate. They ruined my beautiful Harris tweed suit, Savile Row. When the English Commander found out I was a fellow antique dealer in civilian life, he had me released. I tried to track him down to thank him but learned he’d been killed in the Apennines just two weeks previously. I sat down and cried."
On the library wall was a portrait of Casanova painted by a great-great grandfather of Raimondo’s. He insisted I read the memoirs of Casanova. I’m still working on it.
Raimondo was very concerned about his treasures and their future. At that time money could not be taken out of Italy and it was a source of concern to him. Every Tuesday evening, Raimondo’s protegé, a lawyer, Signor Fortini, would come to eat herrings in olive oil and they would discuss the beauty of women’s flanks versus that of horses’ flanks, and the future of the antique business in Italy. Fortini looked after Raimondo’s antique shop now that Raimondo was too elderly and ill to do the job (an oxygen tank was kept on hand for Raimondo’s frequent respiratory crises).
During these discussions, Raimondo allowed his cat, Mascherina, to sit on the table next to his plate. The cat would try to paw the herrings but pull back when Raimondo scolded him. Then the master would finally offer Mascherina a pre-chewed morsel and they would rub their heads together in ritualistic man-cat ecstasy.
At the end of each day, if I wasn’t roaming the city, I would escape to my bedroom. It is perhaps the most romantic bedroom I have ever slept in. It could only be reached by going out the second storey french doors and crossing the balcony. A separate set of french doors draped in gold brocade led into the isolated room.
There were ancient ceiling beams, a four-poster canopied bed with lace-trimmed bed linen, a hand-painted wardrobe that gave off a scent of oranges, freesias and camphor, and a thick rose wall-to-wall carpet. There was a private bathroom tiled in dusty blue, and a huge bathtub.
When the weather grew warmer, the trellis above the balcony dripped with wisteria. The mauve blossoms with their heavy cinnamon scent formed an ankle-thick carpet and wafted into the house. On those warm nights, I would sit on my doorsill taking in the scented navy-blue sky, the fireflies and nightingales.
During my first months in Santo Spirito, my dreams were heavy and upsetting. They were of houses, those huge clapboard North American houses that succumb to damprot. I wandered from empty room to empty room searching for the man who had broken my heart.
But then I’d wake to realize that I was within walking distance of one of the world’s greatest Renaissance historical centres. During my free hours, I wandered through churches and art galleries, and eventually, my dreams began to shift and change. I still dreamt big clapboard houses but now I was searching for a thing, not a person. And one night in my sleep, I found it. At the centre of the maze-like house that was as big as a hotel, was a sacred room. It was circular with a mandala floor of green and white marble and a round highly-coloured stained glass ceiling in the shape of a rose. The city was creeping into my dreams and saving me.
That bedroom could have been the one room in which I thought too much about the past, but Raimondo’s ghosts also helped to crowd it out.
He told me, "I had Maria Callas to the house once. She didn’t say much. Had Graham Green here too. Curzio Malaparte and I ran circles round him. Met the Duchess of Windsor, Pinti Borghese, and, oh yes, I used to eat oysters in London with Peter Ustinov. And, oh yes, I once stole Lucky Luciano’s girlfriend from him. Not a wise thing to do. He had very cold snake eyes. I was sure he would kill me if he found out. But she was such a beautiful thing I couldn’t help myself. Dreadful Sicilian accent though. Wise to keep her mouth shut."
After I had been there for nearly a year, Raimondo began to complain of a persistent pain which began on his right side and travelled to his left. He was diagnosed with acute appendicitis. The ambulance was called and for the occasion, Raimondo dressed in a fine grey tweed Savile Row suit, neatly folded handkerchief and polished Ferragamo shoes.
He insisted on walking to the ambulance and as he left he said to his wife, "Addio Yvette. I’ll meet you on the other side.Though god knows whether it’ll be up or down."
Fortini, the protegé from Raimondo’s antique shop in Borgo Ognissanti, rushed to the hospital that evening and there must have been some kind of hasty pre-surgery exchange with Raimondo, because the following morning Monica the cook hissed at me, "Did you know that Fortini’s in jail?"
I never bought the Italian newspapers because I understood so little, but by pure chance I had bought a copy that day. I ran upstairs to my room to retrieve it. The headline read "Five billion lire in stolen art treasures stopped at the Swiss border." The article stated that a group of five professional men, doctors and lawyers, were stopped trying to move a load of stolen artwork across Lake Como in a Zodiac. The priceless art objects had been in storage in an antique shop in Borgo..., property of one Raimondo O-----.
I knew it was time for me to go.
My first home in Florence was like an illusionist’s trick. You could never be sure what the reality was. But watching the illusion had been so diverting that I hadn’t noticed the pieces of my heart slowly falling back together.
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