“She was very young,” said Jean, “and very beautiful. Almost as beautiful as Elisabeth.” She reached out and laid a hand on his cheek. “She was married to a French nobleman. Petrarch loved her, but could not have her.”
“Une tragédie,” said Elisabeth. “For him. But very lucky for us. He wrote many poems about her. He invented the sonnet, the love poem, just for her.” She pursed her lips, thinking, then held up a finger. “Ah! Wait here. I will come back.” She hurried across the courtyard to their house; a moment later she returned, holding a small book aloft as if it were a prize. “I have a book of Petrarch’s sonnets. A gift from Jean years ago.” She leaned down and kissed the top of his balding head—a simple gesture that spoke volumes about the easy, entwined intimacy of their lives.
She flipped pages in the book; some, I noticed, were dog-eared, including the page where she stopped. “Listen. This is the poem he wrote when Laura died. He had loved her for twenty years by this time. He wrote in Italian; this is in French, which I will try to put into English for you—sorry if the translation is not good.” She scanned the page, mentally trying out a word here, a phrase there, then held up a hand theatrically and began to read.
The eyes I used to speak about with words of fire, the arms and hands and feet and beautiful face that took me away from myself for so long and set me apart from other men; the waving hair of pure gold that shone, the smile that beamed with angel rays that made this earth a paradise—now they are only a bit of dust, and all her feeling is gone. Yet I live on, with grief and disdain, left behind, here in darkness, where the light I cherished no longer ever shows, in my fragile little boat on the tempestuous sea. Here let my loving song come to its end. The vein of my art has run dry, and my song has turned at last to tears.
She stopped, then wiped a tear from each eye. “Such sweetness, and such sadness.”
“You say he loved her for twenty years?”
“More than that. He loved her for twenty years while she was alive. But then she died, during the Black Death. Still he loved her, after she died. He kept loving her, and writing about her, for the rest of his life—twenty-five, thirty more years.”
“But he never got to be with her?”
“Non, never. She was married. She refused all his advances. We don’t even know if they ever talked together.”
“That seems foolish,” I said. “He wasted his life sighing for a woman he could never have instead of looking for a love that he could have.” I gestured at the two of them. “Like you and Jean.”
“But he was pledged to the church,” she pointed out. “He was not supposed to have any woman.”
“He was doubly foolish, then, to obsess about her for his whole life.”
She gave me an odd look then—a look both critical and pitying. “Ah, monsieur scientifique—does your heart always obey the orders of your head? Have you never been foolish in the thing you wanted or the person you loved? Have you never loved unwisely, never grieved too much for someone you lost?”
Her question blindsided me. I felt light-headed and reached out to steady myself on the trellis beside me. Years before, when my wife, Kathleen, died of cancer, I’d retreated from people for two years, burying myself in my work. Then, just as I felt myself beginning to come alive again—just as I started falling in love with Jess Carter, a beautiful medical examiner from Chattanooga—Jess was killed. Then there was Isabella, with whom I’d had a brief romantic encounter, and who’d died in Japan when the tsunami struck the coast where she was staying. And now? Now I was struggling with my feelings for Miranda, a young woman who, because of her age and position, should be as off-limits to me as Laura was to Petrarch.
Elisabeth reached out a hand and laid it on my arm. “I spoke too strongly,” she said. “I think I have reminded you of something painful. I am sorry. Please forgive me.”
I shook my head. “No, it’s all right. It’s my fault. What do I know about what’s foolish and what’s wise, or what’s the best way to cope with pain? When I’m in pain, I study a skeleton. When Petrarch is in pain, he writes a poem. Most people prefer his way to mine. And who can blame them?” I gave her a rueful smile; she returned it with one of warmth and kindness.
“You find poems and stories in the bones,” she said, and Jean nodded. “Good night.” She gave my cheek a quick kiss, took her husband’s arm, and walked with him across the courtyard into the golden light spilling from the windows of their home.
I wondered if it was too late in life to take up writing sonnets.
CHAPTER 26