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I stood at the door of Ben’s house with the key in my hand—heavy and brass, nothing like my New York apartment key. I was about to put the key in the lock when I got the sensation that I had done this before—put this key in this lock, in this door, in this city. It must be déjà vu, I thought, because I had never been to Ben’s house; I had never even been to Italy before. And yet I had a feeling of familiarity so strong, it had to be real. Déjà vu should be a dreamy sensation, not this sharp-edged clarity. I knew I had been here, and somehow that knowledge coexisted with the absolute certainty that I had not.
The heavy door stuck, but I managed to open it with a push from one hip. In the dark entryway, the smell enveloped me—the mustiness of a house left behind. I slid my hand along the wall, looking for a light switch, but found none. From the faint light filtering in through the open front door I could make out the entry hall with wood stairs rising to darkness above. I bumped into a hall table and almost knocked over a teetering lamp, caught it, then turned it on. I closed and locked the front door, and began to examine my new home.
Siena, June 4
Dear Nathaniel,
I’m writing a letter because Ben didn’t seem to believe in home-based Internet service. Very medieval of him. No light switches either—I nearly killed myself the first night I arrived in the dark. The house has a typical medieval plan: a sala (living room) in the front, and the camere (bedrooms) in the back. Those back rooms open onto a central courtyard shared by all the houses around it, planted with a trio of blossoming orange trees—I wake up to the fragrance filling my bedroom through the windows. I wonder who owned this house before us, what merchant or artisan, wine dealer, painter . . . do you know how to find out? You always know everything. Were there surgeons in the fourteenth century? I’m not feeling very much like a neurosurgeon at the moment, and I’m enjoying playing hooky.
My first visit to the law offices of Cavaliere, Alberti and Alberti was like something out of a Fellini film. Cavaliere was rail thin, practically invisible from the side; the Albertis short and round with a total of six chins between them, and they all had sympathetic, meeting-a-bereaved-client looks on their faces. I realize you are probably worrying about me, but just remember that doctors make jokes when things get bad. It makes us feel better.
But these lawyers . . . the windows in their office are so dusty that barely any light comes through, and the antiquated lamps have at most ten-watt bulbs in them. I could hardly see where I was supposed to sign. But then I did, and now I own a house in Siena and everything in it.
The Albertis are pressuring me to relinquish the project to someone “more experienced.” But I am not cooperating. There’s this Tuscan scholar, Franco Signoretti, who claims descent from one of the oldest and most prominent medieval families of Siena. He gave an interview for the local television station that I watched on Ben’s tiny black-and-white TV. (I know it’s hard to imagine medieval history being newsworthy, but things are different here.) Based on the sharp comments this guy dropped during the interview he was clearly trying to discredit Ben’s work. He described Ben as an “American-born young scholar in the making” who “had made a respectable effort, in his regrettably short career in Siena, to leave his mark on our long and illustrious history.” It was unpleasant to hear about Ben in the third person this way, though I’m happy to say Italian has come back to me surprisingly quickly. I’m glad now that Ben pushed me so hard to learn it when I was a kid, though at the time I fought him pretty hard. Listening to the guy rant on about how close he is to a discovery that the “young American” had been working on made me dig in my heels: not the reaction Alberti the Elder was hoping for. The more eager the lawyers get to pass Ben’s research on to another scholar, the more stubborn I feel about hanging on to it. I might even be able to publish for him, with a little help from local experts. After all, Ben trained me. I wish he were here to help me now.
How are you? Get any new books in recently? Thanks for taking care of my apartment. You can toss the plants if they’re too difficult to keep alive.
Love, Beatrice
The morning after my visit with the lawyers, I woke up with the sun in my face in the second-floor guest bedroom—obviously for guests because it was so tidy, and had so little in it. I went downstairs to Ben’s bedroom and stood for a few minutes at the door, looking in. The bed was made, but sloppily—he’d never been a hospital corners sort of guy. His spindly-legged bed table was stacked high with books, and more books stood in piles on the floor. The walls were covered with framed maps and pages of illuminated manuscripts, the dense black letters crowding together on the page. He loved his work, I thought—I loved mine too, but I wouldn’t have wallpapered my bedroom back home with pages from neurosurgical textbooks. The sun wasn’t as strong on the ground floor as it was in my room upstairs, and it came through the orange tree low and faintly green, speckling the walls of the room with leaf-shaped shadows.
I took a deep breath and stepped through the doorway, feeling like I might be invading his privacy—but what privacy do people have once they’re gone? I felt the wave of loss rising then like a tide, here in this cluttered room that sang out Ben’s memory like an elegy. I sat down on the wooden floor and watched the dust motes drift aimlessly in the light until my back ached and my body called out for coffee and breakfast. I closed the door on my way out.
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