The other bank was brightly lit by the lamps scattered along the tall embankment. Long tongues of gold and silvery light were licking at the water, and, as they shimmered, shiny specks broke off from them and danced away. But here, on this side, it was shady, especially where we were sitting. The better, I thought, for us, - that way, while we could easily be noticed, nobody was likely to see who exactly we were.
I sat at Francesco"s side in the low, juicy green grass, and our forearms were touching. He was watching the display of light on the tranquil water, and had not spoken yet, but I could tell that deep down, his walls had crumbled, and the sunlight was spilling over, and he stood there over the ruins having no idea what to do next. There could be no mistake about it, even if he started to treat me the usual way. That was merely a means of defending himself which never went deeper than the words themselves, and without which he could not establish any contact with others, and I had learned not to be deceived by it.
I put my hand on his shoulder, feeling his hard, icy body beneath the coarse fabric of his shirt. There was only one question pressing to be asked, - one which included all the questions I had ever wanted to ask Francesco, and contained the very essence of why things were the way they were now.
"How? How did you?.."
"How did I come to live in this manner, you mean?" Without turning to me, he gave that lopsided, sacrastic little laugh. "Just like that. If I did, then it means this is the way I am. Dirt will stick to dirt."
Continuing this would be no use. It was his usual tone, and his usual way of talking when he did not want to show he was hurt, or simply did not want to let somebody else too close. He was not saying the whole truth. It happened once Beatrice was no more; and while there were many things he was to blame for, he could not blame himself for everything. Not for this.
'You grieved too long, and too strong,' I said very softly, and tightened my hand on his shoulder.
Francesco continued to look at the river, while his face was slowly changing, until it had that stony look which hid immense suffering. I could feel his whole body tense up. The minutes wore on and he remained motionless, frozen in the pain which I, too, shared with him, and finally I became afraid.
"Yes. It was like looking at the sun, and seeing that it had become a lump of ice."
With every word, he took his time, uttering it carefully and lingering on it before going on. The tone had become lethargic and oddly detached; one could think what he was saying had nothing to do with him, and described someone else entirely. This was a stark contrast compared with the shattering power of the words themselves.
"I had woken suddenly, not understanding what had happened. When I looked up, I saw that a crust of ice had covered the sun. The ice gripped it tighter as I watched, and got deeper and deeper into it, until it had frozen solid. And my whole sky turned into ice too, and cracked and crumbled to my feet in sharp, minute shards."
The silence that followed was hollow, and cold, in the same way that outer space must be, - so cold that any chill my changing body had ever known was nothing compared to it. It brought with it an icy blackness that had something final about it, as if it had fallen forever, or had really been there always, since the beginning of time, and that finality was paralyzing.
The gray hair, and something in his weathered, severe face that made him look much older than his eternal mid-thirties, - this came from there, too. That was it. This was the earth-shattering moment since which he was never the same. I wondered how he could have lived on after this; yet he did. It felt like a wonder in itself to see him here, with me, this shabby, gray-haired survivor come from a wasteland I didn"t dare to imagine. How did he feel when he wandered through it, - stumbling once in a while, making himself get up again, and still going on and on? And how much strength had it taken? I put my arm around his waist and pressed my cheek to the coarse fabric, feeling a growing, grateful warmth and just wishing there was something I could do.
I spoke. I had to break that silence, to clamber out of it in some way, and help Francesco out as well.
"How did you make it, Francesco? Were you waiting for something, - maybe without knowing what was it that you are waiting for?"
He reflected on what I"d said.
"No."
There was an underlying hidden uncertainty to his tone; he was probing himself in an attempt to resolve it, delving deep within his being to understand whether what he was saying was true, and the hope had really never been there at all. Then it was gone, and when he spoke again his voice was flat, and the words fell heavily at his feet, one by one.
"There was nothing to anticipate. I was an insane man after it happened, - blind with the pain of it, and the rage. In a while, the world went blank. Since then there were few things in it that mattered to me."
I looked at Francesco"s hand. It was brown, just like my own, though, as the tan hadn"t been brought about by walking during the day, it was not as thick; there were dark patches even underneath the shiny fingernails, and the palm, too, was dark. And, not for the first time already, I noticed that Francesco"s lips were also brown, rather than red, and parched, the way human lips become when exposed to sun and wind. It could mean only one thing.
"You"ve tried to end it, haven"t you?"
A minute elapsed, or maybe longer, - I couldn"t tell.
"Yes," he answered in a dull, distant voice, and again came a long and oppressive pause. "I tried twice. The sun should have incinerated me, but it did not. Then I no longer cared. One has to still be living to want to put an end to it all, - if not in body, then at least at heart. I was dead."
The same cold blackness, and it is unbearable; but there shall be no way out of it, ever, so that any struggling is useless, and it is better to be still and to surrender to it for good. Francesco"s words only drifted through it, making it a little more explicable, but did not break it.
"I thought it must be some curse that God had laid on me. One that would not allow me to end the existence I had been dragged me into, so that I had to suffer longer. I deserved that, so it made sense."
"Think of it that way," I said. "What if it wasn"t a curse, but something opposite? God loves you, so He didn"t let you die by your own hand, because that"d surely mean condemning yourself for good. All that time, He was giving you a chance to come back to Him. You just took it the wrong way."
I held him closer to myself.
"I think you did have hope, Francesco. Perhaps it was just hidden so deep you didn't know it was there. You must have still thought there was, or could be, something which'd make life worth it. Even if you weren"t sure of this, yourself, God was. That"s why He stopped you from doing what you"d wanted to do, and has been guarding you up until now, - because He knew you could be brought back to life again."
The silence was more serene this time, though full of uncertainty and some strangely lost, spacey feeling; and I felt I had to ask him something else, something that was perhaps the most important thing of all.
"And now? Do you have something to live for, and to cling to?"
I waited. Inside, I think I knew already what he would say; but I was still secretly anxious, and excited, though at that moment I wouldn't have even been able to explain why, and what was it that I was expecting him to tell me.
"Yes."
Francesco"s voice broke on the word, as though something had given in, and there came a sudden deep gentleness. I was dipped into it all at once, and the ground swam from beneath my feet as the two of us sank, together, into some ocean of golden and glittering waters.
His hand found mine and clasped it, so cautiously that the movement was almost clumsy. It was like that of a man groping around blindly in darkness, perhaps not really knowing what he had been searching for, and finally grasping the only thing he had found, which had suddenly turned out to be dear to him. But when his fingers closed around my hand, it was with a sense of deep security and finality which brought about an instant clarity and ease.
Clear, bight streaks of gold glowed in Francesco"s eyes, throbbing and melting away into a warm living greenness akin to that of the grass underneath our feet. The light that came from the other bank gave a soft lustre to his dark face, and the brown, dry lips were touched with a slight, contained smile which could give only a faint glimpse of what he, - and I with him, - really felt.
The sky seemed to have descended into the Arno and dissolved in the very water. In its depth, there were columns of light - silvery and very clear closer up, and gradually fading into a murky gold further away, their bases lost in a midnight blue infinity. They trembled, very slightly, and it seemed I was in a dream, drifting between the pillars of some fairytale palace, so high I could not see the ground, obscured by fog.
I woke with a start to the sounds of evening-time Florence, - those of motor scooters, and many people talking and shouting as they passed along Lung"arno Gen Diaz and over Ponte Vecchio. It was time to leave.
"I must go, Francesco," I said. "I came only for a very short while. I"d only told them I went shopping, so I have to be back in about half an hour."
I opened my backpack, and the gift bag I"d prepared for Francesco, and gave it to him. Inside it, there was a smaller bag with small flaky cakes soaked in honey and sprinkled with sesame seed, and a small, pear-shaped head of Burrini cheese with sweet butter inside it.
"There, this is for you. Make some coffee at home, and give yourself a treat."
I had also put a fresh rose of a bright, burning scarlet into the bag, having broken off most of the long stem and wrapped it up so that it was not damaged. I had bought it from an African street vendor on my way here. He had been a big, childlike fellow; he exclaimed the price, so low it seemed almost purely symbolic, with an innocent exuberance, nodding enthusiastically at his customers as he showed his white teeth and his black face shone, and beaming at them in such a way they could not help smiling back. In his arms, he was holding a huge bunch of roses that glowed in the dark like embers, and just looking at them gave me a jolt of a wild, pure joy. The instant I saw them, I decided I must have one for Francesco.
Now I smiled as I thought about it, and about what he would feel when he saw it. I had chosen to hide it to make it a secret, however tiny. Too much open joy could also destroy the fragile bond that had formed between us. But little surprises, - little things one would normally scarce notice, - was what worked, and helped make him happier.
We stood up and went together along the tarmac driveway, and out into the street. Francesco turned to look at me once more, and I nodded at him and smiled. He walked away, and I watched his tall black figure get lost in the crowd, feeling a thick throbbing warmth as I remembered his smile and the feel of his hand clasping mine.