Chapter 1: The Berninis 1 The Berninis Three months later A stranger is staring at me. I drop my shoulder, glimpse him over it. He is tall. He crosses the room, moving toward me with a long stride, smooth and sure. The stranger''s stare fastens, binds me tighter to him as he moves closer. His eyes scrape across my body, then he looks away, back, away, then skips discretion and takes in my length, eyes prowling up and down. Newness incites the eye and I am always a new thing. Once accustomed, he turns from me and looks at the Bernini sculpture in front of us, a scene from Ovid''s Metamorphoses .
Now it is my turn to stare. The stranger is built by blueprint and ruler. Jaw to neck, shoulder to torso, hip to knee: a body of straight lines, design, intention. I''m flushed, too warm, I stink, sweat drips, rivulets of self-reproach; he is near me now, dry and smiling; it unnerves me, his dryness. I''d left my hotel at noon: an error. Heat made the streets shimmer. The air was sticky and humid as a mouth. Dust, rising in fine mists, drifted over me, left me gritty.
Behind us, the Galleria Borghese bursts with tourists; they push in close, pen us in, making a frame around me and the stranger. From a distance we might look like polite people appreciating a famous sculpture, but from where I stand, inside the mass, I can see all the sly, slow glances, flushed faces, dilations, smiles, pulses, and swells, and I am caught in their undertone, washed by their waves of red energy. Our eyes hang on the sculpture at a single juncture, where Pluto''s hand presses deep into Proserpine''s naked leg. The sculpture depicts a story from Roman mythology. One version goes like this: Pluto offends Venus, the goddess of love. As an act of revenge, she tells Cupid to send his arrow through Pluto''s heart, afflicting him instantly with a love-like madness. Proserpine, the daughter of the goddess Ceres, is nearby picking flowers. Pluto, god of the Underworld, abducts her, forcing her away from nature and toward the safety of the dark and isolated world he rules.
Bernini stills, for our consideration, the moment when Pluto sees Proserpine and takes her, holds her roughly. He wraps a hard hand around her thigh, and at that point of contact Bernini has made metamorphic rock soft, impossibly. The way marble fingers sink into marble flesh, the eroticism of this aggression--it makes me uneasy, but I don''t look away and neither does anyone else. The stranger inches closer. His elbow finds my shoulder and stays. Where we touch becomes a whole sensate world made of heat, weight, a scent like wet leaves. Then his arm parts from mine, just barely, and the world expands to that narrow space that separates us, and through that space the possibility of adventure trembles forth. Fine hairs and ridged red flesh rise to bridge the gap between my body and his.
My thoughts crawl along my skin. The stranger and I take breaths in unison, suspended in anticipation of the other''s gesture. I imagine the stranger grasping me as Pluto grasps Proserpine. He leans closer and a budding warmth in me blossoms. A thought toward pleasure: to see him kneel and lick Rome''s dust from my bare leg. Just then the stranger tips forward and inhales sharply as if this would dislodge a tiny particle of the Bernini that he could ingest, something to keep safe inside himself long after he''s left the museum. He sits back on his heels, nods to the statue--an odd gesture of, perhaps, respect--and moves on without me, winding through the crowds. I stand alone a while longer and stare at the goose bumps raised and rippled, carved by a tool onto Proserpine.
In other depictions of this myth, artists paint a weaker heroine. Dürer etches Proserpine (Proserpina to Bernini, Persephone to the Greeks) as a dizzying pinwheel of limbs, the center point of which are her breasts, bulging comically like bugged-out eyes. Alessandro Allori shows her placid and blank, seemingly bored by her kidnapping. Rubens bends her back over the edge of Pluto''s speeding chariot, her will lost in the blur of momentum. Rembrandt''s Proserpine limply claws at Pluto''s face from a vacant state. Theodoor van Thulden leaves her stunned, head tilted up, arms skyward, as if asking for a better god to intervene and save her from her fate. But Bernini''s Proserpine is alive. Her body is strong, and she torques it forcefully against the god, trying to free herself.
She smashes the hardest part of her palm into Pluto''s face. He grimaces. Bernini leaves Pluto dazed, off-balance, faltering, reminding us that Cupid''s arrow kidnaps his agency, too. Ovid''s myth tells of two forced transformations and Bernini shows us two people in motion, struggling unsuccessfully against their fate. The statue is bright, the brightest thing in the room, and it hums with the energy of the aggrieved--Pluto hurts Venus who hurts Pluto who hurts Proserpine; this circular hurt, placed on Proserpine''s thigh, her stone flesh yielding below the god''s grasp. It is stupefying: I am dimmed by awe, aversion, desire. I''ve been standing too long and my right hip begins its familiar twinge. If I don''t find a place to lie down, stretch, and rest, my body will start to lock up.
The straps of my backpack are slightly uneven, and I can already feel the pressure causing the muscles on the right side of my curved spine to cramp. I find my neutral room and count 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. Slowly, I pass by the sculpture. There is other art to see here. I stop for balance and to rest. My back is stiff and stiffens more. Pain transforms the floor''s stubborn slant; reorders it, distorts, unmoors; the plane is changed, both breadth and pitch. The pull of all this art is gone.
Everything is just a thing now. Pain breaks my bond with all but it. I look for an exit sign and walk into a new room and the stranger is there. He faces away from me, but the line of his shoulder straightens my way, aims. He knows I''m near. I stare a moment too long, and he turns toward me. I flinch, recover, then move to study without attention the nearest painting, anything other than him. He watches me through the room.
What a feeling this gives me. It electrifies the experience of looking elsewhere. I track his graceful maneuvering through the crowd. His long consideration of a piece of art, his eyes flicking up to a gilded ceiling--it is all for my benefit. I try to find enough energy to imagine a divergent reality, one in which I become a beautiful body blushing with desire, pain numbed, mind blank, dragged into the present moment by lust and left there, confused and alert. I follow him. He crosses the room, so I do, too; he turns a corner, I turn; he is steps ahead, his scent seeks me, the length of his neck is the length of my name; I am possessed, not by him, but by bloated, ornate reverie, by possibility. A curtain lifts to reveal a new narrative: a lady meets a stranger and now a real story can begin.
When I was six, I held my father''s hand as he followed a red-haired woman around a department store. She was a stranger, but regarded my father with a knowledge I didn''t understand. She looked at him until he lowered his eyes. She moved through the aisles, knowing he would follow, and he did. I walked behind my father, hidden from the woman, but she was not hidden from me. She wore a white dress, the precise image of which I can recall as if she were in front of me now in the Galleria Borghese. Delicate, loose, translucent. Often, I''ve fought the urge to buy something similar, wondering what effect a dress like that might have on me.
My father had squeezed my hand. He''d whispered, Keep up, keep up. I watch my stranger in the Galleria. Would I follow him out of the museum and into an imaginary night? He''s ahead of me in the grand hall, keep up, keep up , but I can''t keep up. My hip stops me. I rest against a wall. The pursuit is over, and I am, again, only myself: a tired mom, overheated and unable, unwilling, to keep walking. The stranger pauses in a far-off doorway, maybe waiting for me, but it''s too late, my fantasy deflates, I''m beat, so beat, museums are exhausting, the day is done; the opening through which the unexpected could emerge is now closed, and I want to go home, or at least to the hotel and its air-conditioning.
I stand in the vestibule, just ahead of the exit, to get my fill of free Wi-Fi before leaving. I cycle through my email and social media accounts. A text pops up. Isn''t it a bit strange (it''s my mother) to go to Italy without telling anyone? I don''t tell her the truth because I don''t know it. Whatever it is will be embarrassing. If I tell her about Colin and Jay at the bar, what they''d said to me and what I''d said to them and how it had shifted something in me, how it had taken me from my family and put me on a plane to Rome--well, I can already see her rolling her eyes, heavy sighs all lined up and waiting. Strange how? I text back. My mother delivers disapproval in the form of questions.
What happened to your PhD? Nothing happened to it , I respond. Should something have happened? Should work have happened? Probably . Dots undulate, bubble up, then dissolve into the depths below my cell phone screen. My mother quits the inquisition. I imagine her frowning at her screen, eyebrow raised. Her silence voices her real concerns: my son, my husband, my new job; the common thread: my abandoned priorities. I put my phone in the pocket of my dress. I''m ready to leave.
I grimace and bend at a drinking fountain. I feel the.