Scritto a Firenze
Agnès Madrigal
Agnès Madrigal writes works of fiction. This short “vignette” was inspired by a visit to the Renaissance city of Florence. A woman, walking alone through the crowds of tourists, contemplates the choices she has made in her life and the concept of a dual nature—a dual nature of self, or of self and writer.
A woman crosses the Ponte Santa Trinatà in Florence, with her fate cradled in her arms. “Scritto a Firenze” is a short story by Agnès Madrigal. Photograph by Madrigalit
Many of the shops, the cafés, the hotels bear the names of the nearby attractions: Ponte Vecchio, Duomo, Santa Maria Novella. They are like living tags, tags the sort they use in social media these days to identify, to group, to make a sense of a kind. These souvenir stores, these restaurants, these pensiones, they were the physical predecessors of this online trend. They already understood the value of a known name; they knew that their audience—the tourists, these many tourists—would need not look much further. The location, the thing, the aura, all neatly contained and tidily comprehended in a single name.
The tourists, these tourists, the thin trembling streets were filled with them, Americans most of all, it seemed, or the Americans were merely the easiest ones to spot in their bright clothes, flashing tennis shoes and fanny packs, loud voices echoing against the stone walls. They looked like funny caricatures in the antique city, twentieth- and twenty-first-century cartoons, pulled from the prepackaged and geometric American suburbs, superimposed on the cobblestone streets, on the cut colored marble facades of the cathedrals and of the baptistery.
“Words she struggles to use, words she struggles to suppress, as though there are two of her: one, obnoxiously certain of her honesty, and the need for the harshness of that or any truth; the other, timid, trembling in the shadow of the Santa Croce basilica, or inside of it, below the massive tombs, the daunting statuary, the bones of Michelangelo.”
—Agnès Madrigal, “Scritto a Firenze”
These American tourists, she wanted to loathe them; she knew instead to love them—for she knew them; grew up with them; ran away from them, but never forgot them. She ran away, as she did, to pretty Florence, to other places, too—New York, San Francisco, Paris, other locales where they also made no sense, where they were illogical, as they seemed to her here, cloddish, even stupid, though she warned herself not to judge. No, she would not judge, for she knew she could judge fiercely, even knowing that the rapture of the gavel could so easily ring in her own ears, in her mind, throughout her corpse long after the sentence was given.
She takes back her adjectives, terrible adjectives. Words she struggles to use, words she struggles to suppress, as though there are two of her: one, obnoxiously certain of her honesty, and the need for the harshness of that or any truth; the other, timid, trembling in the shadow of the Santa Croce basilica, or inside of it, below the massive tombs, the daunting statuary, the bones of Michelangelo. She is a tourist, too. Though she might prove herself a quieter one—she was by herself, there was no one to talk to but her notebook—the type of tourist who might stall longer in front of one of the regal Titians or before one of the painted cells in the Convento de San Marco.
On the other side of the Arno River, the narrator flees down an alley that slowly empties into silence and the opportunity to think again, to write it down. Photograph of the Oltrarno by Madrigalit
She is still one of them, weakly lacking any versatility with the beautiful Italian language, speaking only, woodenly, such small phrases as buona sera, grazie, or una tavola per una. She is alone here, she feels so alone here, alone among the comfortable bodies she rejected—these mothers and fathers; aunts and uncles; even the children, the young cousins, the nieces and nephews now; and more, all of those she had left behind. She did it not forcefully, not aggressively, just absolutely, essentially, as it was, as it was her fate, peculiar as it was that little fate, working through her as it did, turning all the intricate mechanisms of herself, moving the tiny silver hammers, the whirring tourbillons.
When does it fail, fate, she wonders? When does it demolish itself into her? When she dies? Would it not continue on from there, still drawing its meandering lines like chalk upon a black night sky? Would she ever master it, overpower it? She thought it unlikely. Rather she should breathe with it; walk with it; carry it, if that is what one did with it. She carried it in her open arms along the Ponte Santa Trinatà over the Arno River, down the sloping little street in Santo Spirito, and through the babbling alleyway that grew quieter and quieter as she withdrew from the popular area.
“Could she imagine it, her life, projected upon these walls, the past of it like the gorgeous frescos found throughout the city, some sequentially placed in parallelograms, each with a story inside?”
—Agnès Madrigal, “Scritto a Firenze”
She made her way to the small simple room in the bed-and-breakfast she had rented for three months—she had surprised the owners with the length of her stay, did she not (they had wondered) want to rent a furnished flat instead? She did not, though she didn’t tell them why; she wanted the solace of the small room, the prepared meals, the need for nothing to accumulate. She held tightly her fate as she entered the building, climbed the magnificent stairs—so many grand staircases in Florence—and held it still inside the white-walled room once she turned the old metal key in the keyhole. She would continue to hold it, try to hold it still, hold it exactly there.
Could she imagine it, her life, projected upon these walls, the past of it like the gorgeous frescos found throughout the city, some sequentially placed in parallelograms, each with a story inside? And the future, what of that? She felt the temptation to paint upon the blank walls, to see what might be revealed if she did. In that, a future seemed possible, an action—an illusion, perhaps, but wasn’t it always an illusion that enabled one’s ability to survive?