It goes without saying that you would like it here, Martin, but I’ll say it anyway.
The bed and breakfast where we’re staying is sixteenth century. My room is huge and has windows that open above a busy street. This morning there was a market and I awoke to the sounds of people bargaining at the stalls. The boards on the floor of the room are two feet wide, and the windowsill is so deep that I have to stand on tiptoes to lean over and see into the street below. In the big reception room that is next to mine, the ceiling is coveredwith frescoes—entwined leaves and the garlanded heads of classic Roman men. There is also a huge chandelier that droops down into the centre of that room. All the decoration is from the top down and there is nothing but a simple tiled floor below. Out back there is a little courtyard with trees and birds, a glimpse of sky between the branches. The back wall of the house is open to this courtyard and at night, when the lamp is turned on in the hallway, bats fly in to circle the light.
My event today was, strangely enough, at a music conservatory. I was interviewed outside, in the courtyard, and all the while that I was listening to my interviewer speak in Italian on one side of me, or my translator whisper in English on the other side of me, I could hear music tumbling from the windows behind me—strings, and then later, a piano. I wonder if there will come a day when that will not make me think of you.
It was hard to remain calm on the first bumpy flight over from Canada, and the second bumpy flight from Frankfurt to Bologna. I am both more and less afraid of dying since you died. I am less afraid of the actual event, but more afraid that it will happen sooner than I want it to—as was the case with you. Being in a strange place makes me feel untetheredto my life back home, and that in turn makes me feel nothing but panic—which is the feeling I had all fall when you were dying. It is easy now for one state to echo another.
Last night we went to the restaurant in Mantova where Virginia Woolf ate when she was here in 1921. I had the local specialty—tortellini stuffed with pumpkin and amaretto. It was very good. Apparently Virginia Woolf also liked it when she ate there, all those years ago.
I was thinking today about how, when you travelled, wherever you went, you used to have to find a piano to practise on. European cities were good for this because there was always a church or a theatre or a music school that would let you use theirs. That was not an unusual request for them. It could easily have been your piano that I heard behind me when I was talking at the conservatory today. Sometimes, when we were together in another city, I wrote for a few hours while you went off and practised on some borrowed piano. I liked meeting you after you’d been playing because you were always happy and ready for adventure.
Later on today we went to visit the palace that is on the edge of one of the three lakes. Again, the decoration was top-heavy, all those ceiling frescoes andnothing on the walls. But someone explained to me that there had been decorations on the walls once—tapestries, leather hangings—and they had, of course, been removed by various owners who had wanted to hang other artworks in their place. It’s harder to change the thing you cannot reach, so the ceiling decorations have largely remained untouched.
In one of the rooms hornets were boiling in the loins of the entwined plaster lovers on the vaulted ceiling. In another room—the most important room of the palace, where the prince entertained visiting dignitaries—on each of the four walls there were life-size portraits of the prince’s favourite horses. One was called
Gloriosa
. They all looked plump and happier than any of the people in the palace paintings. And in the room with the frescoes of giants that started at the floor and covered all the walls there was graffiti dating from the sixteenth century. Apparently all
The bed and breakfast where we’re staying is sixteenth century. My room is huge and has windows that open above a busy street. This morning there was a market and I awoke to the sounds of people bargaining at the stalls. The boards on the floor of the room are two feet wide, and the windowsill is so deep that I have to stand on tiptoes to lean over and see into the street below. In the big reception room that is next to mine, the ceiling is coveredwith frescoes—entwined leaves and the garlanded heads of classic Roman men. There is also a huge chandelier that droops down into the centre of that room. All the decoration is from the top down and there is nothing but a simple tiled floor below. Out back there is a little courtyard with trees and birds, a glimpse of sky between the branches. The back wall of the house is open to this courtyard and at night, when the lamp is turned on in the hallway, bats fly in to circle the light.
My event today was, strangely enough, at a music conservatory. I was interviewed outside, in the courtyard, and all the while that I was listening to my interviewer speak in Italian on one side of me, or my translator whisper in English on the other side of me, I could hear music tumbling from the windows behind me—strings, and then later, a piano. I wonder if there will come a day when that will not make me think of you.
It was hard to remain calm on the first bumpy flight over from Canada, and the second bumpy flight from Frankfurt to Bologna. I am both more and less afraid of dying since you died. I am less afraid of the actual event, but more afraid that it will happen sooner than I want it to—as was the case with you. Being in a strange place makes me feel untetheredto my life back home, and that in turn makes me feel nothing but panic—which is the feeling I had all fall when you were dying. It is easy now for one state to echo another.
Last night we went to the restaurant in Mantova where Virginia Woolf ate when she was here in 1921. I had the local specialty—tortellini stuffed with pumpkin and amaretto. It was very good. Apparently Virginia Woolf also liked it when she ate there, all those years ago.
I was thinking today about how, when you travelled, wherever you went, you used to have to find a piano to practise on. European cities were good for this because there was always a church or a theatre or a music school that would let you use theirs. That was not an unusual request for them. It could easily have been your piano that I heard behind me when I was talking at the conservatory today. Sometimes, when we were together in another city, I wrote for a few hours while you went off and practised on some borrowed piano. I liked meeting you after you’d been playing because you were always happy and ready for adventure.
Later on today we went to visit the palace that is on the edge of one of the three lakes. Again, the decoration was top-heavy, all those ceiling frescoes andnothing on the walls. But someone explained to me that there had been decorations on the walls once—tapestries, leather hangings—and they had, of course, been removed by various owners who had wanted to hang other artworks in their place. It’s harder to change the thing you cannot reach, so the ceiling decorations have largely remained untouched.
In one of the rooms hornets were boiling in the loins of the entwined plaster lovers on the vaulted ceiling. In another room—the most important room of the palace, where the prince entertained visiting dignitaries—on each of the four walls there were life-size portraits of the prince’s favourite horses. One was called
Gloriosa
. They all looked plump and happier than any of the people in the palace paintings. And in the room with the frescoes of giants that started at the floor and covered all the walls there was graffiti dating from the sixteenth century. Apparently all
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