Interlude

INTERLUDE

A mystery soon solved:       

“He took Pietro with him today.” That explained why Rodolfo was home, at least.

“Pietro? Why would he…” Salvatore craned his head out the window and scrunched his brow at the street below. Pietro hadn’t accompanied dad in months, not after the trout incident. Sal had caught the tail end of the argument, something about not wanting to “hawk fish his whole damn life.” Then came the trout, wobbling through the air, connecting with dad’s face. It wasn’t funny at the time—dad’s pride and fury were legendary, often feeding off each other in cataclysmic chain reactions—but looking back on the wet slap of a lukewarm fish was almost enough to make Sal laugh. If it weren’t for the savage return blow…

“He’s trying to turn him round. Heard about his plan to join the condottieri and had a meltdown.” Rodolfo traced a circle on the plaster wall as he spoke.

“Meltdown?” Sal had never heard the word before. Neither had Rodolfo. Unfamiliar words had a way of tumbling out of his mouth before he could reclaim them. Sal and the others had taken to calling it “Rolf-talk.”

“He lost it. It was the trout all over again.” Pietro’s nose had never quite recovered from the fight. “The Tower of Pisa,” Rodolfo joked one afternoon. He found himself sprawled on the floor, the right side of his face searing from Pietro’s left had. He wondered if familial violence was always so contagious.

“How’s his face?”

“Fine actually. Dad restrained himself, somehow. I think he thinks that he’ll appear more persuasive if he doesn’t resort to face-bashing.”

“You think Pietro will change his mind?” Sal hoped he would.

“I think… I think I’d rather not think right now. Let’s go out, yeah? A surprise day off and all I’ve done is sit around. Any more of this and I’ll start to consider shipping out, too.” A bald-faced lie, of course. Rodolfo would rather do just about anything than get involved with the signoria’s endless epileptic fits of political jockeying and war-mongering. At fifteen, his path in life was already assured. A fishmonger. A seller of fish. A merchant whose wares were…

He was sick of it already. Sal sheepishly followed him out the door.

“How’s the church?” Rodolfo probed.

“She’s well, by the glory of God.” Sal crossed himself haphazardly, it looked more like swatting at a fly.

“I don’t know why I ask. You’d call a storm a sunny day if I asked about the weather.”

“Do you wish the church ill?”

“No, but if we’re going to talk entirely in platitudes then we might as well not talk at all. I want to know how the church is.” Rodolfo scanned his brother’s face for something telling.

Sal knew any answer would disappoint him. The scandals and controversies that endlessly grew out of the Catholic bureaucracy weren’t the kind of details available to him, as an altar boy. Someone had accidentally kicked over the censer and nearly caught the priest’s robe on fire, but something told him this story wouldn’t register on Rodolfo’s scale of interest. He was always looking for something else.

“It’s tremendously boring, is what it is,” Sal answered at half-voice, worried that a passerby might overhear his small blasphemy. “I only know enough Latin to make sense of the prayers. Not to mention the heat and the droning and the overwhelming seriousness of everything. No one warned me that following God would be so… tedious.”

“Well, one day you’ll be clergy. You think that’s where the excitement starts?” Rodolfo jabbed Sal’s arm, causing him to teeter.

“I don’t think excitement should be the goal, Rolf.”

They silently contemplated the nature of Florentine excitement, replete with assassinations, executions, war, and gold. The danger rarely seemed worth the reward, Sal thought. Rodolfo suspected the danger was the whole point.

Rodolfo still wasn’t sure what the goal should be. Sometimes, on nights when indistinct thoughts made sleep mythical, he questioned the idea of goals themselves. Sal seemed to have it right, out of the lot of them. After all, if the church was right—an if Rodolfo would never voice out loud; of course the church was right—then prostrating yourself at the altar seemed the only reasonable course of action. A city that took the bible to heart would be a city of monks, not bankers and mercenaries. It always struck him that this wasn’t the case. God was more of a battering ram than a universal salve. God was a fish you threw in your father’s face when you weren’t getting your way.

Rodolfo cut through an alleyway for a brief relief from the suffocating crowds. Then, back into the fray. The streets were always teeming with people at midday, a mass of wool caps and cinched doublets knocking into one another, arguing about the war with the Milanese, or the news from the East, or the newest edict from the Medici, or the...

It was easy enough to lose two kids in such a crowd. Sal was forever following Rodolfo; his few year’s seniority and generally disaffected demeanor gave him an agreeable psychic distance from Sal’s placidity. He knew better than to ask where Rolf was going. It was a question he never answered.

Suddenly, Sal was thrown to the ground by a blurred doublet and cap.

“You’d do well to watch where you’re walking, Calabrizzi. Are you always bumbling about like an idiot?” came a voice from above. Sal scrambled to his feet and began to slap the dirt from his black robes. He knew the voice. He would not look up.

“Fuck off, Gozzoli.” Rodolfo had already begun to square up with the culprit. Francesco Gozzoli was nearly nineteen, and the son of a prominent furrier. His face was one of those great angular specimens, more fitting of a marble relief than a flesh-and-blood construction. In the convoluted system of Florentine guilds, the Gozzolis would always outrank the Calabrizzis. Fur beat fish in Florence, but just barely.

“What did you say to me?” Francesco was flanked by two other boys, both a head taller than Rodolfo. “You’d better watch your mouth, you filthy fish fucker.” This got a laugh from his two henchmen. Rodolfo knew better than to fight them; it would be a bloodbath. He wasn’t lacking in strength or dexterity, but age and numbers were not on his side. Still, he couldn’t leave without doing something to defend his honor.

“Spoken like a man well-versed in bestiality. I suggest you move along before—” A lightning-quick slap turned Rodolfo’s head, calling to mind echoes of Pietro.

“I heard your mother finally ran off with whatever peasant boy was fucking her. My condolences to your dad.” Another laugh from the henchmen. This was an exceptionally low-blow; their mother was gone—that much was true—but it was consumption, not adultery, that had taken her.

“Get out of my face, Gozzoli, or I swear to Christ you’ll regret it.”

“Oh yeah?” Another slap. “It seems like you’re the one who’s going to regret it.”

“Sure, you’d beat me in a fight. That’s hardly impressive, beating up boys because you’re too weak to fight men. No, I challenge you to something else. A challenge of skill and strength. Winner gets one free punch to the face of his opponent.” Francesco assented immediately, adding that soon Rodolfo’s nose would mirror his brother’s.

Rodolfo’s face grew redder and redder as he pushed his way through the crowd. Sal had to jog to keep up. He told Rodolfo that whatever he was planning wasn’t worth it, that they could go home without indulging Francesco and company with blood sport. But it was no use; Rodolfo had already convinced himself that there was no turning back, that a contract was a contract, even one spoken between boys playing out their parents’ rivalries in the street. After several minutes of pushing and plying, the five boys came to a halt at the edge of the Ponte Vecchio. The bridge was lined with shops, brightly lit windows filled with gold and silver and a thousand other luxuries. In the center of the bridge three great arches crested over the river Arno. Rodolfo turned and looked directly into Francesco’s eyes.

“Here’s my challenge, Gozolli: the first one to climb to the top of the shops wins. Not this side of the shops,” he pointed toward the façades closest to them. “The backside. Over the water. If you can’t do it, or if you won’t do it, you lose.” Sal despaired. Not only was the challenge seemingly impossible, it was definitely illegal. Was it a trick? He didn’t put it past Rodolfo to try to win by technicality. But something in the way he gritted his teeth told Sal he was serious. Francesco, meanwhile, focused most of his energy in maintaining the smug look of assurance on his face. Surely there was a catch.

“You want me to climb on the outside of the bridge?”

“Exactly.”

“And if I don’t, I lose?”

“You heard me, idiot. Let’s hope you climb better than you listen.” Rodolfo turned his back on the group and marched his way to the arches. He couldn’t let them see the fear ricocheting around in his head. At first, he had meant to pose an impossible challenge, something so absurd that even attempting it would be an indication of insanity. But now, for whatever reason, he was seconds away from actually doing it. Was it an attempt to maintain his dignity? This explanation left a lot to be desired, considering the fact that Rodolfo always suspected human dignity was a sham. Was it a need to prove his family’s status? Certainly not. He had long complained to Sal of the constricting—not to mention frighteningly arbitrary—nature of Florence’s guilds. He supposed it was because he was still an apprentice, that some parts of the world wouldn’t be “made real” to him until he crossed the threshold of adulthood. But perhaps that was it. Maybe this was the threshold, the moment he asserted himself as something other than an ancillary character in the novel of his father’s life. He was about to ask himself what a novel was when Sal strode beside him, obviously agitated.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Rolf?” he tried to keep his voice down but ended up squeak-shouting instead.

“I’m going to climb the bridge.”

“You’re going to get arrested, or killed, is what you’re going to get.”

But Rodolfo was already surrendering to the formidable tendency to ascribe undue significance to relatively strange events in the soup of his life, and then to list those events in chronological order. His childhood was spooling out in front of him, a short list of memories strung together by the tenuous thread of causality. Rodolfo only had a vague conception of such a causality. To him, it was more like a story, a story for which the current moment formed the inevitable climax. Images of his mother’s bloody lips hung, crystalline, tied to the sound and smell of the sea, the first time his father had taken him to the coast. The coast was knotted to a swinging corpse strung up over a fire, the flames slowly turning the body to soot. The soot fell into a line leading to a wagon wheel; Rodolfo recognized it as the one that had rolled over his foot. Lips to coast to corpse to wheel to…

This was a poor time to begin forming a life narrative, however. Because he did not have the luxury of time, his constructed plot—a garbled story about the son of a fish merchant finally breaking the law and climbing a bridge—left quite a lot to be desired. At once he was seized by two contradictory feelings: that this moment was terribly important and that his life made no sense.

“Ready, Calabrizzi?” Francesco stood at the opposite arch with his foot on the railing.

“Always.” By now, even Francesco could tell this was a lie. Rodolfo’s hands were shaking as he grabbed the pillar and hoisted himself up onto the railing. His existential vertigo compounded as he looked down into the water. He could hear people shouting, but his mental narrative drowned the voices out. He no longer cared about the onlookers. He had to pass the test. With one arm still around the pillar, he grasped at a relief of brick over his head. It jutted out just enough for him to find his grip. Slowly, slowly, he took his other arm and placed it next to the first. He couldn’t stop his legs from shaking and he became extraordinarily aware of the smoothness of the stone beneath his feet. Breath was escaping him. Rodolfo closed his eyes for a moment to collect himself when he felt something strike him in the chest.

One of Francesco’s goons, right in front of him. Rodolfo reached out to grab him, but he was receding into the sky. The bridge towered over Rodolfo. His back struck water, his lungs began to fill, every part of him thrashed, kept thrashing, desperately trying to restore equilibrium, to find the way up, to stop the water filling his nose, his body becoming the water, everything contracting, but still thrashing, coughing, but still swallowing, the dull roar in his ears, the darkness pulled over his eyes… Rodolfo did not have the presence of mind to create narrative significance for drowning in the Arno. At least, not while it was happening.

A hand shot into the water from a nearby boat and seized Rodolfo by one of his thrashing limbs. In a moment, he was vomiting into the boat. In a few more he was safely deposited on the shore. Rodolfo did not move, the steady drip of water from his doublet was a metronome keeping time to an inward song of rage. Then, he bent down to pick up a nearby rock.

He was going to find Francesco and he was going to break his head open. Rodolfo walked slowly through the streets, attracting more than a few errant glances, clutching his soon-to-be murder weapon with a vice-like grip. He turned it over in his hand, a rough angular shard nearly the size of his fist. He tried to unspool his childhood again—lips, coast, corpse, wheel, etc.—only this time, the threshold into adulthood was murder.

Murder. It wasn’t so hard for Florentines to commit the act, he told himself. People murdered all the time. Whether it was duels in the street or executions in the square or war outside the walls, murder was a fact of life. It would be as simple as swinging his hand. A hand to the temple. A terrible chill ran through his body as he became aware that he was capable of the act. The only remaining obstacle was his conscience. Francesco deserved to die. Or was his unnamed friend the one who deserved it? He was the one that did the pushing, after all. Rodolfo vacillated between vengeful scenarios, envisioning the horrible triumph of a boy and his rock. Should he murder all three or only Francesco, leaving his cratered skull as a warning for anyone that wanted to make a fool out of him? Somewhere in the minutiae of planning homicide, Rodolfo became aware that he was crying. Why was he crying?

But it was too late, shame and humiliation cascaded over Rodolfo’s head in waves. Blinded by tears, he dropped his rock and sat against a nearby wall. He tried to unspool his life again, but nothing seemed connected. No amount of forced coherence unified the pattern of his life. He was even beginning to lose the simple chronology. When had he seen the execution? Was it after he had seen the ocean for the first time? Did his mother die years ago, or was it only yesterday? And so, just as quickly as he had picked up the habit, Rodolfo renounced the act of storytelling. If there was a threshold to be crossed, a time when things were “made real,” it would not be the result of a tidy, conscious narrative marching forward one happening at a time. No, life was something far too messy for stories, even the life of an unremarkable fishmonger.

Or, that’s what he told himself. The truth of the matter was that Rodolfo was human, and no human can resist the temptation to plot their own life. He looked up, bleary-eyed, and saw the vague figure of Sal running toward him.

“Rolf, are you alright? I tried to call the guards, but Francesco and his friends ran as soon as I—”

“Doesn’t matter,” Rodolfo cut him off, pushing the tears from his eyes with the palm of his hand. “I don’t ever want to talk about today again.” He pushed himself up and kicked the rock into an alleyway, the clatter of stone against stone sounding long after the two of them had gone.