of danger, as it had always done. The sun burst from behind the departing slab of cloud. It hit hard, flashing off the steaming flagstones.
Scuttling figures skipped over puddles, hurrying to make up for lost time. Adam joined their ranks, map in hand, heading south out of the piazza. In Via dei Fossi rainwater still streamed from jutting eaves high overhead, driving pedestrians off the pavements into the road, forcing them to do battle with squadrons of scooters and cars. The narrow street filled with the sound of horns and curses, the cacophony played out with leaps and bounds and wild gesticulations, the distant rumble of the departing storm like a low kettledrum roll underscoring the deranged opera.
A twinge of anxiety stiffened his stride, though not at the chaos unfolding around him. He knew the city intimately, but only from books. What if he was disappointed? What if Florence’s ‘unique cultural and artistic heritage’, which he’d detailed in his essays with such hollow authority, left him cold? As if on cue, he found himself on a bridge spanning the River Arno – no lively, sparkling torrent, but a strip of brown and turbid water, a river fit for a factory district.
Five minutes later he reached his destination, and his apprehension melted away. The Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine was deserted when he entered it, and it remained so for the next quarter of an hour. Michelangelo and Raphael had both come here to study, to copy, to learn from the young man who had changed the face of European painting: Tommaso Guidi, nicknamed Masaccio by his friends, the scruffy boy-wonder, dead at twenty-seven. Others had contributed to the same cycle of frescoes – Masolino, Fra Lippo Lippi, names to be reckoned with – but their work was flat, lifeless, when set alongside that of Masaccio.
His figures demanded to be heard, to be believed in; some even threatened to step out of the walls and shake the doubters into credence. Real men, not ciphers. And real women. His depiction of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden required no context in order to be appreciated. More than five hundred years on, it still struck home: the fallen couple, with their bare, rough-hewn limbs, granite hard from toil, cast out like country labourers by some unforgiving landlord. Adam’s face was buried in his hands, a broken man. Eve covered her nakedness in shame, but her face was raised, crying out to the heavens. All the anger, frustration and incomprehension in the world seemed contained within that gaping, shapeless hole Masaccio had given her for a mouth.
The more Adam stared at the image, the more he saw, and the less he understood. A definition of true art? He was still cringing at his own pomposity when a couple entered the chapel.
They were French. His thick dark hair was oiled back into two symmetrical wings that protruded a short distance from the forehead. She was extremely slender, quite unlike Masaccio’s Eve, or maybe as Eve would have looked some years after her banishment from the bounty of Eden – pinched and emaciated.
‘Good afternoon,’ said the Frenchman in accented English, looking up from his guidebook.
It rankled that he was so readily identifiable, not just as a fellow tourist but an Englishman.
‘American?’ asked the Frenchman.
‘English.’
The word came out wrong – barked, indignant – a parody of Anglo-Saxon self-importance. The couple exchanged the faintest of amused glances, which only annoyed him more.
He looked at the man’s perfectly coiffed hair and wondered just how distressing that flash downpour must have been for him. Or maybe the oil helped; maybe it assisted run-off.
He only realized he was staring when the Frenchman shifted nervously and said, ‘Yes…?’
Adam gestured to the frescoes. ‘Las pinturas son muy hermosas,’ he said in his best Spanish.
As he left the chapel, abandoning the couple to Masaccio’s genius, he wondered whether his antagonism towards them owed itself to their interruption of his experience, or whether the work itself had somehow unleashed it in him.
3
Has the Englishman arrived yet?
No, Signora.
When?
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow?
That’s what he said in his letter. The twelfth.
I wish to see him as soon as he gets here.
You’ve already said, Signora. You won’t forget?
Why would I forget? Move a little to the side, please.
Gently. Don’t push.
I’m sorry. Turn over, please.
You don’t have to do this, Maria.
I know.
I’m happy to hire someone else.
You really expect me to cook and clean for someone else?
You’re a good woman.
Thank you, Signora.
Just as your father was a good man.
He had the highest respect for you too, Signora.
There’s really no need to be quite so formal, not when you’re giving me a bed-bath.
He had the highest respect for you too.
You know, Maria, I believe you’re in danger of developing a sense of humour in your old age.
Turn over, please.
4
They left Florence through the Porta Romana, heading south to Galluzzo, where they wound their way up into the hills past a sprawling Carthusian monastery.
The climbing road was flanked by olive groves, neat rows of trees laid out in terraces, their foliage flashing silver in the sunlight. Vineyards and stands of umbrella pines studded the hillside. Every so often, an avenue of dark cypresses indicated a track leading to some isolated farmhouse, which invariably was also guarded by a small cohort of the tall, tapering conifers. Apart from the tarmac road along which they were travelling, there was little to suggest the passing centuries had wrought any meaningful change on the tapestried landscape.
Adam lounged in his seat, taking in the view, the cooling breeze from the open window washing over him, ruffling his hair. The taxi driver was still talking nineteen to the dozen despite Adam’s earlier confession that most of the words were lost on him. Every now and then Adam would catch the man’s eye in the rear-view mirror and grunt and nod his assent – an arrangement that seemed to work to
