Part Two of Ciao Mate
When The Moon
Hits Your Eye
Like A Big Pizza Pie
August night 1963. Florence Italy. Hot.
Young boy in a tub. Hardly naked, not so brave, he has his pants on. Boy quaking. His name is Jonathan Bell.
“YOU CAN’T HIDE FROM ME!” The nun’s voice bulldozes after him.
Jonathan crouches feeling exposed without shirt, shoes and socks. Those items are on the floor in the other room of this hotel. After finishing his third, and last glass of wine he’d inexplicably dropped them there on the sudden, losing them in sweet innocence in the steaminess of a Florentine, August night.
The girls being older had clapped derisively at the sight of his skinny doughboy chest. Deriding him as they continued to drink cheap Chianti from their hotel room glasses.
That night the boy’s three glasses are too many too much of the first wine, first alcohol of any kind, he’s ever drunk. The chianti belonged to the high school girls. They’d intended it for lulling his brothers, those dear little Delilahs.
The girls aren’t clapping now. It’s to be a memorable silence ominous for a life time.
Jonathan is curling his toes in dismay. It’s the first great panic of his short life. He is 14.
It’s his baptism in such turmoil, coming no less in an ancient hotel room in an alternative reality. A singular experience then for a boy from Great Bend, Kansas.
Jonathan is painfully, remarkably fair. His baby skin is like the color of the tub in the strong electric light, fine china touched in pink. He’s peaches and cream all over, excepting a searing hot-poker dab of scarlet on each cheek. He loathes those with all his being.
He yearns to be the rock fence posts and barbed wire of home.
Those slashes of cherry, in Kansas his classmates torment him with his nickname ‘cherry cheeks,’ are spreading larger and larger as the seconds pass over his suffering.
The hated flush suffuses his entire face and neck. It creeps down his torso which as yet has no down anywhere except a blondish small patch under his arms and between his legs, ‘down there’ a place only he knows about.
A few Florentine painters, at least a few—Pontormo, Il Sodoma, Andrea del Sarto– might have brawled over the favors of this young man or if nothing more than to claim him as a model for their very own David. His coloring and limbs would have turned Michelangelo into a pool of melted paint. Leonardo into a crema paradiso. Bronzino would have stood in the corner and moaned.
Don’t tell him any such unimaginable things, sinful old world visions, High Renaissance hijinks. Most of all that at 14 he is pretty—perhaps less than 70% or so but youth makes the most of less—and he’d have lit up into an apoplectic and final Seventh-Seal sort of ruddiness.
The girls are also American as is the nun More so even than the boy, being unsullied by culture and history. At the moment the girls supplicate together in contrition. They plead to a Sister Monica Brigid about this, to Sister Monica Brigid about that.
The boy is indifferent to such beseeching because he doesn’t venerate anything.
The girls are called Debbie and Sandy, to rhyme perhaps with Barbie, with whom they share a plastic aspect in eye and cheek. lf so the boy would be their Ken doll, made safe by his lack of parts.
He’d been delivered by his older brothers to their door that evening at 8:30, the hour they’d set for assignation.
Jonathan is in Florence with his mother and older brothers because they are taking a three week tour of Italy, a gift from their father who stayed behind to do his pastoring, an international exchange pastorate, at the church in Wallasey, England.
Besides Jonathan’s mother and brothers, Steve and Alan, the bus carries the load of 18 teenage girls, their two duenna nuns and an extreme weight in suitcases.
In 1963 any bus tour of Italy was necessarily up scale. To pay for this one for his wife and sons, the Kansas parson had cashed in his life insurance policies praying he wouldn’t die.
Before the advent of mass tourism, the hotels on such a tour were grand, the restaurants heralded. They’d not yet had even a slice of pizza.
Sister Monica Brigid is the boss and looks it. Her presence is detected in the susurrance of a heavy habit skirt. In 1963, in the very midst of Vatican II, the nun is still dressed in full drag.
Dead–fish belly jowls squeeze out of her wimple. Perhaps tightening her eyes still closer together, if that were possible, or so the whim could seem to those scrutinizing her (few did). This sister draped herself in what for the boy was an inordinately grisly crucifix.
Jonathan didn’t pray anymore, proud to think he’d left superstition behind with puberty. At the moment however he prays fervently.
“Go away! Sweet Jesus! Oh please! You god damn bitch!” Although young he had his vernacular down.
Earlier in the other room the girls were coming and going although hardly speaking of Michelangelo—they’d chattered on and on about things to buy. Already over burdened with ‘Made In Italy’ they still craved for more.
During their dismal party they’d spoken only a few words to the stripling, ignoring him because he was three years younger and thereby irrelevant. So he danced by himself to the radio, mainly to Rita Pavone singing ‘Cuore’ half a dozen times. The hit of that summer in Italy.
Mio cuore
Tu stai soffrendo
Cosa posso fare per te
Mi sono innamorata
Per te pace no, no, non c’e!
Heart of mine
You who are suffering
What can I do for you.
I fell in Love
For you there’s no peace anywhere.
To that the boy danced a slow virginal rendition of the Twist (the one approved of in Kansas). The only dance he knew. Not easily done to Rita Pavone.
The girls find him so hilarious they’ve forgotten to be arrogant and join in (theirs an East Coast version of the Twist that lit up the Boy’s cherry cheeks). That evening’s one young moment.
Suddenly, mid contrappusto, the scene popped. All fell still by yet another ‘Office- of- the –Night’ banging on a Florentine hall door. Same knock that had once stilled Benevento Cellini mid course.
Sister Monica Brigid’s medieval mind stilled them in dread as her meat ball fist slammed on wood.
BAM BAM BAM. “LET ME IN!”
Debbie and Sandy were instantly stricken, neither giving a giggle nor a doomed sigh. They were privileged seniors from Saint Scholastica Academy in Baltimore County, ‘The County’ as it was known. A Catholic school, respect the capital C, where the more prosperous citizens of Brooklandville, Greenspring and Owings Mills strutted their spoils and not very demur daughters.
Jonathan came that evening to intuit, a bitter knowledge, how much the girls despised him. Steve and Alan, the brothers he so idolized, had brought him along with the wine, but for protection, exchanging knowing looks and giving him reassuring smiles.
No matter that the girls’ invitation to party was with the young men only, no little brother. That had gone without saying.
At the voice on the other side of the door the girls sibilated together a hushed alarm not unlike ‘go for help, the Visigoths are here.’
“Oh no, it’s that fat turd Sister Monica Brigid! “
“HIDE! HIDE!” (from this point on the evening banter goes in caps with exclamation points).
At “HIDE!” he, the boy, the only he, had jumped off in terror to do just that, ending up in the bathtub with the curtain drawn.
“DEBORAH CATHERINE! ALISANDE! OPEN THIS DOOR!”
A huge body is breaching the hotel room, the creature will soon be coming for Jonathan most probably with his shirt in its hand. The beast’s probably got yellow teeth too just like Sister Monica Brigid.
Jonathan’s cringes sliding down the slippery slide of the porcelain until his head is stopped by the drain. He’s sweating in his dread, something that humiliates him because he knows that when he starts to perspire nothing can staunch it. It always becomes an on going torrent. Drops of it are already plip plipping—damn it, why so alarmingly loud– onto the tub.
Now the radio is silenced. Turned off in a brutal act. All the boy in the bathtub hears is the nun shouting, and the girls yelping.
The nun hollers for him, how horrible.
And cometh indeed the nun does, old yeller with her nose down.
Accompanying her is the faint chant of rattling crucifix and rosary. The dark ages are again nigh as if 500 years of progress had been erased by the whimper in the curtain.
Room check for these St. Scholastica virgins came at 10. In their planning they’d calculated an hour and half to adventure with Jonathan’s older brothers, for dancing to the radio and drinking wine, flirting coyly, though no more than a pretend sip of sin.
However, those naughty brothers of his took only one glass of the toxin wine before abruptly leaving him in such ill tempered care. No pleading from the girls could make them stay. They’d sidled off into the Florentine night looking for older pleasures.
Then Jonathan’s presence, cheeks brightening the room, was for the girls an unforgiveable insult. It tindered the scorned young ladies’ fury. In a pout Debbie Buttafuoco turned the radio up to deny him any chance of speaking. It was their downfall.
The girls could not have been more different, Debbie lean, dark Italian, pretty but with predator features, a biting tongue. Sandy plump, tall, a German redhead with freckles. All they shared was what they wore the St Scholastica uniform, pleated grey skirt of maidenly length, navy blue blazer with the St Scholastica emblem, white blouse with button down collar, (and what the two hated most) knee high gray socks.
Blaring Italian pop songs had summoned Sister Monica Brigid half an hour earlier than expected.
These girls roomed for the tour from choice, why might seem inexplicable except that one was the daughter of a high billing gynecologist, the other of an even higher billing anesthesiologist. Both were price tags on legs.
Religious warfare seethed below the surface of their tour bus. It had surreptitiously riven the tour group in twain, schism! Luther. Reformation. Counter Reformation. Inquisitors. Jesuits! It cleaved the bus with girls and chaperones keeping together to the fore close to the resident tour guide for safety: the pastor’s wife and his three sons segregated off to themselves at the back where exhaust fumes muddled the view.
In the bathroom a blob cloud shifts in a rush. It’s coming clearer through he drawn veil of a plastic curtain. Pentimento!
Behind the shower curtain the boy tries to morph into something small. This means pretending he’s not six feet tall with long skinny arms, a skinny torso, no muscle. He’s writhing in two, pressed down in terror, some nausea too, overcome by Italian hotel room disinfectant. Another deposition from the Cross.
Their personal on-board guide is an overwhelmed fellow who travelled along with them to explain all in exotic English (his favorite saying, “Italian pipples is good pipples”). Even for American tourist athletes of the day this had been an endurance training. They were in fact being readied for an assault on Rome.
After a few days in Venice, the boy, his mother and brothers had come rolling along together with girls and nuns down the peninsula. They went stopping as much as proceeding — Padua, Verona, Mantua, Ferrara, Rimini, Bologna, Modena, Parma.
Everywhere, the boy’s mother gave her delighted half smile. She took Italy like sunshine on her face. His brothers had vowed to fart in every church and they did.
On bus the young ladies blathered or sang campfire songs. One of the seniors had brought along her guitar and strummed Domique for all inchoately. Smiling as she sang, of course. This distraction irritated the boy. Jonathan called it ‘The Singing Nun’s Lobotomy Song’.
Instead, the boy wanted only to study the window with all his intent, to carve the scenes into his brain, all that they drove through, every detail, in order to take Italy back without any loss to Kansas.
Steve also entertained them. Once by repeatedly flipping an ice cream cup spoon at the back of Sister Monica Brigid’s habit while intermittently crouching down in his seat to intone “s-c- c-c-r-oooo-t-u-m-m-m,” in a low priestly voice, and then pierce out with a high and rapid scream “SCROTUM!!!”.
“YOU IN THERE COME OUT THIS INSTANT!” With that the clamor of metal rings above plays the xylophone down the boy’s spine. Dring Dring Dring.
Hitchcock destroying our innocence.
“GOT YOU!”
Curtain flung back, the hearty nun replaces it. She’s a monolithic black habit looming in threat over the tub and its miserable occupant. She points at the boy’s naked breast.
Trecento eyes blaze, maybe made extra vengeful from bombardment by that wooden ice cream cup spoon. But Sister Monica Brigid is taken aback. She’s surprised at what she’s found.
Beyond disbelieve there’s a hint too of disappointment in the way she glances at the quaking boy. She’d obviously expected (hoped) to find one or both of his brothers.
These Protestants! They were even more devious and Godless than she’d accounted for. This blushing eunuch of a boy was already corrupted in heresy.
That day their bus brought them rocking and rolling through Tuscany. It began with Pisa which according to their program was for the Battistero, 1363, the Leaning Tower where everyone took another photo they would never look at, the Duomo dedicated to the Virgin (yawn) and the huge Camposanto still in shatters from an allied bomb (oops).
Everything in Pisa was also sinking, just like Venice. Everything everywhere either sank, crumbled or had been bombed.
And then swerving and honking they were taken to Lucca, to the Duomo, for a surprise, a Madonna and Child, this one by Ghirlandaio a name no one could pronounce or wanted to. As a bonus, unreferenced in the day’s program, they stopped for a surprise Madonna and Child by Fra Bartolommeo, 1509. No wonder Italian artists were all dead.
From there they bussed on in basic silence, except for the slapping of cards as the bored girls endlessly played gin.
Onwards to have lunch, anticipated by all, in Pistoia—followed by the Duomo with attention drawn to the main portal lunette, Madonna and Child by Andrea Della Robbia. Then they paused in Prato. There to admire a work they all took interest in, a lunettte by Andrea Della Robbia, Madonna and Child. That Duomo too had seemed to be sinking even as they stood inside it making them glad to be pushed on.
Afternoon entertainment was journeying to visit Sesto, the Pieve there, to see something different. All took interest —a Circumcision by Jacopo Vignali who in blessed relief none had heard of.
The Protestant mother and her circumcised sons found this hilarious.
In weary joy they were de-bussed almost too stiff to walk at this centuries old hotel subsiding into Florence’s via Porta Rossa. The town’s ‘Centro’ rose around them forbidding, somber huge stones giving them claustrophobia like a tight closet. A look and most were too certain that a lot more Madonna’s were awaiting them.
“GET OUT HERE THIS MINUTE!”
Jonathan clambers out of the tub in his awkward, new, man-boy body feeling like he’s just been cited in a Kinsey Report.
“PUT YOUR SHIRT ON!” ordered Sister Monica Brigid.
Buttoning his shirt on the trot, his passage through the bedroom goes ignored. Teen angst there blights the careful color coordination in a room where even the doorknobs were Botticellian.
“I’LL HAVE YOU THROWN OFF THE BUS!”
Once in the corridor of the Albergo Porta Rossa Jonathan glances back over his shoulder while he makes his escape. Something nipped at the back of his neck. Behind he sees the cutout form of Sister Monica Brigid poking her nun’s head sideways out of the room to watch him.
Corridor tiles glitter from centuries of scrubbing. There are pots of mediterranean succulents.
Perfectly still the nun’s head is another inanimate thing along the line of prints decorating the hallway. It’s a gallery of drawings by School-of-Rafael wannabes.
“Mother” went off the siren in the boy’s head. She was still his ultimate defense.
In the morning, into the crowded breakfast room, Sister Monica Brigid makes her most practiced stage entrance her habit demanding attention. Authority of office hangs on her in Christian trinkets. The air parts for her maidenhead, does a Red Sea act as she comes straight for the table of the mother and her desperado son.
Their table lays strewn by many empty dishes, they both liked to eat well. Crumbs from an assortment of Italian breakfast treats litter the table cloth, Albergo Porta Rossa takes pride in its breakfast. Mother and son have tried everything, the ciambella with lemon, bruttiboni and almonds, panforte, and the boy’s favorite the zeppole.
Sister Monica Brigid gives the table an atom smashing glance. With the edge of her hand she clears away a swath in breakfast pastry crumbs. Sweeps them to the floor.
Sweetly the mother is saying, “We can make room for you, Sister. Would like to join us? You seem to be hungry? There are so many good things here to try.”
The mother had been placidly reading about Ghiberti’s doors. Monumental portals to the baptistery in the hard heart of Florence. Masterpieces of the early Renaissance they took Ghiberti 21 years to execute. Doors Michelangelo in awe named The Gates of Paradise.
Sister Monica Brigid, always in mourning for a dead God, stands too near, a threatening presence over their breakfast table. Her moon face suspends above them looking oddly squashed as if someone heavy had sat on it.
Before the nun can begin her practiced denunciation, now with a preamble addition of something like “I couldn’t care less,” the mother continues. She too knows how to be ruthless.
Her ever placid smile spreads in sfumato brush strokes across her face. She stares up at the nun straight on. The boy knows that one well. It is her beware smile. The one where soft brown eyes turn to dark menace.
“I hear you interrupted their little party last night. A shame. We haven’t much time to be young.
“Would you like to read about The Gates of Paradise? They are quite close. I think we are to walk over.”