Offerings for the Gods of Florence

(With thanks to Eliot, I do not think that they will sing to me.)

As soon as the boys were asleep, I walked out into the streets with my camera. It was just before 9 p.m. on our last night in Florence, and I hadn’t gotten any nighttime photos, because I hadn’t really gone out at night, because kids. As soon as I was out of the door, I was in the middle of a fight - a drunk American woman in a loose white shirt was screaming at a man outside of the jazz bar, her cigarette held at arms length behind her back as if she was trying to protect him from second-hand smoke, and then, a split second later, an inch from his eye as she emphasized some injustice. I jumped to the left as he staggered backwards into the street, then walked to the square with the statues.

Were kids really the reason I hadn’t been out at night? No, or not really. I never really liked going out; I never understood the impulse some people had to see where the night took them. For me, it never took me anywhere. Even at 22, 23, I preferred to sit in my living room with tea and a book, alone, than stagger around the bars in Pacific Beach, trying to meet tourists or girls from SDSU. I knew I was supposed to love the bars, the excitement, the chaos, but I never did. People called me an old man then; the only difference between then and now is that back then I only felt old. And now, as I looked around the square, everyone that was stumbling in the streets was my age or older. Old.

I turned right and walked towards the train station. Taxis cruised slowly past as groups paused in the middle of the street to take photographs. Making memories. Another thing I never understood: selfies, especially for groups, the unnatural smiles held for an unnaturally long time as three, four, five photos are taken, just in case someone blinks. The performative happiness.

“In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.”

I turned left, toward Santa Maria Novella, and found an alley without any restaurants or people spilling out. I passed some trash bins and a cat jumped down, then sprinted right, either chasing a mouse or avoiding me. A Vespa gunned its motor and flashed through an intersection a few blocks ahead; an echo of a woman’s laugh from a window.

Santa Maria Novella. The New Saint Mary’s, only eight hundred years old. Oh, how I wished I’d grown up Catholic! My parents were both raised in the Church, and swore that their children would never be religious. As part of my teenage rebellion, I’d begged them to let me join a church group, any church group, to learn about my spiritual side. They’d decided to let me go to a Unitarian Universalist church - about as liberal as they could find, where we learned about virtually every religion but Christianity. Now, thirty years later, I understood absolutely nothing of the Catholic church or its ceremonies. Once, I’d gone to Tecate, Mexico with Sonny and some of our friends, and we’d gotten drunk in the central square in the morning. Sonny wanted to go into the central cathedral to light a candle and pray, and I was the only one in our group who would go with him; we walked in and there were people in all the pews. He made the motions and they turned, as a body, to stare at us, and I had that sense of forboding, like we were caught in a bad dream. I followed him half-way up the central aisle, and suddenly everyone stood up, still staring at us. We stopped, and then Sonny grabbed me and pushed me into a pew - drunk, we’d completely forgotten it was Sunday, and the morning service was starting. He whispered, “We can’t leave.” He’d known all of the motions, the signs, the signals, and I copied him, a beat late; the priest had shook his head and, at the first opportunity, we walked purposefully to the back, then out into the bright noon light, our group still waiting for us, laughing, as Sonny closed the door as gently as he could. Now, after reading Virgil and Ovid, I knew more about the old gods - the Roman ones, Jupiter and Juno and Neptune and all the rest - than the Catholic ones, enough to know that Hephaistos, worker of metal, struck me as a possible inspiration for Mammon, working in the veins of gold.

I always thought that churches were built for God, but in Italy, I’d started to wonder if they were really of the people, by the people, for the people, if they were really a testament to human power, not to God’s.

And here, Santa Maria Novella was in front of me, lit up across the dark square. There was God, and Jesus, and Mary, and Joseph, and angels, and demons. As far as I could tell, all of them were immortal, just like the “deathless” Roman gods. I thought of Paradise Lost, of reading it out loud to Daniel and Nick when they were babies, acting out the great speeches to them; “Awake, arise, or be for ever fall'n.” Daniel liked that one; he always wriggled when I read Satan’s lines. And in comparing the “polytheistic” Greco-Roman god structure with the structure of Christianity, how could anyone think that the Catholic Church was “monotheistic”? How was the setup of the Catholic immortals, with God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Mary, Joseph, and all of the angels - how was it all that different than the structure of the Roman gods with Jupiter, Juno, Mars, and Neptune?

There was something in the air, in the soil, of Italy that made me more sensitive to these questions, to these spirits, to the idea that there may be more things in Heaven and Earth than were dreamt of in my skeptical philosophy. I’m not quite sure when it was when I began to feel that there must be spirits all around me. My disbelieving mind first questioned these intimations, these sensations of unseen powers that I couldn’t quite understand. I thought that maybe it had something to do with the way that travel makes me give up control. At home, I can control quite a bit of my life, but in other places, I have to give up that semblance of control to some extent. I thought: maybe I am just facing the lack of control of my life, and the only way I can create order is to think that there are influences all around me, pushing things into creation. Maybe, faced with a world we can’t truly understand or grasp, we have to believe in something in order to not be overwhelmed.

I thought of the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.”

The only reason I know the Lord’s Prayer is because it is at the end of a Tupac song, one that Jumane included on a mix tape he made me in 1997.

And in Florence, maybe a week before, I had suddenly believed in something bigger than myself.

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

I walked into the square in front of the cathedral and passed the trattorias, their outside tables protected from the wind with the clear plastic tarps. A menu blew past me and pressed against the side of a bench. I walked over and picked it up: “Novella Osteria Toscana.” I thought about walking over to return it to the restaurant, but the waiters looked like they only wanted to go home, so I placed the menu against the bench again, just where it had blown, but the wind had died so it slipped down to the ground. I straightened up, then walked down the alley straight to Via degli Avelli and zigzagged toward the Duomo. The square was full of people, like a carnival, like Disneyland in July, except it was all adults, all greying hair and bifocals and dark blue Patagonia jackets. One man in white flannel trousers, the bottoms rolled. The men with the neon glow lights were out, stretching their thick rubber bands and shooting helicopters a hundred feet into the air, watching carefully as they gently fell to the ground. I thought: they have their market. These guys must sell thousands of these toys to drunk visitors to bring back to their grandchildren.

I thought about asking how much they wanted for two, one for each of the boys.

I started back toward our apartment, walking past the clothes shops, and then walked a little further toward the river on Via Calimala. The marketplace was empty of merchants now, but the lights were still on, and I saw a big group of people at the end, laughing. They were near some sort of statue, and, as I got closer, I saw that they were putting coins in a pig’s mouth and cheering when the coins fell into a grate. The Fontana del Porcellino - I’d read about this:

“Visitors to Il Porcellino put a coin into the boar's gaping jaws, with the intent to let it fall through the underlying grating for good luck, and they rub the boar's snout to ensure a return to Florence, a tradition that the Scottish literary traveller Tobias Smollett already noted in 1766, which has kept the snout in a state of polished sheen while the rest of the boar's body has patinated to a dull brownish-green.”

I wondered which God controlled this pig, and which God accepted these offerings. How many of these people putting coins in its mouth considered themselves Christian, or Catholic? Did they think about how they were making an offering to a pagan god, or was this a harmless local “tradition” to indulge in? I wondered if visitors in the middle ages would have done the same thing, recognizing, at least implicitly, that there were local gods that needed to be appeased. Perhaps they knew that all religion, like politics, is local. I thought of Reverend Lovejoy in the Simpsons, saying, “This so-called ‘new religion’ is nothing but a pack of weird rituals and chants designed to take away the money of fools. Let us say the Lord's prayer forty times, but first let's pass the collection plate.”

I watched them, hearing a cheer as a coin made it through the grate, and decided not to take my chances.

Early the next morning, I got up, dressed, and grabbed a litre of vino sfuso. I walked up to the Porcellino first. The square was deserted and quiet now; the drunk tourists were gone and the merchants hadn’t even started to bring their carts to the marketplace. I stood in front of the statue and looked at it carefully, the details of its face, its chest, its legs, the grate with coins just below its bars. Coins? Really? Where does it say that the Gods want money? Churches want money; the city-state wants money. Human institutions want money. The Gods want alcohol. I poured some wine on the mouth and watched it trickle down to the grate, seeping through, the silver now tinged purple. I gently patted the snout, bowed my head, and turned toward the river. I walked down the dark streets to the Ponte Vecchio; last night it was so busy that it would have been hard to cross, but now it was completely empty except for me and two police officers at the other end, leaning against their car, talking. They looked up at me for a moment, saw that I wasn’t stumbling, and went back to their conversation.

Most of the bridge is lined with old jewelry shops, so you can’t even see the river, but in the middle of the bridge is a small, clear area between the shops that you can look out from. I went to the upriver side, holding the bottle. I didn’t know what the Arno river god was called - Tiberinus? Arnos? - but I looked out for a moment, saying a small prayer. I wonder if Machiavelli (politic, cautious, and meticulous) or the Medicis ever did the same thing, ever asked for help from the local spirits. The police were around the corner, out of sight. Why was I nervous? It was just wine, right? What might they think it was? I looked at the water and opened the bottle, tipping it out over the side of the bridge. I tried to do it slowly so it wouldn’t make any noise, but it glugged; I thought I could hear the splash as it hit the water.

Water into wine, now into water.

I put the lid back on the bottle. The police didn’t even look up. I took a deep breath. Something - something - felt finished, like the last rite had been performed, my final debt had been paid, and it was time to move on.

To Pisa.