Florence in Ecstasy. Jessie Chaffee

      The Unnamed Press

      P.O. Box 411272

      Los Angeles, CA 90041

      Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.

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      Copyright © 2017 by Jessie Chaffee

      ISBN: 978-1944700416

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937451

      This book is distributed by Publishers Group West

      Cover design & typeset by Jaya Nicely

      This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].

      For my parents, Heide and John, and my brother, Joshua.

      And for my husband, Brendan.

      And then at once she was filled with love and inestimable satiety, which, although it satiated, generated at the same time inestimable hunger.

      — The Book of the Blessed Angela of Foligno

      You imagine the carefully-pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn’t. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it’s in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.

      — Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

      Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Chapter Thirteen

      Chapter Fourteen

      Chapter Fifteen

      Chapter Sixteen

      Chapter Seventeen

      Chapter Eighteen

      Chapter Nineteen

      Chapter Twenty

      Chapter Twenty-One

      Chapter Twenty-Two

      Author’s Note

      Acknowledgments

       Prologue

      This morning is every morning. I’ve been here almost a month, and still I wake too frequently, too early, to the buzz of mosquitoes, gray light, and the window shutters swinging open and closed. I wake from violent dreams filled with strong winds and slamming doors. Bodies thrown against windows loose in their frames, frames loose in their sleeves. I wake in Florence, afraid. The shutters swing open and each time I catch just a glimpse of the Palazzo Vecchio’s tower against violet sky before they swing closed again. The image is familiar now. This empty apartment is mine. Still, this is not quite life. On this morning, I relight the citronella coil and walk to the window. In the alley, a man puts on a magenta helmet, climbs onto a moped, and pulls out onto Via Malenchini, the last to leave the bar below. Once he’s gone there are only the birds that shoot past my window like darts thrown screaming from an unseen hand. It is feeding time.

      I wait, as I do every morning, for the sun to come into view. When it does, it shines at such an angle that the hidden city emerges. I no longer see edges and perimeters. Instead, the roof tiles, drainpipes, plaster walls, cobblestones, and glass panes become a single canvas for the pattern drawn by this glow. All I see is the pattern, etched in light and shadow. I am in a new place, unmarked and alive. This moment is an answer, a stopping point. This morning is every morning. This is when I do not feel alone, when I feel held by this city. Until the sun is fully up and the pattern fades like exposed film, the rooftops, drainpipes, stones, and windows regaining their edges and returning to the foreground. Another long day stretches ahead. But something is shifting.

      I walk to the bathroom, pull my T-shirt up over my head, let my pants drop to the floor, and drag the orange scale away from the wall. It rattles across the blue tiles, catching in each valley. I adjust the needle to zero. Not cheating—never cheating—I watch the numbers spin like a slot machine until they stop, predictably. “It’s good,” I say aloud, running my hand along my face, my arm, my stomach. “It’s good,” I repeat, overly decisive and sober, trying to coax my reflection into agreement. Today, I think as I dress, tie back my hair, and climb the three stone steps to the kitchen, will be different.

      I open the long slatted doors and step out onto the small balcony, which is so steeply pitched it feels like it may topple into the courtyard below. It is one of the reasons I took this apartment, even when the landlady quoted the rent and I felt my stomach drop. She felt it, too, saw the fear in my face, and showed me another place, smaller and darker, said, Much better price, in her raspy voice, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t. I needed the light. The other one, I said, the bright one, as she eyed me skeptically and repeated, Caro, caro, caro. It’s not a problem, I lied, I need the light, the light, the light. When I pass her on the stairs now, she always gives me that same look.

      It is the end of August. For weeks the other windows have been quiet and dark, except for the apartment across the way and one floor down, where an old woman sits all day, her arm spreading on the sill. She is sometimes staring out, sometimes cooking sauce I can smell as steam climbs out and over the terra-cotta roofs. But even her window is vacant this morning. The Italians have fled the cities for the coast, and all over Florence there are handwritten signs taped to shop doors. CHIUSO PER FERIE FINO AL 1 SETTEMBRE. The type of scrawl that normally says “back in five”—only, in this case, it’s “back next month.” The signs do not deter the tourists who fill the piazza around the Duomo, who line up at dawn to be the first into the Uffizi Gallery, who haggle and hassle at the Mercato Centrale, who shout at the buses that lumber down the narrow streets and heed no one, who walk the bridges with gelato dripping down their hands in the evenings and watch Italian bands playing the Beatles. A manic, frenzied movement repeated day after day, night after night. They are looking up, always up. Up at the frescoed ceilings of churches; at the parade of Madonnas in museums; at the oversized head, hands, and feet of the David; at the performers dressed as mummies who move only at the sound of money in their jars; at the buildings edged in angels that circle and circle.

      I am no different. I still cannot cross Piazza della Signoria at night without looking up to the golden lion at the top of the Palazzo Vecchio, to the harsh glare of Neptune who rules the fountain outside, to the writhing sculptures in the loggia at the piazza’s corner—lit from below, the Sabine woman twists and twists out of the grasp of her attacker, all that stone tapering from the massive base to the single point of her finger reaching toward the sky. There is something more, it says.

       Chapter One

      “Signorina.”

      Signora Rosa. Such a delicate name. She must be someone’s grandmother, stout and