Read Online Alena: A Novel by Rachel Pastan - Free Book Online Page A

moved thirty yards back. It would have fallen into the ocean otherwise. Up till then we’d only spent summers in Nauquasset, but we moved there year-round that fall. He had retired early, because of his health, and he wanted to see the ocean every day.”
    “Was that hard for you? The move?”
    “No. Nauquasset always felt like home to me. I loved it there. Have you been to the Cape?”
    I shook my head.
    “It’s barely land at all. Just a curved ribbon unrolling into the blue—or smoky gray—Atlantic. The sky is so wide open, and everything is always in motion. The grass, the flags, the clouds. Even the land, shifting under you. It’s a bleak landscape in some ways, especially in winter, but I’ve never been anywhere else I felt so alive.” A vibrancy I hadn’t seen before rinsed through him while he was speaking. His gray face flushed, his eyes softened, and his hunched spine straightened like a tree growing toward the light.
    After lunch we strolled down arcaded streets and past green lawns dotted with neatly trimmed shrubs. There was a line at the modest brick building that was our destination—modest, anyway, compared with San Marco—but Bernard had tickets and strode unhurriedly to the front. “Are you ready?” he whispered in my ear. He held my hand as if I were a child.
    “Ready for what?” I leaned into him, the soft ridges of the seersucker pressed into me as I stretched my mouth toward his ear.
    “Ready to burn.”
    And so we went into the Scrovegni Chapel.
    At first it was hard to take anything in but the sound of feet ringing against the tiles, the coolness of the narrow space. Then the blue arch of the roof pulled my eyes up, glinting with painted stars. The ribbon of portraits led my gaze along the barrel vault, and I began to take it in: the aching blue and the clear burnished pinks, the solid, graceful figures reaching, bending, kneeling, weeping, soaring (in the case of the angels), the way the scenes floated in space like visions, yet at the same time settled the space around them, making of them shimmering transparent windows into the divine.
    In one panel, Joachim and Anna, haloed and passionate, met in a kiss, the arch of their leaning bodies echoing the arch of the Golden Gate. In another, a bearded Magus kissed the holy infant’s feet while tall camels looked joyfully on and a fat orange star blazed overhead. In a third, a flock of angels, avatars of lamentation, filled the purple sky above the bone-white body of Christ in his grieving mother’s arms. I had seen slides of these frescoes in school, I had answered exam questions about Giotto, I had memorized his dates and the names of his influences. I would have said, if anyone had asked, that I loved Giotto; but nothing in my life had prepared me for this. My skin tingled, flooded with warmth, and a sweet golden honey seemed to slide through me—molten sunshine—melting me and lifting me, making me stand up straighter, desire and delight mingled, the hot sweetness filling me like breath. My heart blazed like the golden star of Bethlehem in the painting of the Adoration.
    A voice floated through the quiet.
“Ecco, ecco, è tempo,”
someone said. Around us, feet shuffled, the crowd shifted. I looked at Bernard.
    “Time, it’s time,” the voice said in singsong English. A man in a black uniform decorated with gold braid stood in the middle of the room, repeating his line in three or four languages. Though we had just gotten in, he was motioning us out.
    “They just give you fifteen minutes,” Bernard whispered, “but don’t worry.” He went over to the guard and began to murmur, softly, surely. The guard interrupted with a blast of Italian. Bernard took a paper from an inner pocket and showed it to him. The man frowned at the paper. He picked it up and held it to the light, then tapped it with a sausagelike finger while Bernard murmured some more. By now, everyone had exited the chapel but us and, of course, the winged