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By Haley Swanson
My first memory of Florence is twisted ankles. I’d packed just one pair of boots: light faux leather, popular at the time, but with no tread, causing me to perpetually slip into the generous gaps between cobblestones slick with gutter runoff. The rain’s gloss resembled skin stretched tight over the city’s streets.
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When the top button of my coat came loose, the pensione owner sewed it back on. I thought Massimo was her husband, but by the end of my semester abroad learned they weren’t married and simply lived together with their daughter Martina. When I didn’t wake to the noise of you clacking through the kitchen, arriving for the morning receptionist shift, it was the sound of Martina’s small feet running around in her room above mine.
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Massimo served pasta in yellow plastic bowls, the kind my mother used to toss salad in back home. I’d eat with my fellow American students, those steaming heaps of primi piatti between us and a bottle of Chianti Joey brought. We’d dole out generous pours into squat wine glasses cloudy with last night’s fingerprints. Luke would then go around to each table—Are you going to eat that?—polishing off lingering pieces of rigatoni, orecchiette and ravioli.
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There was a mattress showroom next door, its green neon sign bathing my narrow twin bed in an unsettling nightly glow. Perhaps you wouldn’t remember which room was mine; I had to remind you when I was locked out, key stuck and unwilling to turn even under the force of your pocketknife. We stood next to each other in that hallway, at a loss, as the motion sensor lights flicked off one by one.
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Would you instead remember my first night in the pensione, how you were hanging sheets of paper listing meal times, quiet hours, Massimo’s cell number? You accidently banged your tape gun against my door. I thought someone was knocking and flung it open. You stood there, flyers in one hand, gun in the other, and said: Sorry, just hanging these up.
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There were tourists everywhere. I was one of them. The Duomo’s lines were long only in spring; in the winter, I’d walk right in and stand in the cathedral’s dark, gaping maw, waiting for the rain to stop. When the weather turned warm, I’d cover my elbows and knees, answer Yes when asked if I was there to pray.
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One afternoon I went to what I believed was the Bargello Museum, instead stumbling into a Franciscan service. They didn’t notice me at the back, pressing myself to the oak paneling and listening to their Italian hymns ping pong between walls.
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When I did find the Bargello, I spent hours this way: nearly toe to toe with Michelangelo’s Bacchus, staring into his unseeing eyes, his slightly parted mouth, grapes tumbling from his hair.
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We studied the sculpture in philosophy class. My teacher asked us: Do you think you are free in your decisions?
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Then there was the Bacchus at Pitti Palace, nestled deep in Boboli Garden. There are so many versions of him, so many versions of you—but enough of you for now.
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Chiesa di Santa Margherita de’ Cerchi: a boom box on the alter playing Gregorian chants on repeat, a basket of notes left by people who feel themselves to be in unrequited love reminiscent of Beatrice and Dante. Who knows if this chapel was actually the site of their meeting; I was always skeptical of the nearby boulder where it was said Dante sat and sketched.
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Caffè Cavour: the tin bar, same men lined up along it each morning, papers tucked under their arms, tipping espresso shots down their open throats. I couldn’t talk myself out of the caffè latte I ordered daily before lunch, though the thought of milk at that hour truly disgusted Italians. The barman tolerated my e una pasticceria per favore, eventually bringing both the coffee and croissant without asking.
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Piazza San Marco: pigeons on the benches next to Molly and me as we breathlessly reach into a white wax bag stained at the bottom from two warm muffins with Nutella at their centers. The number seven bus pulls up, and then back out again. I can still hear it: La prossima fermata é Fiesole.
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I would buy a chocolate bar after class, eat the whole thing while walking to the Ponte Santa Trinita—my favorite of the bridges. I used to number them in my head when I couldn’t sleep at night, beginning with yours: Ponte Amerigo Vespucci, Ponte Alla Carraia, Ponte Santa Trinita, Ponte Vecchio, Ponte alle Grazie.
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Grazie is tattooed on my wrist. What am I grateful for? I’ve forgotten, along with the order of
the bridges. To name them just now was difficult.
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Once you stopped me on Ponte Amerigo Vespucci, cupped my face between your hands under a streetlamp and said: Do you know how happy I am right now? How rare that is?
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You took the plastic bottle of your friend’s homemade grappa from the fridge and pointed to the post-it stuck where a label used to be: Non è acqua it said. You made me read it aloud, over and over, until my pronunciation satisfied you—or maybe it never did, knocking back shot after shot before excusing yourself to the bathroom. I pet your cats until you returned, wrapping your arms around my front, chest pressed flat against my back. I turned around to kiss you. You moved us in the direction of your bedroom. We tripped over a loose tile and laughed.
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I went to your cats on purpose: I knew my shoulder blades, the blank terrain between that you loved so much, would be on display this way.
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I’m torn by memories like this, between recalling the story and how I built its scaffolding. Were you free in your decisions or did I plot them for you?
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For years people have told me they don’t understand who you were, why I ruminate on you this way.Apparently when I write you, I strip you of all physical descriptors and personality traits. Oneinstructor asked if I wanted my book to be about our story, or the ideas. Since she’s best knownas a cultural polemic, I paused and said, Ideas. She, predictably, agreed.
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Ideas I’ve turned you into: sex traveling as a problematic American trope; women conflating sense of self with sex; fetishizing foreign men; excusing men from misogyny due to this fetishization.
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You also have dark, curly hair; lips that aren’t big, but have a clear outline and are held in place by your patchy chin-and-cheek stubble, fine lines—perhaps wrinkles now—running beneath. Unlike your accent, your sloped nose doesn’t seem German (your father was the Italian, I know). I think there’s a barbed wire hoop in your left ear, but frankly it could be your right. I miss your yellow-tinted nails left perpetually stubby from the cigarettes you compulsively roll, a packet of tobacco always sticking out of your back pocket. Black is expectedly your color. You tended to wear the same sweater two days in a row. I remember you most in a leather jacket. I also remember your harsh voice, sharp laugh, the animosity you had for strangers on the street. When I asked where the scar taking up most of your thigh came from, you told me about cutting it open in a childhood skiing accident, your grandmother pouring vodka from the bottle on to the open wound.
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Just recently did I go looking for pictures of you. How else am I to write about you when I haven’t seen you in five years, this fact still cleaving me in two: who I was before you, who I am after you.
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I wonder what you think of the earthquakes in Tuscany, of Trump, the dumpster bomb in my city that went off a couple blocks from where I was at the time and made international news. I think of you during my fourth cervical biopsy, again when a needle punctures the lump in my right breast. It used to send an ice bath through my veins thinking about how I wouldn’t know when you died.
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Last fall, I went back to Florence but didn’t tell you. Instead I went to your bridge, stopped under our streetlamp.
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Am I free in my decisions or does your memory—how impossibly large he’s grown, inevitably outscaling any real version of you that still walks the earth—plot them for me?
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Haley Swanson is a writer and editor based in New York. Her essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Glamour, Electric Literature, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, and elsewhere. With Eliza M. Smith, she’s co-editor of the anthology Sex and the Single Girl: Reinventing Helen Gurley Brown’s Cult Classic (Harper Perennial, 2022). She’s also working on a memoir about female obsession and women who travel alone as told through her time abroad.