Toscana II
June 2024
We met in a weightless space, in a place where certain laws don’t apply and our friends’ advice don’t reach us, because no one knows where it is. We tried to be lonely together and to find the days outside of time again to see if our memories are memories or the present of a feeling with a future, despite the deep cellars where the remnants of our lives are. For in my memory (and the longer it goes on), we lived on air and love, hearty cows from Northern Italy, and Negroni. Like all couples, we have experienced a lot together. We have had intense years together, like all couples. But we spent these intense years in many different places with many different feelings and created libraries of memories, sorted by place and feeling, with still some room left. A landscape is somehow always a feeling. That binds you together, and no one can take that away from you so quickly, nor give it to you, no brief crush in which one projects oneself for a moment. Maybe it was even an attempt to establish a constitution of our own. G7 for two, a relationship summit. Everyone needs a constitution: people, states, systems, lovers too. A framework, rules, boundaries of being together, where we show ourselves without dissolving into infinity. I refuse to think in open or closed categories; there is much more than we are capable of achieving through language. The solution to space and time lies outside of space and time, perhaps in traveling by train, between chapters, back and forth, because what happens when you take back the train that is supposed to take you away? She only said that after our days she might spend hers in Lucca.
We met at the train station of Florence. A black Mercedes limousine picked us up. No surprise there. I was glad to be with someone for whom this was nothing special. This way, you can devote yourself to the things and enjoy them, not to what they do to others. Our castello was an hour away. It perched on a hill like an island in a sea of hills. The driver said it had belonged to the Visconti family for a time, who liked to throw parties there. The long roads wound around the hills, and the rivers flowed towards the sea. You could see the rivers and see where they flowed and roughly know where the sea was. Most riverbeds lay dry and white in the sun, and the little water in the channels was murky and flowed sluggishly. The fields were bare, yellow, not brown like the last time. Everything was very antique, but from the 11th century, as the driver said. You couldn’t tell if the distant shapes were mountains or clouds. A landscape is above all a feeling. The feeling is hard to describe, but the landscape where you have it. Being so cut off can then either be beautiful or terrible.
We got a big house at the end of the grounds. In the evening, we took a walk and drank Bellinis on the large terrace in front of the bar. Back at the house, we put another bottle on ice and talked all night. The next day I noticed all the beauty that surrounded us. The manners the castello had taught the landscape. The wind in the herb gardens in front of our house sounded like the sea. It was a big house with an even bigger garden, without a fence, in which there were vineyards and olive groves. The colors were full to the brim, and our house stood out clearly and yellow from the blue of the sky. From our hill, you could see the other hills. Needless to say, the driveway was lined with cypresses.
The next day, we spent in Florence. We were here a few years ago and have memories of fights on the streets and steaks. Back then, we stayed right by the Piazza Santo Spirito and could see the square and the city from the hotel terrace in the evening. We visited the museums together and let Botticelli show us what life is and that there is nothing new under the sun, not even us. Being together in the museum was like dreaming, where imagination rules and creates a climate of creativity. All our best and worst moments hung there, in golden frames, outside of time, which is even more eternal if such a thing exists, because it’s like with all times, they come and go, and you only notice they were beautiful when they’re gone.
The Villa Michele is a 150-year-old house with a long driveway, where lavender blooms and Ferraris stand. Better than the castle because there is a talkative porter and a waitress who liked to chat with us for a long time. There were striped umbrellas from which you could see the world and a large green hill that the villa leaned against, overlooking the plain in which Florence sits and simmers.
