The Faces of Angels Read Online Free PDF Page A

minibus driven by one of her endless supply of nephews, outings that invariably end at a trattoria run by another nephew, where Signor Bardino—who is tall, lugubrious and very Italian—sometimes joins us. On these occasions, the signora’s accent, which is impenetrable already, grows even thicker, something I have appreciated all the more since Piero told me that she comes from Westchester, New York. This fact alone makes her almost as much a product of her own imagination as her academy is.
    I pointed this out to Billy the other night, and she laughed and blew smoke through her nose. ‘Welcome to Florence,’ she said. ‘City of the Uncommon Delusion.’
    Signora Bardino interests me, not only because of what she has morphed herself into, but because she’s a friend of Pierangelo’s soon-to-be ex-wife. Piero suggested her academy in the first place, and I’ve watched her to see if she has any inkling of my real connection to him. So far there’s been no evidence, and it’s certainly not something I feel inclined to reveal. To Signora Bardino or anyone else, for that matter.
    It’s not that I keep Pierangelo a secret, but I’ve been here almost a month now and I’ve noticed that none of us enrolled at the academy spend much time discussing who or what we are when we’re not here. In my case the reasons for this are obvious—I don’t talk about what happened to me with anyone—but generally I think we don’t do it because it would ruin a vital part of what we’re paying for: the illusion that this really is our life.
    I don’t know for sure what the others have done to increase the viability of their own particular dream worlds, but the first thing I did when I got here was change how I looked. I had my previously boring long blonde hair cut into a pageboy and dyed chestnut brown. Then, yesterday, I went a step further and had it striped. Now, I run my fingers through my metallic streaks, thinking what a fit the nuns at the convent summer camp I used to go to would have if they could see them, and watching the lights switch off in the apartment opposite. The sound of water burbling in our pipes tells me Billy’s pulled the plug in her bath and is on her way to bed, which is a relief. Not because of her, but because, more and more, I think of this city the same way I think of Pierangelo; as an intimate, a lover. And I relish the time we spend alone together.
    Florence knows things about me no one knows. These narrow, hemmed-in streets, the blank grey faces of these buildings with their huge doors that conceal their secrets, in turn know my secrets. This city knows where I was unfaithful—where I held a hand, stole a kiss. It has heard my laughter, my footsteps and my cruelty. Heard me tell Piero how Ty always followed me, never left me alone, and how it drove me crazy. It has listened to me complain that I was fettered by Ty’s love, and watched while I stood on street corners, or sketched a building. It has seen me naked, standing at the window of a borrowed apartment. And tied up. And gagged, lying in the grass, a paper face laughing at nothing while consciousness flickered like a firefly. Florence has seen all that, and the idea would be repellent if stones judged. But they don’t. They merely witness.
    Love. Hate. Luck. I’m sure that’s what the stones would tell me if they could speak, that I was lucky, and caution me not to forget it. And I don’t because it’s true. It was the first thing I thought of this evening when Kirk mentioned the girl.
    Kirk’s Italian is not as good as he thinks it is, and he was labouring over the paragraph in the evening paper when he finally announced, ‘It was a rower who found her.’
    After that, he read on, his voice faltering over the longer words, sounding out the syllables, and more often than not getting the stresses wrong. But despite that, or maybe