The city of Florence is small and seemingly too full of actual history to have space left for ghosts. You wouldn’t have thought they took up that much room. Nevertheless, the guided ghost walk Martin had chosen to take round the nighttime streets was noticeably light on the undead.
The dead, it had plenty of. They thronged the city, their names above doors, their likenesses in relief on the walls, their statues crowding the squares.
From the stories the guide told, the historical population of Florence seemed to have decided that life wasn’t nearly as nasty, brutish and short as it could be and set about rectifying this. The Pazzi Conspiracy, Savonarola, executions and assassinations, what the city lacked in spirits, it more than made up for in spirited murder, maliciousness and medieval mayhem.
Their guide was at least trying to set a suitably unearthly tone. She was dressed in an ancient and mouldering wedding dress, mud stained, frayed and singed about the hems. Her face was painted corpse white, her eyes red and sore, as if from tears.
For an hour she had rustled ahead of them, luminous in the dark alleys, leading them in a spiralling walk outwards from the Palazzo Vecchio and she was now reaching her climax.
It was the story of a bride - so, the wedding dress - forced to abandon her lover and marry a man she did not love, who did not love her, merely wanted her youth, her dowry. A bride who had locked herself away on the wedding night, abstaining from all food and drink in her sorrow until she wasted and they carried her pale, limp body through the streets and laid it with wailing and mourning in the family mausoleum.
Which is where she woke up, in the cold and airless dark, faint and afraid, with no comfort but for the glimmering of candles in the empty church.
Imagine the terror of the bride, says the guide. Imagine the panicked scrabbling, the confining tangle of the wedding dress in which they had immured her, as she scrabbled out, weakly falling to the flagstones. Imagine her hauling with the last of her strength along the pews, down the flickering, echoing nave; through the resisting door, through the dark and people-less streets, at last to her husband’s house.
The guide raises a hand behind her, brushing against an ancient door, firmly closed.
Imagine the terror of the husband, she says, cruel husband to an unwilling girl, finding his dead bride scratching at his door, whispering up imprecations in her unearthly voice. How could he dare open his door?
They turn down an alley into a small square past a still house where carved and startled faces look down from above dark windows.
Imagine the terror of her family, she says, their dead daughter wailing at their windows from the night below. How could they dare open their doors?
The guide leads them through an arch and into another alley and there on the corner, in a niche, is the statue of a young man, his closed face frozen in sadness.
Imagine the terror of the boy, she says, the bride’s lover, his one true love taken from him twice, twice bereaved, when the one he mourns for with all his heart appears pale and silently gesturing from the dark. How could he dare open his door?
And so a final terror, the bride, spared by death but denied by all the living, cold, weak, alone, alone, left to the night, to a second death.
And so, says Martin, she died there in the street and haunts the city alleyways still, still looking for solace in a cold world.
No, says the guide in her wedding dress. And yes. For she did not die. Not that night, not any night. For having passed over her once, Death forgot her entirely, abandoned her like all the others, leaving her cold and weak and alone in the streets, dead to all but still alive, still craving warmth and strength and help. Leaving her to wander down the bare and friendless centuries, haunting the city. A living ghost. Still… among us.
And the guide threw wide her arms in a dramatic sweep. The tour is complete. It is a nice effect, Martin thinks, and as the plump and cheerful American families stomp away, he says so to the guide, falling into step with her as she drifts on. It makes up for the lack of ghosts on the ghost tour, he says.
You have not been listening, says the guide. Florence is full of ghosts, what else are all these? She gestures at a statue under a colonnade. The statue is a Greek hero, she says, but the model was a young nobleman, a friend - today you would say lover - of the artist. He was killed in a fight in a tavern down by the Ponte Vecchio, but here he is, centuries later, haunting the likeness of a myth, still demanding our attention, trying to speak to us in the mute desperation ghosts have. All art, she says, is a haunting, and Florence is nothing but art.
She rustles into a darker street, under the shadows of an overhanging balcony.
Well, yes, says Martin, following her, of course there are ghosts in that sense. But he meant the supernatural, the undead, something monstrous reaching out from the past to unsettle and terrorise the living.
You have not been listening, says the guide. This is Florence. What else is Florence but undead? It is no longer living, it is a thing of the past, a memory of something once alive. Life has abandoned it, the powers of the past, the princes and artists, long gone. It is a monster that draws to it the living, a vampire sustaining itself on them, terrorising them with the sublime, with their own insignificance, with intimations of mortality.
They are in a narrow alley, the end in darkness, pushed together and Martin can smell her now. The musty smell of old and rotting fabric, the smells of the city, of old drains and older stone.
Florence is the bride, you mean, says Martin, pleased with the metaphor. Abandoned by her lovers, the great figures of her past, still seeking the warmth of attention and life?
You have not been listening, says the guide, and she turns to him in the deepening shadows, and lays a hand on his face, a cold, limp hand, the skin translucent and blue.
The bride is the bride, she says, and her face comes near to him, still pale but the eyes suddenly feverish. The bride is the bride, still walking the streets, still searching, searching, searching for warmth, for hope, for life. And her lips are on his, and they are cold, and they are relentless. And whatever she finds, she breathes into his mouth, whatever little she finds, it is never enough.
Imagine the terror.
Alone, the guide leaves the alley, her step firmer now, her pace purposeful. Florence is the bride, she says to the empty dark, it is always searching for attention, for life.
Mute and frozen the statues watch her pass, their hands ever beseeching, ever ignored.
All haunting, she says, gesturing gaily at the grim walls, all haunting is art.
Florence has ghosts, of course, but it also has the living, and who is to say which is more terrible?