Penitent Magdalene (Donatello) – Florence, Italy – 1455 – Wood

There is something in the clasping of the hands. The space in between them feels sacred, alive, like she has captured a spirit, her own spirit perhaps, in the womb of her fingers. The wood, too, feels somehow living, or dying. It rots as we stand here looking at her, fragile and malleable, susceptible, which makes sense given who she is and was: a prostitute molded by Jesus and his followers. Usually depicted with voluptuous lips and long, flaming hair in sticky Renaissance oils, here she stands smooth and unadorned, haggard, which necessitates stares. A person cannot walk into the small, hollow room and fail to stop short. She catches your breath, as though a real person is there behind the glass, and also not there. Her gaze is absent. She has already left this world. She is strong but thin. Tight, knotty muscles pull in her arms. The tendons in the throat draw taut, forming a deep cavity between them and slicing into the bones of her chest, bones layered with the papery skin of an old, old woman. She must’ve been very beautiful once. The skin of her cheeks pulls at high, delicate cheekbones and the remnants of golden paint cover her long, shredding hair. But it’s the hands that make an old woman a saint.

She was allegedly kept in a chapel for fallen women, an emblem of hope for mothers and wives and prostitutes. I envision her in a small, crumbling church in southern Italy, sticky with salt from the nearby sea, a beacon. Few would truly want to be like this, though, bony with missing teeth and matted hair. Waves clapping in the ocean offer a warning. Gulls scream us back.

That summer at the ocean my mother buoyed, swollen with the toxins pumped through her veins and the drugs that dulled her brain. Her face had always been a squareish shape, angular and interesting. It pillowed to a heavy, sallow oval, too thick for its own frame. She had always had this wit about her, this sharpness never far behind the eyes. And here she sat, glazed over and goofy. She laughed at indiscernible jokes, beginning a story loudly, mumbling for a moment and confidently expounding a punch line no one else could understand. It was like hearing a person’s thoughts before they reached the air, birthed quickly and in images, not yet words. Like a conch shell held to the ear, echoing something so personal, so innate to its briny world that all we could ever hear was the sad, moaning song of another’s mind.

In Florence, art is everywhere. It clings to the alleyways, chalked cherubs caressing behind motorcycles, to the ceilings of our classrooms in modest and beautiful frescoes, to the dusty corners of forgotten roads: a shrine to Our Lady of Sorrows. I cannot blame the other students for carrying on, for taking her in and leaving her behind. They see her, and they don’t. They walk away. But there is something painful about looking at this Mary, unique and flawed, not the Madonna so pure that Michelangelo said she never aged, nor even the healthy, pulsing beauty that Magdalene once was. That pain behind the eyes, a recognition, an understanding, is what keeps me at her side. I know this woman and I cannot leave her behind. I cannot tear myself away.

Four years earlier, my sister and I walked barefoot along the sand, through the whips of grass and across the splintered and paint-chipped staircases of Cape Cod, down to the ocean. We collected rocks and shells and sea glass, as always. “I wish it would just be over. That would be easier,” she said. She meant our mother sitting in the recliner in a puddle of sun at the beach cottage. The ropes of tubing and long, green oxygen tanks that had clanked in the trunk the entire car ride. The pill regimen that my father had insisted Cecily, fourteen, must learn to administer. Any number of medical or posthumous details that would be gentler and easier to have over. But I couldn’t let go. “If one of us were sick, Mom would never stop. She’d never leave us,” I said, unable to accept the truth. “I know,” Cec said, “but she’s not really Mom anymore.”

The Prisoners (Michelangelo) – Florence, Italy – 1520 – Marble

The day that I saw the David, the Accademia was sticky with tourists, some collapsing onto wooden benches to rub sore feet, others fanning themselves with flimsy museum guides. I stood on the fringes, soggy-footed and holding a dripping umbrella. Disoriented by the crowd and the rain, I had stumbled through the entrance of the gallery without a ticket and spluttered in cheap Italian as the guard pointed me back out the door. Finally inside the old, stony building, I found a quiet room in which to collect myself. The walls rumbled as thunder rolled in loud, dangerous reams. I gazed up at chalky busts lining the walls, imagined the heads of queens and dukes tumbling from their shelves and clattering in dusty heaps to the floor.

My classmates were brunching lazily, drowning powdered pancakes in syrup at the local café, or consulting guidebooks as they traipsed through Prague, but I had promised my professor that I would stay in Florence, come to see the David. I had missed the lesson at this museum, during which she had instructed my peers to examine David’s disproportionate hands and sketch his exquisite musculature. I had skipped that class and, instead, had spent the day on a plane to the Netherlands in search of my mother, nearly five years dead.

I braced myself for the slow, humid slog down the long hallway and joined the crowd as it groaned toward the David. The masses funneled stupidly along the corridor like cattle, doughy and dripping with rain and sweat, clutching the sticky fingers of small children. I was nearly caught up in the current, too, drawn to that glowing white marble, the allure of its history. I had read that, upon completion, David was transported from Michelangelo’s workshop on a cart rolled with logs by strong, Florentine men, Herculean miniatures in their own right, and that fools on the street threw rocks and sticks at the marble man. That Michelangelo was the third artist to attack this project and that the block of marble that would eventually become David lay in a churchyard for 26 years before Michelangelo got his hands on it. I had been forewarned that the various renderings of this biblical character, Michelangelo’s version joined by Donatello’s effeminate bronze and barely pubescent marble, would appear on the final exam.

My mind was on these things, these factoids, and the fact that I still needed to memorize the French for a piece of art song I would perform in a few weeks, and that I needed to remember to buy a baguette on the way home. And on the thing that always seems to draw me away, to occupy the curling edges of my wandering mind: my mother. I had flown to the Netherlands, that day when I was not here in the Accademia seeing the David, under the pretense of seeing the tulip parade. Holland tulips. Somehow these springtime bulbs seemed like a better excuse for my absence than searching for a dead woman in all of the places I could think of. This, I suspect, was the real source of the nagging, fiddling thing happening in my mind when I saw the streak of marble that would take my breath away.

In a chance glance to the right, through the crevice of a heavy man’s elbow, I saw a pearly figure, just a sliver, just enough to know that something was off. In the middle of the hallway, still facing the David and unable to control myself, I veered off the path and into the face of one of the miserable marble creatures. Their title alone still clatters in my ears: the Prisoners. I was struck dumb.

Two on each side, they lined the narrow corridor, what by all appearances was merely the antechamber to David’s throne room, but which, I learned later, was entitled the Hall of Prisoners. They grimaced at each other across the hallway, writhing in unison. They are the half-rendered half-brothers of the biblical hero up ahead. Yes, these too are Michelangelo’s creations, their marble selected by the artist himself from the Carrara quarries, the best and the brightest. Unlike David, though, they are disfigured. Sharp chisel marks pock their skin like coral, like something from the depths, as though fallen beneath the murky waves from an unlucky vessel, roughed instead of smoothed by the ocean, and claimed by aquatic age or else that eerie, spoken of Atlantis. Otherworldly, I cannot tell whether they belong to the ocean or to purgatory.

A small plaque at the head of the exhibit explained that the four prisoners had been discovered in Michelangelo’s studio after his death. I imagined the uncloaking: marble dust wafting into the air as a heavy canvas cloth was pulled away like a magic trick. The dust sparkling as an astounded Italian gawked at his find. I read on: modern art historians now claim that Michelangelo left the statues intentionally unfinished. They are symbolic, man’s eternal struggle to escape the bonds of human flesh. The Italians dub this technique non-finito, which to my American ear feels flippant and irreverent, but which merely means “incomplete.” Something felt, still feels, wrong to me about this, though. This scholarly description that did not match what I was looking at. Theory made live, they claimed, but all I could see was the pain.

I stared up at the first prisoner. His own skin seemed to have betrayed him. His hands, webbed and craggy, were glued to the side of his face. Knotty abdominal muscles strained under the weight of his heavy arm, draped painfully over his head. How heavy are these statues? I wondered. How much can that arm weigh?

Michelangelo, it is said, was a religious man. He believed that his art was God-ordained, that as an artist he was charged merely with shaving away the excess, revealing the man within the block of marble. Something fails to compute, though. If his role was to liberate the living being inside the marble, how could he leave these creatures to struggle? I cannot come to terms with it. Who could leave them like this? Who could walk away?

I looked into the eyes of the prisoner, at the contorted muscles, at the confusion that seemed innate and natural in his pulsing form, at the museum-goers waltzing past to gaze at the David while considering what flavor of gelato they should try next. I realized, half-embarrassed, that I was angry on behalf of stone, of cold, unseeing marble. But it is never just marble, is it? Dafne stuck in a tree. Hercules rolling a rock up Mount Olympus. Pain is pain is pain. And here it was in front of me, made live and frozen in marble.

I continued down the hall, taking in each painful figure. I halted at the last of the prisoners. Graceful and fawnish, he was almost beautiful. Something you might see in an old and fussy courtyard. An indefinite arm arched across his brow, obscuring a face so nearly realized you could see the trace of a thought on his lips. A secret. The outline of one slender finger traced the smoothed skin of his shoulder, self-soothing as a child in the nighttime.

Once again, I thought of my mother. Of the instinctive cry of a girl for her mother, of the way that I rolled off my lofted bed on the first day of college classes and broke my elbow. Of the tears that seemed babyish before I knew I was broken – who cries because they have fallen out of bed? – but which later felt completely predictable, the Pavlovian effect of pain that yields yearning. I looked again at the prisoner. He seemed to cradle himself in his arms now, softly, softly, whispering a lullaby for grief. I could almost hear his whisper.

Before I left for Italy, I found a dusty journal tucked away in a pile of my mother’s things. She had kept it when she was about my age and studying abroad in Salzburg, Austria. I came to Europe believing I might find her there, in the clear, mountain air, or here in the oils and dusts of an ancient country. I had been crossing off the places that she was not. I think it sounds silly now, like I was under a spell, following some unseen being. I had fled my hometown to a distant college, fled that school for Europe, fled Florence for a remote tulip farm listening blindly for her voice. I looked at this prisoner, at his contorted limbs and sadly soothing finger. I’m starting to wonder if I am really looking for my mother at all, or if the person I’ve lost is myself.

Back in the States, my sister sits across from me at a coffee shop and confesses in whispers that she might not be normal. She can feel that something is not right. She is not like her peers, whose mothers did not die when they were fourteen. “Everyone says I’m so grown up, that I handle things in such a grown up way.” I hear what she doesn’t say – that she knows better. She’s worried that no one else has realized. That no one else will be there when the floor inevitably falls out beneath her. And it will, she feels it intuitively, because who can carry this eternally? I know how to fill these gaps in conversation, to hear the words she does not say as I look at her across a mug of tea, because I know these thoughts. It is a wonder I have not realized before, have not allowed myself to feel it. There is something about hearing another person say the words that have been echoing through your own mind that make them real, that make them terrifying.

De Tuin (Van Looy) – Harrlem, Netherlands – 1893 – Oil on canvas

I find her quietly, this wispy woman in a broad rimmed hat. She sits easily, surrounded, almost swallowed by flora. This scene, so bold and unkempt, stands out among the winter-toned seascapes and stoic renderings of tulip markets that line the wall. There is something outrageous about this painting, about the woman who seems incidentally caught in the corner of its frame. She is faceless, and still so clearly alive. She sweeps an arm through the thick greenery, stretches as though in search of something, bows her head to the blooms.

The museum is intimate, tucked along the curling edges of the Spaarne, a river I had never heard of in a city I never expected to see. Bicycles line arched bridges and the sails of a windmill whisk along neutrally. It is midweek in a sleepy harbor town and no one else is here to see. I am free to stare.

She is cradled by a hillside of nasturtiums, coral, red, tangerine. I think their leaves must lick her ankles, flatten themselves against her skin until they leave crimped, shamrock shaped impressions. Such a deep green, they spread like lily pads, pluming inside out with a gust of wind to reveal a webbed underbelly, brain cells intertwining and circuiting, humming. The Garden. She must’ve smelled the sweet, heavy air as she settled into the bed of leaves and her cotton skirt billowed with breath, swelling like a sail in the wind. She bends at the waist, just slightly, a delicate wrist parting the thick, strong grasses. I want to know what she is looking for.

She has no face, this mystery woman. Cream hat swathed in tulle and tilted to obscure what could be a mischievous grin, or a modest smile. Is that the slim peak of a chin or – but no, just a fold in fabric. Her body is hidden, too, tucked in among the flocks of daisies and black-eyed Susans. Is she reaching for something in the high, sharp grass? A ring dropped down into the hot, heaving soil like a seed. Stretching to graze her fingers along the tantalizing back of a velvet bee. Or is she merely combing her fingers through the waxy greenery, coating her hands in the slick of dew to feel the hum of a garden in the morning?

I step closer and note that these are really only dabs of oil on a canvas. Layers of color, texture hardened on texture, a wash of greens and corals and creams. But it was painted outside, en plein air as the artists were calling it, on a real summer day. There might’ve been a breeze that picked up the swath of fabric from the hat, pulled strands of hair from their neat pins, carried a laugh across the breeze and into the next yard, where children played, where another garden grew.

***

I stand in this museum, in Holland, having traveled here alone to see the tulips, which now seems trivial or even reckless. I have carried an increasingly tattered copy of the journal nearly everywhere I’ve gone, from cafes in Tuscany to snow-capped mountains in Austria, to this museum, to little effect. Though I did travel to Salzburg, the journal proved incapable of doing the thing I thought I needed, of revealing the thing I thought I was looking for, and in a burst of uncharacteristic spontaneity and a panic of cheap flight reservations, I found myself here, staring at an impressionist work by a little known artist instead of at the David.

The museum was small and strange, filled with whirring scientific trinkets and pressed flowers and the egg of something called an elephant bird. I wandered without incident, avoiding the large sudsing machines washing the floor in the bone room and listening to the English audio guide. The painting stopped me quietly. It was not like the Magdalene or the Prisoners, which demand to be felt, to be seen. But it drew me in.

One afternoon, that last week in the hospital, I found myself alone with my mother. Other family members had slowly trickled out to the waiting room and I rested my head across her lap, numb and staring at a flashing screen. Gentle nature scenes played before me, one of a field of tulips. I wanted to point out the scene, had some inkling that tulips meant something to my mother, that she’d wanted to carry them in her wedding, but she was asleep. That week crackles in and out of my mind, flashbulbs I can’t erase. I don’t know where the trip to the tulips came from, really, but I suspect it is rooted there. That some warped seed of hope sent me trundling across the continent in search of something I’d lost, suddenly and shockingly, fastening on to the last familiar image, the last breath of air.

I wonder whether my mother could tell I would be the one of her daughters to linger with her ghost. To reject the cleaning of her closet when my father and sister were so eager to get it over with and then, years later, to sift through each painfully colorful garment, each strand of costume jewelry, alone when no one else was home. To try on her skirts and sweaters. To sit cross-legged on her closet floor, a layered spectacle in beads and scarves as I made lists of which items should be given to whom – a gift or not, who knows – the faded floral purse for her sister, the beaded jacket for her mother-in-law. Did she know this would be the way of things?

When she was in college, my mother took an art history course. Before she died but long before I could’ve used it, she gave me a large textbook filled with her curling print. I don’t know if she thought I might one day use it in a class, or if this gift was a subtle gesture of goodbye. When I returned from Florence, I came upon that dusty book and flipped through, searching for the artworks that I’d seen, and what my mother thought of them. My heart hammered when I found her notes on the Magdalene. I’d had to use the index: not under “Magdalene” or “Penitent,” but, finally, wonderfully, with “Donatello.” The pages were dusty and somewhat yellowed, but the handwriting was still clear and I thought, I found her. I was puzzling over the softly penciled note, “decrepit though full of life,” weighing her word choice and the sway of her pencil, when I realized that these words, this handwriting, were not my mother’s. Her notes were the work of a ballpoint pen, in the same blue ink and flashing, fleeting scrawl of the journal, and she had no notations for the works that I know. I set the book aside, along with this search for a person who seemed permanently inaccessible.

Impressionism captures its subject in the space between moments, in the awkward half-pose of a ballerina, in the random stretch of an arm. The movement meant to show the shifting of a moment, the play of the light, the ephemeral and changing. The things that are lost in between. De Tuin, which is Dutch for “the garden,” is known for its unusual framing. To put the woman in the corner of the scene, mid-motion and fuzzy as is the nature of impressionism, begs the question: what is the subject of this painting? Perhaps, instead of a painting of a woman in a garden, this is a painting of a garden with a woman sitting inside it.

I stand quietly, hands behind my back. I look at this painting, this portrait, and I see a woman caught in the middle – of a moment, of her life, of a random day. She is on the edges. It’s not even a story about her. It’s the story of a summer day in the backyard surrounded by buzzing and photosynthesis and the mix of paints on a pallet. It is the story of living and dying. It is my mother slipping away quietly, silly and strange. It is me, standing alone in a silent museum in the Netherlands, looking at oil and searching for life.