Chapter 1 #10
He tossed his salad with a fork and a spoon, talking all the while.
“Think of two hundred years ago, before refrigeration. They ate their pasta in the mountains with cheese, and by the sea with fish, but nowhere with both. Not because they were stubborn. Because it was their reality. And we have kept the tradition.”
“But now we have both, we could—”
“Never say this!” he stated firmly. “Never!” Then he laughed. I wondered how many Anglos he’d had to teach about cheese, about hats on beds, about so many perfectly obvious parts of life.
The Baronessa chirped brightly: “You know that Oscar was thrown in jail for his art?”
He sat up straight. “Lisabetta. I was never in jail.”
Estelle seemed to have tensed beside me; I could see her exchanging glances with the old man.
I wondered if this was a sensitive topic, but my employer ventured on: “It was in Paris. He had stolen tubes of paint from an art store. Sneaking around in a trench coat with big pockets. Had been doing it for years, but the trick to pinching is to keep a sense of balance. Something missing here, something missing there, nobody minds—”
“So you often say,” Oscar mused.
“But Oscar got greedy, went too often, and the owner had him arrested.”
He opened his hands to me and Estelle, pleading guilty: “I couldn’t afford it. It was one thousand francs.”
“And you know what his defense was? ‘I am a great artist and I need this paint.’ ”
He said, “I did need it.”
I asked if his defense worked, and he nodded serenely. I asked what the paint was.
“Tyrian purple,” the old man said. “Made from the murex snail. A fugitive pigment. Though I was acquitted, I was advised by the court, in the future, to use”—he paused to shudder—“magenta.”
I gasped, and it made him giggle.
“Of course, magenta was no good to me,” he went on.
“I was doing a particular”—he raised his eyes to the ceiling, searching for the proper word, then brought them down again—“style…that could only be Tyrian purple. The subject was Hercules, using a local fisherman as a model, done in the ancient way. I never sold it, never could find a buyer. It was not where my talent lay. Anyway, we all have stolen something!”
“But we have not all been caught!” the Baronessa said, and for some reason this made the table laugh.
Estelle and the Baronessa began speaking again in French, and Oscar forced them to change to English. The topic was one of the utmost importance in this heat wave: water. Apparently Villa Coco, for all its charms, had no well or independent source of water.
“When you buy a house, make sure it has a well,” the Baronessa advised me, and I nodded as if I ever expected to buy a house, much less find one with a well. “I was young and impetuous and loved this house too much. But every house and lover has a fatal flaw—”
I repeated that in my mind: Every house and lover has a fatal flaw.
“—All you can do is learn what it is beforehand, and I felt at least I knew this one’s was water. I hired a rabdomante, a very esteemed one—”
Estelle broke in: “A man who finds water with a stick.”
“A diviner,” I said.
The Baronessa seemed intrigued by this translation.
“A diviner! He was in fact the butler of my friend! A defrosted priest.” (Defrocked, Estelle corrected.) “I remember he said he didn’t like to do it, but if God gives you a gift, you must use it.
He walked all around the property with his stick, and at last he came beside the house, and down it went!
‘Here is water,’ he announced to us. ‘We should dig here.’ I was very sad to tell him that he had found, on the other side of the wall, our refrigerator. ”
I laughed, and she sparkled at me. Estelle smiled; she clearly had heard this story many times.
“But the rabdomante was also a soothsayer, thanks God! This he also did not like to do, but this he did. He said that I would not die in this house. Which upset me greatly, I have to tell you. I love this house. I do not want to die in some terrible hospital with boring people and someone screaming in the next room. I asked him when I would die, but apparently his talent lay only in venue. Like a booking agent.”
Oscar pointed out that she had always wanted to die at sea.
“Yes,” the Baronessa said. “If he had mentioned the sea, I would be content. I am only really happy at sea. I want to die lashed to the mast like Ulisse!”
Oscar was shown to a room downstairs—the “White Room,” where apparently he always stayed—and I was told I would not be needed for the next few hours.
I stood there in confusion until the Baronessa made a gesture as of whisking away a fly and I understood I was to leave.
I managed to occupy myself by making my own assessment of the house’s needs.
It seemed I would have to both prove myself to my employer and find a use for my anxious energy.
I examined the bookshelves and discovered them in anything but alphabetical order.
I looked at the stone objects in the entrance hall and saw no organizing principle, nor was there one for the miniature African warriors marshaled in my room beside a drawing of a Russian church; and in the kitchen’s cutlery drawer, where organization must rule, I found a fork had run off with the spoons.
The work seemed impossible; it was a house built specifically to thwart me.
And yet, good boy that I was, I diligently avoided the Baronessa and her guest, though they were hard to dodge; they seemed to be everywhere I wanted to be.
I went to use the lavatory assigned to me and found the two elderly people crammed inside its close quarters, pointing at the walls and whispering animatedly.
Oscar appeared startled to see me; I saw he was carrying one of his brown paper packages, which he drew behind himself.
He touched the Baronessa’s shoulder. She turned around coyly and said, “One would like a little privacy sometime,” a statement that seemed odd for her to make in my bathroom.
Later in the day, I happened upon them in the “captain’s cabin” (as she called the office), standing together in the middle of the room and each staring at a different painted sea view.
It was altogether peculiar behavior. I tried following their maneuvers around the house, but the two seemed either to stand for an hour before the same drawing…
or else to vanish from sight. In any case, they provided no clues.
As for any questions I had, the Baronessa referred me always to others. “Ask Estelle,” she said. “Or my cousin Giacomo. He comes any day now. He is a character from a Mitford novel.” This was of no help; I wasn’t aware of what a Mitford novel might be.
Oscar stayed two days, and I found him in the kitchen early on his final morning, just as I was making my coffee.
“Have you mastered the Italian coffeemaker?” he asked.
He was dressed again in his ascot, his chardonnay jacket, holding his fedora in his hands.
I wondered how he managed in the heat; it seemed a singular talent of Italian men.
He was waiting for Vinsanda to take him to the train station and had beside him the same packages in brown paper that he’d carried when he arrived.
I wondered if he had brought something to show the Baronessa.
I said I was mastering it better than the language.
“We must find you an Italian man,” he said.
“That is the only way you will learn the language. A warm dictionary, as they say. Of course, finding a man is harder than it was in my day.” He said this very plainly, his gaze out the window to where two black kittens basked in the sun.
“When I was young, you could hike across the hills and any man would be yours. A goatherd, a winemaker, a priest. It was wonderful! Simply wonderful. This was just after the war. I think everyone thought, ‘To hell with it! I’ll take whatever pleasure comes my way.’ Lucky me!
I was there to give it. Think of lying on a hillside with a young shepherd… ”
Do you know what? I was such a self-centered, parochial, cliché-addled fool that it had simply never occurred to me that Oscar was like myself.
And still, looking at him in the kitchen, I could not separate what was a homosexual “tell” and what merely generational and Continental—the fedora, the ascot, the dentures, the scent of rose and old leather—when of course my surprise was the classic stupidity: the thought that someone has always been the age at which we meet them.
Always a silver-haired man with a smile.
Time works for no one but us. When of course of course of course one summer he lay on a hillside with a young shepherd…
“But my heart gave out at fifty,” Oscar continued, turning to me.
“An aortic aneurysm, inherited from my father. Who died at fifty. My doctor advised me to give it all up. Meat and dairy and bread, yes, and sex.” He looked at the Mitsu-bitchy now arriving beside the door.
“It was time, anyway. The era of shepherds was over, and I was too old for the new world. AIDS and parades. I did not want to be a fool in love. So I renounced it all. I don’t eat pasta, I don’t eat cheese.
I don’t fall in love. I am a very cheerful, very harmless old man. ”
I told him I saw so much more in him than that. Again, a bright, good-natured smile to cover whatever memory he concealed from me. I thought of my own vow, renouncing entanglements of any kind. I saw, in Oscar, a kindred spirit. Perhaps I was a harmless young man.
I asked him if he had accomplished what he had come to do. He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “You know, my American friend,” he said, “I think our Lisabetta underestimates you.”