Chapter 1 #13
“Maybe just one,” I said doubtfully.
Estelle said they were each about a dollar. But I felt if I bought them, I would be required to wear them. I knew the chill of autumn would be here soon, but in this heat they seemed absurd. I caught Estelle’s eye.
“I’ll think about it,” I said with a smile, making to return the clothes to the rack.
But the Baronessa did not smile. She lifted her chin and narrowed her eyes, placing her hand on the clothes to prevent me from returning them. She said, very firmly and clearly: “We won’t be back.”
I laughed. Speaking of a shop she told me she visited every week or so, it seemed the height of absurdity, another one of her dramatic moments. But she did not laugh, and neither did my companions.
Oscar leaned in and spoke to me gently: “Lisabetta is right. If you want them, take them now. Will we be back? Who knows?”
And so I came home with Tonino’s wardrobe and began the slow transformation from an American into a man.
It was after Oscar’s departure, during a trip by the Baronessa to the hair salon, when the house was empty at last, that I was finally able to make a complete tour.
The downstairs, for the most part, I already knew.
The entrance hall had three doors: one leading to the kitchen, one to the library, and one to a white-tiled bedroom with a ceiling lamp hung so low that pieces had been broken by unexpectedly tall guests.
This was where Oscar stayed. It was decorated with Turkish paintings that, on closer inspection, seemed all to be of mild foot torture in which the victim smiled with either atonement or delight.
French doors looked out on the garden, and a closet held no surprises except that the serving platters seemed to be stored there.
Through the library was the captain’s cabin, with the views of the sea, in which Oscar had removed the curse, and another door leading to the main living room, which I had passed through many times but never had the occasion to enjoy.
Objects were everywhere, but most striking were two great mirrors above the white corner lounge, painted with dancing ladies.
Naked. Nearby, and leering slightly, was what the Baronessa had informed me was a painting of a Venetian courtesan, in folds of velvet, wearing the foot-high clogs necessary for her profession in high water.
How did the Baronessa know it was a courtesan?
“No pearls!” she told me. “Prostitutes could not wear pearls.” As if this were something everybody knew.
Upstairs was the truly undiscovered country.
I was reluctant to enter her private chambers, so at first I went along the flower-painted hallway, peeking into the room next to mine (yellow, prints of A Rake’s Progress above the twin beds), the room beyond (linens and an imposing antique steam iron), and the Baronessa’s parlor.
Pushkin and Gorky looked up languidly from the sofa.
Here I had been before; the lamps were chrome and from the 1960s, illuminating furniture from the 1980s and books, on shelves to the ceiling, from the 1880s.
A door led onto the balcony, and I could see a storm boiling on the horizon.
From this parlor, I passed through her office (lit overhead by an enormous lamp, which she told me was a streetlight from Milan, and darkened by black furniture and bookshelves) and delicately opened the door to her secret realm.
Her sunken bath, her cluttered vanity, up two stairs to the Nimali-made bed and television and there it was. A woman with a jug. The Picasso.
This was the first item I put in my catalog. I had begun.
After the Picasso, and until two arrivals (one that would send the house into a panic, one that would ruin my best-laid plans), I focused entirely on my job as archivist. I want to make it clear that my discomfort at Villa Coco was organizational, never moral.
Something was going on that I was not being told about, but it was a source merely of interest, not of judgment.
Or so I felt at first. But as I kept being excluded from certain rooms, inhibited from opening drawers and so on, this erratic behavior seemed to touch on my occupation—not only what I had been hired to do but my occupation of leaving behind the distractions of frivolity and thereby building a life of consequence.
I did not seem to be achieving any of the above.
I found myself trying to explain the systems I had been taught, but the Baronessa dismissed these as fads.
“One room that is ready is the library,” she offered, and I felt a great relief. Here was a place I was comfortable setting rules.
“I will make sure it’s alphabetical—”
“Are you mad? Some of these are in Russian! No, I have found another solution. By country of the author’s birth.”
“Okay,” I said, swallowing. “That should be easy.”
“Not so easy as you say! Where, for instance, is Yugoslavia? Or, for that matter, the Ottoman Empire? Prussia? Austria-Hungary? So many nations I knew as a girl. To simplify things, I refer to the map you see here on the wall.”
It was dated 1912.
I did manage to ambush my employer one morning on her descent down the staircase with Pushkin and Gorky.
I asked her to name every item in the entrance hall, the room with the bronze sculpture of the boat and the vitrines.
To my surprise, she was delighted to do so; she sat in a cane chair and pointed at random at some object—say, a wooden statue with an enormous phallus—and began a story in her old wild way: “This not only came from an Italian archaeologist but resembles him…”
This did me no good for my catalog. Nor could I make use of the perfectly ordinary category of “value.” At one point, I broke in on a tale about a rabbi in Beirut by saying, “We should move on to another of your treasures—”
“HO HO HO!”
“What is it?”
“Treasures!” she scoffed. “Not any longer!” Then seemed to stop herself from saying more. I wondered if all these beautiful objects had been found at a thrift shop, and was about to say so when she broke her silence:
“But do you know,” she mused, “there is one truly valuable object remaining here.” She put her hand to her chin and surveyed her crowded little room. “One thing that is worth all the rest.”
I asked her what it might be, but she continued her musing:
“Priceless, in fact. It belongs in a museum, someone told me, only I said it belongs with me. Can you guess it?”
Frantically I looked around the little hall, every inch crammed with paintings with Cyrillic writing, engraved brass bowls, ivory and tortoiseshell inkstones, vases of peacock feathers, ceramic busts of young men and women, an ornate tasseled camel’s saddle, Bakelite hairbrushes and combs and makeup boxes, carved wooden angels, and Native American fetish dolls arranged on a shelf.
Of course I knew the value of artifacts—appraisal is one of the practices of archival science—but estimating the value of the objects around me was a puzzle.
Was she sitting on a fortune? Or a trash heap?
I pointed to a piece of stone, carved in what I took for Arabic, which was set into the plaster of the wall.
“Ah! That is from Cairo. I was invited to dinner at the house of an Egyptian publisher. There was Arabic writing on the wall of his dining room, and I asked him if he would give it to me. So he had that portion of the wall chipped away and sent to me, and there it is before you.” She smiled, admiring it. “It’s worthless.”
My eyes fell in defeat. I had thought myself, if not an expert, then at least someone interested in beautiful things, and in college (before amorous entanglements consumed them) I spent my solitary hours eyeing objects in antiques shops and imagining that I might one day possess them.
But there the objects were labeled, or the owner would provide a fanciful explanation, and nothing was “junk”—its value was its cost, and thus the same for all.
Among my parents’ things, worth was weighed in status.
It was a foreign country, this one I had entered, a country in which the currency changed daily, in which an object’s value was elastic and depended only on the individual.
“But yes, in this room,” I heard her saying beside me, “there is something that is truly a treasure.”
“Show me,” I begged her.
Her eyes moved to me, and a smile flickered on her face, as if she were not fool enough to tell me. “You didn’t ask what was written on the stone. It is ‘Alayam dewl.’ ”
“Alayam dewl,” I repeated.
“Days are like countries,” she said, not moving a muscle as I digested this. She gave a little cough, then tenderly added: “Meaning they will change tomorrow. One day is for us, the next against us. So it goes.”
I had not thought of countries as changing at all; the continent of Europe seemed as fixed as a sculpture group. But then I looked at her map of 1912 and saw that, for someone who had lived as long as she, alayam dewl, indeed.
“You ask about organizing principles. These,” she said, gesturing to the vitrines, “are by affinità.”
“What does that mean?”
“Their obvious attraction to one another!” she said.
“I will show you, and this is something to learn. The Bangladeshi dolls and Afghan blanket together bring to mind the Mughal Empire, and isn’t it amusing to see this Robensky, a terrible antisemite, below a Jewish Greek bridal shawl?
” She gave a little giggle; it baffled me completely, for was not the drawing worth something and the shawl a yellowed rag?
Not at all, not here, not to her. Because, as I was slowly learning, it depended not on training or learning or even experience but on having an “eye.”