Chapter 1 #14
An “eye.” It did not mean the ability to spot the difference between a topaz and a brown diamond, a real Tiffany and a fake, or even some “soul” in an object that all could attest to; it was to spot the echo in oneself.
I scanned the room and could not sense it, but then again, this was a room filled by someone else’s impulses and caprices.
To find an echo in oneself, one had to know oneself.
That seemed an impossibility. Would I ever become a person who bought a bridal shawl and draped it above a work by some well-known artist?
Would I ever become a person who asked for a stone to be chipped off a wall?
“These tigers and lions, from Kenya and from Zanzibar,” she went on with obvious delight, “go with the camel’s saddle but not with the mating hippos.
Those”—and here she paused, her gaze rising mischievously to catch mine—“go with the other erotic objects, like the prostitute and wooden penis, of course.”
“Of course,” I echoed.
So were my hours filled in those early days.
A child will draw the arm holding the tennis racket twice the size of the other arm, to convey its importance, and a director often puts a character in red so the audience can catch her in a crowd, but life does not provide these clues.
So with all the people coming and going at Villa Coco, I could hardly know that the next visitor, a surprise one, was of any importance at all.
It was three weeks into my stay at Villa Coco, and we had reached the middle of October.
Estelle, my employer, and I were sitting at lunch under the fading wisteria when all of a sudden Cesare began to bark.
There was a sound of clattering metal from inside, like the imitation of offstage thunder in amateur theatrics (Nimali had dropped something); and then from around the corner staggered a curious character: all in cream, about as tall as a baronessa, a meringue fedora on his head, a gentle manner of walking like a windup toy, a friendly smile, and yet his circular sunglasses and way of jutting his chin out made me think, instantly, of a diamondback terrapin I kept as a boy.
“Sacré bleu,” said the Baronessa, and Estelle stood at once.
“Buon giorno, tutti,” the man said in a thoroughly American accent.
His smile was also that of a diamondback terrapin.
He switched to a Carolina-accented English: “Ah hope Ah’m not botherin’ your lunch! ”
“Not at all,” the Baronessa said, recovering and looking over at me. “Giovedì, this is an old friend of mine, Pullman—”
“Furman,” the man said, seemingly used to her way with nicknames. “Furman Childress. Ah’ve known…the Baronessa here…since Ah was very young. About your age!”
“You’re still young, Pullman! You look just as you did on Capri, with Oscar,” she told him flirtatiously, and I goggled at the notion. He seemed not as aged as she, but gone soft and pale instead of thin and crisp as paper.
He passed a linen handkerchief across his forehead. “Ah was her friend’s paramour!”
The Baronessa said, “My friend Prince Mariano of Sicily.”
“A prince!” I said. “Wow!”
She batted this away with her hand. “Sicily is nothing but princes.”
“Lisabetta,” he said, bowing in his courtly way to her. “Ah can only stay a moment. Ah was passin’ by on my way to Florence and thought we could have a chat.”
Of course, the Baronessa said. It was always nice to see an old friend, especially when so many now were lost. He removed his hat as one removes the lid from a pot, then smiled to all of us as if sure we were admiring the single blond lock that clung to his otherwise bald forehead like a price sticker to a melon.
I rose to collect the plates and planned to let the old friends talk, but instead I found the Baronessa pulling at my sleeve.
“Giovedì!” She then introduced me to this Furman character in the strangest way: “Here is the young expert come to help us!”
He took off his sunglasses, revealing startling blue eyes. “Ah! A pleasure, young man.”
Estelle broke in: “Expert in archives and records.”
He looked me up and down. “Ah’ve heard so little about you.”
A strange thing to say. I felt instantly uncomfortable. It was like being in an actor’s nightmare, where you are thrust into a scene in which you know none of the dialogue, none of the blocking, and yet everyone around you goes on as if you did.
Me: “Oh, my name’s not—”
“And American!” the Baronessa exclaimed, this time as if it were the highest honor one could achieve.
Pullman (or Furman) gave me a pleasant smile and bent, rather than bowed, toward me. He said it seemed that I was a suitable addition, and hoped the rest of us would understand if he and his old friend had a little privacy…
“I remember him on Capri,” the Baronessa told me once he had left and we were having coffee in the living room, below the portrait of the Venetian courtesan. She seemed somewhat shaken. “The most beautiful boy. How astounding he has not changed at all.”
I stayed silent; it seemed incredible to compare the man I’d met to a beautiful boy. But I realized we were two people looking at the same object from different ends of a telescope.
“By the way,” Estelle said to me, “ ‘Pullman’ is Italian for a tour bus. She enjoys pretending not to remember his name.” Then she turned back to the Baronessa. “Tricky how to handle him.”
I asked what she meant. Glances were exchanged; I felt we were playing a parlor game to which I did not know the rules.
“Very tricky,” the Baronessa said. “Before my friend the prince left him, Pullman managed to get a diamond out of him.”
“Do you mean he stole it?”
“That I would admire!” she said. “No, he seduced it, I suppose. My friend had very particular tastes. I believe Pullman turned the diamond into buildings on the Amalfi Coast and so on, and look at him now. Rich as anything. But his taste is still…After all these years in Italy he has remained utterly American.” Then she added, nodding to Estelle: “As we knew he would.”
I still had no idea what this might mean; being American seemed to me, before my later travels, the natural state of being in the world. What could be wrong with that? And yet I should have guessed from the fact that she used only his nickname after such a long acquaintance: she despised him.
“Our friend Pullman tells many stories about me,” she said, leaning toward me. “But do not believe him. Only some of them are true.”
I nodded sagely, but I supposed I would never meet this person again.
“I have called our friend Oscar,” she said to Estelle with a grave lowering of her voice.
“We must move things forward. And Oscar says he plans to procure slippers for you?” She turned her head, and I was startled to realize she was talking to me.
A flame of a grin. “He says they will make you feel like the pope!”
What did not make me feel like the pope was working with Ghazel one morning, a week or so later.
Moments after I had finished my coffee, the small man emerged from nowhere, stripped to the waist like an oil wrestler, holding out a gleaming machete.
He shouted, “Giovedì!” It could mean only one thing: the faina.
The “wall of dogs” had failed to stop our enemy and it appeared he had a new plan; the machete seemed a sign we were meant to hunt the poor animal.
Nimali looked at me with amusement as I was led away to the chicken coop.
There, Ghazel laid out his plans in his own peculiar way: “YALLAH! TAGLIARE! FAINA! YALLAH!” Almost every other word was this “YALLAH!” pronouncement, which I took to be his personal form of punctuation.
Only later did I realize it was an Arabic interjection along the lines of “Come on!” or “Let’s do it!
” I also gradually realized we were not to hunt the faina but to build a cage from bamboo that would somehow be triggered to fall and trap it.
Details were vague. The weather had been chilly when I awoke, but hacking away at bamboo with a machete under the command of a barking tyrant had me dripping with sweat and I was forced to remove my shirt.
Ghazel, in the meantime, prepared the ropes.
For the entire length of our labors, he talked to me about various topics, none of them comprehensible.
It didn’t matter; he did not require a response.
“YALLAH!” He also had a habit of vanishing without explanation; I came back after a bathroom break to find the tools everywhere, bamboo half cut, and Ghazel nowhere to be seen.
He did not return. It was as if he had been raptured.
In addition to providing a bamboo cage, I was to trim long leafy canes to decorate the entrance hall where I had first met the Baronessa.
More macheteing, more dragging the things across the lawn.
I was shimmering with perspiration, decorated with scrapes and cuts and sickle-shaped leaves, carrying the bamboo into the house, when I found a small conference taking place in the hall.
Here were the Baronessa and Estelle. I was surprised to see my employer dressed in her finery earlier than her usual arrival at eleven.
“This is an exciting appearance,” she said, “but not at all suitable for our trip.”
Struggling with the bundle of bamboo, I looked to Estelle, then to the Baronessa and asked what trip—
But I was interrupted by a commotion from the other room—a crash—and saw the Baronessa’s head turn in terror.
“It’s just…eh, ahem…the brass crocodile!” came a man’s voice.
She looked to Estelle and said something in Italian I did not catch. Estelle smiled at a private joke.