Chapter 1 #15
There entered now a striking young man so entirely unlike the Baronessa that, had I not known they were related, I would have expected her to send him back out onto the street.
Little gold-wire glasses, the dark blond hair parted in the middle, the angular face all wavering smile above a sharp chin, the light blue oxford shirt tailored to his broad torso and narrow waist, the navy sweater tied around his shoulders.
He was a few years older than me, and I recognized him both from the lizard-green car I’d seen on my arrival and from his ancestor’s portrait in my room—for this was the “cousin,” Giacomo.
Giacomo-Giacomo. Afraid of his family, as Estelle had told me.
But somewhere within was the young man who had run away to his cousin’s house and lived with her for a year. He caught my eye. And I thought: Oh no.
“Is it my cousin from Vicenza?” the Baronessa asked. “And has he broken something?”
The young man laughed and approached her, kissing her on each cheek.
I saw from how he held her hand the affection he had for her, and the fact that she did not let go said the same for her.
He spoke in a tentative tone peppered with pauses: “I always knock over that crocodile. It’s…
eh…it’s indestructible. Like you. Ahem. I brought Asiago. ”
She clapped her hands in pleasure. “Buono!”
“Hello, Estelle,” he said, nodding to her.
“You will want to meet Giovedì,” the Baronessa said, gesturing significantly to me. “He is my man Thursday.”
I said hello and that I was in fact the archivist, here to make a catalog. I was well aware that I stood sweat-slicked and shirtless before the man. He looked me up and down, then smiled in greeting. Oh no. This was the last thing I needed.
“The poor boy is American,” she added, as one might add that a guest was completely deaf. “And he has met the faina.”
“Oh!”
“I have,” I said, then gestured to myself and tried to explain: “Ghazel and I were building a trap to replace the wall for the chickens—”
“It is a wall of dogs!” the Baronessa announced.
I contradicted her. “It is not a wall of dogs.”
But she was on to more important things. “We need your help, Giacomo, and quickly. The American has nothing to wear.”
I was afraid she gave the impression that I literally had nothing to wear; that I had arrived in this savage state, naked and carrying bamboo. I said I had not expected a formal event. The cousin and I held a look for a moment.
“Vabon,” he said. “Vabon.” I later learned this was a term in his native Veneto dialect—va bene, okay—and his speech was peppered with it.
“Today we go to Ferrara!” the Baronessa said, yanking on her red wool coat.
“But,” I said, trying to focus on this new information, “but that’s a month from now! With Oscar!”
“Plans have changed!”
We were going on a trip, though no one had told her man Thursday.
It took a great deal of trouble to extract further details: Ferrara was about three hours north, in Emilia-Romagna; we were to travel there in the Mitsu-bitchy, and while we would not stay overnight, the Baronessa would take a hotel room in order to change before her appointment.
There was a package to be delivered. I would be responsible for my elderly employer; Giacomo was merely the driver.
“She has to see a friend of Oscar’s,” Estelle told me once the Baronessa had left for the kitchen. “It will be you and Coco and Giacomo-Giacomo.”
We seemed to be missing an important member of the party. “Not Oscar?”
She shook her head; Oscar was unable to attend.
“I thought it was her trip with Oscar—”
“It cannot wait.”
I ran upstairs for a quick bath—this involved dumping cold water over my body from a jug—and returned to my room to find Giacomo-Giacomo there, studying the clothes in my dresser.
He turned around and seemed surprised to see me in my little yellow robe.
There was no privacy at Villa Coco. I noticed how much taller he was than myself.
Giacomo coughed and said, “My cousin said you couldn’t…
eh, ahem, that I should help pick out something for you.
” He held out the pants from a brown corduroy Tonino suit and a corn-colored sweater.
“I’m sorry I’m intruding,” he said. “I should have told her no.”
I said they were fine, took them from him, and stepped behind a shoulder-height Chinese screen. I asked if he had come all the way from Milan.
“She said it was a crisis,” he said unsteadily as I undid my robe and began to dress. “Of course it isn’t. It never is. But I have to get back Monday to my…eh, ahem, wife.”
What a relief it was to hear he had a wife!
I had been certain I heard the bowstring twang of mutual attraction I knew so well from my reckless college days, the distraction I so wanted to avoid.
Clearly I had dodged the arrow. I stepped into the trousers—high-waisted, of course—and I mentioned to him his resemblance to the photograph beside my bed.
“My grandfather,” he said. Then, without looking me in the eye, he left the room. And I realized that on the vanity, just behind where I had been changing, was a mirror reflecting everything behind the screen.
I found Giacomo-Giacomo standing outside beside the Mitsu-bitchy.
He was facing away from me, arms crossed, and seemed to be thinking of something far away, as one does when one imagines nobody is looking.
He heard my footsteps, turned, and raised a hand in greeting.
“I am wondering what you are wondering,” he said, rubbing his hands together in the morning cold. “Why am I here?”
I said I often wondered why I was there.
“No,” he said. “Why am I here? I am not a very good replacement for Oscar, as my cousin has often told me.”
“Apparently the Baronessa doesn’t trust my driving.”
“Oh? Then why are you here?”
I pretended to be insulted and he laughed.
Then the Baronessa herself appeared, in her red coat, followed by Estelle and Ghazel, who carried two suitcases in brown saddle leather.
This seemed curious, as it was meant to be a day trip.
“I have brought you together to amuse one another while I am occupied. And to carry a cumbersome article.” This was even more curious: a cardboard package, about half a meter square but shallow, which seemed to have been made out of other, smaller cardboard boxes; I assumed it was a Ghazel affair.
It was not heavy but awkward; it took both myself and Giacomo-Giacomo to place it in the back seat, where Estelle instructed us to belt it in; I asked what was in it, but nobody would answer me.
Giacomo-Giacomo took the driver’s seat, his cousin beside him, and I belted myself in beside the package.
Estelle waved farewell, and it gave me not a little pleasure to witness, as things were being put in gear, that a cane emerged from the passenger seat and rapped the cousin on the arm.
“Avanti!” came the voice of the Baronessa. And off we went.
My relief at not having to drive was short-lived; this cousin was a terrible driver.
Or, rather, a suggestible one. He was tempted by every exit, and only the helpful thwack of a cane kept him on the correct road.
He seemed unaware that the sun rose in the east and set in the west and, though cypress shadows provided clear compasses, was forever wondering where north might be.
Even a sign for the very city we sought (Ferrara) puzzled him, and I could feel the car tilting off course, as if his wanderlust compelled him to see sights unknown (“Have you ever been to Forlì?” he asked more than once, receiving another thwack and the comment “Not Forlì! Not Forlì!”).
He drove, in short, like a child in that game where someone is telling you “Colder, colder” and “Warmer, warmer, WARMER!” I saw a family resemblance to his cousin’s penchant for caprice; I wondered if this was what drew them to each other.
I also wondered if we would ever get there.
Not that I supremely wished to; I found myself, bouncing in the back seat beside the mysterious package, to be in that blessed interphase which transit brings, a place between places and thus between states of being.
That is: I was, briefly, free. Free of all expectation and worry and doubt.
The only irritation was the package, intruding upon my person at every corner.
I am sure there is a simpler route to Ferrara, but I prefer to think of it the way we attained it: through the Baronessa’s memory, from a time before the large highways were built, which brought us not speedily through the large cities of Florence and Bologna, but through dark forests and villages so small in scale, so medieval, that it seemed sometimes I was in the back of a carriage, wandering into someone’s fairy tale.
We dipped into town squares, tilted at an angle to the landscape for reasons lost to history, rose along cliffsides protected only by the thinnest of wooden railings, passed post offices and pharmacies with their blinking green crosses and stark concrete government buildings with bare places where the Fascist symbols had been removed and water mills and trout farms and creaking old bridges, and every part of it intrigued me. Perhaps I was like Cesare after all.
“You met the principessa?” Giacomo was asking me. Somehow the conversation had turned to English, and I was not about to send it back into Italian.
I explained that we’d met my first day at Villa Coco.
“Cousin, wasn’t she living in…eh…Zanzibar?” Giacomo asked.
“Indeed,” the Baronessa said. “Just a few years ago.”
“She found a great love,” I added helpfully. “And a great disappointment.”
The Baronessa nodded sagely. “Pippa knows all there is to know about love.”
Her cousin encouraged her to tell a little more.