Chapter 2
Days are like countries, somebody once told me. Meaning: they will change tomorrow.
And indeed they had. When I first came, I worried if I would make it one more day, and here I had lasted more than a month and we were deep into autumn.
Villa Coco embraced it as thoroughly as a teenager embracing some new fad; you would not know, from the giddy excitement over fallen leaves and the sudden profusion of apples, that this had happened, in just this way, each year since before Dante.
The pool was closed (we had hardly used it).
Nimali was seen rushing to Formica to buy a cardigan, as if somehow she had burned last winter’s sweaters.
Even the Baronessa, veteran of ninety-two spins through the seasons, had me searching her closets for a beloved shawl; it turned out to be the one in my bedroom.
For my efforts, I was loaned a gray Afghan blanket trimmed in red and instructed to wear it “in the goatherd style.” Every time I wore it, I was informed “that is all wrong.” But no further instructions were forthcoming.
Vinsanda was told to gather the cotogne, or quinces, and Nimali was told to boil them, strain the result, and form it into a paste to have with cheese.
I later saw the whole lot in the compost bin.
Ghazel, having failed to capture the faina yet again, reported he was trying a new method: POLLO BEN NATO, as he put it.
“I believe he means venenato,” the Baronessa said after some consideration.
“A poisoned chicken. What he has said means an aristocratic one. Do we have aristocratic chickens?” It seemed entirely possible we did.
And on cold nights, to my delight, we began to have full fires in the dining room.
There also arrived, with the cold, a new mystery.
“I have lost my pearls!” the Baronessa exclaimed one morning, sending the household into a frenzied search as we upturned wastebaskets, rooted through pockets, and sieved the contents of sock drawers as if panning for gold.
No dice. She was shocked and aggrieved—but I was not.
Things had been going missing for some time now.
A week had passed since the mysterious trip to Ferrara.
The Baronessa’s cousin had left and not made a return visit, and I was at last allowed entry to all the rooms, so I was finally able to focus on my archival tasks.
I worked room by room, beginning with the art on the walls and moving inward toward smaller objects, like the Fibonacci spiral of a nautilus.
Paintings, furniture, jewelry, the boat in the entrance hall, all described (as Estelle and Oscar both suggested) as simply as possible, without provenance or value.
As to these household disappearances, they seemed, like sleight-of-hand tricks, to happen in the corner of my eye while I was otherwise distracted: Was I mistaken, or had there been a painting of guitars and newspapers?
Where was it now? Then again, I could hardly have memorized the million objects in the villa, and I also had to take into account the Baronessa’s decorating whims, on which pieces might be swapped or put in storage or sent for repairs without my ever knowing.
One day, a drawing from my bedroom was missing.
I went immediately to my employer. “I have a right to move things in my own house” was her reply.
I suppose she did; I suppose she also had a right to move her pearls and forget where she’d put them.
And yet, as the resident recorder in the house, I felt it: a thinning of the atmosphere.
Surely I was imagining things! Surely it was the effect of too many exaggerated stories, too many novels in translation, too much imagination all around.
I put my wild thoughts aside and continued my work.
I requested that all rearrangements and redecorating cease for the length of my time there “counting the spoons,” as she had put it.
The Baronessa sighed and muttered something in Italian.
And yet I succeeded: within a week, the little drawing was back above my bed.
Despite my workload, I still made time for my walks, which became chillier and more barren as we reached November; farmers lit fires by the roadside and the boar hunters seemed to be out in force on weekends, parking their Jeeps along the path and vanishing with their dogs into the wilderness; the only sign of them was distant gunfire.
Cesare followed me on these walks, glad to be with me and glad to run after birds and sniff the piles of leaves.
The sky seemed lower, the hills farther away.
It was as if the landscape had taken a potion.
Every morning, I noticed the countryside changing.
One day a tree would be as it had been since my arrival, and then the next, it would be completely scarlet.
First, just one here or there would shift, but soon—as it goes with any fashion—half the forest wore the colors suddenly in vogue, only to have those original trendsetters turn to earthy browns, then lose their leaves completely.
Eventually just the oaks kept theirs, fawn-colored and glossy, on the lowest branches, while the rest of the forest was bare above a landscape of boulders and fallen logs covered by the leaves.
There were hardly any pines in our valley, but one could see that the mountains above us—holding in their folds the gloomy Vallombrosa Abbey—still wore cloaks of deepest green.
The days grew shorter. And I grew lonely.
It was simple to keep my vow now that the Baronessa had run out of relatives, but I wondered what this vow revealed about me.
Was it the same resolution as Oscar’s? As Giacomo’s?
To combat whatever terror bedeviled us. The same awful arrangement with Heaven: basically a protection racket, in which the Almighty takes our lunch money in return for not throwing us against the lockers?
Oscar had not freed himself of it, even in old age.
Even eating salad from a cabbage bowl. Giacomo had fled into marriage. Had I chosen a similar path?
One morning, a call came in the kitchen, and, after hearing it ring and ring and fearing an Italian conversation, I took a deep breath and picked up the white wall-phone. I was relieved; it was Oscar on the line. I told him we missed him in Ferrara.
“Ah, Ferrara!” he said. “I’m so sorry I could not join you. Lisabetta sometimes moves too quickly for my old heart.”
“I mostly saw Comacchio.”
He laughed roughly. “She told me the car broke down! What did you think of Comacchio?”
I told him it had an astounding commitment to the eel. I said nothing, of course, of my brief interlude with Giacomo-Giacomo.
“Did you know it was eels they ate at the Last Supper? Or so Leonardo thought. Eels and oranges. Promise me you will try them.” I nearly told him that was precisely what Giacomo and I had eaten on our trip, but I had promised to stay mum, and I was liable to give myself away.
“Oscar, tell me what that trip was about.”
“Oh,” he said, pausing. “Has she let you in a bit?”
“I’ve been cataloging things. But there’s something she isn’t telling me.”
He sighed. “You must allow an old woman some mysteries!”
I said the mysteries at Villa Coco were thoroughly unnecessary. “Where the light bulbs are hidden, for instance. Which only Nimali knows. Or how to work the Baronessa’s television set. Which only Ghazel can do.”
I heard him giggling. “Maybe it simply amuses her. Have you found a warm dictionary, my friend?”
I found myself coughing in surprise. I said merely that the possibilities were very limited. I asked if he needed visitors.
“It sounds like you do! No no no no! I will come after the harvest.”
“The harvest?”
“Olives! You are in Italy, my friend!”
“When is that?”
“In a week.” He promised he would bring pesto from Genova.
Nimali continued teaching me Italian, but in addition I had to take a kind of remedial course in art and culture: part of becoming less American.
I was seen as a typical product of the American system of liberal arts, by which was meant I knew everything about Lincoln and Franklin and nothing at all about Dante or Flaubert.
I had about a thousand years of catching up to do.
I began with I Promessi Sposi, by Manzoni, said to be the most popular Italian novel of all time, though I had never heard of it.
On the Baronessa’s shelves I came across a very antique translation, which I found hard going, and I asked her about it.
“Oh, Manzoni!” she cried. “This is the one where the lovers, after many years apart and many trials, including a wicked nun, are at last reunited. And they turn to each other, grown much older, and say, ‘What? All this? For you?’ A classic.” I made it through I Promessi Sposi with the difficulty of one forced to walk on foot along a route schoolchildren take by bus, only to discover that this was not the plot at all.
I found myself entranced by my next assignment; I don’t know whether the translation from French was simpler or it simply suited me better.
It was La Princesse de Clèves by Madame de La Fayette.
I told the Baronessa and she said: “In it are inscribed the wonderful lines: ‘There is a heavy price we have to pay for seeing things as they are. The price is of our youth.’ ” I finished the medieval romance, and enjoyed it thoroughly, but found those lines nowhere within.