Chapter 2 #4
Hiding a smile, he went on about the supposedly glorious life he was missing in Milan in order to harvest her olives. “Opera tickets,” he said. “Wasted!”
His cousin inquired politely what opera.
“Tosca!” he responded.
“Will it suffice for me to throw myself from the roof?”
His expression revealed that perhaps it might. Then they both burst into laughter. I understood this teasing was a habit of theirs, a sign of their old affection.
We of course made no trouble for his cousin; it turned out it was his cousin who made it for us.
We were working in her groves, entertaining her at meals, keeping a vow of silence in the shared hallway, and otherwise leading the polite and chaste existence of young monks in an order.
Naturally, at Villa Coco, nothing could remain polite and calm and orderly.
I was only just learning how the Baronessa preferred an imbroglio.
“Tonight you dine with Estelle,” she announced after our day of work.
“She is in need of hands for her own raccolta and I have promised the two of you will assist.” This was the explanation for Estelle’s absence, though it turned out her harvest was not of olives but of uva—grapes—and that she not only picked the grapes herself but made her own wine.
I saw Giacomo taking a deep breath and looking up into the sky.
And so he and I found ourselves with a double nationality, recruited now into an evening of mashing grapes at Estelle’s.
“It is not foot work but hand work,” the Baronessa told us, making it sound like Balinese dance, adding: “We may all enjoy a moment apart.” I understood the invitation was entirely of her own devising; was she tired of us?
Though we could drive there, Estelle encouraged us to walk (“There will be wine, after all”), and from my frequent passeggiatas in the hills I knew of a shortcut.
It was twilight when we left; the route turned out to be swampier and more deeply rutted than I remembered, and Giacomo seemed irritated by every step.
We were mostly silent on the way over, talking only when he asked me to give him a flashlight once the light grew too dim.
It was perhaps half an hour before we arrived at her little cottage, spattered with mud.
Estelle appeared in the doorway with the fluttering light of a fire brightening one side of her jumpsuit, so that she looked less like a fighter pilot than a Pulcinella. She gestured for us to come inside.
It was an artist’s space; every wall was covered in canvases or drawings, and an easel stood beside the window with a naked human form already sketched upon it.
I had not known she was an artist; of course she was.
Instantly, parts of the crossword began to fill in: why she joined the strange world of Villa Coco, why she was so far out in the country, why she lived alone, why she came and went at her own whims. She was an old-time bohemian in the form of a modern Algerian Italian woman.
She was, in some way, the Baronessa. Reincarnated by a slipshod Heaven so she overlapped with her previous form, but she could have posed for Man Ray on a rock in Capri, or captured lizards with George Norman Douglas, or matched wits with Moravia and Morante.
What a shame that, in our impoverished century, she had only myself and Giacomo to entertain her.
I approached one of her smaller paintings, and it seemed, somehow, that I had seen it before—
“Oh, don’t look at that,” she said, taking it off the wall and holding it to her chest. “It was just something I was trying for Coco. But I don’t have Oscar’s gift.”
“Oscar?”
“And now. Before you get any wine,” she announced commandingly, “we must crush the grapes.” I had seen her vineyard from the road; it looked modest. But the tubs of grapes showed otherwise. She said the grapes would make two dozen bottles of wine.
It was indeed “hand work”: nothing more or less than squashing grapes, shirtless, in a white plastic tub.
Estelle left this to Giacomo and myself; she put on a Nina Simone record and stirred the risotto.
I felt awkward stripping down, with the new climate between me and the cousin, but Giacomo removed his sweater and unbuttoned his striped shirt and revealed that broad chest and the curls of dark hair at his sternum.
Estelle asked Giacomo about Milan. About theater and art; I noticed she did not ask about his wife.
Like everyone I had met in Italy, these two were completely at ease speaking of a Pirandello play or an exhibit of Caravaggio and La Tour, as comfortable as people in my world would be speaking of a television show.
I was surprised to hear Giacomo, usually so awkward in his speech, talk so easily about a subject that kept me in terrified silence.
I watched as the grape juice spattered his upper body and began to stain his hands a royal purple.
The two of us looked like homosexual serial killers.
“And what about your novel, Giacomo?” Estelle asked. “Am I in it?”
I was shocked by this turn of conversation. I had never dared to broach the subject, but Estelle had picked up the Baronessa’s casual way of making everything suitable for conversation. “Eh, ahem,” Giacomo began. “It is set far in the past, you know.”
“I think I would be a wonderful character. So would Giovedì!”
I held up my stained hands. “I don’t want to be in a novel!”
Giacomo smiled. “Vabon. I will not force Americans where they do not want to go.”
“I think it’s time to open the wine,” Estelle announced.
She brought out a bottle, nearly black, and I think only his distracted frame of mind got Giacomo to break his rule on unlabeled wine.
“This is Number Four,” she told us, and explained it was last year’s, her fourth attempt.
“Pretty good. Not like Number One.” Giacomo downed the first glass without pause.
I thought it tasted like a bottle of chilled blood but said nothing; it was good enough for me.
I asked what Number One was like. “Oh,” she said, looking into the fire, “something funny happened in the fermentation. It’s a bit dangerous.
But now is the time to ask us all your questions, you know.
With Coco not around. Have a little more, Giacomo. ”
With the wine, I was bold enough at last to ask what she was doing there.
“Me? Painting, mostly.”
“But how did you get here?”
“In the middle of nowhere, Tuscany? Because of Coco. We’re related, you know.”
This was something I certainly did not know.
“In our way,” she said, pouring me more wine as well. “She had a lover, an important art dealer in Milan, who would come down here every weekend on the train. He was very charming, very handsome. And I had a lover myself when I lived in Milan. Also an art dealer.”
“And they were friends.”
“And they were the same man.”
“Visconti,” said Giacomo.
“Visconti, yes. We knew nothing about each other, Coco and I. We knew the kind of character Visconti was, but we knew nothing about any other women. I was up in the apartment in Milan and she was down here, tucked away in the woods. How would we ever find out? It was a perfect arrangement. We were all very happy. Of course I was too young and spoiled it.” I wondered how old she could possibly be.
I had taken her for someone perhaps a decade older than myself, but to have shared a lover with the Baronessa she would have to be at least in her forties.
The firelight revealed nothing further. She continued, “I knew he went to Florence to visit dealers there. So I thought I would surprise him. I knew exactly the hotel where he always stayed. Helvetia and Bristol. He always liked an English hotel. I took the train down and bribed the concierge to let me into his room, and I was that cliché of the naked girl waiting in the bed. I must have waited for hours; I fell asleep. I heard the turn of a key and a woman’s voice saying, ‘I certainly like how they make the beds here!’ I looked and there was Visconti and, with him, a woman in a blue suit with gray-striped hair, laughing. Of course it was Coco.”
It was so easy to imagine the Baronessa laughing at the situation.
But not so easy to imagine her twenty or more years ago, carrying on an affair.
If Estelle had been twenty, how old would the Baronessa have been?
In her sixties? Nearly seventy? She herself claimed that seventy was her prime of life.
It seemed improbable, but, as I was learning at Villa Coco, the improbable was hardly impossible.
“Anyway,” Estelle said, “there was no going back after that. He had to drop us both.”
“Probably you wanted to drop him!”
“Why?” she asked, and she sounded very much like her beloved rival. “I’m the one who broke the rules. I’m the one who broke his pride. He did nothing wrong.”
Giacomo nodded in agreement.
“And so Coco and I were left without our lover, only with each other. We were bound to be good friends. I was out of an apartment in Milan, so I came down here and helped her out. Eventually I found this place to rent. I sold some things Visconti had given me. And for some reason I’ve stayed.
I still help Coco. I visit her and I take care of her and she protects me. ”
I questioned this and she raised her glass.
“A small town, there are all kinds of problems for a single woman. But people think I am her daughter. And she lets them believe that. It is valuable protection.”
“Vabon. Alla famiglia,” said Giacomo, raising his glass as well. We toasted.
But, as this was apparently the moment for questions, I asked another: “The princess who came, Pippa, mentioned something. And Oscar too. Her ‘great love.’ Was it this Visconti?”