Chapter 2 #9
“Lala” turned out to be a restaurant directly beside the church, and it was Lala herself who served us: a papaya-shaped woman with short blond hair and dark eyes, who accepted Oscar’s flirtations with an abashed expression as she led us to our table.
He winked at me; moments later, a bottle of white wine arrived.
“I still have some charm left,” he confided.
Oscar ordered a cacciucco, a Tuscan seafood stew, for us to share.
When I asked about the rules of the mountains and the sea, he replied: “In some places, the rules don’t apply.
Lala has a nephew in Livorno, and he brings her seafood every morning.
So at Lala, and only at Lala, that is what you eat.
” The stew was easy to love. Deep red, autumnally red, from broth and tomatoes; aromatic with garlic; and in it a pirate’s trove of clams, mussels, varieties of shrimp, and sweetly cooked fish whose names meant nothing to me, as they are found nowhere outside the Mediterranean.
The trick, Oscar told me, was to cook the broth with bones for many hours, then add the seafood at the last moment.
A combination of intensity and freshness, patience and immediacy, all soaked up with the Tuscan bread that suddenly needed no salt.
“We were a great pair on Capri,” Oscar was saying.
I had lost the conversation in the stew, along with my mussel shells.
Perhaps the white wine helped as well. “I came after the war, and the island was a bohemian outpost, and I found it wonderful. But I did nothing but bad sketches! Lisabetta was quite a bit older, and she found my particular talent. The timing was perfect—rich people were coming to the island. They always follow where artists went first.”
“You sold your paintings to them?” I asked.
He didn’t answer directly. “You can’t imagine life after a war. Genova was bombed, and the Fascists were no treat.”
Giacomo asked if he left Genova during the war.
“I was eighteen when Italy entered the war,” Oscar said, smiling as if this were a merry tale.
“We were anti-Fascists, of course, so my father had to hide from time to time and I was left all alone in a house of women. They were afraid the Fascists were going to take me into the military. So you know what they did? I was never tall, as you can see, but I was already a man. So they shaved my legs and dressed me in short pants and gave me a hoop! There I was, eighteen years old, and I had to pretend to be a little boy, with a hoop and stick running down the street. The most humiliating time of my life!”
“Did they catch you?” I asked.
“No, but I was furious! So furious that I refused to speak to my mother and my aunts. I took a piece of chalk and I wrote on the soles of my shoes.” He lifted one foot off the floor, and then the other, pointing to them: “Sì on one shoe and no on the other. For two weeks I would only answer in this fashion.” He lifted each foot.
“Sì. No. Sì. No. In that time, my father came back. And he said, ‘Oscar, I’ve heard you’ve been a real brat!
That you refused to speak for two weeks and only answered with the soles of your shoes, is it true? ”
He paused in his storytelling. With a sly smile, Oscar lifted one shoe off the ground, showing us its bottom and murmuring, in the voice of an abashed teen: “Sì…”
I felt protected by the wine and laughter and the fog of twilight descending around us.
I let Giacomo’s finger curl around mine under the table and I leaned close to him as he whispered something foolish in my ear.
Oscar watched us, patiently looking on us with a smile.
I was careful not to act as we had with my employer, and when Giacomo went inside to find the bathroom, I asked Oscar to tell me more about Capri.
Instead of answering, he leaned forward and said:
“Do not be lazy in love, my friend.”
I was startled. “What? I’m not!”
“You are,” he said quietly, looking at the trailer in the parking lot in front of us. “You take what comes.”
“What…I…”
“I recognize in you myself.” He readjusted his hat. “I spent years in a life I did not want, and not for love. It was because I did not think another life was possible. But it is always possible.” He turned to me with his charming smile.
I wondered how he had seen any of this in me. For certainly laziness had taken me through all my past “stories.” Laziness or lack of will. Did I give it off as a kind of pheromone, the sign of a rudderless man? Or was this simply what he assumed of all young people?
Giacomo returned, wiping his hands on a linen handkerchief. He was the kind of young man who carried a linen handkerchief. He smiled at me and took his seat.
“Hey!” I said, pointing across from us, for just then, I noticed the trailer doing something trailers are not known for doing: it began to transform.
The entire side near us lifted into the air and folded back onto the roof, which folded back again to reveal a gleaming contraption within.
It was a kind of flattened pyramid, all in silver, and it seemed at first as if it were a device delivered by an alien species, or perhaps planted millennia ago by the Etruscans, and the time had come for it to awaken.
Awaken it did: it began by rising high into the air, and then, sliding out first from the bottom, a series of steps extended onto the parking lot, one by one, until at last an enormous staircase stood before us, leading up to emptiness.
By now it was growing dark and people had begun to gather in the lot, which I realized was the town piazza.
Then the whole thing burst into a blaze of lights: the frame of the trailer glowed in reds and whites, spotlights turned on to illuminate the structure, and the edge of each stair began to glow eerily.
From behind the stairs rose a curved sign with one name splashed across it: Nina.
“Wow!” I said.
“Nina!” Giacomo shouted beside me. He was joined by other shouts from the crowd, which rose into a chant. “Nina! Nina! Nina! Nina!”
The device heard the invocation, and obeyed, for a moment later it delivered up, on a pneumatically powered platform, a tiny, somewhat elderly person in a silver wig and deep blue gown, seated in a chair like a saint’s image carried in a town procession or, it occurred to me, like the Madonna herself as Masaccio saw her; she even cradled a microphone in her arms. She sat very still until she arrived at the top of the glowing stairs, then stood unsteadily and, raising the microphone to her lips, and now utterly unlike the Madonna, began to sing…
I could only shout: “What’s happening?!”
The next day, Oscar and Giacomo took off before the coming storm.
I stood in the kitchen doorway with my employer, saying goodbye.
She turned to talk to Nimali, and as she did, Oscar raised his finger to his lips; I was certain this was because, the night before, I had secretly brought him some gin before bed, which we knew the Baronessa would not approve of.
Somehow I could not say no to such a charming man.
Before he got into the car with Giacomo, he turned and said, “Come visit me in Genova. Then you can have those slippers I promised you!” I waved and told myself the gin would surely do no harm.
I had said goodbye to Giacomo in our shared hallway, after hearing him singing the songs of Nina in the bath (he requested a morning one).
I was leaving my bedroom when I saw him in his red bathrobe, a vanity kit nestled in his arms like a lapdog.
His toothbrush was still in his mouth. He was the very image of helplessness, and he turned and saw me staring at him.
I said I hoped he would have a safe journey.
He nodded, mute because of the toothbrush, and shuffled down the hall to embrace me.
The vanity bag was uncomfortable between us.
I pulled him into the bathroom with me and closed the door.
He pressed me against the wallpaper of medieval creatures; I felt them galloping through my system as he kissed me.
How sweet the first flush of romance is: the overture, as it were, providing all the thrilling chords of an opera whose plot we cannot yet know.
Then he nodded and left and closed the door and I was alone.
I tasted his fennel toothpaste and it made me smile as I ran the bath.
So this was what it was like, to feel like you are secretly Venice.
A moment later I was cursing his name: he had used all the hot water.
And the Baronessa and I stood in the little kitchen doorway and waved goodbye to the lizard-green Fiat taking them both away.
One could feel the coming storm prickling on one’s skin, and I looked above the bare trees to see a sky of scattered bones, but what those oracles said about the coming winter I did not know.
“Do you know what I was thinking about?” the Baronessa said to me.
She was leaning once again on her bastone, with gloves in its mouth.
Her vertigo must have been troubling her.
“The time Oscar and I visited Istanbul. Long, long ago, when we were quite young and did foolish things. I did something very foolish, in fact. You have asked me about my greatest treasure.”
“Yes?”
“I stole something on that visit to Istanbul.”
I turned and looked at her. A little old lady with her hair recently done in a white dome. “What was it?”
She did not answer me but followed some private thought: “Those were wonderful days,” she said.
“With Oscar working for me. You know the entrance used to come from there?” She pointed into the woods, where among the trees I could see faint traces of a road leading off into the wilderness.
“See the cypresses? That was where the road came through before a storm brought it all down.” And indeed, just as she said the word, I could make out, in that expanse of oak, the tall, dark sentinels of cypresses still lining a vanished road, as they used to when she came here forty years before.
She said quietly, “Maybe it really is time to go.”
I assumed, of one so elderly, that she was thinking of her own mortality.
It was just Estelle and myself at dinner with the Baronessa.
The fire was crackling below the mantelpiece cupids, and lights flickered in the chandelier.
The meal was wild boar and polenta. The Baronessa said she had great news for me but became distracted by curiosity about Masaccio and the Madonna and, after a brief detour onto Nina (of whom neither of them had ever heard), arrived, of course, at the subject of food.
I had begun exclaiming over the fish stew at Lala (“Buono!” cried the Baronessa) when suddenly Estelle dropped her fork on the table.
“Coco!” she exclaimed, looking at me with surprise. “What potion have you given him? He now speaks Italian!”
I did not even realize I had been doing so. Estelle was staring at me, but the Baronessa did not seem much impressed. “Then let us test him,” she said. “Have you listened to Signora Guicciardini? Who shouts from the crossroads?”
I said indeed I had.
“Oscar sees her as a sibyl,” Estelle said, “shouting prophecies from her cage in Rome. I think she is Old Italy yelling at the New!”
But the Baronessa was fixated on me: “And what, Giovedì, do you think she is saying?”
The room was so quiet I could hear the far-off sound of Cesare barking in the forest. For I knew exactly what the signora had been saying, the great wisdom Oscar told me she was imparting.
I cleared my throat to imitate her: “Hedgehog-fuckers!”
The Baronessa exploded with laughter and grabbed Estelle’s arm.
“She’s mad because people pause at the crossroads,” I explained. “She’s saying, ‘Choose something, you little hedgehog-fuckers!’ ” I thought of what Giacomo had taught me and added: “Though it could be chestnut-fuckers.”
At this, she laughed and laughed and laughed and could be calmed only when one of her pugs began to bark in alarm.
She pulled the dog into her lap and sat there, firelight gleaming in the tears now in her eyes.
More laughter convulsed her, and she held her hand before her face as if she could hardly look in my direction.
For the rest of dinner, I bathed in the warmth of an acceptance I hoped would endure.