Chapter 1 #2
As I went to sleep that night in my dormitory sardine tin (what twins have ever slept in a twin bed?), my mind was on the Baronessa, the marten, the Picasso, as strange-sounding as some novel from another time, another language and tradition.
I felt as if I were on a boat headed into unknown waters.
Was it adventure I craved? To meet a challenge to my very way of being?
Something other than the phantomless folklore of suburban boyhood, or the make-believe importance of college rituals, neither of which I could believe in anymore?
But, having never had any real challenge or adventure, how did I know I wanted it?
Could it really be what my parents advised: to take life seriously?
I did not know. As a boy, I used to lie awake and watch the crossed squares of light that would manifest suddenly and glide across my bedroom walls and ceiling.
I did the same that night. And, just as they had long ago, they enchanted me, even though I knew they were mere headlight projections from ordinary cars of my ordinary world, for they seemed like heralds from some unknown destiny.
And, indeed, I later received the telegram with an arrival date and my instructions.
GIOVEDì COME BY 5:15 TRAIN FLORENCE TO S. DROGO GAZELLE WILL BE WAITING brING GIN FOR PRINCESS who knows what idiotic fantasies I had picked up?
What was certain was that I would not fall for some black-haired, half-shaved stranger leaning on a pitchfork before an olive grove.
And so I took my vow, like a monk’s, that for this period, I would enter the cloister of my work, my mind, and tend the garden there.
The row of cypresses made me smile; what I needed was not romance and chaos but order.
For the whole journey, this Gazelle man kept up a series of barks in his language.
I could not tell if they were directed at me, the road, or perhaps at his private god.
He had been spry taking my bag, but up close I could see he was quite old for luggage duty, probably past sixty, though if one could look past his sun-lined skin, his smell of cigarettes and manure, and his one gold tooth, he had the profile of an old-style movie star.
He had probably been a lady-killer in his youth, this Gazelle. Perhaps still was.
We met one car along the road coming toward us—a lizard-green Fiat—driven by a man with features blurred by sun reflections, and neither he nor Gazelle could decide how to pass on the narrow road, dodging back and forth as they approached each other, until the lizard decided simply to bolt along the edge, and as it passed I caught the eye of the young driver: blond, bespectacled, bewildered.
He seemed to be fleeing the wilderness we now were entering, and his mouth was open as if to give mute warning—but in a cloud of dust, he and his car were gone.
“ECCO!” Gazelle barked, and we came to a sudden stop.
The car shivered and died. We were not anywhere different from where we had been before.
To our right, the olive trees rose up a sunny hillside.
To our left: a two-story, ivy-covered wall.
Nothing before us but more road, leading back into that terrible forest. Where was the house?
The honk of the horn startled me. But what startled me more was when a portion of the wall began to move, swinging out on hinges to reveal a dark room within, crowded with baskets, and out of this darkness walked a woman…
“You’re Giovedì?” she asked. Her sandals scraped along the dusty path. The late-September day was bright and hot as midsummer, but there was the scent of burning leaves and a sensation, in the shadows, of the first hint of autumn.
She was older than I was, but what exact age I was too young to guess, for she walked with the slim elegance I associated with a queen or prime minister, yet her style I thought of as youthful: tank top, dark denim overalls, gold hoop earrings.
Her face was narrow, with a wide forehead and chin.
Her eyes were large and half closed in the bright sunlight.
She wore her kinky hair natural, and the light caught the gold in its spirals, lighting it briefly from within like a Venetian chandelier.
She seemed aware of the effect and put a hand to her hair, tossing it as she smiled.
She seemed like someone who knew many things that I did not.
“Yes,” I said. “No,” I said. “I mean—”
“I’m Estelle.” She held out her hand and I shook it. “You’re here too early.”
My mind scrabbled at her words, looking for a handhold. She spoke with an accent I could not place. “But I…I…the telegram said—”
This Estelle produced an elastic band and, both hands behind her head, began the difficult act of pulling all her loose Afro into it. “Yes yes, you’re fine. But Coco, she sent the telegram without consulting me. You see, the rooms aren’t ready.”
I wondered who this “Coco” was and somehow understood there was no place for me to stay, and my face must have conveyed it because she laughed and put one hand on my arm. “I mean in the villa! For your list. The rooms aren’t ready.”
“Not ready?” Panic twitched within me.
Back to taming her hair. “Don’t worry, she will find things to occupy you.”
I could see that what I had taken for a stone wall was in fact the plain, flat side of a building, studded with windows whose iron bars were equally twined with ivy.
Along its length I could now make out three doors: a large double door camouflaged (and presumably made unusable) by greenery, the small door through which Estelle had appeared, and a wooden gate painted precisely the deep green of the ivy.
On that gate hung a dark bronze knocker in the shape of a foot, and poking out above it, one could see the green aigrettes of a bamboo grove.
How strange to find bamboo in Italy; I wondered what maniac had planted it.
Along the wall also were two stone benches, and I saw, in the shadow of each bench, a number of huddled black kittens, staring bright-eyed up at me.
Across the road was another wall, this one built to the height of the olive grove, which it supported.
In the wall was a low green door that I assumed led inside the hill to some cool, dark chamber.
And above, hanging down over the cliff of the wall: an herb garden fragrant with rosemary, thyme, sage, and others whose leaves I could not yet identify.
A basket lay on the road below these with a pair of shears inside.
I saw a dog race by on the dark path down the hill, a flash of white fur.
“But…I understand I’m to complete a catalog by Christmas. And I don’t even know what I am cataloging—”
She was finishing with her hair; perhaps she did it automatically, because her hands seemed engaged with the task without involving the rest of her. “You’ll have it done in no time. And don’t worry about this heat wave, things will cool off any day now! That’s how it goes around here.”
“You work here?”
Estelle released her hands to her sides; her hair, compressed, had gone from gold to bronze. “Oh no! I’m a kind of…eh, neighbor. A friend of the house.”
“I’m sorry for asking…you’re French?”
“I’m Italian,” she said, then smiled. “And Algerian. A long story.” She looked behind her to where the door had closed, hiding itself once again within the ivy of the wall.
“You’ll stay in the house with her. I live just down the road.
I know this all must seem so strange to you, an esteemed archivist. You’re probably used to regularity. Things aren’t exactly like that here.”
“Oh, I’m not…” I was going to say “esteemed,” but something made me stop. Was this some terrible comedy of misunderstandings?
“Let’s get you into the house,” she said. She shouted at Gazelle, who had begun to smoke on the roadside. She said quite a deal in Italian, then turned to me. “Oh yes! We call it Villa Coco.”