Chapter 1 #3
Estelle reopened the door and gestured for me to enter the house, and I saw that this “hidden” door led, in fact, to the kitchen.
It was of two parts: before us, up a few steps, was the kitchen proper, laid out in a U shape with a sink to the left, an old white-enameled stove in the center, and a cutting board set into the counter at the right.
Canisters were crowded on shelves, straw wiskets hung on hooks, tarnished silver platters were mounted one above the other on the walls, books huddled together, painted ceramic bowls overflowed with fruit and vegetables, and as if the decorator imagined this might not be enough, the wall behind the stove was tiled in black-and-white op-art trapezoids.
The second part was the dining area, as free of clutter as the first was crammed.
A long table of dark, polished wood stood before an enormous fireplace, on whose mantel sat two crudely done brass cupids in an erotic position, and around the table were arranged tall chairs with white linen covers tied over the cushions.
At the center of the table sat an ornate blue-and-white-speckled fruit bowl from which rose a similarly mottled candelabra of sculpted cherubs, and above it all hung two great concentric metal rings, each with half a dozen lamps, such as one sees in an Orthodox church.
It startled me: this combination of the coarse and the sublime.
“Ah, here they are,” said Estelle, picking up a set of keys from the deranged confusion of a countertop. “I’ve been looking for these for days.”
“So…this is the kitchen?”
“The cook’s not here right now,” Estelle said. “She has a headache.” I could well understand why. “Her husband, the handyman, is somewhere. Do you want to meet Coco?”
“Who’s Coco?”
“Lisabetta. I call her Coco. She’ll be down soon.”
“Lisabetta?”
Her eyes brightened with amusement. “The Baronessa!”
I noticed now that beside us, at the entrance and still two steps below the kitchen, was another humble door. Estelle examined my face more carefully, then lifted the latch. The door opened onto what looked like a dimly lit chapel. I gestured for her to go before me.
She waved her hand. “Oh, I’m not going in. I’m heading home. Don’t worry. If there’s a crisis, I live just up the road, you turn left at Signora Guicciardini. The lady who sits in the chair and yells at cars.”
“She’s always there?”
“You’ll be all right, Giovedì.”
“Oh, there’s been a misunderstanding. My name’s not Giovedì. It’s—”
“Of course,” she interrupted, shaking her head. “Who would be named Giovedì? But Coco thought it was funny. She always has a nickname for people at first. Gazelle’s name isn’t Gazelle.”
“I wondered…”
“It’s CHA-zel,” Estelle said, scraping her throat at the first syllable. “He’s from Lebanon. You’ll know she likes you when she uses your real name.”
“She doesn’t like…Ghazel?”
“She’ll like you! Thank God you’re handsome.”
She let me pass before her into the dimness of the room before closing the door and sealing me in alone, and I wondered if this was all a terrible mistake.
I had entered a realm much cooler than the heat of the kitchen or the dusty road, with a humid, vegetal smell.
What I took to be a chapel seemed now to be an entrance hall, and I understood the two ironbound doors to my left were ones I had seen from outside, now long overgrown with ivy.
Facing the unused entrance doors and perhaps four strides away was the most striking aspect of the room: a wrought-iron staircase that crossed the wall diagonally, from upper left to lower right like a filigree sash across a bosom, hugging the wall until arriving at the cool stone floor.
The space’s only windows flanked the entrance doors and stretched up to the ceiling, but, being also overgrown with ivy and barred with iron, they let in only a fluttering, greenish light, and as these were the only windows in a large room crowded with objects, it took me a moment to apprehend that I was in a hall of treasures.
Beside me and on the wall opposite were shelves and vitrines in metal, glass, and wood, not one like another, and each held a pirate’s trove—amphorae and terra-cotta goddesses, brass oil lamps and red lacquerware bowls, cloth dolls and wooden shoes, the marble bust of a soldier and a purplish stone carving the size of a thumb—crowded without any obvious sense of order, material or chronological or otherwise.
It looked both like the British Museum and like a child’s bedroom, filled with beloved trash and treasures.
My heart dropped to the floor as I considered how I would ever tackle cataloging this hoard.
Nowhere was there visible this Picasso mentioned in the ad, not that I could have identified one.
Above the display cases, on the whitewashed walls were hung three enormous paintings done in a dark and modern style that disguised, in the dim light, their subjects; there seemed to be nudity, but perhaps it was fruit.
From great brass urns burst stalks of bamboo so tall they brushed the ceiling, and in the middle of the room sat an elaborately carved walnut desk with a worn pink velvet bar at the bottom, perhaps for kneeling in prayer.
It must have been very old. On the desk sat a sculpture of a boat in bronze.
It caught my attention; from everything in the room, this was the one object picked out for display.
There seemed to be a plaque with something written—
“Koo-koo!” came a voice from above.
I wondered if this was the cook. From outside, I could hear birds arguing with one another.
“Hello?” I said, then tried my only Italian: “Buon giorno?”
There arrived, long before the personage herself, like the scent that heralds a storm’s arrival, a cloud of dense Italian language flowing down the stairs.
The staircase was built so that anyone descending was hidden from view, coming into sight only gradually, and so first only a white cotton slipper appeared, followed by another, then by the lacy hem of a white garment.
Step after step to the rhythm of this endless language until the hypnotic effect was spoiled by the arrival of two fawn pugs tumbling down the stairs.
Now a papery hand, gripping the iron railing.
The garment revealed itself to be an empire-waisted gown of eyelet lace.
And then at last her face appeared in profile, talking away to empty air—perhaps to the pugs, perhaps to Estelle, perhaps just to a world sure to be listening—a gaunt and imperious face topped by fine white hair, intricately curled; a pointed nose and an underbite; and lofty, cunning, creased green eyes, which now, as she pulled wide a fold of her garment, turned to look at me:
“Koo-koo!”
I was utterly confused and, assuming she mistook me for someone else, foolishly spoke: “I’m your new archivist.” I added, awkwardly: “Baronessa.” For this could be no one but herself.
The Baronessa stopped on the staircase and, while the pugs continued their plunge to the lower depths, leaned forward into the lorgnette of her curiosity. “Eh?”
“Your new archivist.” I cleared my throat. “Giovedì.”
A sharp rebuke: “You’re not blond!”
“I…Well, that’s a matter of—”
With a curl of her lip: “And you’re American!”
“I’m from Washington, DC.”
This seemed to stun her like a stab to the chest. “Estelle!” she hissed, then continued down the stairs, waving her hand.
Her accent was peculiar, and untraceable.
Hardly Italian, somehow not European at all, or at least not from a country still on a contemporary map.
Later, I would discover that her words, rather than sticking firmly to the language at hand, as one dines on the dish the waiter has set down, instead seemed to pick from everybody’s plate.
I also found it impossible to guess her age; she had the pale, chartaceous skin of the elderly and hair as white as a snowy owl, but spoke in a manner both suave and crude that did not match my conception of the antique.
Was she one hundred? Seventy? A withered forty-five?
“You’re no use to me. You’ll have to go on the next train. Estelle!”
My chest was flooding in panic. “But I’ve…I’ve come all the way from—”
She raised her head. “Estelle!”
“She’s gone home.”
“Do you see a [Italian word]? I left it somewhere.”
“A…a ba…”
“A bastone! A cane, in your American language. It has a horse’s head.
The mouth opens to hold a pair of gloves.
I suffer from a vertigo and I need this terrible cane.
I am really only comfortable at sea. Estelle!
” By now she had arrived at my level, and I realized how small and delicate she was.
I stepped forward to offer her my arm and she glared at this insult to her vigor. “You will go home on the next train.”
My heart was a rabbit trembling in my chest. I could not go home on the next train; that would mean going home on the next plane, back to my parents and their anxiety and their judgment.
I closed my eyes and winced, thinking of my mother’s critical gaze and angled diacritical brows, her suggestion I go into laboratory work; I thought of graduate school; I thought of the disastrous temptations and distractions of the circus.
Each fate seemed to bring its own handcuffs.
Then I remembered something in Sumerian.
“I’m sorry…Baronessa…but there is no next train,” I said haltingly. “There’s a strike.”
She squinted and leaned toward me with her right ear. “Eh?”
Loudly: “I said there’s a train strike.”