Chapter 1 #5
Surprisingly technical knowledge for a woman who was born twenty-five years or so after Bell’s invention, but accurate.
Once I found the base in the living room, we heard the cordless phone ringing; of course it was in her basket.
We returned to the living room and sat on the white sofa below an old painting of a woman in clogs.
There followed a fumbling with the phone and the book, a few false starts, and then a rapid conversation in what I thought was a very stern tone.
Through the open door into the courtyard I could see my duffel, still upright on the paving stones; it was possible I saw a stain on one corner.
The Baronessa sighed. It sounded to me like bad news, but she returned the phone to the basket and turned to me with a nod.
“Bonne fortune! Well, a kind of fortune. His cousin took the truck on a trip to Montepulciano. That isn’t really far at all, but we have to wait until he’s finished his coffee. In Montepulciano, that could take a while. And involve grappa. We don’t want a drunkard dealing with the pozzo.”
“Maybe we should stop using the tank until he comes.”
“You are a strict young man! I am glad I used the facilities or I would become a criminal in your mind!”
“I just meant—”
“You know,” she went on, suddenly wistful with her hands in her lap, “queens have visited this house. Mick Jagger once came. There have been Nobel Prize winners and movie stars. This might be the most glamorous shit in Southern Europe.”
I was shocked to hear this word come out of her elegant mouth.
She went on: “It will be sad to see it go.” She explained that every ten years or so, these ancient repositories had to be emptied by a professional. “But I must let go of many things.”
“I hope he comes before your friend gets here.”
“Eh?”
“I hope the driver comes before your friend arrives.”
I watched as her grin emerged like an animal from a long hibernation. “What a wonderful idea!”
It took a little more fumbling to find the green thing again, a little more Italian, followed by a second call in French, and yet a third, once again in Italian.
A gasp of happiness came from the old woman.
She tossed the green thing into the basket and clapped her hands.
I could have been seated beside a child.
“We have solved two problems at once,” she announced. “Pippa will arrive with the septic man.”
And that is exactly how it happened. An hour later, lumbering down the narrow dirt road, arrived an enormous vehicle with a hose looped on its hood, like an elephant on its way to a temple, driven by a sour-looking young man with curly black hair, and in the passenger seat could be seen, seated precisely like a queen upon that elephant, an elderly woman with a yellow silk chrysanthemum in her hair.
Pippa. Or, rather, Principessa Giuseppina Maria Augusta Raffaella of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.
It took both the driver and Vinsanda to help her descend.
Though she was dressed in loose harem pants, tunic, and striped pink scarf (looking to my mind like one of my mother’s bridge partners), I could not help finding a resemblance to the elderly Queen Victoria.
Her great-great-aunt, it turned out. But, as Vinsanda led the princess immediately to her room, I was not to meet her until dinner.
There were, after all, more important matters:
“Did you bring the gin?” the Baronessa asked me as we watched the truck maneuver its way into the yard; this was done through the green gate in the wall, and it was a very tight fit.
“The gin?”
She looked instantly irritated. “I told the man in the telegram specifically to add a part about the gin. For Pippa.”
“Oh yes!” brING GIN FOR PRINCESS she looked much more like the little old lady she truly was. Good-spirited, hard of hearing, a bit wobbly getting up from a chair; as innocent as the chickens clucking down the hill. And yet I was not fooled. Shall I admit it?
She terrified me.
Dinner was very late for American tastes: eight thirty.
I took the Baronessa’s comment to mean I was to wear my best clothes; of course I had packed only one jacket and tie, and that only because I imagined life with a “Baronessa” would entail at least one night of fine dining.
I had not imagined I would be expected to dress to celebrate a septic tank.
I was told my room was opposite hers (“with the animals,” she added unhelpfully), then was left to discover what this might mean.
I took my duffel up the stairway I had first seen her descend and found myself in an upper hallway painted its entire length with vines, leaves, and flowers; here and there, I noticed small birds or insects.
I also noticed at least five open doorways, any of which, I thought, might be her room or mine—until I looked into the first one, seeing a boudoir done in pink, with two tubs set into the floor and an enormous Japanese print showing, in vivid anatomical detail, a woman at her bath.
I took note that this must be the Baronessa’s quarters and found, in the room opposite, a painting of a lion attacking a sheep: the animals.
I set my bag inside, closed the door, and lay down for a moment on the surprisingly lumpy bed.
My memory of that day has the overwhelming blur of a border crossing, where the onslaught of unknown languages, scents, tastes, habits, and customs causes one to pick those details necessary for survival—visa requirements, currency exchange, common phrases—so that the amusing or decorative—the station clock, the officer’s mustache, the dusty false flowers in the window box—are often forgotten.
Or, at least, held in suspension, waiting to be useful.
And it was only later that I made out the framed ex-voto paintings (one man saved from drowning, another from industrial mangling, a third from fire, all by the intervention of a rather Dietrich-like Mary); the stenciled roses near the ceiling; beside the bed, an antique photograph of a handsome, serious, and somehow familiar young man in wire glasses; the magnolia leaves outside my window tilting back and forth like hands drying themselves in the sun: the details that would become my life’s companions until Christmas. If I managed to stay.
When I came downstairs, the two elderly women were already seated at the dining table with a chair between them.
They were chatting in English, presumably their preferred language when together.
The chandelier above was lit, as was the candelabra, with its base of fruit and sculpted cherubs.
Pippa was staring at an ice-filled glass, which she held with a perplexed expression.
I assumed it was the gin I had brought. She had changed for dinner—meaning, she had changed her flower.
It was now a red silk chrysanthemum. The rest was all flowing robes and harem pants and scarves, at least two.
The Baronessa was in a long blue quilted jacket and wore a pendant in gold Arabic script.
I now see them as bohemian elegance, but back then, to me, they looked like a pair of lesbian hippies.
Then again: What did I know of dining with aristocracy?
My experience extended only to my parents’ “fancy” dinners, to which my mother wore a cream silk blouse and pearls, my father a cardigan, and salmon mousse was unmolded in the shape of a fish, to the oohs and ahs of the guests—the height of 1980s suburban sophistication.
“You look very comme il faut,” the Baronessa said sternly.
I looked down at my navy blazer, chinos, and yellow tie, very pleased. “In a good way?”
She paused. “A tie seems extreme for a weeknight.” My hand moved automatically to my tie, but she went on: “Now sit right here,” patting the chair between them. “We need a man to separate our femininity. Giovedì, this is my friend Pippa.”
I greeted Pippa and, glancing up at me from her glass, she looked even more perplexed. Perhaps this was as exotic an experience for her as it was for me.
I took the seat between the two ladies, and now we were three, all in a row, facing the kitchen, where I at last got a look at Nimali, the cook.
She was a short, sturdy, fortyish woman with a prominent nose, large Cleopatra eyes, and black hair pulled into a braid that fell to the small of her back.
She wore a brightly flowered housedress such as my grandmother used to wear, which tied in the back, and she stood with two hands firmly planted on the cutting board, staring at us with pursed lips.
Her eyes met mine. She looked at the old women, then back at me and shrugged: sympathy toward this new arrival, this American, who was, like herself, a mere servant here.
I marveled at how many of the people I had met had come from afar—Ghazel, Estelle, Nimali, and Vinsanda—and it made me curious about the world my employer had created.
“We were talking about Pippa’s family,” the Baronessa was saying.
“Princess Margaret is her cousin, and Pippa didn’t know she was once my guest!
What a nuisance. Someone called us ahead of time and said to put a bottle of whiskey in front of her, plop!
, like that at the table. She drank from it the whole time.
And it was lunch. I remember we had linguine alle vongole. ”
“Buone!” cried Pippa.