Chapter 1 #8
“The rooms are not yet ready. We must wait until Oscar. Ah!”
From the vicinity of the garage there arrived a small dog, white, hairy, and merrily covered in leaves and brambles. Its muzzle was, for some reason, stained a bright shade of blue. The Baronessa clapped her hands. “High spirits! Dirty and not at all ashamed of himself!”
The creature ran toward her immediately, contorting itself in delight until its frantic attentions came my way. Through its filthy hair I could see two black eyes looking at me with adoration.
“You have met Pushkin and Gorky,” she explained, referring to the two ridiculous fawn-colored pugs who followed her nearly everywhere, “but not the other member of the household. He sometimes goes on naughty adventures and I worry. I once had a dog who was attacked by a wild boar. Survived, but she always left the dining room if there was pork.” She scratched the head of the little white dog, who writhed in delight.
“This is Cesare, who has a heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad. You will feed him at night.”
I bristled at this new duty imposed upon me but stifled my reaction. I asked why the poor dog’s face was blue.
“Ah! He found a ballpoint pen and could not resist it.” From this, I perceived Cesare had eaten it.
A sigh came from the Baronessa: “I understand the temptation! Do you know what? He lived nine years in a kennel before a tartufiere rescued him! A truffle hunter who gave him to me. Nine years! Everything was new to him—balls, toys, trees, rocks—he had to learn how to do everything!” Her gaze went to me with a mischievous smile. “Perhaps you have something in common…”
I wondered if I had heard her wrong, but she went on:
“As for the rest of my dogs, they are all here,” she said, gesturing to the marble column marked with names still in sight in the courtyard behind us. “The asterisks are all the ones that were not pugs. My little elephants’ graveyard.”
I told her it was quite beautiful.
“You know that elephants really do bury their dead. They will bury other creatures, too. I met a game warden in Kenya who fell asleep in a hollow and awoke to find two elephants covering him with twigs.” I recognized the flutter of a smile. “One must always keep an eye open.”
A sudden vision came to me.
“I saw an animal last night!”
Her voice rang with hope: “A spider?”
This confused me. “No, not a spider, the…the…” I searched my memory, then emerged in triumph: “The marten!”
She let out a little yelp. “The faina!”
Ah—so this was what the fish oil was for. “Faina” would not prove to be another houseguest. “Outside my bedroom window!”
“I would have screamed for someone to come!” she said.
I did not admit that I had done exactly that, and someone coming had been my fondest wish.
She went on to explain that the creature had taken three of the chickens.
At first they thought it was a fox, which would have been easy to avert as it would not climb a wall and one could merely patch holes in the fence.
But the stone marten was different; lithe and agile, it could get through any barrier, even a roof.
They were like snakes, the Baronessa said, but snakes with wings.
They seemed to be able to fly. So she had consulted Ghazel.
“Can you understand Gazelle when he talks?”
I looked from her to the book in my hands. There were so many incomprehensible things in Villa Coco. “I’m afraid I can’t.”
A faint sigh. “I just thought, perhaps, since none of the rest of us can…”
“You can’t understand him?”
She put both hands on her cane and stared at some weeds as one stares at party crashers.
“He first came to Italy as a monk. From Lebanon. He knew no Italian, but of course there was the vow of silence. And the rest was all Latin. So he got along just fine. But he fell in love with a girl over the garden wall, and the monks threw him out. He learned just enough Italian to get the girl pregnant, which couldn’t have been much.
And he never learned another word!” With a quick gesture she plucked some weeds from a potted geranium and tossed them on the ground.
“I don’t know how we communicate,” she added.
“But somehow it comes through! My friend Oscar says talking to Gazelle is like speaking to someone in a dream. Ah, here he is!”
We had slowly gone farther down the hill into the forest of bamboo I had glimpsed the day before peeking out above that gate.
The smooth green stalks were a great contrast to the native trees around us and gave this part of the forest a strange formality.
My employer informed me that she had planted them herself.
In a little clearing, beside a chicken-wire enclosure, stood Ghazel, fists on his hips, staring at a crowd of six or seven chickens.
“Gazelle! La faina!” the Baronessa began in the tone of a tennis player announcing the score before a serve.
Ghazel, completely unstartled by our arrival, turned, gesturing with his hands to make a globe, and said the following: “FAINA! INTRAPPOLARE!”
The Baronessa whispered: “He wants to trap the thing.”
Ghazel tapped his chest. “FACCIO! IO!”
“He’ll do it himself.”
“OLIO! PESCHE!”
“He’s asking for peach oil,” the Baronessa said, furrowing her brow, “but we understand he means the fish oil. Hand it over quickly, Giovedì.”
I gave her the bottle that had traveled across the Atlantic and wondered why I had gone to the trouble when such a thing must be easily found nearby.
She presented it to Ghazel, and he thrust it into his pocket without a glance at me.
I had a notion it would never be used. He pointed to the chicken coop extravagantly.
A loud whisper from the Baronessa: “Ah, he has more to say!” She was as excited as a medium in a séance.
Ghazel spread his arms wide. “PROTEGGERE! POLI!”
“He wants to protect the chickens. He said poles, but I’m sure he means chickens. Isn’t that sweet. Go on!”
Now, his palms flat, he seemed to be miming being trapped in a room. “MURO! CANE!”
She paused thoughtfully at this translation, a finger to her chin, then turned brightly to me. “What a wonderful idea! He wants to make a wall of dogs!” She asked him a question in Italian.
He repeated himself excitedly. “DI CANE! DI CANE!”
Her bright expression fell in disappointment. “Ah, no, I’m mistaken. Not dogs. Di canne. It’s always an issue of the double consonant with Gazelle. Di canne. Bamboo!”
“DI CANNE!”
“A wall of bamboo. Well, that’s more sensible.
Though the other did have some afflatus.
A divine inspiration.” She spoke some more to the wiry old man, and he replied in kind.
“Ah, he’s going to start tomorrow. You and Vinsanto will help him.
Please keep an eye on Gazelle. His inspirations don’t always work out.
Once the chickens got fleas, and his solution was to nail their feet to a board and spray them with pesticide.
It killed the fleas. And the chickens, too, of course. Let us go and practice with the roses…”
We did practice with the roses, beginning with those trained to climb some olive trees, and though she explained in her strange chattering way about the wooden stems and the buds facing away from the plant, it all seemed thoroughly capricious to me as she cut away perfectly lovely branches and left rather hideous ones alone.
She saw something I could not, as a sculptor might with a block of granite.
She had somehow forgotten about this “Formica” with clothes for me, and I decided not to mention it.
My employer was exhausted after these exertions, which took us all around through the olive trees and back to the courtyard.
She led me to a door I had not noticed earlier, and we went inside so she could rest. The room was cool and made of stone; the paintings on all the walls were of seaside towns—shipyards, waves crashing against the walkway, the sun behind a great bell tower, a statue of a golden globe held up by two Atlases—and this, along with the underground feeling of the place, lent it a freshness that must have been of her design.
I studied each painting, then cast my eyes across the various decorations—the coatrack made of deer antlers, the mirror framed with shells—and, in preparation for at last beginning my cataloging, I took off the hat she had lent me and dropped it on the sofa—
I heard a scream and turned. The Baronessa was standing with her hands on her face. “Ma che cavolo hai fatto!” she shrieked. “A hat on the bed!”
I looked down at the sofa, covered with a thin blue cloth. It seemed utterly unlike a bed. “But…but…this isn’t a bed!”
“It’s a daybed!” she exclaimed.
“It’s a sofa. You can put a hat on a sofa.” Why was I arguing over a sofa when the entire proposition was absurd? How quickly one enters into the madness of others.
Her hands went out grasping into the air. “Give me the green thing. We will call Luciano. He’ll know the answer. He’s from Napoli.”
I handed her the phone from her basket. “I don’t think it’s really—”
But she was already speaking with the sewage man from Naples.
It surprised me he played such a large role in her life; I assumed a baronessa would call only someone of equal rank.
But apparently, though she seemed a terrible snob about books and art and culture, people’s rank was of no importance to her.
I looked around the room and discovered it was a kind of office.
There seemed to be boxes of papers and a filing system of some sort.
From one pillow on the “bed,” an embroidered pug sneered at me in crewelwork.
“I have bad news,” the Baronessa reported, holding the phone away from her ear. “It is a bed. And this means death.” She held up a quivering finger. “But he knows a remedy.”
“Thank God.”
She put her ear back to the phone, nodding as she listened, then turned again to me.