Chapter 1 #12
“Giacomo-Giacomo!” She laughed. “He’s very shy.
Coco saved him from a terrible mother. I do not know how they are related.
It’s possible they aren’t at all! Does it really matter?
He ran away from home and lived with her for I think a year before his family clawed him back.
He became…what they wanted him to be. Afraid of them, I think.
He is an editor at a publishing house. But he always comes back to see his cousin.
I think being here with her was the best time of his life. ”
She started up the truck’s engine.
I put my hand on the door. “Maybe this is too personal, but the Baronessa. Is she in good health?”
She asked, “What do you mean?”
“I mean…a woman of her age…and you’ve called me in to…”
She cut the engine. Behind her was the valley, blue smoke rising in the air from somewhere and, from another corner of the landscape, a chain saw droning sharp and high.
“Yes, I insisted on it. She will never be free of her vertigo and it will get worse over time. Though of course,” she added, “she’ll never die! She wouldn’t allow it!”
I laughed, and so did she, though there was something serious in her tone.
Before she took off, she pointed at my head and smiled: “You do look good in Coco’s hat.”
Oscar returned after a week, and I was glad it was not yet another of my extraneous tasks to retrieve him from the San Drogo station, mostly because I was terrified of the Mitsu-bitchy, which felt more like an early experiment in flying machines than a truly functioning road vehicle.
It was also clear to me, after the warnings I had received about the treacherous lower road and my own experiences on the upper one, that only an expert such as Ghazel could navigate the ruts and stones and fallen branches.
I was, in a sense, trapped at Villa Coco.
So, I understood, was the Baronessa, which was perhaps why she invited her friend to visit her rather than the reverse.
I heard the clatter of Oscar’s arrival while I was upstairs making my lumpy bed, but, as he was immediately whisked away to my employer’s chambers, I saw nothing of him until he appeared at lunch, neatly dressed in pale linen pants and a pressed shirt in deep green.
“I look like a bottle of Chianti!” he announced before kissing me on one cheek and then the other.
His familiar scent was comforting. From behind him the Baronessa emerged all in white, raising her horse-headed cane.
“After lunch, we will visit the Formica!” she announced.
“What is this Formica?” I asked.
“The Formica!” she insisted, spreading the fingers on her free hand. “Oh, what is the English? Tell me, what is the name for the creature at a picnic? The creature that bothers everybody so you are forced to leave?”
“A baby?”
A smile. “The ant! The ant. But this ant is not at a picnic, she is at Rignano. And she has clothes for you.”
Oscar said this was a place of great treasures.
“HO HO HO!” the Baronessa chortled. “The great treasure is Oscar and what he has brought me.”
“Shall I bring another toe?” he asked, and they had a great laugh. I assumed this was some untranslatable example of Italian wit.
Lunch began with a baffling dish of what seemed to be giant flower buds, deep-fried. “Zucchini blossoms,” Oscar explained to me. “Filled with ricotta, with one acciuga in the center. An anchovy.”
“But you told me fish could not go with cheese!” I said. He shrugged.
The Baronessa chimed in: “The anchovy is not a fish!”
And that was the final word on anchovies. It seemed the universe could be just as one decided.
They were delicious.
We did not go to this mysterious Formica after lunch.
I suspected my employer had forgotten again, and I had no desire to remind her, so we went about our normal activities (work on the roses, her correspondence, a search for a dog’s toy), and I could see she was growing weary, possibly simply of me, and she suggested I take Oscar out on a walk.
I found him in the loggia, playing solitaire, Pushkin and Gorky at his feet.
I mentioned a walk and he smiled. “Lisabetta still thinks of me as a great hiker,” he said.
“Why don’t we just sit here?” And so we did.
“We must broaden your knowledge of Italy,” he told me. “For instance, Ferrara. Where Lisabetta and I are going next month. Not far away at all.”
I told him I had never heard of it.
“Ah, a marvelous city! It is the birthplace of Antonioni and Vancini and is where they filmed The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. I wish you could come, but unfortunately it is a very important matter for the two of us to deal with. And Napoli. You must go there as soon as possible.”
“Maybe one weekend when I’m free—”
A shake of his head. “But you can’t simply go there.”
I sputtered in confusion; he had not a moment before told me to.
“You can only visit Napoli with a Neapolitan,” he said. “Otherwise you will either have a merely touristic experience or be swallowed up whole. It is very hard to find the middle way. Only a Neapolitan knows the middle way.”
“Are you a Neapolitan?”
An intake of breath. “What, me? Are you mad? I’m from Genova!”
I made a gesture of apology, still ignorant as to how far Genova might be from Naples or, in fact, how far Tuscany might be from Naples. Or from anything; I had not left our little corner of the countryside.
“When you go, of course you must have the pizza. That’s famous.”
I said that was obvious.
“But something more important,” he warned me, turning over a card. “The sfogliatella. Try to say that. Sfogliatella.”
I tried and it fell from my mouth in broken pieces.
“Something like that, yes. Sfogliatella. It’s a pastry. Too heavy for breakfast. You have it midafternoon, let’s say. But the important part is there are two kinds of sfogliatelle. Riccia and frolla.”
“I see.”
“Once you try riccia, you will never go back.” Another card. “The same with frolla.”
“What’s the difference?”
A stern look. “One is riccia and one is frolla! Curly or short. That is the choice.”
“And which should I choose? Curly or short?”
“Ah!” he said, sitting back. “Ah.” A pause. “This I cannot tell you. But once you see them, you will know. The choice you make in this moment sets the course of your life.”
“My life with pastry, you mean.”
He looked to me, then to his cards, and said, “One never knows.” He turned another over and moved it to a row. “I’ll bring you some slippers from Venice,” he added as he leaned back to survey the game. “I know a place where they make beautiful ones in red velvet.”
At this point the Baronessa appeared at the door with Estelle. I saw that my employer had not been resting at all but had been at one of her own mysterious tasks.
“What time is it now?” the old lady demanded. The pugs awakened instantly.
I answered this: “A quarter to three.”
Her hand went dramatically to her heart, as her language went to French: “Sacré bleu! We must get to the Formica before they close! Everyone, into the Mitsu-bitchy!”
It was a race to get outside—a peculiar race, as two of the contestants were over seventy and one had a cane and vertigo.
But we stumbled outside, and I was made to climb into the driver’s seat, with the Baronessa beside me.
The others gathered snugly in the back. The manual transmission was somewhat foreign to me, but I started up the poor vehicle and began to head jerkily uphill, on the route I had taken on my arrival.
But I felt the Baronessa tapping me desperately with her cane.
“There’s no time!” she shouted, and pointed toward the forbidden forest behind us. “Take the other way!”
I looked back at the dark and twisted road below. “But you said!” I sputtered.
“The other way, Giovedì!”
“You said never to—”
Another tap from the cane. “Italiano in macchina!”
The old abandoned road went along the fields without a bump but soon descended into the shadowy woodland, where it switchbacked on its way toward the valley.
And I am afraid to say that, with the Baronessa hitting me with the cane to go faster and my other companions urging me on, I took the hairpin turns at a dangerous speed, plunging through foliage and making life-or-death decisions about which rut seemed deepest. There was no question of Italian in the car; there was nothing but Italian in the car, being shouted from all sides.
A Vesuvius of Italian erupted at the sight of a log fallen halfway across the road that nearly meant the end of us.
But it was not the end of us. And when we emerged from the forest between two stone columns, their finial lions gagged by ivy, the only sound remaining came from the Baronessa, laughing at yet another absurdity of her own invention.
We burst into the shop like bank robbers—it turned out La Formica was a church thrift shop.
Our clamor startled two nuns out of the clothing racks like pheasants flushed from the bush.
The nuns greeted us with reverence. It’s possible that, as nuns, they greeted everything with reverence.
Perhaps even cheap plastic wallets glowed with God.
“Baronessa,” one said, but the Baronessa paid her no mind, striding toward the men’s suits and dragging me along.
“We must find someone your size who has just died,” she told me.
Her thin hands felt the fabrics. Estelle suggested a dead man named Tonino.
Down came one suit after another, and I was bid to try them on; there was no dressing room, so Oscar shielded me from the nuns until I found a pair of trousers long enough to reach my shoes.
Soon I had Tonino’s entire closet hanging on a hook: button-up shirts in plaids and stripes, suits of camel and tweed and linen, sweaters and shoes and ties.
They seemed, to me, hopelessly out of style.
The Baronessa scoffed; she said a high waist and pleats were always in style. “Take them all,” she insisted.